At a Glance
Haeju Origins: Aristocracy, Catholicism, and a Dying Kingdom
An Jung-geun was born in 1879 in Haeju, the capital of Hwanghae Province in what is now North Korea — into a family of yangban standing, the Korean aristocratic class that had provided the country's administrative and intellectual elite through the Joseon Dynasty. His father, An Tae-hun, was a local official and one of the early converts to Korean Catholicism — a faith that had entered Korea from China in the eighteenth century, had been repeatedly persecuted by the Joseon government for its monotheism and its social egalitarianism, and that had by the late nineteenth century established itself as a significant presence in Korean life, particularly among families willing to engage with new ideas from outside the Confucian orthodox tradition.
An Jung-geun was baptised with the Catholic name Thomas and educated in both the classical Chinese learning that remained the foundation of Korean elite culture and the Catholic faith that provided his moral framework. He was, by all accounts, a young man of exceptional physical and intellectual ability: an excellent horseman and marksman, a student of Chinese classical literature, and someone who from early in his adult life was drawn to the question of what his country's deteriorating situation required of those who loved it.
The Korea of his young adulthood was a country in progressive political collapse. The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 had ended Chinese suzerainty over Korea and opened the way for Japanese penetration; the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 had ended Russian competition for influence and left Japan as the dominant power on the peninsula. The Eulsa Treaty of November 1905 — forced on the Korean court by armed Japanese pressure, signed under conditions that Korean historians and international legal scholars have consistently regarded as legally invalid — stripped Korea of its diplomatic sovereignty and established a Japanese Residency-General with effective political control. The treaty's principal sponsor and the first Resident-General was Itō Hirobumi.
The Righteous Army: From Educator to Guerrilla
After the Eulsa Treaty, An Jung-geun spent several years attempting to organise Korean resistance through both educational and military means. He established schools in the northwest, motivated by the conviction — shared with Ahn Chang-ho and others — that national independence required educated citizens. But as the Japanese progressively tightened their control, dissolving the Korean military in 1907 and intensifying surveillance and repression of nationalist activities, he concluded that educational work alone was insufficient and that armed resistance was both morally justified and practically necessary.
In 1908, he crossed into the Russian Far East — the Primorsky Krai region where a significant Korean exile community had established itself — and joined the righteous army (uibyeong) movement that was conducting guerrilla operations against Japanese forces across the Korean-Russian border region. He commanded Korean guerrilla units in engagements against Japanese military forces, gaining direct experience of armed resistance and deepening his conviction that the armed struggle against Japanese occupation was not merely tactically necessary but morally obligatory — a duty that Catholic theology, in his interpretation, placed on those who witnessed injustice with the capacity to resist it.
The guerrilla campaign was ultimately unsuccessful in military terms — the Japanese forces were too superior in equipment and numbers for the righteous army units to defeat in conventional engagements. But the experience confirmed An's commitment to resistance and focused his thinking on what form of action might actually matter: what single act, against what target, might impose a cost on Japanese imperialism significant enough to change the political calculation — or at least to demonstrate to the world that Korean resistance was real and would not be extinguished.
Harbin: The Planning and the Act
By October 1909, An Jung-geun had formed a small group of companions — bound together by the oath of the Donguihoe (Righteous Friends Association), in which they had each cut off the tip of their left ring finger as a blood pledge of commitment — and was tracking Itō Hirobumi's movements. Itō, who had resigned as Resident-General of Korea in June 1909, was travelling to Harbin in Manchuria for a meeting with the Russian Finance Minister Vladimir Kokovtsov — a meeting that was widely understood to be part of the diplomatic preparation for the formal annexation of Korea that the Japanese government was planning for the following year.
The choice of Itō as target was deliberate and considered. An had compiled a list of fifteen crimes for which he held Itō personally responsible — violations of Korean sovereignty, the murder of Korean Empress Myeongseong, the suppression of Korean resistance, the deception of the Japanese Emperor about the true character of Japanese policy in Korea, and what An regarded as the broader betrayal of the principle of Asian solidarity and peace that Japanese imperialism represented. This list — which An articulated at his trial and in his prison writings — was not the rationalisation of an impulsive act but the documented indictment of a man An had concluded was personally and primarily responsible for his country's destruction.
On the morning of 26 October 1909, An positioned himself in the crowd of dignitaries and railway officials on the Harbin platform. When Itō descended from his railway car and walked along the platform to review the honour guard, An stepped forward and fired three shots at close range. Itō was struck and fatally wounded, dying approximately thirty minutes later. An also wounded three other Japanese officials in the incident. He was seized immediately by Russian security personnel, transferred to Japanese custody, and taken to Port Arthur for trial.
