| This undated photo shows four major players in the Gapsin Coup of December 1884. They are, from left, Park Yeong-hyo, Seo Gwang-beom, Seo Jae-pil (Philip Jaisohn) and Kim Ok-gyun. They staged the coup to bring revolutionary change to the Joseon Kingdom, but they were deposed after three days in power. / Korea Times file |
There is an extraordinary photograph dating from the mid-1880s of four dashing Korean men, who look poised, confident, and ready to do big things.
In fact, they had just done a very big thing: They had violently overthrown their government in order to push through revolutionary change. Alas, they themselves were deposed after three days in power, and they were forced to flee the country as state criminals.
This was the famed Gapsin Coup of December 1884, and that famous picture was taken in Japan, where they had found exile. That event and these men captured both the perils and promises of Korea at the dawn of a dramatically new era.
What had brought these four gentlemen together was participation in the emerging enlightenment movement of the 1870s and 1880s. Under the guidance of teachers like Yu Hong-gi and Park Gyu-su, they became convinced of the need for fundamental social reform and for learning from the outside world. Their sense of common mission sharpened as they grew more frustrated with the pace of government reform, until finally in desperation they decided to take immediate action.
Within a year after that fateful act and their shared experience of fleeing to safety, they would go their separate ways. Strikingly, however, the destinies of each of the four would symbolize a different but representative path for the country as a whole.
As the head of this leadership group, Kim Ok-gyun was the best known. Having grown up in political circles and passed the civil service exam, Kim was appointed to increasingly higher positions in the central government in the early 1880s.
He also visited Japan in order to observe directly the rapid advances being made there. Back home, he hosted meetings of like-minded reformists in the self-proclaimed Enlightenment Party, and through this network organized the Gapsin Coup. Upon taking power, however briefly, Kim spelled out a sweeping program of changes, including diplomatic independence from China, the elimination of hereditary class differences, and the reorganization of government to eliminate corruption and waste.
In Japanese exile, Kim lived anxiously due to threats and demands from the Korean court for his extradition. After nearly a decade in Japan, Kim moved to Shanghai in 1894, where he was assassinated. Ironically, Kim died just a few months before the Gabo Reform of the summer of 1894, which implemented, for good, many of the fundamental changes that Kim had long advocated.
Park Yeong-hyo would live to see the implementation of the Gapsin program in his homeland. Park had been the most privileged of the coup leaders, and hence he had the most to lose: He was actually a member of the royal family through marriage.
But like Kim and the others, Park was willing to risk his life and those of his family to pursue his ideals. Unlike Kim, Park would live a long life, the latter part of which was spent as a prominent political and business figure in the colonial period. As an emblem of Korean collaboration with the Japanese takeover, he was reviled by many of his countrymen.
Seo Gwang-beom and his distant cousin Seo Jae-pil joined Park on a journey to San Francisco in 1885. While Park would soon return to Japan, Seo stayed in the United States, moving to the east coast and attending school. This was when he likely received news that his entire immediate family, including his father, a vice cabinet minister, had been executed as a result of his participation in the Gapsin Coup, a gruesome end met by the relatives of other coup leaders as well.
Seo endured through this and other hardships while struggling to live in America, and then returned to Korea following the start of the Gabo Reform in 1894 to attain formal rehabilitation and a series of high ranking official posts. He went back to the U.S. as a Korean ambassador at the end of 1895 and died there from illness in 1897.
Like Seo Gwang-beom, Seo Jae-pil moved across the American continent to settle in the eastern U.S. He in fact became the first Korean American by gaining American citizenship in the early 1890s. But he was Americanized in other ways as well, having attended university, earning a medical degree, converting to Protestantism, taking an English name (Philip Jaisohn), and even marrying an American woman. He also became perhaps the first American missionary to Korea, to which he returned, like Seo Gwang-beom and Park Yeong-hyo, when it became safe to do so after the Gabo Reform.
In order to promote Christianity, enlightenment, nationalism, and mass education, in 1896 Seo Jae-pil founded the Independence Club and The Independent, the first modern newspaper in Korea. Both of these organizations would exert enormous influence over the rapid changes taking place in the country at the turn of the 20th century.
Seo moved back to the U.S. for good in 1898, and remarkably lived another half a century, all the while working to achieve Korean independence from Japanese colonial rule. Fittingly, Seo Jae-pil got a chance to visit his liberated homeland in 1947 before passing away close to his 87th birthday in 1951.
Kyung Moon Hwang is associate professor in the Department of History, University of Southern California. He is the author of, “A History of Korea ― An Episodic Narrative” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). The Korean translation was published as 황경문, “맥락으로 읽는 새로운 한국사” (21세기 북스, 2011).