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A History of East Asia From the Origins of Civilization to the Twenty-First Century
CHARLES HOLCOMBE
University of Northern Iowa
,·...,.~.,.,, M RID E ~"~· CA B G ::: . UNIVERSITY PRESS
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Charles Holcombe 2011
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First published 2011
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data
Holcombe, Charles, 1956- A history of East Asia: from the origins of civilization to the twenty-first century I Charles Holcombe.
p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-521-51595-5 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-521-73164-5 (pbk.) 1. East Asia- History. 2. East Asia- Civilization. I. Title. DS51l.H65 2010 950 dc22 2010024844
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Contents
1
2
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Pronunciation Guide
Timeline: Dynasties and Major Historical Periods
Glossary
Introduction: What Is East Asia?
The Origins of Civilization in East Asia
"Out of Africa": The First East Asians East Asian Languages and Writing Systems Bronze Age China
The Formative Era
The Age of the Classics Zhou Dynasty China (1045-256 BCE) The Hundred Schools of Thought
Confucianism Daoism Legalism The Art of War
First Empire "The Faults of Qin" (221-207 BCE)
The Han Empire (202 BCE-220 CE) The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (220-280 CE)
3 The Age of Cosmopolitanism
China in Division The Five Hu and Sixteen Kingdoms (North China, 304-439 cE) The Southern Dynasties (South China, 317-589 CE)
page ix
xi
xiii
xvii
xxi
11
11 14
24
30
30 30 34 35 39 41 42
44 44 48 55
58
58 58 61
v
190
7 The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
The world was fundamentally transformed in the nineteenth century by the
Promethean new powers unleashed by the industrial and scientific revolutions. Modern transportation and communications technologies, such as the steamship, the railway, and the telegraph (a telegraphic link between China and Europe was
first established in 1871), knit the planet together more tightly than ever before.
New military technologies- including ironclad steam warships and machine guns
gave industrialized countries unprecedented military superiority over nonindustri
alized peoples. The power and wealth of these industrialized countries also made
them widely attractive models, although a perceptible time lag occurred before
many peoples outside the early-industrializing core perceived the apparent irre sistibility of modernization, and many never welcomed it. "From 1860 to 1914,
the web of steel [railways] spread throughout the world, and so did the political,
financial, and engineering techniques that had evolved along with it," yet "among
non-Western peoples, only the Japanese showed real enthusiasm for railways," and
even in Japan, the first eighteen-mile stretch of rail line was not laid until 18721
(see Figure 7.1). In China, the first short rail line was built by a British firm in 187 6
but purchased by the Chinese government the following year and dismantled.
Despite this delayed start, by the end of the nineteenth century, a virtual tidal
wave of Westernization was beginning to sweep the world. Consciously Western
style clothing and hairstyles became widely fashionable, especially among elites. In
the 1870s, for example, Japanese samurai cut their topknots and tentatively began adopting Western fashions. By 1900, it is said that most Japanese men owned at
least one Western-style suit and hat. Representative democratic government also seemed to be the irresistible trend of the times by the end of the century. By 1890,
Japan had a written modern Western-style constitution and an elected legislature (called the Diet). Soon after the turn into the twentieth century, even China
adopted a formal constitution and held elections for provincial assemblies, and in
1912-1913, China experimented with its first nationwide democratic elections.
The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations 191
Figure 7.1. Hiroshige III (ca. 1843-1894), "Picture of a Steam Locomotive along the Yoko hama Waterfront," ca. 1874, Japanese woodblock print. Arthur M. Sadder Gallery, Smith sonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Gift of the Daval Foundation, from the Collection of Ambassador and Mrs. William Leonhart, S 1991.151 a-c.
In many ways, this nineteenth-century wave of Westernization foreshadowed the
current phenomenon of globalization in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries. Transportation and communications became not only much more rapid
but also more standardized. The newly constructed railroads were everywhere quite
similar operations, and typically employed common standard gauges of track. An
International Telegraph Union was established in 1865 and a Universal Postal
Union in 1875. A global modern business culture also emerged, based on shared technology and managerial techniques. By the end of the nineteenth century, there
were integrated global capital markets, nearly instantaneous communications via
the telegraph, refrigerated shipping of perishable food from farms and ranches
in the far-flung corners of the world, and new global markets for such things as
coffee, bananas, rubber, copper, and tin. Indeed, as a percentage of gross national
product, international capital flows peaked in the early twentieth century (from
Britain) and have never been matched again since, while international trade as a
percentage of total output did not return to its 1913 (that is, pre-World War I)
levels again until as late as the 1980s. 2
Some predicted that growing international economic integration would make
war between developed countries impossible. The outbreak of World War I in
1914 proved this assumption rather spectacularly wrong, and also dealt a blow to
the interdependent international financial system, especially in Europe. The onset
of the Great Depression and rise of fascism and Communism by the 1930s then
brought this earlier age of globalization to a close. But before that happened, much
of the world had already been irrevocably changed by modernization. In East Asia,
the peak period of Westernization actually did not arrive until the early twentieth
century, but the deep forces underlying these changes had intruded much earlier.
192 A History of East Asia
Industrialization was the key. Although the early achievements of the European
scientific revolution are justly much celebrated, the extent to which pure science
contributed to early industrialization remains a matter of debate. Pioneering break
throughs in technological invention, and early examples of relatively large scale
production, also did not necessarily automatically lead to an industrial revolution.
The premodern porcelain workshops at Jingdezhen in southeast China, for exam
ple, which employed some seventy thousand workers, have been called "the largest
industrial complex anywhere in the world prior to the eighteenth century," and in
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, China exported over a hundred million
pieces of porcelain to Europe alone. 3 The Chinese had also learned to burn coal
as a fuel at a very early date and developed most of the mechanisms for a steam
engine, such as double-acting piston/cylinder arrays and methods for the transfer
of rotary to linear motion. 4 Yet the Industrial Revolution did not begin in China.
Instead, it was in Great Britain in the early nineteenth century that all the necessary
contributing factors were first harnessed into a true industrial revolution.
Early coal-fired steam engines were so inefficient that they were almost useless,
except at the sites of coal mines themselves, where coal was relatively cheap and
abundant. There steam engines were initially used to pump water out of the mines
to enable deeper mining. As the engines became more efficient, they began to be
used also to haul the coal aboveground, and eventually, in 1825, in northern
England, the world's first railway line was constructed. It just happened that
nineteenth-century Britain combined some of Europe's largest coal reserves with
a serious firewood shortage, encouraging the switch to coal for fuel. Britain also
enjoyed a high level of commercialization and convenient water transportation,
as well as, of course, individuals with considerable mechanical ingenuity and
entrepreneurial flare. 5
The conversion to fossil fuel-powered mechanization was the signature moment
in the Industrial Revolution, but Britain's earlier development of a global trad
ing network (and empire) was also an important precondition. Colonies and
trading partners in America and elsewhere provided both markets for the prod
ucts of British manufacturing and essential supplies of raw materials such as
sugar and cotton. The development of worldwide trade also provided thelframe
work for experimenting with large-scale business formats such as the joint-stock
corporation.
In 1795, David Davies had already remarked on the peculiarity of the English
working-class habit of drinking tea sweetened with sugar: "After all, it appears a
very strange thing, that the common people of any European nation should be
obliged to use, as part of their daily diet, two articles imported from opposite sides
of the earth. " 6 Remarkably, all of this British tea came from China, and most of
the sugar came from the Caribbean. This is striking testimony to the global reach of British commerce.
In the seventeenth century, a new kind of private chartered trading company had
emerged to become the leading edge of European business activity in Asia. Espe
cially important initially was the Dutch VOC (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compag
nie, or East India Company), which was founded in 1602. The Dutch established
The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
a base at Batavia (modern Jakarta) on the island of Java in 1619 and soon achieved
a near-monopoly of the still vital spice trade among the islands of what is now
Indonesia. Thanks to the actions of the Japanese Tokugawa Shogunate, the Dutch
also gained a complete monopoly on European trade with Japan after 1639. Mean while, the French Compagnie des Indies for a time seriously rivaled British interests
in India, but after British military victories in such battles as Plassey, in 1757, and
Pondicherry, in 1760, it was the British East India Company (EIC) that emerged as the dominant force in India. From its bases in India, the EIC then began projecting
British interests to China. The British EIC had been founded in 1599, when a group ofLondon merchants
acquired a royal charter from Queen Elizabeth I. The EIC enjoyed a monopoly over all British trade east of the Cape of Good Hope and soon became the largest
British chartered company doing business outside of England. The "East India" in
its title originally referred to the "East Indies" (modern Indonesia), but the British
were driven from there by the Dutch, and the focus of EIC activity turned to the
Indian subcontinent. As of the start of the nineteenth century, all British imports
from the Far East were required to be deposited and sold from EIC warehouses.
The EIC docks and warehouses in London employed fifty thousand persons, the
company owned some 115 ships, and it had the largest standing army in Asia. In
fact, as of the 1830s, the EIC army was more than twice the size of the regular
British government army. The Crown granted the EIC the right to coin money and
administer justice, and it was actually the EIC rather than the British government
that first brought India under British control. Victory in the Napoleonic wars in the early nineteenth century established over
whelming global British naval superiority and, together with the early British lead
in mechanized industry, made Britain the sole global superpower of the century -
and the largest empire in the history of the world. British success stimulated imi tation, however, and before long, a second wave of late-industrializing countries
arose, including the United States, Germany, Russia, and Japan. The United States
and Germany, in particular, had seriously eroded Britain's industrial lead by the
early twentieth century. These countries (together with France, which, although
now in relative decline, was still a major player) became the new great powers, and
they soon engaged in a frantic competition for empire. Between 1876 and 1915, a
quarter of the world was colonized by these roughly half dozen major modern pow
ers.7 Many older powers found themselves eclipsed by these developments. China
and the Ottoman Empire were especially diminished, becoming the so-called "sick
men" of Asia and Europe, respectively.
In the eighteenth century, China had enjoyed a standard of living roughly equiva
lent to that of Western Europe. By some estimates, China actually consumed more
sugar per person and produced at least comparable volumes of textiles as Europe
at that time, and "western European land, labor, and product markets, even as
late as 1789, were on the whole probably further from perfect competition ... than
193
194 A History of East Asia
those in most of China. "8 In the aggregate, if no longer in per capita terms, China
was probably still the richest country in world as late as 1800, with something
like one-third of the world's total production. Even well into the nineteenth cen
tury, conditions in China did not necessarily appear all that bleak to European
observers. Robert Fortune, for example, a botanist sent to China by the EIC, still
insisted in 1857 that although, "as their farms are all small," Chinese farmers "are
probably less wealthy than our farmers in England," yet those Chinese farmers still
"live well, dress plainly, and are industrious, without being in any way oppressed. I
doubt if there is a happier race anywhere than the Chinese farmer and peasantry. "9
By 1900, however, China's share of world production had fallen to only 6 per
cent. This was probably not the result of any absolute decline but instead was
only relative to the explosive new growth of the industrialized economies. Yet,
to the considerable bewilderment of many people in China, China was rapidly
becoming marginalized, relatively impoverished, and surrounded by dynamically
expanding new empires. Neighboring countries that had formerly been viewed
as tributaries of the Chinese Empire were, one by one, pulled into new foreign
imperial configurations: Burma was ceded to Britain in 1886, and Nepal became
a British protectorate in 1815; France acquired Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in
stages between 1862 and 1885; Japan successfully claimed the Ryiikyii (in Chinese,
Liuqiu) island chain in 1878 and, in 1895, pulled Korea into the Japanese orbit
and acquired Taiwan as an outright colony. Except for Taiwan, actual Chinese
territory was not directly colonized by these modern empires, but many Chinese
people did eventually conclude that China was being reduced to at least "semi
colonial" status under the terms of a so-called treaty port system. This treaty port
system referred, literally, to ports opened by formal diplomatic treaties, starting
with the treaty that ended the first Opium War in 1842.
