Baekbeom ilji (Diary of Kim Gu), Volumes 1 (1929) and 2

This book is an autobiography written by the independence activist and statesman Kim Gu, known by his pen name Baekbeom (1876–1949), and consists of two volumes, first and second. At seventeen Kim Gu sat the last state examination of the Joseon Dynasty but failed to succeed; he then joined the Donghak movement, and at nineteen became a Palbong jeopju (district leader), leading Donghak forces as vanguard commander in an attack on Haeju Fortress. At twenty-one he took part in a plot to avenge the queen's murder and was arrested, but escaped from prison and entered Magoksa Temple in Gongju, where he became a monk for a time. After the Eulsa Treaty was signed in 1905 he devoted himself to the independence movement, and was involved in the actions of the patriots An Jung-geun and An Myeong-geun. Immediately after the March First Movement of 1919 he went into exile in Shanghai, and after serving as the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea's first Director of the Police Bureau and then Minister of Home Affairs, he became its Head of State (Gukmuryeong) in 1926. In 1939 he became Chairman of the Provisional Government, and the following year organised the Korean Liberation Army as an armed anti-Japanese force; in 1941 he issued a declaration of war against Japan. The first volume was written in 1929, when Kim Gu was fifty-three, in the form of letters to his two sons, Kim In and Kim Sin, in mixed Korean and Chinese script, looking back on about a year of independence work at the Shanghai Provisional Government; it is set out under the headings "My Family and My Childhood," "My Hard Early Years," "The Road of Wandering" and "Giving Myself to the Nation." The second volume was written after he left Shanghai for Chongqing following two anti-Japanese actions carried out in 1932 under the leadership of the Korean Patriotic Corps (Hanin Aegukdan), and records his struggle up to national liberation under headings such as "Shanghai during the March First Movement" and "The Wonder of Ten Thousand Li of Wind on the Yangtze." The passages on the Provisional Government's return to Korea and his tour of the three southern provinces appear to have been added around the end of 1945. "My Wish," appended after both volumes, clearly expresses Kim Gu's national ideal of building a unified, fully independent nation. This Baekbeom ilji was first published on 15 December 1947 by Guksawon, brought out by Kim Gu's son Kim Sin, and has since been reprinted more than ten times by various publishers at home and abroad. It is further valued as an autograph original written intermittently over the twenty-seven years Kim Gu spent in senior posts of the Provisional Government from Shanghai to Chongqing, and stands as both a primary source for the Provisional Government and a precious resource for research into the independence movement and for biographical study of this national figure.

AI Translation

Where it is

Region

Seodaemun-gu, Seoul

Designation

Treasure · 보물