The An Jung-geun Memorial Hall: A Museum That Keeps Moving

On Platform 1 at Harbin Station there are two shapes set into the ground. One is a triangle. The other has four sides. They are five or six paces apart, which is roughly the distance a person covers between deciding to do something and doing it.

Above them a plaque gives a date: 1909.10.26. That is the whole of the primary evidence at this site. Everything else here — a bronze statue, a wall of calligraphy, a clock stopped at half past nine, a viewing window, a museum that has now occupied four different addresses — exists to explain two marks on a platform.

Five or six paces

The triangle marks where An Jung-geun stood. The four-sided marker shows where Itō Hirobumi fell. The current versions carry added detail: seven stars inside the triangle, for An’s childhood name Eung-chil, which refers to seven moles; three concentric circles inside the other shape, for three shots.

Those decorations are recent. When the markers were first laid in 2006 they carried no explanation at all — two shapes in the concrete, unlabelled, which visitors either knew about or walked over. The plaque naming the event was added in the run-up to the 2014 memorial hall.

The distance is the point. This was not a sniping. It happened at conversational range on a crowded platform, in front of a Russian honour guard, in the middle of a state welcome.

26 October 1909, as recorded

Itō Hirobumi had been Japan’s first prime minister and, from 1905, the first Resident-General of Korea. He had resigned the Korean post in June 1909. He travelled to Harbin — then the headquarters city of the Russian-built Chinese Eastern Railway — for informal talks with the Russian finance minister Vladimir Kokovtsov about Manchuria and the Korean peninsula.

His train reached Harbin Station at nine in the morning. Kokovtsov boarded to greet him. About twenty minutes later the two men came down to review the welcoming party. An Jung-geun, who had reached Harbin from Vladivostok four days earlier, was standing behind the Russian ranks. He stepped through a gap and fired a Browning pistol at Itō from a few paces.

Three rounds struck Itō, in the chest and abdomen. He was carried back onto the train and was declared dead about thirty minutes later, at the age of sixty-nine. An then fired at the men beside Itō to avoid having shot the wrong person: Kawakami Toshihiko, the Japanese consul-general at Harbin; Mori Taijirō, secretary to the Imperial Household Minister and better known as the poet Mori Kainan; and Tanaka Seitarō, an executive of the South Manchuria Railway. All three were seriously wounded. All three survived.

An did not attempt to escape. He shouted for Korean independence in Russian and was seized by the Russian guard, held for two days, and handed to the Japanese authorities.

Lushun, and five months

An was moved to the Kwantung Government-General prison at Lushun, on the Liaodong peninsula. Prosecutors began interrogating him on 30 October 1909. He gave a list of fifteen charges against Itō as his stated reasons, and asked to be treated as a prisoner of war, on the grounds that he held a rank in the Korean righteous-army resistance. The court rejected that claim.

Lawyers retained abroad on his behalf, including British and Russian counsel, were refused permission to appear; the court appointed Japanese lawyers instead. Japanese diplomatic records show the foreign minister, Komura Jutarō, directing in November 1909 that the case be tried under Japanese criminal law, and instructing in December that a death sentence be sought.

Six hearings were held in February 1910. On 14 February 1910 An was sentenced to death. He withdrew his appeal on 19 February after his own counsel advised him it would achieve nothing, and spent the remaining weeks writing: an autobiography, finished on 15 March, and an essay on peace in East Asia arguing for a Korean-Chinese-Japanese union against Western imperialism, which he did not finish. He had been told he would have months; Tokyo ordered the sentence carried out promptly.

He asked to be shot as a soldier. He was hanged on the morning of 26 March 1910, at the age of thirty. A Catholic priest, Joseph Wilhelm, had come to the prison on 1 March and heard his confession against the instruction of his bishop, and was disciplined for it; the Archdiocese of Seoul held a memorial mass for An in 1993.

Three governments, three verbs

This is the part the hall does not resolve, and the clearest way to see it is in the words each side uses on the record.