The Opium Wars
Beginning in 1760, all Western maritime commercial activity in China was officially
confined by the Qing Dynasty government to the single port of Guangzhou (in
English, Canton). Rather than being some ancient Chinese tradition, this was
actually a new application of imperial border control policies that had recently
proven rather successful against the nomads of the northwest. 10 The policy also
did not apply to the Russians, who could travel overland to Beijing, nor to Chinese
merchants themselves, who came and went relatively freely. But Western shipping
was limited to Guangzhou, where a number of Chinese firms joined to form a
monopolistic association (called the Co-hong by the English) that handled every
aspect of contact with the Western merchants.
Most prominent, now, among those Western merchants were the British, who
had developed a considerable appetite for a certain Chinese product called tea, which they were beginning to purchase in substantial quantities - by the 1830s,
thirty million pounds per year. Even in Guangzhou, Westerners were not allowed
inside the city walls but were confined, instead, during the six-month trad
ing season, to a cluster of so-called factories south of the city walls near the
The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
Pearl River. More permanent foreign residences were downriver in Portuguese
Macao. Repeated British efforts to renegotiate these restricted terms of trade,
most famously with the mission led by Lord George Macartney in 1793, were
simply rebuffed by Beijing. Although Western merchants sold many different products in exchange for Chi
nese tea, silk, porcelain, and lacquerware, only rarely could they sell enough to
balance the exchange. The deficit, or trade imbalance, had to be made up with
payments in cash (which, in China, meant silver). One contemporary American,
for example, estimated that between 1805 and 1825, a net sixty-two million U.S.
dollars in cash was transferred from the United States to China. 11 Western mer
chants were naturally, therefore, interested in finding a product that they could
market successfully in China, and in the late 1700s, they finally did: opium. 12
Opium is a narcotic drug produced from a flower called the poppy. Opium
had long been a familiar substance throughout the Old World and may have
even been grown in ancient Egypt. What was new was the technique of smok
ing opium, which appears to have begun as a spin-off from the practice of smoking
New World tobacco. Although opium smoking may have started simply by mix
ing tobacco and opium together, ultimately, instead of lighting the opium on fire
and directly inhaling the smoke, the technique became to apply heat to a bead of
opium in a pipe until it vaporized and then inhale the vapor. Such opium smoking
became especially widespread in China, but the Chinese government also took
a global lead in outlawing the practice, banning nonmedicinal use of opium by
as early as 1729. Elsewhere in the world, opium use was far from universally
illegal prior to the twentieth century. Indeed, nineteenth-century British mothers
not uncommonly dosed their own children with a liquid tincture of opium called
laudanum. Initially, there was not very much opium in China. Only two hundred chests
were imported in 1729, and domestic cultivation was minimal. In 1770, however,
a famine in Bengal, in northeastern India, caused the EIC to petition Parliament
for assistance, resulting in the Tea Act of 1773, which allowed the EIC to sell its
products tax-free in the British colonies. This provoked some irate colonists in
Boston, Massachusetts, to react angrily by dumping EIC tea into the ocean the
so-called Boston Tea Party- in December 1773. Also in 1773, and as a result of
that same Indian famine, the EIC gained a monopoly on the sale and production
of opium in Bengal. This opium was shaped into balls bearing the EIC seal and
marketed in China. During the decade 1780-1790, imports of Indian opium into
China quadrupled, and by the early nineteenth century, opium is said to have
become the most valuable commercial crop in the world. The obvious problem with this lucrative opium trade was that it was illegal in
China, although it was not illegal elsewhere. In a concession to Chinese govern
ment pressure, therefore, in 1800, the EIC agreed to stop selling opium in China.
This made little difference, however, because the EIC continued to grow and man ufacture opium in India, where it was perfectly legal, and auction the opium off
to private firms, who then shipped it to China. The EIC's British monopoly on
trade with the Far East applied only to trade between Asia and Britain and never
195
196 A History of East Asia
to trade between different ports within Asia. Opium imports into China continued unabated.
Then, in 1834, the EIC British monopoly expired and was not renewed. Like most other European countries, early modern Britain had favored policies of mer
cantilism, or protected trade, but in the early nineteenth century, a new ideal of
free trade was taking hold. In 1776, Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, coined
his famous phrase about the "invisible hand," suggesting that the free exchange of
goods through market forces was the most efficient means of organizing an econ
omy. In 1817, David Ricardo further developed the idea of comparative advan tage, using the example of Portuguese specialization in wine production, which
could then be exchanged for English cloth to mutual profit. Nineteenth-century
British "classical" economists came to believe that government interference with
the operation of market forces was likely to do more harm than good and advo
cated a laissez-faire approach and free trade. The inherent intellectual persua
siveness of this argument was underwritten by the rapidly increasing productivity
of British industry - by 1840, Britain enjoyed about one-third of the world's
total international trade and Britain now moved decisively toward a goal of free trade.
The expiration of the EIC monopoly on British trade with China in 1834 was a
step in this direction, and it brought increased British trade - but correspondingly,
also increased sales of opium. Between 1830 and 1836, the annual number of
chests of (British controlled) Indian opium imported into China increased from
18,956 to 30,302. Since the balance of trade had now shifted against China, and
silver was pouring out to pay for opium imports, Beijing perceived a mounting
economic as well as criminal and moral crisis. Although a number of proposals
were considered, Beijing resolved to crack down and end the illegal drug trade. In
1839, a special imperial commissioner named Lin Zexu (1785-1850) was sent to Guangzhou to eliminate opium smuggling.
Lin arrived in March, and by July, he had arrested some seventeen hundred
Chinese involved in the drug trade and confiscated seventy thousand opium pipes. Smugglers found it almost impossible to sell opium at any price. But Lin was
not content with this and sealed off the Western factories, demanding that they
surrender all their opium supplies. The highest-ranking official in the Western
community in Guangzhou, the British superintendant of trade, was placed in an
awkward position because his authority over the private businessmen was limited.
He also could hardly wait for instructions from London because, at that time, it still
would have taken six months before he could expect a reply. On his own initiative,
therefore, he promised the merchants that the British government would reimburse
them for any opium confiscated by the Chinese. With that encouragement, the
foreign merchants turned over twenty-one thousand chests, or two and a half
million pounds, of opium to Commissioner Lin, who had it carefully dissolved in specially dug trenches.
Because the British home government proved unwilling, in the end, to pay for
the confiscated opium, the huge financial loss involved then became an issue.
In addition, Commissioner Lin was not satisfied with merely confiscating the
The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
existing opium supplies and also demanded that any foreign merchant wishing
to do business in China must sign an oath, on penalty of death, never to bring
opium into China again. The British, as a group, refused to sign, arguing that it
would subject British citizens to what they viewed as a barbaric Chinese criminal
justice system, exposing them to possible extortion and the probability of torture
and execution if accused, whether falsely or not. Before long, shots were fired, and
in early 1840, a British fleet arrived to enforce British interests. China and Great
Britain went to war.
The Qing Dynasty had no real oceangoing navy at all, whereas Britain had the
most powerful navy in the world. The British fleet also already included a pioneer
ing iron steam warship called the Nemesis. The war at sea was therefore entirely
one sided. On land, however, there were not enough British troops to have much
impact on the huge Chinese Empire. Eventually, the British fleet managed to sail
up the Yangzi River and cut the Grand Canal, which transported vital tax grain
from the south to the capital at Beijing in the north. The Qing Dynasty was com
pelled to agree to terms, signing the Treaty ofNanjing (Nanking) in August 1842.
This treaty opened five ports to British trade (including, most importantly,
Shanghai) and gave the island of Hong Kong permanently to Great Britain (it was
the surrounding New Territories that were merely leased, for a term of ninety-nine
years beginning in 1898, and which triggered the return of Hong Kong to Chinese
rule in 1997), and the Qing Dynasty also agreed to pay reparations amounting to
some twenty-one million dollars.
After the war, opium remained illegal in China, while the volume oflegal British
sales in China remained disappointing. As Britain industrialized, British manufac
turers entertained visions of China as the largest potential market in the world, but
such hopes were never fully realized. At the end of the nineteenth century, China
was still importing fewer British manufactured goods than the Netherlands. 13
Although the reasons for this are complicated, British "old China hands" were
inclined to blame their frustration on continuing unfair Chinese trade restrictions.
At least initially, moreover, this was not entirely without reason because the British
were still not actually being allowed inside the city of Guangzhou, there were still
only five ports open to British trade, and taxes on British imports were collected
erratically. British merchants therefore pressured their government to take more vigorous steps to pry open the tantalizingly vast China market.
An opportunity arrived in October 1856, when Chinese authorities at
Guangzhou arrested some crewmembers of a ship called the Arrow. The owner
of the ship was Chinese, the arrested crewmen were also "natives," and her Hong
Kong British registration had technically expired eleven days previously, but the
ship's master was British, and it was the British flag that was allegedly hauled down.
The British governor of Hong Kong used this occasion to press further demands
for the opening of China. The result was a second Opium War, in which Britain
was this time joined by France - provoked to war by the execution of a French
Christian missionary. The prosecution of this second war was delayed by the erup
tion of the bloody Sepoy Mutiny in India (1857-1858), but eventually, in 1860,
a large British and French army landed on the northern coast near Beijing, the
197
198 A History of East Asia
Chinese coastal defenses were stormed, and British and French troops marched into Beijing. The imperial Summer Palace in the northwestern suburbs of Beijing
was burned and looted, and the emperor fled to Manchuria, where he died the
next year. A five-year-old boy, known as the Tongzhi Emperor (r. 1862-1874),
ascended the throne of a dynasty that appeared on the verge of collapse.
Domestic Rebellions
Even as the Qing Dynasty was waging two losing wars against European pow
ers between 1840 and 1860, it was simultaneously also confronted with multiple
domestic rebellions, some of which were on a vastly larger scale of destructiveness.
The most devastating of all was the Christian Taiping Rebellion ( 1850-1864). The
origins of this Christian rebellion were linked to those same recent foreign activities
on the southeastern Chinese coast. The region around Guangzhou had been most affected by the fighting in the first Opium War ( 1840-1842), and the opening of
other ports that resulted from that war not only ended Guangzhou's monopoly on
Western trade but Guangzhou soon also found itself absolutely eclipsed by the rise
of Shanghai in importance. For these and other reasons, there were regional eco
nomic dislocations, distress, and banditry. Banditry led to the formation of local
self-defense militias, which then tended to represent local majority populations in
confrontations with minorities.
