The Truth about China and Japan/Chapter 1
THE TRUTH ABOUT CHINA
AND JAPAN
I
The best authorities are agreed that the ancient Chinese originally migrated from a point near the Caspian Sea across what is now arid desert to the upper reaches of the Yellow River. The date at which this exodus took place is so remote that all trace of it has been lost; and although the proofs of the Central Asian origin of the race are satisfying to scholars, they are of a nature which cannot be here adequately summarized. Excavations recently made in Honan province have, however, brought to light utensils and modellings in baked clay of the most primitive description, including Noah's arks of almost Biblical exactitude. According to some experts, these are conclusive evidence not only of a settlement which may be counted at least six thousand years old but point to a close cultural connection with very distant regions. It may be that systematic search will some day disclose new and remarkable facts concerning Chinese origins in the cradle of the human race.
In any case it is quite certain that thirty centuries before the Christian era the Chinese had already occupied most of the territory comprised in the modern provinces of Kansu, Shensi, and Honan; that their route eastwards—towards the sea—was barred by forests may be assumed. It is interesting to record that their pictorial character for 'East' is a sun shining through trees, whilst the word 'obstruction' is compounded by placing the selfsame tree in a doorway. The remote ancestors of the race certainly cleared the land as they advanced, changing from a pastoral cultivator race, tilling the soil in small patches, into a purely agricultural nation at a time when classical Greece had not yet emerged out of the dim mists. The Chinese still venerate the name of the ruler who established tillage as the basic institution, and who rightly assumed that there is no increment so rich and so beneficial to mankind as the increment of the fields.
Twenty-five hundred years ago, when Confucius and Laotzu flourished, China was already a very old country. Although the celebrated Stone Drums in the Confucian Temple in Peking, which are said to record the hunting adventures of an emperor of the Chou dynasty (B.C. 876), show the most ancient writing known, it is probable that the transition from tying knots on cords, as a means of conveying ideas, to cutting notches on wood and finally to writing pictorial and ideographic symbols, took place many centuries earlier. The conception of a central kingship was certainly well-fixed by the time of the first emperors of the Hsia dynasty (B.C. 2200); and Confucius, writing in the sixth century before Christ on the discontents of the age, constantly bewails the spacious days of the legendary rulers Yao and Shun, who ruled as shepherd kings anterior to the Hsia. Remembering how much older the human race is to-day admitted to be than was believed a generation ago, it is by no means improbable that the Chinese entered the Yellow River valley at least a hundred centuries ago.
This ancient people of the pre-Christian era was a small, warring community of not more than a few million souls. Distributed along the loess soil of the broad, central valleys, their expansion during a very long period was hardly noticeable, wars and expeditions tending to monopolize their attention and breaking up the country into petty states in spite of the Imperial rule. The North China of to-day was then nothing but an arid frontier-land, a glacis; and the present metropolitan province of Chihli as wild as much of Mongolia still is. That barbarian raiders from the wastes of Central Asia were a pest from the earliest times, and harried the race as soon as it had acquired ease and wealth from tillage, may be gathered from the policy of the Emperor Chin Shih Huang-ti (B.C. 249—206). It was this ruler who is still celebrated in the Annals for two dissimilar yet closely-related acts: he burned China's classics, because they were bringing decadence to the race, and began the building of the Great Wall as a protection for his newly-formed Empire.
The oldest capitals of China, Hsianfu in Shensi and Loyang in Honan, were soon directly protected by this vast rampart which was methodically extended by succeeding dynasties, until in the time of the Mings the last gap between the Mongolian mountains and the sea was finally closed at Shanhaikwan. Yet neither the Great Wall nor the great sacrifice of learning was of much avail: the Chinese were to be a constant prey to more warlike peoples. The quietist characteristics of the race had indeed become unalterably fixed in the long-ago, their own wars and disputes tending to have a municipal rather than a national character.
China's nearest neighbour in these early times was Korea; and a vast amount of Far Eastern history pivots on this fact. Whilst it is true that Chinese adventurers, sailing down from the Yangtsze estuary, began to get into touch with the Annamese and aboriginal kingdoms around Canton soon after the Christian era, the land routes southwards were still barred by mountainous country, filled with fierce peoples. The Koreans were more docile. Broken up into small communities living in caves, culture was brought to them by Chinese scholars two thousand years ago; and their genius was sufficiently literary to allow them almost immediately to evolve an alphabet of their own for their polysyllabic dialect. That they flourished and grew in numbers rapidly is proved by the fact that they had colonized all the region of Southern Manchuria called the Liaotung fifteen hundred years ago, advancing to within a few miles of Shanhaikwan. Always famous as miners, their workings can still be seen in extra-mural Chihli; and so well-known was their quest for the precious metals that Kheraded-Bey, an Arabian traveller of the eighth century, described Silla (Korea) as being rich in gold.
It was the first of the four Manchurian-Mongolian races, who successfully conquered North China and established dynasties, who broke Korea's land-contact with the Chinese. The Kitan Tartars in the year 1012 took the Liaotung peninsula and all the territory west of the Yalu River, driving the Koreans back into their original abode. The present boundaries of Korea were therefore fixed more than nine hundred years ago. The Kitans, who soon penetrated into North China, handed on their sovereignty to another Tartar tribe, the Chin Tartars, who were just as short-lived but established themselves firmly north of the Yellow River. Then came the Mongol or Yuan dynasty; and when this dynasty was finally expelled by the Mings in the fourteenth century, the Chinese colonization of Manchuria was greatly developed, with the transference of the national capital from Nanking back to Peking (1412). Just as Chihli and the Mongolian border-lands had been settled in previous centuries, so now did the plains of the Tartars receive in large numbers the Sons of Han.
This Manchurian colonization was, however, limited to the Liaotung, i.e. the country east of the Liao River, and to the districts immediately adjoining it. Beyond—in the mountains and forests—lurked fierce tribes ever ready to raid their peaceful neighbours. The Chinese symbols of conquest were now as in the dim past the mattock and the plough; their permanent posture was one of defence carried on from inside walled cities. In the sixteenth century began their historic struggle with the Manchus, a race of mountaineers living at the foot of the Ever White mountain, who finally repeated the miracle of Kublai Khan and his Tartars and conquered the Empire after a conflict lasting two generations.
The first census taken by the Manchus in 1651, after the restoration of order, returned China's population at 55 million persons, which is less than the number given in the first census of the Han dynasty, A.D. 1, and about the same as when Kublai Khan established the Mongol dynasty in 1295. Thus we are faced by the amazing fact that, from the beginning of the Christian era, the toll of life taken by internecine and frontier wars in China was so great that in spite of all territorial expansion the population for upwards of sixteen centuries remained more or less stationary. There is in all history no similar record. Now, however, came a vast change. Thus three years after the death of the celebrated Manchu emperor Kang Hsi, in 1720, the population had risen to 125 millions. At the beginning of the reign of the no less illustrious Ch'ien Lung (1743) it was returned at 145 millions: towards the end of his reign in 1783 it had doubled and was given as 283 millions. In the reign of Chia Ch'ing (1812) it had risen to 360 millions; before the Taiping Rebellion (1842) it had grown to 413 millions: after that terrible rising it sunk to 261 millions. Thus good government between the years 1651 and 1842—a period of 191 years—increased China's population from 55 millions to 413 millions, an eightfold growth. It had been left to a foreign race to achieve this surprising result.
II
Who are the Japanese? For political reasons the Japanese trace their emperors from a sun-goddess who is supposed to have come from Korea in the seventh century B.C. There is a great deal more in myths than is generally supposed, and there is no reason to doubt that the earliest connection between the Asiatic mainland and Southern Japan was expressed in the terms of an armed invasion led by a queen. In any case it is generally accepted that the Japanese are partly descended from a double stream of immigrants who came from the mainland by way of Korea, one stream being Manchu-Korean and the other Mongol; but Baelz, one of the most distinguished investigators of Japanese origins, finds from the recording of many cephalic indices and from other biometrical data that the strongest strain in the people is undoubtedly Malay.
If you strip off the outer Chinese clothing of both men and women (the kimono is a direct importation from China made during the Tang dynasty) you make a remarkable discovery. The men wear a loin-cloth peculiar to all the water-peoples of the island-groups along the shores of Southern Asia; whilst the women have on what is nothing more or less than the Malay sarong, or skirts, and a little sleeveless jacket. Garbed like this and placed on the curved Malay fishing-boats still in use you see the original invaders as they floated up from their southern islands on the Kuroshiwo, or black current which washes their shores. In their houses, raised two feet above the ground, you may trace the vestigial remains of the water-house built on piles; and although the Japanese share with the Koreans the habit of removing their shoes indoors and sitting on matted floors, their peculiar wooden clogs, with the separated big toe, are plainly the invention of a barefooted people treading the forest trails, and needing at a moment's notice to be able to free their feet for tree-climbing.
It is necessary to dwell on these details in order to fix well the differences between the Chinese and the Japanese. The Chinese almost from the dawn of history are a race of peaceful cultivators, walling themselves in for defence; the Japanese are a water-people, who become a forest-folk and who hunt and fish and only learn agriculture reluctantly. At the beginning of the Christian era, thinly scattered in the valleys and along the coasts of their own islands, they had not yet driven out the aborigines we know as the Ainus and warfare against them was constant and intense. Being rude and unlettered, there are few traces of their early history. But from this dim forest past comes the Japanese torii, that curious structure originally made of tree-trunks—which so many mistake for a gateway—which was erected in front of the Sun-Goddess's shrines so that fowls might perch on it and salute at dawn the first rays of the rising sun.[1]
Chinese history shows that between the years 57 and 247 of our era Japan sent four embassies to the Courts of the Han and Wei dynasties; but it is not until the sixth century that the light on the relations between Japan and China begins to grow clear. With the spread of Buddhism from across the Yellow Sea came the first real knowledge of the Chinese classics, the Japanese written language by means of Chinese ideographs dating only from the seventh century. Prior to that there are certain evidences that the peculiar Korean script was fitfully borrowed, although it never really took root.
It is learning, then, that forms the first bridge between China and Japan, and in this learning Buddhism plays a great and important part. Priests and scholars crossed in great numbers from China, giving religion, which had been hitherto expressed in the crude Shinto forest-rites, a new and more imposing significance. There was a constant stream of immigrants crossing by way of Korea; Chinese temples begin to be built; and the result of this cultural intercourse may be gathered from the fact that a census of the Japanese nobility, taken in 814 A.D., indicated 382 Korean and Chinese families against 796 of purely Japanese origin. The governmental institutions of China were likewise borrowed, the eight departments of state being copied from the Hang dynasty in China, which is famous in Japanese annals for its civilizing influence. At the beginning of the eighth century the first Japanese capital was built at Nara on the accepted Chinese plan of a metropolis, with nine gates and nine avenues, the palace being placed in the northern section and approached by a broad straight avenue dividing the city into two perfectly equal parts. During the ensuing centuries Japan was completely transformed by the adoption of Chinese civilization, foppishness in dress and a great growth of luxury distinguishing the period. That Chinese suzerainty was admitted is not disputed, China enjoying under the T'ang a greater cultural supremacy in Eastern Asia than ever before or since.[2]
So it lasted for more than three hundred years. Then a great change took place in the character of Japan owing to the feudal era, which was brought about by the struggle for power between leading families and by the intensified warfare with the Ainu barbarians. A certain Yorimoto in the twelfth century first obtained the title of Sei-itai-shogun, (Barbarian-subduing Generalissimo,) and just as the office of Regent had long been hereditary in the Fujiwara family, who gave the emperors their empresses by prescriptive right, so now did the office of Shogun belong to the Minamoto family, who established a capital at Kamakura.[3]
The result of these facts—that militarism so early acquired a special character having all the strength of an established ritual—tinges all Japanese history, and begins that long dualism in government which still lives on under the present modern Constitution. After a period of Chinese culture, the first characteristics of the race reassert themselves, and the history of the strongest clans becomes the history of Japan. The Court, sinking as Chinese Courts were wont to sink into a purely ceremonial office, is pushed more and more into the background; and rival Shoguns, taking the field against one another and acquiring ever greater strength through the growth of the hereditary warrior-class, split up the country into great fiefs.
