Korea has a new empress ― or so her family says

Without any official backing, some descendants of Korea’s former royal family crowned a new empress yesterday.
South Korea was ruled by an emperor before it was deprived of its diplomatic sovereignty in 1905 and made into a Japanese colony in 1910. The imperial family was not reinstituted in 1945 after South Korea was liberated from Japan’s colonial rule, and the country has since remained a democracy without a monarch.
The privately run Imperial Family Association of Daehanjeguk (the Empire of Korea), organized in June by about a dozen descendants of the last emperor, held an hour-long ceremony in a hotel in downtown Seoul to have Yi Hae-won, 88, restored as the empress of South Korea.
“We unanimously agreed that Yi deserves to be the empress as she is the eldest authentic survivor of the imperial family,” said Yi Cho-nam, president of the association. “We hope to unite the royal descendants spread across the country and speak as one voice through Empress Yi.”
South Korea was a kingdom ruled by the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) until 1897 when King Gojong claimed himself to be an emperor in a bid to raise national pride against international powers.
In a nationwide poll conducted last month by RealMeter, a local pollster, 54.4 percent of 460 South Koreans said they would like to see the royal house be brought back to at least symbolic power. The poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.6 percent.
The crowning ceremony was not sponsored or supported by the South Korean government in any way, Yi said.