It happened that southernmost China had some especially large minority groups,
including such aboriginal peoples as the Miao, Yao, and Zhuang. Among the ethnic
Chinese, there were also significant subethnic differences, including occupational
groups like the so-called boat people (who spent their entire lives afloat) and,
most critically, a division between the Cantonese "natives" (bendi) of Guangdong
and the Hakka (in Mandarin, Kejia) "guest families." While these Hakka are
unquestionably Chinese (for a time in the 1980s-1990s, the leaders of the People's
Republic of China, Taiwan, and Singapore were all three simultaneously Hakka),
they are distinguished by speaking a unique dialect of the Chinese language. They
were also relatively late migrants into the far south, often relegated to marginal
farmland, and felt much discriminated against by the local Cantonese majority in
the nineteenth century. 14
The founder of the Taiping movement was a Guangdong Hakka named Hong
Xiuquan (1814-1864). 15 Hong Xiuquan had made the thirty-mile journey from
his native village to Guangzhou city four times between 1827 and 1843 to sit for the
imperial civil service examinations, but though he passed the preliminary exams,
he never obtained even the lowest degree. During his second visit to Guangzhou in
1836, he was exposed to Christian street preaching and accepted some Christian
pamphlets. After his third examination failure, he suffered a nervous breakdown
and experienced mysterious visions of, among other things, an old man who gave
him a divine sword. After his fourth examination failure in 1843, he finally read
those Christian pamphlets and came to the conclusion, based on them, that his
visions were of God and Jesus Christ- who, as his father and older brother, had
commissioned him to "restore" Christianity to China.
The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
Although Hong did spend two months in 184 7 studying at a Southern Baptist
mission in Guangzhou under the Reverend Issachar Roberts of Tennessee, and a
complete Chinese-language translation of the Bible was available to him, his train
ing in Christian theology was obviously limited, and he developed a somewhat
eccentric individual form of the faith, much influenced by his otherwise fairly con
ventional Chinese upbringing. The very name Taiping (great peace), for example,
was drawn from ancient Chinese Daoist religious texts. There is no denying the
sincerity of Hong's Christian zeal, however. Evangelizing in the countryside, he
won some ten thousand converts by 1849. These were mainly, like Hong himself,
Hakka or members of other minorities. They formed a God-Worshippers Society
that practiced baptism and congregational worship and strictly enforced the Ten
Commandments. These God-Worshippers clashed with Cantonese self-defense militias, and early
military successes inspired Hong Xiuquan to declare open rebellion against the
Qing Dynasty in 1851, from a base on Thistle Mountain in the Yao aboriginal area
of Guangxi Province. Hong pronounced himself the Heavenly King of a Heavenly
Kingdom of Great Peace (Taiping tianguo). From this starting point in the far south,
Taiping armies smashed their way through encircling imperial forces and marched
north, picking up new recruits along the way. The Taiping soldiers maintained
impressively taut discipline - they were forbidden to smoke, drink alcohol, loot,
or have sexual relations - and the Qing imperial armies seemed unable to resist
them. By 1853, the Taipings had captured Nanjing (Nanking) and made it their
capital. Many Westerners were at first excited by the idea of a Christian rebellion in
China, especially one that appeared likely to emerge victorious and overthrow
the Qing Dynasty. An early British fact-finding mission to the Taiping capital at
Nanjing in 1853, however, was bluntly informed that the Taiping Heavenly King,
Hong Xiuquan, was "the Lord of the whole world; he is the second son of God
and all people in the whole world must obey and follow him .... The True Lord is
not merely the Lord of China ... he is your Lord also." 16 Such haughty attitudes
understandably tended to alienate Western opinion, not least among Christian
missionaries, who were especially displeased by Hong's claim to be the literal
younger brother of Jesus Christ. Up through their seizure of N anjing in 18 53, the
Taiping rebels appeared unstoppable, but thereafter their offensives stalled, and an
internal coup in 1856 led to much mutual Taiping slaughter. Mter 1856, Taiping
cohesion and elan dissipated, and Qing imperial counteroffensives began to gain
ground. The Western powers soon adopted postures of neutrality in this Chinese civil
war and, after the Anglo-French victory in the second Opium War in 1860, even
openly supported the Qing imperial side. An American mercenary named Freder
ick Townsend Ward (1831-1862), though he had originally dreamed of becoming
a Taiping prince, instead organized an "ever victorious army," trained European
style, on behalf of the Qing Dynasty. When Ward was killed, he was replaced by
a regular British army officer, Charles Gordon (1833-1885). Although this West
ern contribution was colorful, it actually played only a small part in the massive
199
200 A History of East Asia
imperial effort to suppress the Taipings. By 1864, Nanjing was recaptured by the
Qing Dynasty, and great effort was expended to eradicate every trace that the Taip
ing movement had ever existed. The Taiping Rebellion was therefore ultimately a
complete failure, and it left some twenty million people dead in its wake, together
with widespread devastation. But because the imperial armies that eventually sup
pressed the Taipings were regionally rather than centrally organized, it contributed
to the long-term decentralization of the Qing Dynasty, and the Taiping Rebel
lion also served as a conscious inspiration for more successful twentieth-century Chinese revolutionaries.
This Taiping Rebellion was merely the largest of several mid-century rebellions.
To mention only one other, in 1864, Muslims in the far northwestern province of Xinjiang rebelled, echoing earlier Muslim rebellions in Gansu, Ningxia, and
Shaanxi. The ruler of a small Islamic state on the opposite side of the Pamir
Mountains, Khokand, sent a detachment of sixty-eight men across the moun
tains to intervene, under the command of Ya'qub Beg (ca. 1820-1877). ("Beg"
is a Uighur Ti.irkic title meaning "noble.") Ya'qub Beg soon brought all of the
Tarim basin area of southern Xinjiang under his control, and after the fall of
Khokand to the expanding Russian Empire, he became an independent force.
While managing to remain autonomous, Ya'qub Beg accepted the title of "emir"
from the Ottoman Empire and received substantial Ottoman military assistance. The British, who hoped that Ya'qub Beg's emirate might serve as a buffer in the
so-called great game of imperial rivalry between Britain and Russia, also granted
Ya'qub Beg full diplomatic recognition and allowed him to open an embassy in London.
Ya'qub Beg portrayed himself as a defender of the Islamic faith against the infidel
Chinese and strictly enforced Sharia law. Women were required to be veiled, for
example, and drinking alcohol and eating pork were banned. Since the core of
Ya'qub Beg's forces were outsiders from the other side of the Pamir Mountains,
and because of such harshly puritanical regulations as well as the closing off of
trade with China, the Muslim population of Xinjiang, which had initially supported
Ya'qub Beg, grew disaffected over time. The Qing Dynasty, meanwhile, resolved
to make a massive commitment of resources to retake Xinjiang, and after about a
decade and a half of independence, the Qing reconquest of Xinjiang (except for a
small pocket in the northwest that had been occupied by Russia) was completed
by the end of 1877. 17
This was to be the last major successful military campaign ever waged by the Chinese Empire.
The Tongzhi Restoration (1862-1874)
The Qing Dynasty was therefore confronted with multiple serious crises in the mid nineteenth century. As a foreign conquest dynasty, ruled by a relatively small hered
itary ethnic elite, the Manchu position in China was also inherently vulnerable. During the first British diplomatic mission to China in 1793, Lord George Macart
ney had concluded that Manchu rule was "the tyranny of a handful of Tartars [a
word the British sometimes used for Manchus] over more than three hundred
The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
millions of Chinese" and predicted the dynasty's inevitable collapse, perhaps even
during his own lifetime. 18 Yet the Qing Dynasty not only outlived Lord Macart
ney, it also survived all the mid-nineteenth-century wars and rebellions and even
experienced a burst of renewed vigor. This period of revitalization is known as the
Tongzhi Restoration, since it coincided with the Tongzhi reign period (1862-74)
of a young new emperor. 19
For a generation beginning in the 1860s, China experienced relative peace, and
the Qing Dynasty also began making some pragmatic adjustments to the dra
matically altered circumstances of the late-nineteenth-century world. Although,
when compared to the Meiji Restoration in contemporary Japan (1868-1912), the
Chinese Tongzhi Restoration was visibly less successful in transforming China into
a modern, Western-style nation-state and industrialized power, when compared
to almost everywhere else in the non-Western world, "China's Response to the
West" was actually relatively effective. 20 To the extent that China's response to
the challenge of the modern West was different from Japan's, this may have been
partly because the domestic threats to the dynasty in China initially absorbed more
attention. Unlike Japan, China also was not forced to emerge abruptly from two
centuries of isolation under irresistible foreign pressure, so the changes in China
were more gradual and imperceptible. Though their sense of self-assurance may
have been seriously misplaced, the Chinese long continued to feel relatively self
confident in their traditions.
Yet, unlike Japan, China's capital city was militarily occupied by hostile foreign
forces at the end of the second Opium War. Even as the court in Beijing was still
preoccupied with suppressing the massive Taiping Rebellion, it had little choice
but to make concessions to the new Western ways. When British and French
troops marched into Beijing in 1860, the emperor retreated to Manchuria, leaving
the emperor's brother, Prince Gong, to deal with the foreigners. Prince Gong
responded pragmatically.
In 1861, China's first ever government agency for handling foreign affairs (the
Zongli Yamen) was established. After defeat in two Opium Wars, the need for
military modernization was particularly obvious. Not content with merely pur
chasing advanced foreign weapons, under the slogan of "self-strengthening," new
Western-style arsenals and shipyards began to be constructed in China. Because
some Qing reformers concluded that modern Western military superiority was ulti
mately rooted in math and science, the study of those subjects - so different from
the preparation in the humanities for the traditional Confucian examinations -
began to be promoted in the 1860s. A College of Foreign Languages (the Tongwen guan) was opened in 1862 to teach
such unfamiliar languages as English, French, Russian, and German. Considerable
effort was invested into translating Western books, and in 1872, the first group of
120 Chinese students made the journey to Hartford, Connecticut, for a modern
Western education. This project came under conservative criticism, however, and
it was abandoned in 1881. As of 1879, there were only 163 students enrolled in
the College of Foreign Languages. For a country the size of China, these were not
impressive numbers.
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202 A History of East Asia
This emphasis on education, however, did reflect a glimmering recognition that "superficial imitation in concrete things is not so good as arousing intellectual
curiosity. The forges and hammers of the factories cannot be compared with the
apparatus of people's minds." Even the modernizing Chinese journalist who wrote
these words around 1870 still insisted, however, that "the Way of Confucius is the
Way of Man." 21
Even among reformers, many people long remained convinced
that modern Western technologies could merely be selectively adopted for their
utility (yang) in defending the essence (ti) oftraditional Chinese civilization. Most
ordinary Chinese people probably saw even less reason to abandon traditional ways.
The decision to dispatch China's first permanent diplomatic missions abroad
was not approved by the court until 1875, and when the first ambassador was
appointed to a European country, his boat was mobbed and burned. When rumors
spread in the port city of Tianjin in 1870 that nuns in the French Sisters of St.
Vincent de Paul orphanage were purchasing dying children for diabolical purposes (in fact, the sisters were taking in children, and even paying for them, to baptize
them and save their souls), a mob massacred ten nuns, two priests, the French
consul, and his chancellor. Many leading figures in the Tongzhi Restoration era,
moreover, were convinced that China's crisis was primarily a spiritual or moral one,
for which the best solution was a reinvigoration of traditional values and Confucian
education. Most people remained largely ignorant about the wider world beyond
China's borders. As late as 1895, one reformer complained that he could not find a decent map of the world for sale in Beijing. 22
Although modern industrial technologies were slowly introduced into China -
China's first steamship company was formed in 1872, for example, and a scatter
ing of cotton mills and other modern facilities were constructed, in addition to the
government's arsenals outside of the Western-dominated treaty ports, these long
remained little more than isolated experiments that were not always entirely suc
cessful. As late as 1933, the modern manufacturing, mining, transportation, and utilities sectors combined still produced only 7 percent of China's gross domestic
product. 23
China did not industrialize to any statistically significant extent.
This was not due to any lack of commercial drive or capitalistic enterprise. As one British official complained in 1865, "nine-tenths of the whole of the foreign
trade are under the sole control, ownership, and combination of the Chinese."
