The Tonghak Peasant Rebellion

Brian Thimmesch

Hist 285, Gao

Section 0102

The Tonghak Peasant Rebellion

The Tonghak Peasant Rebellion of 1894 was a response of the lower class Korean citizen to the corrupt governmental regime that existed in Korea during that time. The Tonghak Rebellion is significant because it was able to gain traction with a large enough portion of the Korean population to make demands of the government and force change. This rebellion gets its name from “Tonghak” an endogenous Korean religion that led to the rebellion. While it’s difficult to say if the Tonghak religion led to the unrest or if the unrest led to the rise in Tonghak popularity, it is clear that the Korean lower class used the Tonghak religion as a tool with which to bring about political change.

The Tonghak revolution was a result of the Korean cultural system in which the wealth and success of upper class Korean officials depended on the exploitation of the Korean lower class. Korea’s government was set up in such a way that kept the governmental officials alienated from the common Korean citizen, and as a result, it was common practice for Korean officials to cut deals with foreign powers that sacrificed the interests of the Korean commoners. While there may have been money changing hands in Korea, the vast majority of it went into the hands of middlemen and government officials rather than into the hands of the workers. As a result, “The main policy of the central government was to impose limits on the plunder, and prevent the peasants from being squeezed so severely that they would rebel.” The Korean government was walking a fine line, trying to exploit their citizens, but not so much as to cause unrest. Despite the attempts of the government to regulate exploitation, minor peasant insurrections were fairly common in the years prior to the Tonghak rebellion2. It wasn’t until the rise in popularity of the Tonghak Religion that the leaders of such insurrections were able to recruit enough...