Journal of Korean Studies

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND OF SEOUL’S RISE AS THE “KOREAN MECCA”

Seoul became the royal seat of the Chosŏn Dynasty when Yi Sŏnggye, the founding monarch of the Chosŏn Dynasty, moved the capital from Kaesŏng to Hanyang (present-day Seoul) in 1394. The making of Seoul into a capital city was inextricably linked with the founding of a new dynasty. The blueprint for making Seoul into the capital city was laid out by Chŏng Tojŏn, known as the “architect” of the early Chosŏn system. Based on the urban planning principles for capital cities written in the “Records of Construction” in The Rites of Zhou, Chŏng designed and named the key components of the city, including palaces, shrines, office buildings, market places, and thoroughfares inside the city walls befitting a capital city of a new Confucian state.⁶ It was against the backdrop of Chosŏn’s efforts to rebuild state finances from the devastations of the Imjin War (1592–98) that Seoul began to grow into a commercial hub. While early Chosŏn economic policy was marked by tight government control and restriction on commercial activities, the Chosŏn court in the post–Imjin period implemented a series of economic reforms which fueled the decline of state-authorized licensed monopolies, the growth of private merchant activities, and the circulation of metallic cash.⁷ Amidst these economic changes, Seoul grew beyond the mere royal seat of the government to serve as the country’s economic, social, and cultural center, where both tangible commodities and intangible knowledge and information accumulated.

This urban transformation turned the capital into a place that attracted not only aspirants to holding office but also people from all walks of life in search of wealth and power.⁸ According to Ko Tonghwan, Seoul’s population stayed around 110,000 to 120,000 before the end of the sixteenth century but increased to nearly 300,000 by the end of the eighteenth century.⁹ This rapid increase in population rendered the space inside the walls more densely populated on the one hand, and the space outside the walls witnessed the rise of new towns on the other. More specifically, the suburban areas outside the West Gate and East Gate turned into agricultural towns to support the urban population, and the small villages along the Han River, including Yanghwajin, Sŏgang, Map’o, and Yongsan, developed into commercial centers and connected the government licensed shops in Chongno inside the city with major market centers in the countryside. As a result, the population outside the city walls grew to make up nearly 50 percent of the total population of the capital by the late eighteenth century. Reflecting this urban [End Page 74] expansion, the Chosŏn government incorporated new towns formed outside the walls into the administrative districts of the capital in 1788.¹⁰

Despite Seoul’s urban expansion far beyond its city walls, the city walls stood strong to define the capital and the perception persisted that the capital was limited to the space inside the walls. The Chosŏn government continued to consider only the people residing inside the walls as the capital’s residents and to give them more favorable treatment such as tax exemptions.¹¹ Furthermore, as there was a stark difference between the living conditions inside and outside the walls, the people who had come to Seoul in search of urban prosperity strove to make their way inside the city walls. For example, Chŏng Yagyong, a reform-minded scholar who spent eighteen years in exile in a remote village in Chŏlla Province, wrote in a letter to his sons in the early nineteenth century:

Although I had you stay in hiding in the countryside for the moment as my name appears on the criminal register right now, my plan for the future is only to reside within ten li from Seoul. If the family fortune is on the wane [to the point] that it is impossible to reside deep inside the capital walls, then you should stay in the suburbs and maintain [your] livelihood by planting fruit trees and growing vegetables for a while. It will not be too late to wait until you acquire sufficient wealth to get into the center of the capital.¹²

Seoul’s centrality and Koreans’ aspiration to live in the city were not subtle phenomena that only the domestic population could sense. Rather, it was readily apparent that even foreigners—who took a short trip to Korea after Korea opened its doors to the outside world by signing the Kanghwa Treaty of 1876—could notice at a glance. For example, Isabella Bird Bishop, an English traveler who visited Korea in the mid-1890s, described Seoul as “the Korean Mecca,” in the sense that “the heart of every Korean is in Seoul.”¹³ She wrote, “people who live in it, of whatever degree, can hardly be bribed to leave it even for a few weeks. To the Koreans, it is the place in which alone life is worth living.”¹⁴ In a similar vein Swedish war correspondent William A:son Grebst, who visited Korea during the Russo-Japanese War wrote:

Korea’s sun rises only in Seoul. While there is a matter of degree, it goes without question that a capital is a place where the mental activities of all the people of its country concentrate, and the center of the country that everyone wants to visit at least once. There is no other country in the world that dovetails into this expression better than Korea. People often say Paris is no other than France. In precisely the same way, Seoul is no other than Korea.¹⁵

This quote reveals that the capital’s primacy survived the turbulent years with a rapidly changing regional order in East Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before it became the colonial capital of Keijō in 1910. But more important, it shows us that Seoul, the primary destination in Korea for varying [End Page 75] purposes, was recognized as a microcosm of Chosŏn to Koreans and foreigners alike. For imperialist powers that were seeking to maximize their influence and interests in Korea, Seoul was the place to go. This serves as the main reason why the contestations over Seoul’s city space were so fierce among the Korean state, multiple imperial powers, and ordinary residents, which will be explored in the following sections.

THE OPENING OF SEOUL

Although the Kanghwa Treaty, signed between Korea and Japan in 1876, is generally regarded as the moment when Korea was “opened” by Japan to the global system of capitalist modernity, studies have shown that the opening of Korea was not at all simple and Japan was not the only imperialist power engaged in this process. Instead, Korea’s opening to the outside world was an overlapping process begun by Japan, then complicated by China, and ultimately settled by Western powers: (1) Japan introduced Korea into the system of unequal treaties and challenged China’s place within the East Asian regional order; (2) China arranged more treaty relations between Korea and Western countries in order to counterbalance the growing influence of Japan over Korea; and (3) Western countries spread their extraterritorial rights and other privileges from one to another via most-favored-nation provisions.¹⁶ It was the same with the opening of Seoul. Since multiple foreign powers actively engaged in the opening of Seoul due to its centrality in Korean society, this process was as contested, if not more contested than the opening of Korea.