By the 1890s, it is estimated that Chinese people "owned about 40 percent of
the stock of Western firms in shipping, cotton spinning, and banking, and held
shares in roughly 60 percent of all foreign firms in China." Even in the British
colony of Hong Kong, by 1880, of the eighteen largest property tax payers, all but
one were Chinese. 24 Although the vast majority of the Chinese people remained
poor farmers, even agriculture was extensively market oriented, and the Chinese business classes were indisputably industrious.
Yet the abundant availability of cheap labor, the tendency of much production
to be performed as a sideline activity by individual households for just a little
extra cash, and the inherent risks and uncertainties of large-scale modern ventures reduced the private incentive to purchase costly labor-saving machinery or build
The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
large and expensive factories. Commercial law was underdeveloped, and all the
necessary surrounding infrastructure of a modern economy was still largely nonex
istent. The late Chinese Empire may have also carried laissez-faire well beyond the
point of diminishing returns, since the central government no longer maintained
roads, guaranteed much security, set uniform standards for weights and measures,
or even issued a standard national currency beyond small-denomination copper
cash (this in the land that had first invented paper money centuries earlier!). The
weakness of late imperial government, and decentralization of authority following
the Taiping Rebellion, also meant that there was little concerted mobilization of any
sense of national purpose or concerned awareness of China's strategic interest in
promoting deliberate industrialization, as was the case in Meiji Japan. And finally,
there was pure inertia: the forms of modern industry that had been pioneered
elsewhere simply took time to develop in China.
The Treaty Ports
The Treaty of Nanking that ended the first Opium War in 1842 opened five
Chinese ports to British trade. To these initial five, other ports (and similar treaties
with other countries) were soon added, and by the early twentieth century there
were ninety-two treaty ports, including both ocean and river ports and inland
railway junctions. All that such treaty port status really meant was that citizens of
the countries that had signed treaties with China were allowed to reside and do
business in those cities. In most of the treaty ports, moreover, the foreign presence
remained small. Some of the larger treaty ports did become major centers of
Western activity, however. Foremost among these was Shanghai, which quickly
became the largest and most modern city in China. Shanghai's abrupt rise from obscurity was mainly due to its location, midway
down the Chinese coast and near the mouth of the Yangzi River, which was the
principal premodern commercial artery reaching into the interior of China, and
also near the major tea- and silk-producing regions. It was a city built on trade, and
the British- or more precisely, Anglo-Indians, because they operated extensively
from bases in India and included a fair number of actual Indians - were the domi
nant presence. One 1881 estimate put Britain's share of China's total foreign trade
at 77.5 percent. 25 Shanghai became a thoroughly international city, however, with
residents from all around the world. English-, French-, German-, and Russian
language newspapers were published, and special schools were established for the
children of the foreigners.
The Shanghai International Settlement was originally intended exclusively for
foreign residence, but when the Taiping Rebellion threatened to overrun the area,
large numbers of Chinese people sought refuge inside the International Settle
ment. Thereafter Chinese people always remained the overwhelming majority of
its population. By the early twentieth century, more Chinese-language daily news
papers were being printed inside the International Settlement at Shanghai than
in all the rest of China combined. 26 Yet the International Settlement remained a
foreign concession, a kind of autonomous merchant republic that was inside China
203
204 A History of East Asia
~ International settlement
French concession
Old Chinese city
Yellow Sea
Hangzhou Bay
Map 11. Shanghai and Vicinity, ca. 1930
but not under Chinese control. Some twenty-seven hundred of the wealthiest for
eign property tax payers annually elected a nine-member municipal council that
governed the International Settlement. In addition, there was a separate French
Concession, under direct French administration. Only the suburbs and the old city were under Chinese jurisdiction.
The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
Modern Shanghai became one of the great cities of the world. By the end of
the nineteenth century, the International Settlement in Shanghai boasted paved
roads, streetlights, running water, telephones, and electricity. The mansions of
the great foreign taipans (a regional slang expression meaning "big bosses") lined
Bubbling Well Road with their tennis courts and gardens. Western entertainments
included the club, amateur theater, golf, horse racing, and cricket. If wealthy
foreigners lived comfortably in Shanghai, moreover, Shanghai was also a magnet
for ambitious Chinese, who were attracted by the promise of security and economic
opportunity. By about 1870, some ofthe Chinese agents offoreign businesses were
already beginning to invest in their own modern enterprises, forming the nucleus
of an emerging modern Chinese business class.
Yet Shanghai's modern success had an unmistakably dark underside. Shang
hai "was literally built on the opium trade," and by the early twentieth century,
there were some eighty opium shops and fifteen hundred opium dens inside the
city. 27 Shanghai's somewhat shady reputation was notorious. For a time in the early
twentieth century, the leading gangster in the French Concession was simultane
ously also chief superintendent of the Chinese police squad. Continued foreign
administration of the International Settlement and French Concession was also a
potentially explosive affront to the growing sense of Chinese nationalism. The first
Chinese member of the Shanghai Municipal Council was not seated until 1928.
The Boxer Rebellion (1898-1900)
The Tongzhi emperor died young in 187 4, providing his mother, the Empress
Dowager Cixi (1835-1908), with an opportunity to place yet another pliable minor,
this time her nephew, the Guangxu Emperor (r. 1875-1908), on the throne. As
the real power behind the throne, this empress dowager balanced conservative
and reformist factions against each other, with her chief concern being simply the
preservation ofher dynasty (see Figure 7.2). Despite the steps that had been taken
toward "self-strengthening" during the Tongzhi Restoration, the Qing Dynasty was
militarily humiliated when it became embroiled in a war with Japan, over Korea,
in 1894-1895 - even though, on paper, the Chinese army was nearly six times the
size of the Japanese army, and the Chinese navy had twice as many ships. The
indemnity that China was forced to pay Japan as a result of its defeat was equal
to 15 percent of Japan's total gross national product in that year, and this massive
transfer of financial spoils then helped underwrite Japan's further industrialization.
In China, the defeat came as a great shock.
The war with Japan severed China's ancient tributary relationship with Korea,
transferred the island of Taiwan from the Chinese to the Japanese empire, and
initially threatened to make further inroads into China's northeastern territories.
Although Russia, France, and Germany intervened to prevent that from happening,
just three years later, these very same Western great powers themselves began
extracting leaseholds from Chinese soil. In 1898, Russia began building a naval
base, called Port Arthur, at the tip ofLiaodong peninsula in Manchuria. Germany
acquired the port of Qingdao on the Shandong peninsula, France leased a harbor
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206 A History of East Asia
Figure 7.2. The Qing Dynasty Empress Dowager Cixi with foreign envoys' wives, 1903- 1905. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sadder Gallery Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.: Negative# SC-GR 249.
in far south China, and Britain leased a port in Shandong (Weihaiwei) and signed a ninety-nine-year lease on the New Territories surrounding Hong Kong. The
Russians began constructing railways across Manchuria, and despite Shanghai's undisputed preeminence among the treaty ports, the city in China that soon had
both the largest total number and the highest percentage of resident foreigners
became Harbin, which was founded in 1898 as a Russian railway town in the very
center of Manchuria. 28 At its peak, more than half of Harbin's population was Russian, and it boasted a Russian university, schools, courts, and churches.
Alarmed by these concessions, and also by the extension of even larger, more
nebulous foreign "spheres of influence" into the interior of China, the youthful
Guangxu Emperor was emboldened to take radical action and embarked on the
so-called one hundred days of reform in 1898. As the name implies, however, these
reforms quickly proved abortive. Conservatives were horrified, and the empress
dowager staged a palace coup, placed the emperor under house arrest in the rebuilt
Summer Palace, executed six reformers and drove others into exile, and declared herself regent.
In the next year, 1899, north China began to suffer from a severe drought. A mysterious religious society called the Yihequan (Boxers United in Righteousness,
or simply Boxers) provided an explanation: the alien religion of Christianity was
causing the people to abandon their traditional gods, and in retribution, the gods were withholding the life-giving rain. This Boxer movement emerged from the
The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
variety of religious and martial arts self-defense groups that were widespread in
the Chinese countryside. Many Boxers apparently were quite young boys. As the
senior U.S. diplomat in Beijing explained to the Secretary of State in 1900, "a
number of teachers go through the country, gather together the idle young men
at the various villages and organize them into companies and pretend if they will,
under their direction, go through certain gymnastic movements and repeat certain
incantations, that they will become impervious to all weapons and nothing can
harm them. "29
Though the Boxers were anti-Christian and antiforeign, they were at least poten
tially also anti-Manchu and anti-Qing. Conservatives at the Qing court in Beijing
were sympathetic, though, and on June 21, 1900, Empress Dowager Cixi actually
issued a sweeping declaration of war against foreigners in China. The Legation
Quarter in Beijing was besieged, as was the foreign community in the important
northern port city of Tianjin, which at the time contained some nine hundred
foreign civilians, including the future American president Herbert Hoover. Coop
eration between the Boxers and regular imperial officials was poor, however, and
most Qing officials, including those in the entire south of China, simply chose
not to participate. Ironically, in view of their antiforeignism, the Boxers were
generally less active in areas where the Western presence was strongest. Most
of the relatively small number of foreign deaths (a much larger number of Chinese
Christian converts were killed) were in remote northwestern Shanxi Province and
Inner Mongolia. In response to this Boxer uprising, in August 1900, a multina
tional army marched into Beijing and rescued the foreign community there (see
Figure 7 .3). The Boxers were crushed, and a so-called Boxer Protocol was imposed
on the Qing Dynasty, which included the payment of an indemnity equal to nearly
twice the annual tax revenue of the dynasty. In the aftermath, even the empress
dowager belatedly recognized the need for Western-style reforms, and with the
turn into the twentieth century, the Qing Dynasty finally embarked on a conscious
course of rapid modernization.
At the start of the nineteenth century, Korea's only foreign contacts were with Qing
Dynasty China and Tokugawa Japan. Choson Korea was a self-acknowledged
tributary of China. This meant that the Korean kings were expected to use the
Chinese calendar and seek confirmation of their enthronement from the Chinese
emperor, who also issued approximately annual proclamations to Korea. Over the
course of the Qing Dynasty, Seoul sent an average of nearly three embassies each
year to Beijing. The Koreans called this "serving the great" (sadae). However, the
Korean elite also retained deep feelings of loyalty to the previous Chinese Ming
Dynasty, which had come to Korea's aid during Hideyoshi's invasions, and felt
considerable disdain for the alien Manchu rulers of the Qing. The Qing Dynasty
sealed its border with Korea with a palisade, boat traffic between China and Korea
was forbidden (Korean fishermen were, in any case, confined to coastal waters),
and contact was limited only to official embassies. And although Korea may have
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208 A History of East Asia
Figure 7.3. The Ninth U.S. Infantry lined up before the imperial palace in Beijing, 1901, following the suppression of the Boxer Rebellion. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-68813.
been an acknowledged tributary of the Chinese empire, as one Chinese official
explained in 187 6, this really meant that except for the obligatory ceremonial tribute missions, Korea was entirely autonomous in both its domestic and foreign
affairs. 30
The peculiar ambiguity of Korea's relationship with China even became
a convenient excuse for rebuffing early Western approaches. When the British
attempted to advance trade proposals with Korea in 1845, it was explained that
this would be impossible because Korea "could not be opened to trade by China,
for it was not a part of China," and it also "could not open itself to trade, for it was not independent."31
Korea's relationship with Japan was also somewhat complicated. Following Hideyoshi's invasions and the subsequent establishment of the Tokugawa Shogu
nate in Japan, contact with Korea was restored by a trade agreement in 1609.
