Queen Min

Queen Min (posthumously Empress Myeongseong), the wife of King Gojong, was for more than twenty years the most powerful person at the Korean court – more powerful, many observers maintained, than the King himself. Manoeuvring between China, Japan, Russia and the United States, she tried to preserve the country’s independence and the power of her clan while cautiously modernising Korea. For the Japanese politicians and soldiers who, after their victory over China in 1895, wanted to turn Korea into their sphere of influence, she became the chief obstacle. On 8 October 1895 Japanese assassins killed her in her palace and burned her body. In the short term her death did not spare Japan a setback in Korea, but it became one of the first acts on a long road that led through the annexation of Korea in 1910 to the conquest of Manchuria in 1931.

Her personal name was not known in her lifetime. She was called Queen Min after the clan from which she came. Later works give her name as Min Ja-yeong, but its authenticity is sometimes questioned. The title of Empress Myeongseong was conferred on her only after her death.

Childhood and marriage

She was born on 17 November 1851 in Yeoju, in Gyeonggi Province, into the aristocratic Yeoheung Min clan. The clan had earlier given Korea two queens and many high officials, but her immediate family was neither wealthy nor influential. Her father, Min Chi-rok, died in 1858, when she was seven, and she was brought up by her mother.

In 1864 the eleven-year-old Gojong came to the throne, and real power was exercised as regent by his father, the Heungseon Daewongun. When the time came to find a wife for the young King, the regent wanted to avoid a repetition of the first half of the century, when the relatives of queens from the Andong Kim clan had ruled the country over the heads of the kings. Gojong’s mother, herself of the Min clan, proposed an orphaned girl with no father or brothers. The Daewongun interviewed her and was satisfied. In March 1866 the fourteen-year-old Miss Min married the King, a year her junior, and was crowned queen. The regent is said to have admitted later that she was “a woman of great determination and composure”. As historians have put it, he had raised to the throne his most dangerous opponent.

The struggle with her father-in-law

The first years of the marriage were humiliating for her. The King preferred the company of a concubine, and when she bore him a son in 1868, the Daewongun made a great show of rejoicing at the birth of his grandson. The Queen shut herself away in her chambers and read. She studied the Chinese classics, history and philosophy – reading usually reserved for men of the yangban class. In 1871 she gave birth to a son who died after a few days. According to accounts, the Daewongun reproached her for being unable to give the King a healthy heir, while she suspected that a medicine he had sent had contributed to the child’s death. Her only child to survive was Yi Cheok, born in 1874, the future Emperor Sunjong.

Meanwhile the Queen built up her own faction, made up of members of her clan, officials sidelined by the regent and Confucian scholars outraged by his policies. In 1873 the Confucian scholar Choe Ik-hyeon submitted a memorial criticising the Daewongun’s rule, and Gojong, by then 21, announced that he would rule in person. The regent had to step down. From then on the court was run by the Queen and her relatives, who took the most important offices. Her father-in-law never forgave her. In 1874 a bomb hidden in a parcel exploded in the house of her adoptive brother, Min Seung-ho, killing him, his son and the Queen’s mother. The perpetrators were never identified, but suspicion fell on the Daewongun’s men.

Opening the country

The Daewongun had pursued a policy of keeping Korea completely closed. The Queen and her faction concluded that the country could no longer be isolated. In 1876, after an incident involving a Japanese gunboat off Ganghwa Island, Korea signed a treaty with Japan opening its ports. In the following years it signed treaties with China, the United States (1882), Britain and Germany (1883), Italy and Russia (1884) and France (1886). The Queen supported sending study missions to Japan and China and, in 1883, a mission to the United States led by her kinsman Min Yeong-ik. With her consent the first school with English teachers was founded, as were the first Western hospital, run by the American doctor and missionary Horace Allen, and the first school for girls, from which Ewha University grew. American military instructors were engaged, machinery was imported and a telegraph was built. The Queen herself remained a Buddhist who was also attached to shamanic rites, but she tolerated Christian missionaries because she valued their knowledge.

The reforms also had a dark side. The Min clan was widely accused of corruption, the sale of offices and the misappropriation of state revenue. In July 1882 soldiers of the old units, who had gone unpaid for months and were finally issued with rotten rice, mutinied, killed several Min dignitaries and Japanese instructors, and then broke into the palace in search of the Queen. The mutiny was backed by the Daewongun, who briefly regained power. The Queen fled in disguise, carried out of the palace by the officer Hong Gye-hun. She was hiding in the provinces when her father-in-law announced her death and ordered mourning. She called on China for help. Chinese troops entered Seoul, arrested the Daewongun and took him away to China, and the Queen returned to the palace.

