Secret tunnels

By Robert Neff

In the late 1890s and early 1900s, Seoul was a city filled with intrigue, espionage, assassins and thieves. Even the royal court was not exempt from these dangers. Thus it is not surprising that measures were taken to ensure the royal family was able to be conveyed to safety in a precarious situation. But how secret were these measures?

Following the savage murder of Queen Min by members of the Japanese legation and some disloyal Koreans on Oct. 8, 1895, an article appeared in a small Wisconsin newspaper in which Ralph Cooke declared he was convinced that the queen was still alive and hiding in a secret fortress north of the palace. According to Cooke, he was the first Westerner to actually visit this refuge:

“The king’s means of reaching this formidable hiding place is through an entirely undeveloped country, of where this is much in Corea. It is partly tunneled and partly leads across a bed of pounded granite sand. Of course it is tunneled at the entrance ways at each end – that furnishing exit and entrance at the Seoul palace, and that at the old fortress. This tunnel is said to have been constructed thousands of years ago by a body of priests hired by the crown.”

He went on to add that the priests were sworn to “absolute secrecy.”

“The reigning king agreed to allow them a pension so long as they lived for this service, and at the same time swore vengeance on their religion should the passageway ever become known to his subjects. The laboring priests are furthermore said to have been cautioned not to make any sort of record of the existence of the passageway if they wished for the welfare of their god in Corea.”

Cooke’s story is just that ― a story. The fortress to which he was referring was not really that much of a secret and had been visited by many Westerners prior to 1895. The first known visitor was George C. Foulk in 1884. Cooke’s very long article was filled with inconsistencies and appears to have been constructed from articles that had appeared in earlier editions of American newspapers.

Writers in Wisconsin weren’t the only ones to profess intimate knowledge of security at the Korean palaces. Four days after Cooke’s article appeared, the New York Times wrote:

“The late Queen of Corea does not seem to have had a very happy life, and if all reports be true she did not quite deserve one. She ruled the King with a rod of iron, and sold every office in the realm to the highest bidder. She oppressed the people so that she was in constant fear of assassination. It was her custom to sit up all night, and she never went to bed until 5 or 6 o'clock in the morning. She had several bedrooms, so that no one knew where she slept, except her own intimates. Under her bedchamber there was a trap door, with steps leading down to a room below, where she kept always on guard fleet-footed couriers, with a vehicle in readiness so that she could fly at a moment's notice. But all these precautions seem to have been unavailing.”

The article is nothing more than another fanciful story ― a product of rumor and invention. There is, however, one early newspaper account that is intriguingly accurate. In April 1904, a writer for the Atlantic Constitution wrote:

“[It] is popularly supposed that deep down in the ground lying between the present imperial palace and the Russian legation there runs a tunnel built to insure the emperor taking no chances should any other stray agitator try to secure an audience without permission.”

Part of the “tunnel” can still be seen at the ruins of the Russian legation in Jeong-dong. Whether it is or isn’t a tunnel I will leave up to you, the reader, to decide.

Picture Credit: The escape route at the Russian Legation, courtesy of Dr. J.M. Park.

Robert Neff is a contributing writer for The Korea Times.