Reflections | Korea under Japanese rule: the violent killing of a queen that led to a century of animosity

Recently in Seoul, I visited Gyeongbokgung, the main palace of Korea’s Joseon dynasty (1392–1897). It was my third visit, but it was the first time I was able to spend time wandering the grounds at leisure. Crowds and noise aside, Gyeongbokgung is an attractive palace in a beautiful location, even if it’s somewhat Disneyfied – perhaps inevitable given that 90 per cent of it was systematically destroyed by the Japanese in the early 20th century in a deliberate attempt to kill the spirit of their colonised subjects, meaning that most of the current edifices in the complex were only rebuilt in recent decades.

If one ventures to the northern end of the palace, which I did, one would arrive at Geoncheonggung, the reconstructed residence of King Gojong, the last king of the Joseon dynasty and the first emperor of the short-lived Korean Empire (1897–1910), and his wife, Queen Min. It was here that on October 8, 1895, Japanese assassins, aided by their Korean collaborators, killed the queen, who was fiercely opposed to Japan’s insidious designs on her country. Having brutally murdered Min, they burned her body in what could only be construed as a gratuitous act of viciousness, before burying her remains.

The death of Min, posthumously given the title Empress Myeongseong by her husband, outraged the international community (which petered out, as international outrages tend to do), but, more importantly, it galvanised Korean opposition to the Japanese. This incident, together with the string of atrocities committed by the Japanese, continues to poison the relationship between the two East Asian nations.

In the 12th century, in what is today the Chinese province of Heilongjiang, another royal corpse is said to have been desecrated. The politically inept but artistically gifted retired Emperor Huizong of the Northern Song dynasty, who bequeathed posterity with his inimitable Slender Gold style of calligraphy, was captured by Jurchen invaders in 1127, together with more than 10,000 people, including his son, Emperor Qinzong, their families, and all those denizens of the palace and court who hadn’t already died or fled.

Huizong died of illness in captivity in 1135, after suffering eight years of extreme deprivation in the harsh conditions of the far north and humiliation at the hands of his captors (female members of the imperial family were enslaved and forced into prostitution, while the Jurchen mocked Huizong with the ignominious title Hunde Gong, the “Duke of Befuddled Virtue”). According to popular stories, the Jurchens placed Huizong’s body on a rack above a pit and proceeded to burn it. When the corpse was half burnt, they poured water over it to douse the flames and then dumped it into the pit filled with the run-off. They did so, the story goes, to extract oil for their lamps.