Before 1882, Seoul’s gates stayed closed more firmly against foreigners than the rest of Korea did. According to Son Chŏngmok, Seoul’s opening was one of the most difficult issues for Japan and Korea to agree upon in negotiating the Kanghwa Treaty.¹⁷ Following the treaties that America and other Western powers had imposed on Japan, Japan attempted to insert into the Kanghwa Treaty a clause stipulating the exchange of diplomatic representatives residing in the capital city. However, the Chosŏn government adamantly rejected the proposal on the grounds that there had been no precedent for foreigners residing permanently inside the capital. Instead, the Chosŏn government suggested that the Japanese could visit the capital, either short-term or long-term, whenever certain matters arose.¹⁸ Here, the Chosŏn government’s statement is historically incorrect because there were cases when foreigners resided inside the city walls of Seoul during Chosŏn’s history. However, it bears noting that their presence had nonetheless been kept almost completely invisible.¹⁹ Even Chinese envoys visiting Seoul through officially sanctioned diplomatic channels were cloistered in the Hall of Cherishing China (Mohwagwan) outside the West Gate of Seoul and were discouraged from contacting local Koreans. Based on the information that he gleaned in the early 1870s, William Elliot Griffis noted, “while the entire body [End Page 76] of Coreans [sic], dignitaries, servants, merchants, and cartmen center [around] Peking and all circulate freely in the streets among the people, the Chinese envoy to Seoul must leave his suite at the frontier and proceed to the capital with but a few servants, and there dwell in seclusion.”²⁰ As the Chosŏn court continued to take a hard line against this issue, Japan withdrew this clause to negotiate the treaty in the end. Despite its success in opening the treaty ports in Korea, Japan failed to enter the capital, and took a government building located outside the West Gate as its first legation building in 1880.

The year 1882 marked a turning point in Seoul’s closed-gate policy to foreigners. This change came with a series of events surrounding the military unrest in Seoul, known as the Imo Mutiny, and resulted in allowing foreign military, diplomatic, and commercial presences inside the city walls. In 1881, the Chosŏn government established a new military unit called the Pyŏlgigun (Special skills force) and invited Japanese officers to train this unit as part of its military reform. The military unrest occurred when the soldiers in the traditional military units, discontented with their treatment compared to the new unit, attacked the Japanese legation and killed the Japanese training officers. Seeking a new way to increase its influence over Korea, Qing China sent three thousand troops to Seoul to quell the revolt and took charge of the maintenance of public order in Seoul on behalf of the Korean troops dissolved during the military unrest.²¹ It is widely known that Chinese intervention in Korean affairs during the period from the Imo Mutiny of 1882 to the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 marked a clear break with its past practices. According to Joshua Van Lieu, Qing officials deliberately invoked tributary protocols in representing their unprecedented engagement with Chosŏn in order to secure the Qing Dynasty’s domination over Chosŏn on the global stage.²² A case in point is the Regulations for Maritime and Overland Trade between Chinese and Korean Subjects of 1882. Designed to make the Chinese presence more visual and material than any of the other foreign powers, the trade regulations granted Korean merchants the right to trade and reside with extraterritoriality in Beijing, and the same privilege was granted to Chinese merchants in the city of Seoul in addition to the town of Yanghwajin (present-day Map’o) on the Han River.²³ What deserves particular attention here is the introduction to the regulations. It stated that the regulations were to apply exclusively to the relationship between China and Korea, “the former country granting a privilege to the latter as its long tributary state, with other treaty nations not included.”²⁴ Although the gist of these regulations was not much different from Western-style commercial treaties, by framing them with the language of a long-standing tributary relationship, China attempted to claim the exclusive right to trade and reside inside the city walls of Seoul.

The privilege to enter Seoul, however, did not remain as exclusive as China had hoped. When British diplomat Harry Parkes learned about the trade regulations between China and Korea, he postponed the ratification of the British-Korean Treaty and insisted on new negotiations. After months of negotiations, near [End Page 77] the end of 1883, Parkes succeeded in obtaining a new treaty that granted British citizens the same rights as their Chinese counterparts. In addition to China and the United Kingdom, the right to trade and reside inside the city of Seoul had become a common provision among all of the nations that had treaty relations with Korea by the end of the 1880s. Germany, Russia, Italy, and other Western countries that subsequently entered treaty relations with Korea used the British-Korean Treaty as a template, while Japan and the United States, two countries that entered treaty relations with Korea before the United Kingdom, obtained the same right by claiming most-favored-nation status. As a result, in addition to the first three treaty ports (Inch’ŏn, Wŏnsan, and Pusan), the capital city of Seoul had opened to foreign commerce and residence by the mid-1880s.

Once Seoul opened its doors, the number of foreigners continuously increased. In 1897, the foreign population of Seoul increased to 3,257: 1,758 Japanese; 1,273 Chinese; ninety-five Americans; fifty-seven Russians; thirty-seven British; twenty-eight French; and nine Germans.²⁵ Although the foreign populations remained relatively small in comparison to the overall population of Seoul, they had a much greater impact than their size would indicate. As Isabella Bird Bishop noted, “in every part of the city, the foreigner, shut out till 1883, is making his presence felt, and is undermining that which is Korean in the Korean capital by the slow process of contact.”²⁶ One could notice this change most evidently from the changing urban landscape of the capital city. On the eve of signing a series of treaties with Western powers, the Chosŏn court removed the aforementioned stone tablet outside the city gate forbidding the approach of foreigners to the capital.²⁷ With this removal, Seoul witnessed foreigners from various countries forming their distinctive commercial and residential areas within its city walls for the first time. As a result, the urban landscape of Seoul became increasingly cosmopolitan, more than ever before.

