Empress Myeongseong

She was born on October 19, 1851, in Yeoju-gun, Korea, in Gyeonggi province to the yangban clan Yeohung Mins.

She was born under the name Min Ja-young, but was often called the name "daughter of Min Chi-rok". Tragically, she was orphaned by the time she was 8 years old, but this seems to play as an advantage in the future for the young girl.

Not much is known about the empress's early childhood. When she was 15 years old, with the influence of a court lady in her clan, she caught the attention of Daewongun, her future father-in-law. Daewongun, the father of the emperor, ruled over the country as a regent since his son, Emperor Goong, was still underage. When it was time for his son to marry, Daewongun set to find a girl without many relatives who would fight for power and seek favor at the court. Myeongseong was the perfect candidate, seeing as though she did not have any close relatives and was also a lady of noble birth.

Min Ja-Young was crowned Queen of Joseon, at the age of 16 years old with her marriage to Emperor Gojong, who was 15 years old at the time. She received the title Her Royal Highness, Queen Min (Min Daebi Queen Min), and "Her Palace Majesty"

Typically, queen consorts concerned themselves with setting fashions for the noble women of the realm, hosting tea parties, and gossiping. Queen Min, however, had no interest in these. She did not enjoy lavish parties, rarely commissioned extravagant fashions from the royal ateliers, and rarely hosted afternoon tea parties with the powerful aristocratic ladies and princesses of the royal family unless there was some political gain.

Queen Min spent her time studying political affairs, international relations, economics, military matters and every other subject of importance that was not considered normal for ladies. She became her own teacher and greatly expanded her knowledge, not only on political affairs but also on science, philosophy and religion. At that time, Korea followed strict Confucian principles, and her interference in political affairs did not fit in with Confucian ideology, which encouraged repression of women so they conformed to the ideals of traditional virtuous womanhood. Many male nobles, her father-in-law included, did not rally for the empress because of this.

Queen Min proved unable to have a child until she was 20 years old, five years after the marriage. That child, a son, tragically died three days after he was born. The queen and the shamans (mudang) she called in to consult blamed the Taewongun for the baby's death. They claimed that he had poisoned the boy with a ginseng emetic treatment. From that moment on, Queen Min vowed to avenge her child's death.

Daewongun publicly declared Queen Min unable to bear a healthy male child and directed his son and her husband Gojong to have sex with a royal concubine, Yeongbodang Yi to produce an heir. It is also said that King Gojong highly favored this royal concubine. In 1880, the concubine gave birth to a healthy baby boy, Prince Wanhwagun, whom Daewongun titled Prince Successor. This offence did not sit well with the Queen, worsening her relationship with Daewongun.

Working behind the scenes, Queen Min was a key figure in the takeover of power from her father-in-law and securing it for King Gojong. Crucially, she managed to unite the whole Min clan, and also get the support of the regent’s close relatives as well as that of Confucian scholars. Min Sung-ho, Min’s relative, and Choi Ik-hyun, a court scholar, wrote a formal impeachment of Daewongun to the Royal Council of Administration. The document argued that Gojong, now 22, should rule in his own right, without the regency of the Daewongun.

The Royal Council directed the Daewongun, with Gojong's approval, to retire to his estate at Yangju in 1882, the smaller Unhyeongung. Queen Min then banished the royal concubine and her child to a village outside the capital and stripped them of their royal titles. Sadly, Prince Wanhwagun soon died afterwards, with some accusing Queen Min of involvement in it. From that time on Queen Min was the dominant lady at court and her position only further strengthened.

Because Queen Min showed greater political skill and intelligence than her husband, she had real power in the Royal Court. When Empress Myeongseong was 24 years old, she gave birth to a son, the Crown Prince Sunjong, who survived infancy. However to her dismay, he was a sickly child, and Queen Min's enability to produce a healthy heir still huanted her.

Just as Perry's naval guns provoked a radical reform movement in Japan, the Meiji Restoration, Japan's naval guns provoked a reform movement in Korea, the Progressive Movement. Faced with Japan's naval and land forces, Korea signed the Ganghwa Treaty on February 15, 1876, agreeing to open treaty ports with Japan. Queen Min decided to use this treaty to the advantage of her people, the Korea Strategy. Empress Min and Emporer Gojong supported new learning and adopted advances in the making of ammunition, electricity, chemistry, smelting, mechanical engineering, cartography, and other basic subjects related to military affairs.

Under the terms of the Ganghwa Treaty, Japan got access to five Korean ports and all Korean waters, special trading status, and extraterritorial rights for Japanese citizens in Korea. This meant that Japanese accused of crimes in Korea could only be tried under Japanese law—they were immune to local laws. The Koreans gained absolutely nothing from this treaty, which signaled the beginning of the end of Korean independence.

Queen Min to deal with Japan to modernize and planned that, once that was sufficiently completed, Korea would then ally with the United States or some other or more Western powers to drive the Japanese influence out of Korea. However, the members of the court rejected this idea and regarded the Japanese and the Western powers alike as being too dangerous. The Queen still wanted Korea to be modernized and began to reorganize the Korean government herself. She gave special attention to foreign affairs, studying Western technology, modernizing the military and studying Western economic models.

The modernization of the military met with opposition that led to the Insurrection of 1882. Members of the old military did not agree with Empress Myeongseong's modernization and wanted the royal couple out of the kingdom. They sought the support of Daewongun to overthrow Min and Gojong. Hearing this, the Queen devised a plan and reached out to the Qing Dynasty in China for help. In previous years, the Empress had established a relationship with the Chinese, giving them a powerful ally. China sent their troops, and they ended the rebellion and restored Queen Min and Gojong to the palace.