The Koreans viewed the Tokugawa shogun as equal in status to their own king,
and a small number of Korean embassies were sent to the shogun's castle in Edo, but no Japanese embassies traveled to Korea, and direct Korean contact with the
Shogunate ended in 1811. Instead of the shogun (or the Japanese emperor), it
was the daimyo (lord) of Tsushirna, a small Japanese island midway between the
The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
Figure 7.4. Kojong (1852-1919), emperor, and previously king, of Korea, ca. 1904. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-72798.
main islands and the Korean peninsula, who enjoyed a monopoly of Korean trade.
This lord of Tsushirna acted simultaneously as a vassal of the Japanese shogun
and as a kind of tributary of the Korean king, having been granted official titles
by the Korean court. Approximately a thousand persons from Tsushirna traveled
to Korea each year, but they were confined to a strictly monitored Japan House in
the single port of Pusan.
The 1860s were a decade of restorations everywhere in East Asia. China had
its Tongzhi Restoration, Japan had its Meiji Restoration, and there was also a sort
of royal restoration in Korea, as well. Certain rough parallels between these three
restorations may be explained by the fact that the ruling elites in each country
were imbued with many of the same Confucian ideas and confronting some of the
same challenges. All three countries also had youthful new monarchs in the 1860s. In 1864, King Kojong (r. 1864-1907) carne to the throne of Korea at the age
of twelve (see Figure 7 .4). The king's father, who was known as the Taewon'gun
(the "Lord of the Great Court"), was still alive (he had not himself ever been
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210 A History of East Asia
king), and this father acted as an informal regent from 1864 to 1873 on his son's behalf.
The Taewon'gun attempted to promote reforms that would strengthen the
Korean monarchy by reducing corruption, inefficiency, and yangban aristocratic privileges. At the same time, he also intensified the crackdown on Christianity
and hardened Korea's resolve in fending off the growing number of Western approaches. Korea's apparent successes in driving off a French fleet in 1866, and
then a U.S. naval squadron in 1871, encouraged Koreans to believe that this was
still militarily possible. If the Tokugawa Shogunate in Japan reacted to news of the
Opium War in China by concluding that resistance to modern Western military power would be futile, the Taewon'gun in Korea drew the opposite conclusion:
the way to avoid humiliation was· to stand firm and resolutely reject all foreign demands for trade.
After the Meiji Restoration of imperial rule in Japan in 1868, and the disso
lution of the Tokugawa Shogunate, Japan's new Western-style Imperial Foreign
Office officially assumed jurisdiction over Korean relations from the daimyi5 of
Tsushima in 1871. The Korean government, however, refused to accept these
changes. Among other things, the Koreans objected to Japanese officials now
dressing in Western-style clothing, but most especially, the Koreans refused to
acknowledge the position of the Japanese emperor. This was because the Japanese
imperial title was equal in rank to the Chinese, and as a tributary of China, the
Koreans could not recognize another emperor. While, at first glance, this may
seem absurdly obscurantist, in fact, recognition of the Japanese emperor would
have implied Japanese superiority over the lower-ranking Korean king. Indeed,
many of Japan's Meiji Restoration leaders actively hoped that the restoration of
imperial rule in Japan would also bring a "restoration" of what they believed to have been Korea's ancient (but mythical) subordination to Japan.
Korea's refusal to recognize the imperial government in Japan was regarded as
an outrage by many patriotic Japanese and provoked debate over the desirabil
ity of immediate war with Korea. Although cooler heads prevailed, in 1875, a Japanese navy warship engaged in surveying off the coast of Korea's Kanghwa
Island attempted to put a small boat ashore for fresh water. Korean shore batteries
fired some shots, which may have been intended only as warnings, and the Japanese
returned fire and landed troops. In 1876, Japan further signaled the firmness of its intentions by dispatching three warships, four transports, and eight hundred
soldiers to Korea. King Kojong had, meanwhile, begun to rule in his own name,
ending the regency of the Taewon'gun in 1873. King Kojong was less resolute in
his opposition to all foreign contacts than the Taewon'gun had been, and under the
looming threat of a Japanese invasion, and acting under Chinese advice, in 1876,
Korea signed a modern Western-style treaty (the Treaty of Kanghwa) with Japan.
This treaty formally declared Korea to be an independent country (supposedly clarifying its relationship with China) and granted Japan various treaty port-style concessions.
While Korean conservatives looked to China to balance the growing Japanese influence, some Korean modernizers aligned themselves with Meiji Japan. In 1884,
The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
a handful of Korean reformers plotted a coup, in consultation with the Japanese
minister in Seoul. On December 4, during a banquet celebrating the opening of
a modern post office, the conspirators struck. Seven Korean officials were assassi
nated, and guards from the Japanese legation took the Korean king and queen into
"protective" custody. A new Korean government was proclaimed, and moderniz
ing reforms were outlined. Chinese troops counterattacked the palace immediately,
however, regaining custody of the king. The result of this failed coup, which only
lasted two days, was to tarnish the reputations of both the reform and the pro
Japanese positions.
The Qing Dynasty in China, meanwhile, which supported certain self
strengthening modernizing efforts in Korea and had actually negotiated modern
treaties on Korea's behalf with the United States, Great Britain, and Germany in
1882, had by this time broken with its traditional posture of noninterference and
was now actively intervening in Korea. In 1885, the Qing appointed a resident
commissioner to Korea (a man named Yuan Shikai, who would later become the
first official president of the Republic of China). The tensions inevitably resulting
from the conflicting Chinese and Japanese ambitions in Korea were temporarily
cooled by an agreement in 1885 that both China and Japan would withdraw their
troops. This uneasy peace was brought to an abrupt end, however, by a religiously
inspired Korean rebellion in 1894.
In the 1850s, a Korean named Ch'oe Che-u (1824-1864), who had been ineligi
ble to take the Korean civil service examinations because his mother had remarried,
received what he claimed was a revelation from the Lord of Heaven. This inspired
him to formulate a new religion, which was something of an eclectic mixture of
traditional East Asian ideas and was called Tonghak (Eastern Learning), in con
scious opposition to the alien ideas of the West. Although Ch'oe was executed in
1864, Tonghak beliefs continued to simmer in the Korean countryside. In 1894, a
local Tonghak uprising swept across southwest Korea, fueled by popular discontent
with heavy taxes and high interest rates. This became the most massive rebellion
in recorded Korean history. An anxious Korean king asked China for military
assistance, and the Qing Dynasty responded by sending a small detachment of
soldiers. Japan countered by deploying a much larger force of its own. Although
the Korean authorities, alarmed by the possibilities unleashed by this dual foreign
intervention, quickly offered concessions to the Tonghak rebels, who agreed to lay
down their arms, the Japanese troops remained. On July 23, a Japanese infantry
regiment seized the Korean palace. On August 1, war was declared between China
and Japan.
Over the following nine months, the Japanese army easily expelled Chinese
troops from Korea, captured territory in Manchuria, and even gained a foothold
in coastal China proper. Qing Dynasty Chinese forces proved to be badly led,
undermined by corruption, and split by faction and regionalism. A substantial
portion of the Chinese navy actually refused to participate in a war they consid
ered beyond their concern. Japan won this Sino-Japanese War (1894-1895) with
surprising ease. The war was much celebrated in the modern Japanese press but
came as a tremendous shock, and a wake-up call, to China. Under the terms of
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212 A History of East Asia
the resulting Treaty of Shimonoseki that ended the hostilities, China was forced
to transfer the island of Taiwan to Japan (as well, initially, as a strategic penin
sula in southern Manchuria, which intervention by Russia, France, and Germany
promptly compelled Japan to return) and to pay Japan an enormous indemnity
equal to roughly 15 percent of Japan's total gross national product. In addition,
China formally acknowledged the independence of Korea, which in practice meant
the ascent of Japanese interests there.
During the Sino-Japanese War, Japan moved quickly to assume a dominant
position in Korea, extracting the right to begin constructing railways on the penin
sula and to provide advisors for Korean domestic affairs. Even while the war with
China was still raging, pro-Japanese Korean officials reorganized the government,
introducing sweeping modernizing reforms (known as the Kabo reforms) in 1894-
1895. The Chinese calendar was dropped from official Korean documents and a
new Korean calendar substituted in its place. The Confucian civil service examina
tion system was abolished, as was the institution of slavery and formal distinctions
between the aristocratic yangban classes and commoners. Western-style clothing
and hairstyles were forcibly promoted. Altogether, there were 208 new laws, cul
minating in a new constitution in January 1895.
Despite Japanese victory in the war with China, Korea once again temporarily
eluded reduction to an outright Japanese protectorate, partly because of the obvious
contradiction inherent in the Japanese policy of pursuing domination in Korea
while simultaneously proclaiming a goal of promoting Korean "independence"
from the archaic Chinese tributary system. The order that all Korean men cut
their topknots and adopt Western hairstyles provoked great popular discontent,
and when, in October 1895, a Japanese-backed coup assassinated the Korean
queen and restored pro-Japanese officials to power, this assassination outraged
and horrified Korean opinion. In February 1896, King Kojong, seeking to escape
Japanese domination, allowed himself to be smuggled out of the palace by Russian
marines in the palanquin of a court lady. The king took refuge in the Russian
legation, where he spent the next year. 32
By playing off Russian interests against the Japanese, as he had previously used
the Chinese against the Japanese, King Kojong was able to retain a measure of
Korean independence. In 1897, the king returned to his palace and formally
assumed the supreme East Asian title of"emperor" (in Korean, Hwangje), asserting
his sovereign equality with both the Chinese (Manchu) and Japanese monarchs.
Over the next few years, modern army units were organized, postage stamps issued,
and streetcars and electric lights introduced into the capital (see Figure 7 .5), and in
1902, the newly renamed Korean Empire even acquired a Western-style national
anthem. The Christian mission to Korea, meanwhile, was on its way to becom
ing the most successful in East Asia, and modern Western-style education began
exerting a profound effect on Korean thought. A newspaper published by the
Independence Club beginning in 1897 was the first to be published entirely in
the Korean alphabet (han'gul), without any Chinese characters. A new spirit of
modern Korean nationalism began to glimmer, and the hope kindled that Korea
might successfully be transformed into an independent, modern, Western-style
The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
Figure 7.5. The West Gate of Seoul, Korea, ca. 1904, showing an American electric tramway.
Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-72552.
nation-state. 33 The degree of material modernization remained limited, however
(see Figure 7 .6), and in the early twentieth century, the dream of Korean indepen
dence would prove to be a false hope, as the lengthening shadow of the Japanese
Empire stretched across the land.
In the early nineteenth century, Western contact with Japan was limited to an
annual average of only one Dutch ship. In Japan, the Dutch were confined to
the single port of Nagasaki, where they were effectively quarantined on a small
island, surrounded by a high fence topped with iron spikes, and linked to shore by one bridge. Yet, even so, Japan's isolation should not be exaggerated. After 1716,
official permission resumed for the study of Western books, with a particular
interest in books concerning medical and military science. This became a special
ized form of learning known as Dutch studies (Rangaku). In 1811, the Tokugawa
213
214 A History of East Asia
Figure 7.6. Korean women with a sedan chair, 1919. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62- 72675.
Shogunate itself set up an agency to translate selected Dutch works. By the 1840s
and 1850s, even before the arrival of Commodore Perry, a few domains were
already independently constructing foundries for the casting of modern Western style munitions.
