This is the beautiful face of Yu Kwan-sun. In 1919, she was 16 years old.  She became the face of Korea's fight for freedom.
Yu was a student at Ewha Haktang in Seoul. On March 1, 1919, she and four classmates joined others in the streets in a protests where cries of Manse! (long live Korean independence, in this case). A Declaration of Independence, written by publisher Choe Nam-seon, was signed by 33 Korean cultural and religious leaders and was recited at Seoul's Pagoda Park.Â
A few days later, Yu returned to her hometown of Cheonan with a smuggled copy of the Declaration of Independence. She went from village to village spreading word of the Samil (March 1) Movement and encouraging residents to organize their own protests.Â
On April 1st, 3,000 people gathered at Aunae market in Cheonan. Yu was there, distributing Korean flags and giving speeches calling for independence. The Japanese military arrived and fired on the crowd, killing 19 people, including Yu's parents.
An estimated two million people out of a population of 20 million, participated in 1,542 independence marches, according to Djun Kil Kim, author of "The History of Korea". More than 7,000 people were killed and about 46,000, including Yu, were jailed.Â
Yu continued to express her support for Korean independence and, with other inmates organized a large-scale protest on the first anniversary of the March 1 Movement.
Yu was offered a lighter sentence if she would admit guilt and cooperate with the police. She refused.
The police subjected her to torture to give up the names of collaborators or safe houses. She held firm.
She was transferred to Gonju police station and stood trial for sedition and security law violations. At the trial, she protested its unjustness saying, "Your country has invaded another country. You have no rights to judge our guilts."  She was convicted and sentenced to five years at Seodaemun prison.
"Even if my fingernails are torn out, my nose and ear ripped apart, and my legs and arms are crushed, this physical pain does not compare to the pain of losing my nation," she wrote in prison. "My only remorse is not being able to do more than dedicating my life to my country." Â
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She was eventually transferred to an underground cell, where she was repeatedly beaten and tortured. "Japan will fall" she wrote shortly before dying of her injuries on September 28, 1920 at the age of 17.
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Legend says on March 1, the statues of Yu Kwan-sun march screaming "Long Live Korean Independence" and if you say her name to one of the statues, the head will turn and she will look into your eyes.
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Photo from the New York Times
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THE BIRTH OF INDEPENDENT KOREA
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Kyung Moon Hwang, professor of History at the University of Southern California (USC), wrote a wonderful piece on the birth of Korean nationhood that you can read here. In an interview with Ted Widmer of Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, he explained the significance of the March 1, 1919 independence protests in Korea.
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In downtown Seoul on March 1, 1919 "people had been gathering for the funeral of King Gojong, who had been forcefully removed and had to abdicate three years before the formal annexation of Korea as a colony.
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By the time 1919 came, Korea had been a Japanese colony for 9 years. There was a confluence of forces, intellectual, political, and otherwise (...) and it was decided that on March 1, the leaders of this organized effort in Korea who had signed a Declaration of Independence (composed by famous poet Choe Nam-seon) would read the declaration on March 1 in a park in central Seoul. They were quickly arrested, which they knew in advance would happen.
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This pattern of reading aloud the declaration and then going out to march peacefully was repeated throuout the Peninsula for several weeks.
Photo of March 1, 1919 march
from http://www.jejuweekly.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=6085
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"You can tell from the documents that have been accessed of various organizations both within and outside the Peninsula (...) that the leadership (...) was aware of the strategy behind using the Paris Peace Conference as a platform to voice their aspirations on a global stage.
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"I can't say that the average Korean was aware of this percolating idea around the world, but certainly the intellectuals, the social leaders, and educational leaders were aware of this. I think it proved to be a powerful, unifying force in 1919 in Korea and many places to try to break through and do something about this condition, which Koreans had experienced for 9 years but, before then, had not experienced since the Mongol domination of the 13th and 14th centuries.
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Photos from the Korean Times
"There were Koreans in Mexico...in Hawaii, in other parts of East Asia, in Siberia (...) there were efforts to connect them all following March 1, in this network to bring about their desired outcome. So it's really extraordinary the extent to which the diaspora was already well widespread around the world (...) it didn't take much to trigger that sense of Korean national collectivity. We see it in evidence of telegrams and letters. There is money moving between different places, overseas as well.
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There were all these heroic, glorified independence figures working in some capacity or another with each other...but the networking is quite extraordinary. (...) between 14,000 and 16,000 documents were discovered in an attic of the Korean National Association building in Los Angeles. They were kind enough to let the Korean Heritage Library at USC digitalize those documents (...) so it's available to anyone in the world.
Traveling by train in Korea in the 1930s
from http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2018/05/721_249222.html
"If you believe success hinged upon gaining immediate independence, then of course the March 1 demonstrations did not succeed (...but) it did bring about a major loosening of the major restrictions of the Japanese (...) the ensuing one-and-a-half decades after March 1 really was a period of liberalization, and it did result in tremendous developments in terms of modern Korean culture.
(...) "the period of the 1920s to the early 1930s was a direct outcome from the March 1 demonstrations, a considerable period of liberalization and cultural activity as well as associational and social activity."
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All those freedoms basically disappeared in the late 1930s as Japan mobilized for total war, first in China and then against the USA. But then comes the period of real independence after World War II.
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"This is the most important period of modern Korean history. Many important events happened in the short period from liberation in August of 1945 to the outbreak of the Korean War, from 1950 to 1953, when national division emerged and solidified thanks to the occupation of the Peninsula by the Soviet Union in the North and the Americans in the South.
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(...) "That would represent the culmination of the ideological and political divisions (...) which became formalized through the establishment of North and South Korea in 1948 as separate states. Then there was an attempt in 1950 by the North Koreans to overcome that through force, which started the Korean War.
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The foreigners who risked their lives to defend our ancestors.
The Korean Herald published:
On the turbulent path of Korea towards independence and building of a nation, there were foreigners who steadfastly supported the Korean people, even though their contributions have been overshadowed by those of the Korean Patriots.
The Korea Herald, in collaboration with Independence Hall of Korea, has published a series of articles that present these foreigners, their lives and legacies.
Among them were Albert Wilder Taylor and his wife Mary Taylor, and Frederick Arthur McKenzie.
Albert W. Taylor was a gold mining engineer, however, he became well-known as a journalist. Taylor appears in the photo above with his wife, British actress Mary Linley Taylor (whose memoir "Chain of Amber" you can buy HERE.
It is unknown precisely when Taylor, who spoke Korean fluently, started to send news about Korea or his motives.
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However, it is known that Taylor accepted a job as a correspondent in 1919, when he learned that a person based in Tokyo was looking for someone to cover the funeral of King Gojong, last Joseon Monarch.
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That same day, his son was born at Severance Hospital in Seoul. During his visit to his wife, he saw the nurses quickly trying to hide printed copies of the Declaration of Independence under a bed in a room reserved for foreign patients. He obtained a copy and send it to the AP News agency office in Tokyo.
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Taylor, who informed the world of the fight for independence in Korea through articles regardingt the Declaration and the 1st of March Movement, wrote on March 7, a letter to his mother-in-law, "I did not request this job, but I was named correspondent in Korea for the AP news agency. I was busy with my work until recently, covering the funeral of the Korean King and writing articles about the independence movement in Korea."
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Photographs taken by Taylor at King Gojong´s funeral from Gyeongbukgung Palace to Heunginjimun Gate.
After the funeral of the King, Taylor wrote many other articles. He visited to site of the Jeam-ri Massacre, where Japanese soldiers gathered residents in a church in Jeam-ri village in Hwanseong in the province of Gyeonggi-do and massacred them in retaliation for the march for independence.
His article about this mass murder was published in the New York Times on April 24 under the heading, "Japanese Troops Massacre Koreans." The newspaper in English published in Japan also covered his report on April 27 and 29.
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American Consul Raymond Curtice wrote a report on April 21 in which he describes visiting the site of the massacre on April 16 with AP correspondent A.W. Taylor.
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Aside from the massacre, Taylor also covered trials of independence fighters who led the movement. A story on the trials of Son Byung-hee (1861-1922) and others ran on the July 13, 1920, edition of the Dong-A Ilbo. It read, “A Westerner appeared in the press box for the first time. This man was Taylor, a correspondent of the American news agency AP, who will break news on the trials.”
Few remaining records mention what Taylor covered and wrote as a correspondent after 1920. What can be inferred without difficulty, however, is what Joseon meant to him.
In 1923, he built a two-story red-brick house with a basement in Seoul’s Haengchon-dong neighborhood, where Gen. Gwon Yul’s home is known to have been, and carved the Sanskrit word “Dilkusha,” meaning “heart of delight,” into the foundation.
Taylor lived in Seoul with his wife Mary Linley Taylor (1889-1982) and their son Bruce Tickell Taylor (1919-2015), but they were deported in 1942 as Japan’s imperialism neared its peak.
After Japan’s surrender in 1945, Taylor made every effort to return to Korea, sending letters to the U.S. administration and American military authorities there. Unfortunately, he died of a sudden heart attack in 1948. His widow brought his ashes to Korea in September the same year and interred them at Yanghwajin Foreign Missionary Cemetery in Seoul.
Taylor and his wife built their house in Seoul in 1923 and named it Dilkusha, which means Heart's Delight in Hindi. They lived there until they were deported by the Japanese in 1942. In 2016, the Korean government initiated reconstruction and the house was opened to the public as a historic site to commemorate the 102nd anniversary of the 1st of March Movement.
Above, Jennifer Taylor, Albert Taylor's granddaughter, at the re-opening of ger grandparent's house in Seoul, now open to the public.