Relations with China, which had been cordial and intimate during the formative period, now greatly diminished in cordiality. We know that during the Yuan or Mongol dynasty two expeditions, which failed disastrously, were sent to Japan in order to enforce the claims of suzerainty. This left behind a heritage of hatred which never disappeared. True, under the Ashikaga Shoguns, in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, increasing importance was attached to trade with China so as to defray the costs of the interminable civil wars. The Ming dynasty, when its capital was at Nanking, was induced, although Japanese piracy was constant, to grant commercial passage ports to facilitate this intercourse, Japanese sword-blades significantly forming the principal carticle in the Japanese export trade. It was at the end of the fourteenth century, when relations had been reopened, after a formal protest by China at the continued piracy practised, that there occurred that remarkable event, the investiture of the Shogun Yoshi-mitsu by a Chinese envoy with a royal diploma and a crown. No event in Japanese history has attracted more attention than this. That the Shogun, who in point of dynastic law was simply the emperor's 'protector', performed this act mainly to consolidate his own usurpation seems to-day clear; but the minute and careful regulations which the Ming emperors issued regarding the tribute vessels from Japan—to prevent armed conspiracies—prove that on the Chinese side there was no doubt about Japanese vassalage. Certain it is that, as the years passed, relations between China and Japan steadily diminished in cordiality, and contact became more and more distant, save in the singular and supremely important matter of Korea.
III
A glance at the map will show how inevitable it has been that Korea should have played so large a part in the political history of the Far East. The peninsula, which juts out in such an astonishing way, somewhat after the fashion of Italy in Europe, is separated from Japan by only 120 miles of water. If, however, the island of Tsushima, which divides the straits into two channels, is included, as well as smaller islands such as Iki, it may be said that when passing between the two countries land is hardly ever out of sight. This is an important consideration: in olden times it had political consequences of the most far-reaching nature.
The Chinese claims of suzerainty in Korea had never been disputed. In primitive days, for instance during the T'ang dynasty, the expression of China's suzerain rights may only have had a fugitive character: yet it was none the less undeniable. The ancient method of a small country admitting suzerainty was simply the dispatch of periodic embassies carrying tribute or gifts, and by this ceremonious act acquiring the right of protection against alien aggression; Korea had sent such missions to her great neighbour, who had given her civilization, from the time of the Han dynasty: and during the wars between the several Korean kingdoms in the sixth century, Chinese troops had not only participated in the struggle but had driven out the Southern dynasty, which was supported by Japanese warriors, making all Korea nominally a Chinese province.
The period of Tartar domination in North China, first under the Kitan, then under the Chin Tartars, broke up the traditional relationship between China and Korea. But no sooner was the Mongol dynasty well-established than it revived the old customs, and received homage, Korea aiding and abetting the expeditions against Japan.
Under the Ming dynasty the intimate ceremonious relations between China and Korea were re-established on a firmer basis than ever before; for in 1392 a new Korean dynasty had arisen, and the first emperor tendered his homage and accepted the Chinese calendar and chronology as a sign of his submission. From then on investiture of the Korean sovereigns was regular and formal, no succession being legitimate until it had Chinese Imperial sanction. Korea became so thoroughly saturated with Chinese culture that the Korean dress of to-day is still based on Ming models; the old Chinese topknot being left on Korean heads when the Manchus conquered Korea in 1637 (before they had entered China) as an act of grace because the Koreans had submitted so promptly.
The great and growing friction between China and Japan which was evident during the Ming period, and which was signalized by Japanese raiders in 1554 landing on the Kiangsu and Chekiang coasts south of the Yangtsze and capturing a number of towns, brought the inevitable result in Korea. Japanese raiding in the peninsula during the sixteenth century became more and more frequent, finally culminating in the great and hideous Hideyoshi expedition, which is such an outstanding feature in Far Eastern relations that it must be dealt with at some length.
The great commander Hideyoshi, taking advantage of the feudal militarism, had subdued all Japan and by 1592 had massed an immense army of 300,000 which he was determined to use abroad. His original design was undoubtedly not the conquest of Korea but the conquest of China. Korea was simply the stepping-stone, and had Korea consented to be put to such a use she need never have suffered as she did. The Koreans of the sixteenth century were, however, loyal to their Chinese commitments, and just as Belgium of the twentieth century refused to be made a passageway for the German armies into France, so did Korea refuse to allow Hideyoshi a free hand, and desperately resisted. Her castles and her armies were destroyed one after another, the Japanese advance finally reaching Pingyang, although never going beyond.
It was Korean sea-power which finally saved the nation. The Chinese, to ward off the Japanese piratical raids on the Yangtsze coasts, had designed a heavily-timbered ship completely shut in—a sort of floating tank—which made it impossible for the dread Japanese swordsmen of those days to board and get to grips with their enemy. The Koreans, whose junk intercourse with China, notably with Shantung and the Liaotung, was constant, had improved on this model and sheathed it with iron scales, making it look like a turtle. To Korea, curiously enough, belongs the honour of using the first ironclads in history; for with a navy composed of such vessels the Korean forces attacked the Japanese transports in Fusan harbour, and at other points along the Korean coast, and almost completely destroyed them. China, on being appealed to, sent army after army to the rescue of her vassal, and although these troops did not greatly distinguish themselves, their dead-weight added to the Korean forces confined the Japanese advance to Pingyang—the invaders finally retiring and evacuating Korea in 1598 as a result of their sea-losses and their domestic dissensions. The country had, however, been so terribly ravaged during six long years that it never recovered. The slaughter was so immense that there is shown in Kyoto to this day a mound under which are buried the pickled noses and ears of 35,000 Chinese and Korean troops killed by the clan of Satsuma.