The Chinese presence in Seoul began with Chen Shutang’s construction of official Qing buildings in present-day Myŏngdong near the South Gate of Seoul. A Guangdong native, Chen Shutang was appointed as the first commissioner of trade in Korea in recognition of his successful achievement as a consul in San Francisco. Constructed on a total of 730 p’yŏng of land (roughly 26,000 square feet), the main gate and central buildings of this complex were constructed in “the fashion of official Chinese buildings” decorated with “the usual guardian gods and a brick dragon screen.”²⁸ According to Bishop, who had probably visited most of the Chinatowns in existence in the late nineteenth century, the Chinatown in Seoul was nearly as large as and no different than other Chinatowns elsewhere in 1894.²⁹ The Chinese presence quickly expanded into other parts of the capital under the Qing Imperial Resident Yuan Shikai’s proactive promotion of Chinese commercial interests in Korea. Chinese merchants and immigrants came from various parts of China as well as treaty port cities in Japan and established native-place associations known as huiguan in various locations within the [End Page 78] city walls as a means to maintain their networks. For example, the Guangdong Huiguan was established in present-day Sogongdong, the Northern Huiguan around Sup’yogyo, and the Southern Huiguan in present-day Sŏsomun.³⁰ By the time of the Sino-Japanese War, Chinese shops were scattered all over from the South Gate through Chongno to the East Gate and dominated the commercial activities in Seoul.³¹

Meanwhile, Western communities developed in Chŏngdong. This small area situated between Kyŏngun Palace and the western edge of the city walls had once been a secluded neighborhood with only a few residences. The transformation began as the first American minister in Korea, Lucius Foote, purchased Korean-style buildings and opened the American legation in Chŏngdong in 1883. As Western countries that had entered into treaty relations with Korea thereafter set up their legations and consulates, and Western missionaries followed to open up schools and churches, Chŏngdong became one of the most distinctive spaces with an international atmosphere by the turn of the twentieth century. When Bishop visited Chŏngdong in the 1890s, she noted:

Chong-dong … the quarter devoted to foreign legations, consulates, and mission agencies, would have nearly ceased to be Korean had not the Koreans set down the Kyeng-won Palace [sic] with its crowded outbuildings in the midst of the foreign residences. Most of the native inhabitants have been bought out. Wide roads with foreign shops have been constructed. The French have built a legation on a height, which vies in grandeur with that of Russia, and the American Methodist Episcopal Mission has finished a large red brick church, which, like the Roman Cathedral, can be seen from all quarters.³²

What deserves attention here is that the Western countries were coming together and forming one community vis-à-vis the Korean community, while at the same time vying with one another over space in Chŏngdong. The Western countries constructed their legation buildings in their own architectural styles in order to show their power and civilization, as well as a means to distinguish themselves from one another. The resulting concentration of various architectural structures in Chŏngdong created a cosmopolitan atmosphere. From the 1890s, the Western presence began to expand into various other parts of the capital as well as beyond the city walls through missionary hospitals and dispensaries.³³ Above all, the most conspicuous Western presence inside the walls was the Chonghyŏn Cathedral (present-day Myŏngdong Cathedral). Completed in 1898 after six years of construction, the cathedral was the first piece of Gothic architecture in Korea, with its main building rising twenty-three meters and its steeple rising forty-five meters in height. The dominance of this building was even further strengthened by its location. Built on top of a hill overlooking downtown Seoul, this was the tallest Western-style building and it starkly contrasted with the sea of low brown roofs of traditional thatched houses below the hill. [End Page 79]

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Figure 1.

Chŏngdong in 1901. The building on the top of the hill is the Russian legation. Burton Holmes, 1901-nyŏn Sŏul ŭl kŏtta [Walking in Seoul in 1901], trans. Yi Chinsŏk (Sŏul: P’urŭn’gil, 2012). Originally published as Seoul, the Capital of Korea, Japan, Japan–The Country, Japan–The Cities (Chicago: Travelogue Bureau, 1917). Reprinted with permission from P’urŭn’gil.

Just like other foreign communities, the Japanese community began near where its legation was located: Chin’gogae at the foot of Namsan. However, different than the spread of the Chinese and Western presences inside the walls, the Japanese community stayed rather clustered around where they first settled until Japan’s victory in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904–5. After seeing its legation set on fire and Japanese settlers being the target of attacks during the Imo Mutiny and the Kapsin Coup, Japanese settlers focused on transforming Chin’gogae into “Little Japan” rather than venturing into other parts of the city. Japanese settler organizations, such as the Residents’ Assembly and the Chamber of Commerce played key roles in this transformation. Since their establishment in 1885 and 1887, respectively, they had made steady efforts to fulfill the settlers’ need for public utilities and other amenities that were essential to Japanese living. As a result, “Little Japan” became a place where “unveiled women and men in girdled dressing gowns and clogs moved about as freely as in Japan” and made a unique contribution to the growing cosmopolitan nature of Seoul by the end of the nineteenth century.³⁴ It was with the postwar influx of Japanese first after the Sino-Japanese War and later after the Russo-Japanese War that the boundary of “Little Japan” gradually stretched outward to the street leading to the South Gate. Keeping up with this expansion, the Japanese Consulate moved to present-day [End Page 80] Ch’ungmuro in 1896, and this relocation paved the way for the foundation of Honmachi (Main street), which functioned as the center of the Japanese settler community during the Colonial Period.

SEOUL BECOMES MIXED RESIDENCE

As early as in 1885, Kim Yunsik (1835–1922), a representative figure of the “Eastern Way, Western Technology” who served as the minister of the Foreign Office (T’ongni kyosŏp t’ongsang samu amun), anticipated that the opening of Seoul would create new troubles and tensions that Seoul had never experienced before. In his literary collection Unyangjip (The collected works of Kim Yunsik), Kim explained how the trade regulations between Qing China and Chosŏn Korea unexpectedly functioned as a legal and diplomatic ground for foreign merchants with any citizenship to obtain the right of residence in Seoul. Here, Kim emphasized that the root of the problem was less of the opening itself, but more of the manner in which Seoul was opened. To elaborate, Kim was fully aware of how the treaty ports that were forced to open to foreign trade and residences were operating in the East Asian region at the time. Taking Shanghai and Tianjin, two major treaty ports in Qing China, as examples, Kim noted that each treaty port had designated concessions and entry regulations with which the Qing prevented the difficulties and problems that could possibly arise from a situation where foreigners with different customs and languages comingled with the Chinese. In the case of Seoul, however, foreigners formed mixed residence with Koreans, and therefore it was impossible to govern all of them with just one regulation. This was the most serious problem among many, Kim pointed out. After listing potential problems that would arise from Seoul’s opening as a city of mixed residence, Kim finished his discussion by proposing to move foreign communities immediately outside the city walls of Seoul, such as to Yanghwajin or Map’o, in order to prevent his concerns from happening.³⁵

In fact, Kim Yunsik and the Korean government made repeated attempts to undo Seoul’s opening as a mixed residence: first to relocate foreign communities outside the city walls of Seoul to Yongsan and later to establish a foreign settlement within the city walls to which foreign residence was to be restricted.³⁶ Their final attempt in 1895, however, ended in failure as Chosŏn was plunged into political turmoil when the assassination of Queen Min was followed by King Kojong’s flight to the Russian legation in Chŏngdong. Since then, the foreign presence within the walls continuously increased, and mixed residence in Seoul rapidly accelerated.

