신채호 申采浩

Independence activist & historian (Danjae)

Life & career

Sin Chae-ho (申采浩, 1880-1936) was a journalist, nationalist historian and independence activist of the Korean Empire and Japanese colonial periods. His pen names were Danjae and Ilpyeondansaeng, and he also wrote under names such as Muaesaeng, Yeolhyeolsaeng and Hannom. An eighteenth-generation descendant of Sin Suk-ju, he was born on 8 December 1880 (7th day of the 11th lunar month) in Dorasan-ri, Jeongsaeng-myeon, Gongju-mok, Chungcheong Province (now Eonam-dong, Jung-gu, Daejeon), the second son of Sin Gwang-sik and Lady Bak of the Miryang Bak clan. After losing his father at the age of eight he moved with his grandfather Sin Seong-u to Godumi village in Gwirae-ri, Nangseong-myeon, Cheongju, the family's ancestral home, where he studied the Chinese classics.

In 1898 he entered the Seonggyungwan on the recommendation of Sin Gi-seon, and in 1905 he was appointed an erudite there but soon resigned to become an editorial writer for the Hwangseong Sinmun. From around 1907 he was chief editor of the Daehan Maeil Sinbo, where his Doksa sillon (1908) and biographies of national heroes awakened national consciousness, and he took part in the Sinminhoe and the National Debt Repayment Movement. In 1910 he went into exile in China and worked in Vladivostok, Shanghai and Beijing; he joined the founding of the Provisional Government in 1919 but broke with it in protest at Syngman Rhee's petition for a League of Nations mandate.

In 1923, at Kim Won-bong's request, he wrote the Declaration of the Korean Revolution for the Heroic Corps, calling for direct revolution by the people, and after the National Representatives' Conference that year he left the Provisional Government and criticized the diplomatic approach. He later joined the anarchist movement, was arrested in Taiwan in 1928 and sentenced in 1930 to ten years in prison. While serving his sentence in Lüshun Prison he collapsed from a cerebral hemorrhage in February 1936 and died without receiving treatment. His writings, including Joseon sanggosa and Joseonsa yeonguch'o, laid the foundations of modern nationalist historiography.

After separating from his first wife, Lady Jo of the Pungyang Jo clan, he married the nurse and independence activist Bak Ja-hye in 1920; they had sons including Sin Su-beom. He was posthumously awarded the Order of Merit for National Foundation, Presidential Medal, in 1962, and his grave is in Gwirae-ri, Nangseong-myeon, Sangdang-gu, Cheongju. He is said to be counted, with Sin Gyu-sik and Sin Baek-u of the same Sandong Sin family of Cheongju, among the "three talents of Sandong".

Grave

He is buried in his family's ancestral village of Gwirae-ri, Nangseong-myeon, Sangdang-gu, Cheongju, where his grandfather had settled.

Descendants

With his second wife, Bak Ja-hye, whom he married in 1920, he had two sons; the younger, Sin Su-beom, survived into adulthood and lived until 1991.

Other 고령 신씨 figures