Ahn Jung-geun and Kim Gu Were Once Enemies — Cheonggyedong

In 1919, Yun Chi-ho wrote this in his diary.

It is not an easy sentence to agree with.

So this channel decided to look at it again.

How much of Yun's assessment actually holds up?

Our story begins fifteen years before the assassination of Ito.

In 1894, the Donghak Peasant Army rose up across Korea.

An Tae-hun, a local scholar-official in Sincheon, Hwanghae Province, gathered about seventy hunters and militiamen and made a stand at Cheonggye Mountain.

In those ranks was his sixteen-year-old son — Ahn Jung-geun.

In the autobiography he later wrote in prison, "The Life of An Eungchil," Ahn recalled it this way.

The boy Ahn Jung-geun was not a bystander — he was a combatant.

How did Ahn Jung-geun remember the Donghak movement?

What he wrote in "The Life of An Eungchil" is unsparing.

And in the unfinished manuscript he left behind in Lushun Prison, "A Treatise on Peace in the East," he wrote this.

To Ahn Jung-geun, the Donghak unrest was an event that led to troop deployments and war between China and Japan.

On the opposite side of that same battlefield was another boy.

Kim Gu, a nineteen-year-old Donghak leader in Hwanghae Province.

According to Kim Gu's own memoir, "Baekbeom Ilji," his unit was attacked and scattered by the forces of Yi Dong-yeop.

As he was being hunted down, an unexpected hand reached out to him — a secret envoy sent by An Tae-hun.

According to Baekbeom Ilji, An Tae-hun arranged lodging for Kim Gu and his family in Cheonggyedong, where Kim spent about four months studying under the Confucian scholar Ko Neung-seon.

The father of the one who had led the suppression took in the boy who had been suppressed.

On October 26, 1909, Ahn Jung-geun shot Ito Hirobumi at Harbin Station.

In his subsequent interrogation, he listed fifteen reasons for killing Ito — including the murder of Empress Myeongseong, the Eulsa Treaty, the deposal of Emperor Gojong, the disbanding of the army, and the killing of righteous militia and civilians.

His claim was that this was not a personal murder, but an act of combat in wartime.

But there is one fact we need to establish first.

Japan's policy of annexing Korea had already been decided three months before Ahn's attack.

On April 10, 1909, Prime Minister Katsura Taro and Foreign Minister Komura Jutaro visited Ito Hirobumi, who was recuperating at the time, to present the annexation policy.

Kurachi Tetsukichi, then head of the Foreign Ministry's Political Affairs Bureau, testified to this in his 1939 oral memoir, "The Circumstances of the Annexation of Korea."

Three months later, on July 6, the Japanese Cabinet formally adopted "The Matter Concerning the Annexation of Korea" as a cabinet decision.

Before Ito's death, annexation was already national policy.

So how much of Yun Chi-ho's claim that the assassination "hastened" the annexation is actually true?

The annexation policy had already been set.

Ito himself agreed to that policy in April 1909.

But Ito is known to have had a different vision from the hardliners for how Korea should be governed after annexation.

After Ito's assassination, calls for annexation and petitions for union came out into the open in Japan.

Sone Arasuke, whose health had deteriorated, resigned in May 1910, and War Minister Terauchi Masatake took over as Resident-General and carried out the annexation.

No source confirms that this change in personnel was a direct result of the assassination.

What can be confirmed is a sequence in time — within ten months of the assassination, annexation was carried out, and the initiative in that process passed to Terauchi.

On August 22, 1910, the annexation treaty was signed.

It was promulgated and took effect on the 29th.

Ahn Jung-geun recorded that the Donghak unrest led to the deployment of Chinese and Japanese troops and to war.

Fifteen years later, his own act of assassination likewise became an event that could be used by a Japanese political establishment that had already settled on annexation.

This does not mean the two events share the same cause or responsibility.

But a structural similarity remains — that intent and outcome can diverge.

This is not Ahn Jung-geun's own realization, but this channel's interpretation.

Yun Chi-ho was a man who judged by outcomes rather than emotion.

His assessment of armed resistance as a whole follows the same vein.

Yun read the sequence of events in exactly that way.

Ahn Jung-geun's attack did not decide the annexation.

But the close timing — annexation carried out within ten months of the attack — explains the background of Yun's assessment.

Whether the attack actually hastened the timing cannot be confirmed.

Still, it seems reasonably persuasive that this incident lent momentum to the hardliners who had already decided on annexation.

And it seems unlikely that today's Japanese historiography would treat this point with complete candor — this is not a historical record, but this channel's own conjecture.

Ahn Jung-geun died a martyr's death in Lushun on March 26, 1910.

Kim Gu, the boy An Tae-hun had taken in and protected at Cheonggyedong, went on to become chairman of the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea and continued the independence movement.

The bond between two families once divided into suppressor and suppressed ended up recorded in history under the same name — independence fighters.

This episode is not meant to condemn Ahn Jung-geun.

It simply holds up the record he himself left about the Donghak movement as a measure, to look again at where his own act came to stand.