In December 1884 a group of young reform-minded officials who wanted to break with China and follow Japan’s path staged the Gapsin Coup with the support of the Japanese legation. Several ministers were murdered and the royal couple were placed under guard. The Queen secretly summoned the Chinese garrison, which, commanded by Yuan Shikai, routed the conspirators and the Japanese after three days. From then on the Queen distrusted Japan. For the next ten years she relied on China, whose representative in Seoul, Yuan Shikai, wielded enormous influence, while also seeking a counterweight in Russia and the United States.

War and the Triple Intervention

In 1894 the Donghak Peasant Revolution broke out in the south of the country, directed against an administration that oppressed the countryside and against foreigners. The government asked China for help, but Japan sent troops as well. On 23 July 1894 the Japanese occupied the palace, took the King under their control and handed power to the Daewongun, while the Queen’s faction was pushed aside. The First Sino-Japanese War broke out, and China was defeated. Under Japanese supervision the Korean government carried out the Gabo reforms, and the Japanese minister, Kaoru Inoue, tried to win over the royal couple with promises of loans and protection.

In the spring of 1895, after the Treaty of Shimonoseki, Russia, France and Germany forced Japan to return the Liaodong Peninsula to China. The Queen – a woman “of remarkable intelligence and strength”, whose “life was a battle”, as the traveller Isabella Bird, who spoke with her several times, wrote – immediately exploited Japan’s weakness. Her faction regained its influence, the leader of the pro-Japanese reformers, Pak Yeong-hyo, fled to Japan in July, and the court drew closer to the Russian minister, Karl Waeber. In the autumn the Queen pushed through the disbandment of the Hullyeondae, the units trained by the Japanese.

The assassination

The new Japanese minister, the retired general Gorō Miura, arrived in Seoul in September 1895 and quickly decided to get rid of the Queen. Together with members of the legation, Japanese adventurers known as sōshi and Korean Hullyeondae soldiers, he prepared an attack in which the Daewongun was also implicated. Before dawn on 8 October 1895 the attackers burst into Gyeongbokgung Palace. They killed Hong Gye-hun – the same man who had saved the Queen in 1882 – and the Minister of the Royal Household, Yi Gyeong-jik, and searched the women’s quarters for the Queen, beating court ladies and throwing them out of windows. The Queen was killed in her chambers. It is not known for certain who struck the fatal blow. Her body was burned in a nearby grove. She was 43 years old.

Two days later an edict was issued in the King’s name, against his will, which blamed her for the country’s misfortunes and reduced her to commoner status. It was revoked in November. The Japanese perpetrators, recalled home, were released by the courts in Hiroshima in January 1896 for “insufficient evidence”.

Empress Myeongseong

After fleeing to the Russian legation in February 1896, Gojong settled accounts with the men he held responsible for his wife’s death. In 1897 he gave her the posthumous name Myeongseong, and when he proclaimed himself emperor in October, he raised her to the dignity of empress. On 21 and 22 November 1897 he gave her a funeral of great pomp: thousands of soldiers marched in the procession and thousands of lanterns were carried. The Hongneung tomb was built in Seoul. After Gojong’s death in 1919 her remains were moved to Namyangju and laid beside her husband.

Memory and controversy

In South Korea Queen Min is today a figure in the national pantheon, a symbol of resistance to Japan and of the wrongs of the colonial era. Her death has become the subject of novels, films, television series and the musical The Last Empress. Historians, however, judge her differently. Some see her as an able and courageous politician who understood that the country had to be opened up while not allowing it to be subordinated to any single power. Others point out that her rule meant the nepotism and corruption of the Min clan, that it was she who twice brought foreign troops into the country, and that her policy of manoeuvring between the powers brought no lasting security. No reliable photograph of the Queen survives. All those published as her portraits are of doubtful authenticity.

Her assassination matters for the history of the twentieth century not only because it was a crime. It showed how far Japanese soldiers and nationalists operating abroad were prepared to go, and how readily the authorities in Tokyo acquitted them. The assassin of Hirobumi Itō, An Jung-geun, placed the murder of the Queen first in his list of charges against Japan in 1909. Japan, which lost its influence in Seoul for several years after 1895, regained it through the war with Russia and the Treaty of Portsmouth, and in 1910 annexed Korea. From Korea, and from southern Manchuria, where it had acquired railways and the lease of the Kwantung territory, the Japanese army set out in 1931 to conquer the whole of Manchuria.