Gojong

Gojong ruled Korea for forty-four years while it was taken away from him piece by piece. He came to the throne at eleven in 1863, with his father the Daewongun ruling as regent on a policy of keeping foreigners out entirely. That ended when Japan forced a treaty in 1876 on the same terms the West had forced on Japan twenty years earlier. The rest of his reign is a search for a protector. He played Qing China, Russia and Japan against each other; after Japanese agents murdered his wife Queen Min in the palace in 1895, he fled to the Russian legation and governed from it for a year. In 1897 he declared the Korean Empire and took the title of emperor, which was an assertion of equality with China and Japan and changed nothing on the ground. Japan won its war with Russia in 1905 and made Korea a protectorate. He sent a secret delegation to the Hague peace conference in 1907 to protest; it was refused a hearing, and Japan forced him to abdicate for having sent it. Annexation followed in 1910. He died suddenly in January 1919. The belief that he had been poisoned was widespread and has never been proved, and his funeral drew enormous crowds into Seoul - which is how the March First independence movement found its moment weeks later. That movement is the reason he is remembered as a rallying point, having been ineffective as a ruler. Korean historians remain divided over how much room he actually had, between those who read him as a weak man in an impossible position and those who read the reform edicts as a real programme that ran out of time.

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