Princess Deokhye was born into the final royal family of Korea, the daughter of the last emperor, King Gojong, but she was forced into a life of exile and tragedy. By the time she was a teenager, the Japanese authorities who ruled over Korea sent her thousands of kilometers from her homeland, beginning a long descent into a mental illness that would define the rest of her days. Her story is that of a nation stripped of its independence, and a young woman caught in the machinery of empire. The woman remembered in history as Princess Deokhye was not given a name when she was born in Changdeok Palace in Seoul on May 25, 1912.
She was the daughter of the Korean Emperor Gojong and his concubine, Yang Gui-in, and in the beginning, she was treated almost as an illegitimate child. That situation did not last long. She quickly earned her father’s affection, and in 1917, at the age of five, she was officially recognized and registered as a member of the imperial family under the title Princess Deokhye. The princess was born into an imperial household that had already lost its power.
Since 1392, Korea had been ruled by the Joseon dynasty, a kingdom that lived in near total isolation for centuries and prospered in its own way. But the nineteenth century brought new challenges. The great powers of Europe and North America were extending their influence across the Far East, carrying with them new cultures, technologies, and systems of government. Beginning in the mid-1850s, Japan itself was subjected to increasing intrusions from the United States, France, and Britain, which forced the country to open its trade to Western influence.
From the 1870s onward, Korea became the focus of these ambitions. Once Japan underwent a period of rapid modernization in the 1860s and 1870s, it developed growing designs on the Korean peninsula. Under the leadership of Queen Min, the consort of the Korean King Gojong, in the 1880s and 1890s, the country fiercely resisted both Western and Japanese intervention, often by aligning with Russia against the Japanese. But a series of events in the 1890s and the first decade of the 1900s exhausted Korea and brought its struggle for independence to an end.
In 1910, the country was effectively annexed by Japan. Gojong, who had briefly declared himself Emperor of Korea in the late 1890s, was forced to abdicate, although the Japanese authorities allowed him to retain a largely ceremonial position as a nominal emperor. The royal family into which Princess Deokhye was born in 1912 had thus been reduced to a facade. From 1910 onward, the Empire of Japan was the real power in Korea, ruling through an occupation government.
That administration in Seoul, along with the central government in Tokyo, played a pivotal role in shaping Princess Deokhye’s life. Gojong had many children, but a number of them died at a young age, which moved Deokhye higher among his offspring. This created particular difficulties, as it made Japanese authorities in Korea more inclined to interfere in her affairs, especially after 1917, when she was officially registered as a member of the imperial family. In an attempt to prevent Japanese authorities from taking control of her life, in 1919 Gojong sought to arrange a marriage for his youngest daughter.
Earlier, he had established the Duksu Kindergarten School to prevent her from being sent to Japan as her brothers and sisters had been. Now a marriage was planned to strengthen her ties to Korea. The proposed union was with Kim Jang-han, a nephew of one of the senior court secretaries in Seoul, Kim Hwa-jing. But objections from the Japanese authorities in Seoul prevented the marriage from taking place.
Then came the sudden death of Gojong a few days later, on January 21, 1919, which ensured that no further marriage arrangements would be attempted for the princess in Korea. Gojong had not been ill at the time, and there was speculation that he had been poisoned by the Japanese authorities in Seoul, perhaps because of his secret efforts to marry his daughter to a prominent Korean figure. That theory was never disproved, and it is likely the way he actually died. With the death of her father, the princess effectively came under the guardianship of the Japanese occupation government in Seoul.
Although her mother was still alive, her life continued with a certain degree of normality, and she was sent to study at Hinodae School in the Korean capital. But her life was about to take a radical turn in the mid-1920s. In 1925, as part of the Japanese government’s policy to thwart any possible rebellion in Korea, Deokhye was sent away from her homeland to Japan itself. She was only thirteen years old at the time.
During her stay there in the late 1920s, she attended Gakushuin School in Tokyo, which had been founded as a vocational school in 1923. There she learned sewing and received a cultural education. Many details of her life while in Japan remain largely obscure. It is known that she was allowed to return briefly to Korea in early 1930 to attend her mother’s funeral.
