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A military, as opposed to an armed gang, is intended to be loyal to a realm— but in practice, the loyalties of a soldiers typically lie with their commander. A realm and its paid enforcers may agree on a common set of goals or disagree violently. In the latter case, either the realm or the military may succeed in enforcing its own will on the other, and may do so for good or ill. These uncertainties, however, do not make the study of militaries any less rigorous or important. If the grand European and Asian imperial states of the 19th century imparted any lesson to the world, it was this: without a military there is no state, and a nation without a state awaits a future of doubt and fear.

In 1867, a French fleet, commanded by Admiral Roland Goullet from his post on the flagship Flammant, approached the large city of Busan in hopes of opening trade relations with the secluded Korean kingdom. However, the Korean government had taken pains to ensure that access to Busan remained a privilege, to be granted and revoked at will. The Japanese had possessed this privilege for centuries, but the French were interlopers at best and pirates at worst. As the French approached Busan, guns and cannons on the shore fired on them. The Flammant returned fire, and succeeded in destroying the Korean shore batteries. Though he had been given no such orders from his higher-ups, Admiral Goullet ordered the seizure of a fortress on the shore, and, after sending one ship to report back to the French naval base in Prey Nokor, sent most of the remaining fleet onward to Busan.

These events put the Korean court on the back foot. One faction favored meeting the invaders with sword and torch— after all, the Spanish and the Britannians had been turned back from Korea for far less serious offenses in 1832 and 1845. In 1867, however, the Korean king was a mere boy, whose father had died three years previously. The regency government’s grip on Seoul was fragile, and, if the reports from Busan were true, an all-out war with this “France” could shatter it entirely. Meanwhile, China, the traditional suzerain of Korea, had begun a more peaceful program of productive engagement with Europe under the Yongwu Emperor, and wished to see its Korean vassal follow a similar path. The Treaty of Busan, signed in 1868 (after Paris had been adequately briefed on the tomfoolery that had unfolded in the Far East without their permission), would irreversibly change Korea’s future. The treaty gave France a concession in Busan, in which French merchants could store their wares and from which they could range outward in search of trade opportunities. The treaty also arranged for two ports, Incheon and Wonsan, to be opened to French trade by 1871. However, the treaty recognized Korea as a sovereign state with a power to sign treaties and make commitments independently of Beijing.

After five years of studying Europe’s diplomatic situation with the aid of Chinese strategists, the Korean court decided to counter the military dominance France had established before the Treaty of Busan and the economic influence it had built up in the years since by bringing in a counterweight. On 1873, the first hundred men of Korea’s Hussar Legion (Huszárok légió) arrived in Incheon, as part of the Visegradian aid promised to Korea’s representatives in Buda. These men were sent to strengthen Korea’s military, but the chain of events they unleashed would not be confined to the barracks.


“Thousands upon thousands of years of history,” Colonel Ferenc Szente sniffed disapprovingly, “and it all amounts to this rickety kingdom of troubled millions!” As the first commanding officer of the Hussar Legion, Szente regularly dealt with the Korean state and army, and the journal he kept during his years in Korea illustrates the chronic rot which afflicted both institutions.

Since the accession of Sunjo in 1800, powerful families from the yangban (兩班/양반), a class of aristocrats who monopolized most positions of authority, held the kings of Korea’s Yi (李/이) dynasty as puppets. For most of the unfortunate Sunjo’s reign, the Korean court was dominated by the king’s in-laws in the Andong Kim clan. A bloody purge of high officials in 1801 solidified this control, which lasted until Sunjo’s death and the accession of Heonjong in 1834. The new king’s mother, however, belonged to the Pungyang Jo clan, which came to eclipse the Kim in influence. Upon Heonjong’s death without heirs in 1849, however, the right to choose the next king belonged, in accordance with Korean custom, to the oldest living Queen Dowager. This happened to be Sunwon, the widow of Sunjo and highest-ranking member of the Andong Kim. She engineered the accession of a 19-year-old relative of the former king Yeongjo, whose family had been driven out of the capital by the toxic politics of Korea’s court and eked out a living as farmers on Ganghwa Island ever since. The newly-minted King Cheoljong was illiterate, uncultivated, and a hard drinker. The Kim dominated his reign, and sealed their control over him by arranging his marriage to one of their own. At the time of Admiral Goullet’s campaign, anti-Kim factions in the court, led by the Pungyang Jo, made a sport of questioning the legitimacy of the boy-king Minjong [1], the only son of Cheoljong and Korea’s nominal ruler after 1864. In the end, the collection of yangban that ruled the country in Minjong’s name decided that fighting the French was an unwise proposition— but this added an extra dimension to Korea’s bitter factionalism. The Andong Kim had traditionally associated with conservatives and persecuted Korean Catholics, but agreeing to the Treaty of Busan made them the main proponents of engagement with the West. Hardline conservatives, put off by the pragmatism of the Kim-dominated government, joined the opposition. The Pungyang Jo and their new ally, an obscure relation of the Joseon Dynasty named Yi Ha-eung, eagerly awaited a realignment of Korean politics. The increasing age and infirmity of Queen Dowager Cheorin, mother of the young Minjong and de-facto ruler of Korea, would soon grant this wish.


Poorly-substantiated claims that 1800s Korea experienced out-of-control population growth and utterly stagnant agriculture have led to a belief that this era was one of unmitigated disaster for the country. In truth, the disasters of the 1800s were mitigated, but only barely so. Instead of a haphazard rise, Korea’s population appears to have increased steadily over the course of the 1700s and then steadily leveled off, reaching a number between 13 and 16 million in 1850 (Yi-era censuses were, unfortunately, quite incomplete and inaccurate). The country’s demographic pressures were somewhat alleviated by migration from the eight historic provinces of Korea to the comparatively newer territory of Heunggang (興疆/흥강, “Flourishing Frontier”), which the Koreans conquered in the 1600s while assisting in the Shun dynasty’s subjugation of the Jurchens. Heunggang’s villages and the provincial capital of Yeongil [2] were well-used to new immigrants, who cleared away the local forests to create new fields for rice, barley, beans, and millet. In the rest of Korea, the state’s construction of reservoirs made irrigation easier, and the new practice of double-cropping (growing rice and barley on the same fields) increased yields. The potato and sweet potato, which originated in Vespucia and spread to Korea through China, were well-suited for hilly areas (which, in a mountainous country like Korea, were quite abundant) that other crops couldn’t deal with. Tobacco, introduced in the 1600s, joined cotton as one of Korea’s cash crops.

