Nevertheless we find the white man pushing on, in his eternal quest for trade, not to be denied, founding trading stations at Chinese ports. Generally it is only in submission to a show of force, or to its active application, that these trading facilities, warehouses and so on, are permitted to him. He is obliged to fight to be allowed to establish them, and further, we find him fighting again to punish the native people who have disregarded the agreements they have made with him and who sometimes have killed the peaceful traders.
Out of the troubles thus arising came war between Britain and China as early as 1840. The Chinese were quite incapable of seriously opposing the large British force which was sent out. The result was the conclusion of a commercial treaty which opened five principal ports of China to British trading vessels and gave Britain possession of the island of Hongkong. In 1854 Shanghai, one of the five ports above named, was opened to the trade of all nations.
But still the attitude of the people and of the Government was hostile to the foreigner. At any moment an uprising and a general massacre might happen. A few white missionaries, chiefly of British and American nationality, penetrated into the country, preaching Christianity at constant risk of their lives.
The year 1860 saw a great change in the relations of the white men and the Chinese. Hitherto any fighting between them had been near the coast and the great ports. Now, as a protest against the ill-treatment of which the foreign traders were the victims and the bad faith with which the Chinese broke the treaties, and also to insist on the establishment of legations of the European Powers to protect the interests of their nations, a strong combined force of British and French marched on Pekin, the capital city, and looted and burnt the sacred Summer Palace from which the Emperor had fled.
The really important result of the campaign was the shock which it gave the Chinese and the conviction which it brought home to them of the strength and determination of the white men. Thereafter they treated the foreign traders with a consideration never paid them before, and ministers representing foreign powers had their appointed residences in Pekin.
It is true that as lately as 1900 a combined foreign force was obliged to march in extreme haste on Pekin in order to save those ministers, who were in great peril there. But it was peril arising out of an insurrection against the Government, rather than immediately from the Government's own action. Nevertheless it is also true that the very clever old Empress, who was then ruler of China, deliberately contrived to convert the activities of the revolutionaries into an attack upon the foreigners, rather than upon the Government itself. And it is to be noted that in co-operation with that combined army, which thus again invaded China's once sacred capital, was a force of the other branch of the yellow race, the island branch, the Japanese.
The story of that island branch is certainly no less interesting than that of the continental. At what point far back in the story they branched off from a common stock we do not know, but it is more than probable that they came from the same original source. We found Kublai Khan, when master of China and of an immense part of the world besides, sending out from China an expedition against the islanders, of which the fate was much like that of the Grand Armada which the masterful power of Spain launched against our own islands. Japan kept her independence then, and has fought for it again and asserted it conclusively far later.
The awakening of Japan
She too, in her story, seems to have repeated, as did China, something very like the series of changes through which society passed in Europe, with its feudalism and the rest of it. But whereas in modern China this feudalism seems to belong to some era very, very far back in her story, so that she has almost lost all memory of it, with Japan, on the contrary, it is a very recent chapter—later even than with us of Europe. It is a condition from which she has indeed only just shaken herself free. 1867 is generally given as the date at which Japanese feudalism passed. And it passed in a fashion for which there is certainly no parallel in Western story. The Daimios, who were the feudal lords, of their own accord agreed, as the only means of ending their mutual fighting, to give up their local powers into the hands of the Mikado.