It means grand prince, a title reserved for the father of a king who had never been a king himself. The Taewongun was regent to minor king Kojong.

Was the first official wife of King Kojong, the twenty-sixth king of the Choson dynasty of Korea. She allied with the Russians to block Japanese political expansion. Was later killed by Japanese thugs and soldiers. 

In 1801, a decree constituted an important liberalization of the slave system in Korea. Hereditary slavery remained until 1886, slavery in general was outlawed in 1894.

Were the feudal ruling class or nobles during Choson Korea.  

The dowager queen continued the persecution of Christians in Korea. She ordered the institution of a five-family mutual surveillance system to ferret out Christians in the southerner faction. A Korean Christian Hwang Sayong, even reported to the papal court in Rome requesting a military expedition from France to protect Korean Christians from persecution. He was later executed for treason by the dowager along with 300 other Christians.

Compiled in 1857, these were written works by the Korean commoners. They were subjects on historical novels, which reflected Korea’s glory days.  

The peasants in Choson Korea rebelled if the officials did not agree to economic reforms.

One of the most enduring survival strategies was the kye, a voluntary organization that promoted mutual assistance. Like similar credit associations that arose in Japan, the kye provided a mechanism for people to pool funds and then take turns using the capital. Early kye had specific functions: to give members access to support groups and the large sums needed to pay for funerals and weddings. Even yangban and wealthy households joined them. Later kye emphasized the pooling of resources to overcome hardship. Some had specific community-wide goals, such as repairing an irrigation system, whereas others allowed individual members to use the money for diverse purposes.

Survival strategies included planting New World crops and opening marginal fields. The sweet potato arrived via Japan in 1763; the white potato arrived via China around 1840. Both were cultivated as insurance against famine. Another nineteenth-century addition to the diet was cabbage. Despite these dietary supplements, tenant farmers and farmers of small plots led a precarious existence. After a year or two of poor harvests, they abandoned their fields, wandered the country, and died of starvation by the thousands. In desperation they practiced slash-and-burn agriculture on hillsides that denuded the uplands and increased the frequency of floods.

Rebellions constitute the chief indicators of social unrest in the nineteenth century. A major rebellion led by fallen yangban and professional geomancer Hong Kyongnae broke out in the northwest P’yong’an province in 1811. One cause was perceived injustice in the taxation and service systems. General discontent with the prejudicial policies of the central administration and resentment against blocking promotion to high office among its examination passers led men of intermediate statuses to organize a army of rebels.

In 1862 the government’s failure to solve the problems of maladministration in the land tax, military cloth tax, and grain relief and loan systems provided the main cause for a series of rebellions throughout the country, primarily in the three southern provinces. Although taxes had earlier been combined into a single land tax, corruption by clerks and magistrates more than offset the reductions gained from distributing taxes equally among all residents.

Ch’oe Cheu was the founder; He called the faith Tonghak (Eastern Learning, or “ Korean National Teaching”). It combined Confucian ethics with Buddhist faith, Taoist naturalism and longevity, geomancy, and the use of talismans, imprecations, and shamanistic appeals to spirits in an amalgam that was supposed to represent Korean thought as a counterpoise to Western learning.

Discontented with his life as a déclassé yangban (his mother had remarried, thus barring him from the civil service examination) and the sorry situation of his country, Ch’oe Cheu experienced a vision in which he believed Hanunim (the Lord of Heaven) entrusted him with the task of spreading a new faith to the Korean people and saving mankind on earth. Ch’oe also created a potion for curing illness.

The abolition of all but forty-seven private academies dedicated to Confucian worthies of the dominant factions was an insult to both hereditary factions and past titans of Confucian scholarship. Government spending and the inflation that resulted from the 100-cash were a violation of conservative Confucian attitudes toward profligacy(Recklessly wasteful; wildly extravagant).

