becoming a “hermit kingdom” was a natural result of successive invasions by the Japanese and the Manchus, compounded by a historical distrust of foreigners. Until late in the nineteenth century, Korea’s isolation, interrupted as it was only by a few missionaries and wandering voyagers, was even more complete than that of Japan or China. To a greater extent than the Chinese or Japanese, the Koreans came to distrust their neighbors as well as the West, and xenophobia was a strain which would periodically recur throughout Korea’s history.
2: Syngman Rhee at about the age of twenty. This photograph dates from Rhee’s days at the Paichai School, when he and a group of fellow students founded the Maiyil Sinmun and Rhee became one of Philip Jaisohn’s lieutenants in the newly organized Independence Club. (Pacific Stars and Stripes Photo)
“The political history of Korea in the nineteenth century,” observes Cornelius Osgood, “is essentially that of reaction to the pressures of modern nations.”1 Its system of government, modeled after that of the Ming rulers, had scarcely changed since the inception of the Yi dynasty. The king was in theory an absolute ruler, advised by a three-man cabinet led by the prime minister. By the late nineteenth century, corruption and inefficiency in the royal government encouraged both Japan and Russia to break the centuries-old filial relationship between China and Korea under which the latter paid obeisance to Peking.
Thus it was into a society beset with new pressures from without that Syngman Rhee was born around 1875. His father was a yangban, a member of the highest class of society comprised largely of scholars and civil servants. Although Lee Kyung-sun had lost his earlier wealth, his social standing itself was a prized possession in Korea. To this day the yangban draws attention in the Korean countryside: a distinguished figure with his white, flowing gown, characteristic long pipe, and tall horsehair hat.
Rhee’s biographer has written that “all his life Syngman Rhee has been more intimately influenced by women than by men.”2 In the Orient the relationship between father and son is often a restrained one, and so it was with Rhee. With his mother, who was also his first teacher, he appears to have been much more close. She taught him from a Chinese reader, and raised him in the tradition of Chinese classicism, a reflection of the extent of Chinese influence in Korea.
Rhee’s first contact with the West was a dramatic one. When he was nine, an epidemic of smallpox left him blind in both eyes. His parents sought relief in all of Korea’s herb remedies without success. Only as a last resort did they determine to take the young boy to a foreigner: the newly-arrived medical missionary, Dr. Horace Allen.
Dr. Allen was later to become American minister in Seoul, and this would not be the last time his path would cross Syngman Rhee’s. To a terrified boy of nine, however, Dr. Allen’s medicines restored the gift of sight, and undoubtedly made possible Rhee’s later political career. In the afterglow of his restoration, Rhee could scarcely not have been impressed by the fact that Western medicine had cured his blindness when all the old ways had failed.
His experience with Horace Allen may have been the factor that stimulated Rhee to further interest in the West, or it may have been the growing influence of missionaries in Korea. In any case, at the age of nineteen Rhee began attending—at first secretly— the Paichai School, founded by a Methodist minister, Henry G. Appenzeller. There he learned of the Western world and confirmed what his episode of blindness had led him to suspect: that Korea was hopelessly backward and was falling behind even its Eastern neighbors. In his two years at Paichai, Rhee may have first come to think of the West as the power center of the world; late in life he spoke of Paichai as the first school in Korea to provide “full-fledged western education.” When their agitation for Korean independence would force them to leave Korea, persons such as Kim Koo and Kim Ok-kun would go to China. Syngman Rhee would go to Washington.3
By the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Korean court faced threats from Japan and Russia with an attitude compounded of ignorance and paralysis. A dynasty rendered ineffectual by corruption, nepotism, and lack of leadership continued to look to China for protection while factions oriented towards Japan and Russia jockeyed for position.
When the last of the true Yi kings died in 1864, the son of Prince Tae-won gained the throne after a succession of intrigues stimulated by the absence of a legitimate heir. In an attempt to consolidate his power, Tae-won had himself named regent until his son came of age, at which time he married him to a daughter of the influential Min family. Tae-won reckoned without the strength and political acumen of the queen, however, who was several years older than the new king. Korea’s downfall was to be hastened by the maneuverings of the regent and the queen to control the Korean court, and to orient the Hermit Kingdom towards one or another of its powerful neighbors.
In 1885, China and Japan concluded the Tientsin Convention calling for a mutual withdrawal of troops sent to Korea the previous year in the wake of an abortive coup by the Japanese. The agreement provided only a temporary respite, however, for Japan was convinced of China’s military weakness and had become increasingly willing to provoke hostilities over Korea. In cooperation with many nationalistic Koreans, Japanese agents in Seoul attempted to undermine the Hermit Kingdom’s traditional ties with China.
Although Korea had made treaties as an independent government in the late nineteenth century, Queen Min manifested a strong preference for Chinese advisors, and the court at Seoul continued to reflect the Chinese influence long paramount in Korea. The followers of the ex-regent, Tae-won, were only partially successful in checking Chinese influence. For personal and political reasons Tae-won opposed the queen; the weak king pathetically sought America’s aid as a disinterested broker. Ironically, a “progressive” group of government officials looked to Japan as their model and as the instrument by which to counter Chinese influence. Although Paichai had turned Rhee’s chief attention across the Pacific, it is possible that at that time he might have preferred increased Japanese influence in Korea to the decadence of the China-oriented Yi dynasty.
In 1894, a rebellion in southern Korea by the Tong Hak, a politico-religious grouping linked to Prince Tae-won, prompted Korea to appeal to China for aid. Peking responded with 1,500 troops; Japan, whose aid was unsolicited, sent nearly 10,000, at the same time claiming that China’s failure to advise Japan of its intention to send troops was a violation of the Tientsin Convention. Japanese troops in Seoul seized the king, and China acknowledged the opening of hostilities after the Japanese sank a ship carrying Chinese troops.
The resulting Sino-Japanese War ended in quick victory for the Japanese. The treaty of Shimonoseki seemed innocuous as far as Korea was concerned, since China was forced to recognize, as Japan already had, the full independence and autonomy of Korea. The Hermit Kingdom’s close relations with China had irritated the Western powers, and they viewed Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War as having provided a needed clarification of Korea’s status.4
But the dangers of “independence”—in fact, the absence of Chinese protection—became immediately apparent in Seoul, where the king continued a virtual prisoner of the Japanese. In addition, the successful conclusion of the war with China brought increased influence to Japanese militarists unsympathetic toward those moderates who advocated the gradual development of Korea as a Japanese sphere of influence.
An acerbating factor was Queen Min, who had retained her Chinese advisors and was vigorously opposed to the Japanese. On October 8, 1895, Japanese soldiers—apparently in connivance with Korean followers of Tae-won—attacked Duk Soo Palace, threatened the king, and then murdered the queen and the head of the household. The body of the queen was drenched in kerosene and burned.
For months after the murder of Queen Min, the king remained a prisoner in the palace. On February 11, 1896, however, he escaped in disguise to the protection of the Russian Embassy, an action which prompted the Russians to reassert their interest in Korea and which effectively postponed Korea’s assimilation by Japan until the obstacle represented by Russia could be removed. Proclaimed the king:
“On account of the unhappy fate of our country, traitors have made