They Took the Titles — The Gyeongsul Traitors and 76 Peers, 22 August 1910

22 August 1910, the Residency-General

A week earlier, on 16 August, Resident-General Terauchi Masatake summoned Prime Minister Yi Wan-yong and Agriculture Minister Jo Jung-eung to his residence and showed them the draft. There was nothing that could be called negotiation; the text had been settled in Tokyo.

On 22 August, Japanese gendarmes were posted every fifteen gan along the streets of Seoul. Under those conditions a purely formal council was held before Emperor Sunjong, and Yi Wan-yong was granted full powers. That afternoon the treaty was signed at the Residency-General in the names of Yi Wan-yong and Terauchi. It ran to eight articles. The first begins:

His Majesty the Emperor of Korea makes complete and permanent cession to His Majesty the Emperor of Japan of all rights of sovereignty over the whole of Korea.

If the Eulsa pact of five years earlier took away foreign relations, this document took everything else.

Why they hid it for a week

The signing was done on 22 August; the proclamation came on 29 August. For eight days the authorities controlled the newspapers, banned political assembly, and effectively confined the senior ministers. The point was to deny any opposition time to organise.

On 29 August, Yi Wan-yong had Yun Deok-yeong, chief of the royal secretariat, apply the imperial seal. The Korean Empire ceased to exist. The day Koreans call the National Humiliation is not the day the treaty was made but the day it was announced. Between the country changing hands and the people learning of it lay a planned week.

Sunjong's signature is missing

The first entry in this series noted that the Eulsa pact lacked Gojong's ratification. The document five years later has the same defect.

According to research by Professor Yi Tae-jin of Seoul National University, the imperial rescript proclaimed on 29 August is missing or wrong in two respects. First, it lacks the signature 'Cheok' (坧) — Sunjong's given name — which he had placed on every rescript since November 1907. Second, the seal impressed on it is not the state seal but the Chikmyeongjibo (勅命之寶), an administrative seal Japan had taken when it forced Gojong to abdicate in 1907. It is not an instrument for a treaty between states.

Sunjong signed the letter of full powers, this research concludes, but refused to the end the rescript signature that constituted ratification. This is among the grounds on which, in 2010, a thousand Korean and Japanese intellectuals declared the treaty null from the outset.

It should be said plainly that this is a leading scholarly argument, not a matter on which every question is closed.

The Gyeongsul traitors — eight names

Two names in this table appear again. Yi Wan-yong and Pak Je-sun were among the Five Eulsa Traitors in 1905 and among the eight here in 1910. In those five years one rose from education minister to prime minister, the other from foreign minister to home minister. Selling the country was a promotion.

A peerage is not an honour. It is a receipt.

On the very day the treaty was proclaimed, Japanese Imperial Ordinance No. 14 — the Korean Peerage Order — was promulgated alongside it, conferring Japanese titles on Koreans who had served the annexation.

Money followed. Grants were paid to 3,645 people — peers, meritorious persons, and officials of the old government — totalling 6.79 million won. At the values of the day, the largest recipients received several lifetimes' worth.

Why this list matters: conferring a title is an administrative act that leaves a record. Testimony about what someone did may conflict, but who received which title on which date is written down. That is why, when the Republic of Korea later defined pro-Japanese anti-national conduct in law, receiving a peerage was itself among the criteria.

A peerage was not a mark of honour. It was a receipt proving a transaction had occurred. And receipts survive.

The eight who refused

Of the 76, eight refused or returned the title: Kim Seok-jin, Yun Yong-gu, Hong Sun-hyeong, Han Gyu-seol, Min Yeong-dal, Jo Gyeong-ho, Jo Jeong-gu, Yu Gil-jun.

One name here recurs too. Han Gyu-seol — the chief state councillor who on 17 November 1905 refused to the last and was dragged from the room. Five years later he refused a barony. The first refusal was not an accident.

Kim Seok-jin, offered a barony, drank poison on 8 September 1910. He refused the title by dying.

Two days later, on 10 September, the scholar Hwang Hyeon took opium at his home in Gurye. Over several days he had written a death poem and a final letter. One couplet has outlasted everything else:

Closing my book beneath the autumn lamp, I think back over the ages —
how hard it is in this world to be a man who knows how to read.
秋燈掩卷懷千古 難作人間識字人

The Maecheon Yarok he was writing until the end is a critical record of the years 1864 to 1910. Watching his country disappear, he went on keeping the record to the last.

Two lists, one principle

There were five names on 17 November 1905 and eight on 22 August 1910. Two names appear on both. And one name refused on both occasions.

This is what a record shows. One choice may be an accident; two are not. That is why the dates and the names and the offices must be written down precisely — so that later they can be laid over one another.

A week from now, on 29 August, the National Humiliation will be recorded here: not the day the country vanished, but the day people were allowed to find out.

Sources

• Encyclopedia of Korean Culture — the annexation treaty
• Wikisource — full text of the treaty
• National Institute of Korean History — the annexation
• Wikipedia (ko) — the Korean peerage
• SBS — the rescript without an imperial signature