The Donghak rising of 1894 was the largest popular revolt in Korean history and the point at which the movement entered politics permanently.
Its immediate cause was local. A magistrate at Gobu in the south-west imposed forced labour to build an unnecessary reservoir and then charged the peasants for the water. A local Donghak leader, Jeon Bongjun, led the protest that followed, and it spread across the Jeolla provinces. The rebels' demands were not primarily religious: they concerned taxation, corrupt officials, the treatment of the low-born and the export of grain during shortage. They took the provincial capital at Jeonju and negotiated a settlement that included local self-governing councils, an experiment in popular administration with few contemporary parallels.
The second phase was different in kind. When the Korean court called in Chinese troops and Japan sent its own forces in response, the rising resumed as resistance to foreign intervention. It was destroyed at Ugeumchi in late 1894, where peasant forces with matchlocks and bamboo spears were cut down by Japanese units with modern rifles. Jeon Bongjun was captured and executed in 1895. Casualty estimates run from tens of thousands into the hundreds of thousands and none is reliable.
The rising failed and helped trigger the First Sino-Japanese War, which ended Korean independence in practice. Its memory has since been claimed by very different parties, as peasant revolution, as nationalist rising and as religious movement. UNESCO inscribed its surviving archive on the Memory of the World register in 2023.