While the rebellion was settling within the Korean border, the Japanese saught this as an opportunity. Japan took advantage of the turmoil and forced Gojong, without his wife's knowledge, to sign a treaty on August 10, 1882, paying indemnity and allowing the stationing of Japanese troops in Seoul.

Aided by Japanese legation guards, the Korean Progressive Party then seized control of the palace and began issuing decrees in the name of the Queen and King. Empress Myeongseong reached out to China again, and the Chinese troops came to the rescue of the royals, ending the Progressive Party and killing several of their key leaders. In the chaos, Japan, once again, forced Emperor Gojong to sign a treaty, the Hanseong Treaty indemnifying Japan for losses during the coup without the Empress's knowledge.

As Queen Min and King Gojong struggled to bring progressive reforms in the face of Conservative resistance and Progressive impatience, tensions between China and Japan escalated. On April 18, 1885, China and Japan signed the Li-Ito Agreement in Tianjin, agreeing to keep each other informed about planned moves on Korea.

Queen Min still pushed for a modernized Korea even during the conflicts. With support and approval from King Gojong, she created reforms in the economy, communications, transportation, agriculture, military science, education, the press, and medicine. She supported the founding of schools, newspapers, and hospitals, and welcomed Christian missionaries from the United States and Europe. Christianity made remarkable strides under Queen Min's protection..

Queen Min spearheaded a reorganization and modernization of Korea's military. She also built strong political relationships with China, Russia, and the other Western powers in hopes of playing them off against the Japanese to protect Korean sovereignty. Fearful of the Japanese power in Korea, she granted China trading access to ports still closed to Japan and requested that Chinese and German officers train and control her modernizing army.

Conflict between China and Japan reached a boiling point, resulting in the Sino-Japanese War in 1894 that lasted a year. One of their major disagreement was the occupation of Korea and access to their trading ports. During the war, Qing China deployed 630,000 troops to Korea as opposed to just 240,000 Japanese troops. However, because of their better-equipped military, the modern Meiji army and navy quickly crushed the Chinese forces. On April 17, 1895, China signed the humiliating Treaty of Shimonoseki, which recognized that Korea was no longer a tributary state of the Qing empire.

As many as 100,000 of Korea's peasants had risen up late in 1894 to attack the Japanese forces as well, but they were all slaughtered. Internationally, Korea was no longer a vassal state of Qing China, leaving the country exposed to Japanese advances. In the end, Korea's greatest enemy, Japan, was now fully in control of the nation. Queen Min was devastated. Japan quickly wrote a new constitution for Korea and stocked its parliament with pro-Japanese Koreans. A large number of Japanese troops remained stationed indefinitely in Korea.

Desperate for an ally to help unlock Japan's stranglehold on her country, Queen Min turned to the other emerging power in the Far East—Russia. She met with Russian emissaries, invited Russian students and engineers to Seoul, and did her best to stoke Russian concerns about the rising Japanese power. Her efforts were in vain because soon Russia and Japan would go to war for control of the Korean Peninsula.

Japan's agents and officials in Seoul, were aware of Queen Min's appeals to Russia. They concluded that the Queen was a hindrance to their goals and needed to be stopped. They consipered with her father-in-law, Daewongun, who also wanted to see the downfall of Queen Min.

In the fall of 1895, Japanese ambassador to Korea, Miura Goro, formulated a plan to assassinate Queen Min, he named "Operation Fox Hunt." Early in the morning of October 8, 1895, a group of 50 Japanese and Korean assassins launched their assault on Gyeongbokgung Palace. They seized King Gojong but did not harm him. Then they attacked the queen consort's sleeping quarters, dragging her out along with three or four of her attendants.

The Japanese displayed the queen's dead body to several other foreigners in the area—including the Russians so they knew their ally was dead—and then carried her body to the forest outside the palace walls. There, the assassins poured kerosene on Queen Min's body and burned it, scattering her ashes.

In 1897, Gojong ordered a careful search of the woods where his queen's body had been burned, which turned up a single finger bone. He organized an elaborate funeral for this relic of his wife, featuring 5,000 soldiers, thousands of lanterns and scrolls enumerating Queen Min's virtues, and giant wooden horses to transport her in the afterlife. The queen consort also received the posthumous title of Empress Myeongseong.

After the death of Queen Min, Gojong and the crown prince fled from Gyeongbokgung palace to the Russian legation in Jeongdong, Seoul. Her death also caused a chain of events, including the Russo-Japanese War from 1904 to 1905. Soon after the death of the queen, Deawongun once again forcefully occupied the royal court after his involvement in her murder.

Queen Min was a consort in a strictly Confucian monarchy and yet she was a formidable force and is still remembered by Koreans today as one of the champions of independence against the power of Imperial Japan. Some older Koreans, who went through the Japanese occupation, criticize her for failing to resist the Japanese militarily. While the Japanese portrayed an argumentative image of her throughout their history.

In modern time South Korea, influenced by a recent novel, TV drama and musical, the people sees her as a national heroine, for striving diplomatically and politically to keep Korea independent of foreign influence. A skilled in foreign affairs and diplomacy, she set in motion an ambitious plan to modernize Korea.

Empress Myeongseong accomplished much more than what was expected from her. She went from being seen as a weak orphan girl, but an Empress who defended her country against foreign influences up until her last breath. She sought to modernize Korea and place her country on the map. Myeongseong did not submit to the restrictions placed on her due to her gender, resulting in the reign of a powerful and influential female leader. Though not many records of her leadership style and court life survived during the Japanese annexation of Korea, we can still get an idea of her determined, strong-willed, influential, and strong personality. All the makings of a great leader.