The Trial and the Prison Writings
An Jung-geun's conduct at trial was extraordinary — not in the conventional sense of legal strategy but in the sense of moral and intellectual performance. He did not contest the facts, did not claim diminished responsibility, and did not attempt to escape punishment. He argued, calmly and systematically, that his act was justified: that Itō Hirobumi had committed crimes against Korea and against the peace of Asia, that those crimes were documented and provable, and that his action was the response of a soldier of a nation at war with an occupying power rather than the act of a common criminal.
The Japanese court rejected these arguments and sentenced him to death. The sentence was never in doubt. What was remarkable was An's use of the months between his arrest and his execution to write — to produce the body of thought that would outlast the Japanese Empire that killed him and speak to subsequent generations of Koreans about what he had done and why.
His most important prison text was the unfinished Dongyangpyeonghwalon — A Treatise on Peace in East Asia — which he was writing at the time of his execution and which could not be completed before the Japanese carried out the sentence. The treatise argued that genuine peace and prosperity in East Asia required not Japanese domination of Korea and China but a partnership of equals — that Japan's expansionist imperialism was not only a crime against Korea but a strategic self-destruction that would ultimately bring catastrophe on Japan itself. The argument was prescient: An was executed in 1910 and Japan's catastrophic defeat in 1945, which ended its empire, would vindicate his prediction within three decades of his death.
His calligraphic prison writings — executed with his left hand, since he had pledged his right ring finger in the Donguihoe oath — are among the most treasured artefacts of Korean cultural heritage. He produced hundreds of pieces, many of them with political and philosophical content, in a classical brush style of evident skill and power. The pieces were distributed to Japanese officials, prison guards, and others during his imprisonment, and significant numbers have survived in both Korean and Japanese collections. South Korea has designated them national treasures.
Execution and the Paradox of Imperial Timing
An Jung-geun was executed by hanging at the Lüshun Prison in Port Arthur on 26 March 1910 — six months before Japan formally annexed Korea on 22 August 1910. The timing is heavy with historical irony: the man who killed the principal architect of Korean annexation was executed before the annexation he had acted to prevent was completed, and could not know that his act had failed to stop what he had most feared. His remains were buried in the prison cemetery; despite repeated requests by Korean governments over more than a century, Japan has never provided information sufficient to allow the recovery and return of his remains for burial in his homeland.
The failure to return An's remains has become itself a political issue in Korean-Japanese relations — a continuing open wound that symbolises the broader failure of Japan to fully reckon with the history of colonial rule that An died resisting. The remains of the man whom Korea regards as its supreme patriotic martyr lie in foreign soil, unrecovered, a century and more after his death.
Legacy: The Martyr Across the Division
An Jung-geun is one of the very few figures in Korean history who is revered with equal intensity in both South and North Korea — a man whose patriotism transcends the ideological division that has separated the peninsula since 1945 and whose image and story appear in textbooks, monuments, films, and cultural productions on both sides of the DMZ. In South Korea, the An Jung-geun Memorial Hall in Seoul is among the most visited historical sites in the country. In China — where Harbin is located, and where the Korean minority community has long maintained connections to the independence movement — a memorial hall to An Jung-geun was opened at the Harbin railway station in 2014.
The moral complexity of his legacy — the deliberate assassination of a specific individual, however despicable, as a political act — has generated serious philosophical and theological reflection in Korean culture. An himself addressed this complexity in his prison writings, engaging with Catholic just war theory and the ethics of political violence with a seriousness and honesty that have made those writings enduringly interesting rather than merely historically significant. He did not pretend that what he had done was morally simple. He argued that it was morally justified. The argument continues to be read and debated.
What is beyond debate is the quality of his personal character — the courage, the intellectual seriousness, the religious depth, and the absolute commitment to his people's freedom that his prison writings reveal. He died at thirty years old, his country still under the power he had tried to shake, his greatest written work unfinished. He left behind a calligraphic inscription that has become perhaps the most famous piece of writing in Korean history: "一日不讀書 口中生荊棘" — "A day without reading and thorns grow in your mouth." The man who assassinated a prime minister was also, in the most fundamental sense, a man who believed that civilisation depended on learning, and that the freedom he sought for Korea was not merely political but cultural and intellectual. Korea has not forgotten either dimension of what he was.