Seoul’s development as a mixed residence is, in some sense, rather natural when we take into consideration Seoul’s prominence in the country, far more so than Beijing in China or Toyko in Japan. As examined earlier, with constant gravitation of the population from the country to the capital, the space inside Seoul’s [End Page 81] walls had been turned into a densely populated place, forcing newcomers to settle down outside the walls.³⁷ Thus, the ratio of Seoul’s residents living outside the city walls to the total population of Seoul increased from less than 10 percent in the fifteenth century to nearly 50 percent in the late eighteenth century.³⁸ Well before the opening in 1882, the walled part of Seoul was already full. Evidently, what was awaiting foreigners entering into Seoul was utterly unlike small fishing villages such as Inch’ŏn or Yokohama. Far from constructing their settlements on large plots of empty land with a city plan with a grid system, foreigners in Seoul had to literally squeeze themselves in between Korean residents. For early settlers, the only means to form their ethnic communities inside the city was through the purchase of houses, one after another, from Koreans who had lived there. As such, foreigners came to live side by side with, rather than completely cut off from, Koreans within the city walls of Seoul.

The Hansŏngbu naegŏmun (The correspondence of the Seoul Magistracy) allows us to get a glimpse of the process through which Seoul developed into a city of mixed residence. Composed of the Seoul Magistracy’s correspondence with other government offices as well as with individual residents of Seoul from 1896 to 1907, this collection covers various economic and social issues involving foreigners and thereby reflects the rapid social changes after Seoul’s opening. While the entirety of this collection offers an invaluable window through which we can understand the changes occurring in Seoul at the turn of the twentieth century, what is particularly illuminating in regard to the issue of mixed residence is the Kakkuk kagye (Title deeds of foreigners). It consists of a total of 253 contract cases, in which all of the foreigners bought houses or land from Koreans: sixty-nine Chinese cases, eighty-eight Japanese, seventy-six Americans, and twenty French. Moreover, the majority of these contracts provided the name of the seller and the buyer and the location of the property, purchase price, and date. Some contracts went into more detail, such as the condition of the house and, most important, information about the neighbors the house in question was sharing walls with. Taking, for example, the contract between Korean Yun Kisŏn and Chinese Li Shunsheng, Li bought from Yun an eleven k’an (approximately four hundred square feet) tile-roof house located near the Changt’ong Bridge on the Ch’ŏnggye Stream in 1889.³⁹ According to the title deed, this house shared walls with a Korean with the last name of Kim to the west, with another Korean with the last name of Yi to the south, and with a Chinese merchant to the north.⁴⁰ This means that Chinese Li lived literally next door to Korean residents in Seoul. Furthermore, as the area near the Changt’ong Bridge was where the Chinese community was located, this document exemplifies how foreign communities in Seoul were formed by individual purchases of houses and land between foreigners and Koreans. In such a process, it is not surprising that foreign residents came to comingle with native Koreans.

One important problem that arose from this process was that the increase in the number of foreign households directly resulted in the decrease in the number [End Page 82] of Korean households inside the city. This correlation between the foreign and Korean households is well encapsulated in one report in the Korean newspaper Tongnip sinmun: every time a “foreigner’s house is constructed, a Korean’s house is demolished.”⁴¹ In earlier editorials, the Tongnip sinmun editors took a positive stance toward Seoul’s opening and its development into mixed residence as they saw Koreans living side by side with foreigners in Seoul as a symbolic indication of Korea becoming one among equals in a world populated by nations.⁴² Over time, however, the editors began to write editorials that were fraught with anxiety about mixed residence. This anxiety was first and foremost rooted in the fear of losing the space to live—or a space to be—to foreigners in their own capital city.

It may be asked, what objection can there be to a mixed residence? The influx of Japanese, Chinese, and other foreigners brings with it money and intelligence. The former gives the Koreans work while the latter, practical education. All this is no doubt very tempting. Only, we fear that Koreans will soon find no place to live in the city, however much they stand in need of capital and education. Seoul will, in the course of a few years, cease to be a city of Koreans.⁴³

One of the groups that echoed this anxiety more seriously than others was Seoul’s merchant community. In 1887, and a few more times afterward, the government-licensed merchants in Chongno closed their stores in protest and called for the government to deprive foreign merchants of their right to trade and reside inside the city walls. For Korean merchants, the Chinese and Japanese merchants, with strong capital bases in addition to extraterritoriality, posed a serious threat to their long-preserved monopoly right. As a result, Korean merchants were losing in the competition over a large percentage of the commercial districts in the capital, and by 1898, the newspaper noted that foreign merchants already occupied nearly one-third of the capital’s commercial district.⁴⁴ As it was certain that the number of foreigners would only increase in the future, the editors lamented that in the near future, “Koreans would be as cornered as Native Americans,” and “Seoul would be entirely occupied by foreigners.”⁴⁵

While the conflicts over space between Koreans and foreigners were occurring in various places inside the city walls, Chŏngdong was at the center of this contestation. Since Kojong moved out of the Russian legation to Kyŏngun Palace and proclaimed the Taehan Empire in 1897, this confined space became the district of foreign legations stationed in Korea and at the same time the seat of the imperial palace of the newly established Korean state. Previous scholarship has noted that King Kojong’s selection of Kyŏngun Palace as his new residence, a palace that was located in the closest proximity to the foreign legations among all the palaces, reflects the Taehan Empire’s precarious geopolitical position within the politics of imperialism within East Asia.⁴⁶ Facing Japan’s growing encroachment after the Sino-Japanese War, Kojong felt the need to keep the Western imperial powers close in order for Korea to maintain its sovereignty. It was [End Page 83] for this reason that, instead of returning to Kyŏngbok Palace, Kojong moved to Kyŏngun Palace, which was not at all equipped to function as the seat of the Korean “empire.”⁴⁷ Such political and geographical proximity to the Western powers, however, turned into one of the biggest obstacles Kojong would face when he sought to assert his power and prestige as a sovereign.