Commodore Perry and the Opening of Japan (1853-1854)
Because Japan appeared to be a poor country, unlikely to buy significant amounts
of any European goods, and having no known local products that were particularly
in demand in Europe- and because the Japanese islands were also quite remote and out of the way for European shipping coming from the west- Great Britain and
the other major European powers had been relatively content to leave Japan in its self-imposed isolation. Two of the newly emerging modern great powers, however,
did have special interests in the Pacific Ocean that made opening relations with
Japan seem more crucial: the United States and Russia. In the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, the Russians had made repeated efforts to establish relations
The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
with Japan, without success. The United States, meanwhile, had expanded to the
shores of the Pacific with the acquisition of California in 1848. American clipper
ships, on the voyage from California to Guangzhou (Canton), often came within
sight of the Japanese islands, and American whalers frequently found themselves
in Japanese waters by the 1840s. In the age of sail, shipwrecks were an all too
common occurrence, and the U.S. government was concerned about the treatment
of American sailors shipwrecked in Japan. As steam navigation was increasing in
importance, tl1ere was also a growing need for widespread and strategically located
coaling stations. And, of course, there was always the possibility of trade.
At least twenty-five times before the arrival of Commodore Perry's squadron,
U.S. ships, either officially or privately, had attempted to establish contact with
Japan. In 1846, an official mission under the command of Commodore Biddle
had failed - according to the interpretation prevailing in Washington, because
Commodore Biddle had not made a forceful enough impression on the Japanese.
When the decision was reached to send another expedition in 1851, therefore, its
commander, Commodore Mathew Calbraith Perry (1794-1858), was encouraged
to be firm.
Commodore Perry gathered what little information he could find about a Japan that was still largely unknown to the West and approached cautiously. In July
1853, Perry arrived in what is now called Tokyo Bay with four ominous black
warships, including the powerful steam frigates Mississippi and Susquehanna. Perry's
flagship, the Mississippi, mounted eight large eight-inch guns and two even larger
ten-inch cannons. Precisely because Japanese officials were not entirely ignorant
of developments in the outside world and were well aware of China's humiliating
defeat in the Opium War in 1842, these big guns left a sobering impression. On
arrival, Commodore Perry remained in his cabin and refused to meet with junior
Japanese officials, demanding instead that he be allowed to deliver a letter from
President Fillmore into the hands of senior officials ashore.
Because the Americans were unclear about the institution of the Japanese mil
itary overlord known as the shogun, the president's letter was addressed to the
Japanese emperor. In fact, however, a young shogunal chief councilor handled the
negotiations. The shogun himself, who was on his deathbed, was not even told
of the American arrival, and the emperor was quite powerless. Perry's men went
ashore with loaded weapons, while the Japanese concealed armed samurai under
the floorboards of the reception room, in mutual anticipation of trouble. An Amer
ican missionary who had learned a few words of Japanese while living in China
had been brought along to serve as interpreter, but most negotiations were actually
conducted in the Dutch language. After delivering his letter stating the American
demands, Commodore Perry departed, promising to return again next spring with
an even larger squadron to receive the Japanese answer.
Armed resistance appeared futile, but yielding to foreign demands would mean
a great loss of shogunal prestige, so the shogunal authorities took the unprece
dented step of asking for daimyo advice. In the mid-nineteenth century, Japan was
still divided into some 27 6 daimyo domains, each of which, despite acknowledging
Tokugawa overlordship, retained its own independent government, armed forces,
215
216 A History of East Asia
and sometimes even currency. Since most daimyo now urged the Shogunate not
to give in to foreign demands, but also cautioned against war, the act of seeking
daimyo advice only made the Shogunate's position even more awkward. Finan
cially, the Tokugawa treasury was empty. Shogunal authority had also recently
been threatened by the economic revival of some of the more powerful outlying
domains. Although most daimyo, like the Shogunate itself, were deeply in debt, a
few key domains had succeeded in restructuring their economies and putting their finances on relatively sound footing. These included, in particular, the domains
of Choshu, at the western tip of Japan's main island, and Satsuma, in southern
Kyiishu. 34
Satsuma, for example, in part because of its southern climate, had achieved something of a monopoly on sugar production in Japan.
In February 1854, Commodore Perry returned with ten warships, and the Toku gawa Shogunate abruptly yielded, signing a treaty (the Treaty of Kanagawa) with
the United States. Before long, other countries had also signed treaties, and a
treaty port system similar to what had previously been established in China was
now extended to Japan as well. Foreign residence in Edo (the Shogun's castle
town, modern Tokyo) was permitted beginning in 1859. Nagasaki, Yokohama,
Kobe, and other ports were opened, the standard treaty port privilege of extrater ritoriality (foreign exemption from local law) was conferred, and fixed low tax rates
on foreign imports were established. In the process, shogunal military power had
been exposed as hollow for everyone to see. Since shogunal authority had no real ideological basis for legitimacy apart from its military dominance, the Tokugawa position now became precarious.
The Meiji Restoration (1868)
In the eighteenth century, the school of National Learning, whose most famous
representative was Motoori Norinaga (I 730-1801), had revived an interest in
ancient native Japanese myths and literature, especially the imperial mythology
enshrined in the oldest Japanese history, the I<.ojiki. Tokugawa shogunal authority
had theoretically been justified from the beginning merely as a delegation of power
from the emperor, and with the Shogunate now demonstrating obvious weakness in
the face of foreign threats, the slogan "revere the emperor and expel the barbarians" (sonno-joi; more literally, "revere the king," since this was originally a four-character
Chinese expression traceable to commentaries to the preimperial era Analects of
Confucius) began to rally patriotic opposition both to the foreign concessions and,
at least implicitly, to the Tokugawa Shogunate itself, in the name of loyalty to the emperor.
Yoshida Shoin (1830-1859), a samurai from Choshu, had attempted to stow
away aboard one of Commodore Perry's ships to learn more about the mysterious
foreigners. He was caught, however, and placed under arrest. After his release,
he organized an influential patriotic school. Yoshida blamed the Shogunate for its failure to expel the foreigners and decided that the Tokugawa Shogunate must
be overthrown. He plotted to assassinate a shogunal emissary to the imperial
capital, Kyoto, in 1858, but was caught once again and this time beheaded. Yoshida
The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
became, however, a hero for many Japanese patriots. In 1860, furthermore, the
shogunal grand councilor actually was assassinated while entering Edo castle by
warriors from the domains of Mito and Satsuma. The years following the signing of the first foreign treaties were marked by
several outbursts of patriotic terrorism, as samurai vented their indignation through
individual acts ofviolence. Two Russian sailors were killed in 1859. The American
consul's Dutch interpreter was murdered in 1861. In 1862, the daimyo of Satsuma
delivered an imperial command to the shogun, demanding that the shogun report
to Kyoto in person to explain his concessions to the foreigners. As this daimyo was
returning from delivering the message, his procession encountered a small group
of British people on the road near Yokohama who failed to dismount in token of
respect for the daimyo. Outraged samurai attendants attacked the foreigners, killing
one Englishman and wounding two others. In 1863, the British legation in Edo
was burned by arsonists (including Ito Hirobumi, who would later become one of
Meiji Japan's leading statesmen). By 1863, extremists had gained control of the imperial court and compelled
the Shogunate to agree to set a date for the expulsion of all foreigners. This
was to be June 25, 1863. Although most of Japan failed to take any action on
that date, fortifications in the western domain of Choshu did begin firing on
passing ships. In retaliation, in 1864, a combined British, French, Dutch, and
American fleet stormed the forts and destroyed them. The previous year, in 1863,
a British squadron had also shelled the castle town in Satsuma, in retribution for
the earlier attack on Englishmen on the road near Yokohama. Tokugawa Japan's
defenselessness against modern firepower was exposed. Thereafter, attempts to expel the foreigners were swiftly abandoned as obviously
futile, and a new patriotic slogan began to replace "revere the Emperor and expel
the barbarians": "enrich the country and strengthen the army" (jukoku kyohei,
also a four-character expression originally dating from Warring States China). By
the late 1860s, the situation had changed from one of conflict between patriotic
Japanese and foreigners to one of competition between different groups of Japanese,
each often with its own sources of foreign assistance. The Shogunate, for example,
was leaning toward France, while the domains of Satsuma and Choshu were dealing
especially with the British.
In the meantime, the requirement of alternate attendance at the shogun's castle
in Edo had been effectively lifted in 1862, and daimyo families departed Edo for
their own domains. In 1864, a radical faction gained control in Choshu and began
promoting its agenda at the imperial court in Kyoto. When fighting in July reduced
much of Kyoto to ashes, the imperial court ordered the Shogunate to launch
a punitive expedition against Choshu. This was supported by other domains and
initially was moderately successful, but when a second campaign was begun against
the recalcitrant Choshu in 1866, this time, many other domains remained neutral.
A secret agreement was arranged for mutual support between Satsuma and Choshu in March, which brought together the two most powerful "outside" domains, and
a Shogunal attack on Choshu that month was militarily defeated. The Tokugawa
Shogunate was crumbling.
217
218 A History of East Asia
0
Domains Active in the Meiji Restoration ,"
A: Ch6shu B: Tosa C: Satsuma D: Hi zen
Map 12. Tokugawa Japan, ca. 1860
The death of the Shogun Iemochi in 1866 (at age twenty-one, apparently of beriberi) provided a suitable pretext for the Shogunate to call off its war with
Choshu, but soon thereafter, an order was issued in the name of the emperor
calling upon Choshu and Satsuma to actively assume the military offensive against the Tokugawa Shogunate. At this juncture, samurai from the domain ofTosa (on the smaller southern island of Shikoku) prevailed on the new shogun, who had
been personally reluctant to accept the title in the first place, to resign. Amaz ingly, the shogun did exactly that, petitioning the emperor in November 1867
to accept a reversion of shogunal authority back to the imperial throne. The ex
shogun retained vast landholdings, however, and remained a powerful daimyi5.
Anti-Tokugawa forces were not satisfied, therefore, and on January 3, 1868, samu
rai, primarily from Satsuma, seized the imperial palace and proclaimed an imperial
The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
restoration. This is known to history as the Meiji Restoration, after the name of
the Meiji imperial reign period (1868-1912). Although the ex-shogun did resist
this coup d'etat, his army was defeated by imperial forces in four days of heavy
fighting. The ex-shogun soon surrendered and was generously treated by the vic
tors, eventually even receiving the highest rank in a newly created modern peerage.
In November, the young Meiji emperor departed the ancient capital, Kyoto, in
western Japan and took up residence in the former shogun's castle in Edo, which now became known as Tokyo (Eastern Capital).