Now just as the Shogun Yoshimitsu for political purposes had accepted investiture at the hands of a Chinese envoy, so did Hideyoshi after his defeat accept—unknowingly so Japanese historians declare—from the Chinese envoys a document which can have but one meaning. So important is its text as an explanation of the nature of the conflict between the two nations—China claiming a cultural supremacy which Japan constantly rejected by force of arms—that the text should be read:—
The influence of the holy and divine one (Confucius) is widespread; he is honoured and loved wherever the heavens overhang and the earth upbears. The Imperial command is universal; even as far as the bounds of ocean where the sun rises, there are none who do not obey it.
In ancient times our Imperial ancestors bestowed their favours on many lands; the Tortoise knots and the Dragon writing were sent to the limits of far Pusang (Japan), the pure alabaster and the great seal character were granted to the mountains of the submissive country. Thereafter came billowy times when communication was interrupted, but an auspicious opportunity has now arrived, when it has pleased us again to address you.
You, Toyotomi Taira Hideyoshi, having established an Island Kingdom, and knowing the reverence due to the Central land, sent to the West an envoy, and with gladness and affection offered your allegiance. On the North you knocked at the barrier of ten thousand li, and earnestly requested to be admitted within our dominions. Your mind is already confirmed in reverent submissiveness. How can we grudge our favour to so great meekness?
We do therefore specially invest you with the dignity of King of Japan, and to that intent issue this our commission. Treasure it up carefully. Over the sea we send you a crown and robe, so that you may follow our ancient custom as respects dress. Faithfully defend the frontier of the Empire; let it be your study to act worthily of your position as our minister: practise moderation and self-restraint; cherish gratitude for the Imperial favour so bountifully bestowed upon you; change not your fidelity; be humbly guided by our admonitionc; continue always to follow our instructions.
Respect this!
Death, however, prevented Hideyoshi from dealing with a matter of great historical interest. Other influences were at work demanding close attention.
Already, before this turning-point in Far Eastern history, the white man had suddenly appeared on the scenes and by his presence changed the whole course of events.
IV
In 1542 a Portuguese junk on a voyage from Siam to Macao was blown from her course and fetched up off the coasts of Satsuma province. The mariners were well-received. Great curiosity was excited by their arquebuses, arms of any sort always delighting the Japanese; and these arquebuses were rapidly copied and used against the Koreans and the Chinese in the Hideyoshi expedition. The Portuguese sailors carried back the tidings of their discovery with them to their missionaries, the great Francis de Xavier landing at the chief Satsuma city, Kagoshima, in 1549.
It would take a volume in itself to describe the direct and indirect consequences of the arrival of the European trader and the European priest on Japanese soil. But the net results can be summed up in this way. At first, being desirous of trade, the Christian propagandists were accepted by some of the feudal chiefs, for trade and religion in those days marched hand in hand. A great number of converts were made on the island of Kyushu, and in spite of some friction all was seemingly well. But when the selfsame Hideyoshi in 1587, prior to his Korean expedition, had carried out the subjection of Kiushu and the Satsuma clans, he propounded the following five questions to the Jesuits:
"Why and by what authority the propagandists had constrained Japanese to become Christian converts? Why they had induced their disciples to overthrow Buddhist temples; why did they persecute the bonzes; why they ate animals useful to man? Why the Jesuit chiefs allowed merchants of their nation to buy Japanese and to make them slaves in the Indies?"
The reply given to this questionnaire was deemed unsatisfactory and Hideyoshi issued his famous edict of expulsion. For at least ten years considerations of trade prevented the edict from being carried out, but with the coming of Franciscan monks a new phase was reached.
The Franciscans were Spaniards and were rivals of the Portuguese. Established at Manila, where their compatriots carried on a regular trade with Spanish South America, they bitterly disliked the rival order of Jesuits and were determined to humiliate them. The Jesuits, having been placed under a ban, were carrying on their religious observances secretly. The Franciscans scouted their methods. In spite of a Papal bull, which put Japan beyond their scope, they persisted in going into the country, penetrating even to Kyoto, which was then the Imperial residence, and making a number of converts. A purely fortuitous act brought their doom. A Spanish galleon, on her way from Manila to South America, drifted on to the rocks and, being very richly laden, was seized as a prize. The pilot, in a last effort to save his vessel, showed the Japanese officers a map of the world and the vast extent of the Spanish dominions. Asked to explain how one country had acquired such sway he made the historic reply: "Our kings begin by sending into the countries they wish to conquer missionaries who induce the people to embrace our religion, and when they have made considerable progress, troops are sent to combine with the new Christians, and then our kings have not much trouble in accomplishing the rest."
On learning this speech Hideyoshi was overcome come with fury and ordered still more severe measures. He died before his policy was completed, but the Tokugawa Shogun who succeeded him left nothing to be desired on the score of severity. Japan was, however, still torn by civil war, and the foreign question, although urgent, was eclipsed by domestic issues. Consequently although another edict of expulsion was issued in 1614, i.e. twenty-seven years after Hideyoshi had taken action, and still another in 1616, it was not until 1638 that the final act was played. In that year the last remaining group of Japanese Christians, numbering it is said 20,000 fighting men and 17,000 women and children, retired to the promontory of Shimabara in the Gulf of Nagasaki. There these insurgents, fighting under flags with red crosses and with battle-cries of Jesus an Maria, were attacked and almost entirely exterminated, and Christianity in Japan disappeared.
In this last act a Dutch trading-vessel had played a part, assisting the Shogun's forces in the bombardment. The Dutch had been granted a license to trade in 1605. They possessed precisely the qualifications suited to the situation then existing in Japan: they had commercial potentialities without any religious associations: and when the Spaniards and Portuguese had been entirely expelled the field was left entirely to them—the island of Deshima in Nagasaki, which was not more than three hundred yards long, being the sole window left open to the world. Every kind of indignity was, however, imposed upon the Dutch. No Dutchman could be buried on Japanese soil. Every Dutch ship had her rudder, guns, and ammunition removed, and her sails sealed, and no religious service of any sort could be held; and this condition of affairs existed for a period of 217 years, until the coming of Perry. Not only this, but no Japanese might build vessels capable of navigating the high seas. The Japanese, foiled in Korea and fearful of the empires of the West, had irrevocably sealed themselves up.
