The sign outside a rundown gate on an old-fashioned street in central Beijing gives few clues about its history and the surrounding buildings lie in rubble.
  

Long-time Chinese residents claim that the gate is a part of the Shideng small temple where Shin Chae-ho, a revered Korean independence activist, once lived in the 1920s during his exile in China.
  

As an independence activist, a historian and a journalist, Shin was credited with setting up a nationalist historiography of modern Korea. He was arrested by Japanese military police in 1928 and died at a prison in China in 1936.
  

During Japan's 36 years of colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula from 1910, many Korean independence activists like Shin moved to China to continue their anti-Japanese resistance movement.
  

The Shideng temple, which already had been demolished during Beijing's rapid urban development, is a reminder of the vanishing relics where Korean independence activists once worked.
  

Lee Deok-nam, a 71-year-old daughter-in-law of Shin, has been living in Beijing since the mid-2000s, and said it was "deeply regrettable" that such aging buildings were knocked down by developers.
  

"Until the early 2000s, there were some places (where Shin once worked) in Beijing. But, for now, there is nothing left due to reconstruction projects," Lee said.

Near the Wangfujing shopping street in Beijing, there is another aging building, which was used by the Japanese military police as a prison where Yi Yuk-sa, one of Korea's most famous poets and an independence activist, died.
  

Universally known by his pen name, Yi's works symbolize the spirit of Korean independence movements against Japan's harsh colonial rule.
  

In the 1930s, Yi studied in China, while making frequent contacts with a number of Korean independence activists.
  

Yi, who suffered symptoms of lung disease, was arrested in 1943 and transferred to the prison of the Japanese military police in Beijing, where he endured brutal torture. In 1944, Yi died in the prison.
  

The former prison is also facing demolition. Park Han-yong, an official at the Seoul-based Institute for Research in Collaborationist Activities, said, "Along with Shanghai, Beijing was one of the centers for anti-Japanese independence movements for Korean activists."
  

"But efforts to preserve historical sites in Beijing have been neglected, compared with Shanghai," Park said. The institute is conducting research work on Koreans who gained by collaborating with Japan during the colonial rule. (Yonhap)