The Chinese “resident” Yuan took no immediate action, but the next morning, December 5th, great surging crowds of Coreans begged that he would interfere, because they said the Japanese were holding the King as a prisoner in his palace. Yuan sent a messenger to the Japanese minister, inquiring why he had surrounded the King with soldiers and killed the ministers, demanding that he immediately evacuate the palace. After three hours had passed, and no answer coming, Yuan moved with his Chinese troops and the Corean military, making a force of four or five thousand men, toward the old palace. He found the entrance strongly guarded with the Japanese. The battle which ensued lasted from about 3 to 4 P.M., several score of the combatants being killed. As darkness drew near, the Japanese made their way to the northeastern part of the palace grounds, whence the King escaped from them with a few of the Progressive leaders and the party of students. The Corean soldiers carried the King to the north temple, where he was saved, but Han Yong Sik and seven of the students were hacked to pieces by the mob. About 8 P.M. Captain Murakami led off his soldiers and making a masterly retreat reached the Japanese legation after forty-eight hours of absence. Pak Yong Hio, Kim Ok Kiun, So Kwang Pom, Su Ja Pil, and a half dozen or so of the military students accompanied the Japanese.
All day long on December 6th, with the cry of “Death to the Japanese,” the Corean militia and the ruffians were let loose on a wild revelry of outrage, butchery, and incendiarism. The nine white foreigners in Seoul, of whom three were ladies, together [[467]]with twenty-two Japanese who had escaped bullets, stones, and knives, found refuge in the American legation, which was put in a state of defence by Lieutenant Bernadou. The twenty soldiers left behind in the Japanese legation, aided by a hundred or more of their fellow refugee countrymen, defended the walled enclosure from the mob. On the afternoon of the 7th, provisions being exhausted, the Japanese with admirable coolness, discipline, and success began the march to Chemulpo. The women, children, and refugees were put inside of a hollow square formed by the soldiers, the legation buildings were fired, and despite hostile soldiers, Chinese and Corean with rifles and cannon, and armed men firing from roof and wall, they unbarred the city gates and with their wounded crossed the river. Reaching Chemulpo on the 8th, they were fed by the sailors on the Japanese man-of-war, which had happily arrived. A Japanese steamer carried the news to Nagasaki.
The short-lived Liberal Government came to an end after forty-eight hours’ existence. The conspirators fled to Japan, whence most of them reached America. A month later Count Inouye, with a guard of six hundred troops, took up his quarters outside the west gate in Seoul and negotiations were opened. On January 9th a convention was signed by which the Corean Government agreed to pay an indemnity of six hundred thousand yen, and Herr Von Möllendorf and Su Sang Yu were sent to Japan to arrange terms for the renewal of friendly relations. The Coreans, to show their regret, chopped up and distributed around the streets the flesh and bones of eleven human beings supposed to have been active in the killing of defenceless Japanese in Seoul. At Tientsin, May 7, 1885, the Marquis Ito and Li Hung Chang signed a convention, by which it was agreed that the troops of both countries should be withdrawn and that neither government should land a military force in Corea without notifying the other. Early in the spring the Japanese legation was built at Corean expense in Occidental style, this being the first of the many foreign edifices which now adorn Seoul. The Chinese and Japanese troops embarked for their respective countries at Chemulpo on the 21st of May. On October 5, 1885, the Tai-wen Kun, fresh and rosy after his sojourn in Tientsin, re-entered Seoul. He was escorted by Chinese warriors and many thousands of Coreans. Most of his immediate followers being dead or in exile, his name was not often [[468]]mentioned during the decade of years following. He lived in comparative seclusion until the outbreak of the Chino-Japanese war.
The Progressives of 1884 were in too much of a hurry. They had tried to hatch the egg of reform by warming it in the fire. The affair of December, in its origin an anti-Chinese uprising of Radicals, became at its end an anti-Japanese demonstration in which about three hundred lives were lost. Yet as if to show that revolutions never go backward, this bloody business pushed open the gateway through which science and Christianity entered to hasten the exit of barbarism. Dr. Horace N. Allen, an American missionary physician, had arrived in Seoul in September, 1884. When called on the night of December 4th to minister to the Min Yong Ik, he found the native doctors stopping up the sword wounds with wax. Dr. Allen, by treating the injured man in scientific fashion, saved his life. The superiority of Western methods having been demonstrated, the wounded Chinese soldiers and Coreans, with their shattered bones and torn flesh, over which they had plastered the reeking hides cut from living dogs, or had utilized other appliances of helpless ignorance, came to him in crowds. Unable to attend to all these sufferers, application was made for a hospital. The Government at once set apart the dwelling occupied by Han Yong Sik and, naming it the House of Civilized Virtue, established April 10, 1885, a hospital.
Following this event, American missionaries arrived in increasing numbers. The Government engaged three American young men, Messrs. D. A. Bunker, G. W. Gilmore, and H. B. Hurlbert, as teachers, who with thirty-five sons of noble families as their pupils opened a school September 23, 1885. Missionaries with unquenchable patience began the instruction of a people much better acquainted with malevolent demons than with beneficent beings or with one living and true God, whose only idea of sin is that it is a civil offence, and whose language has no word for the love of a superior to an inferior. In apathetic faces they were to light the fire of a new hope. To become a Christian in Corea means a complete revolution in a man’s life, especially in that of a yangban, who has the intellectual power of a man with only the actual knowledge of a child. Nevertheless, with orphanages, Sunday-schools, Christian women’s work in the home, organized Christian churches, hospitals, schools for boys and girls, and a printing [[469]]establishment, most of the forms of active Christianity were soon visible in Corea, the country which, in 1904, with its tens of thousands of believers, is the most hopeful of missionary fields.
