Ernst Oppert

Who was Ernst Oppert?

Ernst Jakob Oppert was a Jewish businessman from Germany best known for his unsuccessful attempt in 1867 to remove the remains of the father of regent Yi Ha-eung from their grave in order to use them to blackmail the regent into removing the Korean trade barriers.

Oppert was born into a wealthy banker family in Hamburg. Two of his brothers, Julius and Gustav, became leading German orientalists, while Ernst opened a trading business in 1851 in Hong Kong. When that company went bankrupt in 1867, he became interested in trading with Korea, which at that time followed a strict isolationist policy and was a closed market for westerners. Oppert visited the country clandestinely several times. Although Oppert himself had no experience in learning the Korean language he judged the Korean language to be much harder to learn than either Chinese or Japanese. It has to be said that Oppert based this judgment on a scarcity of sources and that the arguments to prove this statement, as mentioned in his book: A Forbidden Land: Voyages to the Corea, are in fact non-factual and based upon opinions: