The opening of the ports in 1876

The Treaty of Ganghwa was signed in 1876 after about 20 days of talks in a drill hall on Ganghwa Island, with Japanese warships waiting offshore.

By the 1860s, ships from Western countries were appearing off the Korean coast more and more often, asking to trade. China and Japan had both already been forced to open ports. Joseon, governed for the young King Gojong by his father Heungseon Daewongun, chose to keep the door shut. This unit follows how that policy held for about a decade and how Japan, borrowing the gunboat methods that Western powers had used on it, forced the door open in 1876.

Two clashes with Western ships

In 1866 the American merchant ship General Sherman sailed up the Daedong River toward Pyongyang, demanding trade and seizing supplies. Local officials and residents fought back and burned the ship. The same year, after the government executed thousands of Korean Catholics and several French missionaries, a French fleet attacked Ganghwa Island; this is called the Byeongin Yangyo. In 1871 an American fleet arrived at Ganghwa to press the Sherman affair. Joseon troops under Eo Jae-yeon fought hard at Gwangseongbo fort, and the Americans withdrew without a treaty; this is the Sinmi Yangyo.

The Unyo incident

Japan had modernised quickly after 1868 and was looking for a way into Korea. On the 20th day of the ninth month of 1875, the Japanese warship Unyo anchored near Ganghwa Island and sent boats toward the Choji fort, claiming to look for drinking water while surveying the channel. The Joseon garrison warned them off and then fired. The warship bombarded the fort, landed troops on Yeongjongdo island, and killed and looted before leaving. Japan then used the clash as grounds to demand a treaty.

The treaty of 1876

Early in 1876 Japan sent warships and a plenipotentiary, Kuroda Kiyotaka, to the coast near Ganghwa. The Joseon court sent Sin Heon, a military official who had commanded during the French and American clashes. Qing China, wary of Russia and keen to avoid a fight with Japan, advised Joseon to negotiate. After about 20 days of talks in the Yeonmudang drill hall, the treaty was signed in the second month of 1876. Its formal name is the Joseon-Japan Treaty of Amity, and Koreans also call it the Treaty of Ganghwa.

The treaty and the agreements that followed opened three ports to Japanese trade. Busan opened first, Wonsan followed in 1880 and Incheon, then called Jemulpo, in 1883. Japanese people who committed crimes in the ports would be tried by Japanese consuls, not by Korean courts, which is known as extraterritoriality. Japan also gained the right to survey the coast, Japanese money could circulate in the ports, and trade went untaxed until 1883. Because the benefits ran almost entirely one way, historians describe it as an unequal treaty.

Opening the ports changed Joseon quickly. Treaties with the United States and European countries followed in the 1880s, foreign goods and ideas arrived, and the court split between those who wanted rapid reform on the Japanese model, those who wanted slower change, and those who opposed foreign contact altogether. These divisions led into the crises of the following decades.