In 1866, when Korean Catholics offered to mediate with the Russians in their demands for trade, the Taewongun suspected a plot to undermine Korean security. He ordered a nationwide persecution of Korean Catholics that lasted to 1871 and reduced their ranks from twenty thousand to eight thousand. The French landed troops on Kanghwa Island to chastise the Koreans for their refusal to tolerate Christianity, but Korean troops were able to force the small French force to withdraw.

In 1866, a ship of U. S. registration, the General Sherman, with an English captain and a crew of Malays and Chinese, ran aground in the Taedong River near Pyongyang and demanded trade. Irate local residents attacked the ship, burned it to ashes, and killed its crew.

King Kojong took a number of steps to promote reform and self-strengthening, always shadowed by conservative opposition. He dispatched a secret investigative mission to Japan to report on developments there, followed by a second study mission in 1881. Another training mission went to China to study military science. King Kojong agreed to open two additional ports to Japan at Inch’on and Wonsan and to allow the first Japanese minister to Korea to establish a legation in Seoul.

In 1868, Japan added to the pressure on Korea from abroad. When the new government sent a note in the Meiji emperor’s name to the king of Korea asking for a treaty of trade and amity, the Taewongun refused even to accept the note on the grounds that there was only one legitimate emperor, the emperor of the Qing Dynasty in China. Japanese resentment over what radical samurai perceived as an insult to the Meiji emperor almost resulted in Japan’s invasion of Korea in 1873 before cooler heads prevailed.

In contrast to xenophobic conservatives associated with the Taewongun and gradualists around Queen Min who took a pro-China stance, a more radical faction believed that Korea had to follow Japan’s lead. Calling for social equality, the appointment of men with talent and ability, centralized administration, and enlightenment, it convinced King Kojong to institute a number of reforms in 1883: a modern post office, the Ministry of Culture and Information, and publication of the first newspaper, the Hansong sunbo.

Both economic hardship and religious persecution played roles in the Tonghak Rebellion, the largest rebellion in Korean history. The treaties signed with foreign powers worsened conditions for ordinary people. Japan bought Korean rice, but the profits from the increase in prices went to middlemen, not producers.  Having lost confidence in his army’s ability to repress the Tonghak rebels, King Kojong asked China for help. Before it arrived, he reached an agreement with the Tonghak military leader, Chon Pongjun, to call off the rebellion in return for religious toleration and a promise to allow the Tonghak to administer their captured territory.

Japan’s efforts to foster reform in Korea aroused opposition. Japan sponsored Pak Yonghyo and So. Kwangbom, former leaders of the 1884 coup exiled to Japan, and placed them in the Kabo cabinet. Alarmed by Japan’s takeover of the Korean government and the return of men they regarded as the traitors of 1884, the Tonghak under Chon Pongjun rose again to drive Japan out of the country. The reform program aimed at remaking government and society. It called for rationalizing the bureaucracy, abolishing sinecures, establishing a regular budget and a uniform currency, ending the king’s control over the exchequer.

The Triple Intervention in April 1895 by Russia, France, and Germany to force Japan to give up its territorial gains following the Sino-Japanese War meant that Japan had to retreat from Korea as well. Pak Yonghyo’s ambition to become prime minister was foiled when a Japanese legation official leaked his proposal to as-sassinate the queen. He barely escaped to Japan.

During negotiations, Li Hongzhang tried to insert a clause indicating that Korea was a tributary of China. Shufeldt refused to accept it because the United States would never agree to sign a treaty with a dependency. He compromised by allowing King Kojong to send a letter to President Chester A. Arthur declaring that Korea was both “ self- governing” and a Chinese tributary, a description that fit the reality, since the Qing regime had never interfered with either Korea’s domestic problems or its relations with Japan.

The rebels forced King Kojong to recall his father, the Taewongun, to the capital and appoint him chief of administration. Fearing that the Taewongun’s hostility to Japan might provoke a Japanese invasion of Korea, China dispatched forty-five hundred troops to Seoul. Invited to what was supposed to be an amicable meeting, the Taewongun found himself hustled onto a Chinese ship, transported to China, and kept under close surveillance for three years. After his departure, Chinese troops wiped out the rebels.

The radical faction under the leadership of Kim Okkyun organized a coup to seize power. Because the conspirators had no support inside Korea, Kim Okkyun convinced the head of the Japanese legation to let him use legation guards. The coup leaders seized the palace, held King Kojong captive as their symbol of legitimacy, sum-moned high officials to court, and decapitated them on the spot.

Yuan Shikai also interfered in Korea’s domestic affairs. When a provincial Korean official blocked the export of rice and beans to Japan in 1888 to preserve food stocks during a famine after Japanese merchants had purchased them, Yuan insisted that Korea pay the penalty demanded by Japan. He obstructed Japanese efforts to build a telegraph line from Pusan to Seoul and to reform Korean coinage at the Korean court’s request. He also blocked Korean attempts to obtain foreign loans and foreign military advisers. Yuan’s actions demonstrated that China’s direct intervention in Korea’s foreign and domestic affairs had become part of the new relationship.

During the 1880s, Protestant missionaries from the United States brought education and medicine to China, Japan, and Korea. In the 1890s, Japanese and other businessmen fostered interest in trade, modern transportation projects, and the exploitation of natural resources. Trains started running between Inch’on and Seoul, and a railroad bridge connected Seoul and Noryangjin over the Han river in 1900. The first street-car arrived in 1898, demonstrating to the populace its advantage over palanquins for female yangban, donkeys and horses for male yangban, and ox-drawn carts for commoners.

While under house arrest in 1887, Yu Kilchun, who had studied in Japan while living with Fukuzawa Yukichi and then in the United States, wrote his famous account of conditions in Western nations, Soyu kyonmun ( What I Saw and Heard in the West) that advocated adopting Western institutions. Over the next fifteen years, Protestant missionaries and Japanese businessmen introduced hospitals, schools, banks, cur-rency, telegraph lines, electric power lines, and brick buildings for public offices.

A dual structure characterized Japan’s modern economy. Conglomerates linked through holding and trading companies called zaibatsu ( financial cliques) dominated the most modern sectors of the economy— mining, shipbuilding, machinery, steel, and chemicals— and produced standardized, high- volume products. Although each company within the zaibatsu pursued a single enterprise and remained legally distinct, access to the zaibatsu’s capital through its bank, a central advisory committee that set policy and long- term goals, and interlocking boards of directors tied them together.

Syngman Rhee

(Nationalism in the United States)

New Root Society capitulation

(with Rose of Sharon)

Mutual Aid Association

(colonial of an anti-Japanese cover)

Kim II Sung

(and Communist alliances)

Park Chung Hee

(future South Korean dictator)

Effects of the 1901 Boxer Protocol

Elite “grassroots” modernization

Yan Fu’s 30%

1904 World’s Fair

(mistreatment of Chinese)

Incubator Nationalism (in Japan)

Democracy as defined by Liang Qichao (people power not individual rights; statist; anti-Western, humanistic)

Han versus Manchu (Social Darwinism)

Sun Yatsen (mythologized)

Anti-Manchu Triads

Overseas Chinese contributions

Three Principles of the People (Nationalism, Democracy, Livelihood)

Yuan Shikai

(remember him from Korea?)

1912 abdication of the Qing emperor

Yuan as emperor with Confucian state religion

Nationalists (Sun) in Japan

Struggles with warlords

(and outlying support in Tibet, Manchuria, Mongolia)

New Culture Movement

(Chen Duxiu in Japan and France)

Youth worth celebrating?

Hu Shi and the vernacular language

Lu Xun

(Japan and Russian influences)

Li Hongzhang

(self-strengthening combined with business)

Foreign Investment in China

(compared to China)

Management-labor friction

Twenty-one demands minus the protectorate status

May 4^th, 1919 Movement (explosion)

John Dewey

(connected to new China)

Significance of Footbinding

Qiu Jin

(to revolutionize, expose, and educate)

Michael Borodin

Ho Chi Minh

Chiang Kaishek

Party within the Party split

(Communists within the Nationalist Party)