Donghak Peasant Revolution

The initial Gobu uprising was temporarily pacified when the government replaced the corrupt magistrate with a conciliatory official who persuaded the rebels to disperse. However, the peace was brief. Government investigators soon arrived to punish the participants, forcing Jeon and his co-conspirator, Kim Gae-nam, to flee south to Mujang. There, they allied with Son Hwa-jung, another powerful Donghak leader. On March 20, 1894, they issued a call to arms. Gathering thousands of followers on the slopes of Mount Baek, the rebel army marched back into Gobu in April, launching a full-scale insurrection. The peasant army, though poorly equipped, was fueled by religious zeal and a desperate hunger for justice. They routing government forces at the Battle of Hwangtojae and again at the Hwangryong River, capturing the historic provincial capital of Jeonju Fortress by May. Terrified by the rapid collapse of his armies, King Gojong’s court made a fateful decision: they appealed to China’s Qing Dynasty for military assistance.

The arrival of 2,700 Chinese soldiers on Korean soil triggered a geopolitical avalanche. Japan, watchfully waiting for an opportunity to assert its dominance over the peninsula, claimed that China had violated the Convention of Tientsin by failing to notify Tokyo before deploying troops. In response, Japan dispatched its own army, seizing the royal palace in Hanseong and instigating the First Sino-Japanese War. Back in Jeonju, shocked by the sudden arrival of foreign armies on their shores, the rebel leaders and government forces quickly signed the Treaty of Jeonju in May, agreeing to a temporary truce. The peasants dispersed to their fields, hoping to implement local administrative reforms through their own self-governing councils, while the two East Asian empires turned the Korean Peninsula into a bloody theater of war.

As the summer of 1894 waned, Japanese forces drove the Chinese out of the peninsula and tightened their grip on the Joseon court. The realization that their homeland was slipping into foreign subjugation reawakened the dormant peasant army. In October, the Northern and Southern factions of Donghak set aside their theological and tactical differences, assembling a massive coalition force of tens of thousands of fighters at Samrye. Jeon Bong-jun led this army north toward Seoul, determined to expel the Japanese invaders and the puppet officials they had installed. But the world had changed since their spring victories. At the Battle of Ugeumchi in late November, the poorly armed peasants, carrying little more than bamboo spears and antiquated matchlock muskets, confronted a combined force of government troops and Japanese regular infantry equipped with modern artillery and Gatling guns. The result was a slaughter. Charging uphill into a wall of mechanized fire, the rebel ranks were systematically obliterated.

The defeat at Ugeumchi broke the spine of the revolution. A final, desperate stand at the Battle of Taein failed to turn the tide, and by the winter of 1894, the remnants of the peasant army were hunted down across the snow-covered hills of the Honam region. Jeon Bong-jun and the other principal leaders of the uprising were betrayed, captured, and brought to Seoul in chains. In March 1895, they were executed by mass hanging. The Donghak Peasant Revolution had ended in ruin, its fields soaked in the blood of its believers, leaving the Joseon Dynasty fragile and completely exposed to the imperial designs of Japan. Yet, the memory of the circular signatures of the Sabal Tongmun and the vision of a world where all humans were divine survived, remaining a potent symbol of popular resistance and national sovereignty for the century of foreign occupation and civil strife that lay ahead.