There is in all history no such singular dénouement to the double policy Hideyoshi had inaugurated. A complete consolidation of the forces of feudalism now followed the failure of foreign conquest; and it is very important to realize how much all this has affected the character of the Japanese, and how during the last three decades they have attempted to do what they failed to accomplish three centuries ago.
Thrown back on themselves, their innate characteristics became intensified—they became more and more like themselves. With minute and voluminous regulations governing every activity; with the guards of the feudal lords on every highway, making travel from one fief to another impossible save under special license; entirely cut off from the outer world, and having no connection even with Korea save what the Daimyo of Tsushima might do by almost stealth at the tiny Fusan settlement, Japan in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was further from China than she was from Europe and America, since the Dutch traders at Deshima were at least a connecting link with the West. There was indeed no single exchange of documents or any species of intercourse between China and Japan from the proclamation of the Manchu dynasty in Peking in 1644 until the commercial treaty of Tientsin of 1871.
It is necessary to consider this matter from a special point of view.
Whilst the Ming emperors did not greatly welcome the first appearance of Western navigators in their seas in 1518—i.e. twenty-six years before they reached Japan—no direct action was taken by them until the savagery of the Portuguese trading-crews and their raids into the country in search of women spread alarm and led to popular reprisals. Then only was intercourse confined to Macao and Canton, and a policy of control inaugurated.
Canton was well-fitted to maintain trade relations with unknown nations. Originally founded by Chinese sea-adventurers, who had sailed down the Chinese coasts and forced their way into the small aboriginal kingdoms during the first centuries of the Christian era, it had not been formally incorporated in the Empire until the T'ang dynasty (A.D. 618—907). In the eighth and ninth centuries the spread of Islamism had brought Arab navigators to the uttermost East, and soon Chinese vessels, although generally going not further than the Malacca Straits, journeyed as far as Africa and the Indies. Marco Polo himself at the end of the thirteenth century, when he left the land of Cathay after his remarkable sojourn at the Court of Kublai Khan, sailed from Amoy, in the southern province of Fuhkien, for the Persian Gulf in a Chinese deep-sea junk of which he says:—
And first let us speak of the ships in which merchants go to and fro amongst the Isles of India. These ships, you must know, are of fir timber. They have but one deck, though each of them contains some fifty or sixty cabins wherein the merchants abide greatly at their ease, every man having one to himself. The ship hath but one rudder, but it hath four masts; and sometimes they have two additional masts, which they ship and unship at pleasure. Each of these great ships requires at least 200 mariners, some of them 300. They are indeed of great size, for one ship shall carry 5,000 or 6,000 baskets of pepper, and they used to be formerly larger than they are now. . . .
The Cantonese and other South Chinese were therefore very familiar with foreign things; their argosies had long dotted the seas of the Malay archipelago when the first conquistadores passed through the Malacca Straits and reached out for the Yellow seas; and until atrocities and arquebuses became synonymous terms the fair-faced foreigners were not restricted.
Here we have in a single sentence the history of two centuries of Euro-Chinese intercourse. The traders of Canton were not like the historic burghers of Calais who were forced to surrender the keys of their city to an alien conqueror: they merely adapted themselves to the exigencies of the hour and secured a trade monopoly by inaugurating and stereotyping a mercantile system which greatly resembled the system of medieval Europe. The emporia at Canton and at the adjacent port of Macao completely supplied the wants of buyers and sellers: in China, unlike Japan, there was no fear of foreign conquest—restriction was simply a police measure.
In religion as in commerce there is much the same story. Matteo Ricci, the first Jesuit to establish himself in China, came to Canton in 1581 and reached Peking twenty years later. He was then an accomplished Chinese scholar, and was duly presented to the Ming emperor Wan Li, who greatly welcomed him. When the Manchu cavalry entered Peking in 1644 as a result of treachery at the Great Wall and the Mings disappeared, the Jesuit Fathers were so firmly entrenched and had so many thousands of converts that they were fully accepted by the new dynasty—just as the Greek Patriarchate was accepted by the Turks after the conquest of Constantinople. It was a question of national discipline, ancestor-worship, which finally brought conflict, the rival monastic orders of the Franciscans and the Dominicans refusing to accept the complaisance of the Jesuits and calling the practice idolatry. The matter was referred to the Popes and there were conflicting rulings. In the year 1700 the great emperor Kang Hsi definitely proclaimed that "the customs of China are political"—meaning that ancestor-worship was part of the national discipline and must be maintained; and although the Popes dissented and hurled anathemas at all who tolerated the practice, it was not until 1724—that is, after a century and a half of close religious intercourse—that an edict of expulsion was issued in Peking and only partially obeyed. The early nineteenth century indeed found Catholic missionaries still working in China in secret, and they were the first Europeans to penetrate Korea. They were indeed part and parcel of the external forces which were forcing open China, and when the first Japanese treaty of 1871 was signed with China, missionaries of all denominations had been commonplaces for two generations.
VI
Adequately to treat this critical period of history—the renewal of direct and formal intercourse between China and Japan late in the nineteenth century, as a result of the opening of the two countries by the military action of the West—requires what is entirely missing, namely, a critical and authentic monograph on the statesman Li Hung Chang, who, until the outbreak of the war over Korea in 1894, so largely controlled the foreign relations of Peking. We do not yet know the things we require to know; we are still in the dark. The handling of evidence, the assignment of proportion, the testing of policy—all these things, difficult enough in the case of Western statesmen, become doubly so when Oriental statecraft is mixed with European issues, and the whole hidden in the twilight of an old-fashioned Yamen. Brought in 1870 to the gateway of the capital (for Tientsin is the gateway to Peking) as metropolitan viceroy and High Commissioner for Trade in the Northern Seas, Li Hung Chang had behind him all the prestige he had won by crushing, with General Gordon's aid, the last despairing efforts of the Taiping rebels. It was his particular duty to contrive machinery to resist foreign pressure; to limit international intercourse to the coastline; and thus to prevent clashes between an ignorant proletariat and a defiant mercantilism. Already the foundations of the Chinese State had been so sapped by internal discontent and external attacks that very little more was required to bring irreparable dynastic disaster. Japan was then a very small issue: but Korea, infallibly and inevitably, provided the meeting-place for the inherent rivalry between two nations.