The Chinese plaque above the platform uses jibi — shot dead. Korean usage calls the act a uigeo, a righteous undertaking, and the hall’s formal name in both Chinese and Korean carries the honorific yishi or uisa. Japanese reference works use ansatsu, assassination.

The official positions match the vocabulary. South Korea’s government honours An as an independence activist and awarded him the highest grade of the Order of Merit for National Foundation in 1962; North Korean sources also treat him as a national figure. The Chinese foreign ministry, defending the memorial in January 2014, called him a well-known anti-Japanese figure respected in China and said that establishing commemorative facilities under domestic rules was entirely legitimate. The Japanese government’s position, stated by Chief Cabinet Secretary Suga Yoshihide on 20 January 2014, is that An was a terrorist, and that memorialising him did not help regional cooperation.

An’s own account, given under interrogation and in the unfinished essay, was that he acted as an officer of a belligerent force and that he expected Korea and Japan to be friends afterwards. That reading has not been adopted by anyone. It is on the record all the same.

The grave nobody has found

An left written instructions about his body. He asked to be buried in Harbin Park — the ground now called Zhaolin Park, in Daoli District — and moved to Korea once the country was independent. His two brothers, Jeong-geun and Gong-geun, petitioned for the body and were refused. He was buried the same afternoon in the prison’s common cemetery at Lushun.

Thirty-five years later, when independence came, nobody could say where. The Japanese prison physician and the descendants of another prisoner executed there both recalled visiting graves on the hill behind the prison, which suggests the cemetery was not concealed so much as abandoned and then built over or forgotten. Other accounts circulate — that the coffin went to a Christian cemetery in Lushun founded by Danish residents, reported in Korea in 2019 on the strength of a 1910 Russian newspaper item; that the remains were taken to Japan, argued by a Korean writer in 2016. Neither has been corroborated by documents that others can check, and they contradict each other.

The searching is well documented. Some archival material surfaced after China and South Korea normalised relations in 1992. North and South Korea worked through the documents together from 2005 to 2007 and mounted a joint survey at the prison. South Korea’s veterans affairs ministry excavated in 2008 and again in 2010, working across a hillside of about 6,600 square metres northwest of the site. Nothing was recovered. Seoul has repeatedly asked Tokyo for burial records; a foreign minister said in 2011 that he intended to find and hand over any that existed, and nothing followed.

Hyochang Park in Seoul holds an empty mound reserved for him, next to the graves of Yun Bong-gil and Lee Bong-chang. It has been waiting since 1946.

The first markers here were Japanese

After 1909 the Japanese authorities set their own marker on Platform 1, a bronze plate about five metres from the south end of the old underpass reading, in effect, the place where Prince Itō met his death. A bust of Itō stood against the wall of the Platform 1 waiting room.

Both were removed after Japan’s surrender in 1945. So the platform has now carried commemoration in two directions, from two states, in the same few metres of concrete, with a thirty-year gap in between when it carried none.

2006: a display in another district

The modern sequence starts away from the station. In July 2006 the Korean Ethnic Art Museum at 85 Ansheng Street in Daoli District opened a new building with an An Jung-geun display on the ground floor. In October 2008 it reopened on the second floor after a refit paid for with 100 million won from South Korea’s veterans affairs ministry, channelled through the Independence Hall of Korea: the Harbin side did the fit-out, the Korean side produced the exhibition. Reports at the time counted more than 110 items, including around ninety photographs and eight pieces of calligraphy, arranged by An’s life, the movement inside Korea and the resistance abroad, with his eleven days in Harbin set out day by day.

The 2006 platform markers and a small An Jung-geun room in the railway history display upstairs at the station belong to the same moment. None of it was the memorial hall yet.

2013 and 2014: a request for a stone, answered with a building

In June 2013 the South Korean president Park Geun-hye, visiting Beijing, asked Xi Jinping for a monument to An at Harbin Station. On 19 November 2013 the Chinese foreign ministry said it would actively pursue the proposal. The same day, Japan’s chief cabinet secretary said Tokyo was strongly dissatisfied.

