King Gojong

Gojong came to the throne of Joseon in 1863 as a boy of eleven and ruled through four decades in which Korea was forced out of isolation and ultimately lost its independence. Born in 1852 to a collateral branch of the royal house, he was selected as successor to the childless King Cheoljong, and for the first decade of the reign power was exercised by his father, the Heungseon Daewongun, who pursued internal reform alongside a strict policy of excluding foreign powers. After Gojong assumed personal rule in the 1870s, the Treaty of Ganghwa with Japan in 1876 opened Korean ports, and treaties with Western states followed.

His reign was marked by intensifying rivalry among China, Japan, and Russia for influence over the peninsula, played out through factional struggles at the Korean court. His consort, Queen Min, became a central figure in these contests and an obstacle to Japanese ambitions; in 1895 she was assassinated in the palace by a group acting under Japanese direction, an event that shocked the country. Early in 1896 Gojong took refuge in the Russian legation in Seoul, where he remained for about a year.

In 1897, after returning to a newly built palace, Gojong proclaimed the Korean Empire and took the title of emperor, asserting Korea's formal equality with China and Japan. The Gwangmu period that followed saw efforts at modernization in infrastructure, education, and the military, though the state's room for maneuver steadily narrowed. Japan's victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 removed the last counterweight to its position in Korea, and the protectorate treaty of November 1905 transferred control of Korean foreign affairs to Tokyo.

Gojong never accepted the protectorate. In 1907 he secretly dispatched emissaries to the Second Hague Peace Conference to appeal for international support; the mission failed, and Japan used it as grounds to force his abdication in July of that year in favor of his son Sunjong, the dynasty's last monarch. Korea was annexed outright in 1910. Gojong lived on in Deoksugung Palace in Seoul until his death in January 1919. Rumors that he had been poisoned spread widely, and public mourning for the former emperor helped ignite the March First Movement, the nationwide protest against Japanese rule that began at his funeral.