In 1868 Japan had informed the Seoul Government of the restoration of the Meiji emperor through the intermediary of the Daimyo of Tsushima; but her demands for an acknowledgment of vassalage had been peremptorily rejected. War might even then have come had it not been for the wisdom of the statesmen of the Restoration period. The persistent efforts of the Western maritime Powers to enter into trade relations with the Hermit Kingdom had filled the coasts of Korea with alarm almost from the beginning of the nineteenth century, and had culminated in the United States sending in 1871 a special mission. But the American gunboats had been fired upon, and a sharp action had ensued which had resulted in Korean coast forts being captured and destroyed. This gesture was, however, fruitless, and another decade passed before Western diplomacy intervened again. China was apparently indifferent; to this day no one accurately knows whether she foresaw what must soon occur.
On Japan, however, American action in Korea had an immediate and powerful repercussion; it was borne in on her that not one day should be wasted in delay. Nearly thirty years had now passed since China had been opened by foreign treaties; nearly twenty since she herself had given effect to Perry's demands. Yet China and Japan were officially not cognizant of each other's existence, and were unrepresented at each other's Court.
In the autumn of 1871 (i.e. four months after the American gunboat affair off Chemulpo) Date, the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs, arrived in Tientsin and signed with Li Hung Chang a treaty which materially and radically differed from all other treaties China had made. Its language and its clauses have indeed to-day the highest importance; for they reveal the fact that the first attempt of Japan to accommodate herself to a type of relationship alien and antithetical to Eastern culture was made in a spirit of equality. The written, precise agreement, which Europe owes to Roman Law, here appears in flowing, ceremonious language; and what should have been from its very nature clearly and absolutely defined from the very beginning is only vaguely touched upon.
Listen to the language.
Article I declares:—
Henceforth the friendship between China and Japan shall be increased and shall last like heaven and earth forever. The countries subject to each state shall in like manner treat each other with respect, and shall commit no acts of hostility towards each other, to the end that everlasting peace may be maintained.
Article II declares:—
be increased.
Article III declares:—
The system of administration and the laws of the two countries being different, each country shall be free to conduct its own administration independently. Neither country shall be permitted to interfere in the concerns of the other and press for the adoption of things prohibited by law. Assistance shall be rendered mutually for the enforcement of laws, and each country shall give orders to its merchants that they must not lead astray the people of the other country or commit any offence whatsoever.
Was there any discussion, it may be asked, about Korea or did both plenipotentiaries avoid the issue? No one knows, for the treaty-makers are dead—and their diaries have been destroyed.
But even more interesting than these general political maxims, in which the two sovereign states dimly take cognizance of each other's existence, are the two articles which give each country extraterritorial rights at ports open to trade where consuls have been stationed, and failing that leave control in the hands of local officials who are authorized to execute justice after lex loci. China (and the fact has capital importance to-day) possessed in the period 1871-94 extraterritorial rights in Japan precisely as Japan possessed extraterritorial rights in China—and it was this question just as much as the question of Korea which ultimately made an attack on China necessary to Japan.
Article VIII declares:—
Each country shall, in each of the ports of the other country which are open to trade, station a Consul who will exercise control over the merchants of his nationality. All matters relating to property of all kinds, to business or professions, and to judicial suits, shall be referred for settlement to the Consul, who shall decide them according to the laws of his country. Suits arising between merchants of the two countries shall be brought in the form of petitions; the Consul shall endeavour to settle such cases, and shall do his utmost to prevent them being made the subject of litigation. When a settlement cannot be effected in this manner, the Consul shall act in accordance with justice. In cases of robbery and absconding (where the aggrieved party is an alien), it will be sufficient for the local authorities of each country to arrest the offenders and take back the stolen property; the Government concerned shall in no case be required to make compensation.
Article IX declares:—
Should in any open port of either country no Consul be appointed, the local authorities of the country in question shall exercise control over the subjects and trade of the other country, and render good offices; should an offence be committed, they shall arrest and try the offender, and after reporting the facts of the case to the Consul at the nearest open port, give sentence according to the law.
By one of those curious ironies which are not rare in history, within three months of its signature the treaty was subjected to an acid test by an incident in the Loochoo Islands. This string of islands, which forms a pendent to the islands of Japan, was for centuries tributary both to China and Japan. But China was the older suzerain. Tribute was first sent to China in A.D. 1372 and to Japan only 1451. The princes of the Loochoos had also received their investiture regularly from the emperors of China since the time of the Ming sovereign Yung Lo (1403-25); but the islands had been conquered by the Prince of Satsuma in 1609 and since that date their princes had received investiture from the emperor of Japan. When in 1871 some Loochoo Islanders were shipwrecked on the coast of Formosa and killed and eaten by the head-hunters of the mountains, Japan demanded redress for her subjects and China made no counter-claim of suzerainty. Li Hung Chang, however, accepted responsibility and undertook the chastisement of the Formosan savages; but his decision was almost immediately reversed by the Peking Government, which declared that the tribes in question acknowledged no overlord. Japan then dispatched an expedition of 3,000 troops—which caused the Chinese Government once again to change its policy, and claim the sole right to intervene in Formosan affairs. Chinese troops were likewise sent to Formosa and the two countries seemed to be drifting into war; the intervention of the British envoy in Peking effected a settlement by means of an indemnity. The language of the settlement recorded in Peking on the 31st October, 1874, is important because it was signed by the great Japanese statesman Okubo, who had long specialized in his country's foreign relations. The preamble says:
. . . Certain Japanese subjects having been wantonly murdered by the unreclaimed savages of Formosa, the Government of Japan regarding these savages as responsible dispatched a force against them to exact satisfaction. An understanding has now been come to with the Government of China that this force shall be withdrawn and certain steps taken; all of which is set forth in the three Articles following.
Thus Japan assumes successfully that the people of a principality tributary to both China and Japan are Japanese subjects. This principle, once asserted, henceforth guided all her policy in her contest with her great neighbor.