It is possible to argue that the Korean peasantry, who made up 90% of the population, could at least survive even if they didn’t exactly thrive. For example, the number of famines actually decreased in the 1800s, despite the common reputation of the 1700s as a political and cultural golden age for Korea. However, that number was still intolerably high, and the increasing corruption in local and national government did little to help matters. Pressed by hunger on one side and the caprice of the state on the other, peasants were even forced in some cases to abandon their villages and wander as vagrants. Some survived as “fire-field people” (火田民/화전민, hwajeonmin)— they moved from place to place to stay abreast of the tax collectors, and used fire to burn away the vegetation cover on hilly wilderness and clear space for planting crops. Some migrated to China’s frontier territories, where colonization of the Jurchen lands and southeastern Xiboliya (centered on the port of Haishenwai) proceeded apace. Some turned to banditry. Musket-bearing bands of men on horseback called “fire brigands” (火賊/화적, hwajeok) haunted the countryside, and boats full of “water brigands” (水賊/수적, sujeok) prowled rivers and seashores. And some decided, in concert with disaffected elites, to give the government a piece of their mind.

While it’s believed that Hong Gyeongnae was a yangban who failed his civil service exams, it’s also possible that he was a commoner who never had the opportunity to take such an exam. What is indisputable is that, within the first ten days of Hong’s 1812 rebellion against the Korean state, the coalition of aggrieved peasants, local elite sympathizers, and intimidated magistrates that he assembled conquered most of northern Pyeongan Province without major resistance. The widely-published and well-recorded manifesto of the rebellion decried the frustration of all of Pyeongan’s social classes at Seoul’s perception of them as “militant, wild, and barbarous” and its discrimination against government officials of Pyeongan origin. The manifesto went on to detail the arbitrary and ill-considered exercise of power by the king’s in-laws, who presided over a corrupt and exploitative machine. The natural disasters, famines, and cosmic changes of the day, the manifesto concluded, were clear proof that the Yi dynasty had lost the Mandate of Heaven and would inevitably be overthrown. The challenge posed by the Hong Gyeongnae rebellion was not just of a military nature, but also an ideological one— it challenged the Yi dynasty’s legitimacy using its own Confucian ideology. The rebellion took five months to subdue, and the rebel-held town of Jeongju held out for a 100-day siege. After capturing Jeongju, the government’s troops took 3,000 captives, and executed all the males over 10 years of age among them. This brutality, however, would not bring the Yi dynasty any measure of peace. In 1833, an increase in the price of rice set off a major riot in Seoul. A pattern of minor disturbances in the countryside, in which bands of peasants typically attempted to set fire to the local magistrate’s office and the tax records within, was broken by a major 1862 uprising in the southern city of Jinju. Thousands of peasants in white headbands marched through the streets and murdered local officials and merchants, and their success inspired a copycat uprising in the nearby city of Iksan. The regular Korean army was busy suppressing violence in all three southern provinces (Jeolla, Gyeongsang, and Chungcheong) until 1863.

The Hussar Legion could not have arrived at a worse time. Its mission was to train the Korean recruits which the government sent to it in the ways of modern warfare, and the government may have hoped for a well-armed, well-trained force of 1,000 with which to smash revolts every now and then. The commanders of the regular Korean armies, however, refused to accept any encroachment on their jurisdiction by foreigners, and petitioned the Korean government to not let the Hussar Legion see active duty, not divert resources to it from the regular army’s allotted share of the budget, and to perhaps dissolve the Legion entirely if the good king Minjong were so inclined. Korea’s commoners also had grievances against the foreigners, but for different reasons. The native Korean network of retailers, wholesalers, and middlemen lost ground every day to French traders, and later to Dutch and Britannian concessionaires who set up shop over the early 1870s. The Hussars and their recruits, having no relation to the traders, were not the cause of the commoners’ anger, but they certainly made for convenient scapegoats.


The Yi dynasty had not traditionally possessed a strong money economy, in which a standardized currency serves as the main medium of taxes, trade, and salaries. Since the 1600s, the state had accepted the payment of taxes in cash, rice, or cloth. Korea’s internal trade was not robust as in Shun China or even Tokugawa Japan— outside of the large cities of Seoul and Gaeseong (large is a relative term, and Seoul’s population did not exceed 500,000 until the mid-1800s) the markets were open-air, only convened on market days, and typically existed at a day’s walk from each other. At these markets, bolts of silk or cotton cloth were more popular media of exchange than money, which could be inflated or debased. The state paid the salaries of its soldiers through rations of rice. It is this last feature of the Korean economy which most directly concerns the Gimyo Incident.

In the Gimyo (己卯/기묘, “Earth Rabbit”) year of the Korean sexagenary calendar, which corresponds to the Western year 1879 AD, the troops keeping the king’s peace in Seoul found that their grain rations had been adulterated with chaff and sand. The resulting riot saw the participation of not just soldiers but commoners, many of whom had lost their jobs due to the increased competition which accompanied the internationalization of the Korean economy. A storm of rage erupted right inside the capital, and, after the loyalist units of the regular Korean army and police failed to quell it, the instigators of the Incident prepared to march on the Changdeok Palace.

Within the Palace’s walls, Minjong decided that he would not call for Chinese assistance.

The death of Queen Dowager Cheorin in 1878 negated any leverage she had over her 21-year-old son. A circle of powerful members of the Andong Kim had tried to re-establish their clain’s influence over Minjong that Cheorin’s death had lost them by advising the young king on matters of state. Here, they advised him to send a message to Tianjin and ask the Chinese for assistance in putting down the rebellion. Korea was China’s most loyal tributary state, and the Emperor would certainly never permit such disorder in his allies’ own capital. Minjong answered sharply in the negative, and sent a runner to Colonel Szente of the Hussars. Despite many hurdles, the original group of 100 sent by Visegrad had swelled to a force of 2,400, with infantry and cavalry subdivisions. Koreans made up the rank-and-file, while the Europeans served as officers and trainers. Both groups were paid with money, not rice. Having been released from their barracks by Minjong’s order, the Hussars marshaled the remaining loyalist units in a clash with a force of rioters of roughly equal size, only a half-mile from Changdeok Palace. The first of the Hussars’ many campaigns of historic importance ended with the instigators of the Gimyo Incident dead or imprisoned, and with the city pacified at the cost of 87 civilian deaths. Minjong promptly accused many of the more power-hungry, old, and conservative members of the Andong Kim of being unpatriotic and cowardly, and arranged for them to be banished from Korea. Most of these exiles, lacking anywhere else to go, settled in Beijing. The Pungyang Jo, secretly glad that Minjong had dealt with the Andong Kim but shocked by his decisiveness, refrained from any open dissent for the next few years. Minjong remains a controversial figure, but one thing about him is certain— anyone seeking to rule in his name would have to fight for the privilege.

