[100 Years Ago Today] November 11, 1926 – Two Minutes of Silence in London, an Empire Rewriting Its Rules, and a Colony Watching the World

1. Hook Opening

As you wind down your day, picture two minutes of complete silence. In London on November 11, 1926, contemporary reports say Armistice Day was observed, for the first time, as a solemn commemoration throughout the whole country. Dense crowds filed past the Cenotaph in Whitehall, and during the silence the whole city stood still. In Seoul, then called Gyeongseong, under Japanese colonial rule, we could not locate a single page of that day’s Korean newspapers. This edition is built only on what can be confirmed, and it says plainly where the record goes dark.

2. Korea Under Colonial Rule

We found no same-day article from Dong-A Ilbo, Chosun Ilbo or Maeil Sinbo for this Thursday, and no confirmed weather or price data, so none is given here. What survives is the week around it.

On November 4, 1926, seven days earlier, the Korean Language Society (Joseon Eo Yeonguhoe) held a ceremony at the Sikdowon restaurant in Jongno to mark the 480th anniversary of the promulgation of Hunminjeongeum, the original Korean alphabet. It was called “Gagyanal,” after the first syllables of the traditional letter-learning sequence. November 4 matched the 29th day of the ninth lunar month, which is why that date was chosen. It is the ancestor of today’s Hangul Day. Reports say Dong-A Ilbo covered it on page 5 of its November 4 edition.

Surveillance and prosecution continued. Summaries of Keijo District Court prosecutors’ records held at Korea University list interrogations of defendants under the Peace Preservation Law in early November 1926, and a witness summons on November 19 in a case against Park Rae-won and eleven others for violating the Peace Preservation Law and the Publication Law. These records cannot tell us what happened on November 11 itself, but they show that thought-crime cases were moving steadily through the courts.

3. East Asia in Turmoil

In China, Chiang Kai-shek’s Northern Expedition was surging north. Sources agree that his forces reached Kiukiang on the Yangtze on November 5, 1926, and that the fight for Nanchang took place around this time. The Nationalist Central Political Committee decided to move the capital to Wuhan on November 26, according to one account, while another dates the Wuhan government’s start to December 5. The sources differ, so treat exact dates with caution.

In Japan, news of Emperor Taisho’s grave illness appears in the record only in December, and he died on December 25. None of that had happened yet on November 11.

4. The World Stage

In the United States, President Coolidge had issued an Armistice Day proclamation on November 3, 1926. Press reports said traffic stopped in cities during the observance. Congress had passed a resolution on June 4 calling for annual observance, and 27 state legislatures had by then made November 11 a legal holiday.

In Sydney, a large crowd including the vice-regal representative and military and church leaders gathered in Martin Place. In Dublin, a report describes students at Trinity College clashing over a Union Jack after the silence.

At the same moment the Imperial Conference in London was in its final stretch. A cable dated November 12 says all committees were summoned to give their reports the finishing touches, with the aim of concluding the conference by November 25. This is the meeting at which Britain and its dominions worked out their relationship as equals, a quiet rewriting of how an empire describes itself.

5. Colonial Parallels

For this Thursday, our weekly theme is labor and economy. We found no dated record of Korean strikes in November 1926, so we turn to parallels. A scholarly article documents strikes at Japanese-owned cotton mills in Shanghai during 1926. In Britain, the coal dispute that followed May’s General Strike was in its sixth month; a New Zealand paper headlined it “Six Months’ Strike” on November 2. Workers on three continents were testing the same question: who sets the terms of work?

Imperial order was being negotiated in London while it was being challenged in Chinese factories and Korean courtrooms. Those are very different pressures, and this record does not link them directly. Placing them side by side is a reader’s lens, not a historian’s claim.

6. Person of the Day

We found no individual from Korea whose actions on November 11, 1926 can be confirmed, and we will not invent one. Instead, consider the anonymous people behind the November 4 ceremony: scholars of the Korean Language Society who gathered in a Jongno restaurant to honor an alphabet. Their names are better recorded in Korean sources; this edition names the institution rather than guess at individuals.

7. Understanding Daily Life

Daily life in Gyeongseong on this exact day cannot be reconstructed from the sources found, and imagined street scenes would be fiction. What the record does show is that cultural life under colonial rule was not silent. A group of language scholars could hold a public commemoration of their alphabet, reported in a major Korean newspaper, while the courts across town processed Peace Preservation Law cases. Both were true in the same season.

8. Century Mirror

The modern K-culture wave rests on a language that, in 1926, was celebrated by a small society in a restaurant under colonial rule. The alphabet that now fills K-pop lyrics and K-drama subtitles had its modern anniversary begun here.

9. Tomorrow’s Preview

Tomorrow, November 12, marks the 60th anniversary of Sun Yat-sen’s birth, a date of great weight in a China whose armies are marching north. Until then, good night.

Sources: contemporary London, New Zealand and Australian press reports (Papers Past and others), US presidential proclamation records, Korean press coverage of the first Gagyanal, Korea University summaries of Keijo District Court prosecutors’ files, and published histories of the Northern Expedition. No same-day Korean newspaper text was located.