Good evening, and welcome back to 100 Years Ago Today. It’s 🕙 10:10 PM KST (1:10 PM UTC), six days after the Chuseok holiday had ended in Gyeongseong. The early-autumn air was turning crisp. Beside Gwanghwamun Gate, the new Government-General building stood just four days from its completion ceremony. Inside the Gyeongseong District Court, the same unresolved cases — the Korean Communist Party trial and a press-related prosecution — were still on the docket.
Korea Under Colonial Rule
The Maeil Sinbo, the colonial government’s official Korean-language paper, ran a striking line on this exact date: “Urban planning will be one of the most important future policies for governing Korea, and its cost will be enormous.” Coming just days before the new headquarters building was to open, the timing was hard to miss — a colonial state announcing its next ambition even as it finished building the last one.
The courts told a different story of continuity. Following the September 13 hearing in the First and Second Korean Communist Party Incidents, proceedings against roughly one hundred defendants — including Kang Dal-yeong, arrested in the crackdown tied to preparations for the June Tenth Movement — remained unresolved. A separate press-freedom case, referred to in Korean sources simply as a “pilhwa” (筆禍, “brush calamity”) incident, was also still pending; the surviving records do not specify whose writing, or what exactly, triggered it. Earlier reporting from September 4 had already noted that verdicts for students arrested for shouting “manse” during the June Tenth demonstrations had still not been handed down. A gleaming new capitol and an unfinished docket of dissent shared the same news cycle.
Korea Under Colonial Rule, Nationwide
Behind these court dates lay a quieter story of reorganization. After King Sunjong’s state funeral that June, colonial authorities concluded that socialist independence activists had used the occasion to organize, and began keeping increasingly detailed records of what they called “seditious” activity from 1926 onward. Even as the Second Korean Communist Party lay shattered by the mass arrests around Kang Dal-yeong, records show that around September 1926, figures including Kim Chul-su, Oh Hee-seon, and Won U-gwan were already meeting to rebuild the party’s leadership — the beginning of what would later be known as the Third Korean Communist Party.
What played out in a single Seoul courtroom was, in other words, one visible node of a nationwide surveillance and reorganization effort that colonial records themselves describe as intensifying and increasingly intertwined with leftist thought.
The World Stage
Half a world away, Chinese Nationalist forces had Wuchang under siege. After seizing Hankou and Hanyang on September 6 and 7, the National Revolutionary Army encircled the walled city — the last stronghold of warlord Wu Peifu’s forces — in a siege that, by this date, had already run more than three weeks. The city would not fall for another thirteen days, on October 10, the fifteenth anniversary of the original Wuchang Uprising that had toppled the Qing dynasty.
In Europe, the aftershocks of Germany’s September 8 admission to the League of Nations — complete with a permanent Council seat — were still being felt nineteen days later, the diplomatic payoff of the previous year’s Locarno Treaty transforming a defeated power back into a great one. In Tokyo, Emperor Taisho remained in poor health, still under the regency his son, Crown Prince Hirohito, had held since 1921.
Twenty-Four Hours in Colonial Seoul
Before dawn, lanterns went up first at the construction site beside Gwanghwamun. With the dedication ceremony only four days out, carpenters and plasterers would have been working long hours on final details, laborers hauling the last loads of material up the scaffolding. By morning, newsboys were already threading through the alleys hawking the Maeil Sinbo and its urban-planning headline.
By midday, spectators drifted toward the alley outside the Gyeongseong District Court to watch the Communist Party proceedings. The mood inside the courthouse was heavy, but Jongno street carried on much as always — passersby near the Dansungsa theater, students browsing the bookshops nearby. As dusk fell, rickshaw pullers made their last runs between Jongno and the Japanese quarter of Bonjeong. No confirmed weather record survives for this particular evening, but the season itself would have carried the same early-autumn chill common to late September.
Century Mirror
Set a construction laborer’s day in 1926 beside one in 2025.
| Comparison | 1926 Gyeongseong | 2025 Seoul |
|---|---|---|
| Daily wage, construction laborer | Tens of jeon — a typical period range; no confirmed figure for this specific date | Roughly 150,000–200,000 won for day-labor construction work |
| Cost of a newspaper | A few jeon per copy; subscriptions billed monthly | Mostly free online; print subscriptions run about 20,000 won a month |
| Flagship government building | New Government-General headquarters, ten years in construction, days from opening | Government Complex Seoul and other standing ministries |
The building laborers were racing to finish that week would open its doors as the very symbol of colonial rule within days. A century later, different buildings and a different government stand on ground nearby — a reminder of how much, and how little, changes in a hundred years.
Tomorrow’s Preview
Tomorrow, Tuesday, September 28, 1926 — the dedication ceremony will be just three days away, the courts still unfinished, Wuchang still under siege. 🕙 Until then, good night, and see you at 10:10.
<저작권자 ⓒ 코리안투데이(The Korean Today) 무단전재 및 재배포 금지>