In the meantime, modernization became more than just a thin veneer across Korea’s surface. Minjong, seeking a constituency that he could appeal to in future confrontations with the yangban clans, surrounded himself with a series of young men (the average age was 37) with reformist tendencies. This “Royal Clique” of officials and ministers generally sought to follow China’s lead in “Self-Strengthening,” or adopting Western technology and science (especially in the military and financial fields) while retaining traditional Korean culture. The resulting policy of “Eastern Ways, Western Machines” (東道西器/동도서기, Dongdo Seogi) saw the first telegraph lines on Korean soil connect Seoul and Incheon in 1883. Chinese funding contributed to the project’s quick completion, and to modernizations in other fields. The government entrusted Hans de Villiers, a expatriate from the VFS, with the management of the Korean Customs Service. The Customs Service’s efficient collection of tariffs on imports created a dependable and rapidly growing source of funding for the Korean state and its ambitions. Despite the important role that foreign talent and resources played in the great changes of the 1880s, native-born Koreans were no mere bit-players. During the tentative modernizations of the early 19th century, a class of wholesale merchants known as gaekju, or yeogak, emerged as middlemen, performing the vital tasks— warehousing, transport of goods, running inns for merchants, providing banking services— without which no economy could truly be called modern. Those gaekju who survived the intense competition from the Europeans or Chinese became wealthy entrepreneurs, who in some cases were richer than the state-appointed commanders who governed their hometowns. They invested money in cropland in the south, coal mines in the north, and in the education of their sons and daughters (but mostly their sons). The government sought to supply this demand by establishing the Royal College (育英公院/육영공원, Yugyeong Gongwon), whose French instructors (all of whom had served the Korean government as interpreters or soldiers for a decade or more) promised all the benefits of a Western-style and French-medium education to the children of Korea’s nouveau and vieux riche. The Royal College, however, was often seen at the time as a poor substitute for spending a year or so learning a language of one’s choice and then traveling directly to the West to study there.

The precedent for such “journeys to the West” was set dramatically by Minjong himself in 1886, during the king’s yearlong voyage to Europe. A Korean fleet of Dutch-built ships carried the royal entourage through the Indian Ocean and the great Suez Canal. Disembarking in Rome (the king had been advised to land in a neutral country, to avoid signaling support for Europe’s major powers in their increasingly acrimonious disputes), Minjong met with the Prime Minister of the Italian Confederation, and resided for two months in a Roman villa that, upon further consultations with the Italian leadership, became the site of a permanent Korean embassy. From there, the king’s route took him to Paris, Hanover, and Vienna. The visit to the South German capital almost derailed the trip entirely— in an interview with a local reporter, Minjong declared that, as a fellow king who sought to rule wisely, he sympathized with the Habsburgs and expressed confidence in “their ability to provide prosperity and justice for all the people of this land.” The resulting diplomatic incident was quelled only by the protestations of Jean Langlade, an official of the Korean Finance Ministry who joined the royal entourage on Minjong’s request, that “the King of Korea has no stake or attitude in the affairs or alliances of this continent, and his reference to ‘this land’ was clearly meant for South Germania alone, and not for any wider ethnic region.” The latter part of the journey, in which Minjong visited Buda and Karaliaučius (Emperor Mykolas refused to let the Koreans enter Vilnius, citing the dangers posed by a recent rash of anti-government activism that the Saugumas had yet to suppress), passed without any major disturbances.

Minjong returned to Incheon by March 1887. His voyage, which had been intended to present Korea as an fiercely independent state that nonetheless remained open to productive collaboration with foreigners, was generally successful in its predetermined aims. However, it also almost singlehandedly lifted Korea’s fledgling newspapers out of obscurity. Drawing from earlier scholars’ traditions of writing public letters and circulars to voice opinions, report facts, or draw support for causes, members of Korea’s Westernizing elite sought to create newspapers for their own profit and consumption. Typically printed in a mixed script of Chinese characters and the native Korean Hangul alphabet, these papers offered an innovative mix of editorials on domestic affairs, coverage of international affairs, letters to the editor, petitions to the government, and royal edicts. Since the founding of the Sudo Jubo (“Capital Weekly”) in 1877, newspapers had been a kind of public space, where educated Koreans could communicate with the state and each other in unprecedented ways. Minjong’s trip to Europe, however, caught the attention of a much wider audience, and after the king’s return to Korea a new wave of newspaper consumers from the middle and lower classes emerged. The literate simply purchased the publications, and the illiterate listened in to public readings of newspaper articles in Seoul’s shops and thoroughfares while on break from work. It was during this time that observers noticed a trend of newspapers published only in Hangul, with no Chinese characters mixed in. These new papers, which presented Korean words familiar to everyone in a script that was familiar to more people and easier to learn than Chinese characters, came to compete with the mixed-script papers in popularity. Their emergence also added fuel to the fiery debate on Korean education, in which warring camps of educators argued that the reform of Korea’s traditional school systems should be accompanied by a reform of the Korean language and the systematic removal of Chinese characters from public life.

Minjong was certainly the man of the hour, and all reports indicate that he loved the attention. The newspapers’ coverage of his reign, however, would soon grow much more critical.


Some Koreans of the 1890s argued that the king’s voyage to Europe, and the year that he spent hobnobbing with that continent’s elite, awoke some dormant force within him. Others believed that the aspects of Minjong’s personality and philosophy which affected his later reign were present all along. Whatever the case, few could doubt that Minjong, now in his thirties, sought to live life by the “pleasure principle” which had been devised and popularized a decade earlier by the controversial Norwegian psychologist Sigurd Fryd. At the same time, his commitment to further reforms grew tenuous. Most Korean reformers of the time were quite pragmatic in their attitudes— they saw themselves as working toward greater efficiency in the state by implementing practical reforms, and not as crusaders for some glorious ideal of “newness” or against some abstract “tradition.” Minjong was also a pragmatist, in his eschewing of rigid ideals in favor of practical benefits, but things which benefited him personally always seemed to count for more than things which benefited the realm as a whole. Minjong had affiliated with the reformists in order to gain a bloc of supporters independent of any of the old yangban clans. Now, several factors caused a rift to open between Minjong and Korean progressives, which included his “Royal Clique” and other agents less friendly to the Yi dynasty.

