Yi Wan-yong

Yi Wan-yong was a Korean aristocrat and official who changed patrons several times in a single lifetime: he began as a man of Queen Min’s court, then became a supporter of America, an ally of Russia and, from 1905, Japan’s most important Korean collaborator. As Minister of Education he backed the 1905 treaty establishing a Japanese protectorate; as Prime Minister he forced the abdication of Emperor Gojong in 1907; and on 22 August 1910 he signed the treaty that abolished the Korean state. For his services the Japanese made him a count, then a marquis, and gave him wealth and honours, and on his death the Order of the Chrysanthemum. In both Korean states his name is today a synonym for traitor. His life shows the kind of men on whom Japan built its rule in Korea, the first great prize on the road that in the 1930s took it into Manchuria and China.

Background and education

He was born on 17 July 1858 (by the lunar calendar the 7th day of the sixth month; some Japanese sources give 1856) in the village of Baekhyeon in Gwangju County near Seoul, into an impoverished branch of the noble Ubong Yi clan. In 1867, at the age of ten, he was adopted by a distant relative, the senior official Yi Ho-jun, a close associate of the regent Heungseon Daewongun. The adoption gave him standing and a thorough Confucian education. In 1882 he passed the state examination and entered government service, and because his adoptive father had by then already gone over to the queen’s clan, he rose quickly.

In 1886 he was one of the first Korean officials to study English and Western learning at the Royal School run by American teachers. In 1887 he went with the first Korean minister to Washington, and in 1889–1890 he headed the Korean legation in the United States as chargé d’affaires. After his return he held senior posts and was regarded at court as an expert on American affairs. He knew English, but never learned Japanese. Even later he spoke with the Japanese through an interpreter or in English.

Between Russia and Japan

In 1895 he joined the government as Minister of Education. When Japanese assassins murdered Queen Min on 8 October that year, Yi Wan-yong, regarded as a man of the pro-American and pro-Russian faction, took refuge in the American legation. He was soon involved in plots against the pro-Japanese government, and in February 1896 he was one of the organisers of King Gojong’s flight to the Russian legation. After the fall of the pro-Japanese cabinet he became Foreign Minister. He was a co-founder and chairman of the Independence Club, the association that erected the Independence Gate in Seoul on the site of the gate through which Chinese envoys had formerly entered the city. When, however, the Russians began to demand concessions for themselves, Yi Wan-yong came into conflict with the Russian minister and at the end of the 1890s was sidelined to a provincial post.

The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 decided his future course. He concluded that after Russia’s defeat and the Americans’ withdrawal no one would defend Korea against Japan, and that the court could survive only by coming to terms with it. In November 1905, when Marquis Hirobumi Itō arrived in Seoul with a draft treaty depriving Korea of the right to conduct its own foreign policy, the Minister of Education, Yi Wan-yong, was the first of the ministers to change his mind and support the agreement. He proposed adding a clause stating that the protectorate would last “until Korea becomes prosperous and strong”. On 17 November five ministers, he among them, accepted the treaty under pressure from Japanese troops. The Koreans called them the “Five Eulsa Traitors”, and across the country there were demands for their punishment.

Prime Minister of the protectorate

Itō, who became Resident-General in 1906, made Yi Wan-yong his chief collaborator and in 1907 entrusted him with the premiership. When it came to light in June 1907 that Gojong had sent secret emissaries to the peace conference at The Hague, Yi Wan-yong and his ministers demanded that the Emperor step down. On 19 July Gojong handed power to his son, Sunjong, and the government treated this as an abdication. The next day, during the ceremony of the transfer of the throne, a crowd burned down the Prime Minister’s house together with his ancestral tablets. On 24 July Yi Wan-yong signed an agreement with Itō that gave the Resident-General control over legislation and the appointment of officials, while a secret annex provided for the disbanding of the army. The Koreans also count him among the “Seven Jeongmi Traitors”. In July 1909 Yi Wan-yong’s government handed the courts and prisons over to the Japanese.

Yi Wan-yong competed for Japanese favour with the pro-Japanese association Iljinhoe and its leader Song Pyŏng-jun, who as early as 1909 was lobbying in Tokyo for a “merger” of the two states. On 22 December 1909, as the Prime Minister was leaving the cathedral in Seoul after a mass for the late King Leopold II of the Belgians, he was attacked with a knife by a young patriot, Yi Jae-myŏng, disguised as a chestnut seller. The assailant killed the rickshaw puller and gravely wounded the Prime Minister, piercing his lung. Yi Wan-yong survived thanks to an operation by Japanese doctors, but he felt the effects of the wound until his death. The attacker was executed in September 1910.

The signature on the annexation

In the summer of 1910 the new Resident-General, General Masatake Terauchi, presented Yi Wan-yong with a draft treaty on the incorporation of Korea into Japan. The Prime Minister did not oppose the annexation itself. He negotiated only that the country should keep its historic name, Joseon, and that the Emperor should keep the title of king rather than the lower title proposed by the Japanese. According to Japanese accounts, he feared that if he hesitated the Japanese would entrust the government to his rival Song Pyŏng-jun. On 18 August the council of ministers accepted the draft. On 22 August, after a meeting in the presence of Emperor Sunjong, who issued him with full powers, Yi Wan-yong drove to Terauchi’s residence and signed the treaty annexing Korea. It was proclaimed a week later, on 29 August 1910.

The reward came quickly. In October 1910 Yi Wan-yong received the title of count in the newly created Korean branch of the Japanese peerage and a grant of 150,000 yen, a large sum even in comparison with other titled collaborators. The Koreans also placed him among the “Gyeongsul traitors”. He is the only man to appear on all three lists of traitors, those of 1905, 1907 and 1910.

Under Japanese rule

After the annexation Yi Wan-yong became Vice-Chairman of the Central Council (Chūsūin), an advisory body attached to the Governor-General, made up of Korean notables and without real power. He was active in agricultural organisations and associations of the aristocracy, regularly travelled to Tokyo to pay homage, and among his compatriots promoted “Japanese–Korean rapprochement”. When the March First Movement broke out in March 1919, he published three successive warnings in the press, in which he called the demonstrations a senseless disturbance and argued that Korea could not regain its independence. For these services he was raised to the rank of marquis in 1920 (according to some sources in 1921). He was also an adviser to the committee that, on the Governor-General’s orders, compiled an official history of Korea. He was among the richest men in the country. His contemporaries admired him as a calligrapher.

He died of pneumonia in Seoul on 12 February 1926; the illness was linked to the wound he had received sixteen years earlier. That day the Emperor of Japan conferred on him the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Chrysanthemum, Japan’s highest decoration, which no other Korean outside the royal family received before 1945. The Governor-General, Makoto Saitō, attended the funeral. The Korean press marked his death with bitter comments.

Memory

Yi Wan-yong was buried in a remote spot in Iksan, in North Jeolla Province, so as to make the grave hard to find. Even so, it was repeatedly desecrated, and in 1979 his descendants removed it and had the remains cremated. In South Korea his name is a byword for traitor. In 2005 the National Assembly passed a law on the confiscation of property acquired by collaborators at the time of the annexation, and his heirs were among the first from whom the state took back land.

His few defenders, already in colonial times, presented him as a realist who believed that Korea’s fate had been decided by the great powers and that it was better to negotiate favourable terms than to leave the matter to the open supporters of Japan in the Iljinhoe. Historians point out, however, that at the decisive moments he did not resist but acted on his own initiative, and that each time he collected a reward for it. His life is an example of the mechanism Japan later used in Manchuria and China: conquest carried out by the hands of local elites ready to sign whatever the stronger side demanded.