In 1900, the Taehan Empire began full-fledged construction on Kyŏngun Palace in order to transform what had been left as a private residence of the royal family into an imperial palace that could manifest the dignity of the new empire. To this end, not only were old buildings and palace walls repaired but new buildings were also constructed. One of the most important constructions in this transformation was the main throne hall, Chunghwajŏn (The hall of central harmony). It was not until 1902, when the construction of Chunghwajŏn was done, that Kyŏngun Palace completed the formalities to become an official palace.⁴⁸ Although the present-day Chunghwajŏn was restored as a one-story building, at the time of completion, it was a two-story wooden building constructed in the traditional Korean court architectural style. At a ceremony celebrating its completion, Kojong said, as this “grand building stands up high and lights up the palace grounds,” there could be no other happier occasion than this.⁴⁹

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Figure 2.

Chunghwajŏn in Kyŏngun Palace, circa 1910. The Western-style building on the left is Sŏkchojŏn. Chōsen Tōkanfu, Kankoku shashin chō [Photo album of Korea]. (Tokyo: Ogawa Kazumasa Shuppanbu, 1910), plate 14.

Another important addition was the construction of Western-style buildings. This is one key feature that sets Kyŏngun Palace apart from other royal palaces of the Chosŏn Dynasty. The most representative example of Western-style architecture within the palace complex was Sŏkchojŏn (Stone hall).⁵⁰ Designed by British [End Page 84] architect G. R. Harding, the Stone Hall was completed in 1910, after ten years of construction, as a neoclassical three-story building with embellished balconies. After its completion, it became one of the most dominating pieces of architecture within the city walls of Seoul, vying for first place with Chonghyŏn Cathedral.⁵¹ Although Sŏkchojŏn was unable to serve as an imperial palace, as it was completed a few months after the Annexation Treaty, Sŏkchojŏn nonetheless held an interesting symbolic position in the landscape of the Taehan Empire. While this three-story, Western-style building presented a vivid contrast in comparison with other single-story buildings in traditional Korean architectural style on the palace grounds, this same “Western”-style building was intended to serve as a symbol of the reinvented “Korean” imperial house, as well as its conformity with the “civilized” ways of the world.

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Figure 3.

Sŏkchojŏn in Kyŏngun Palace in the 1900s. The figure on the left is Prince Yŏngch’in. Kungnip Kogung Pangmulgwan. Reprinted with permission from the National Palace Museum of Korea.

In conjunction with expanding Kyŏngun Palace, the Taehan Empire attempted to reassert its authority over the space of Chŏngdong by controlling foreign construction in the area. During the Chosŏn Dynasty, the types of buildings one could erect were strictly restricted by the social status of the building’s owner. Not only the size and height of the buildings, but materials and decorations were also determined according to the owner’s social status.⁵² Foreigners, however, were not subjected to such regulations as they enjoyed the right of extraterritoriality. In November 1901, the acting minister of Foreign Affairs, Min Chongmuk, sent a message [End Page 85] to the American, English, German, French, Russian, and Japanese legations with a request to prohibit their citizens from constructing multiple-storied buildings in the vicinity of the imperial palace in Chŏngdong. Noting the recent phenomenon in the city that involved foreigners building houses that were more than one story, Min argued that it was problematic in the area of Chŏngdong more than any other place in the city. Chŏngdong was the place where the imperial palace was located, the single most important site that all of the Korean people looked up to. However, the tall foreign buildings in the area, according to Min, were obstructing the view of the imperial palace and thereby obstructing imperial authority.⁵³

The Taehan Empire’s efforts to reestablish an architectural hierarchy in Seoul, however, escalated the tension between foreigners and Koreans over the urban space to the national level. In their response to Min’s request, Seoul’s diplomatic community inquired about the exact height and the area in which the prohibition should be made applicable and postponed conforming to the new regulation until they received more clearly defined terms.⁵⁴ In order to revise their construction regulation with clearer terms, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs requested a survey of the area from the Seoul Magistracy. Almost a year later, the Seoul Magistracy sent the following report to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs:

We have received an order to inform [you of the] regulations on building heights in the Chŏngdong District and to present clear restrictions on building construction in the vicinity of each palace with complete drawings. In the treasured areas surrounding palaces, regardless of whether the person is a foreigner or a Korean, people cannot buy and sell as they please. Each purchase causes administrative complications. In addition, if foreigners build towering Western-style houses in these areas and look down at the inside of the palaces, what could surpass this in terms of extreme uneasiness? … Carefully examining the lay of land and the history of areas surrounding palaces, a complete ban [on building construction] within the five hundred mi [meters] from the palace walls will prevent loss of dignity. Attached is the list of all the palaces. Please review it and do not allow anyone, whether a Korean or a foreigner, to build a new house as they please within the five hundred meters from each palace. In the case of buying and selling existing houses, one must receive permission from the government office. It is only afterward that one can announce the intention of selling to each legation.

Kwangmu 6, October 14 (1902)
Mayor of Seoul Magistracy Chang Hwasik
Acting Minister of Foreign Affairs Ch’oe Yŏngha
Kyŏngun Palace, Chongmyo, Sajik, Wŏn’gudan, Kyŏnghŭi Palace, Kyŏngbok
Palace, Ch’angdŏk Palace, Yŏnghŭi Palace, Chŏkyŏng Palace, Yuksang Palace,
Sŏnhŭi Palace, Ch’angŭi Palace, Kyŏngu Palace, Pyŏlgung Andong⁵⁵

This report shows that the Seoul Magistracy made construction regulations more specific as well as more comprehensive. Instead of using the loosely defined [End Page 86] terms that could be potential sources for controversy, such as “multiple-storied buildings” and “the vicinity of the imperial palace,” the Seoul Magistracy placed a complete ban on construction of new buildings within five hundred meters of the palace. In a way, this five-hundred-meter limit was devised to function as a new boundary, to replace the city walls of Seoul and to rescue the imperial house from living under foreign shadows. In addition, the Seoul Magistracy came up with a new measure to control the existing foreign ownership within this boundary by making its permission a prerequisite when foreigners intended to sell their property. Finally, and most important, the Seoul Magistracy extended its control over the space beyond Chŏngdong into the other parts of the city by applying this new regulation to other imperial residences and ritual spaces inside the city walls.