VII
In 1875 some Japanese sailors were fired upon from the Korean forts which the Americans had destroyed four years previously. Once again the forts were levelled and Japan informed China of her intentions. It was not only Chinese claims which were irritating to her but the menace of Russian arms was keenly felt. Not only had Russia, by the use of chicanery, annexed in 1860 the whole Pacific province of Manchuria and founded the great city of Vladivostok, but she had attempted in 1861 to do what the Mongols under Kublai Khan had done—to occupy the strategic island of Tsushuma, which commands the Korean Straits. China gave Korea friendly advice regarding the establishment of amicable relations, but although Japan sent a dispatch to the Seoul Court proposing a treaty it was rejected. In February, 1876, an ambassador and a divisional general, with the necessary troops, anchored off Korea prepared for peace or war—and a treaty resulted, characteristically signed by the divisional general, in which the independence of Korea was acknowledged.
What did this signify? How was it possible to reconcile such a declaration with the tribute missions which still regularly proceeded to Peking and which were a matter of common knowledge? Did it mean that the new-type relationship which Western arms had forced on Eastern empires—with written Roman Law agreements—must inevitably destroy old cultural claims and the old hegemony? No one knows, but it is not mere coincidence that in the year following this treaty Li Hung Chang should have annexed to China the forty-mile neutral strip on the west, or Chinese, bank of the Yalu River, which for centuries had been a No-man's-land, because it lay beyond the old boundary palisade. Plainly the move showed fear—a dim realization that a "strategic frontier" was being menaced.
Yet in spite of these things there seems to have been no definite policy regarding the main factor—foreign pressure. In 1881, however, Li Hung Chang wrote a dispatch to the Korean Court advising "limited treaties" with the Western Powers. In 1882 the United States, still hankering after proper relations, sent a commodore on board of an American gunboat escorted by three Chinese men-of-war; and precisely as Commodore Perry had done a generation before in Tokio Bay, finally signed the first Western treaty.
Immediately after this event we get an important clue. The American treaty had been signed in May: in September Chinese and Korean officials, meeting at Tientsin, come to a written agreement and disclose in a single sentence the real nature of the relationship existing between China and Korea. The preamble to "the Regulations for maritime and overland trade between Chinese and Korean subjects of 1882" begins in this way:—
. . . All that pertains to the relations of Korea as a boundary state of China has been long ago regulated by fixed rules, and no change is required in this respect. But as now foreign countries entertain trade with Korea by water, it becomes necessary to remove at once the prohibition of sea trade hitherto enforced between China and Korea, and let the merchants of both countries participate in all the advantages of commercial relations; the regulations affecting the exchange of produce on the frontier will also, as time may require, be modified; but the new regulations for the maritime and overland trade now decided upon are understood to apply to the relations between China and Korea only, the former country granting to the latter certain advantages as a tributary kingdom, and treaty nations are not to participate therein. It is in this sense that the following Articles have been agreed upon.
At last we see clearly. Korea was a "boundary state" precisely as Annam, Tonking, Siam, Burmah, Tibet, Nepaul, Eastern Turkestan, and the Principalities of Outer Mongolia were boundary states, i.e. buffer territories ruled over by lesser kings. Surrounding the ancient Middle Kingdom, which was looked upon as centre of all things because in the Confucian cosmogony the emperors, Sons of Heaven, were necessarily the High Priests of all who acknowledged the sway of Chinese culture, they had a definite and special rôle to fulfil. It is easy to see that the difficulties facing China in the nineteenth century were the difficulties facing England in India, where for the same reasons, although they were given another name, the Russian advance in Central Asia, which was leading to the absorption of the independent Khanates, menaced the whole buffer-territory theory. China's predicament in Korea was therefore England's predicament in Afghanistan; intercourse by water had been absolutely and rigidly cut off even between suzerain and tributary because the only method of enforcing a veto in the East is to make it absolute. Westernism, of which Japan had become a pretended exponent, was destructive of the old sanction. Water was the element which could not be controlled. It is water to-day which still remains the master-force in the Far East . . .
In 1883 further regulations to control Korean frontier traffic throw further light on an obscure and difficult subject. Chinese and Korean officials, talking to one another in the Liaotung, reveal some of the curiosities of the old relationship. One clause states that "it being one of the prerogatives of the Court of China to draw its supply of fish for sacrificial purposes from the embouchures of rivers situated on the Chinese side of the Yalu and in the Korean district of Pingyang, the people are strictly forbidden to fish there clandestinely". What visions of a long departed past does this not conjure up, the Altar of Heaven and the Temple of Imperial Ancestors in Peking, so many hundreds of miles away, drawing supplies by prescriptive right from this tributary region! Another clause declares just as unemotionally: "Whereas all the territory under the jurisdiction of the Liaotung is Crown land attached to His Majesty's Second Capital and subject to the rules which formerly received Imperial sanction, merchants who come for the purchase of local produce can only be allowed, whether coming or going, to pass through the sidegates of the Fenghuang palisade passage; travellers who have been turned back from the tribute-road must not choose roads according to their fancy."
How redolent of the seventeenth century! For "His Majesty's Second Capital" is Moukden—the original chief city of the little Manchu principality which after fifty years of struggle had captured Peking. And just as miniatures or skeletons of the great Boards of State are maintained even to this day in Hsianfu, which ceased to be the national capital thirteen centuries ago, so was Moukden still spoken of as "the second capital". And the palisade which appears so casually—forty miles from the Yalu River—is the old Chinese boundary palisade built by the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth century to protect Chinese settlers from Manchu raids—where guards were still maintained in ignorance of the old purpose.
By these marks we see something of tragedy which Westernism, sweeping in by the sea, spelt for an old-world empire.
Meanwhile in the capital of Korea this upsetting of the time-honoured past was provoking as desperate a struggle as it had in Japan during the last days of the Tokugawa Shogunate; the Korean royal family, torn by intrigues, was divided into a so-called conservative pro-Chinese party, led by the ill-fated Queen, and a so-called liberal pro-Japanese party. The destruction of the Japanese Legation and the general mob-violence, induced by the signing of the first foreign treaties in 1882, culminated in the landing of Yuan Shih-kai and other generals with 3,000 Chinese troops to back up the Queen's party. And these were promptly followed by the landing of the same number of Japanese troops.