A treaty with France, negotiated in the summer of 1886 and ratified May 30, 1887, enabled the French Roman Catholic missionaries to come forth into open day. They at once made preparations for the erection of a cathedral, which, when completed and dedicated, May 29, 1897, was the tallest and most imposing edifice in the capital. It is 202 feet long and from 60 to 90 feet wide, and cost $60,000. The French minister endeavored to secure the same magisterial rights for the bishops and priests in Corea which have been long enjoyed by prelates of the Roman form of Christianity in China. Although at first the Government resisted, yet these claims have been virtually validated, and France acts in Corea, as elsewhere in Asia, as the protector of Roman Catholics. Much disquiet and local disorder in various parts of the country, especially in Quelparte and the provinces of Whang Hai, may be traced to popular notions and the procedure of the priests based on this peculiarity of French foreign policy.
Corea soon found that diplomacy could not be one-sided. Having dealings with foreign nations, it was not sufficient that Western governments should have their representatives in Seoul, while there were no Corean legations or consulates abroad. An episode arising from international jealousies soon caused this desire to take tangible form, despite active opposition from China. On April 14, 1885, the British Government, in view of eventualities with Russia, ordered the temporary occupation of Port Hamilton in the Nan How group of islands, about thirty-five miles from the northeastern end of Quelparte. Corea at once protested against this seizure of territory, and, in spite of all offers of gold for purchase, and all diplomatic pressure, she secured, after voluminous correspondence and the assurance that Russia would not occupy any part of Corea, the evacuation of Port Hamilton by the British. The flag of the double cross was hauled down February 27, 1887. At once the Government at Seoul prepared to send embassies to Japan, Europe, and the United States to establish permanent legations. This plan was of course opposed by Yuan Shi Kai, the Chinese “resident,” as he called himself, in an active, impudent, and villainous manner, he acting at the beck of his chief, [[470]]Li Hung Chang. The right to make a treaty carries with it the right of a legation abroad, and the American minister, the Honorable Hugh N. Densmore, by order of the Government of the United States, invited the embassy to take passage in the U.S.Ss. Omaha, which was done. With his secretary, Dr. H. N. Allen, Pak Chung Wang, envoy plenipotentiary, arrived in Washington and had audience of President Cleveland in January, 1888. A minister of equal rank went also to Europe and another to Japan. The Chinese “resident” then planned, by transferring his headquarters three miles from Seoul, to get all other foreigners removed from Seoul in order to have more power, but the scheme was frustrated in good season.
The road out of fetichism, superstition, and ignorance into light and civilization was not an easy one and had many a drawback. Until schools dispel ignorance, and the certainties of science dominate the minds of the natives terrorized by superstition, Corea, long intoxicated with sorcery, will suffer from continual attacks of the delirium tremens of paganism. Even the importation of condensed milk acted on the diseased imagination of the people to develop the disease. In 1888 what is known as the “baby war” agitated the people. The report was spread abroad that Americans and Europeans were stealing children and boiling them in kettles for food, and that foreigners caught women and cut off their breasts. The absence of cows led the Coreans to believe that the condensed milk, so much used among them, came wholly from a human source. For a time there was imminent danger of an uprising, but a proclamation from the King couched in strong language calmed the excitement, which gradually died away. The local revolts against unjust taxation and dishonest officials occurred with the usual regularity of such events in Corea.
Provision was made for a stable revenue in a system which was organized under Herr Von Möllendorf on an independent Corean basis, but after his dismissal in July, 1885, the customs service was put under the management of Sir Robert Hart, and an entirely new staff of men was sent from China. Mr. H. N. Merrill was made chief commissioner and the three open ports were given in charge of men directly from the Chinese customs staff, one of the most able and valuable among whom was Dr. McLeavy Brown. Financially promising as this movement seemed [[471]]and has proved, it gave China her great prestige and furnished the strongest lever for carrying out her ambitious plans in the peninsula, which some Coreans suspected of going even so far as to dethrone the King and to set up a new heir—a plot which Min Yong Ik exposed. Yuan, the Chinese resident, made himself practically a Chinese mayor of the palace. In ostentatious display of gorgeous costume, palanquin and retinue, as he vibrated between the royal residence and the Chinese legation, he and his procession formed one of the notable sights of the Corean capital. In a word, Li Hung Chang’s policy, working in conjunction with the Mins at court, headed by the Queen, resulted in a vigorous and undisputed reassertion of Chinese control, so that in the emergency which was soon to arise, the Peking Government felt perfectly safe in speaking of Corea as “our tributary state.” Apparently the influence of Japan had become a cipher, while that of the United States had dwindled into a merely academic theory of Corean independence. Potentially Japan was insulted and defied by her old rival and modern enemy. To make her grip on Corea sure, China massed her forces on the frontier, bought large quantities of Nagasaki coal for her steel-clad fleet at Port Arthur, and with her German-drilled army and great fortresses on the promontories guarding the sea-gates to the capital, she seemed herself defiantly ready to maintain her prestige regained in the peninsula which she called her “tributary state.”
Thus stood, or rather, thus crouched, in the early days of 1894, the pigmy, Corea, between the continental colossus on the one hand and the insular athlete on the other. To add to troubles imported from abroad, the long-standing intestine disturbances again broke out and the Tong Hak rebellion culminated in civil war, at the local causes of which we may now glance. This uprising of sectarians became not the cause, but the occasion of the clash between China and Japan, which ended in the destruction of China’s claim of suzerainty over Corea, and the independence of the peninsular state. [[472]]