[100 Years Ago Today] October 14, 1925 – One Day Before the Shrine Ceremony, Gyeongseong Remains Under Watch

Korea Under Colonial Rule

Two days earlier, an imperial envoy had arrived at Gyeongseong Station carrying sacred objects from Japan’s Ise Grand Shrine — a mirror, and a sword once worn by the late Emperor Meiji. Since then, those relics had rested inside the grounds of the newly built Chōsen Jingū on Namsan, waiting for the following day.

Japan’s cabinet had fixed the calendar for this back on September 24: the consecration ceremony, the jinza-sai, would fall on October 15, and the shrine’s annual grand festival would be observed every October 17 from then on. The Gyeonggi Provincial Police had committed nearly the entire force to the streets on two specific days — the 13th, when the envoy arrived, and the 15th, when the consecration itself would take place. Today, wedged between those two, wasn’t a full mobilization. But patrols never eased, and plainclothes officers kept watching the crowds around the station and along Jongno.

A number of Jongno merchants had kept their shops shuttered for several days now, a gesture the press described as voluntary reverence toward the new shrine. It was “voluntary” the way choices tend to be in a city under continuous police watch. Government offices and schools across the colony had already received repeated directives encouraging shrine worship — this was not an isolated ceremony, but the capstone of a campaign the Government-General had been building for years.

East Asia in Turmoil

The shrine campaign was unfolding against a backdrop the colonial state preferred not to dwell on. Just three months earlier, in July, the great Eulchuk flood had killed 647 people nationwide, destroyed or swept away more than 23,000 homes, and left another 46,000 submerged — total damage exceeding 103 million yen, more than half the Government-General’s annual budget. Recovery was still leaning heavily on newspaper-organized donation drives rather than the colonial administration itself, even as police manpower kept flowing toward Namsan instead.

In Manchuria, the aftermath of a different agreement was being felt. The Mitsuya Agreement, signed that June between the Government-General’s police bureau and the warlord Zhang Zuolin, had committed Chinese authorities to registering Korean residents, confiscating weapons, and forcibly dissolving anti-Japanese organizations. By October, armed Korean independence groups operating out of Manchuria were feeling the squeeze more sharply than they had in years.

The World Stage

Far to the south, in Guangdong province, a fortress was falling. The Nationalist government’s Eastern Expedition Army — troops trained at the Whampoa Military Academy — captured the walled city of Huizhou after a thirty-hour battle, breaking a stronghold contemporaries had called “a fortress of gold.” It was effectively the first major military victory of the newly formed Nationalist-Communist alliance, and it would help set the direction of Chinese politics for years to come.

The contrast is almost too clean to be real: in Gyeongseong, a colonized city readying itself, under armed guard, to receive a foreign empire’s sacred relics. In Guangdong, a new revolutionary army tearing down the walls of an old warlord’s stronghold. Two very different visions of East Asia’s future, unfolding on the very same day, less than a thousand miles apart.

Colonial Parallels

Korea was hardly alone in living under imposed authority in 1925. In India, the Swaraj Party — having won seats in the Central Legislative Assembly — pursued a strategy of obstruction from inside British colonial institutions, refusing cooperation while working within the very system Britain had built. In Ireland, the independence won in 1922 remained an unfinished settlement; a Boundary Commission process that year would leave the 1920 partition essentially unchanged, disappointing nationalists who had hoped for something different.

China’s path looked different again — not colonized outright, but carved into spheres of warlord and foreign influence for decades. What was happening at Huizhou that week was, in part, an attempt to reverse that fragmentation by force. Korea, India, Ireland, and China: four very different responses to the same underlying question of who gets to decide a nation’s future, all playing out in the same October.

Person of the Day: Zhou Enlai

Serving as political commissar for the Eastern Expedition Army that took Huizhou this day was a 27-year-old officer named Zhou Enlai. He had studied in Japan and France, joined the Chinese Communist Party at its founding, and returned to China to help build the Whampoa Military Academy’s political department under the first united front between Nationalists and Communists. Huizhou was his campaign as much as it was Chiang Kai-shek’s, though history would remember the two men very differently in the decades that followed.

Nothing connected Zhou Enlai to Gyeongseong that day — no record places him within a thousand miles of the shrine controversy on Namsan. But the coincidence of dates says something about 1925 itself: a year in which colonial subjects and revolutionary armies across East Asia were, each in their own register, negotiating who would hold power over the next century.

Understanding Daily Life

What did October 14, 1925 actually look like on the ground in Gyeongseong? From before dawn, workers were moving through the Namsan shrine grounds, giving the sacred food offerings a final check and smoothing gravel along the approach paths. By midday, police and plainclothes officers were still watching the crowds near the station and along Jongno, and passersby walked quietly past shuttered storefronts, trading low conversation about what tomorrow’s ceremony would bring.

As dusk settled and the sky over Namsan turned red, workers at the shrine were preparing lanterns for the evening ahead. Patrols continued deep into the night. For some residents, it was the last quiet evening before a foreign god took up residence on their mountain. For others, it was simply one more night to keep their heads down and get through safely.

Century Mirror

A hundred years ago, a Wednesday in Gyeongseong meant a city holding its breath — one day out from a ceremony imposed on it from outside, its streets patrolled to enforce a “reverence” nobody had been asked to feel. Recovery from a flood that had killed hundreds was still running on private charity, while police manpower was reserved for a shrine.

Today, national ceremonies in Korea are attended by choice, not compelled by an occupying police force, and disaster response is treated as a state priority rather than an afterthought. The word “preparation” hasn’t disappeared in a century — but who it serves, and at whose expense, has been completely inverted.

Tomorrow’s Preview

Tomorrow, October 15, is the day itself — the consecration ceremony at Chōsen Jingū, and Gyeongseong’s police will once again fill every street in the city. Sleep well — we’ll be back tomorrow evening at 10:10 PM KST.