Corea: The Hermit Nation

by William Elliot Griffis

The religious history of the people in the Corean peninsula is first that of fetichism and shamanism, then of Buddhism, which brought in culture and made a nation, giving also to the land its permanent monuments, its art, manners, and most of its folk-lore and general traditions. In the intellectual clash which, in every country in eastern Asia, has at one time or another taken [[473]]place between Confucianism and Buddhism, Buddhism remained victorious. Running a splendid career for over a thousand years, it finally reached corruption through wealth, worldliness, and political ambition. Yet intrenched in office and revenue, it held its own until overthrown with the dynasty in 1392, when Confucianism, after a long struggle, became the state church system. Buddhism, left to stagnation and decay, and as the religion of the peasants, remained in a frightfully corrupt form, while the scholars and thinking men were almost wholly devoted to Confucianism. As this system of Chinese ethics lends itself most admirably to despotism and the continuance in power of the privileged classes over the masses, so also under stereotyped Confucianism, Corea’s type of civilization, as we see it to-day, seems to mean for the nation at large only a general degradation as compared with the splendor of the mediæval Buddhist age. Allied with Chinese bigotry of race and ignorance of the world, Corean Confucianism degenerated still further into the savagery of conceit, of which the Tai-wen Kun seemed an incarnation, and made Chō-sen, as a body politic, a country eaten up with parasites—one-tenth of the population living on the other nine-tenths. In the persecution of the Christian converts to that form of Christianity which entered in 1777, Corean Confucianism showed itself as barbarous and as devilish as the Spanish Inquisition, or anything else in history which masks man’s lower nature under the garb of noble pretexts. Nevertheless, the very patience of the Christians under their tortures, the zeal and consecration of both the natives and their foreign priests, so impressed a Corean scholar named Choi, that in 1859 he set himself to ponder the question whether, after all, Christianity, though foreign, were not the true religion.

After severe sickness and a revelation, as he believed, from the Lord of Heaven, Choi felt himself called to found a new religion. He proceeded to do so after the time-honored manner most fashionable in China, Corea, and Japan, where originality is not too common, that is, make an eclectic system. From the ethics of Confucius and the philosophy of his commentators, from the writings of Lao-tsze and his interpreters, and from the Buddhist sutras and their accretions, he composed a book entitled the Great Holy Scripture and wrote out the brief prayer which his [[474]]followers still daily repeat. As Christianity was a Western sect, he gave to his new religion the name of Tong Hak, Eastern Doctrine or Culture. Many, perhaps most, of his followers laid their emphasis in the new religion upon the idea of maintaining Orientalism as against Occidentalism. Beginning in the town of Kion Chiu, forty-five miles north of Fusan, the movement spread quickly into the provinces of Chung Chong and Chullado. Entering the sphere of politics, it gave the downtrodden peasants hope and new life, in the midst of the awful night of ever-increasing official corruption and oppression. It was about this time that the tenure of office by the provincial governors was changed from three years to one year. This move, made in the interests of the official class, vastly increased the burdens laid upon the people, since the political spoilsman, who usually bought his office, having now less time wherein to recoup and fill his own chest, became threefold more grasping than before.

The influence of Christianity is very manifest in the history of the Tong Haks and in the literary, dogmatic, and devotional manifestations of their leader. Within six years, under the fierce initiative of the Tai-wen Kun, Choi and his disciples were officially charged with being “foreigner Coreans” and followers of the Lord of Heaven, that is, Roman Catholic Christians. Choi was tried, tortured, and beheaded, and his doctrines were outlawed. As with the Boxer and other common delusions among the ignorant, the Tong Haks believed that “by the influence of their god they could dance the sword dance and ascend into the air.” The sect kept on spreading year after year, its animus blending with that spirit of revolution and resistance to intolerable official oppression then rampant in the southern provinces, the two movements melted into each other and became one.

Early in 1893, before the palace gate at Seoul, there was a wonderful sight. With pathetic ceremonies and long and patient waiting, fifty of Choi’s followers presented a petition that their founder be rehabilitated and their sect be tolerated even as the Christians were. They intimated that if they were kept under ban they would drive all aliens out of the country. Their prayer for toleration was refused, and they were driven away by the palace guards. In the springtime the Tong Haks led a great uprising of the peasantry in the southern provinces. The soldiers sent to [[475]]Seoul to put down the insurrection were scattered like chaff before the wind. The insurgents occupied the chief city of Chullado and the danger seemed to threaten the whole kingdom. The Corean general, Hong, notified the Court of his inability to cope with the situation. Then the pro-Chinese faction in Seoul, instigated by Yuan, applied to Peking asking for military aid to put down the Tong Hak rebels. According to the Li-Ito convention of May 7, 1885, neither China or Japan could send soldiers into Corea without first notifying the other Power.

Meanwhile Kim Ok Kiun was in Japan. Though the Government at Seoul repeatedly demanded his extradition and both in Corea and Japan assassins continually plotted to kill him, he received the same asylum and protection which, under the laws of civilization, the Government in Tokio gave to all foreigners. Finally, in 1894 Kim Ok Kiun was lured to Shanghai by a false telegram and a forged bank-draft. On his arrival at the hotel he was promptly murdered. His assassin was rewarded with honor, fame, and money from Seoul, and in China looked on as a hero. With indecent haste, but following its ancient barbarous traditions, the Chinese Government made itself the express company which carried the victim’s body in a man-of-war to Corea, where it was cut to pieces and the head and limbs exposed on the public highway. This action of China raised a storm of popular wrath in Japan, while about the same time, China, first on June 7th forwarding her troops into Corea, in violation of the treaty of 1885, sent a defiant insult to the Tokio Government. Following this action, a despatch was sent to the Japanese legation in Peking, in which were the words which we italicize: “It is in harmony with our constant practice to protect our tributary states by sending our troops to assist them.… General Weh has been ordered to proceed to Zenra … to restore the peace of our tributary state.” Thus by force of arms China defied Western diplomacy, and, trampling on the treaties, asserted her ancient claims of suzerainty over Corea as her vassal state.