Around that time, the first beginnings of her mental health difficulties can be traced. After returning to Japan, it was recorded that she began to sleepwalk, while her behavior became more disturbed in the months that followed. Eventually, she was diagnosed with what was called dementia praecox in the early twentieth century, an obsolete medical term generally applied at the time to any kind of deteriorating psychotic disorder. A more accurate assessment of Deokhye’s condition today would conclude that she was suffering from schizophrenia, characterized by recurrent or periodic psychotic episodes.
Despite the increasing difficulties of her condition, the Japanese government was determined to marry her to a Japanese husband once she reached a suitable age and her condition stabilized enough for the wedding to take place. During the 1930s, the Japanese Emperor Taisho decided that Deokhye should marry Count So Takeyuki, a member of a moderately ranked Japanese noble family. The So clan, to which he belonged, had ruled Tsushima Island, off the western coast of the main Japanese island of Honshu, for centuries before Japanese society was reorganized in the 1860s and 1870s. The reason was specific.
Thanks to their position in the far west of the Japanese archipelago and their proximity to the Korean peninsula, the clan had played a role in Japanese-Korean relations for centuries. Now, the daughter of the last Korean king was to marry the head of that very clan. The wedding was scheduled to take place on Tsushima Island on May 8, 1931. Afterward, Deokhye’s condition deteriorated.
This was not her husband’s fault. By all accounts, he was a considerate husband, and indeed the young couple welcomed a child when their daughter, Ma, was born on August 14, 1932. However, by the following year, Deokhye’s condition was declining sharply, and during 1933, she was admitted to a mental hospital for the first time. She would spend years there intermittently throughout the pre-war and wartime period.
Not much is known about her life during those times, which is unsurprising given the secretive nature of dealing with mental health disorders in any society in the first half of the twentieth century. She had the support of her husband, a figure often portrayed in an unflattering light, but who was clearly not the villain of the story. Like her, he had been forced into this marriage, and he had to deal with family financial problems as well as his wife’s condition throughout the war years and the difficult period that followed. He must have felt some affection for her, as surviving poems of his are dedicated to his wife and daughter.
Despite their best efforts, the marriage did not last, especially after the war ended and the imperial government that had forced them to marry in 1931 disappeared. Korea had also gained its independence in the aftermath of the war. As a result, the couple divorced in 1953. However, the greater tragedy they faced came three years later, when their daughter ran away from home, leaving behind a letter that seemed to be a suicide note.
She was never seen again, and it is presumed she ended her own life. In the wake of this shocking development, Deokhye’s condition deteriorated further. The former princess might have spent her final year forgotten in a Japanese sanatorium, had it not been for the intervention of some parties in Korea on her behalf. In the aftermath of the Korean War, which was fought between 1950 and 1953, the country was divided into two.
North Korea sided with the Soviet communist bloc, and South Korea with the capitalist bloc led by the United States. While North Korea is generally known for its brutal dictatorship, South Korea also lived for many years under authoritarian rule, especially under Syngman Rhee from 1948 to 1960. Under these conditions, there was an inherent suspicion of the old royal family, and Deokhye’s return to Korea was opposed. But in the early 1960s, circumstances became more favorable, and in 1962, the princess was granted permission to return to her homeland.
She wept when she saw the mainland of Korea for the first time in thirty-two years. The princess spent the rest of her life residing in her childhood home at Changdeok Palace in Seoul, which had been reestablished as a residence for surviving members of the Joseon family. There she lived with her sister-in-law Yi Bangja and her nephew, a half-brother’s son and Gojong’s grandson and the last nominal head of the Joseon dynasty, supported by the Korean government. Still, even then, Deokhye’s troubles did not quiet.
She was periodically transferred to Seoul National University Hospital for help with her psychological disorders in the years following her return to Korea. Nevertheless, she lived for about three more decades, until her death on April 21, 1989. She was apparently suffering from aphasia, a condition caused by brain damage that robs the sufferer of the ability to understand language, meaning she could not speak with others or understand what was said to her. She had outlived all her siblings by that time.
It was a difficult life, damaged from the start by the political circumstances into which she was born, a trauma from which she never seemed to fully recover. Today, a monument stands on Tsushima Island commemorating her marriage to her husband, Count So, in 1931. Deokhye’s life has been the subject of numerous books, plays, and films.
The most famous is the Korean film The Last Princess, released in 2016 to critical acclaim, which deals with her life in Japan and her efforts to return to Korea.