China then went further than the request. Rather than a stone, the Harbin municipal government and the Harbin Railway Bureau were told to fund a memorial hall, and the display from the Korean Ethnic Art Museum was moved into the station itself. The hall opened on 19 January 2014, free of charge, in a converted waiting room whose exterior was rebuilt to the look of the old station. Floor-to-ceiling windows at one end faced the platform. Outside, a circular emblem of doves and an olive branch was dated to the opening day.

Japan protested to both Beijing and Seoul the following day, by telephone from the foreign ministry’s Asian and Oceanian affairs bureau to the two ambassadors in Tokyo. South Korea’s foreign ministry welcomed the hall. Heilongjiang’s vice-governor told the state news agency that the point was not to start a diplomatic argument but to make people value peace. The Chinese foreign ministry spokesman said the protest was not accepted.

Four days of statements, for a room with a window.

The station was rebuilt, and the museum moved again

Harbin Station is a working terminus with eight platforms, on the lines to Beijing, Manzhouli, Suifenhe, Qiqihar, Jiamusi and Mudanjiang. In the mid-2010s the city rebuilt it, in the Art Nouveau idiom of the 1903 station, at a cost reported around 6.5 billion yuan.

That programme closed the old hall on 30 August 2017; the new north building opened the next morning, and the south building in December 2018. The memorial went back to the Korean Ethnic Art Museum in the interim and returned to the south square on 30 March 2019, after a gap described at the time as close to two years. There was no reopening ceremony. A short advertisement in the Harbin Daily was the announcement.

The present hall opens with a full-length bronze of An standing on a map of the peninsula, one hand holding his hat, the other showing the finger joint he cut off in early 1909 when he and a group of comrades swore an oath in blood. Above the statue a clock is stopped at 9:30. The galleries run through birth, education, the resistance, Harbin, the trial, his last words. At the far end, steps lead to a viewing platform where a window looks out at the restored platform markers, and the two shapes are repeated on the floor at the same spacing so that you can walk the distance yourself.

By coincidence or not, 30 March 2019 was also the day the restored Korean Liberation Army headquarters opened in Chongqing, at the other end of the same story.

Standing in the hall

Allow thirty to forty-five minutes. Captions are in Chinese and Korean. The hall is small, and its strongest object is not an object: it is the window, and the fact that the platform on the other side of it is still in daily use, with trains and passengers moving across the spot.

A Korean visitor at the 2019 reopening said the room was smaller than expected, and that what was in it matched what he had been taught at school. A retired South Korean air force chief, there the same day, said he had asked people at the station where the memorial was and none of them knew. Both remarks are useful preparation. This is a municipal display of about one room, attached to a transport building, and it is not signposted the way its diplomatic history might lead you to expect.

Two things nearby are worth attaching to the visit. Zhaolin Park, in Daoli District, is the Harbin Park of An’s will — the ground he asked to be buried in, and where he is recorded as having discussed the plan with Woo Deok-sun and sat for his last photograph at a studio near the south gate. And the Provisional Government site in Shanghai is the other end of the same subject, ten years later and two thousand kilometres away.

Harbin’s Russian railway origins are the background to all of this, and are covered on Central Street and at Saint Sophia; here, one sentence is enough. Itō came to Harbin because a Russian railway administration was headquartered in a Chinese city, which is why a Japanese statesman and a Russian minister met on a platform that a Korean could reach without a visa.

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What survives at this site is a set of substitutes. The markers stand in for an event nobody photographed. The hall stands in for the markers, which most visitors cannot reach. The mound at Hyochang Park stands in for a body that four excavations have failed to find. Even the station is a reconstruction of an earlier station.

The one thing that has not moved is the distance between the two shapes on the platform, and that is measured in paces rather than metres, which is the most exact unit anyone has for it.

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The LoreLens app can identify commemorative markers, plaques and museum buildings across Harbin and explain the dates and decisions behind them.