The reply of the Tokio Government was the announcement, on June 12, 1894, of the despatch of a body of the Mikado’s troops under strict discipline to Chō-sen. On June 17th China was invited to co-operate with Japan in financial and administrative reforms in Corea, in order to preserve the peace of the Far East. [[476]]China curtly refusing this request, demanded the immediate return to Japan of her soldiers, at the same time ordering her Tartar forces in Manchuria to cross that ancient Rubicon of Eastern Asia—the Yalu River. Chartering the British ship Kow Shing, she put on board eleven hundred soldiers with ammunition and artillery to reinforce the Chinese camp at Asan in the northwest of Chung Chong province. The reply from Tokio was, that, pending an amicable settlement of the questions in dispute, any further despatch of Chinese troops into Corea would mean war.

As soon as it was known in Tokio that the Tartar forces had been mobilized and that the Kow Shing was being loaded, the Japanese fleet sailed and orders were given to the troops, railways, and steamers to be ready for the embarking of an army. Within twelve days a Japanese army corps was landed at Chemulpo, marched to Seoul, the Han River bridged by pontoons in twenty minutes, and the military cordon around Seoul completed. On the 20th of July Yuan fled the Corean capital, leaving his nationals to shift for themselves. On the 23d Mr. Hoshi Toru, envoy of the Mikado, with a military guard entered the palace and demanded of the King an answer to the question of Corea’s independence and willingness to stand by her treaty with Japan. The royal answer was in the affirmative. The King called in the Tai-wen Kun to allay his fears and aid him in the formation of a new cabinet, to which he invited, for the most part, the Liberals exiled in 1884. Prince Pak Yong Hio, who had been declared an arch-traitor and his house razed to the ground, was again received into royal favor.

On July 25th the Japanese cruiser Naniwa, under Captain, now Admiral, Togo, met the Kow Shing. After four hours of parley and refusal to surrender, the transport was sunk by the guns of the Naniwa. On July 29th and 30th the Japanese met the Chinese forces at Asan, routed them and occupied their stronghold. The declarations of war between the emperors of China and Japan, the old rival Sons of Heaven, were published to the world on the same day, August 1, 1894. The former was full of arrogance and ignorance, the latter was clear in phrase and temperate in tone. The Chinese lady then on the throne called on her soldiers to “root the pigmies out of their lair.” With the conceit and stupidity of the giant, China went to war against the intelligent [[477]]and splendidly armed Jack of the islands. In results it was an affair of Goliath and David over again. Ancient and overweening orthodoxy met culture and intelligence in the field and on the wave, to be confronted by what was despised as too small to do harm. At bottom the Chino-Japanese war meant the right of a nation to change its civilization. Japan, already a signatory to the Geneva Convention and her officers trained in the ways of civilization, even though her people were dubbed heathen by some semi-enlightened folks of the West, went to war in Christian style. The Japanese had a superb Red Cross organization, a corps of surgeons, and a body of fifteen hundred trained nurses, while their hospitals were equipped according to scientific ideas. With each army corps and fleet went a lawyer versed in international law, to see that nothing should be done against the laws of nations. The literary fruits of these precautions and this loyalty to the high standards of civilization are seen in Mr. Takahashi’s masterly work “International Law During the Chino-Japanese War,” and in Mr. Ariga’s “La guerre Sino-Japonaise au point de vue du droit internationale.” The Chinese had not yet (or before the year 1904) recognized the laws of civilization and had scarcely the beginning of hospital corps, hospitals, or surgeons. It was not wonderful, therefore, that her wounded usually crawled away to die like dogs, or that her ignorant soldiers frequently fired upon those bringing succor to the wounded. The official organization of the Chinese was honeycombed with corruption, but with their thirty thousand drilled troops and fleet, including battle-ships, of which the Japanese had none, they expected easy victory. Occupying Ping-an, they built between fifty and sixty forts. At sea their fleets were busy in convoying transports full of soldiers to the mouth of the Yalu River to prevent the Japanese from advancing beyond Corea and in the hope of overwhelming them at one onset. On the site of their previous victory three centuries before, they expected to rout the Japanese and then to drive them southward and out of Corea.

The Japanese, centuries ago, learned the difference between bulk and brain, and are but slightly overawed in the presence of mere weight or size. They knew that the military reputation of China only existed on paper, and their excellent system of jiu-jitsu had taught them how to turn an enemy’s strength against himself. [[478]]Her soldiers had grown up in the new era of ideas which had come to fruit under Christian civilization. Borrowing these ideas and forces and combining them with their own resources and informing them with their own genius, they gave the world a surprise. They had long grieved in spirit over their non-recognition by the world at large of their peaceful ambitions and of the principles that lie at the basis of their civilization. They mourned that war and bloodshed were necessary to impress the world and secure respect. Within six months they humbled China and compelled her to sue for peace.

In three divisions, up from the south, eastward from the mouth of the Ta Tong River, and westward from Gensan, the three columns of the Japanese army marched and met at Ping-an (Ping Yang). After two days’ fighting, September 15th and 16th, the Chinese hosts were routed. The next day, at sea, off the mouth of the Yalu River, the Chinese fleet, in the first great battle of modern steel ships, was disabled and was never afterward able to resume the offensive. Before October 1st Corea was entirely cleared of Chinese. On the continent of Asia, chiefly in Manchuria, they held an area larger than their own empire. Port Arthur fell on November 21st, and the great fortress of Wei-hai-wei was surrendered January 31, 1895.