This meeting of China and Japan face to face after centuries of isolation filled the air with electricity. Instinctively the two nations hated one another. All the jealousy and bad blood of generations seemed to be concentrated in Seoul: and incident followed incident with bewildering rapidity. In 1884 several thousand Korean and Chinese troops under Yuan Shih-kai attacked one of the palaces which was defended by two companies of Japanese infantry. More Chinese and Japanese troops arrive and rumours of war grow. But the pear was not yet ripe; and accordingly in 1885 the late Prince Ito proceeds to Tientsin and signs yet another convention with Li Hung Chang.
In this instrument China and Japan mutually undertake to evacuate Korea: they declare that they "shall respectively accomplish the withdrawal of the whole number of each of their troops, in order to avoid effectively any complications between the two countries: the Chinese troops shall embark from Asan; and the Japanese from the port of Chemulpo." They also undertake not to send troops without giving prior notice. But regarding the essential issue, the definition of the true status of Korea, neither is yet ready to commit itself, although in an additional clause they "mutually agree to invite the King of Korea to instruct and drill a sufficient armed force, that she may herself assure her public security, and to invite him to engage into his service an officer or officers from amongst those of a third Power who shall be entrusted with the instruction of the said force."
Following this, American officers arrive and drill Korean troops for a brief space; and England, after a few more months, evacuates Port Hamilton, which she had occupied because Russia seemed about to move south to the "warm water". But the real issue is Yuan Shih-kai and the policy of Tientsin. This man, later to aspire to the throne of China, had returned to Seoul as Imperial Resident—having induced Li Hung Chang to consent to this cunning step because Japan only possessed a Minister Plenipotentiary.
And so at last the storm is there on the horizon-line; plainly to be seen by those with vision.
VIII
China, after the lesson of the Tonkin war with France (1884-85), had commenced the fortification of Port Arthur under Li Hung Chang's guidance. She likewise vastly improved her navy, which soon included two ironclads and a number of good cruisers, placing the whole under the joint command of a Chinese admiral and a British admiral. But in 1890 the Englishman lost his post as the result of a petty dispute—and China's fate in Korea was sealed. Corruption and inefficiency soon reigned supreme in the new navy, which might have repeated the performance of the Korean armoured ships of the sixteenth century, but which went into action in 1894 at the Battle of the Yalu with sand-filled shells, and so changed all history.
Japan's determination to wage war against China came in 1894—immediately she had signed her treaty with Britain abolishing extraterritoriality in Japan. War was held by her a necessary step not only to consummate her international emancipation but to take from China rights which embarrassed her. The facts that follow have supreme importance to-day.
The British treaty abolishing extraterritoriality was signed on the 16th July, 1894, when events in Korea, due to the so-called Tong Hak rebellion,[4] had led to the landing of both Chinese and Japanese troops. The first act of war, the sinking of the chartered transport "Kowshing" carrying Chinese reinforcements by a Japanese cruiser, did not occur until the 25th July, i.e. until nine days after the treaty had duly been signed in London. In other words, Japan was working by time-table on the accepted Prussian model. Land-fighting was delayed until three days later, Japan only issuing her declaration of war on 1st August, having on the 23rd July broken into, and taken possession of, the royal palace and carried off the Queen and her children, which allowed her to appoint a puppet Regent.
The rest of the Powers quickly followed England's example in the matter of extraterritoriality, and in her greatly improved position among the nations it was essential for Japan that the privileges of extraterritoriality in China—which she did not then possess—should be acquired by her, whilst the extraterritorial jurisdiction China possessed in Japan should be forcibly cancelled.
This is one of the deeper reasons for Japanese action in Korea. Although China agreed to the complete independence of Korea almost after her first defeats, Japan was aiming at very different objects. The cession of the Liaotung, or the area included in the old willow palisade, plus the annexed Yalu zone, was but one small thing, just as Formosa was another. The real prize was the reversal of the old relationship between China and Japan—that suzerain China should become the tributary and tributary Japan the suzerain. Everything else is subordinate to this root-idea. The intervention of Russia and her satellites in 1895, which was followed by the brutal Japanese murder of the Korean Queen and the loss of all Korean influence, and then by the Manchurian war—these and many other things are but interruptions in the grand policy—interruptions due to necessity and to world-influence. The root-idea to-day, as it has been for many years, is to complete the plan of making suzerain China the tributary and tributary Japan the suzerain.
The curious and intricate character of this crisis which necessitates a double policy—one for the West and another for the East—is adequately illustrated in the four chapters that follow.
- ↑ This recondite subject has never been properly explored,
partly because Japanese scholars are forbidden under dire
penalties from exercising their critical faculties and building
up a true picture of prehistoric Japan. There is, for instance,
no reason to doubt that phallicism not only figured very
largely in the primitive Japanese cult but was the basis of
the life of the people. The peculiar place of women in the
social structure and their ruthless exploitation—which is
shown in the official method of registration of the children
of concubines—father so-and-so, mother unknown—has had
an important influence on the development of the race and
on the present position of Japanese society. Even bushido,
which has been made such an international asset, is entirely
borrowed, being based on the Chinese work 'San Kuo Chih',
or History of Three Kingdoms—the warring period of the
third century, when, with the fall of the Han dynasty, China
was broken up into small warrior states and the virtues of
mounted knighthood became very celebrated.
Thus of things that are really Japanese there remain only the Imperial myths; the torii; tattooing; the loin-cloth; geta, or clogs with divided toes; mound-burial; plurality of wives; the thatched, raised water-house; phallicism; and the Malay-Indonesian fishing-boats. - ↑ Regarding this question of suzerainty see the remarkable facts further on.
- ↑ This title was not a new one: it was the circumstances which made it important. It had been first conferred at the end of the eighth century when Ainu warfare was very constant.
- ↑ Regarding the true explanation of the Tong Hak rising, see Document G in the Appendix.