"...anything other than a rousing success. Min, for her part, took tremendous pride of the "Korean way," what she described to her close circle as a middle path between the breakneck Westernization of Japan in the Meiji Era and the fiercely conservative Qing Chinese reaction against the fairly modest Western reforms, much as Korea was in the middle between those two larger historical powers that had contested one another for influence on the peninsula.
With the old pro-Chinese conservative element largely broken over the last fifteen years, Kim Hong-jip was the ideal administrator for such a project; he was an admirer of the exiled Chinese intellectual Kang Youwei, who had tried but failed to marry Western concepts to Chinese society to reinvigorate the crumbling Empire, but what did not work in Peking could perhaps work in Seoul [1]. The process was distinctly of the Joseon civilization; on the one hand, the King Gojong began wearing Western-style military uniforms when in court and his advisers suits bought from American tailors, but they all still wore the traditional topknots. Lessons at the hundreds of schools and academies that sprung up across Korea were largely taught in native Korean and, for the first time, attempted to teach the Hangul script rather than the traditional Chinese Hanja. Unlike just over the Yalu, where missionaries and Christians were burned alive or crucified by the rampaging Boxer societies, religious tolerance was encouraged and demanded by Court, and only Catholic churches - invariably sponsored and staffed by French - gave sermons in anything other than Korean. Min, though remaining Buddhist, was particularly proud of the Hangul Bible she was given as a gift by her good friend, the American Methodist missionary and Ehwa's founder, Mary Scranton.
Americans were perhaps the foreigners who held the most prestige in Korea, and that was in large part because they meddled little in the kingdom's internal affairs despite leasing their key Asian naval harbor at Port Hamilton between the mainland and Jeju [2]. Merchants stayed mostly in the foreign legations of Inchon, Kaesong and Seoul, military advisers brought with them loads of Winchesters and Remingtons for the burgeoning Royal Korean Army to drill with, while missionaries became key parts of their communities. Russians, too, were held in good esteem, for similar reasons; provided Korea was nominally "neutral" and did not provide an avenue for any other power to threaten St. Petersburg's precious railroad concessions in Manchuria, and every winter allowed the Pacific Fleet to harbor in the mouth of the Taedong off Nampo while Vladivostok was frozen over, the Tsar and his ministers made no substantial demands, and the few Orthodox missionaries who did trek to the peninsula were rarely seen or thought of outside of Hamgyong Province. [3]
Koreans had thus long since forgotten the brief gunboat incident at Ganghwa Island with the Americans over thirty years prior; they had not, on the other hand, forgotten the various Japanese and French invasions or intrigues (most famously France's treatment of Korea as a mere additional theater in their war with China in 1884), or the fact that those two nations had carved out treaty ports which were effectively their exclaves in Wonsan and Pusan, respectively, and citizens of both enjoyed near-total extraterritorial rights throughout the peninsula, a privilege not shared by any other foreigner. Japan had long sought to bully Korea, continued to scheme against it and pro-Japanese instigators opposed to the royal couple such as Kim Ok-gyun remained in Tokyo, alongside republican revolutionaries in that same city who were in exile and inspired by the Han Chinese Tongmenhui that sought a progressive democratic republic in the place of the decaying Qing. France, for its part, still regarded Korea as a pseudo-protectorate and semi-vassal despite the changing circumstances on the ground there; the French, thus, were particularly disliked, despite Catholicism now being increasingly influential on the peninsula, particularly in Pyongyang, the so-called "Jerusalem of the Orient"..."
- Land of the Morning Calm: Korea's 20th Century
[1] My Korean history is based entirely around Wiki-ing all these people I'm mentioning in said updates; if anyone knows when, precisely, did "Hanseong" become "Seoul," and why? Was it a Korean endeavor? How late did it carry the name Hanseong? I've been using Seoul since the 1860s but I wonder if that's correct.
[2] It kind of amazes how strategic Port Hamilton was at one point considered; those islands are tiny!
[3] Russian Orthodoxy of course had a pretty limited proselytizing component outside of formally Russian territories (and even then; see Central Asia). They didn't penetrate Alaska much either when it was theirs.
(All in all, Korea can be considered to be undergoing a "soft" or "partial" Meiji here; not nearly to Japan's extent, but much more so than even pre-Tiananmen Coup China and much more than what Korea did OTL. The French forced opening in 1869 and then the gradual withdrawal of Chinese/conservative influence and Min being able to pursue her preferred reforms without Japanese shenanigans puts the not-so-Hermit Kingdom in a substantively better position than they were comparatively in 1900 OTL)