The far shore rose slightly to a wooded knoll, desolate and tranquil. Unlike most of the inhabited islands of Korea, which have at least a small port to shelter a handful of fishing trawlers, I could see nothing in the way of a single vessel or harbour.
But perhaps the silence and tranquility were not so surprising. After all, North Korea lies just 1.6 kilometres north of the island across the narrow Han estuary, and boat traffic and commercial fishing is prohibited in these waters. Being in such close proximity to the enemy, the ROK troops stationed here are in a state of constant readiness.
We drove across Ganghwa Bridge, ripples and eddies swirling in the strong current. Twice daily, the Pacific Ocean pushes and sucks vast quantities of water in and out of the Yellow Sea basin, resulting in the world’s second-highest tides. Here, along Ganghwa Island, high tide rises nine metres above low tide. The rapid rise and descent creates powerful currents that can sweep along at seven or eight knots between the islands as the tide sweeps in from the south and recedes in the opposite direction.
* * *
Ganghwa Island has been privy to some pretty remarkable history, due to its geographical location at the entrance to the Han River and its proximity to Seoul, just seventy kilometres upstream. During the last millennium, Ganghwa had served in times of trouble as a refuge for royal families, governments, dethroned monarchs, and disgraced officials.
Mark Napier Trollope, a British chaplain stationed in Korea who went on to serve as Bishop of Korea from 1911 until his death in 1930, trekked across Ganghwa Island and wrote that during the first eight centuries after Christ, it was considered a simple prefecture. Then, in the eighth century, its stature was raised to that of a fortress. Ganghwa was “the first outpost to be attacked and the most important to be defended in case of invasion by sea.”
Over the years, the island has received the full brunt of foreign assaults. The Mongols invaded in 1231, and through 1258 attacked Korea seven different times in an attempt to dominate the Goryeo kingdom. The Goryeo king, Gojong, fled to Ganghwa in 1232 and established a government in exile and a mini fortified capital. The Mongols burned and pillaged towns and villages across the peninsula, including the ancient former capital city of Gyeongju in the southeast. In fact, Ganghwa was about the only area of the country not to be overrun, as the Mongols would not or could not cross the Yeomha Channel to land on the island. It would not be until 1270 that the royal court returned to the mainland. In the 1350s, the last of the Mongol garrisons were jettisoned from the country.
Paul Theroux wrote, in Riding the Iron Rooster, that the Mongols were then conquering on horseback half the known world, including Moscow, Poland, eastern China, Afghanistan, and Vienna.
Then, in 1636, the Manchu-dominated Chinese Qing Dynasty sent 120,000 soldiers overland to Korea. The Joseon king at the time, Injo, moved his entire court to Ganghwa, but this time the Manchus took Korean vessels to Ganghwa, and overran the island and set the fort and buildings on fire. Injo surrendered and Korea became a client state to the Manchus, whose army devastated parts of the country and plundered its cities.
In October 1866, the French Far Eastern Squadron — seeking retribution for the execution that spring of four French priests who had been proselytizing Catholicism in Korea — sailed up the Yeomha Channel and bombed Ganghwa’s coastal fortifications, landing at the coastal village of Gapgot, near today’s Ganghwa Bridge. They proceeded to burn much of nearby Ganghwa town to the ground. Five years later, the U.S. Asian Squadron anchored in the channel and pounded the island forts with shells before its soldiers moved to land and decimated the Korean soldiers in what’s known as the Sinmi Invasion (sinmi means “year of the sheep” according to the Chinese Zodiac calendar).
Ganghwa has seen its share of death and destruction over its long history.
Just over the bridge, in Gapgot, a former historic town (though today, a four-lane main road runs through it), we drove to the Ganghwa War Museum. Over the winter, Heju and I had attended a national tourism exposition in Seoul, at which the Ganghwa Department of Culture and Tourism booth was represented by a youthful and friendly employee, named Gu Yun-ja, who spoke excellent English and insisted that we contact her when we visited her historic island. She had told us she would arrange for a tour of the museum. The appointment was for ten o’clock this morning.
We met Yun-ja, along with a museum guide who spoke only Korean, and the four of us moved slowly through the well-appointed and handsome interior of the museum. There was a glassed-in exhibit that incorporated G.I. Joe–type figures into a recreation of the battle between American and Korean soldiers that had occurred at Gwangseongbo (the suffix bo refers to a main citadel or garrison, where approximately 350 soldiers are stationed) on Ganghwa Island on June 11, 1871. In the exhibit, the Americans, decked out in blue uniforms and black leather boots, were curiously depicted in positions of submission. Six were supine and very dead; several others were on the ground, impaled by the swords of Korean soldiers. The Koreans wore baggy white pants and shirts of cotton — rather like judo attire — and straw shoes, and not a single one was injured or dead. The display would have been fine, were it accurate, but it was not, and visitors with no, or rudimentary, knowledge of Korean history, would wrongly conclude that the Yanks were walloped that day.
“What a bunch of BS,” I whispered to Heju furtively, because I did not want our museum guide — a stern, serious woman who I thought would not take kindly to knowing her museum was being maligned — to hear me.
The fact is that only three of 759 U.S. soldiers were killed that day, but close to 350 Koreans lost their lives. You see, the Americans were equipped with lightweight carbine rifles but the Koreans had only swords, spears, and slow-loading matchlock muskets. It was a monumental mismatch. I have seen graphic photos of the slaughter that showed American soldiers standing over the bedraggled bodies of Koreans, lying where they had fallen.
An American, William Elliot Griffis, who lived in Japan in the 1870s, and was one of the first historians to chronicle Korean history, wrote in Corea: The Hermit Kingdom, that the U.S. Asian Squadron had sailed to Korea in 1871 to seek trade ties. America was already trading with Japan and China and was desirous to trade with Korea as well. But Corea — as it was then spelled — kept its borders tightly closed.
The accepted Korean perspective today is that the U.S. squadron, though, did not arrive only to seek trade and sign a treaty. They contend it was to exact revenge for an incident in which a U.S.-flagged ship, the USS General Sherman, had steamed up the Taedong River to Pyongyang in 1866 and, after hostilities, its crew members, including several Americans, were reportedly beaten to death.
The U.S. Asian Squadron had arrived off Ganghwa in May 1871. Their flagship was the Colorado, and there were two gun boats, Monocacy and Palosa, and two corvettes, the Alaska and the Benicia. The Commander-in-Chief was Rear Admiral John Rogers, and there were eight hundred infantry and marines aboard the ships as well as the U.S. minister to Peking, Frederick F. Low, a man wary of entering the “sealed country,” believing Koreans to be “semi-barbarous and hostile people.” Admiral Rogers seemed prepared for war.
The modest Monocacy and Palosa were the only vessels of the five suitable to head up the shallow Han River to Seoul. But when the two ships finally anchored just south of Old Seoul, only low-ranking Korean officials were sent to meet them. King Gojong, then nineteen, would not hold power until he turned twenty-one. His father ruled as a regent in place of Gojong, and he was known as Prince of the Great Court, or Daewongun (dae means “great,” won “court,” and gun “prince”). His foreign policy was simple: no foreigners, no Catholics, no treaties or trade with the West or Japan.
Rebuffed, the U.S. admiral informed the Korean representatives that his squadron would survey the land from the local waters by ship. Korean maps featured cities, rivers, and hills painted in generous and artistic detail, but were usually rudimentary, with little sense of proportion and no reference to longitude and latitude. Monocacy and Palosa moved downstream along the Han, then south through the long, narrow Yeomha Channel. Along Ganghwa’s east shore was a twenty-kilometre stone wall, first