In theory, this was a restoration of the sole legitimate ancient Japanese impe
rial government after centuries of improper domination by military usurpers (the
shoguns), performed in the name of the quintessentially traditional Confucian
virtue of loyalty. In the early years of the Meiji Restoration, there was even some
actual revival of ancient court titles. The mid-ranking samurai who led this Meiji
Restoration, moreover, had for many years been indignant at the incompetence
of the few thousand hereditary families who monopolized Tokugawa wealth and
power and the correspondingly sweeping lack of career opportunities for the much
larger number of, often bitterly impoverished, lower-ranking samurai. In many
ways, the meritocratic ideals underlying this revolutionary change were as tradi
tionally Confucian as they were modern and Western. 35
At the same time, however, this was also a quite revolutionary break from the
past. The Meiji Charter Oath that was issued in the name of the emperor in
April 1868, which famously urged that "evil customs of the past shall be broken
off and ... Knowledge shall be sought throughout the world so as to strengthen
the foundations of imperial rule," provides what one historian has called "a per
fect example of this blending of tradition with intended change." New foreign
ideas were to be openly considered, but chiefly to buttress an allegedly primordial
Japanese imperial throne. 36 Another striking example of this process of blending
tradition with novelty is provided by the composition of Japan's modern national
anthem in the 1870s: by a German bandmaster, who set verses from the tenth
century Kokinshii to music. A modern Japanese nation-state was created that was
in many ways new, but popularly imagined as ancient. Into modern Japan's fron
tiers, also, certain peoples who had formerly often been viewed as foreign, such as
the Okinawans of the Ryukyii Islands in the south and the Ainu of the far north,
were reconceived now, not as foreign but as more pristine survivals of the ancient
Japanese. 37
Despite a patina of tradition, the first two decades of the Meiji reign period
were a time of considerable enthusiasm for foreign Western ideas, which came
to be flatly labeled "civilization and enlightenment" (bunmei kaika). Abandoning
the use of Chinese characters in writing was seriously debated, and the possibility
of moving to a Western-style alphabet was considered. One future minister of
education even suggested, in 1872-1873, replacing Japanese with English as the national language. In the end, although neither Chinese characters nor the native
Japanese kana syllabaries were abandoned (to say nothing of the Japanese language
itself), a new standard modern vernacular Japanese written national language did take shape by the end of the nineteenth century. 38
219
220 A History of East Asia
Among the most ardent popular Westernizers of the age was Fukuzawa Yiikichi
(1835-1901), who, in 1885, went so far as to editorialize that Japan should cul
turally "leave Asia" and distance itself from its more backward neighbors. "It is
better for us to leave the ranks of Asian nations and cast our lot with civilized
nations of the West," wrote Fukuzawa. 39 Fukuzawa Yiikichi had begun life as a
student of Dutch learning. In the 1860s, he visited Europe and the United States
and published a best-selling book based on his experiences called Conditions in the WBst in 1866.
Even Fukuzawa could be described as a vigorous Japanese nationalist, however,
and in a predictable reaction to some of the more extreme Westernizing initiatives,
conservative Japanese became incensed that the Meiji government was outdo
ing the old Tokugawa Shogunate in making concessions to the foreigners. Meiji
Restoration leaders sometimes, therefore, found themselves the targets of patriotic
attacks, among them that very same minister of education who had once proposed
abolishing the Japanese language and replacing it with English. He was stabbed to
death in 1889 because ofhis allegedly disrespectful behavior at the Imperial Grand Shrine in Ise. 40
Meiji Modernization
In the immediate aftermath of the Meiji Restoration, institutions were in consid
erable flux in Japan, shifting uncertainly from American to British, French, or
German models. As Fukuzawa Yiikichi described the Japan of the 1870s, "there
was a government but no nation." It would not be until the late 1880s that the
certainty of a (supposedly primordial) Japanese national, or more grandly, imperial
identity firmly gripped the popular consciousness. 41 Indeed, as of 1868, it was not
even obvious that the new government would survive. It was so closely associated
with the southwestern domains of Choshii and Satsuma, and to a lesser extent, also
Tosa and Hizen, that certain other domains in the northeast rebelled in July. The
rebellion was put down, but by what was still essentially a Choshii and Satsuma rather than a truly national army.
Although the four domains that had led the Meiji Restoration contained only
about 7 percent of the total Japanese population, as late as 1890, they still provided
some 30 percent of the central government's leaders and filled roughly half of all
the top positions. 42
Despite the Meiji slogan of "personal rule by the emperor,"
real power was wielded in the emperor's name by a handful of senior officials. A
narrow circle of some twenty individuals came to be known as the Meiji oligarchy.
As elder statesmen (genro), these same Meiji oligarchs continued to dominate
Japanese politics well into the twentieth century. This new Meiji government did
have the clear-sighted practical objective, however, of transforming Japan into a strong, modern, centralized nation-state.
In July 1869, all the daimyo were ordered to transfer their domains to the cen
tral imperial government. The former daimyo were initially well compensated with
substantial revenue and new government titles as local governors. In 1871, how
ever, these same governors were stripped, without advance notice, of those titles
The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
and forced to retire to Tokyo. The underlying regional uniformity that had already
emerged during the centuries of the Tokugawa Shogunate, and that had already
succeeded in imposing a degree of early modern bureaucratic centralization, made
the transition from aristocratic domains to a centralized system of administrative
prefectures a relatively smooth process. By 1871, the new imperial government
appeared stable enough that half of the leading oligarchs confidently embarked
on an extended tour of the West. While they were gone, however, a diplomatic
crisis emerged over Korea's refusal to recognize Japanese imperial titles. Several of
the Meiji leaders wanted to dispatch a punitive force against Korea immediately.
When a more cautious approach against Korea was finally adopted, the oligarchs
Saigo Takamori (1827-1877), Itagaki Taisuke (1837-1919), and others resigned
in protest in 1873.
Saigo, who had been one of the heroes of the Meiji Restoration, now retuned
to his old domain in Satsuma and became a leading figure representing samurai
class discontent. After the abolition of the daimyo domains in 1871, the central
government had assumed the responsibility for paying all samurai stipends. This
was an enormous financial obligation, however, which absorbed approximately
one-third of all government revenue. It was clearly unsustainable, and the payment
of samurai stipends was permanently suspended in 1876: converted into interest
bearing bonds. In that same year, the samurai privilege of wearing two swords
was also banned. One by one, all the special samurai privileges were abolished,
until none remained. In 1870, commoners had been granted surnames; in 1871,
commoners were permitted to ride horses, travel freely, and marry samurai; in
1873, a new conscription law obligated commoners to serve in the army. Whereas
commoners had once been actively forbidden to bear arms, they were now required
to do so, in the service of the new Japanese nation-state.
The 1876 ban on carrying two swords, the government's failure to avenge the
alleged Korean insults, and general unease at the rapid pace of change and West
ernization fed samurai discontent, especially in the very domains that had led
the Meiji Restoration, where samurai expectations were often most acutely disap
pointed. In Satsuma, neither the ban on carrying swords nor the elimination of
samurai stipends was enforced. Notable samurai rebellions occurred in Saga in
1874, in Choshii in 1876, and finally in Satsuma in 1877, this one led by Saigo
Takamori himself.
A year earlier, the central imperial government, then under the domination
of the oligarch Okubo Toshimichi (1830-1878) himself originally a samurai
from Satsuma had sent agents to disarm the arsenal in Satsuma's castle town.
Captured by local men, one agent "confessed" under torture that he had been sent
to assassinate Saigo. Declaring that he had questions to ask the central government,
in February 1877, Saigo led a large force of fifteen thousand samurai on a march
toward Tokyo. Though they never got off the southwestern island of Kyiishii,
and their samurai army, with its lingering regional loyalties, ultimately proved
no match for the modern conscript army of the central government, it still took
six months for the full weight of the imperial army to put this samurai rebellion
down. In September, his cause a failure, Saigo Takamori committed ritual suicide
221
222 A History of East Asia
(seppuku). In a sense, the entire samurai class died with him. Although the Meiji
oligarch Okubo was himself then assassinated the very next year, in 1878, the old
warrior class never again posed a serious threat to the new Meiji order.
The Meiji Constitution
Like Saigo Takamori, the oligarch Itagaki Taisuke had also resigned from the gov
ernment over the dispute involving Korea, but unlike Saigo, he adopted a dissident
approach based not on samurai nostalgia but on modern Western liberal political
ideals. Itagaki began to lobby for the creation of a representative government assem
bly. This was the origin of what is known as the popular rights movement. In the
decade of the 1870s, no fewer than 130 petitions were submitted to the emperor,
calling for the establishment of representative self-government. Self-government
seemed to be one of those irresistible Western trends of the times, and even the
Meiji government itself encouraged some degree of modern popular participation.
The oligarch Okubo Toshimichi took a conservative stance, however. Under his
watch, a press law in 1875 imposed advance censorship and restricted political
criticism.
After the assassination of Okubo in 1878, the Meiji government made some con
cessions, and it soon publicly pledged to put a written Western-style constitution
and an elected national assembly in place by 1890. In anticipation of this, the first
Japanese political parties began to form in 1881. Because the trend toward repre
sentative government seemed unstoppable, the Meiji oligarchs concluded that their
best course of action was to quickly adopt an acceptably conservative version of a
modern constitution rather than be outrun by the pace of liberal expectations from
outside the government. In 1881, a list of minimally acceptable conditions was
drawn up, which included the stipulations that the new constitution be conferred
from above as a gift from the emperor and that if the elected assembly refused
to pass a proposed budget, the last year's budget would take effect automatically
(thereby, if not denying, at least limiting, the power of the purse to the elected
legislature).
In 1882, the oligarch Ito Hirobumi (1841-1909) went to Europe to study various
modern constitutional models directly (see Figure 7.7). Although Ito did stop in
Britain, and an associate went to France, Ito spent seven months in Germany,
and the Meiji oligarchs appear to have, from the beginning, favored the German
model. This was the newly unified imperial Germany of the kaiser and the Iron
Chancellor, Prince Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898), which, although it made
significant concessions to representative self-government, also retained firm central
imperial control. Returning to Japan, Ito Hirobumi was then placed in charge of
drafting the new Meiji constitution.
As a further countermeasure against suspiciously liberal Anglo-American demo
cratic ideas, German influences were now combined with ancient East Asian tradi
tion in the formation of a new Japanese peerage in 1884, which was designed to fill
a hereditary Upper House that would balance the popularly elected lower cham
ber of the future legislature. The legal framework was German, but most of the
The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
Figure 7.7. Ito Hirobumi (1841-1909), the first prime minister of Japan. National Diet
Library Web site.
members of this newly created nobility were former Tokugawa daimyo or old court
nobles, and the titles for this new aristocracy were actually drawn from the ancient Zhou Dynasty Chinese classics.43 A cabinet, or modern Western-style executive
branch, was established in 1885 (before the election of the first legislature), with
the idea that it might function as a "transcendent" cabinet, answerable only to the
emperor rather than to the legislature. Ito Hirobumi became Japan's first prime
minister. Meanwhile, under tight secrecy, and in consultation with a German legal advisor
on the faculty of Tokyo Imperial University, Ito and his assistants produced a draft
constitution. On February 11, 1889, this new Meiji constitution was formally pro mulgated. On the German model, it was a gift from the emperor to the people, with
the emperor remaining "above the clouds." In addition, the army and navy minis
ters were answerable to the emperor alone and independent of civilian control. The
awesome potency of the imperial symbol was, furthermore, deliberately renewed
and strengthened. In 1888, an engraving of the Meiji emperor was distributed to
all public schools and official buildings, making the emperor's image a ubiquitous
presence throughout the new Japanese nation. In 1890, an "Imperial Rescript on
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224 A History of East Asia
Education" was issued, urging students that "should any emergency arise, offer
yourselves courageously to the state; and thus guard and maintain the prosperity
of our Imperial throne, coeval with heaven and earth. "44 Japanese schoolchildren
were obliged to bow to the imperial portrait and hear the "Rescript on Education"
recited regularly. Once again, this was a blending of allegedly ancient Japanese
traditions with the forms of modern, Western-style nation building.
The first election for the Lower House of the new national legislature (called
the Diet) was held in 1890. Since the franchise was limited to relatively wealthy
taxpayers, only a little over 1 percent of the population were actually eligible to
vote, and the government continued in practice to be largely directed by the same
handful of Meiji oligarchs, in the name of the emperor. Still, Japan had become
the first nation east of Suez to have a modern, Western-style constitution and an
elected legislature. This was a conservative constitutional order that would soon be
put to the service of expansive imperialism, but it was nonetheless an unmistakable
emblem of modernity. In addition, Japan was also on its way to becoming the first
non-Western society in the world to successfully industrialize.