Contrary to the Taehan Empire’s hope to clear up ambiguities, however, these new regulations provoked a heated diplomatic controversy between the Taehan Empire and Seoul’s diplomatic community. At stake in this controversy was that foreign authorities considered the Seoul Magistracy’s new regulations a serious violation of the treaties signed in the 1880s. Among many foreign authorities stationed in Seoul, French minister Collin de Plancy took the lead in denouncing the Korean government’s announcement. More specifically, in December 1902, Collin de Plancy claimed that French citizens in Korea were granted the right to reside and the right to construct residences or warehouses within the limits of the concessions at ports or places open to foreign trade by the French-Korean Treaty. Moreover, the treaty stipulated that all arrangements for the selection, determination of the limits, and laying out of the sites of foreign settlements should be made by the Korean authorities in conjunction with competent foreign authorities. Viewed in light of this treaty, Collin de Plancy argued, not only did the new construction regulations infringe upon French residents’ rights stipulated in the treaty, but it was also a violation of the French-Korean Treaty because the Korean government failed to discuss this matter with the French prior to the announcement. Collin de Plancy thus concluded that the French Consulate would not cooperate with the Taehan Empire on this matter.⁵⁶

The Taehan Empire could not acquiesce in this matter as well. In fact, this was a matter of great consequence as it had a direct impact on the reconstruction of Kyŏngun Palace and furthermore, on the establishment of the Taehan Empire’s sovereignty over the space in its capital. After discussing this matter with the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Seoul Magistracy responded to the French Consulate regarding the clauses that the French Consulate accused the Taehan Empire of violating:

[Those clauses] apply to various ports such as Chemulp’o, Wŏnsan, and Pusan but not to the capital city of Hanyang. Therefore, the clause such as “all arrangements shall be made by the Korean authorities in conjunction with the competent foreign authorities” applies specifically to aforementioned ports and places in Korea open to foreign trade. The capital city is different from various ports and places on the [End Page 87] coast. But now that you attempt to enforce the treaty that takes effect in ports and settlements in the capital city, we have no choice but to refute it.⁵⁷

Correspondence went back and forth between the French Consulate and the Seoul Magistracy without making any progress on this matter for about a month. The last report that is identifiable in the collection of the Hansŏngbu naegŏmun on this matter was correspondence from the Seoul Magistracy to the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In this report, the Seoul Magistracy informed the ministry that they postponed the survey of the Chŏngdong area until the next spring due to cold weather.⁵⁸ However, no more reports are found on this issue. Judging from the fact that the present-day Kyŏngun Palace is surrounded by numerous buildings that were built during this period, it seems safe to say that the Taehan Empire’s attempts to establish sovereignty over Seoul’s space largely failed.

EXTRATERRITORIALITY: MALADIES OR OPPORTUNITIES

Another problem that mixed residence brought into the space of Seoul was the problem of extraterritorial jurisdictions, which significantly undermined Korean sovereignty in different ways. As mentioned earlier, Seoul had no boundaries for foreign communities and thereby no boundaries for foreign jurisdictions. This lack of boundaries meant that foreigners could carve out extraterritorial spaces anywhere in the capital. In so doing the entire space of the capital—if there were foreign entities—could be absent from the jurisdiction of the Korean state. Undoubtedly, this imposed serious restrictions on the exercise of Korean sovereignty. A further challenge to Korean sovereignty came from the rise of a new group of Koreans who took advantage of extraterritoriality and the looseness of the Korean jurisdiction in Seoul. In New Frontiers, Robert Bickers and Christian Henriot have noted that the treaty port system in East Asia led to “the creation of new gray areas of contested sovereignty and control” by giving rise to “a vast array of nationals engaged in the pursuit of their livelihoods and interests in the interstices of empire, adroitly operating on the margins of treaty legality and using extraterritoriality.”⁵⁹ In this regard, Seoul presents a similar, yet different case from other treaty port cities due to its ambiguous status as a city that opened its doors to foreign trade and residence just like other treaty port cities on the one hand, and the capital city of the Korean state on the other hand. Such gray areas that were created right in Korea’s political center were indeed a serious challenge for a state that was striving to establish its territorial sovereignty in the face of encroaching imperialism.

The aforementioned Kim Yunsik’s concerns about Seoul’s opening as a city of mixed residence capture well the Korean state’s perspective on this issue. In fact, it was precisely this issue of extraterritoriality and its infringement on law enforcement and political authority that largely underlined Kim’s concerns. For [End Page 88] this reason, Kim listed Chosŏn’s granting of the right to trade and reside in Seoul to British citizens in the British-Korean Treaty—which provided legal grounds for all of the nations to be able to claim the same right, and, in turn, paved the way for Seoul’s development into a city of mixed residence—as one of the three biggest mistakes Chosŏn made in concluding treaties with foreign nations. Kim lamented that the officials took this issue too lightly without understanding its implications for Korea when concluding the British-Korean Treaty, and now it had become “a malady without a remedy.”⁶⁰ Kim pointed out three potential problems related to extraterritorial privileges that could arise from Seoul’s opening as a city of mixed residence:

Within the city walls, the good and the vicious coexist. Some become hired help for foreign merchants, while others become interpreters. They stir up trouble and do all manners of wickedness. Already it can be seen more and more. If our authorities want to investigate their crimes, the vicious then complain to their diplomats and consuls. Diplomats and consuls cover up all of their deeds and even request permanent passports and ignore our authorities. If the officials cannot control the people and allow these sorts of people, who do not fear the law, to reside in the capital city, to do as they please, and to cause chaos with no one to stop them, then the officials have no means to enforce ordinances. The good can turn into the vicious. This is the sixth harm. Also, if those who flout the law flee and hide in foreign warehouses, the Korean officials have to follow the provision in the treaties with foreign countries which stipulates that, if a Korean who violates the law is hiding in places like foreign merchants’ residences and warehouses, the Korean officials cannot enter those places to search and arrest that Korean on its own authority. Hence, foreign merchants’ warehouses become refuges for fugitives. How can refuges for fugitives so easily exist inside the capital? This is the seventh harm. Furthermore, there are already many thieves inside the city walls. If foreign warehouses are established, there will be even more cases of thievery. Foreigners will demand our government to make arrests and recover the stolen goods. The suffering is already unbearable. Moreover, based on just a hint of suspicion, some foreigners will take the law into their own hands and try to make arrests themselves. The innocent will be taken as thieves and be tortured. The people of the city will live their lives in constant fear. This is the eighth harm. These are merely the eight harms that are particularly obvious. The other troublesome issues are too difficult to enumerate.⁶¹

