Empress Myeongseong had spent years maneuvering against Japanese encroachment, cultivating relationships with Russia and other foreign powers to counterbalance Tokyo's growing grip on Korean affairs. Her husband, King Gojong, relied heavily on her counsel. The Japanese saw her not merely as an obstacle but as the single greatest impediment to their designs on Korea. Minister Miura, appointed to the legation just weeks earlier, set in motion a conspiracy that would involve dozens of participants -- Japanese army officers, civilian agitators, and members of the Korean Hullyondae military training unit who had been co-opted by Tokyo. Around 2 am, the conspirators arrived at the home of the Daewongun, Gojong's father and a rival of the queen, and pressed him to join their procession to the palace. He demanded assurance that the king and crown prince would not be harmed before agreeing to be carried to the gates.

The attackers breached the palace grounds with roughly sixty men. Inside the queen's quarters, they encountered court ladies whom they seized by the hair and flung from windows, demanding to know which woman was the queen. A Russian architect named Afanasy Seredin-Sabatin, on duty at the court that night, later recorded what he witnessed -- his account surfacing in Russian archives more than a century later. The assassins found Empress Myeongseong and killed her. Her body was wrapped in bedding, carried to a nearby pine grove within the palace grounds, doused in kerosene, and burned. She was forty-three years old. The sheer brutality shocked even those foreign observers accustomed to the ruthless politics of late-nineteenth-century East Asia.

International outrage forced Japan to recall Miura and put the conspirators on trial. The civilian proceedings in Hiroshima ended in acquittal, the court ruling that there was insufficient evidence the defendants had known about the plot to kill the queen. A separate military tribunal reached the same conclusion for the army personnel involved, reasoning they were merely following orders and that Japanese martial law was unclear on whether subordinates could refuse unjust commands. Most of the assassins returned to Korea and resumed their careers. Some became prominent voices in the Japanese colonial community there. Adachi Kenzo, one of the civilian ringleaders, went on to become Japan's Minister of Communications.

The assassination destabilized Japan's position in Korea for years. In February 1896, a terrified King Gojong fled with the crown prince to the Russian legation for safety, ruling from within its walls and ordering the execution of four pro-Japanese cabinet members he branded the Four Eulmi Traitors. He disbanded the Hullyondae for their complicity and the Capital Guards for failing to protect the palace. Japan's influence waned until its victory in the Russo-Japanese War a decade later restored its dominance. Across Korea, the killing catalyzed the rise of civilian resistance militias known as the Righteous Armies, and in 1909, the patriot An Jung-geun cited the empress's assassination as one of his reasons for killing the Japanese statesman Ito Hirobumi in Harbin.

Today, Gyeongbokgung Palace stands restored around the site where these events unfolded. The building Gonnyeonghap, in the western section of the inner palace, marks the location of the assassination. Visitors walk through courtyards that once echoed with the chaos of that October morning. In 2005, the testimony of Seredin-Sabatin was finally released in South Korea, a century-delayed witness account that filled in details long obscured. Descendants of the assassins traveled to Korea to apologize publicly. The memory of Empress Myeongseong has become woven into the national story of resistance -- not simply as a victim of imperial violence, but as a political figure whose determination to keep Korea independent cost her everything.