Industrialization
One of the major reasons for nineteenth-century Japanese modernizing success was
the sharp clarity with which the Meiji oligarchs perceived the strategic urgency of
the situation and moved swiftly to implement necessary, even if sometimes painful,
measures to achieve their overarching goals of national security. Though their most
pressing concern was to duplicate modern Western military power, there was also
a quick recognition that the secret underlying modern military power was modern
economic productivity. The Meiji government managed to put its new national
economy on a sound footing, in part by keeping foreign debt minimal and by
eliminating the payment of samurai stipends. In 1871-1872, a new standardized
currency system, based on the yen, was established, and a modern banking system
modeled on the U.S. Federal Reserve was implemented. In 1882, a central Bank
of Japan was established. Initially, some Japanese leaders were under the impression that trade and com
merce alone were the source of modern national wealth, but by the 1870s, the
Meiji oligarchs had realized that mechanized industrialization was the magic key
that unlocked the secrets to exponential increases in productivity. The Meiji elite
therefore determined that rapid industrialization would be necessary, not only
for strategic military considerations but also to prevent Japan from slipping into
poverty and becoming a mere supplier of raw materials for industrialized foreign
countries. Early attempts to stimulate private investment in modern industry were
not particularly successful, however, in part because of the aversion to risky new
business ventures by conservative old merchant houses, and in part because the
amount of capital necessary for industrialization was simply too large. The Meiji
government was furthermore unable to protect domestic industrial development
by placing a wall of high taxes on competing foreign imports because import
taxes had been fixed at low rates by treaty. The Meiji government resolved to
The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
Figure 7.8. The model industrial silk-reeling factory that was built in 1872 in Tomioka, Gunma Prefecture, Japan (woodblock print). Snark/Art Resource, New York.
compensate, therefore, by itself deliberately promoting domestic industrialization.
The Tomioka silk-reeling factory, for example, was built by the government in 1872, both to provide employment and to encourage private mechanization by
demonstrating how (see Figure 7.8). The first modern industries in Japan were
mostly built and administered by the government itself. 45
A substantial focus of this government-led industrialization, moreover, was
strategic and military. The modern arms industry was initially owned and operated
by the government, and though private light textile manufacturing soon prospered
and became more important in foreign trade, generating much critically needed
foreign exchange, even some of the technology used in private textile production
225
226 A History of East Asia
derived from spinoffs of military applications. In the 1880s, for example, an abso
lute majority of private cotton textile mills in Japan were powered by steam engines
made by a government arsenal. "Virtually every major firm in Japan benefited from
the Meiji military industrial program ... including Toshiba and Nikon, which were
created directly by and for the Meiji military. "46
On the other hand, however, Japan's success in industrialization also owed much to the skills, attitudes, and commercial practices that had already developed indige
nously in late Tokugawa times, and the actual takeoff of the industrial economy was
led by small-scale private textile manufacturing.47 And if government initiative was
critical for technological borrowing and the early development of large-scale (and
initially often unprofitable) heavy industry, the government's resources themselves
were also far from infinite. Because taxes on imports were fixed at relatively low
rates by treaty, and the Meiji oligarchs were deeply concerned to avoid incurring
any debilitating foreign debt, the principal source of government funding was the
land tax, which, in the 1870s, contributed some 90 percent of all government
revenue.
The serious economic constraints facing the Meiji government led to a program
of enforced austerity in the 1880s, which imposed much hardship but also may
have strengthened the overall economy. By the mid-1880s, the government was
financially solvent. Also in the 1880s, the government deliberately began to transfer
its infant industrial plant into private hands. The government-built silk mill at
Tomioka, for example, was sold to the private firm Mitsui in 1893.
Since the early Meiji "government could not afford the luxury of a gestation
period during which the shipping industry might build a 'model' organization"
naturally by itself, after several failed experiments, the government moved toward
a policy of official support for a single favored private firm. In the shipping industry,
that favored firm was Mitsubishi. Mitsubishi had begun under another name in
1866 as an industrial promotion agency belonging to the domain afTosa, but it was
subsequently reorganized into a private firm and, in 1873, renamed Mitsubishi. After Mitsubishi successfully provided military transport during the government's
punitive expedition against the aborigines in Taiwan in 187 4, the government
gave thirteen large steamships to Mitsubishi and began providing it with an annual
government subsidy. Among other things, "the financial reports made necessary by
the subsidy led to Mitsubishi's rapid adoption ofWestern accounting techniques."
Mitsubishi developed and prospered, with government backing, to meet the Meiji
government's strategic needs in providing transport in war and also in competing
with the West, which was perceived as an urgent national concern due to the fact
that Western shipping long continued to dominate Japan's foreign trade. 48
Mitsubishi became one of the distinctively Japanese conglomerates called
zaibatsu, which dominated the modern sector of the Japanese economy in the
years between the Meiji Restoration and World War II. The word zaibatsu might
loosely be translated as "wealth lord," in an expression parallel to gunbatsu, or
"warlord." There were perhaps a score of zaibatsu in pre-World War II Japan, but
by every reckoning, there were four particularly great zaibatsu: Mitsubishi, Sumit
omo, Yasuda, and Mitsui. Although Mitsui dated from early Tokugawa times, the
The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
zaibatsu as a whole were a significantly new kind of business enterprise. In part,
they merely reflected a general trend toward larger businesses in the industrialized
world of the later nineteenth century. Mergers, monopolies, trusts, syndicates, and
cartels seemed to be the order of the day: in 1880, for example, Standard Oil con
trolled some 90 percent of all U.S. oil refining. The Japanese zaibatsu, however,
rarely monopolized a given market sector, but instead duplicated and competed with each other through extensive diversification into a wide range of endeavors,
typically including manufacturing, banking, and trade. Japan became the first non-Western society to successfully industrialize, but the
takeoff of Japan's modern economy was far from instantaneous. In the 1880s,
Japan's foreign trade was still only about a quarter of the volume of China's,
and much of Japan's foreign trade was still controlled by Western merchants. As
late as 1900, an approximately equal percentage of China's population (to say
nothing of absolute numbers) was employed in industry as in Japan. 49
Traditional
style enterprises continued to produce most of the commodities for the Japanese
domestic market. As late as 1898, 82 percent of the Japanese population was still rural, and Japan remained a largely poor country. Despite the Meiji Restoration, for
most people, lifestyles did not change all that dramatically in the second half of the
nineteenth century. The rickshaw, a two-wheeled vehicle pulled by human muscle power, far from being an ancient East Asian tradition, was actually not invented
until after the Meiji Restoration in Japan, and the emperor did not enjoy his first ride in a horse-drawn carriage until 1871. (Roads had been poorly developed in
premodern Japan, and wheeled vehicles were rare.) The first short railway line,
linking Tokyo to nearby Yokohama, did not commence operations until 1872.
Electric light service in Tokyo only began in 1887. 50
Yet Japan was already becoming militarily strong. By 1880, Japan was producing
its first modern rifle of its own design. In 1899, a renegotiated treaty with Great
Britain took effect, ending many of the more objectionable features of the treaty
port system that had been in effect since the 1850s (although Japan did not regain
the right to set its own taxes on imports until 1911). In 1895, Japan defeated
China in war. In 1902, Japan officially became a British ally, and in 1905, Japan
defeated a recognized modern great power, Russia, in war. By this time, Japan
had convincingly demonstrated its claim to the status of a being modern world
power.
For Further Reading
On comparative industrialization and economic development in China and Europe, see Lloyd E. Eastman, Family, Fields, and Ancestors: Constancy and Change in China's Social and Economic History, 1550-1949 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), esp. chaps. 6-8; Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: Uni versity of California Press, 1998); Robert B. Marks, The Origins of the Modern W:Jrld: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century, 2nd ed. (Lan ham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007); and Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern W:Jrld Economy (Princeton University Press,
2000).
227
4,,4,,11 A History of East Asia
On the Opium Wars, see Peter Ward Fay, The Opium war, 1840-1842: Barbarians in the Celestial Empire in the Early Part of the Nineteenth Century and the war by Which They Forced Her Gates Ajar (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975), and Harry G. Gelber, Opium, Soldiers, and Evangelicals: England's 1840-42 war with China, and Its Aftermath (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
For the Taiping and other nineteenth-century Chinese domestic rebellions, see Albert Feuer werker, Rebellion in Nineteenth-century China (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1975); Philip A. Kuhn, Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China: Militarization and Social Structure, 1796-1864 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni versity Press, 1970); Franz Michael, in collaboration with Chung-li Chang, The Taiping Rebellion: History and Documents, 3 vols. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, [1966] 1972); Elizabeth J. Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845-1945 (Stanford University Press, 1980); and Jonathan D. Spence, God's Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong Xiuquan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).
A classic study of the Tongzhi Restoration is Mary Clabaugh Wright, The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T'ung-Chih Restoration, 1862-18 7 4 (Stanford University Press, 1957).
The treaty ports and Sino-Western contact are dealt with in John King Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842-1854 (1953; Stanford University Press, [1953] 1969); Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China, 1800-42 (Cambridge University Press, 1951); and Rhoads Murphey, The Outsiders: The ~stern Experience in India and China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977). On the final phase of the mature treaty port system in Shanghai, see Nicholas R. Clifford, Spoilt Children of Empire: ~sterners in Shanghai and the Chinese Revolution of the 1920s (Hanover, NH: Middlebury College Press, 1991).
Concerning the Boxer Rebellion, see Paul A. Cohen, History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), and Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
The end of the traditional order in Korea is described in Martina Deuchler, Confucian Gentlemen and Barbarian Envoys: The Opening of Korea, 1875-1885 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977); Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea, 1895-1910 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Key-Hiuk Kim, The Last Phase of the East Asian WOrld Order: Korea, Japan, and the Chinese Empire, 1860- 1882 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
Indispensable sources for the Meiji Restoration in Japan include Marius B. Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), and Marius B. Jansen, Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration (New York: Columbia University Press, [1961) 1994). A detailed narrative of events preceding the Meiji Restoration is pro vided by Conrad D. Totman, The Collapse of the Tokugawa Bakufu, 1862-1868 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1980). The doomed samurai rebellion of Saigo Takamori is narrated in chapter 9 oflvan I. Morris, The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1975). For a study of one important Meiji oligarch, see Roger F. Hackett, Yamagata Aritomo in the Rise of Modern Japan, 1838-1922 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).
The changing self-image of the Japanese nation in this period is skillfully surveyed by Carol Gluck, Japan's Modern Myths: Ideology in the Late Meiji Period (Princeton University Press, 1985). Changing Chinese perceptions of Japan during the 1870s-1880s, as East Asia's premodern cultural community was seriously shaken by rapid Japanese modernization, are examined in D. R. Howland, Borders of Chinese Civilization: Geography and History at Empire's End (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996).
For Meiji Japan's precocious economic modernization, see Johannes Hirschmeier, The Ori gins of Entrepreneurship in MeijiJapan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964);
The Nineteenth-Century Encounter of Civilizations
Byron K. Marshall, Capitalism and Nationalism in Prewar Japan: The Ideology of the Business Elite, 1868-1941 (Stanford University Press, 1967); Thomas C. Smith, Political Change and Industrial Development in Japan: Government Enterprise, 1868-1880 (Stanford Uni versity Press, 1955); and Kozo Yamamura, ed., The Economic Emergence of Modern Japan (Cambridge University Press, 1997). Mikiso Hane provides a rare glimpse into the impact of modernization on the lives of ordinary Japanese in Peasants, Rebels, and Outcastes: The
Underside of Modern Japan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982).
229
