Kwak Nak-won

Kwak Nak-won (Korean: 곽낙원; 26 February 1859 – 26 April 1939) was a Korean independence activist and the mother of Kim Ku. She joined her son in exile in the Republic of China and assisted him and her grandchildren in their resistance against the Empire of Japan. She, along with her son, are revered in South Korea, where she is seen as a paragon of Korean motherhood.

Kwak was born into a poorly-educated farming family in the last few decades of the Joseon kingdom. She gave birth to Kim Ku at age seventeen. She joined her son in exile in China between 1922 and 1925, as well as between 1934 and 1939. Her second period in exile overlapped with the Second Sino–Japanese War, and she followed her son and the Kuomintang as they escaped from the Japanese across China.

They eventually settled in Chongqing, but she took sick with pharyngitis on the journey and died at the age of 80, six years before the liberation of Korea. In 1992, she was posthumously awarded the Order of Merit for National Foundation from the South Korean government. She is now buried in the Daejeon National Cemetery.

She had a significant impact on her son and was reputed to be tenacious and fiercely devoted to the independence movement.