Korea had not seen any major public disturbances since the Gimyo Incident, but now it began to seethe once more. Public agitators, who typically represented one or another of the small political clubs that Korea’s educated elite had taken to forming, decried the royal government’s placement of foreign profit before domestic development. Instead of investing in Korean talent and industry, Seoul sold rights to develop various Korean resources, including the rights to harvest Heunggang’s timber and to develop Pyeongan’s gold and coal mines, to European and Vespucian companies. Voices who pointed out how the king personally profited from such arrangements were likely to be silenced quickly. In 1895, the government requested in no uncertain terms that the venerable Sudo Jubo retract an editorial which called upon Koreans to avoid using the new Seoul-Gaeseong Railway, because the contract for the railway had been given to an Italian company instead of the Korean Railway Corporation (朝鮮鐵道公社/조선철도공사, Joseon Cheoldo Gongsa), which had built a fine (if slightly outdated) railway connecting Daegu and Busan three years earlier. When the newspaper refused, the government used “years of unpaid taxes” as an excuse to confiscate its printing presses. Silence, however, was fleeting. The Sudo Jubo, bereft of its presses, leveraged its reputation, its remaining funds, and donations from concerned supporters to hire a staff of trained calligraphers. Three months after the government’s attack on its offices, the Sudo Jubo had settled on a formula of biweekly issues, each of which would be completely handwritten. The first issue of the “new Sudo Jubo” featured an article on the Rokmyeonggwan (鹿鳴館/록명관, “Deer-Cry Hall”), a large building that, constructed for the ostensible purpose of “housing and entertaining foreign guests,” became the site of elaborate and expensive French-style balls and parties, in which Korean royals and nobles mingled freely with foreign diplomats, officers, and businessmen.

The match which lit this tinderbox was a long bamboo switch, with which some Seoul police official whose name is lost to history savagely flogged three vegetable vendors to within an inch of their lives in the scorching July of 1898. The brutality of this punishment attracted a large crowd in the nearby market, which was listening to a newspaper reading. In their attempts to forcibly stop the official from killing the vendors, they broke his arm and dislocated his knee. Realizing that they had already broken the law by assaulting a representative of the king, they decided to break even more laws. The next two weeks of riots and protests, which gained an increasing degree of internal cohesion and connections with agents outside the city after local political associations and labor unions decided to participate, saw raids on police stations, the freeing of political prisoners from jails, and the defection of several platoons of the Korean regular army. The Hussars, who had helped save the government during the Gimyo Incident, had been dispatched to Korea’s northern border to deal with large bands of Jurchen bandits who were causing trouble for the foreign concessions nearby. Inspired by the events in Seoul, masked raiders stole weapons from a police station in Incheon. A little-known group called the “Study Circle for the Weberian Philosophy” claimed responsibility for the event. On August 1st, several explosions erupted near Changdeok Palace. A company of soldiers turned up outside the palace a few hours later, claiming that the situation had worsened dramatically and that they needed to enter in order to protect the king. Upon entering, the soldiers overpowered the palace guards, detained Minjong and all the members of the royal family, and raised a banner of gold silk, dyed in the color of Republicanism, above the palace roof. The Musul (戊戌 /무술, “Earth Dog”) Revolution, named for the Korean year corresponding to 1898, had ended in victory. The association of merchants, intellectuals, unionists, and priests who had assumed leadership of the revolt, however, did not seek a republic. On August 3rd, the people of Seoul were informed by a royal edict that “within three months, the formation of a National Assembly (國民議會/국민의회, Gungmin Uihoe) of the Korean people, which will collaborate with the king in ensuring justice and prosperity, will be effected.”


The returning Hussars’ offer of cooperation greatly strengthened the National Assembly’s ability to pursue its ambitions, but Colonel Tadeusz Sikorski made sure to clarify that his Legion allegiance to the Assembly was conditional. “The Hussar Legion was created by Visegrad to serve the King of Korea,” Sikorski stated during the second session of the Assembly. “To avoid embarrassment for Visegrad and for Korea, the Legion will look to carry out its original mission unless released of its responsibilities by the king.” Minjong, of course, had no plans of releasing his well-armed allies just yet. For the time being, the king decided to collaborate with the Assembly— but he watched it closely, expecting that it would soon make a catastrophic mistake of some kind.

The National Assembly, for a time, disappointed Minjong’s hopes. Aware of its deep roots in urban society and thought, the Assembly attempted to reach out to rural areas by annulling the Korean government’s old prohibitions on Donghak (東學/동학, “Eastern Learning”), a quasi-religious movement whose adherents were spread throughout Korea and numbered in the tens of thousands. Although Donghak was at least partially defined by its opposition to Seohak (西學/서학, "Western Learning"), or Christianity, the interest in rural prosperity, justice, and safety that the Assembly proclaimed convinced the leaders of Korea’s Donghak parishes (and by extension, the parishioners) to give the Assembly the benefit of the doubt despite its obvious Western leanings. The Assembly made further attempts to enlist the lower classes by reaffirming an 1887 ban on slavery and serfdom, and promulgating a new ordinance that eliminated legal distinctions between social classes. A peasant and a yangban lord were now equal under the law. The Assembly was also interested in greater efficiency of government, and to this end it formally separated the royal court from the state, placing the budgetary demands of the former under the “Royal Household Department” of the latter. Although the National Assembly retained paramount legislative authority and invested its Chancellor (to be newly elected by the Assembly’s members every three years) with executive authority, the king was allowed to remain as the head of state and given the power to veto laws passed by the assembly (although the Assembly could, with a simple majority of 51%, override the veto). The bloated old ministries of the Korean state were either dissolved or renovated to create a new line of departments, which dealt with education, foreign affairs, home affairs, finance, justice, defense, and commerce. Returning to social matters, the Assembly ratified a pre-Musul draft ordinance that outlawed child marriage, setting the legal marriage age at 20 for both genders, and ended a prohibition on widows remarrying.

Under the influence of the school teacher Kim Juseung, who served as Chancellor from 1901 to 1902, the Assembly confirmed the abolition of the traditional gwageo, or civil service exam, whose excessive focus on esoteric features of Chinese literature and philosophy made sure that only the yangban literati could pass consistently and barred most men of talent from the lower classes from taking part in government. It also made Hangul the official script of all government forms and documents, but Chinese characters remained a compulsory subject in schools. The Assembly expected that Chinese characters would remain a part of public life for many more decades, and felt that banning the study of them would only limit the professional prospects of future Korean generations. Although the European officers of the Hussars (there were around 84 of them now, commanding a force of 4,100) were leery of the National Assembly’s chances of success or longevity, the majority seem to have privately been quite supportive. A letter sent to Brno by a certain Sergeant Andrej Mládek reported that “the streets are quite peaceful, and most of the wreckage from the riots has been cleaned up by squads of citizen volunteers. Only the most disciplined members of the old police forces have been retained, and they train alongside eager volunteers from among the civilians and the lower ranks of the army. The people are not much richer than before, but there is a civic pride in Seoul that I think does not exist in raucous Edo or stately Peking, or any other great city of the Far East.”

As with most documents, however, what is omitted in Sergeant Mládek’s letter often reveals more than what is stated. His emphasis on the Assembly’s successes in Seoul belie its inability to enforce its will outside the capital’s walls. In the districts and provinces of Korea, where political offices had long passed like heirlooms between patriarchs and heirs of powerful families, the Assembly’s progressivism held little appeal. The commanders of the administrative districts did not openly defy the Assembly, but surrounded by cliques of traditional yangban scholar-officials, disgruntled soldiers from the long-neglected provincial units of the army, and representatives of foreign-owned concessionary companies, they simply ignored it. Representatives from Seoul were turned back, and letters from Seoul were burned. Money and resources from Seoul were eagerly accepted, but never used for their intended purpose. The provincial cliques ruled as shadow governments, and did so with the tacit support of the population. Although Korea is now quite cosmopolitan, the people of the country during the Yi era highly valued traditional culture. The cliques accordingly fed their subjects exaggerated stories of the Assembly’s complete lack of regard for traditional culture, and of the moral degeneration that afflicted Seoul. In this respect, however, the cliques weren’t particularly wrong. The Assembly’s enthusiasm often did include a sort of disdain for Korean custom, and this soon sealed their fate. The Topknot Controversy of 1902, initiated by the Assembly’s quixotic decision to abolish traditional Korean topknots and encourage Western haircuts, even gave the people of Seoul pause. The provincial cliques, however, did more than just pause. Riots erupted throughout the country, and the conservatives of Gyeonggi Province (which surrounded the capital) organized a demonstration against the measure which quickly became a demonstration against the Assembly’s failures, hypocrisy, and hyperbole. Taking advantage of the presence of a large friendly element within the city, Minjong declared that the National Assembly had been permitted to commit too many mistakes, and would henceforth be abolished by force if necessary. Many of the soldiers who had defected to the Assembly during Musul simply defected again, leaving their pro-Assembly comrades to face the might of the Hussars alone. After a short siege, the doors of the Rokmyeonggwan were blown open by artillery. A number of high-profile members, including Kim Juseung, were arrested.

Restoration to power, however, solved few of Minjong’s problems. He inherited a government that was in the midst of drastic reforms, and the reforms which could not easily be reversed simply had to be allowed to proceed. After the establishment of order in Seoul, Minjong attempted to restore his authority in the provinces. The local cliques, which had by now become experienced in the arts of gathering their own funding and keeping the peace in their own lands, resisted. They did not ignore Minjong to the same extent that they ignored the Assembly, but it was enough to show Minjong that his writ did not run across all Korea anymore. Even his leadership of Seoul was in question, as radicalized soldiers and civilians still milled about, waiting for one of the “heroes of Musul” to come out of the woodwork and restore popular rule. Their wishes were partly satisfied by the re-establishment of the National Assembly in 1904, but the Second National Assembly was a very different beast from the First. The Second Assembly had no Chancellor. Any man who had ever held the post of Chancellor or been in consideration for it was, on account of being too popular to publicly execute, exiled to New Zealand instead. The Second Assembly was, in other words, completely powerless— but in this respect, it was not much worse off than the king himself.


By 1907, Minjong seemed to have finally given up. China had already given up on Minjong in 1905, when its government recognized the chaotic Korean government’s inability to pay even a symbolic amount of tribute, and finally relieved it of its traditional obligations to grant such payments. This was accompanied by a degree of celebration in Korea, and landmarks of Korea’s tributary status like the Yeongeunmun Gate were eagerly torn down, the enthusiasm soon petered out. With the provincial cliques keeping large amounts of tax revenue for themselves, Minjong turned to European banks in order to pay for the cost of governance. After 1907, Minjong took out loans not so that he could govern but so that he could escape. In a distorted echo of his voyage twenty years earlier, Minjong toured Europe in search of pleasure and distraction, and added onto the rather unhealthy lifestyle and dietary habits he’d built up over the course of the 1890s. This proceeded until 1908, when Minjong allegedly died at the dining table in a Milanese resort with a forkful of tiramisù halfway to his mouth. That version of events is probably quite embellished, but what is known is that Minjong left behind a Queen Dowager and two sons. The sons were twins.

The Queen Dowager, a member of the Pungyang Jo and a relic of the era in which clan affiliation actually meant something, had conspired with the Gyeonggi clique to install Prince Akjang (樂章君/악장군, Akjang-gun) as the next king. Minjong, however, had publicly declared his wish for Prince Chunun (春運君/춘운군, Chunun-gun) to succeed him— and this decided matters for the Hussars, who threw their support behind Chunun and successfully ensured his enthronement in the following month. This was to be the Visegradians’ last act of significance in Korea. The Chinese government knew from its agents in Seoul that the Hussars (now a force of 9,600) were the most professional and well-armed military force in the nation. If they were to serve as kingmakers, as makers and breakers of royal ambition, they could not be permitted to remain under European control any longer. The Visegradian government, upon receiving word from China, considered refusing Beijing’s terms— but after a quick look at Europe’s diplomatic situation and secret talks with its South German ally, Buda decided that alienating any possible allies could be an unsound strategy. By 1910, around three-quarters of the Visegradians in Korean employ had been recalled home, and a new cadre of Korean officers took their place. One of these was Yun Hajin.

A native of Heunggang, Yun had been orphaned at a young age during a power struggle between two clans of settlers in the northern forest. The fourteen-year-old boy had found his way to Yeongil afterward, and wandered aimlessly for an indeterminate period of time until his recruitment by the Hussar Legion during one of their northern campaigns against local bandits. Lacking any other commitments, Yun threw himself headfirst into army life, emerging as a capable Sergeant just six years after his recruitment, shortly before the Musul Revolution. For the next decade, Yun’s men traveled around, like most of the Hussars, as free agents. They worked for anyone who claimed to be a governing authority, whether pro- or anti-Assembly, and kept the peace by neutralizing local bandits and smugglers. Yun could help but feel, however, that the real bandits were the people whom he served. These thoughts meant little until 1910, when the departing Colonel Sikorski nominated Andrej Mládek to succeed him and tapped Yun for the post of Major, a rank which was second only to that of the Colonel's. Such a promotion, Yun thought, was certainly a blessing. He wondered if he could make another upward jump in due time.

As it turns out, the Chinese had plans for Yun too. The weakness of the Korean government was regarded as a strategic problem, because it left Korea exceptionally open to influence from the Europeans. The great powers were distracted by the run-up to the Great War at the moment but could not be trusted to remain friendly to Chinese interests after the war’s inevitable end. Such vulnerability could not be permitted to exist along the Chinese border (and especially not right next to prosperous regions like the Yellow Sea coast), and so Beijing plotted a coup in collaboration with Choe Munjeong, a centrist journalist who’d previously lived in Haishenwai but returned silently to Korea after Minjong’s death. Yun was to provide the firepower for the coup, which was ostensibly meant to provide strong leadership for Korea at any cost. Shortly after the Western New Year of 1912, Chunun awoke to find his palace surrounded. A runner presented the confused king with two demands: restore the position of Chancellor to the National Assembly and appoint Choe Munjeong to fill it, and promote Yun Hajin to Colonel of the Hussar Legion. Both demands were approved, but Choe remained at his post for all of five months before he unexpectedly resigned, nominated Colonel Yun to take his place, and left the country for French Indochina. The Chinese had not planned for this, and Yun’s apparent insistence on maintaining the posts of Chancellor and Colonel simultaneously gave them cause for concern. However, China’s impending entry into the Great European War shifted most other diplomatic questions to the back burner, and Beijing did not complain very much when Chunun abruptly left for Japan, stating that he wished to acquire medical care for some unnamed condition in the advanced Franco-Japanese hospital at Kyoto.

While Chunun recuperated, Yun meditated. In late 1913, he retired from both of his offices, appointed Bak Mincheol as Chancellor and Major Yu Dongju as Colonel, and then took up residence in a Buddhist temple near the capital. Observers did not miss the fact that Bak and Yu had both been comrades and friends of Yun since his days as a common soldier, but this initially appeared to amount to very little. Yun sincerely appeared disinterested in anything outside the temple— he did not allow reporters to visit him, and didn’t seem to be communicating with his friends in high places. This changed after a Japanese newspaper reported Chunun’s intent to “make changes to the government of the state.” In a storm of yellow journalism, Seoul’s newspapers cried out that Chunun sought to finish what his father stated, and would end the National Assembly’s existence when he returned from Kyoto in three months' time. The National Assembly declared Chunun deposed, and, as the sickly Prince Akjang had died of natural causes in 1912, made a big show of casting about for a suitable king. When the representatives of the Assembly came to his temple, Yun refused at first out of courtesy. But by June 1914, while the Chinese were focused on a particularly thorny bit of warfare in Southeast Asia, Yun’s enthronement ceremony unfolded with great fanfare in Changdeok Palace.


Something must be said here on the subject of names. Until the Census Ordinance of 1933, most Koreans followed Chinese naming customs. Children received a birth name from their parents, and upon reaching their twentieth birthday they chose a new "courtesy name" for themselves. The courtesy name was a mark of adulthood, and used by a person in dealings with friends and strangers. Only parents or close family members used an adult’s birth name. In addition to the birth and courtesy names, the kings of Korea (who retained Chinese naming customs even after the Census Ordinance) had a third name. The temple name was chosen posthumously, and it would be used to refer to the departed monarch in the ancestor-worship ceremonies of the Confucian temples, in which the monarch’s descendants and successors paid their respects. They usually featured an adjective that reflected the king’s reign in some way. At the request of the National Assembly, the naming committee charged with naming the son of Cheoljong picked “Minjong” (湣宗/민종, “The Confused”), and all references to Minjong made after his death use that name, despite its unflattering meaning, out of the respect traditionally afforded to temple names. Only kings who died in office, however, would be afforded a temple name— kings who were deposed and died in disgrace retained their courtesy name. The son of Minjong is known, despite his reign as the last king of the Yi dynasty, as “Prince Chunun.” Yun Hajin had, like most of Heunggang’s population, retained his birth name even past the age of twenty. Shortly before his enthronement, however, the first king of the Yun dynasty adopted the courtesy name Yun Myeongdo (尹明道/윤명도, “Bright Path/Path to Tomorrow”).


Myeongdo’s thirty-one-year reign was one long exercise of balancing tradition with revolution. Tradition came first. In a speech before the National Assembly, Myeongdo reaffirmed that the nation’s name in Korean would still be “Joseon” (朝鮮/조선), for “the name and symbols of Joseon may have been dynastic at first, but they are national now. I will surpass the Yi kings in my service to the Joseon nation of the Great Han (大韓/대한, Daehan) people.” The National Assembly remained in existence, and maintained its subordinate political position in relation to a king with sweeping executive and legislative powers. The standard dialect of Korean remained the Seoul dialect, and the Ministry of Education reaffirmed that the standard script would be a mixed script of Hangul and Chinese characters. And, it could be argued, a powerful general seizing the throne was itself something of a Korean tradition. The first king of the Yi dynasty, Yi Seonggye, had done the same in the 1300s.

Next came changes, and drastic ones at that. The Hussar Legion become the core of a new Royal Korean Army, which also integrated other modernized, experimental forces like the gendarmerie of Seoul. The dissolution of the “regular” Korean armies and the integration of their subunits into the RKA brought the strength of the new force to 181,400 men. The Korean constitution of 1916 clarified the king’s role as commander-in-chief of the RKA, and Myeongdo took advantage of this in his regular meetings with the General Staff. The bulk of such meetings typically concerned the campaigns against the provincial cliques which refused to swear loyalty to the government. These took up most of the late 1910s and cost a considerable amount of blood and treasure, but, by 1919, General Yu Dongju received a document of surrender from the the Hamgyeong Clique, whose members had been holed up in the city of Cheongjin for the better part of a year. The administrative and economic reorganizations of the captured territory, which included most of Korea’s lands outside the province of Gyeongsang and the island of Jeju, included replacing the system of district commanders with a new line of provincial governors with civil authority (appointed for one term of six years by the state and discharged afterward) and regional military commands that took charge of defense. Many of the new governors were progressives with roots in the provinces they were appointed to govern, and the state assisted them in a vast program of land reform. This finally broke the power of the countryside aristocracy, eliminating the main obstacle to the new government (which drew much of its support from military discipline and the tacit approval of the urban classes), and created a new class of rural smallholders grateful and sympathetic to the increasingly centralized Korean state. While his subordinates fought the war in the provinces, and the army grew tenfold in size as it recruited new friends and old enemies, Myeongdo haggled with diplomats. The RKA’s efforts to establish Seoul’s control over Korea involved the nationalization of French and Dutch assets in the country. This had caused a minor stir in Europe, but both nations were war-weary and, after consultations with the Koreans, refused to press the issue.

The late 1920s, despite being a time of worldwide depression, were formative for the 20th-century Korean economy and society. The restored stability of the country convinced the financial and industrial bourgeoisie, who had been growing steadily more important since the 1890s, to stop saving and start investing again. The state eagerly supported the resulting economic boom, by entering into joint ventures with bankers and businessmen, and privatizing some of the cropland, mines, and factories which had been snatched from the defeated Entente powers. Although the close and almost conspiratorial relations between business and state would later be decried as “cronyism” by some and cause genuine problems for all, Korea’s formula for development seemed to be working at the moment. Prioritization of exports and tariffs on imports forced Korean companies which couldn’t secure a niche in the domestic market to look outward— to Japan, newly-conquered Xiboliya, and beyond. The construction of private and public universities, ensures that the Korean were, if not geniuses to a man, a folk well-versed in the practical arts. Although state and society preferred that the young become professionals of some sort— doctors, civil servants, and engineers received a great deal of public praise— little could prevent those with artistic inclinations from following their own way.