Kim’s prediction proved true to a surprising degree. According to the mayor of the Seoul Magistracy, Yi Ch’aeyŏn (1861–1900), Seoul’s crime rate increased when Koreans and foreigners began to reside together in the capital.⁶² Among others, issues associated with foreigners in particular came to account for a large part of the Seoul government’s tasks. These issues caused a great deal of difficulty for the Seoul government as foreigners were protected by their extraterritorial privileges as well as turned to their own police powers stationed in Seoul.⁶³ As a result, it was not uncommon for Koreans who became involved in disputes with foreigners to be beaten up by foreigners or arrested and detained by foreign [End Page 89] guards.⁶⁴ Numerous newspapers and criminal reports attested to the lawlessness of Seoul at the turn of the twentieth century. Many of these reports demonstrated cases where Chinese and Japanese residents in Seoul violated local laws and regulations, but Korean police were powerless to do anything about them.

What further challenged Korean sovereignty was the question of which authority was to exercise ultimate jurisdiction over Korean subjects who were working for foreigners. Since foreign residents in Seoul depended largely on assistance from Korean servants and employees in conducting business as well as living their everyday lives, they extended their extraterritorial privilege to shelter their Korean helpers from the Korean authorities. Koreans who were hired as official employees of foreign legations and consulates enjoyed even stronger extraterritorial protection than Korean private helpers, and their misconducts often became the source of diplomatic clashes between Korean authorities and foreign legations. Such conflicts can be glimpsed through the following newspaper report:

The interpreter of the Police Headquarters of the Japanese Consulate, named Yon Taehung [Yŏn T’aehŭng], dressed in Japanese clothes and entered the house of a Korean policeman, Yi Kyŏngsul, knowing that Yi was on duty at the time. He insulted Yi’s wife and made a disturbance. The neighbors heard the noise and informed Yi, and Yi arrested Yŏn on the charge of breaking and entering. Yŏn tried to pass himself off at the police station as a Japanese [citizen], but his identity was soon established, and he was put in prison awaiting trial. The Japanese legation demanded Yŏn’s release on the grounds that Yŏn belonged to the Japanese legation. However, the police authority refused to comply on the grounds that the prisoner was a Korean and therefore amendable to Korean law.⁶⁵

Here, it is important to note that working as interpreters came to serve as new opportunities particularly for the marginalized groups who were excluded from the center for centuries during the Chosŏn period. As Kyung Moon Hwang has shown, the country’s increasing contact with the outside world induced a striking turnaround in the fortunes of the secondary status group, with the interpreters standing at the forefront of this prominence. Their foreign language skills, which had been long held in disregard, now enabled them to soar to upper positions in the Korean government and wield enormous influence in the pre-annexation bureaucracy.⁶⁶ A striking example was Russian interpreter Kim Hongnyuk, who was also known for causing political chaos with his failed attempt to poison King Kojong in 1898. Despite, and perhaps owing to, his humble origins in Hamgyŏng Province—the border region between Korea and Russia—he acquired knowledge of the Russian language and became an interpreter at the Russian legation. Under the growing influence of Russia over the Taehan Empire, Kim obtained “almost unlimited power” while retaining his position in the Russian legation.⁶⁷ It was said that he advanced his own interests by false pretenses in every possible way, so much so that “his insolence, intrigues, and rascality filled the country with his creatures, the city with his sensual scandals, and the people with indignation.”⁶⁸ [End Page 90]

As cases like Yŏn and Kim were not only increasing in number but also causing thorny issues between Korean authorities and foreign consulates, the Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs decided in 1897 to give jurisdiction over this category of Koreans to the relevant foreign consulates.⁶⁹ This decision, however, served as a chance for many Koreans, some without any association to a foreign presence, to become fully aware of the advantages offered by extraterritorial protection. Consequently, there was a noticeable increase in the number of Koreans who began to take advantage of extraterritorial immunity in the pursuit of their livelihoods or interests. For example, many Koreans fabricated their national identities with simple lies and tricks. Similar to the aforementioned Yŏn case, newspapers frequently reported on cases in which Koreans, while dressed in foreign attire, made trouble and indulged in extortion.⁷⁰ Some seeking extraterritorial protection registered their names with foreign religious institutions.⁷¹ Others willingly worked for foreign legations and consulates and even for foreign armies and guards. In short, Seoul witnessed an increase in the number of Korean subjects who were not subjected to Korean jurisdiction through various channels.⁷²

Foreign legations also began to express their discomfort with these opportunistic groups of Koreans, as these Koreans were slipping from their grip. In 1899, for instance, French Consul General Collin de Plancy extradited to the Korean authorities two Koreans who were charged with defrauding Koreans of their property under the false authority of representatives of the French railroad company. In his words, these two Koreans were the same as thieves as they not only “defamed the French company’s reputation but also caused harm to Koreans” by taking advantage of loopholes in the law.⁷³ The Russian legation faced a similar problem. Reflecting Russia’s strong influence over the Taehan Empire, it seems that there were many Koreans trying to impersonate Russian citizens. In 1899, the Russian legation published the following notice in every issue of the Tongnip sinmun until the newspaper ceased publication at the end of the year:

As for Koreans who registered for Russian citizenship, or Koreans who claim that they became Russian citizens, allow them to buy something on credit only when they present formal proof issued from the Russian legation. Otherwise, it is a merchant’s mistake, and therefore the legation has no responsibility.⁷⁴

