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Few of the Tong-haks had any idea that their movement was being organized under Japanese influences. It did not suit Japan that Korea should develop independently and too rapidly. Disturbances would help to keep her back. When the moment was ripe, Japan set her puppets to work.

This victory of the rebels filled the government with consternation, which became greater when the insurgents, on June 1, took the capital of the province of Chölla. It was now feared that they would soon be at the gates of Seoul. This insurrection of the Tong-Haks was the inciting cause of the war between China and Japan.

The Japanese had secured an agreement from China in 1885 that both countries should withdraw their troops from Korea and should send no more there without informing and giving notice to the other. When the Tong-haks, thirty thousand in number, came within a hundred miles of Seoul, and actually defeated a small Korean force led by Chinese, Yuan Shih-kai saw that something must be done.

As far back as 1894, when the Japanese arranged the Tong-hak Rebellion in Korea, to give them an excuse for provoking war with China, Son was one of their leading agents. He believed that Western influence and in particular Western religion was inimical to his country, and he hoped by the Tong-haks to drive them out.

A new society now sprang up, and spread with amazing rapidity, the Tong-haks. It was anti-foreign and anti-Christian, and Europeans were at first inclined to regard it in the same light as Europeans in China later on regarded the Boxers. But looking back at it to-day it is impossible to deny that there was much honest patriotism behind the movement.

The Tong-haks were suddenly found to be possessed of arms, and some of their units were trained and showed remarkable military efficiency. Their avowed purpose was to drive all foreigners, including the Japanese, out of the country; but this was mere camouflage. The real purpose was to provoke China to send troops to Korea, and so give Japan an excuse for war.

At the same time that the Tai-ping rebels were spreading their new doctrines in China, a prophet, Choi-Chei-Ou by name, arose in Corea, who taught a doctrine made up of dogmas of the three religions of China, with some Christian ideas thrown in. This prophet was seized as a Roman Catholic in 1865 and executed, but his followers, known as the Tong-Haks, held firm to their faith.