The 1930s saw an explosion of art and literature, such as had not been seen since the 1700s. Inspired by Western forms and East Asian classics, writers like Seo Taejo and filmmakers like Gu Hyeongjun creates new works of romance, adventure, and— within a few strict limits— satire. Many valid comparisons can be drawn with developments in neighboring China, but such similarities break down when analyzing the two countries’ feminist movements. The process of closing the gender gap in China tended to be top-down and state-directed, with the enthronement of Empress Chunhua being a fairly representative example. In Korea, meanwhile, the steadily growing demographic of educated women, drawn from all the classes and regions of the country, inscribed their demands on paper, on film reels, and, in one notable incident that got three activists arrested for a week, the walls of the National Assembly’s Great Hall. Myeongdo wasn’t particularly favorable to allowing women legal parity with men (he once asked an aide why “education… wasn’t enough to ask for”) but he’d prospered from his alliance with Korea’s progressives. They’d helped convince the public to accept his overthrow of the Yi dynasty, and now they staffed his bureaucracies and sat in the National Assembly which, despite its power being mostly ceremonial nowadays, had given him his throne. Seeking to avoid the radicalization— or, more accurately, the further radicalization— of the feminist movement, Myeongdo finally allowed the National Assembly to pass the Reform Act of 1936, which repealed any remaining Yi-era legal bases for gender inequality. Women could now freely attempt to seek employment as professionals, inherit and transfer property, and run for local, provincial, and national political offices. Social attitudes, however, did not shift so easily as laws, and it took a decade or two before women made up a sizable portion of the political or professional classes.


Despite all these shake-ups, control of the situation never exited Myeongdo’s grasp. The Unitarian Party of Korea, which grew out of an obscure study group in Incheon, became the Soldier-King’s greatest headache over the late 1920s and early 1930s. The group initially sought to end the Yun regime with a single blow, but their 1929 coup attempt fell apart almost immediately. Seoul’s people might be well used to backing revolts, but its police were also well-accustomed to stopping them by this point. The sole government casualty was a technician who the Unitarians accidentally shot as they tried to take over the Sengupta station. The leaders of the UPK went underground for a time, and then made the trip to Tsushima Island in small boats launched from empty beaches in southeastern Korea. The Nagai government, upon being alerted of their presence on Japanese soil, received the survivors of the sea’s fury quite warmly, giving them sustenance, support, and a block of office buildings in Fukuoka. From its new “provisional capital,” the “Union of Korea” switched to a strategy of steadily needling the Korean government, chipping away at its strength and goading it into doing something controversial. This strategy enjoyed rather more success— the remnants of the old provincial clique armies, driven into the forests and mountains by the Royal Korean Army, pledged their allegiance to the UPK and received technical and material support in periodic illegal deliveries from Japan. The resulting bush war led the Royal Korean Army to a seemingly interminable game of whack-a-mole against Blue guerrillas in the hills, but by the late 30s the UPK had effectively been neutralized. Ships of Unitarian operatives traveling to Japan passed without major issues, but the Royal Korean Navy’s dragnet typically ensnared any traffic traveling the other way. Alternate smuggling routes extending from Hokkaido to northern Xiboliya and Korea gave the Unitarians in Korea some cause for hope, but, as Admiral Heo Gapsu reported to the king in 1937, “the Navy is doing its best to justify its share of the budget.” By 1940, the eruption of the Sino-Japanese War marked the beginning of the end for East Asian Unitarianism. Most of the large militias, recognizing that their struggle against Seoul would soon become much more futile, lay down their arms after the Chinese completed their blockade of Japan.

It’s noteworthy that the Sudo Jubo continued to publish handwritten issues decades after the dynasty which confiscated their printing presses had been overthrown. At least some of the editors may have had Republican inclinations, but the motive for the newspaper staff’s stubbornness seemed to be a kind of pride. The ability to handwrite issues from anywhere at any time, and to pack up and move to a different city if need be, was an important symbol of press freedom and cavalier disregard for the will of any monarch, Yi or Yun. The fact that the Yun Dynasty was tarred with the same brush as the Yi, despite all its attempts to seem different and better, was the harsh price of Myeongdo’s strength.


Myeongdo died of a stroke on July 11, 1945. The naming committee bestowed upon him the temple name of Geunjo (近祖/근조, “Modern Patriarch”), which reflected his status as the founder of a new dynasty and the era that he was undoubtedly a product of. For a time, the streets were alive with chatter about the new king. Geunjo was a hard and stubborn ruler even at the best of times, but the fierce and protective love that he had borne for his country was not the shallow love of Minjong. Geunjo was 67 when he died, and yet right until the end he had stayed interested in the prosperity and, more importantly, safety of the realm and its people. Would his 19-year-old son Yun Gang, who now ruled as king, feel the same way? There were distressing rumors, spread from the mouths of former servants and palace guards, that the new king’s narcissism during his teenage years had rivaled Minjong’s. Even more distressing rumors spoke of a secret opium addiction. It was certainly suspicious that Geunjo had not often brought his son with him on his trips to the country’s nine provinces. Could it be that the Soldier-King was concealing his son from the world? Some even supposed that Yun Jayeong, Yun Gang's elder sister, might make a better monarch. She was already an important figure in the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, after all...

Seoul’s rumor mill underestimated Yi Misun. The Queen— now Queen Dowager— of Korea was a granddaughter of Yi Ha-eung, a relative of the Yi dynasty and ally of the Pungyang Jo who had been exiled in the 1890s for breaking ranks with the weakened Korean conservatives’ tacit support for modernization. Her marriage with Geunjo in the early 1920s was initially a matter of expediency— it granted legitimacy to the groom and a path back to grace for the bride’s family. Over the space of almost two decades, though, the couple became quite close. As a result, Misun had plenty of reasons— the respect that she had for her husband as a person, her dedication to the system that her husband had built, and her duty as a mother— to ensure that Yun Gang turned out all right. Myeongdo never shook off his rustic Heunggang dialect, and didn’t have much patience for writing Chinese characters when he could simply use Hangul. Misun, however, made sure that her son spoke in a proper Seoul accent and was fully literate in Hangul and Chinese characters. The Yun court and government involved much less ritual than Yi institutions, but Yun Gang’s Korean tutors the boy instructed as to the meaning and significance of certain key Confucian and Buddhist ceremonies, like the worship of ancestors.