This notice allows us to glimpse a new situation where an opportunistic group of Koreans started to become a troubling category for both the Korean society as well as the Russian legation. Although it is difficult to grasp the entire picture with this one notice, it seems clear that the Russian legation received a large number of complaints from Korean merchants who had suffered a loss from credit transactions with ethnic Koreans who had actually acquired, or falsely claimed, Russian citizenship. What deserves particular attention in this notice is the existence of ethnic Koreans with Russian citizenship. According to the editors of the Tongnip sinmun, the Korean state witnessed a growing number of [End Page 91] Koreans in the border regions leaving Korea and acquiring foreign citizenship. More specifically, the editors noted that many Koreans residing in Hamgyŏng, P’yŏngan, and Kyŏngsang provinces were leaving for Russia, China, and Japan, respectively, in order to escape the restrictive ordinances of the Taehan Empire. The editors went on to urge the state to carry out law reforms otherwise, unable to withstand the harsh laws, “all subjects of the Taehan Empire would register for foreign citizenship.”⁷⁵

In examining the unprecedented growth of Korean communities abroad in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Andre Schmid notes that migration, or the crossing of territorial boundaries, challenged the assumed congruency of territory, people, and identity that underlay the conventional definition of a nation. According to Schmid, these diasporic Koreans were crossing not merely territorial boundaries but, more important, the conceptual boundaries of the nation. With the advent of the notion of territorial sovereignty, the ability to delimit space and exercise sovereignty over the people became one of the criteria for judging a nation’s competency. At this very time, the growing number of Koreans who were leaving the national territory—which supposedly defined them—symbolized the porousness in the boundaries of the nation, and furthermore, the incompetency of the Korean state in exercising its territorial sovereignty.⁷⁶ In this light, it is not too difficult to imagine how the aforementioned ethnic Koreans with Russian citizenship residing in the capital posed a similar, perhaps more serious, challenge to the Korean state. Their very existence raised troubling questions about the congruency of nation, territory, and identity at the heart of the nation that was in urgent need to establish sovereignty over its territory and citizens.

It is needless to say that the ethnic Koreans with foreign citizenship in the capital were a great source of anxiety to the Korean state. However, an even more serious problem that the issue of extraterritoriality brought into Seoul was the rapidly growing sense of dissatisfaction with the Taehan Empire among the people in the capital. Despite the establishment of the Taehan Empire and its claim of equality with all nations in the world, what Korean inhabitants in Seoul experienced in their everyday lives was a deepening subordination of their status to foreigners, rather than associating with foreigners on an equal footing as they hoped. In 1899, the editors of the Tongnip sinmun complained, in the format of a conversation between a foreigner and a Korean, that the Taehan Empire was treating foreigners better than its own subjects. Taking an example of how Seoul’s nightly curfew was unfairly forced on Koreans while it was lifted for foreigners, the editors commented that “the various rules and regulations trouble only the subjects of the Taehan Empire.”⁷⁷ Particularly in juxtaposition with the foreign legations’ active protection of their citizens, as well as their extension to their Korean employees, for Korean inhabitants in Seoul the Taehan Empire appeared to be impotent in protecting them from foreign encroachments. As a result, at the turn of the twentieth century the target of some Korean residents’ resentment about their mistreatment in Seoul was gradually shifting from foreigners toward [End Page 92] the Taehan Empire.⁷⁸ For Kojong and Korean elites who strove to arouse patriotism as a means to protect the nation, this growing sense of alienation of Koreans from their loyalty to the Taehan Empire was indeed a serious challenge.⁷⁹

CONCLUSION

In 1914, the Japanese colonial government abolished extraterritoriality along with the legal authority of the Japanese community and other foreign settlements in Korea. As a result, all of the extraterritorial enclaves that previously existed in Korea were absorbed into a unified administrative system, and the Japanese, Koreans, and foreigners now came under the same authority of the colonial government. The colonial authorities celebrated this change in the law as an important advancement in colonial administration. In the Keijō fushi (History of Keijō Prefecture), the authorities wrote that these settlements should have been abolished with the Annexation Treaty in 1910, as they were originally established for self-rule. Although delayed for four years, it bore important fruit as the new law placed multiple legal authorities under a unified administrative system.⁸⁰ Previous studies have examined this change as part of Japanese efforts to impose their assimilation policy in Korea and have paid close attention to the Japanese agency. However, my discussion of Seoul’s mixed residence from 1876 to 1910 provides an important local context for why the colonial government had to come up with such a policy. In other words, it was precisely against this backdrop of lived experiences of extraterritorial privileges in Seoul that Japanese authorities had to remake Seoul into the colonial capital of Keijō and incorporate the capital’s residents into loyal subjects of the Japanese emperor.

This article examined the opening of Seoul and the unprecedented formation of multiple foreign communities within the city walls of Seoul. As the capital city of the Confucian state Chosŏn, the space inside the city walls had been devoted to express royal authority and Confucian epistemology, thus foreigners and foreign presences were largely kept invisible from the urban scene of Seoul. It was not until the opening of Seoul in 1882 that the city witnessed the formation of foreign communities inside its walls for the first time in its history. Here, instead of narrowly focusing on Korean and/or Japanese efforts in respatializing Seoul at the turn of the twentieth century, this article demonstrated that the opening of Seoul and the following respatialization inside the city walls was a process that involved multiple foreign powers. Regardless of varying interests in Korea, foreign powers competed against one another over space, and this competition significantly changed the urban landscape of Seoul as well as the everyday lives of Seoul’s residents.

It was against this backdrop of multiple foreign presences that the issue of mixed residence arose as one of the most urgent issues of the time. Seoul’s status as a capital city further magnified the seriousness of problems that mixed [End Page 93] residence brought into the space inside the city walls. With no clear boundaries of foreign communities, foreign and Korean citizens comingled together under multiple jurisdictions. Mixed residence in Seoul blurred more than just the residential boundaries of different citizenships. But, more important, it blurred the jurisdictional boundaries over people residing in Seoul and this, in turn, invited a group of Koreans to take advantage of extraterritoriality in the pursuit of their own interests, which even further blurred the boundaries of citizenship. As such, a closer examination of precolonial Seoul in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shows us that the city’s transformation was driven by contestations on multiple levels: contestations between nations pursuing their political goals in the capital on one level, and contestations between individuals seeking their personal fortunes in the city on another. On the national level, facing issues such as mixed residence and extraterritoriality, the Korean state attempted to better exercise spatial sovereignty as an independent nation, while multiple foreign powers (Qing China, Meiji Japan, and Western nations) pursued their imperial agendas in Seoul. On the individual level, the social and cultural aspects of the everyday life of Seoul’s residents changed dramatically as they had to navigate through the spatial politics imposed by both Korean and foreign nations.