Misun’s efforts were almost completely derailed by a number of factors. Her boy was, unfortunately, quite prideful— born into the world of privilege that his father built for him, he assumed that he was entitled to obedience regardless of how much effort he put into acting like a leader. Worse still, the rumors about Yun Gang’s involvement with opium weren’t entirely wrong. After the boy— 12 years old at the time— broke his leg in a fall, the court doctor prescribed a drug whose active ingredient was derived from Southeast Asian poppies. This, the general uncertainties of adolescence contributed to a rather unfortunate case of depression that the government did its best to conceal from the public. Geunjo was quite concerned, but matters of state tied his hands and prevented him from spending much time with his son. It fell to the boy’s mother, sister, and tutors to help him, and, by all accounts, they did admirably. When the heads of Korea’s various ministries and departments traveled to Changdeok Palace to pay homage, the new king they found was neither haughty, listless, nor confused. He was soft-spoken and a bit of a snob, but generally intelligent and cooperative. Yun Gang’s adoption of the rather prideful courtesy name Yun Sungyang (尹崇陽/윤숭양, “Majestic Sun”) worried people at first, but the decade after 1945 was generally a good one. Geunjo had left behind a well-oiled machine, and Sungyang maintained it with a skill that approached expertise every year. Though he was initially advised against traveling to the Republic of Japan because of the chaotic and disorderly conditions there, Sungyang recognized the political and economic benefits of paying a visit to Kyoto. His 1950 conference with Democrat Izuku Midoriya gave legitimacy to both men— both of whom had come to power during or after 1945— and helped re-establish the strong bonds of Korean-Japanese trade and investment that had preceded the September Revolution. Aid from Japanese people living in Korea to their rediscovered family members or friends was allowed to cross the Sea of Japan freely, with the Korean government taking only a minor slice. Such remittances remained an important source of funding for the Japanese republic and people well into the 60s.

The looming storm of the Great Asian War, however, was a different sort of challenge. Segments of Korean society, and especially the Japanese-Korean community, called for Korea to join China in resisting Unitarianism and pointed to the terms of the EASA, which compelled the members of the alliance to defend each other. Others, knowing that the Indian giant could not be knocked over as easily as the Japanese Unitarians, called on the government to restrict itself only to shipments of aid to the actual combatants, or even to declare complete neutrality in the war. Unlike in China, the monarch could not simply submit the matter to a vote. The Korean National Assembly still existed as a kind of advisory council to the real holders of power, but it had lacked genuine duties independent of the king’s own since the Musul Revolution. After all the deliberations of military and civilian figures, it fell to Sungyang to give the final word on his country’s policy. The destruction of Changsha appeared to decide matters for the young king, and, over the objections of even his own mother, he prepared to send Korea to war.

***

The “Bulgae” speech of King Gyeongjong (敬宗/경종, “The Honorable”). Televised and broadcast over the Sengupta on May 31, 1956.

“An old friend of my father’s told me in my youth about the legend of the Bulgae. In ancient times, a great king of a country submerged in darkness despaired at the lack of light in his realm. He then sent a Bulgae, a great hairy dog cloaked in fire, to steal the sun and bring it back to the country of darkness. But when the dog clamped his jaws upon the sun, he found that it was too hot even for his otherworldly tongue. He let go, and returned home with his tail between his legs.

Undeterred, the king sent another Bulgae, bigger and more fierce, to steal the moon. But when this dog sank its jaws into the moon, it found that the moon was unbearably cold. It too returned home, defeated. Since then, the king of the country of darkness has tried again and again, sending his dogs to swallow the sun and moon whole, but they have failed every time. This, it is said, is why we refer to a solar eclipse (日食/일식, ilsik) as an “eating of the sun,” and a lunar eclipse (月食/월식, wolsik) as an “eating of the moon.” Each represents a failed attempt to remove the light from our lives.

Many of you, no doubt, remember such tales. The rural countryside in which this story and others developed is still the residence of half of our countrymen, and the growing population of city-dwellers has, perhaps, not forgotten them completely. I speak to you now of memory and forgetfulness, because the enemy that looms ahead is one that has made himself forget many things about his own past.

Thousands of years ago, a great sage named Gautama, whose teachings are studied in all the continents, spent his whole life within the confines of modern India. Two hundred years ago, the wise rulers of India proved, before the thought had ever occurred to any East Asian nation, that it was possible for a land and people to be Asian and modern at the same time. There were many things which my late father never bothered to learn, but even as his mind began to fail him he could easily recite the names of every Gurkani emperor in chronological order. The Indian Enlightenment was, and continues to be, an inspiring tale for all nations which seek strength, justice, and prosperity.

Today, the king of darkness calls himself a Chairman, but the task he has committed himself is no less reprehensible or futile than attempting to steal the heavenly bodies. We Koreans, inheritors of the traditions of Dangun and Gija, Confucius and Zhu Xi, Buddha and Lindemann, are well-suited to recognize that India’s current leaders are monsters. They are monsters without parallel in over 5,000 years of history. India, that troubled land, may yet be a country of sages at its core— but its leadership has forced it into a suit of ill-fitting armor, and put a sword in its hand. Its leadership has marched millions of frightened men, coerced into participating in heinous tasks, across jungle and and hill— and there they have spread yet more fear among the populations caught within their grasp.

Today, India brings the world fire and steel. What makes our country different? It is true that our land is modern, but it is also a land of friendship and loyalty. Here, wizened grandparents tell stories of heroes and monsters, and the lessons contained within, to their grandchildren. The current leaders of India sneer upon such things, because stories do not harden armor or sharpen steel. But these things strengthen men. They give people something to fight for. They teach us, as Koreans and as humans within an enormous world of billions, to recognize inhumanity and commit ourselves to its elimination.

I, Sungyang of Korea, do hereby declare war upon the Unified Indian State and its allies. I pledge that, before the end of the year, the Great Shun will receive humanitarian aid, military supplies, and a Korean Expeditionary Force of 160,000 capable soldiers. I pledge that our nation’s navy will cooperate closely with the Republic of Japan, and ensure that the Blue menace never pollutes that nation’s shores again.

Our nation, having been influenced by so many cultures while maintaining its own, is capable of taking the long view on things. We know that the modern era is one more wealthy, more interconnected, and more hopeful than any which came before. It is something worth fighting for. Let our fiery outrage singe the dog’s tongue, and our cold resolution freeze its teeth.”



[1] In OTL, Cheoljong had no heirs. TTL, he eats more ginseng.

[2] OTL: Yanji, capital of the PRC’s Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture.