Remaking the Chinese Empire: Manchu-Korean Relations, 1616–1911 By Yuanchong Wang ===
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4 DEFINING CHOSŎN Qing China’s Depiction of Chosŏn’s Status, 1862–76 For the Qing ruling house and intelligentsia, “everyday familiarity” collapsed on the very first day that the Westerners entered Beijing as permanent diplomatic representatives.¹ As the self-strengthening movement unfolded in the 1860s, Beijing was increasingly intrigued by the possibility of employing European methods to enhance China’s military and technical capabilities for the sake of China’s future. The innovations proposed by various reformers caught the attention of more open-minded Chinese officials who were interested in statecraft outside their ivory towers. This elite drew on knowledge from abroad and pioneered Chinese modernization, aware that the entrenched politico-cultural concept of all-under-Heaven embedded in a cosmopolitan, Confucian worldview was ineluctably giving way to more realistic world politics born of sophisticated foreign negotiations informed by Western norms. The elite realized that they must first learn those norms from their Western counterparts. In 1864 the Zongli Yamen published Wanguo gongfa (lit. “the common law among ten thousand countries”), the Chinese edition of Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law, which had appeared in English in 1836.² Translated by an American Presbyterian missionary in Beijing, William A. P. Martin (1827–1916; known in Chinese as Ding Weiliang), it was the first guide to international law in China and the Chinese world. The Chinese edi- tion pointedly added a map of the world that presented it in the conventional arrangement of eastern and western hemispheres, which further eroded the Sinocen- tric view by portraying China as merely one country among others.³ The Great Qing began to transform its political and diplomatic norms by integrating notions of international law into its own constitutional and institutional systems. However, the disintegration of the Qing’s old conceptualization of Western countries as barbarians did not lead to a similar breakdown in the Zongfan frame- work that bound together the Manchu and Korean courts. Their symbiotic legitimacy, which could not be redefined or circumscribed by international law, still strongly influenced their internal and external policies and behavior in the middle of the nineteenth century. In this sense, the two Opium Wars and the treaties from 1842 to 1860 did not simply mark “the twilight of the Old” and “the dawn of the New,” as the East-West dichotomy would have it.⁴ Rather, the treaty port net- work imposed from the outside and the time-honored Zongfan arrangement inside the Qing realm formed a dual system of two coexisting elements, and the for- mer did not immediately begin to replace or incorporate the latter, as many scholars have retrospectively presumed. Since the 1860s, as contacts between Chosŏn and Western countries grew more frequent, both Beijing and Hansŏng found it increasingly difficult to define their Zongfan relationship and Chosŏn’s interna- tional status and state sovereignty. While the two countries asserted unanimously that Chosŏn was China’s shuguo or shubang (“subordinate country”) pos- sessing the right of zizhu, China’s treaty counterparts treated Chosŏn as a state with independent sovereignty that maintained a merely ritual relationship to China. This chapter explores this diplomatic conundrum and its consequences. Chosŏn as China’s Shuguo : The Sino-French Conflict of 1866 The Beginning of the Puzzle: The French Invasion and China’s Response In 1866, France decided to launch an expedition against Chosŏn in response to the killing of French missionaries in anti-Catholic purges initiated by Yi Ha-ŭng (1820–98), better known by his title, Taewŏn’gun (Prince of the great court). The Taewŏn’gun had become the de facto regent after his twelve-year-old son, Yi Hŭi (King Kojong), assumed the throne in 1863 as the closest male relative and thus the legitimate successor of the late King Ikchong.⁵ During the decade of his
regency, the Taewŏn’gun carried out a series of domestic reforms, but as a follower of Confucianism he also regarded Western religions as heresies or “evil ideas” (K., sahak). In early 1866 he started to persecute converts to Christianity and Catholicism, leading to the execution of thirteen French missionaries and hundreds of native converts in a short time.⁶ When news of the purge reached Beijing, the French chargé d’affaires, Henri de Bellonet, decided to launch a punitive expedition against Chosŏn. On July 14, 1866, Bellonet sent the Zongli Yamen a letter threatening that France would invade and temporarily occupy Chosŏn and appoint a new king. He noted that the expedition would have nothing to do with China, as he had earlier been informed by the Yamen that Chosŏn managed its own affairs. Indeed, in 1865 Bellonet had asked the Yamen to issue a dispatch to Chosŏn to inform the king that French missionaries wanted to bring their teachings to the kingdom. The Yamen had de- clined to do so, explaining that “Chosŏn, as a shuguo of China, only uses the Chinese calendar, uses Chinese regnal titles, and pays annual tribute to China.” Bel- lonet interpreted this response to mean that “the Chinese government has no authority or power over Corea.”⁷ From then on, both Western states and the Zongli Yamen had continuous difficulty pinning down Chosŏn’s status as China’s shuguo in terms that the other side could accurately understand. The Zongli Yamen claimed both that Chosŏn was a shuguo of China and that because Chosŏn managed all its own affairs under the rubric of zizhu, China would not intervene in them. This statement was clear in Zongfan terms but came across as equivocal and paradoxical to Western ministers. While Bellonet acknowl- edged that Chosŏn had “formerly assumed the bonds of vassalage to the Chinese empire,” he asserted that at the present moment, “we do not recognize any au- thority whatever of the Chinese government over the kingdom of Corea.”⁸ This statement recognized Chosŏn as an independent nation, but the Yamen’s Chinese translation of it missed its political meaning. The Wanguo gongfa of 1864 did not provide the Yamen with a definition of shuguo that could be translated into appropriate Western terms. What, then, caused this misunderstanding between France and China? This question is closely connected to the Western perception of the Sinocentric political arrangement. At least since the late eighteenth century, Western travelers, observers, and diplomats who witnessed the practice of Korea and other entities of sending emissaries with tribute to Beijing used the term “tributary” to describe the nature of the relationship between China and Korea, Vietnam, and other countries.⁹ Their descriptions constituted the first step toward using the terms “tribute system” or “tributary system” to refer to the Zongfan system in Western literature on China and East Asia. In the first half of the nineteenth century, when Western diplomats brought international law to East Asia, the Western under- standing of this tribute system became increasingly skewed. As the Western states gradually integrated China and Japan into the family of nations defined accord- ing to European norms, they found that Chosŏn maintained a special relationship with China that they could not explain adequately within the framework of these norms. Thus, according to M. Frederick Nelson, “searching back into the categories which their international system listed, they hit upon that of suzerain and vas- sal as most nearly fitting this East Asiatic relationship, and they then proceeded to apply the legal attributes of vassalage to the non-legal status of a shu-pang [shubang, subordinate country].”¹⁰ The Sino-Korean relationship was thus depicted as a form of a suzerain-vassal relationship in order to fit it into a Western inter- pretive setting.¹¹ As this and the following chapters show, the special relationship between Egypt and the Ottoman Empire was seen as an instructive analogy, in part as a result of Japan’s strategy of using European legal terminology to undermine the Sino-Korean relationship.¹² As the misunderstanding between the French and China shows, this suzerain-vassal rendering of the Zongfan order risked a legal quagmire regarding Chosŏn. Both China and Chosŏn declared that Chosŏn was China’s subordinate country with the right of autonomy; the Western countries and Japan interpreted this to mean that Korea was an independent sovereign state with all international rights. The confusion was exacerbated by the fact that Wanguo gongfa used Chinese Zongfan concepts to translate English legal terms. For example, the English term “colony” was rendered as pingfan (fence), shu-bang, or shuguo; “dependency” as
shubang; “vassal state” as fanshu (subordinate country or dependent country); “sovereign states” as zizhu zhi guo (countries with the right of self-rule); and “right of sovereignty” as zizhu zhi quan (right of self-rule).¹³ The discrepancies between the Chinese and European terms show that China’s perspective remained essen- tially familistic, whereas the Europeans and the Americans operated in a primarily legal context.¹⁴ Martin, the Wanguo gongfa translator, was not the first to adopt these Chinese terms in translation. As early as the 1830s, some Protestant missionaries, such as Karl Gützlaff (1803–51) from Prussia, rendered “colony” as fanshu guo in their Chinese-language magazines published in South China. For example, the September 1833 issue of Dong Xi-yang kao meiyue tongji zhuan (Eastern- Western monthly magazine) calls India Da Yingguo zhi fanshu guo (the subordinate country of Great Britain) and Siberia Eluosi fanshu guo (the subordinate country of Russia).¹⁵ Since the 1860s, the terminological inconsistency led to great confusion over the nature of the Zongfan relationship and growing conflicts between China, Korea, and other countries. As a result, Western diplomats in East Asia widely perceived the Sino-Korean relationship as a “nominal” one, with China exercising “no real authority” over Korea.¹⁶ Misunderstandings persisted through the late 1880s and early 1890s, as William W. Rockhill (1854–1914) confessed in his study of Sino-Korean relations, which was aimed at clarifying what he described as “a puzzle for Western nations”—whether Korea was “an integral part of the Chinese empire” or “a sovereign state enjoying absolute international rights.” Rockhill argued that the Chinese term shuguo, generally but misleadingly converted into English terms such as “vas- sal kingdom” or “fief,” was “the key-note to the whole system of Korean dependency.”¹⁷ What led Rockhill to identify Korea’s status as a puzzle seems to have been its contrast with the European colonial experience of his day: the relationship between a European colonial power and its overseas colonies—that of Britain and India, or of France and Algeria—was clear, since the colony was undoubtedly an integral part of the empire, fully subject to the imperial administration. The questions regarding Sino-Korean relations raised in the early 1890s by George N. Curzon, who later served as viceroy of India, similarly reflected this colonial discourse.¹⁸ But although these Europeans could not reconcile Chosŏn’s status with their Eurocentric understanding of colonial relationships, they nonetheless regarded the Sino-Korean relationship as a legitimate one, which may explain why their states never publicly denied that Chosŏn was a dependency of China be- fore 1895. The Sino-French negotiation over Chosŏn’s international position in 1866 was the beginning of the exposure of a range of conceptual, textual, ideo- logical, and epistemological conflicts between China and its Western counterparts. Bellonet was thus among the first Westerners who encountered difficulties in dealing with the Zongfan order in practice. On the Chinese side, the Zongli Yamen, as a temporary institution established on an ad hoc basis, had no right to communicate with Chosŏn, and until the end of the Zongfan relationship in 1895 it never gained that right. Rather, the Ministry of Rites continued to carry responsibility for Chosŏn’s affairs. The Zongli Yamen simply sent any cases involving Chosŏn to the Ministry of Rites for processing. The ministry, for its part, could not make changes to established imperial codes, formalities, or precedents regarding Chosŏn, so it often forwarded the cases to the emperor and the Grand Council to receive further instructions. This conven- tion-driv- arrangement persisted until 1882, when Beijing endowed Li Hongzhang—the Beiyang superintendent under the supervision of the Zongli Yamen—with the right to communicate with the king. Contacts between Chosŏn and Western states in the 1860s thus exposed China’s policy deficit in the uncharted territory between the Zongli Yamen and the Ministry of Rites, and this deficit endured for another three decades. Given this context, the Zongli Yamen pursued a policy of “mediation” (Ch., paijie) between Chosŏn and the West. It replied to Bellonet that the French should not rush to attack Chosŏn and that China would mediate be- tween France and Chosŏn, but it did not claim responsibility for the killing of the French missionaries. In a memorial to the emperor and in a confidential letter to governors-general and governors of the coastal provinces and Manchu generals in Manchuria, the Yamen expressed serious concern over the French hostility to- ward Chosŏn and proclaimed that China could “in no way sit it out” if Chosŏn were to come under foreign attack.¹⁹ It also notified Chosŏn, via the Ministry of
Rites, of the possibility that French forces might invade the country.²⁰ Undeterred, Bellonet instructed Admiral Pierre-Gustave Roze (1812–83), commander of the French Far Eastern Squadron, to launch the expedition. On Sep- tember 20 Roze led three warships from Zhifu (Chefoo, now Yantai) on the Shandong Peninsula across the Bohai Sea. They arrived at a small island off the coast of Inch’ŏn, where they made navigational charts of the waters along the coastlines. Roze refused to contact local officials while conducting these activities. At court, the Taewŏn’gun learned of the arrival of the foreign “strange-shaped ships” (K., iyang sŏn), but he nonetheless continued his anti-Catholic campaign by ar- resting and executing more converts. Ten days before the French forces arrived, the young king, at his father’s suggestion, had issued a “decree of antiheresy” (K., ch’ŏksa yunŭm) to further stoke anti-Catholic resentment.²¹ On October 1 the three primary members of the most recent tributary mission to Beijing—Yu Hu-bok, Sŏ Tang-po, and Hong Sun-hak—returned to Hansŏng and were granted an audience with the king. The mission had been charged with requesting the Qing to invest the daughter of the late official Min Ch’i-rok with the title of queen; she would later be known as Queen Min (1851–95). Yu made a point of informing the king and senior ministers that the foreigners in Beijing were beyond Chinese jurisdiction and were not afraid of the “big country.”²² Yu’s account may have given the court the impression that China had become a vic- tim of Western invaders, and that Chosŏn would be next. This news reinforced the Taewŏn’gun’s anti-Catholic and xenophobic attitude, convincing him that Chosŏn’s security could be guaranteed only by resisting the “barbarians of the ocean” (K., yang’i).²³ Two weeks after Yu’s audience with the king, the French squadron reached Inch’ŏn and blockaded all entrances to the Han River of Hansŏng. In spite of Korean resistance, French marines landed on Korean soil and proceeded to loot the capital of Kanghwa Prefecture and other nearby towns. With the arrival of cold weath- er in early November, they withdrew back to Zhifu. The Western ministers in Beijing had assumed that the expedition would bring Chosŏn into the modern world. The American chargé d’affaires Samuel Wells Williams (1812–84), for instance, exclaimed that “it is full time that Corea was introduced into the family of nations.”²⁴ But Williams and his colleagues soon realized that the French had failed to conduct any negotiations with the Koreans, much less introduce into the country any ideas of the family of nations. Instead the military invasion provided the Taewŏn’gun with a further justification for his policy of “countering barbar- ians and protecting the nation” (K., yang’i poguk).²⁵ Parallel Tracks: Continuing Sino-Korean Zongfan Contacts On November 1, 1866, while the battle with the French marines was raging in Kanghwa, the king held a grand ceremony in Hansŏng to welcome two Manchu en- voys, Kuiling and Xiyuan, who came to invest the new queen. Following the customary ritual codes, the king went to the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country on the city’s outskirts to welcome the envoys. Afterward, inside the capital, the king performed the requisite ceremonies to receive the book of investiture. The investiture emphasized that the queen should assist the king in bringing prosperity to the country, which had been a loyal “ fan and fence” (Ch., fanping) of China for generations.²⁶ In a domestic decree that the king issued after the grand ceremony to celebrate the investiture, he emphasized that Chosŏn, the “lower country,” appreciated the magnanimous favor of the “central dynasty” and the “big country.”²⁷ During the envoys’ three-day sojourn, all rituals were performed precisely according to precedent. In conversations between the king and the envoys, the ongoing war with the French, raging just twenty-five miles away, never came up. The boundary between Zongfan matters and diplomatic affairs was as clear as the two countries’ court-to-court and country-to-country relationships. The arrival of an imperial mission in Chosŏn at this critical moment raised serious concerns among the French. Prince Gong explained that the envoys “were on affairs of ceremonial, and in accordance with long-established usage, having no reference to the quarrel between France and Corea,” but Bellonet was suspicious.²⁸ Prince Gong circulated his correspondence with Bellonet among the foreign ministers, which served to publicize in the diplomatic corps China’s
definition of the Sino-Korean relationship. While Prince Gong argued with Bellonet about the Korean issue, two Korean tributary missions arrived in Beijing in succession. The first mission, headed by Han Mun-kyu, arrived on November 6 to receive the imperial calendar for the upcoming year. In the king’s memorial to the em- peror that Han brought to Beijing, the king stated that Chosŏn had no wish to do business with foreign countries and that Catholicism and other foreign religions were not welcome in Chosŏn. In addition, Han brought to Wan Qingli, a minister of the Qing Ministry of Rites, a personal letter from Yi Hŭng-min (1809–81), a former tributary emissary who had become acquainted with Wan the previous year. In his letter, Yi tried to legitimize the Taewŏn’gun’s anti-Catholic policy and hoped Wan would take advantage of his position to discuss the issue with the emperor and the Zongli Yamen, in the hope that China would persuade foreigners not to visit Chosŏn. Realizing that the issue was beyond the jurisdiction of his ministry and personal correspondence, Wan forwarded the letter to the emperor, asking for instructions and suggesting that he relay the court’s recommendations to Chosŏn through his personal response to Yi.²⁹ The court did not take Wan up on his offer. The emperor’s decree to the king likewise skirted the issue, simply telling the king to secure Chosŏn without offering any specific strategy. Two months after Han’s arrival, a second Korean mission, this one bearing the annual tribute, reached Beijing on February 1, 1867, three days before the Spring Festival. In his memorials to the emperor on the occasion of the lunar New Year, the king declared again that it was impossible for Chosŏn to trade with “foreign barbarians” such as the French or to allow them to spread the Gospel in the country. The king also reported that Yi Hŭng-min had been punished because his personal letter to “high-ranking officials of the imperial dynasty” had violated regulations. The Chinese court had no further instructions for the king. Meanwhile, the French did not follow their brief expedition with further campaigns against Chosŏn. The issue of Chosŏn’s status remained unsettled and soon proved con- fusing to the United States. The Shuguo between Zizhu and Independence: American Views of Chosŏn’s Status, 1866–71 Shipwrecks and Savages: China’s Disavowal of Responsibility for Chosŏn In July and September 1866, two American schooners, the Surprise and the General Sherman, were wrecked in Chosŏn, the former off the coast of the country and the latter in the Taedong River in P’yŏngyang. The crew of the Surprise was treated kindly and escorted safely to the Chinese side via Fenghuang Gate, but the members of the General Sherman ’s crew were mercilessly killed right in P’yŏngyang. After learning about the General Sherman case, the American minister in Bei- jing, Anson Burlingame (1820–70), immediately brought the issue to the attention of Prince Gong because “Corea was formerly tributary to China.” To Burlingame’s surprise, Prince Gong “at once disavowed all responsibility for the Coreans, and stated that the only connection between the two countries was one of ceremonial.” In a letter to Rear Admiral Henry H. Bell (1808–68), the acting commander of the US Asiatic Squadron, Burlingame affirmed that “the Chinese government disavows any responsibility for that of Corea, and all jurisdiction over its people.”³⁰ The case was thus passed on to Bell, who, in a confidential dis- patch to the Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles (1802–78), suggested that the United States launch punitive action against Chosŏn.³¹ In fact, Secretary of State William H. Seward (1801–72) had proposed to the French representative in Washington that the United States and France initiate a combined action against Chosŏn, but France had declined.³² Bell’s proposed expedition did not take place either. In early 1867 the navy dispatched the USS Wachusett to Chosŏn under the command of Robert W. Shufeldt (1822–95) to investigate the General Sherman incident. But the expedition yielded nothing, as severe weather forced Shufeldt out of Chosŏn before he could receive an official response to his queries. To the United States, Chosŏn remained what American scholars would call a “hermit nation.”³³
American diplomats found themselves involved in another shipwreck in East Asia in March 1867, this time involving the schooner Rover in Taiwan (Formosa). The Rover foundered on the southern coast of the island, and the crew members who came ashore were ambushed and killed by aborigines known as the Koaluts. Believing that the incident was within his jurisdiction, Charles W. Le Gendre (1830–99), the American consul at Xiamen (Amoy), brought the matter to the atten- tion of the governor-general in Fuzhou, the local officials of Taiwan Prefecture, and the Zongli Yamen. The local officials informed Le Gendre that the crew had met with their deaths in “savage lands” (Ch., shengfan jie) “beyond the civilization of the sovereign” (Ch., wanghua buji), not “within the waters over which the Chi- nese government exercises jurisdiction,” and that their murderers were “savages” rather than “Chinese civilians” (Ch., huamin). Therefore, articles 11 and 13 of the 1858 Sino-American Treaty regarding China’s jurisdiction did not apply, and the Chinese government had no responsibility to take action against the Koaluts as the consul had requested. Le Gendre, believing to the contrary that the “savages” were within China’s jurisdiction, warned his Chinese counterparts that other states could cite such a disavowal of responsibility as an excuse to occupy the “savage lands.”³⁴ Finally, the Chinese authorities dispatched soldiers to accom- pany Le Gendre to southern Taiwan, but the minister alone entered the Koaluts’ territory and concluded an agreement with the chieftain.³⁵ Le Gendre’s experience of negotiating with the Chinese side was not notable at the time and seemed unrelated to Chosŏn. But it would prove significant in the 1870s, when Tokyo hired Le Gendre to help reframe Japanese policy toward Taiwan, Ryukyu, Chosŏn, and China. A “Nominal” Connection: Low’s Assessment of the Sino-Korean Relationship Before Japan joined the Western states in challenging Chosŏn’s status, Frederick F. Low (1828–94), the American minister in Beijing and the former governor of California, organized an expedition to Chosŏn in 1871 with the aim of negotiating a treaty for the protection of shipwrecked mariners. His action pushed Beijing to clarify China’s definition of the Sino-Korean relationship. As Low saw it, “Corea is substantially an independent nation” and the Korean tribute to China “is sent rather as a quid pro quo for the privilege of trading with the Chinese than a governmental tribute.”³⁶ Low nonetheless solicited the aid of the Zongli Yamen to ob- tain useful information about Chosŏn. In February 1871 Low delivered to the Yamen a letter that he hoped would be forwarded to the king of Chosŏn via the Min- istry of Rites. After sending the letter to Chosŏn, the ministry noted, in a confidential memorial to the emperor, that “Chosŏn has used China’s ruling titles and calendars for a long time and proved the most loyal. All affairs regarding its government, religion, prohibitions, and laws are subject to its own management by the rule of zizhu, and none of these affairs has China hitherto interfered in.”³⁷ These same words were used by the Zongli Yamen in its dispatch to Low in March. Low decided, first, to interpret China’s position as affirming Chosŏn’s independent sovereignty, stating that “although Corea is regarded as a country subor- dinate to China, yet she is wholly independent in everything that relates to her government, her religion, her prohibitions, and her laws; in none of these things has China hitherto interfered.” In essence, he translated the Chinese term zizhu into full independence. Second, he concluded that the Chinese declaration aimed to “guard against complications that may possibly grow out of an attempt by foreign nations to open intercourse with Corea, and relieve this Government of all re- sponsibility for the acts of the Coreans, whether hostile or otherwise.” Low thus interpreted Beijing’s declaration as a repudiation of responsibility for Chosŏn’s behavior. It seemed that it was time for him to sail for Chosŏn, a place that was, for him, “more of a sealed book than Japan was before Commodore Perry’s visit.”³⁸ Low determined to become another Perry. Yet Low failed to crack the book. After arriving in Chosŏn in May, he was unable to establish official contacts with the Korean side. The expedition only inten- sified Chosŏn’s hostility toward Western countries. Chosŏn continued to identify itself as “a subject of China” that had no right to “communicate with foreign countries”—that is, to conduct diplomacy. This point was reiterated by the king in his memorial to the emperor in June 1871 in response to Low’s letter, forwarded from Beijing.³⁹ After the frustrating failure of his expedition, Low still hoped to contact Chosŏn through Beijing, and his conversations with the Zongli Yamen
provided him with further opportunities to reconceptualize the Sino-Korean relationship. He concluded that the relations between the two countries, “established during the reign of the Ming Emperors, nominally continued unchanged, although, practically, they have little force.”⁴⁰ Despite a sharp refutation from Prince Gong, Low continued to hold this opinion. Between 1866 and 1871, the Western ministers’ perception of Chosŏn shifted: they no longer considered it a tributary of China but rather saw it as an inde- pendent state beyond Chinese jurisdiction. Several key terms of international law were now applied to the Sinocentric Zongfan order, even though nothing within this order had changed. In 1871 the Qing signed its first Western-style treaty with Japan that portrayed the two countries as equals. Over the next five years, Japan, in the midst of dramatic Westernizing reforms under Emperor Meiji (r. 1867– 1912), became the vanguard of the challenge to the Sino-Korean relationship, aided by its position as an insider in the East Asian community. The participation of the rising Japanese empire opened a new chapter in modern East Asian history. The Shuguo between Chinese Legitimacy and International Law: The First Sino-Japanese Debate Japan’s Contacts with Chosŏn and the Sino-Japanese Treaty of 1871 During the Japanese Tokugawa bakufu period (1603–1867), communications between Japan and Chosŏn were conducted through the Sō family in the domain of Tsushima. Chosŏn interacted with the Sō in a semi-Zongfan framework. The head of the Sō sent boats to Chosŏn for trade in accordance with Chosŏn’s regula- tions, and he presented himself as a subordinate in letters to the king. In return, when necessary, Chosŏn followed the policy of kyorin, communicating with a neighboring country, by dispatching messengers to Japan to consolidate the two countries’ friendly relations. All such messengers visited Kyoto and Edo (Tokyo) via Tsushima. Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan established the Gaimushō, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to manage foreign relations under newly adopted Western norms. While its relationships with other countries evolved steadily, Japan failed to modernize its relationship with Chosŏn. Chosŏn refused to accept Japan’s sovereign letters, figuratively closing the country’s door in Japan’s face. In the meantime, Japan was approaching China to pursue an international status equal to it. In September 1871 the Japanese minister plenipotentiary, Date Munenari (1818–92), signed a treaty, written in both the Chinese and Japanese languages, with Li Hongzhang in Tianjin. The first article stated, “Relations of amity shall henceforth be maintained in redoubled force between China and Japan, in measure as boundless as the heaven and the earth. In all that regards the terri- torial possessions of either country the two Governments shall treat each other with proper courtesy, without the slightest infringement or encroachment on ei- ther side, to the end that there may be for evermore peace between them undisturbed.”⁴¹ The term “territorial possessions” and its applicability to Chosŏn later became a source of disagreement between the two countries. The term is a rough English equivalent of the Chinese suoshu bangtu. Suoshu means “to belong to,” but bangtu is too vague to be accurately defined in international law. Literally, bang means “country” and tu means “land,” but bangtu could mean “country,” “land,” or “territorial possessions.” Both China and Japan subsequently realized that the term failed to establish whether the countries serving as China’s outer fan, in particular Chosŏn, counted among China’s “territorial possessions.” Both sides used the term’s uncertain definition to their own advantage, resulting in fierce disputes when Japan began implementing an aggressive policy toward Ryukyu and Chosŏn in the 1870s. An Ambush on the Chinese: Soejima’s Embassy to Beijing in 1873 In December 1871 a ship from Ryukyu was shipwrecked on the southern coast of Taiwan, where the aborigines killed fifty-four members of its crew. Since Japan was in the process of annexing Ryukyu by converting it into a Japanese domain (J., han), Tokyo regarded the incident as a good opportunity to finalize the matter by cutting off Ryukyu’s Zongfan relationship with China. In February 1873 Emperor Meiji appointed the minister of foreign affairs, Soejima Taneomi (1828–1905),
as ambassador extraordinary to China to ratify the Treaty of Tianjin of 1871. The emperor instructed Soejima to discuss the killings of the Ryukyuese sailors to determine whether the whole of Taiwan was under China’s jurisdiction.⁴² A key proponent of the Seikan ron (expedition against Korea), Soejima eagerly availed himself of this chance to glean information on China’s attitude toward Japanese-Korean contacts. Among the members of the Japanese mission was Japan’s newly appointed adviser on foreign policy toward Taiwan, Charles Le Gendre, whose experience was invaluable to Tokyo’s efforts to formulate and implement a new pol- icy toward the Chinese Zongfan system.⁴³ It was through Western advisers such as Le Gendre who mastered modern Western norms regarding sovereignty and international law that Japan transformed itself into an outsider to the East Asian community in terms of its foreign policy. Soejima arrived in Tianjin in April, and his visit marked the first time that a Japanese official showed up in China in a Western tailcoat. After ratifying the treaty, Soejima briefly discussed Japanese-Korean relations with Li Hongzhang. Li warned that Japan should be friendly to Chosŏn and that any Japanese expedition against it would violate the Sino-Japanese treaty.⁴⁴ In Beijing, with Le Gendre’s assistance, Soejima visited foreign legations in the city. The current British min- ister, Thomas F. Wade (1818–95), reported to London that “the Japanese are also suspected of a design on Corea” and that Soejima “is evidently anxious for an assurance from the Chinese that Corea is an independent Kingdom, so independent of China, that is to say, as to make what may befall Corea no concern of the Chinese.” Wade inferred that Japan would apply gunboat diplomacy to Korea.⁴⁵ According to Frederick Low, Soejima had “only two questions of importance which he desires to discuss with the Chinese government.” First, he wanted to know “whether China is responsible for the acts of the aborigines on the island of Formosa.” According to Low, “If the answer is in the negative, notice will then be given that Japan proposed to send a military force to Formosa to chastise the savage and semi-civilized tribes that practically hold undisputed possession of the large part of the island.” Second, Soejima wanted to “ascertain the precise rela- tions between China and Corea; whether the former claims to exercise such control over her tributary as to render China responsible for the acts of the Coreans, or whether other nations must look to Corea alone for redress for wrongs and outrages which her people may commit.”⁴⁶ Soejima’s view of the likely relationship between China and its periphery—Taiwan and Chosŏn—matched Western countries’ conclusions regarding the limits of China’s jurisdiction over these regions. When Soejima solicited Low’s opinions on Chosŏn, Low showed him the Zongli Yamen’s dispatch of March 1871, men- tioned earlier, which affirmed China’s noninterference in Chosŏn’s affairs in accordance with the principle of zizhu. Upon Low’s assertion that Chosŏn was “wholly independent,” Soejima made the judgment that Chosŏn lay “beyond the Qing’s sovereignty [J., shuken].”⁴⁷ The Japanese policy of challenging Chosŏn’s status as China’s shuguo thus began to converge with the policies pursued by the United States, France, Britain, and other Western states in China. Soejima’s conclusion found support in a meeting at the Zongli Yamen on June 21, 1873, that brought together a Japanese representative, Yanagiwara Sakimitsu (1850–94), and the Chinese ministers Mao Changxi (1817–82) and Dong Xun (1807–92). Yanagiwara asked how China could justify claiming Chosŏn as a shuguo, since the Yamen had asserted in its 1871 note to the American minister that “China never interfered with its internal politics, religion, prohibitions, and laws.” Mao, drawing on an understanding of Sino-Korean contacts that he might have gained when working at the Ministry of Rites, explained that “the so-called shuguo referred only to investiture and tribute submission” and that China would not interfere with Chosŏn’s right to conduct negotiations over war and peace.⁴⁸ Mao’s response satisfied Soejima because it corroborated Low’s argument.⁴⁹ Soejima, along with his Western counterparts, was granted an audience with the Tongzhi emperor on June 29. It was the first imperial audience for Western ministers since the 1840s and it encouraged both sides to improve their understanding of each other. Upon his return to Tokyo, Soejima stepped up his advocacy for an expedition to Korea, but the return of a Japanese mission to the United States and Europe halted his plan. The three key members of the mission, Iwakura Tomomi (1825– 83), Ōkubo Toshimichi (1830–78), and Kido Takayoshi (1833–77), argued that
Japan should focus on domestic reforms to “reorganize its national politics and make its people rich.”⁵⁰ As this policy prevailed, the proponents of the Seikan ron, such as Soejima, Saigō Takamori (1827–77), Itagaki Taisuke (1837–1919), and Etō Shinpei (1834–74), were pushed out of the cabinet. In December 1873 the young king of Chosŏn assumed direct rule and ended the regency of Taewŏn’gun. Tokyo tried to take advantage of this occasion to pursue a new diplomatic relationship with Hansŏng, but its efforts failed in the face of sharp resistance by local officials in Pusan, where the Koreans still preferred to communicate with the Japanese through the kyorin framework. Japan, it seemed, could not make any substantial progress on opening a new channel of communication with the Korean court. The Birth of Chosŏn’s “Sovereignty”: The Second Sino-Japanese Debate and the Treaty of Kanghwa Defining China’s Territory: Taiwan, Kanghwa, and Mori’s Visit to Beijing In the summer of 1874, while Tokyo was sending troops to South Taiwan to deal with “the territory in question beyond the jurisdiction of the Chinese govern- ment,” it also sent Yanagiwara Sakimitsu and Ōkubo Toshimichi to Beijing for further negotiations about Taiwan.⁵¹ The Zongli Yamen told the Japanese represen- tatives, “Even if the aborigines are ‘barbarians,’ they are still China’s barbarians, and only China has the right to punish them if they are guilty.” The Chinese ministers pointed to relevant rules of international law and Chinese historical evidence, such as local gazetteers, to bolster their point. Without close advice from Western advisers such as Le Gendre, the Japanese failed to prove that the aborigines’ area of residence in South Taiwan was beyond China’s jurisdiction. Under the mediation of Thomas Wade, the doyen of the diplomatic corps in Beijing, the Chinese and Japanese sides reached a succinct agreement. Interestingly, the third article of the agreement stated that “all correspondence that this question has occasioned between the two governments shall be canceled, and the discus- sions dropped for evermore.”⁵² In this way, Japan not only invalidated any documents that could expose its inferior position in the talks on the reach of China’s territory but also shifted future negotiations to the track of international law. To the Japanese, the negotiations indicated that only a Japan equipped with European norms could challenge the Chinese discourse, which helps explain why, over the following decade, Japan frequently solicited its Western advisers for suggestions regarding Japan’s foreign policy toward its neighbors. A skirmish between Japan and Chosŏn near Kanghwa Island in September 1875 led to the resurgence of support for the Seikan ron in Japan. This time Iwakura and his fellow politicians endorsed the expedition, because Japan’s diplomatic situation was much improved. In addition to reaching an agreement with China about the Taiwan incident, Tokyo had resolved its territorial disputes with Russia over Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands by signing a treaty in St. Petersburg in May 1875, through which it obtained Russian acquiescence to its actions in Chosŏn. Meanwhile, in order to check Russia’s southern advance in East Asia during the Russo-British rivalry in Central Asia, Britain planned to occupy Port Hamilton, a small Korean island known as Kŏmundo near the Tsushima Strait.⁵³ This plan provided Japan with an excuse to initiate an expedition against Korea without triggering an intervention from these Western powers. In October 1875 Kido Takayoshi suggested that Japan should press China for an explanation of its relationship with Chosŏn; once Beijing had disavowed responsibility for Chosŏn’s foreign affairs, Japan could freely take action against Chosŏn.⁵⁴ The Japanese government appointed Mori Arinori (1847–89) as the minister plenipotentiary to Beijing. Educated in Britain and having worked in the United States, Mori was familiar with Western diplomatic rules and had consulted with Erasmus Peshine Smith (1814–82), the American special adviser to the Gaimushō on international law, regarding the Kanghwa incident. Sanjō Sanetomi (1837–91), chancellor of the realm, issued instructions to Mori’s embassy, and the most important among them was to “identify Chosŏn as an independent country [J., dokuritsu koku]” and persuade China to help establish Japanese-Korean relations for the sake of Japan’s and China’s common interests. In short, Mori’s mission was “to cut off the Sino-Korean relationship.”⁵⁵ The foreign minister, Terashima
Munenori (1832–93), telegraphed the chargé d’affaires in Beijing, Tei Einei (1829–97), saying that since Soejima’s visit in 1873 had not confirmed that Chosŏn was not a “ fan and subordinate” (J., hanzoku) of the Qing, Tei should be cautious about all contacts between Japan and the Qing regarding Chosŏn.⁵⁶ Another Ambush on the Chinese: Mori’s Debate with the Zongli Yamen On January 2, 1876, the Qing court dispatched two envoys, Jihe and Wulasiconga, to Chosŏn to invest the king’s son, Yi Ch’ŏk, as the crown prince. Three Han Chinese grand secretaries—Mao Changxi, Li Hongzhang, and Zuo Zongtang (1812–85)—drafted the imperial edict of investiture in December 1875. Two days later Mori arrived in Beijing with the aim of denying this Sino-Korean relationship from the perspective of international law. Mori paid his first visit to Thomas Wade, in the hope that the latter could mediate between Japan and China. Wade was impressed by Mori, but his situation made it impossible for him to assist Mori.⁵⁷ Wade’s relations with Beijing were strained due to an incident in the previous year in which a young British interpreter handpicked by Wade, Augustus R. Margary, had been killed on an expedition to Burma from Yunnan. Wade had repeatedly telegraphed London to ask for more naval forces to pressure China into negotiating with him for another treaty. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) supported Wade and conceived a plan to ally with Japan against China, a scheme he called “one of the greatest secrets of State going.”⁵⁸ But the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Edward Henry Stanley (1826–93), did not endorse this aggressive approach.⁵⁹ Under the circumstances, Wade had no desire to be involved in the Sino-Japanese negotiations on Korean affairs, but after his conversation with Mori he reported to London that “the minister’s manner, rather than his language, made me mistrustful. I inferred that an expedition of Corea is determined on and that the object of his confidential communications to me was to ascertain whether objection to the expedition would be taken by English, or any other foreign action.”⁶⁰ Wade could not have been more correct. On January 6, 1876, the Japanese ambassador plenipotentiary to Chosŏn, Kuroda Kiyotaka (1840–1900), sailed from Tokyo for the Korean Peninsula, leading a fleet of two gunboats and four schooners.⁶¹ Mori, accompanied by his interpreter, Tei Einei, and two secretaries, met with five Chinese ministers on January 10 at the Zongli Yamen to discuss Chosŏn’s status. Zhou Jiamei (1835–86) served as the secretary for the Chinese side. Mori, the youngest man in the room, was also the only person who knew international law and had Western educational and diplomatic experience. Shortly after the talks started, the two sides realized that they were on diametrically opposed tracks. The conversation unfolded mainly between Mori and Shen Guifen (1818–81), who had previously worked at the Ministry of Rites. Mori asked why China, identi- fying Chosŏn as its shuguo, nonetheless claimed that Chosŏn’s “politics, religion, prohibitions, and laws fall under the principle of zizhu .” Shen explained, “The shuguo is not land under the governance of our country [Ch., yuan bushi woguo guanxia zhi di]. But it pays tribute on time, receives our investiture, and accepts our country’s calendar, and this has made it our shuguo .” Shen further informed Mori that Vietnam, Ryukyu, and Burma were also China’s shuguo, with different schedules for the payment of tribute. When Mori asked whether a shuguo could negotiate with foreign countries on trade without informing China, Shen replied that the country in question would manage its affairs by itself and China would not get involved, but that it would legally respond to any disputes arising between the shuguo and China’s treaty partners. Shen warned Mori that any invasion of a shuguo of China would not be defensible and would contravene the first article of the Sino-Japanese Treaty of 1871.⁶² At this point it became apparent that the disagreement between the two sides hinged on their different definitions of the term shuguo. For Mori, a shuguo could mean a colony, a dependency, or a nation with semisovereign rights. In particular, he used the relationship between the Muhammad Ali dynasty of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, that between Hungary and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and that between Canada and the British Empire as three examples of shuguo in the Western context. The three examples were, however, completely lost in the Chinese translation because of the vast gap in international knowledge between the two parties. The Chinese ministers retorted with convincing examples drawn from the Chinese context to prove that Chosŏn was in all senses a shuguo of China.
The debate ended without agreement. The meeting having fallen short of his expectations, Mori acknowledged the gulf between the two sides and expressed frustration with Chinese officialdom.⁶³ In the aftermath of the so-called Tongzhi Restoration—an attempt to strengthen the dynasty and traditional order in the 1860s—the Qing was facing increasingly serious challenges from within as well as from outside the country. On the same day that Mori was arguing with the Zongli Yamen, Empress Dowagers Cian (1837–81) and Cixi (1835–1908), in the Forbidden City about two miles west of the Yamen, were tearfully beseeching two officials, Weng Tonghe (1830– 1904) and Xia Tongshan (1830–80), to serve as teachers for the young emperor, Guangxu, who was Dowager Cixi’s nephew.⁶⁴ The political heart of the empire was vulner- able. It was not until 1898, three years after his empire was humiliated by Japan in the war that broke out in Chosŏn, that the emperor was able to launch a reform with the strong support of Weng. After the meeting, Mori asked the Zongli Yamen to issue a passport to a Japanese assistant whom he wanted to send to Chosŏn via Mukden to inform the Japa- nese ambassador to Chosŏn about the Sino-Japanese meetings. He also expressed his own desire to visit Li Hongzhang at Baoding, Li’s political headquarters, to show his gratitude for Li’s greetings. The Yamen refused to issue the passport because of the absence of relevant precedent, reiterating its assertion that Chosŏn was China’s shuguo. This response triggered another exchange of verbal jousts through diplomatic notes. Mori argued that “Chosŏn is an independent country, and the status of a so-called shuguo of China is only a nominal title [J., kūmei; Ch., kongming]…. Any Japanese-Korean contacts have nothing to do with the Sino- Japanese Treaty.”⁶⁵ This statement, echoing Low’s comments in 1871, marked the complete convergence of Japanese and Western policies challenging the nature of the Sino-Korean relationship. Perceiving this alignment, the Yamen wrote to the emperor, expressing severe concern over the likely prospect of problems caused by Japan, a country that “has recently adopted Western politics and customs and changed its own costumes and calendars.”⁶⁶ Japan had become a major troublemaker in China’s eyes. In order to inform Chosŏn of the situation, the Zongli Yamen asked the Ministry of Rites to immediately dispatch a copy of Mori’s note to Hansŏng. The note was sent from Beijing on January 19, 1876, four days after Japanese naval forces had arrived at Pusan. The Yamen, completely blind to the Japanese advance on Chosŏn, busied itself with arguing with Mori. Once the two sides had arrived at an utter impasse, two officers sent by Li Hongzhang arrived in Beijing to accom- pany Mori to Baoding. Both the Yamen and Mori were happy to hand the case to Li in hopes of winning a favorable ruling at Baoding. Li’s “Sincere Advice”: The Baoding Negotiations Thus began Li Hongzhang’s deep involvement in Chosŏn’s affairs as a provincial official. On January 10, while the Yamen squabbled with Mori, Li briefly ex- plained “some diplomatic ideas” regarding Chosŏn’s possible contacts with the West in his reply to a letter from Yi Yu-wŏn (1814–88), a Korean prime minister who had visited Beijing in 1875 as a tributary emissary.⁶⁷ Two weeks later, while his letter was on its way to Hansŏng, Li welcomed Mori at Baoding. The conver- sations that ensued were all the more complicated in that they were conducted not in Chinese or Japanese but in English. Moreover, in their reports to their re- spective governments, written in their own languages instead of in English, both sides claimed to be prevailing over the other. Neither Beijing nor Tokyo had an accurate picture of the actual progress of the talks.⁶⁸ The first conversation, on January 24, lasted for more than six hours over a banquet at Li’s office. Li had invited two officials, Huang Pengnian and Huang Huil- ian, to attend the meeting as guests and assistants. While Huang Pengnian was an erudite Confucian scholar, Huang Huilian was Cantonese and had been edu- cated at an American missionary school in Shanghai; his first name, Huilian, was a Chinese transliteration of William, the name of the school’s headmaster, William Jones Boone (1811–64; known in Chinese as Wen Huilian). William Huang had visited British Guiana and been drafted by Beijing to serve as an
interpreter during the Second Opium War in 1860. It seems that Mori decided to speak with Li in English after learning of William Huang’s English proficiency, as he felt that English would better allow him to convey the principles of international law as he believed they applied to the Korean issue.⁶⁹ To Mori’s argument that Chosŏn was an independent country rather than China’s shuguo, Li responded, Everyone knows that Chosŏn has been subordinate to China for thousands of years. In the phrase suoshu bangtu [territorial possessions] of the [Sino- Japanese] treaty, the tu means Chinese provinces, namely, China’s inner land [Ch., neidi] and inner subordinates [Ch., neishu], on which the Chinese gov- ernment levies taxes and whose political affairs it manages. The bang refers to countries such as Chosŏn that are China’s outer fan and outer subordinates [Ch., waishu], whose taxes and political affairs are always their own business. This is a convention, and it does not start with our dynasty. Chosŏn is indeed China’s shuguo.⁷⁰ This interpretation of suoshu bangtu implied that although Chosŏn did not lie within China’s immediate orbit, it was nonetheless part of the broader Chinese em- pire. Mori realized that no agreement could be reached on this point, so he ended the argument with Li. In the subsequent discussion on the Kanghwa incident, whereas Li stressed several times that Japan should obey the Sino-Japanese Treaty of 1871 and international law, Mori, who had visited the prominent British philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) before returning to Japan and had seen the dramatic expansion of the Western colonial enterprise, re- sponded that state power was much more reliable than textual treaties. At the end, Mori asked Li what China would do if a war broke out between Japan and Chosŏn. Li replied that not only China but also Russia would send troops to defend Chosŏn. Li then wrote out for Mori, under the title “Sincere Advice” (Ch., Zhonggao), eight Chinese characters, which read, “Acting only to disturb harmony, brings no benefits at all” (Ch., Tushang heqi, haowu liyi). Mori did not men- tion Li’s warning in his reports to Tokyo. The next day, New Year’s Eve, Li visited Mori for a short conversation that did not touch on the Korean issue but in- cluded a discussion of Japan’s reforms. Li did not inform the Zongli Yamen of the details of this conversation, but Mori kept a full record in English, which indi- cates the epistemological gulf that separated the two men and the worlds they represented and defended.⁷¹ As Mori and Li closed their talks, the Japanese fleet dropped anchor at the offing of Kanghwa Island. After Mori returned to Beijing, he resumed his debate with the Zongli Yamen. The Yamen emphasized to Mori that “solving its difficulties, resolving its dis- putes, and securing its safety and security [Ch., shu qi nan, jie qi fen, qi qi anquan] are the responsibilities to Chosŏn that China has taken upon itself, and they are how China treats its shuguo. It is the longstanding policy of China to refrain from forcing its shuguo to do what it is reluctant to do and to stand by when it runs into trouble.”⁷² Mori, however, continued to insist that “Chosŏn is indeed an independent country, so Japan will not take Chosŏn’s relations with China into con- sideration in matters between Japan and Chosŏn. The so-called shuguo is no more than a nominal title. Nothing should be related to the treaty of 1871.”⁷³ Thirty- four days of intensive negotiations had brought the two sides nowhere. Old News and No News: The 1876 Imperial Mission to Chosŏn and the Limits of Zongfan Communications The Sino-Korean Zongfan rituals that took place in Hansŏng in 1876 showed how untenable Mori’s enthusiastic diplomatic rhetoric was. On February 16, two days after the end of the Sino-Japanese debate in Beijing, the king held a grand ceremony in Hansŏng for the two imperial envoys coming to invest the crown prince. All procedures followed the precedents of investiture, and the host and guests alike performed the rituals according to code. The king expressed to the en- voys his sincere gratitude to the emperor and the Zongli Yamen for informing him of the Japanese activities in Beijing. The envoys, praising the stance that Chosŏn had taken against Japan’s sovereign letters, said that Japan’s forces had reportedly arrived in Kanghwa and wanted to establish a consulate there, and they
voiced uneasiness about the situation.⁷⁴ In fact, the king had already dispatched two officials to negotiate with the Japanese at Kanghwa before receiving word from Beijing. He did not solicit advice from the envoys, nor did the envoys show any interest in obtaining details of the negotiations. Some historians have argued that Beijing used the imperial envoys to, among other things, persuade Chosŏn to conclude a treaty with Japan,⁷⁵ but records of the contact between the king and the envoys contradict this assertion. On February 27 Chosŏn signed a treaty with Japan that ended their eight-year dispute. That same day, the Ministry of Rites in Beijing dispatched, at the top speed of five hundred li per day, a note to Chosŏn along with a copy of the Baoding conversations between Li and Mori. Handicapped by the sluggish speed of communications, the ministry, the Zongli Yamen, and Li Hongzhang could not follow the progress of the Japanese-Korean negotiations. Beijing did not receive a reply to its February note to Chosŏn about Japan’s talks with China until May 31, three months after the conclusion of the Treaty of Kanghwa. By contrast, Mori could receive Tokyo’s instructions by telegram within ten days, and Thomas Wade, who closely monitored the negotiations, was able to have his report delivered to London within eight days. Modern technology was changing international politics in an inconspicuous but concrete way, but no such improvements had yet reached the Sino-Korean channels of communication. A week after the treaty was signed, the Manchu general at Mukden, Chongshi (1820–76), asked the Zongli Yamen whether the Ministry of Rites had received any response from the Koreans. Chongshi confessed that although Mukden bordered Chosŏn, the only information he had on Chosŏn consisted of rumors spread by Chinese and Korean merchants in the area. He hoped that the two imperial envoys could give him some reliable updates.⁷⁶ The general was, of course, disap- pointed in this hope. In the Forbidden City, meanwhile, the two empress dowagers discussed the Korean situation with Guo Songtao (1818–91), a minister of the Zongli Yamen who had been appointed the first minister to Britain. The dowagers disparaged Mori’s and Wade’s “cunning” personalities and called them “first- class bad men” (Ch., diyi deng huairen) whose mission was to “make trouble.”⁷⁷ Like Chongshi, the dowagers and Guo were unaware that the Treaty of Kanghwa had already been signed. At the time, China had no official channel for communications beyond the empire, although Western ministers had arrived in Beijing as early as 1861. Its first minister to Japan would not set foot on Japanese soil until December 1877, almost five years after the arrival of the first Japanese minister in Beijing. A week after Guo’s conversation with the dowagers, it was from Mori, one of the “first-class bad men,” that the Zongli Yamen and the Manchu court learned that Japan had signed a treaty with Chosŏn. And it was not for another month—and then through the German minister to Beijing, Max August von Brandt (1835–1920)—that the Yamen first heard about the contents of the treaty. Only on April 17, when Mori submitted a full copy of the treaty to the Zongli Yamen, did the Chinese side finally see what it entailed. China’s passive position vis-à-vis Chosŏn and the treaty system with Japan was laid bare. In the two decades after 1876, it would become in- creasingly clear that this was China’s normal state within the established framework. On April 21 Beijing at last received a note from the king, who briefly reviewed the treaty negotiations. The king never submitted a copy of the treaty to the em- peror, nor did the emperor ever request it or raise any questions about the agreement. The king reported that the mistrust between Chosŏn and Japan had evapo- rated thanks to the inauguration of the long-term friendship between them: “The bilateral contacts will be conducted by officials of the two countries on an equal footing. As it is not the first time that we have traded with Japan, we have allowed the Japanese to trade at our ports, where they must follow our rules.”⁷⁸ Although the treaty endowed Japan with the right of consular jurisdiction and abolished all former trade conventions and junk trade (J., saiken sen), Chosŏn’s perception of the treaty was still rooted in conventional kyorin norms, rather than in any understanding of international law. It is difficult, then, to define the treaty as a truly modern one.⁷⁹
The Japanese Invention: The Birth of Chosŏn’s “Sovereignty” as a Textual Derivative On March 22, 1876, the Gaimushō released the contents of the Treaty of Kanghwa and distributed an English version among the foreign ministers in Tokyo. The English translation of article 1 reads, Chosŏn being an independent state enjoys the same sovereign rights as does Japan. In order to prove the sincerity of the friendship existing between the nations, their intercourse shall henceforward be carried on in terms of equality and courtesy, each avoiding the giving of offence by arrogance or manifes- tations of suspicion. In the first instance all rules and precedents that are apt to obstruct friendly intercourse shall be totally abrogated and, in their stead, rules, liberal and in general usage fit to secure a firm and perpetual peace, shall be established.⁸⁰ Many diplomats at the time and scholars since then concluded that this article, and in particular the first sentence, explicitly defines Chosŏn as an independent state under the terms of international law, although some scholars have recognized that the English translation of the first sentence is not precise.⁸¹ Given that the original text of the treaty used only Japanese and Chinese, a comparison of the Japanese and Chinese texts of the first article and the English version reveals critical discrepancies in several key terms. The first sentence of the article in the Japanese version reads, “Chōsen koku wa jishu no kuni ni shite, Nihon koku to byōdō no ken o hoyū seri 朝鮮國ハ 自主ノ邦ニシテ日本國ト平等ノ權ヲ保有セリ” (lit., The country of Chosŏn is a nation with the right of self-rule, possessing rights equal to Japan’s). The Chi- nese version of this sentence—“Chosŏn kug chaju ji bang, boyu yŏ Ilbon kug p’yŏngdŭng ji kwŏn 朝鮮國自主之邦保有與日本國平等之權”—has the same meaning.⁸² It is clear that the Gaimushō made a deliberate choice to translate the term jishu (K., chaju; Ch., zizhu) as “independence” and the phrase jishu no kuni (K., chaju ji bang; Ch., zizhu zhi bang) as “independent state.” More importantly, the English translation intentionally rendered the Chinese character ken (K., kwŏn; Ch., quan) not simply as “right” but as “sovereign right.” The second half of the sentence, which literally says that Chosŏn “possesses rights equal to Japan’s,” thus ends up claiming that Chosŏn “enjoys the same sovereign rights as does Japan.” Later in the article, the Gaimushō translated the phrase dōtō no reigi (K., tongdŭng ji ye; Ch., tongdeng zhi li), which literally means “equal rituals” or “equal courtesy,” as “equality and courtesy.” By changing the term dōtō from an adjec- tive to a noun, the Gaimushō reinforced the claim inherent in its translation of the first sentence. Since the Western ministers in Tokyo could not read Chinese or Japanese texts, the Gaimushō may have hoped to mislead the English-speaking world by defin- ing Chosŏn’s sovereignty and independence in the English translation. Both the American minister, John Bingham (1815–1900), and the British minister, Harry Parkes, accepted the provided translation and helped disseminate it in the West.⁸³ Certainly, Chosŏn’s sovereign right, or sovereignty, was not created by Japan’s subtle English translation; rather, Chosŏn always enjoyed sovereignty on its own territory, but this sovereign was subject to China’s emperorship in the Zongfan world.⁸⁴ It was not until 1882, when Chosŏn signed a treaty with the United States, that its “sovereign right” was explicitly defined for the first time in both Chinese and English. In 1876, neither Beijing nor Hansŏng foresaw the problems caused by the English translation of the treaty. Japan believed that it had successfully re- solved the issue of Chosŏn’s status through the treaty and that it had prevailed over Beijing in the debate on the topic. In his final report to the Gaimushō on his mission to Beijing, Mori was self-congratulatory: “Suffice it to say,” he claimed, “that the Zongli Yamen has been convinced by my argument…. The only objective of the debate was to cut off the Sino-Korean relationship, which I have achieved.”⁸⁵ Yet he would soon realize that he had been too optimistic. Commodore Robert W. Shufeldt of the US Navy returned to East Asia in March 1880 in hopes of negotiating a treaty with Chosŏn. During the intervening four years, Chosŏn had dispatched only an envoy of amity (K., Susin sa) to Japan in 1876 in observance of conventions, whereas it continued to send annual tributary
emissaries to Beijing. Chosŏn believed that it had restored the pre-1876 order that was maintained by the policy of serving the great in its relations with China and that of communicating with a neighboring country vis-à-vis Japan. The arrival of Shufeldt in the early 1880s created a stir in the hermit nation and became a test of the trilateral relations between Chosŏn, Japan, and China.
4 DEFINING CHOSŎN Qing China’s Depiction of Chosŏn’s Status, 1862–76
For the Qing ruling house and intelligentsia, everyday familiarity collapsed on the very first day that the Westerners entered Beijing as permanent diplomatic representatives.¹ As the self-strengthening movement unfolded in the 1860s, Beijing was increasingly intrigued by the possibility of employing European methods to enhance China’s military and technical capabilities for the sake of China’s future. The innovations proposed by various reformers caught the attention of more open-minded Chinese officials who were interested in statecraft outside their ivory towers. This elite drew on knowledge from abroad and pioneered Chinese modernization, aware that the entrenched politico-cultural concept of all-under-Heaven embedded in a cosmopolitan, Confucian worldview was ineluctably giving way to more realistic world politics born of sophisticated foreign negotiations informed by Western norms. The elite realized that they must first learn those norms from their Western counterparts. In 1864 the Zongli Yamen published Wanguo gongfa (lit. the common law among ten thousand countries), the Chinese edition of Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law, which had appeared in English in 1836.² Translated by an American Presbyterian missionary in Beijing, William A. P. Martin (1827–1916; known in Chinese as Ding Weiliang), it was the first guide to international law in China and the Chinese world. The Chinese edition pointedly added a map of the world that presented it in the conventional arrangement of eastern and western hemispheres, which further eroded the Sinocentric view by portraying China as merely one country among others.³ The Great Qing began to transform its political and diplomatic norms by integrating notions of international law into its own constitutional and institutional systems.
However, the disintegration of the Qing’s old conceptualization of Western countries as barbarians did not lead to a similar breakdown in the Zongfan framework that bound together the Manchu and Korean courts. Their symbiotic legitimacy, which could not be redefined or circumscribed by international law, still strongly influenced their internal and external policies and behavior in the middle of the nineteenth century. In this sense, the two Opium Wars and the treaties from 1842 to 1860 did not simply mark the twilight of the Old and the dawn of the New, as the East-West dichotomy would have it.⁴ Rather, the treaty port network imposed from the outside and the time-honored Zongfan arrangement inside the Qing realm formed a dual system of two coexisting elements, and the former did not immediately begin to replace or incorporate the latter, as many scholars have retrospectively presumed. Since the 1860s, as contacts between Chosŏn and Western countries grew more frequent, both Beijing and Hansŏng found it increasingly difficult to define their Zongfan relationship and Chosŏn’s international status and state sovereignty. While the two countries asserted unanimously that Chosŏn was China’s shuguo or shubang (subordinate country) possessing the right of zizhu, China’s treaty counterparts treated Chosŏn as a state with independent sovereignty that maintained a merely ritual relationship to China. This chapter explores this diplomatic conundrum and its consequences. Chosŏn as China’s Shuguo : The Sino-French Conflict of 1866 The Beginning of the Puzzle: The French Invasion and China’s Response
In 1866, France decided to launch an expedition against Chosŏn in response to the killing of French missionaries in anti-Catholic purges initiated by Yi Ha-ŭng (1820–98), better known by his title, Taewŏn’gun (Prince of the great court). The Taewŏn’gun had become the de facto regent after his twelve-year-old son, Yi Hŭi (King Kojong), assumed the throne in 1863 as the closest male relative and thus the legitimate successor of the late King Ikchong.⁵ During the decade of his
regency, the Taewŏn’gun carried out a series of domestic reforms, but as a follower of Confucianism he also regarded Western religions as heresies or evil ideas (K., sahak). In early 1866 he started to persecute converts to Christianity and Catholicism, leading to the execution of thirteen French missionaries and hundreds of native converts in a short time.⁶
When news of the purge reached Beijing, the French chargé d’affaires, Henri de Bellonet, decided to launch a punitive expedition against Chosŏn. On July 14, 1866, Bellonet sent the Zongli Yamen a letter threatening that France would invade and temporarily occupy Chosŏn and appoint a new king. He noted that the expedition would have nothing to do with China, as he had earlier been informed by the Yamen that Chosŏn managed its own affairs. Indeed, in 1865 Bellonet had asked the Yamen to issue a dispatch to Chosŏn to inform the king that French missionaries wanted to bring their teachings to the kingdom. The Yamen had declined to do so, explaining that "Chosŏn, as a shuguo of China, only uses the Chinese calendar, uses Chinese regnal titles, and pays annual tribute to China. Bellonet interpreted this response to mean that the Chinese government has no authority or power over Corea."⁷ From then on, both Western states and the Zongli Yamen had continuous difficulty pinning down Chosŏn’s status as China’s shuguo in terms that the other side could accurately understand.
The Zongli Yamen claimed both that Chosŏn was a shuguo of China and that because Chosŏn managed all its own affairs under the rubric of zizhu, China would not intervene in them. This statement was clear in Zongfan terms but came across as equivocal and paradoxical to Western ministers. While Bellonet acknowledged that Chosŏn had formerly assumed the bonds of vassalage to the Chinese empire, he asserted that at the present moment, we do not recognize any authority whatever of the Chinese government over the kingdom of Corea.⁸ This statement recognized Chosŏn as an independent nation, but the Yamen’s Chinese translation of it missed its political meaning. The Wanguo gongfa of 1864 did not provide the Yamen with a definition of shuguo that could be translated into appropriate Western terms.
What, then, caused this misunderstanding between France and China? This question is closely connected to the Western perception of the Sinocentric political arrangement. At least since the late eighteenth century, Western travelers, observers, and diplomats who witnessed the practice of Korea and other entities of sending emissaries with tribute to Beijing used the term tributary to describe the nature of the relationship between China and Korea, Vietnam, and other countries.⁹ Their descriptions constituted the first step toward using the terms tribute system or tributary system to refer to the Zongfan system in Western literature on China and East Asia. In the first half of the nineteenth century, when Western diplomats brought international law to East Asia, the Western understanding of this tribute system became increasingly skewed. As the Western states gradually integrated China and Japan into the family of nations defined according to European norms, they found that Chosŏn maintained a special relationship with China that they could not explain adequately within the framework of these norms. Thus, according to M. Frederick Nelson, "searching back into the categories which their international system listed, they hit upon that of suzerain and vassal as most nearly fitting this East Asiatic relationship, and they then proceeded to apply the legal attributes of vassalage to the non-legal status of a shu-pang [shubang, subordinate country]."¹⁰ The Sino-Korean relationship was thus depicted as a form of a suzerain-vassal relationship in order to fit it into a Western interpretive setting.¹¹ As this and the following chapters show, the special relationship between Egypt and the Ottoman Empire was seen as an instructive analogy, in part as a result of Japan’s strategy of using European legal terminology to undermine the Sino-Korean relationship.¹²
As the misunderstanding between the French and China shows, this suzerain-vassal rendering of the Zongfan order risked a legal quagmire regarding Chosŏn. Both China and Chosŏn declared that Chosŏn was China’s subordinate country with the right of autonomy; the Western countries and Japan interpreted this to mean that Korea was an independent sovereign state with all international rights. The confusion was exacerbated by the fact that Wanguo gongfa used Chinese Zongfan concepts to translate English legal terms. For example, the English term colony was rendered as pingfan (fence), shu-bang, or shuguo; dependency as
shubang; vassal state as fanshu (subordinate country or dependent country); sovereign states as zizhu zhi guo (countries with the right of self-rule); and right of sovereignty as zizhu zhi quan (right of self-rule).¹³ The discrepancies between the Chinese and European terms show that China’s perspective remained essentially familistic, whereas the Europeans and the Americans operated in a primarily legal context.¹⁴ Martin, the Wanguo gongfa translator, was not the first to adopt these Chinese terms in translation. As early as the 1830s, some Protestant missionaries, such as Karl Gützlaff (1803–51) from Prussia, rendered colony as fanshu guo in their Chinese-language magazines published in South China. For example, the September 1833 issue of Dong Xi-yang kao meiyue tongji zhuan (Eastern-Western monthly magazine) calls India Da Yingguo zhi fanshu guo (the subordinate country of Great Britain) and Siberia Eluosi fanshu guo (the subordinate country of Russia).¹⁵ Since the 1860s, the terminological inconsistency led to great confusion over the nature of the Zongfan relationship and growing conflicts between China, Korea, and other countries.
As a result, Western diplomats in East Asia widely perceived the Sino-Korean relationship as a nominal one, with China exercising no real authority over Korea.¹⁶ Misunderstandings persisted through the late 1880s and early 1890s, as William W. Rockhill (1854–1914) confessed in his study of Sino-Korean relations, which was aimed at clarifying what he described as a puzzle for Western nations—whether Korea was an integral part of the Chinese empire or a sovereign state enjoying absolute international rights. Rockhill argued that the Chinese term shuguo, generally but misleadingly converted into English terms such as vassal kingdom or fief, was the key-note to the whole system of Korean dependency.¹⁷ What led Rockhill to identify Korea’s status as a puzzle seems to have been its contrast with the European colonial experience of his day: the relationship between a European colonial power and its overseas colonies—that of Britain and India, or of France and Algeria—was clear, since the colony was undoubtedly an integral part of the empire, fully subject to the imperial administration. The questions regarding Sino-Korean relations raised in the early 1890s by George N. Curzon, who later served as viceroy of India, similarly reflected this colonial discourse.¹⁸ But although these Europeans could not reconcile Chosŏn’s status with their Eurocentric understanding of colonial relationships, they nonetheless regarded the Sino-Korean relationship as a legitimate one, which may explain why their states never publicly denied that Chosŏn was a dependency of China before 1895. The Sino-French negotiation over Chosŏn’s international position in 1866 was the beginning of the exposure of a range of conceptual, textual, ideological, and epistemological conflicts between China and its Western counterparts. Bellonet was thus among the first Westerners who encountered difficulties in dealing with the Zongfan order in practice.
On the Chinese side, the Zongli Yamen, as a temporary institution established on an ad hoc basis, had no right to communicate with Chosŏn, and until the end of the Zongfan relationship in 1895 it never gained that right. Rather, the Ministry of Rites continued to carry responsibility for Chosŏn’s affairs. The Zongli Yamen simply sent any cases involving Chosŏn to the Ministry of Rites for processing. The ministry, for its part, could not make changes to established imperial codes, formalities, or precedents regarding Chosŏn, so it often forwarded the cases to the emperor and the Grand Council to receive further instructions. This convention-driven arrangement persisted until 1882, when Beijing endowed Li Hongzhang—the Beiyang superintendent under the supervision of the Zongli Yamen—with the right to communicate with the king. Contacts between Chosŏn and Western states in the 1860s thus exposed China’s policy deficit in the uncharted territory between the Zongli Yamen and the Ministry of Rites, and this deficit endured for another three decades. Given this context, the Zongli Yamen pursued a policy of mediation (Ch., paijie) between Chosŏn and the West. It replied to Bellonet that the French should not rush to attack Chosŏn and that China would mediate between France and Chosŏn, but it did not claim responsibility for the killing of the French missionaries. In a memorial to the emperor and in a confidential letter to governors-general and governors of the coastal provinces and Manchu generals in Manchuria, the Yamen expressed serious concern over the French hostility toward Chosŏn and proclaimed that China could in no way sit it out if Chosŏn were to come under foreign attack.¹⁹ It also notified Chosŏn, via the Ministry of
Rites, of the possibility that French forces might invade the country.²⁰
Undeterred, Bellonet instructed Admiral Pierre-Gustave Roze (1812–83), commander of the French Far Eastern Squadron, to launch the expedition. On September 20 Roze led three warships from Zhifu (Chefoo, now Yantai) on the Shandong Peninsula across the Bohai Sea. They arrived at a small island off the coast of Inch’ŏn, where they made navigational charts of the waters along the coastlines. Roze refused to contact local officials while conducting these activities. At court, the Taewŏn’gun learned of the arrival of the foreign strange-shaped ships (K., iyang sŏn), but he nonetheless continued his anti-Catholic campaign by arresting and executing more converts. Ten days before the French forces arrived, the young king, at his father’s suggestion, had issued a decree of antiheresy (K., ch’ŏksa yunŭm) to further stoke anti-Catholic resentment.²¹
On October 1 the three primary members of the most recent tributary mission to Beijing—Yu Hu-bok, Sŏ Tang-po, and Hong Sun-hak—returned to Hansŏng and were granted an audience with the king. The mission had been charged with requesting the Qing to invest the daughter of the late official Min Ch’i-rok with the title of queen; she would later be known as Queen Min (1851–95). Yu made a point of informing the king and senior ministers that the foreigners in Beijing were beyond Chinese jurisdiction and were not afraid of the big country.²² Yu’s account may have given the court the impression that China had become a victim of Western invaders, and that Chosŏn would be next. This news reinforced the Taewŏn’gun’s anti-Catholic and xenophobic attitude, convincing him that Chosŏn’s security could be guaranteed only by resisting the barbarians of the ocean (K., yang’i).²³
Two weeks after Yu’s audience with the king, the French squadron reached Inch’ŏn and blockaded all entrances to the Han River of Hansŏng. In spite of Korean resistance, French marines landed on Korean soil and proceeded to loot the capital of Kanghwa Prefecture and other nearby towns. With the arrival of cold weather in early November, they withdrew back to Zhifu. The Western ministers in Beijing had assumed that the expedition would bring Chosŏn into the modern world. The American chargé d’affaires Samuel Wells Williams (1812–84), for instance, exclaimed that it is full time that Corea was introduced into the family of nations.²⁴ But Williams and his colleagues soon realized that the French had failed to conduct any negotiations with the Koreans, much less introduce into the country any ideas of the family of nations. Instead the military invasion provided the Taewŏn’gun with a further justification for his policy of countering barbarians and protecting the nation (K., yang’i poguk).²⁵ Parallel Tracks: Continuing Sino-Korean Zongfan Contacts
On November 1, 1866, while the battle with the French marines was raging in Kanghwa, the king held a grand ceremony in Hansŏng to welcome two Manchu envoys, Kuiling and Xiyuan, who came to invest the new queen. Following the customary ritual codes, the king went to the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country on the city’s outskirts to welcome the envoys. Afterward, inside the capital, the king performed the requisite ceremonies to receive the book of investiture. The investiture emphasized that the queen should assist the king in bringing prosperity to the country, which had been a loyal " fan and fence" (Ch., fanping) of China for generations.²⁶ In a domestic decree that the king issued after the grand ceremony to celebrate the investiture, he emphasized that Chosŏn, the lower country, appreciated the magnanimous favor of the central dynasty and the big country.²⁷ During the envoys’ three-day sojourn, all rituals were performed precisely according to precedent. In conversations between the king and the envoys, the ongoing war with the French, raging just twenty-five miles away, never came up. The boundary between Zongfan matters and diplomatic affairs was as clear as the two countries’ court-to-court and country-to-country relationships.
The arrival of an imperial mission in Chosŏn at this critical moment raised serious concerns among the French. Prince Gong explained that the envoys were on affairs of ceremonial, and in accordance with long-established usage, having no reference to the quarrel between France and Corea, but Bellonet was suspicious.²⁸ Prince Gong circulated his correspondence with Bellonet among the foreign ministers, which served to publicize in the diplomatic corps China’s
definition of the Sino-Korean relationship. While Prince Gong argued with Bellonet about the Korean issue, two Korean tributary missions arrived in Beijing in succession.
The first mission, headed by Han Mun-kyu, arrived on November 6 to receive the imperial calendar for the upcoming year. In the king’s memorial to the emperor that Han brought to Beijing, the king stated that Chosŏn had no wish to do business with foreign countries and that Catholicism and other foreign religions were not welcome in Chosŏn. In addition, Han brought to Wan Qingli, a minister of the Qing Ministry of Rites, a personal letter from Yi Hŭng-min (1809–81), a former tributary emissary who had become acquainted with Wan the previous year. In his letter, Yi tried to legitimize the Taewŏn’gun’s anti-Catholic policy and hoped Wan would take advantage of his position to discuss the issue with the emperor and the Zongli Yamen, in the hope that China would persuade foreigners not to visit Chosŏn. Realizing that the issue was beyond the jurisdiction of his ministry and personal correspondence, Wan forwarded the letter to the emperor, asking for instructions and suggesting that he relay the court’s recommendations to Chosŏn through his personal response to Yi.²⁹ The court did not take Wan up on his offer. The emperor’s decree to the king likewise skirted the issue, simply telling the king to secure Chosŏn without offering any specific strategy.
Two months after Han’s arrival, a second Korean mission, this one bearing the annual tribute, reached Beijing on February 1, 1867, three days before the Spring Festival. In his memorials to the emperor on the occasion of the lunar New Year, the king declared again that it was impossible for Chosŏn to trade with foreign barbarians such as the French or to allow them to spread the Gospel in the country. The king also reported that Yi Hŭng-min had been punished because his personal letter to high-ranking officials of the imperial dynasty had violated regulations. The Chinese court had no further instructions for the king. Meanwhile, the French did not follow their brief expedition with further campaigns against Chosŏn. The issue of Chosŏn’s status remained unsettled and soon proved confusing to the United States. The Shuguo between Zizhu and Independence: American Views of Chosŏn’s Status, 1866–71 Shipwrecks and Savages: China’s Disavowal of Responsibility for Chosŏn
In July and September 1866, two American schooners, the Surprise and the General Sherman, were wrecked in Chosŏn, the former off the coast of the country and the latter in the Taedong River in P’yŏngyang. The crew of the Surprise was treated kindly and escorted safely to the Chinese side via Fenghuang Gate, but the members of the General Sherman ’s crew were mercilessly killed right in P’yŏngyang. After learning about the General Sherman case, the American minister in Beijing, Anson Burlingame (1820–70), immediately brought the issue to the attention of Prince Gong because Corea was formerly tributary to China. To Burlingame’s surprise, Prince Gong at once disavowed all responsibility for the Coreans, and stated that the only connection between the two countries was one of ceremonial. In a letter to Rear Admiral Henry H. Bell (1808–68), the acting commander of the US Asiatic Squadron, Burlingame affirmed that the Chinese government disavows any responsibility for that of Corea, and all jurisdiction over its people.³⁰ The case was thus passed on to Bell, who, in a confidential dispatch to the Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles (1802–78), suggested that the United States launch punitive action against Chosŏn.³¹ In fact, Secretary of State William H. Seward (1801–72) had proposed to the French representative in Washington that the United States and France initiate a combined action against Chosŏn, but France had declined.³² Bell’s proposed expedition did not take place either. In early 1867 the navy dispatched the USS Wachusett to Chosŏn under the command of Robert W. Shufeldt (1822–95) to investigate the General Sherman incident. But the expedition yielded nothing, as severe weather forced Shufeldt out of Chosŏn before he could receive an official response to his queries. To the United States, Chosŏn remained what American scholars would call a hermit nation.³³
American diplomats found themselves involved in another shipwreck in East Asia in March 1867, this time involving the schooner Rover in Taiwan (Formosa). The Rover foundered on the southern coast of the island, and the crew members who came ashore were ambushed and killed by aborigines known as the Koaluts. Believing that the incident was within his jurisdiction, Charles W. Le Gendre (1830–99), the American consul at Xiamen (Amoy), brought the matter to the attention of the governor-general in Fuzhou, the local officials of Taiwan Prefecture, and the Zongli Yamen. The local officials informed Le Gendre that the crew had met with their deaths in savage lands (Ch., shengfan jie) beyond the civilization of the sovereign (Ch., wanghua buji), not within the waters over which the Chinese government exercises jurisdiction, and that their murderers were savages rather than Chinese civilians (Ch., huamin). Therefore, articles 11 and 13 of the 1858 Sino-American Treaty regarding China’s jurisdiction did not apply, and the Chinese government had no responsibility to take action against the Koaluts as the consul had requested. Le Gendre, believing to the contrary that the savages were within China’s jurisdiction, warned his Chinese counterparts that other states could cite such a disavowal of responsibility as an excuse to occupy the savage lands.³⁴ Finally, the Chinese authorities dispatched soldiers to accompany Le Gendre to southern Taiwan, but the minister alone entered the Koaluts’ territory and concluded an agreement with the chieftain.³⁵ Le Gendre’s experience of negotiating with the Chinese side was not notable at the time and seemed unrelated to Chosŏn. But it would prove significant in the 1870s, when Tokyo hired Le Gendre to help reframe Japanese policy toward Taiwan, Ryukyu, Chosŏn, and China. A Nominal Connection: Low’s Assessment of the Sino-Korean Relationship
Before Japan joined the Western states in challenging Chosŏn’s status, Frederick F. Low (1828–94), the American minister in Beijing and the former governor of California, organized an expedition to Chosŏn in 1871 with the aim of negotiating a treaty for the protection of shipwrecked mariners. His action pushed Beijing to clarify China’s definition of the Sino-Korean relationship. As Low saw it, Corea is substantially an independent nation and the Korean tribute to China "is sent rather as a quid pro quo for the privilege of trading with the Chinese than a governmental tribute."³⁶ Low nonetheless solicited the aid of the Zongli Yamen to obtain useful information about Chosŏn. In February 1871 Low delivered to the Yamen a letter that he hoped would be forwarded to the king of Chosŏn via the Ministry of Rites. After sending the letter to Chosŏn, the ministry noted, in a confidential memorial to the emperor, that "Chosŏn has used China’s ruling titles and calendars for a long time and proved the most loyal. All affairs regarding its government, religion, prohibitions, and laws are subject to its own management by the rule of zizhu, and none of these affairs has China hitherto interfered in."³⁷ These same words were used by the Zongli Yamen in its dispatch to Low in March.
Low decided, first, to interpret China’s position as affirming Chosŏn’s independent sovereignty, stating that although Corea is regarded as a country subordinate to China, yet she is wholly independent in everything that relates to her government, her religion, her prohibitions, and her laws; in none of these things has China hitherto interfered. In essence, he translated the Chinese term zizhu into full independence. Second, he concluded that the Chinese declaration aimed to guard against complications that may possibly grow out of an attempt by foreign nations to open intercourse with Corea, and relieve this Government of all responsibility for the acts of the Coreans, whether hostile or otherwise. Low thus interpreted Beijing’s declaration as a repudiation of responsibility for Chosŏn’s behavior. It seemed that it was time for him to sail for Chosŏn, a place that was, for him, more of a sealed book than Japan was before Commodore Perry’s visit.³⁸ Low determined to become another Perry.
Yet Low failed to crack the book. After arriving in Chosŏn in May, he was unable to establish official contacts with the Korean side. The expedition only intensified Chosŏn’s hostility toward Western countries. Chosŏn continued to identify itself as a subject of China that had no right to communicate with foreign countries—that is, to conduct diplomacy. This point was reiterated by the king in his memorial to the emperor in June 1871 in response to Low’s letter, forwarded from Beijing.³⁹ After the frustrating failure of his expedition, Low still hoped to contact Chosŏn through Beijing, and his conversations with the Zongli Yamen
provided him with further opportunities to reconceptualize the Sino-Korean relationship. He concluded that the relations between the two countries, established during the reign of the Ming Emperors, nominally continued unchanged, although, practically, they have little force.⁴⁰ Despite a sharp refutation from Prince Gong, Low continued to hold this opinion.
Between 1866 and 1871, the Western ministers’ perception of Chosŏn shifted: they no longer considered it a tributary of China but rather saw it as an independent state beyond Chinese jurisdiction. Several key terms of international law were now applied to the Sinocentric Zongfan order, even though nothing within this order had changed. In 1871 the Qing signed its first Western-style treaty with Japan that portrayed the two countries as equals. Over the next five years, Japan, in the midst of dramatic Westernizing reforms under Emperor Meiji (r. 1867– 1912), became the vanguard of the challenge to the Sino-Korean relationship, aided by its position as an insider in the East Asian community. The participation of the rising Japanese empire opened a new chapter in modern East Asian history. The Shuguo between Chinese Legitimacy and International Law: The First Sino-Japanese Debate Japan’s Contacts with Chosŏn and the Sino-Japanese Treaty of 1871
During the Japanese Tokugawa bakufu period (1603–1867), communications between Japan and Chosŏn were conducted through the Sō family in the domain of Tsushima. Chosŏn interacted with the Sō in a semi-Zongfan framework. The head of the Sō sent boats to Chosŏn for trade in accordance with Chosŏn’s regulations, and he presented himself as a subordinate in letters to the king. In return, when necessary, Chosŏn followed the policy of kyorin, communicating with a neighboring country, by dispatching messengers to Japan to consolidate the two countries’ friendly relations. All such messengers visited Kyoto and Edo (Tokyo) via Tsushima. Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan established the Gaimushō, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to manage foreign relations under newly adopted Western norms. While its relationships with other countries evolved steadily, Japan failed to modernize its relationship with Chosŏn. Chosŏn refused to accept Japan’s sovereign letters, figuratively closing the country’s door in Japan’s face.
In the meantime, Japan was approaching China to pursue an international status equal to it. In September 1871 the Japanese minister plenipotentiary, Date Munenari (1818–92), signed a treaty, written in both the Chinese and Japanese languages, with Li Hongzhang in Tianjin. The first article stated, Relations of amity shall henceforth be maintained in redoubled force between China and Japan, in measure as boundless as the heaven and the earth. In all that regards the territorial possessions of either country the two Governments shall treat each other with proper courtesy, without the slightest infringement or encroachment on either side, to the end that there may be for evermore peace between them undisturbed.⁴¹ The term territorial possessions and its applicability to Chosŏn later became a source of disagreement between the two countries. The term is a rough English equivalent of the Chinese suoshu bangtu. Suoshu means to belong to, but bangtu is too vague to be accurately defined in international law. Literally, bang means country and tu means land, but bangtu could mean country, land, or territorial possessions. Both China and Japan subsequently realized that the term failed to establish whether the countries serving as China’s outer fan, in particular Chosŏn, counted among China’s territorial possessions. Both sides used the term’s uncertain definition to their own advantage, resulting in fierce disputes when Japan began implementing an aggressive policy toward Ryukyu and Chosŏn in the 1870s. An Ambush on the Chinese: Soejima’s Embassy to Beijing in 1873
In December 1871 a ship from Ryukyu was shipwrecked on the southern coast of Taiwan, where the aborigines killed fifty-four members of its crew. Since Japan was in the process of annexing Ryukyu by converting it into a Japanese domain (J., han), Tokyo regarded the incident as a good opportunity to finalize the matter by cutting off Ryukyu’s Zongfan relationship with China. In February 1873 Emperor Meiji appointed the minister of foreign affairs, Soejima Taneomi (1828–1905),
as ambassador extraordinary to China to ratify the Treaty of Tianjin of 1871. The emperor instructed Soejima to discuss the killings of the Ryukyuese sailors to determine whether the whole of Taiwan was under China’s jurisdiction.⁴² A key proponent of the Seikan ron (expedition against Korea), Soejima eagerly availed himself of this chance to glean information on China’s attitude toward Japanese-Korean contacts. Among the members of the Japanese mission was Japan’s newly appointed adviser on foreign policy toward Taiwan, Charles Le Gendre, whose experience was invaluable to Tokyo’s efforts to formulate and implement a new policy toward the Chinese Zongfan system.⁴³ It was through Western advisers such as Le Gendre who mastered modern Western norms regarding sovereignty and international law that Japan transformed itself into an outsider to the East Asian community in terms of its foreign policy.
Soejima arrived in Tianjin in April, and his visit marked the first time that a Japanese official showed up in China in a Western tailcoat. After ratifying the treaty, Soejima briefly discussed Japanese-Korean relations with Li Hongzhang. Li warned that Japan should be friendly to Chosŏn and that any Japanese expedition against it would violate the Sino-Japanese treaty.⁴⁴ In Beijing, with Le Gendre’s assistance, Soejima visited foreign legations in the city. The current British minister, Thomas F. Wade (1818–95), reported to London that the Japanese are also suspected of a design on Corea and that Soejima is evidently anxious for an assurance from the Chinese that Corea is an independent Kingdom, so independent of China, that is to say, as to make what may befall Corea no concern of the Chinese. Wade inferred that Japan would apply gunboat diplomacy to Korea.⁴⁵ According to Frederick Low, Soejima had only two questions of importance which he desires to discuss with the Chinese government. First, he wanted to know whether China is responsible for the acts of the aborigines on the island of Formosa. According to Low, If the answer is in the negative, notice will then be given that Japan proposed to send a military force to Formosa to chastise the savage and semi-civilized tribes that practically hold undisputed possession of the large part of the island. Second, Soejima wanted to ascertain the precise relations between China and Corea; whether the former claims to exercise such control over her tributary as to render China responsible for the acts of the Coreans, or whether other nations must look to Corea alone for redress for wrongs and outrages which her people may commit.⁴⁶
Soejima’s view of the likely relationship between China and its periphery—Taiwan and Chosŏn—matched Western countries’ conclusions regarding the limits of China’s jurisdiction over these regions. When Soejima solicited Low’s opinions on Chosŏn, Low showed him the Zongli Yamen’s dispatch of March 1871, mentioned earlier, which affirmed China’s noninterference in Chosŏn’s affairs in accordance with the principle of zizhu. Upon Low’s assertion that Chosŏn was wholly independent, Soejima made the judgment that Chosŏn lay "beyond the Qing’s sovereignty [J., shuken]."⁴⁷ The Japanese policy of challenging Chosŏn’s status as China’s shuguo thus began to converge with the policies pursued by the United States, France, Britain, and other Western states in China.
Soejima’s conclusion found support in a meeting at the Zongli Yamen on June 21, 1873, that brought together a Japanese representative, Yanagiwara Sakimitsu (1850–94), and the Chinese ministers Mao Changxi (1817–82) and Dong Xun (1807–92). Yanagiwara asked how China could justify claiming Chosŏn as a shuguo, since the Yamen had asserted in its 1871 note to the American minister that China never interfered with its internal politics, religion, prohibitions, and laws. Mao, drawing on an understanding of Sino-Korean contacts that he might have gained when working at the Ministry of Rites, explained that "the so-called shuguo referred only to investiture and tribute submission" and that China would not interfere with Chosŏn’s right to conduct negotiations over war and peace.⁴⁸ Mao’s response satisfied Soejima because it corroborated Low’s argument.⁴⁹ Soejima, along with his Western counterparts, was granted an audience with the Tongzhi emperor on June 29. It was the first imperial audience for Western ministers since the 1840s and it encouraged both sides to improve their understanding of each other.
Upon his return to Tokyo, Soejima stepped up his advocacy for an expedition to Korea, but the return of a Japanese mission to the United States and Europe halted his plan. The three key members of the mission, Iwakura Tomomi (1825– 83), Ōkubo Toshimichi (1830–78), and Kido Takayoshi (1833–77), argued that
Japan should focus on domestic reforms to reorganize its national politics and make its people rich.⁵⁰ As this policy prevailed, the proponents of the Seikan ron, such as Soejima, Saigō Takamori (1827–77), Itagaki Taisuke (1837–1919), and Etō Shinpei (1834–74), were pushed out of the cabinet. In December 1873 the young king of Chosŏn assumed direct rule and ended the regency of Taewŏn’gun. Tokyo tried to take advantage of this occasion to pursue a new diplomatic relationship with Hansŏng, but its efforts failed in the face of sharp resistance by local officials in Pusan, where the Koreans still preferred to communicate with the Japanese through the kyorin framework. Japan, it seemed, could not make any substantial progress on opening a new channel of communication with the Korean court. The Birth of Chosŏn’s Sovereignty: The Second Sino-Japanese Debate and the Treaty of Kanghwa Defining China’s Territory: Taiwan, Kanghwa, and Mori’s Visit to Beijing
In the summer of 1874, while Tokyo was sending troops to South Taiwan to deal with the territory in question beyond the jurisdiction of the Chinese government, it also sent Yanagiwara Sakimitsu and Ōkubo Toshimichi to Beijing for further negotiations about Taiwan.⁵¹ The Zongli Yamen told the Japanese representatives, Even if the aborigines are ‘barbarians,’ they are still China’s barbarians, and only China has the right to punish them if they are guilty. The Chinese ministers pointed to relevant rules of international law and Chinese historical evidence, such as local gazetteers, to bolster their point. Without close advice from Western advisers such as Le Gendre, the Japanese failed to prove that the aborigines’ area of residence in South Taiwan was beyond China’s jurisdiction. Under the mediation of Thomas Wade, the doyen of the diplomatic corps in Beijing, the Chinese and Japanese sides reached a succinct agreement. Interestingly, the third article of the agreement stated that all correspondence that this question has occasioned between the two governments shall be canceled, and the discussions dropped for evermore.⁵² In this way, Japan not only invalidated any documents that could expose its inferior position in the talks on the reach of China’s territory but also shifted future negotiations to the track of international law. To the Japanese, the negotiations indicated that only a Japan equipped with European norms could challenge the Chinese discourse, which helps explain why, over the following decade, Japan frequently solicited its Western advisers for suggestions regarding Japan’s foreign policy toward its neighbors.
A skirmish between Japan and Chosŏn near Kanghwa Island in September 1875 led to the resurgence of support for the Seikan ron in Japan. This time Iwakura and his fellow politicians endorsed the expedition, because Japan’s diplomatic situation was much improved. In addition to reaching an agreement with China about the Taiwan incident, Tokyo had resolved its territorial disputes with Russia over Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands by signing a treaty in St. Petersburg in May 1875, through which it obtained Russian acquiescence to its actions in Chosŏn. Meanwhile, in order to check Russia’s southern advance in East Asia during the Russo-British rivalry in Central Asia, Britain planned to occupy Port Hamilton, a small Korean island known as Kŏmundo near the Tsushima Strait.⁵³ This plan provided Japan with an excuse to initiate an expedition against Korea without triggering an intervention from these Western powers. In October 1875 Kido Takayoshi suggested that Japan should press China for an explanation of its relationship with Chosŏn; once Beijing had disavowed responsibility for Chosŏn’s foreign affairs, Japan could freely take action against Chosŏn.⁵⁴
The Japanese government appointed Mori Arinori (1847–89) as the minister plenipotentiary to Beijing. Educated in Britain and having worked in the United States, Mori was familiar with Western diplomatic rules and had consulted with Erasmus Peshine Smith (1814–82), the American special adviser to the Gaimushō on international law, regarding the Kanghwa incident. Sanjō Sanetomi (1837–91), chancellor of the realm, issued instructions to Mori’s embassy, and the most important among them was to "identify Chosŏn as an independent country [J., dokuritsu koku] and persuade China to help establish Japanese-Korean relations for the sake of Japan’s and China’s common interests. In short, Mori’s mission was to cut off the Sino-Korean relationship."⁵⁵ The foreign minister, Terashima
Munenori (1832–93), telegraphed the chargé d’affaires in Beijing, Tei Einei (1829–97), saying that since Soejima’s visit in 1873 had not confirmed that Chosŏn was not a " fan and subordinate" (J., hanzoku) of the Qing, Tei should be cautious about all contacts between Japan and the Qing regarding Chosŏn.⁵⁶ Another Ambush on the Chinese: Mori’s Debate with the Zongli Yamen
On January 2, 1876, the Qing court dispatched two envoys, Jihe and Wulasiconga, to Chosŏn to invest the king’s son, Yi Ch’ŏk, as the crown prince. Three Han Chinese grand secretaries—Mao Changxi, Li Hongzhang, and Zuo Zongtang (1812–85)—drafted the imperial edict of investiture in December 1875. Two days later Mori arrived in Beijing with the aim of denying this Sino-Korean relationship from the perspective of international law.
Mori paid his first visit to Thomas Wade, in the hope that the latter could mediate between Japan and China. Wade was impressed by Mori, but his situation made it impossible for him to assist Mori.⁵⁷ Wade’s relations with Beijing were strained due to an incident in the previous year in which a young British interpreter handpicked by Wade, Augustus R. Margary, had been killed on an expedition to Burma from Yunnan. Wade had repeatedly telegraphed London to ask for more naval forces to pressure China into negotiating with him for another treaty. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) supported Wade and conceived a plan to ally with Japan against China, a scheme he called one of the greatest secrets of State going.⁵⁸ But the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Edward Henry Stanley (1826–93), did not endorse this aggressive approach.⁵⁹ Under the circumstances, Wade had no desire to be involved in the Sino-Japanese negotiations on Korean affairs, but after his conversation with Mori he reported to London that the minister’s manner, rather than his language, made me mistrustful. I inferred that an expedition of Corea is determined on and that the object of his confidential communications to me was to ascertain whether objection to the expedition would be taken by English, or any other foreign action.⁶⁰ Wade could not have been more correct. On January 6, 1876, the Japanese ambassador plenipotentiary to Chosŏn, Kuroda Kiyotaka (1840–1900), sailed from Tokyo for the Korean Peninsula, leading a fleet of two gunboats and four schooners.⁶¹
Mori, accompanied by his interpreter, Tei Einei, and two secretaries, met with five Chinese ministers on January 10 at the Zongli Yamen to discuss Chosŏn’s status. Zhou Jiamei (1835–86) served as the secretary for the Chinese side. Mori, the youngest man in the room, was also the only person who knew international law and had Western educational and diplomatic experience. Shortly after the talks started, the two sides realized that they were on diametrically opposed tracks. The conversation unfolded mainly between Mori and Shen Guifen (1818–81), who had previously worked at the Ministry of Rites. Mori asked why China, identifying Chosŏn as its shuguo, nonetheless claimed that Chosŏn’s "politics, religion, prohibitions, and laws fall under the principle of zizhu . Shen explained, The shuguo is not land under the governance of our country [Ch., yuan bushi woguo guanxia zhi di]. But it pays tribute on time, receives our investiture, and accepts our country’s calendar, and this has made it our shuguo ." Shen further informed Mori that Vietnam, Ryukyu, and Burma were also China’s shuguo, with different schedules for the payment of tribute. When Mori asked whether a shuguo could negotiate with foreign countries on trade without informing China, Shen replied that the country in question would manage its affairs by itself and China would not get involved, but that it would legally respond to any disputes arising between the shuguo and China’s treaty partners. Shen warned Mori that any invasion of a shuguo of China would not be defensible and would contravene the first article of the Sino-Japanese Treaty of 1871.⁶²
At this point it became apparent that the disagreement between the two sides hinged on their different definitions of the term shuguo. For Mori, a shuguo could mean a colony, a dependency, or a nation with semisovereign rights. In particular, he used the relationship between the Muhammad Ali dynasty of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, that between Hungary and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and that between Canada and the British Empire as three examples of shuguo in the Western context. The three examples were, however, completely lost in the Chinese translation because of the vast gap in international knowledge between the two parties. The Chinese ministers retorted with convincing examples drawn from the Chinese context to prove that Chosŏn was in all senses a shuguo of China.
The debate ended without agreement.
The meeting having fallen short of his expectations, Mori acknowledged the gulf between the two sides and expressed frustration with Chinese officialdom.⁶³ In the aftermath of the so-called Tongzhi Restoration—an attempt to strengthen the dynasty and traditional order in the 1860s—the Qing was facing increasingly serious challenges from within as well as from outside the country. On the same day that Mori was arguing with the Zongli Yamen, Empress Dowagers Cian (1837–81) and Cixi (1835–1908), in the Forbidden City about two miles west of the Yamen, were tearfully beseeching two officials, Weng Tonghe (1830– 1904) and Xia Tongshan (1830–80), to serve as teachers for the young emperor, Guangxu, who was Dowager Cixi’s nephew.⁶⁴ The political heart of the empire was vulnerable. It was not until 1898, three years after his empire was humiliated by Japan in the war that broke out in Chosŏn, that the emperor was able to launch a reform with the strong support of Weng.
After the meeting, Mori asked the Zongli Yamen to issue a passport to a Japanese assistant whom he wanted to send to Chosŏn via Mukden to inform the Japanese ambassador to Chosŏn about the Sino-Japanese meetings. He also expressed his own desire to visit Li Hongzhang at Baoding, Li’s political headquarters, to show his gratitude for Li’s greetings. The Yamen refused to issue the passport because of the absence of relevant precedent, reiterating its assertion that Chosŏn was China’s shuguo. This response triggered another exchange of verbal jousts through diplomatic notes. Mori argued that "Chosŏn is an independent country, and the status of a so-called shuguo of China is only a nominal title [J., kūmei; Ch., kongming]…. Any Japanese-Korean contacts have nothing to do with the Sino-Japanese Treaty."⁶⁵ This statement, echoing Low’s comments in 1871, marked the complete convergence of Japanese and Western policies challenging the nature of the Sino-Korean relationship. Perceiving this alignment, the Yamen wrote to the emperor, expressing severe concern over the likely prospect of problems caused by Japan, a country that has recently adopted Western politics and customs and changed its own costumes and calendars.⁶⁶ Japan had become a major troublemaker in China’s eyes.
In order to inform Chosŏn of the situation, the Zongli Yamen asked the Ministry of Rites to immediately dispatch a copy of Mori’s note to Hansŏng. The note was sent from Beijing on January 19, 1876, four days after Japanese naval forces had arrived at Pusan. The Yamen, completely blind to the Japanese advance on Chosŏn, busied itself with arguing with Mori. Once the two sides had arrived at an utter impasse, two officers sent by Li Hongzhang arrived in Beijing to accompany Mori to Baoding. Both the Yamen and Mori were happy to hand the case to Li in hopes of winning a favorable ruling at Baoding. Li’s Sincere Advice: The Baoding Negotiations
Thus began Li Hongzhang’s deep involvement in Chosŏn’s affairs as a provincial official. On January 10, while the Yamen squabbled with Mori, Li briefly explained some diplomatic ideas regarding Chosŏn’s possible contacts with the West in his reply to a letter from Yi Yu-wŏn (1814–88), a Korean prime minister who had visited Beijing in 1875 as a tributary emissary.⁶⁷ Two weeks later, while his letter was on its way to Hansŏng, Li welcomed Mori at Baoding. The conversations that ensued were all the more complicated in that they were conducted not in Chinese or Japanese but in English. Moreover, in their reports to their respective governments, written in their own languages instead of in English, both sides claimed to be prevailing over the other. Neither Beijing nor Tokyo had an accurate picture of the actual progress of the talks.⁶⁸
The first conversation, on January 24, lasted for more than six hours over a banquet at Li’s office. Li had invited two officials, Huang Pengnian and Huang Huilian, to attend the meeting as guests and assistants. While Huang Pengnian was an erudite Confucian scholar, Huang Huilian was Cantonese and had been educated at an American missionary school in Shanghai; his first name, Huilian, was a Chinese transliteration of William, the name of the school’s headmaster, William Jones Boone (1811–64; known in Chinese as Wen Huilian). William Huang had visited British Guiana and been drafted by Beijing to serve as an
interpreter during the Second Opium War in 1860. It seems that Mori decided to speak with Li in English after learning of William Huang’s English proficiency, as he felt that English would better allow him to convey the principles of international law as he believed they applied to the Korean issue.⁶⁹
To Mori’s argument that Chosŏn was an independent country rather than China’s shuguo, Li responded,
Everyone knows that Chosŏn has been subordinate to China for thousands of years. In the phrase suoshu bangtu [territorial possessions] of the [Sino-Japanese] treaty, the tu means Chinese provinces, namely, China’s inner land [Ch., neidi] and inner subordinates [Ch., neishu], on which the Chinese government levies taxes and whose political affairs it manages. The bang refers to countries such as Chosŏn that are China’s outer fan and outer subordinates [Ch., waishu], whose taxes and political affairs are always their own business. This is a convention, and it does not start with our dynasty. Chosŏn is indeed China’s shuguo.⁷⁰
This interpretation of suoshu bangtu implied that although Chosŏn did not lie within China’s immediate orbit, it was nonetheless part of the broader Chinese empire. Mori realized that no agreement could be reached on this point, so he ended the argument with Li. In the subsequent discussion on the Kanghwa incident, whereas Li stressed several times that Japan should obey the Sino-Japanese Treaty of 1871 and international law, Mori, who had visited the prominent British philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) before returning to Japan and had seen the dramatic expansion of the Western colonial enterprise, responded that state power was much more reliable than textual treaties. At the end, Mori asked Li what China would do if a war broke out between Japan and Chosŏn. Li replied that not only China but also Russia would send troops to defend Chosŏn. Li then wrote out for Mori, under the title Sincere Advice (Ch., Zhonggao), eight Chinese characters, which read, Acting only to disturb harmony, brings no benefits at all (Ch., Tushang heqi, haowu liyi). Mori did not mention Li’s warning in his reports to Tokyo. The next day, New Year’s Eve, Li visited Mori for a short conversation that did not touch on the Korean issue but included a discussion of Japan’s reforms. Li did not inform the Zongli Yamen of the details of this conversation, but Mori kept a full record in English, which indicates the epistemological gulf that separated the two men and the worlds they represented and defended.⁷¹ As Mori and Li closed their talks, the Japanese fleet dropped anchor at the offing of Kanghwa Island.
After Mori returned to Beijing, he resumed his debate with the Zongli Yamen. The Yamen emphasized to Mori that "solving its difficulties, resolving its disputes, and securing its safety and security [Ch., shu qi nan, jie qi fen, qi qi anquan] are the responsibilities to Chosŏn that China has taken upon itself, and they are how China treats its shuguo. It is the longstanding policy of China to refrain from forcing its shuguo to do what it is reluctant to do and to stand by when it runs into trouble."⁷² Mori, however, continued to insist that "Chosŏn is indeed an independent country, so Japan will not take Chosŏn’s relations with China into consideration in matters between Japan and Chosŏn. The so-called shuguo is no more than a nominal title. Nothing should be related to the treaty of 1871."⁷³ Thirty-four days of intensive negotiations had brought the two sides nowhere. Old News and No News: The 1876 Imperial Mission to Chosŏn and the Limits of Zongfan Communications
The Sino-Korean Zongfan rituals that took place in Hansŏng in 1876 showed how untenable Mori’s enthusiastic diplomatic rhetoric was. On February 16, two days after the end of the Sino-Japanese debate in Beijing, the king held a grand ceremony in Hansŏng for the two imperial envoys coming to invest the crown prince. All procedures followed the precedents of investiture, and the host and guests alike performed the rituals according to code. The king expressed to the envoys his sincere gratitude to the emperor and the Zongli Yamen for informing him of the Japanese activities in Beijing. The envoys, praising the stance that Chosŏn had taken against Japan’s sovereign letters, said that Japan’s forces had reportedly arrived in Kanghwa and wanted to establish a consulate there, and they
voiced uneasiness about the situation.⁷⁴ In fact, the king had already dispatched two officials to negotiate with the Japanese at Kanghwa before receiving word from Beijing. He did not solicit advice from the envoys, nor did the envoys show any interest in obtaining details of the negotiations. Some historians have argued that Beijing used the imperial envoys to, among other things, persuade Chosŏn to conclude a treaty with Japan,⁷⁵ but records of the contact between the king and the envoys contradict this assertion.
On February 27 Chosŏn signed a treaty with Japan that ended their eight-year dispute. That same day, the Ministry of Rites in Beijing dispatched, at the top speed of five hundred li per day, a note to Chosŏn along with a copy of the Baoding conversations between Li and Mori. Handicapped by the sluggish speed of communications, the ministry, the Zongli Yamen, and Li Hongzhang could not follow the progress of the Japanese-Korean negotiations. Beijing did not receive a reply to its February note to Chosŏn about Japan’s talks with China until May 31, three months after the conclusion of the Treaty of Kanghwa. By contrast, Mori could receive Tokyo’s instructions by telegram within ten days, and Thomas Wade, who closely monitored the negotiations, was able to have his report delivered to London within eight days. Modern technology was changing international politics in an inconspicuous but concrete way, but no such improvements had yet reached the Sino-Korean channels of communication.
A week after the treaty was signed, the Manchu general at Mukden, Chongshi (1820–76), asked the Zongli Yamen whether the Ministry of Rites had received any response from the Koreans. Chongshi confessed that although Mukden bordered Chosŏn, the only information he had on Chosŏn consisted of rumors spread by Chinese and Korean merchants in the area. He hoped that the two imperial envoys could give him some reliable updates.⁷⁶ The general was, of course, disappointed in this hope. In the Forbidden City, meanwhile, the two empress dowagers discussed the Korean situation with Guo Songtao (1818–91), a minister of the Zongli Yamen who had been appointed the first minister to Britain. The dowagers disparaged Mori’s and Wade’s cunning personalities and called them first-class bad men (Ch., diyi deng huairen) whose mission was to make trouble.⁷⁷ Like Chongshi, the dowagers and Guo were unaware that the Treaty of Kanghwa had already been signed.
At the time, China had no official channel for communications beyond the empire, although Western ministers had arrived in Beijing as early as 1861. Its first minister to Japan would not set foot on Japanese soil until December 1877, almost five years after the arrival of the first Japanese minister in Beijing. A week after Guo’s conversation with the dowagers, it was from Mori, one of the first-class bad men, that the Zongli Yamen and the Manchu court learned that Japan had signed a treaty with Chosŏn. And it was not for another month—and then through the German minister to Beijing, Max August von Brandt (1835–1920)—that the Yamen first heard about the contents of the treaty. Only on April 17, when Mori submitted a full copy of the treaty to the Zongli Yamen, did the Chinese side finally see what it entailed. China’s passive position vis-à-vis Chosŏn and the treaty system with Japan was laid bare. In the two decades after 1876, it would become increasingly clear that this was China’s normal state within the established framework.
On April 21 Beijing at last received a note from the king, who briefly reviewed the treaty negotiations. The king never submitted a copy of the treaty to the emperor, nor did the emperor ever request it or raise any questions about the agreement. The king reported that the mistrust between Chosŏn and Japan had evaporated thanks to the inauguration of the long-term friendship between them: The bilateral contacts will be conducted by officials of the two countries on an equal footing. As it is not the first time that we have traded with Japan, we have allowed the Japanese to trade at our ports, where they must follow our rules.⁷⁸ Although the treaty endowed Japan with the right of consular jurisdiction and abolished all former trade conventions and junk trade (J., saiken sen), Chosŏn’s perception of the treaty was still rooted in conventional kyorin norms, rather than in any understanding of international law. It is difficult, then, to define the treaty as a truly modern one.⁷⁹ The Japanese Invention: The Birth of Chosŏn’s Sovereignty as a Textual Derivative
On March 22, 1876, the Gaimushō released the contents of the Treaty of Kanghwa and distributed an English version among the foreign ministers in Tokyo. The English translation of article 1 reads,
Chosŏn being an independent state enjoys the same sovereign rights as does Japan. In order to prove the sincerity of the friendship existing between the nations, their intercourse shall henceforward be carried on in terms of equality and courtesy, each avoiding the giving of offence by arrogance or manifestations of suspicion. In the first instance all rules and precedents that are apt to obstruct friendly intercourse shall be totally abrogated and, in their stead, rules, liberal and in general usage fit to secure a firm and perpetual peace, shall be established.⁸⁰
Many diplomats at the time and scholars since then concluded that this article, and in particular the first sentence, explicitly defines Chosŏn as an independent state under the terms of international law, although some scholars have recognized that the English translation of the first sentence is not precise.⁸¹ Given that the original text of the treaty used only Japanese and Chinese, a comparison of the Japanese and Chinese texts of the first article and the English version reveals critical discrepancies in several key terms.
The first sentence of the article in the Japanese version reads, Chōsen koku wa jishu no kuni ni shite, Nihon koku to byōdō no ken o hoyū seri 朝鮮國ハ 自主ノ邦ニシテ日本國ト平等ノ權ヲ保有セリ (lit., The country of Chosŏn is a nation with the right of self-rule, possessing rights equal to Japan’s). The Chinese version of this sentence—Chosŏn kug chaju ji bang, boyu yŏ Ilbon kug p’yŏngdŭng ji kwŏn 朝鮮國自主之邦保有與日本國平等之權—has the same meaning.⁸² It is clear that the Gaimushō made a deliberate choice to translate the term jishu (K., chaju; Ch., zizhu) as independence and the phrase jishu no kuni (K., chaju ji bang; Ch., zizhu zhi bang) as independent state. More importantly, the English translation intentionally rendered the Chinese character ken (K., kwŏn; Ch., quan) not simply as right but as sovereign right. The second half of the sentence, which literally says that Chosŏn possesses rights equal to Japan’s, thus ends up claiming that Chosŏn enjoys the same sovereign rights as does Japan. Later in the article, the Gaimushō translated the phrase dōtō no reigi (K., tongdŭng ji ye; Ch., tongdeng zhi li), which literally means equal rituals or equal courtesy, as equality and courtesy. By changing the term dōtō from an adjective to a noun, the Gaimushō reinforced the claim inherent in its translation of the first sentence.
Since the Western ministers in Tokyo could not read Chinese or Japanese texts, the Gaimushō may have hoped to mislead the English-speaking world by defining Chosŏn’s sovereignty and independence in the English translation. Both the American minister, John Bingham (1815–1900), and the British minister, Harry Parkes, accepted the provided translation and helped disseminate it in the West.⁸³ Certainly, Chosŏn’s sovereign right, or sovereignty, was not created by Japan’s subtle English translation; rather, Chosŏn always enjoyed sovereignty on its own territory, but this sovereign was subject to China’s emperorship in the Zongfan world.⁸⁴ It was not until 1882, when Chosŏn signed a treaty with the United States, that its sovereign right was explicitly defined for the first time in both Chinese and English. In 1876, neither Beijing nor Hansŏng foresaw the problems caused by the English translation of the treaty. Japan believed that it had successfully resolved the issue of Chosŏn’s status through the treaty and that it had prevailed over Beijing in the debate on the topic. In his final report to the Gaimushō on his mission to Beijing, Mori was self-congratulatory: Suffice it to say, he claimed, that the Zongli Yamen has been convinced by my argument…. The only objective of the debate was to cut off the Sino-Korean relationship, which I have achieved.⁸⁵ Yet he would soon realize that he had been too optimistic.
Commodore Robert W. Shufeldt of the US Navy returned to East Asia in March 1880 in hopes of negotiating a treaty with Chosŏn. During the intervening four years, Chosŏn had dispatched only an envoy of amity (K., Susin sa) to Japan in 1876 in observance of conventions, whereas it continued to send annual tributary
emissaries to Beijing. Chosŏn believed that it had restored the pre-1876 order that was maintained by the policy of serving the great in its relations with China and that of communicating with a neighboring country vis-à-vis Japan. The arrival of Shufeldt in the early 1880s created a stir in the hermit nation and became a test of the trilateral relations between Chosŏn, Japan, and China. Previous ChapterNext Chapter
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4DEFININGCHOSŎNQing China’s Depiction of Chosŏn’s Status, 1862–76For the Qing ruling house and intelligentsia, “everyday familiarity” collapsed on the very first day that the Westerners entered Beijing as permanent diplomaticrepresentatives.¹Astheself-strengtheningmovementunfoldedinthe1860s,BeijingwasincreasinglyintriguedbythepossibilityofemployingEuropeanmethodsto enhance China’s military and technical capabilities for the sake of China’s future. The innovations proposed by various reformers caught the attention of moreopen-minded Chinese officials who were interested in statecraft outside their ivory towers. This elite drew on knowledge from abroad and pioneered Chinesemodernization, aware that the entrenched politico-cultural concept of all-under-Heaven embedded in a cosmopolitan, Confucian worldview was ineluctably givingway to more realistic world politics born of sophisticated foreign negotiations informed by Western norms. The elite realized that they must first learn thosenormsfromtheirWesterncounterparts.In1864theZongliYamenpublishedWanguogongfa(lit.“thecommonlawamongtenthousandcountries”),theChineseeditionofHenryWheaton’sElementsofInternationalLaw,whichhadappearedinEnglishin1836.²TranslatedbyanAmericanPresbyterianmissionaryinBeijing,William A. P. Martin (1827–1916; known in Chinese as Ding Weiliang), it was the first guide to international law in China and the Chinese world. The Chinese edi-tion pointedly added a map of the world that presented it in the conventional arrangement of eastern and western hemispheres, which further eroded the Sinocen-tricviewbyportrayingChinaasmerelyonecountryamongothers.³TheGreatQingbegantotransformitspoliticalanddiplomaticnormsbyintegratingnotionsof international law into its own constitutional and institutional systems.However, the disintegration of the Qing’s old conceptualization of Western countries as barbarians did not lead to a similar breakdown in the Zongfan frame-work that bound together the Manchu and Korean courts. Their symbiotic legitimacy, which could not be redefined or circumscribed by international law, stillstrongly influenced their internal and external policies and behavior in the middle of the nineteenth century. In this sense, the two Opium Wars and the treatiesfrom1842to1860didnotsimplymark“thetwilightoftheOld”and“thedawnoftheNew,”astheEast-Westdichotomywouldhaveit.⁴Rather,thetreatyportnet-work imposed from the outside and the time-honored Zongfan arrangement inside the Qing realm formed a dual system of two coexisting elements, and the for-mer did not immediately begin to replace or incorporate the latter, as many scholars have retrospectively presumed. Since the 1860s, as contacts between Chosŏnand Western countries grew more frequent, both Beijing and Hansŏng found it increasingly difficult to define their Zongfan relationship and Chosŏn’s interna-tionalstatusandstatesovereignty.WhilethetwocountriesassertedunanimouslythatChosŏnwasChina’sshuguoorshubang(“subordinatecountry”)pos-sessingtherightofzizhu,China’streatycounterpartstreatedChosŏnasastatewithindependentsovereigntythatmaintainedamerelyritualrelationshiptoChina.This chapter explores this diplomatic conundrum and its consequences.ChosŏnasChina’sShuguo:TheSino-FrenchConflictof1866The Beginning of the Puzzle: The French Invasion and China’s ResponseIn 1866, France decided to launch an expedition against Chosŏn in response to the killing of French missionaries in anti-Catholic purges initiated by Yi Ha-ŭng(1820–98), better known by his title, Taewŏn’gun (Prince of the great court). The Taewŏn’gun had become the de facto regent after his twelve-year-old son, Yi Hŭi(KingKojong),assumedthethronein1863astheclosestmalerelativeandthusthelegitimatesuccessorofthelateKingIkchong.⁵Duringthedecadeofhis
regency, the Taewŏn’gun carried out a series of domestic reforms, but as a follower of Confucianism he also regarded Western religions as heresies or “evil ideas”(K.,sahak).Inearly1866hestartedtopersecuteconvertstoChristianityandCatholicism,leadingtotheexecutionofthirteenFrenchmissionariesandhundredsofnativeconvertsinashorttime.⁶When news of the purge reached Beijing, the French chargé d’affaires, Henri de Bellonet, decided to launch a punitive expedition against Chosŏn. On July 14,1866, Bellonet sent the Zongli Yamen a letter threatening that France would invade and temporarily occupy Chosŏn and appoint a new king. He noted that theexpedition would have nothing to do with China, as he had earlier been informed by the Yamen that Chosŏn managed its own affairs. Indeed, in 1865 Bellonet hadasked the Yamen to issue a dispatch to Chosŏn to inform the king that French missionaries wanted to bring their teachings to the kingdom. The Yamen had de-clinedtodoso,explainingthat“Chosŏn,asashuguoofChina,onlyusestheChinesecalendar,usesChineseregnaltitles,andpaysannualtributetoChina.”Bel-lonetinterpretedthisresponsetomeanthat“theChinesegovernmenthasnoauthorityorpoweroverCorea.”⁷Fromthenon,bothWesternstatesandtheZongliYamenhadcontinuousdifficultypinningdownChosŏn’sstatusasChina’sshuguointermsthattheothersidecouldaccuratelyunderstand.TheZongliYamenclaimedboththatChosŏnwasashuguoofChinaandthatbecauseChosŏnmanagedallitsownaffairsundertherubricofzizhu,Chinawouldnot intervene in them. This statement was clear in Zongfan terms but came across as equivocal and paradoxical to Western ministers. While Bellonet acknowl-edged that Chosŏn had “formerly assumed the bonds of vassalage to the Chinese empire,” he asserted that at the present moment, “we do not recognize any au-thoritywhateveroftheChinesegovernmentoverthekingdomofCorea.”⁸ThisstatementrecognizedChosŏnasanindependentnation,buttheYamen’sChinesetranslationofitmisseditspoliticalmeaning.TheWanguogongfaof1864didnotprovidetheYamenwithadefinitionofshuguothatcouldbetranslatedintoappropriate Western terms.What, then, caused this misunderstanding between France and China? This question is closely connected to the Western perception of the Sinocentric politicalarrangement. At least since the late eighteenth century, Western travelers, observers, and diplomats who witnessed the practice of Korea and other entities ofsending emissaries with tribute to Beijing used the term “tributary” to describe the nature of the relationship between China and Korea, Vietnam, and othercountries.⁹Theirdescriptionsconstitutedthefirststeptowardusingtheterms“tributesystem”or“tributarysystem”torefertotheZongfansysteminWesternliterature on China and East Asia. In the first half of the nineteenth century, when Western diplomats brought international law to East Asia, the Western under-standing of this tribute system became increasingly skewed. As the Western states gradually integrated China and Japan into the family of nations defined accord-ing to European norms, they found that Chosŏn maintained a special relationship with China that they could not explain adequately within the framework of thesenorms. Thus, according to M. Frederick Nelson, “searching back into the categories which their international system listed, they hit upon that of suzerain and vas-salasmostnearlyfittingthisEastAsiaticrelationship,andtheythenproceededtoapplythelegalattributesofvassalagetothenon-legalstatusofashu-pang[shubang,subordinatecountry].”¹⁰TheSino-Koreanrelationshipwasthusdepictedasaformofasuzerain-vassalrelationshipinordertofititintoaWesterninter-pretivesetting.¹¹Asthisandthefollowingchaptersshow,thespecialrelationshipbetweenEgyptandtheOttomanEmpirewasseenasaninstructiveanalogy,inpartasaresultofJapan’sstrategyofusingEuropeanlegalterminologytounderminetheSino-Koreanrelationship.¹²As the misunderstanding between the French and China shows, this suzerain-vassal rendering of the Zongfan order risked a legal quagmire regarding Chosŏn.Both China and Chosŏn declared that Chosŏn was China’s subordinate country with the right of autonomy; the Western countries and Japan interpreted this tomeanthatKoreawasanindependentsovereignstatewithallinternationalrights.TheconfusionwasexacerbatedbythefactthatWanguogongfausedChineseZongfanconceptstotranslateEnglishlegalterms.Forexample,theEnglishterm“colony”wasrenderedaspingfan(fence),shu-bang,orshuguo;“dependency”as
shubang;“vassalstate”asfanshu(subordinatecountryordependentcountry);“sovereignstates”aszizhuzhiguo(countrieswiththerightofself-rule);and“rightofsovereignty”aszizhuzhiquan(rightofself-rule).¹³ThediscrepanciesbetweentheChineseandEuropeantermsshowthatChina’sperspectiveremainedessen-tiallyfamilistic,whereastheEuropeansandtheAmericansoperatedinaprimarilylegalcontext.¹⁴Martin,theWanguogongfatranslator,wasnotthefirsttoadopttheseChinesetermsintranslation.Asearlyasthe1830s,someProtestantmissionaries,suchasKarlGützlaff(1803–51)fromPrussia,rendered“colony”asfanshuguointheirChinese-languagemagazinespublishedinSouthChina.Forexample,theSeptember1833issueofDongXi-yangkaomeiyuetongjizhuan(Eastern-Westernmonthlymagazine)callsIndiaDaYingguozhifanshuguo(thesubordinatecountryofGreatBritain)andSiberiaEluosifanshuguo(thesubordinatecountryofRussia).¹⁵Sincethe1860s,theterminologicalinconsistencyledtogreatconfusionoverthenatureoftheZongfanrelationshipandgrowingconflictsbetweenChina, Korea, and other countries.As a result, Western diplomats in East Asia widely perceived the Sino-Korean relationship as a “nominal” one, with China exercising “no real authority” overKorea.¹⁶Misunderstandingspersistedthroughthelate1880sandearly1890s,asWilliamW.Rockhill(1854–1914)confessedinhisstudyofSino-Koreanrelations,which was aimed at clarifying what he described as “a puzzle for Western nations”—whether Korea was “an integral part of the Chinese empire” or “a sovereignstateenjoyingabsoluteinternationalrights.”RockhillarguedthattheChinesetermshuguo,generallybutmisleadinglyconvertedintoEnglishtermssuchas“vas-salkingdom”or“fief,”was“thekey-notetothewholesystemofKoreandependency.”¹⁷WhatledRockhilltoidentifyKorea’sstatusasapuzzleseemstohavebeen its contrast with the European colonial experience of his day: the relationship between a European colonial power and its overseas colonies—that of Britainand India, or of France and Algeria—was clear, since the colony was undoubtedly an integral part of the empire, fully subject to the imperial administration. Thequestions regarding Sino-Korean relations raised in the early 1890s by George N. Curzon, who later served as viceroy of India, similarly reflected this colonialdiscourse.¹⁸ButalthoughtheseEuropeanscouldnotreconcileChosŏn’sstatuswiththeirEurocentricunderstandingofcolonialrelationships,theynonethelessregarded the Sino-Korean relationship as a legitimate one, which may explain why their states never publicly denied that Chosŏn was a dependency of China be-fore 1895. The Sino-French negotiation over Chosŏn’s international position in 1866 was the beginning of the exposure of a range of conceptual, textual, ideo-logical, and epistemological conflicts between China and its Western counterparts. Bellonet was thus among the first Westerners who encountered difficulties indealing with the Zongfan order in practice.On the Chinese side, the Zongli Yamen, as a temporary institution established on an ad hoc basis, had no right to communicate with Chosŏn, and until the endof the Zongfan relationship in 1895 it never gained that right. Rather, the Ministry of Rites continued to carry responsibility for Chosŏn’s affairs. The Zongli Yamensimply sent any cases involving Chosŏn to the Ministry of Rites for processing. The ministry, for its part, could not make changes to established imperial codes,formalities, or precedents regarding Chosŏn, so it often forwarded the cases to the emperor and the Grand Council to receive further instructions. This conven-tion-driv- arrangement persisted until 1882, when Beijing endowed Li Hongzhang—the Beiyang superintendent under the supervision of the Zongli Yamen—withthe right to communicate with the king. Contacts between Chosŏn and Western states in the 1860s thus exposed China’s policy deficit in the uncharted territorybetween the Zongli Yamen and the Ministry of Rites, and this deficit endured for another three decades. Given this context, the Zongli Yamen pursued a policy of“mediation”(Ch.,paijie)betweenChosŏnandtheWest.ItrepliedtoBellonetthattheFrenchshouldnotrushtoattackChosŏnandthatChinawouldmediatebe-tween France and Chosŏn, but it did not claim responsibility for the killing of the French missionaries. In a memorial to the emperor and in a confidential letter togovernors-general and governors of the coastal provinces and Manchu generals in Manchuria, the Yamen expressed serious concern over the French hostility to-wardChosŏnandproclaimedthatChinacould“innowaysititout”ifChosŏnweretocomeunderforeignattack.¹⁹ItalsonotifiedChosŏn,viatheMinistryof
Rites,ofthepossibilitythatFrenchforcesmightinvadethecountry.²⁰Undeterred, Bellonet instructed Admiral Pierre-Gustave Roze (1812–83), commander of the French Far Eastern Squadron, to launch the expedition. On Sep-tember 20 Roze led three warships from Zhifu (Chefoo, now Yantai) on the Shandong Peninsula across the Bohai Sea. They arrived at a small island off the coastof Inch’ŏn, where they made navigational charts of the waters along the coastlines. Roze refused to contact local officials while conducting these activities. Atcourt,theTaewŏn’gunlearnedofthearrivaloftheforeign“strange-shapedships”(K.,iyangsŏn),buthenonethelesscontinuedhisanti-Catholiccampaignbyar-resting and executing more converts. Ten days before the French forces arrived, the young king, at his father’s suggestion, had issued a “decree of antiheresy” (K.,ch’ŏksayunŭm)tofurtherstokeanti-Catholicresentment.²¹On October 1 the three primary members of the most recent tributary mission to Beijing—Yu Hu-bok, Sŏ Tang-po, and Hong Sun-hak—returned to Hansŏngand were granted an audience with the king. The mission had been charged with requesting the Qing to invest the daughter of the late official Min Ch’i-rok withthe title of queen; she would later be known as Queen Min (1851–95). Yu made a point of informing the king and senior ministers that the foreigners in BeijingwerebeyondChinesejurisdictionandwerenotafraidofthe“bigcountry.”²²Yu’saccountmayhavegiventhecourttheimpressionthatChinahadbecomeavic-tim of Western invaders, and that Chosŏn would be next. This news reinforced the Taewŏn’gun’s anti-Catholic and xenophobic attitude, convincing him thatChosŏn’ssecuritycouldbeguaranteedonlybyresistingthe“barbariansoftheocean”(K.,yang’i).²³Two weeks after Yu’s audience with the king, the French squadron reached Inch’ŏn and blockaded all entrances to the Han River of Hansŏng. In spite of Koreanresistance, French marines landed on Korean soil and proceeded to loot the capital of Kanghwa Prefecture and other nearby towns. With the arrival of cold weath-er in early November, they withdrew back to Zhifu. The Western ministers in Beijing had assumed that the expedition would bring Chosŏn into the modern world.The American chargé d’affaires Samuel Wells Williams (1812–84), for instance, exclaimed that “it is full time that Corea was introduced into the family ofnations.”²⁴ButWilliamsandhiscolleaguessoonrealizedthattheFrenchhadfailedtoconductanynegotiationswiththeKoreans,muchlessintroduceintothecountry any ideas of the family of nations. Instead the military invasion provided the Taewŏn’gun with a further justification for his policy of “countering barbar-iansandprotectingthenation”(K.,yang’ipoguk).²⁵Parallel Tracks: Continuing Sino-Korean Zongfan ContactsOn November 1, 1866, while the battle with the French marines was raging in Kanghwa, the king held a grand ceremony in Hansŏng to welcome two Manchu en-voys, Kuiling and Xiyuan, who came to invest the new queen. Following the customary ritual codes, the king went to the Hall of Admiring the Central CivilizedCountry on the city’s outskirts to welcome the envoys. Afterward, inside the capital, the king performed the requisite ceremonies to receive the book of investiture.Theinvestitureemphasizedthatthequeenshouldassistthekinginbringingprosperitytothecountry,whichhadbeenaloyal“fanandfence”(Ch.,fanping)ofChinaforgenerations.²⁶Inadomesticdecreethatthekingissuedafterthegrandceremonytocelebratetheinvestiture,heemphasizedthatChosŏn,the“lowercountry,”appreciatedthemagnanimousfavorofthe“centraldynasty”andthe“bigcountry.”²⁷Duringtheenvoys’three-daysojourn,allritualswereperformedprecisely according to precedent. In conversations between the king and the envoys, the ongoing war with the French, raging just twenty-five miles away, nevercame up. The boundary between Zongfan matters and diplomatic affairs was as clear as the two countries’ court-to-court and country-to-country relationships.The arrival of an imperial mission in Chosŏn at this critical moment raised serious concerns among the French. Prince Gong explained that the envoys “wereon affairs of ceremonial, and in accordance with long-established usage, having no reference to the quarrel between France and Corea,” but Bellonet wassuspicious.²⁸PrinceGongcirculatedhiscorrespondencewithBellonetamongtheforeignministers,whichservedtopublicizeinthediplomaticcorpsChina’s
definition of the Sino-Korean relationship. While Prince Gong argued with Bellonet about the Korean issue, two Korean tributary missions arrived in Beijing insuccession.The first mission, headed by Han Mun-kyu, arrived on November 6 to receive the imperial calendar for the upcoming year. In the king’s memorial to the em-peror that Han brought to Beijing, the king stated that Chosŏn had no wish to do business with foreign countries and that Catholicism and other foreign religionswere not welcome in Chosŏn. In addition, Han brought to Wan Qingli, a minister of the Qing Ministry of Rites, a personal letter from Yi Hŭng-min (1809–81), aformer tributary emissary who had become acquainted with Wan the previous year. In his letter, Yi tried to legitimize the Taewŏn’gun’s anti-Catholic policy andhoped Wan would take advantage of his position to discuss the issue with the emperor and the Zongli Yamen, in the hope that China would persuade foreignersnot to visit Chosŏn. Realizing that the issue was beyond the jurisdiction of his ministry and personal correspondence, Wan forwarded the letter to the emperor,askingforinstructionsandsuggestingthatherelaythecourt’srecommendationstoChosŏnthroughhispersonalresponsetoYi.²⁹ThecourtdidnottakeWanup on his offer. The emperor’s decree to the king likewise skirted the issue, simply telling the king to secure Chosŏn without offering any specific strategy.Two months after Han’s arrival, a second Korean mission, this one bearing the annual tribute, reached Beijing on February 1, 1867, three days before the SpringFestival. In his memorials to the emperor on the occasion of the lunar New Year, the king declared again that it was impossible for Chosŏn to trade with “foreignbarbarians” such as the French or to allow them to spread the Gospel in the country. The king also reported that Yi Hŭng-min had been punished because hispersonal letter to “high-ranking officials of the imperial dynasty” had violated regulations. The Chinese court had no further instructions for the king. Meanwhile,the French did not follow their brief expedition with further campaigns against Chosŏn. The issue of Chosŏn’s status remained unsettled and soon proved con-fusing to the United States.TheShuguobetweenZizhuandIndependence:AmericanViewsofChosŏn’sStatus,1866–71Shipwrecks and Savages: China’s Disavowal of Responsibility for ChosŏnInJulyandSeptember1866,twoAmericanschooners,theSurpriseandtheGeneralSherman,werewreckedinChosŏn,theformeroffthecoastofthecountryandthelatterintheTaedongRiverinP’yŏngyang.ThecrewoftheSurprisewastreatedkindlyandescortedsafelytotheChinesesideviaFenghuangGate,butthemembersoftheGeneralSherman’screwweremercilesslykilledrightinP’yŏngyang.AfterlearningabouttheGeneralShermancase,theAmericanministerinBei-jing, Anson Burlingame (1820–70), immediately brought the issue to the attention of Prince Gong because “Corea was formerly tributary to China.” ToBurlingame’s surprise, Prince Gong “at once disavowed all responsibility for the Coreans, and stated that the only connection between the two countries was oneof ceremonial.” In a letter to Rear Admiral Henry H. Bell (1808–68), the acting commander of the US Asiatic Squadron, Burlingame affirmed that “the ChinesegovernmentdisavowsanyresponsibilityforthatofCorea,andalljurisdictionoveritspeople.”³⁰ThecasewasthuspassedontoBell,who,inaconfidentialdis-patchtotheSecretaryoftheNavy,GideonWelles(1802–78),suggestedthattheUnitedStateslaunchpunitiveactionagainstChosŏn.³¹Infact,SecretaryofStateWilliam H. Seward (1801–72) had proposed to the French representative in Washington that the United States and France initiate a combined action againstChosŏn,butFrancehaddeclined.³²Bell’sproposedexpeditiondidnottakeplaceeither.Inearly1867thenavydispatchedtheUSSWachusetttoChosŏnunderthecommandofRobertW.Shufeldt(1822–95)toinvestigatetheGeneralShermanincident.Buttheexpeditionyieldednothing,assevereweatherforcedShufeldtout of Chosŏn before he could receive an official response to his queries. To the United States, Chosŏn remained what American scholars would call a “hermitnation.”³³
AmericandiplomatsfoundthemselvesinvolvedinanothershipwreckinEastAsiainMarch1867,thistimeinvolvingtheschoonerRoverinTaiwan(Formosa).TheRoverfounderedonthesoutherncoastoftheisland,andthecrewmemberswhocameashorewereambushedandkilledbyaboriginesknownastheKoaluts.Believing that the incident was within his jurisdiction, Charles W. Le Gendre (1830–99), the American consul at Xiamen (Amoy), brought the matter to the atten-tion of the governor-general in Fuzhou, the local officials of Taiwan Prefecture, and the Zongli Yamen. The local officials informed Le Gendre that the crew hadmetwiththeirdeathsin“savagelands”(Ch.,shengfanjie)“beyondthecivilizationofthesovereign”(Ch.,wanghuabuji),not“withinthewatersoverwhichtheChi-nesegovernmentexercisesjurisdiction,”andthattheirmurdererswere“savages”ratherthan“Chinesecivilians”(Ch.,huamin).Therefore,articles11and13ofthe1858 Sino-American Treaty regarding China’s jurisdiction did not apply, and the Chinese government had no responsibility to take action against the Koaluts asthe consul had requested. Le Gendre, believing to the contrary that the “savages” were within China’s jurisdiction, warned his Chinese counterparts that otherstatescouldcitesuchadisavowalofresponsibilityasanexcusetooccupythe“savagelands.”³⁴Finally,theChineseauthoritiesdispatchedsoldierstoaccom-panyLeGendretosouthernTaiwan,buttheministeraloneenteredtheKoaluts’territoryandconcludedanagreementwiththechieftain.³⁵LeGendre’sexperienceof negotiating with the Chinese side was not notable at the time and seemed unrelated to Chosŏn. But it would prove significant in the 1870s, when Tokyo hiredLe Gendre to help reframe Japanese policy toward Taiwan, Ryukyu, Chosŏn, and China.A “Nominal” Connection: Low’s Assessment of the Sino-Korean RelationshipBefore Japan joined the Western states in challenging Chosŏn’s status, Frederick F. Low (1828–94), the American minister in Beijing and the former governor ofCalifornia, organized an expedition to Chosŏn in 1871 with the aim of negotiating a treaty for the protection of shipwrecked mariners. His action pushed Beijing toclarify China’s definition of the Sino-Korean relationship. As Low saw it, “Corea is substantially an independent nation” and the Korean tribute to China “is sentratherasaquidproquofortheprivilegeoftradingwiththeChinesethanagovernmentaltribute.”³⁶LownonethelesssolicitedtheaidoftheZongliYamentoob-tain useful information about Chosŏn. In February 1871 Low delivered to the Yamen a letter that he hoped would be forwarded to the king of Chosŏn via the Min-istry of Rites. After sending the letter to Chosŏn, the ministry noted, in a confidential memorial to the emperor, that “Chosŏn has used China’s ruling titles andcalendars for a long time and proved the most loyal. All affairs regarding its government, religion, prohibitions, and laws are subject to its own management bytheruleofzizhu,andnoneoftheseaffairshasChinahithertointerferedin.”³⁷ThesesamewordswereusedbytheZongliYameninitsdispatchtoLowinMarch.Low decided, first, to interpret China’s position as affirming Chosŏn’s independent sovereignty, stating that “although Corea is regarded as a country subor-dinate to China, yet she is wholly independent in everything that relates to her government, her religion, her prohibitions, and her laws; in none of these thingshasChinahithertointerfered.”Inessence,hetranslatedtheChinesetermzizhuintofullindependence.Second,heconcludedthattheChinesedeclarationaimedto “guard against complications that may possibly grow out of an attempt by foreign nations to open intercourse with Corea, and relieve this Government of all re-sponsibility for the acts of the Coreans, whether hostile or otherwise.” Low thus interpreted Beijing’s declaration as a repudiation of responsibility for Chosŏn’sbehavior. It seemed that it was time for him to sail for Chosŏn, a place that was, for him, “more of a sealed book than Japan was before Commodore Perry’svisit.”³⁸LowdeterminedtobecomeanotherPerry.Yet Low failed to crack the book. After arriving in Chosŏn in May, he was unable to establish official contacts with the Korean side. The expedition only inten-sified Chosŏn’s hostility toward Western countries. Chosŏn continued to identify itself as “a subject of China” that had no right to “communicate with foreigncountries”—that is, to conduct diplomacy. This point was reiterated by the king in his memorial to the emperor in June 1871 in response to Low’s letter, forwardedfromBeijing.³⁹Afterthefrustratingfailureofhisexpedition,LowstillhopedtocontactChosŏnthroughBeijing,andhisconversationswiththeZongliYamen
provided him with further opportunities to reconceptualize the Sino-Korean relationship. He concluded that the relations between the two countries, “establishedduringthereignoftheMingEmperors,nominallycontinuedunchanged,although,practically,theyhavelittleforce.”⁴⁰DespiteasharprefutationfromPrinceGong, Low continued to hold this opinion.Between 1866 and 1871, the Western ministers’ perception of Chosŏn shifted: they no longer considered it a tributary of China but rather saw it as an inde-pendent state beyond Chinese jurisdiction. Several key terms of international law were now applied to the Sinocentric Zongfan order, even though nothing withinthis order had changed. In 1871 the Qing signed its first Western-style treaty with Japan that portrayed the two countries as equals. Over the next five years, Japan,in the midst of dramatic Westernizing reforms under Emperor Meiji (r. 1867– 1912), became the vanguard of the challenge to the Sino-Korean relationship, aidedby its position as an insider in the East Asian community. The participation of the rising Japanese empire opened a new chapter in modern East Asian history.TheShuguobetweenChineseLegitimacyandInternationalLaw:TheFirstSino-JapaneseDebateJapan’s Contacts with Chosŏn and the Sino-Japanese Treaty of 1871During the Japanese Tokugawa bakufu period (1603–1867), communications between Japan and Chosŏn were conducted through the Sō family in the domain ofTsushima. Chosŏn interacted with the Sō in a semi-Zongfan framework. The head of the Sō sent boats to Chosŏn for trade in accordance with Chosŏn’s regula-tions,andhepresentedhimselfasasubordinateinletterstotheking.Inreturn,whennecessary,Chosŏnfollowedthepolicyofkyorin,communicatingwithaneighboring country, by dispatching messengers to Japan to consolidate the two countries’ friendly relations. All such messengers visited Kyoto and Edo (Tokyo)via Tsushima. Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan established the Gaimushō, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to manage foreign relations under newlyadopted Western norms. While its relationships with other countries evolved steadily, Japan failed to modernize its relationship with Chosŏn. Chosŏn refused toaccept Japan’s sovereign letters, figuratively closing the country’s door in Japan’s face.In the meantime, Japan was approaching China to pursue an international status equal to it. In September 1871 the Japanese minister plenipotentiary, DateMunenari (1818–92), signed a treaty, written in both the Chinese and Japanese languages, with Li Hongzhang in Tianjin. The first article stated, “Relations of amityshall henceforth be maintained in redoubled force between China and Japan, in measure as boundless as the heaven and the earth. In all that regards the terri-torial possessions of either country the two Governments shall treat each other with proper courtesy, without the slightest infringement or encroachment on ei-therside,totheendthattheremaybeforevermorepeacebetweenthemundisturbed.”⁴¹Theterm“territorialpossessions”anditsapplicabilitytoChosŏnlaterbecameasourceofdisagreementbetweenthetwocountries.ThetermisaroughEnglishequivalentoftheChinesesuoshubangtu.Suoshumeans“tobelongto,”butbangtuistoovaguetobeaccuratelydefinedininternationallaw.Literally,bangmeans“country”andtumeans“land,”butbangtucouldmean“country,”“land,” or “territorial possessions.” Both China and Japan subsequently realized that the term failed to establish whether the countries serving as China’s outerfan,inparticularChosŏn,countedamongChina’s“territorialpossessions.”Bothsidesusedtheterm’suncertaindefinitiontotheirownadvantage,resultinginfierce disputes when Japan began implementing an aggressive policy toward Ryukyu and Chosŏn in the 1870s.An Ambush on the Chinese: Soejima’s Embassy to Beijing in 1873In December 1871 a ship from Ryukyu was shipwrecked on the southern coast of Taiwan, where the aborigines killed fifty-four members of its crew. Since JapanwasintheprocessofannexingRyukyubyconvertingitintoaJapanesedomain(J.,han),Tokyoregardedtheincidentasagoodopportunitytofinalizethematterby cutting off Ryukyu’s Zongfan relationship with China. In February 1873 Emperor Meiji appointed the minister of foreign affairs, Soejima Taneomi (1828–1905),
as ambassador extraordinary to China to ratify the Treaty of Tianjin of 1871. The emperor instructed Soejima to discuss the killings of the Ryukyuese sailors todeterminewhetherthewholeofTaiwanwasunderChina’sjurisdiction.⁴²AkeyproponentoftheSeikanron(expeditionagainstKorea),Soejimaeagerlyavailedhimself of this chance to glean information on China’s attitude toward Japanese-Korean contacts. Among the members of the Japanese mission was Japan’s newlyappointed adviser on foreign policy toward Taiwan, Charles Le Gendre, whose experience was invaluable to Tokyo’s efforts to formulate and implement a new pol-icytowardtheChineseZongfansystem.⁴³ItwasthroughWesternadviserssuchasLeGendrewhomasteredmodernWesternnormsregardingsovereigntyandinternational law that Japan transformed itself into an outsider to the East Asian community in terms of its foreign policy.Soejima arrived in Tianjin in April, and his visit marked the first time that a Japanese official showed up in China in a Western tailcoat. After ratifying the treaty,Soejima briefly discussed Japanese-Korean relations with Li Hongzhang. Li warned that Japan should be friendly to Chosŏn and that any Japanese expeditionagainstitwouldviolatetheSino-Japanesetreaty.⁴⁴InBeijing,withLeGendre’sassistance,Soejimavisitedforeignlegationsinthecity.ThecurrentBritishmin-ister, Thomas F. Wade (1818–95), reported to London that “the Japanese are also suspected of a design on Corea” and that Soejima “is evidently anxious for anassurance from the Chinese that Corea is an independent Kingdom, so independent of China, that is to say, as to make what may befall Corea no concern of theChinese.”WadeinferredthatJapanwouldapplygunboatdiplomacytoKorea.⁴⁵AccordingtoFrederickLow,Soejimahad“onlytwoquestionsofimportancewhich he desires to discuss with the Chinese government.” First, he wanted to know “whether China is responsible for the acts of the aborigines on the island ofFormosa.” According to Low, “If the answer is in the negative, notice will then be given that Japan proposed to send a military force to Formosa to chastise thesavage and semi-civilized tribes that practically hold undisputed possession of the large part of the island.” Second, Soejima wanted to “ascertain the precise rela-tions between China and Corea; whether the former claims to exercise such control over her tributary as to render China responsible for the acts of the Coreans,orwhetherothernationsmustlooktoCoreaaloneforredressforwrongsandoutrageswhichherpeoplemaycommit.”⁴⁶Soejima’s view of the likely relationship between China and its periphery—Taiwan and Chosŏn—matched Western countries’ conclusions regarding the limitsof China’s jurisdiction over these regions. When Soejima solicited Low’s opinions on Chosŏn, Low showed him the Zongli Yamen’s dispatch of March 1871, men-tionedearlier,whichaffirmedChina’snoninterferenceinChosŏn’saffairsinaccordancewiththeprincipleofzizhu.UponLow’sassertionthatChosŏnwas“whollyindependent,”SoejimamadethejudgmentthatChosŏnlay“beyondtheQing’ssovereignty[J.,shuken].”⁴⁷TheJapanesepolicyofchallengingChosŏn’sstatusasChina’sshuguothusbegantoconvergewiththepoliciespursuedbytheUnitedStates,France,Britain,andotherWesternstatesinChina.Soejima’s conclusion found support in a meeting at the Zongli Yamen on June 21, 1873, that brought together a Japanese representative, Yanagiwara Sakimitsu(1850–94),andtheChineseministersMaoChangxi(1817–82)andDongXun(1807–92).YanagiwaraaskedhowChinacouldjustifyclaimingChosŏnasashuguo,since the Yamen had asserted in its 1871 note to the American minister that “China never interfered with its internal politics, religion, prohibitions, and laws.”Mao,drawingonanunderstandingofSino-KoreancontactsthathemighthavegainedwhenworkingattheMinistryofRites,explainedthat“theso-calledshuguoreferredonlytoinvestitureandtributesubmission”andthatChinawouldnotinterferewithChosŏn’srighttoconductnegotiationsoverwarandpeace.⁴⁸Mao’sresponsesatisfiedSoejimabecauseitcorroboratedLow’sargument.⁴⁹Soejima,alongwithhisWesterncounterparts,wasgrantedanaudiencewiththeTongzhiemperor on June 29. It was the first imperial audience for Western ministers since the 1840s and it encouraged both sides to improve their understanding of eachother.Upon his return to Tokyo, Soejima stepped up his advocacy for an expedition to Korea, but the return of a Japanese mission to the United States and Europehalted his plan. The three key members of the mission, Iwakura Tomomi (1825– 83), Ōkubo Toshimichi (1830–78), and Kido Takayoshi (1833–77), argued that
Japanshouldfocusondomesticreformsto“reorganizeitsnationalpoliticsandmakeitspeoplerich.”⁵⁰Asthispolicyprevailed,theproponentsoftheSeikanron,such as Soejima, Saigō Takamori (1827–77), Itagaki Taisuke (1837–1919), and Etō Shinpei (1834–74), were pushed out of the cabinet. In December 1873 the youngking of Chosŏn assumed direct rule and ended the regency of Taewŏn’gun. Tokyo tried to take advantage of this occasion to pursue a new diplomatic relationshipwith Hansŏng, but its efforts failed in the face of sharp resistance by local officials in Pusan, where the Koreans still preferred to communicate with the Japanesethroughthekyorinframework.Japan,itseemed,couldnotmakeanysubstantialprogressonopeninganewchannelofcommunicationwiththeKoreancourt.The Birth of Chosŏn’s “Sovereignty”: The Second Sino-Japanese Debate and the Treaty of KanghwaDefining China’s Territory: Taiwan, Kanghwa, and Mori’s Visit to BeijingIn the summer of 1874, while Tokyo was sending troops to South Taiwan to deal with “the territory in question beyond the jurisdiction of the Chinese govern-ment,”italsosentYanagiwaraSakimitsuandŌkuboToshimichitoBeijingforfurthernegotiationsaboutTaiwan.⁵¹TheZongliYamentoldtheJapaneserepresen-tatives, “Even if the aborigines are ‘barbarians,’ they are still China’s barbarians, and only China has the right to punish them if they are guilty.” The Chineseministers pointed to relevant rules of international law and Chinese historical evidence, such as local gazetteers, to bolster their point. Without close advice fromWestern advisers such as Le Gendre, the Japanese failed to prove that the aborigines’ area of residence in South Taiwan was beyond China’s jurisdiction. Underthe mediation of Thomas Wade, the doyen of the diplomatic corps in Beijing, the Chinese and Japanese sides reached a succinct agreement. Interestingly, thethird article of the agreement stated that “all correspondence that this question has occasioned between the two governments shall be canceled, and the discus-sionsdroppedforevermore.”⁵²Inthisway,JapannotonlyinvalidatedanydocumentsthatcouldexposeitsinferiorpositioninthetalksonthereachofChina’sterritory but also shifted future negotiations to the track of international law. To the Japanese, the negotiations indicated that only a Japan equipped with Europeannorms could challenge the Chinese discourse, which helps explain why, over the following decade, Japan frequently solicited its Western advisers for suggestionsregarding Japan’s foreign policy toward its neighbors.AskirmishbetweenJapanandChosŏnnearKanghwaIslandinSeptember1875ledtotheresurgenceofsupportfortheSeikanroninJapan.ThistimeIwakuraand his fellow politicians endorsed the expedition, because Japan’s diplomatic situation was much improved. In addition to reaching an agreement with Chinaabout the Taiwan incident, Tokyo had resolved its territorial disputes with Russia over Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands by signing a treaty in St. Petersburg inMay 1875, through which it obtained Russian acquiescence to its actions in Chosŏn. Meanwhile, in order to check Russia’s southern advance in East Asia duringtheRusso-BritishrivalryinCentralAsia,BritainplannedtooccupyPortHamilton,asmallKoreanislandknownasKŏmundoneartheTsushimaStrait.⁵³Thisplanprovided Japan with an excuse to initiate an expedition against Korea without triggering an intervention from these Western powers. In October 1875 KidoTakayoshi suggested that Japan should press China for an explanation of its relationship with Chosŏn; once Beijing had disavowed responsibility for Chosŏn’sforeignaffairs,JapancouldfreelytakeactionagainstChosŏn.⁵⁴The Japanese government appointed Mori Arinori (1847–89) as the minister plenipotentiary to Beijing. Educated in Britain and having worked in the UnitedStates, Mori was familiar with Western diplomatic rules and had consulted with Erasmus Peshine Smith (1814–82), the American special adviser to the Gaimushōon international law, regarding the Kanghwa incident. Sanjō Sanetomi (1837–91), chancellor of the realm, issued instructions to Mori’s embassy, and the mostimportantamongthemwasto“identifyChosŏnasanindependentcountry[J.,dokuritsukoku]”andpersuadeChinatohelpestablishJapanese-KoreanrelationsforthesakeofJapan’sandChina’scommoninterests.Inshort,Mori’smissionwas“tocutofftheSino-Koreanrelationship.”⁵⁵Theforeignminister,Terashima
Munenori (1832–93), telegraphed the chargé d’affaires in Beijing, Tei Einei (1829–97), saying that since Soejima’s visit in 1873 had not confirmed that Chosŏn wasnota“fanandsubordinate”(J.,hanzoku)oftheQing,TeishouldbecautiousaboutallcontactsbetweenJapanandtheQingregardingChosŏn.⁵⁶Another Ambush on the Chinese: Mori’s Debate with the Zongli YamenOn January 2, 1876, the Qing court dispatched two envoys, Jihe and Wulasiconga, to Chosŏn to invest the king’s son, Yi Ch’ŏk, as the crown prince. Three HanChinese grand secretaries—Mao Changxi, Li Hongzhang, and Zuo Zongtang (1812–85)—drafted the imperial edict of investiture in December 1875. Two days laterMori arrived in Beijing with the aim of denying this Sino-Korean relationship from the perspective of international law.Mori paid his first visit to Thomas Wade, in the hope that the latter could mediate between Japan and China. Wade was impressed by Mori, but his situationmadeitimpossibleforhimtoassistMori.⁵⁷Wade’srelationswithBeijingwerestrainedduetoanincidentinthepreviousyearinwhichayoungBritishinterpreterhandpicked by Wade, Augustus R. Margary, had been killed on an expedition to Burma from Yunnan. Wade had repeatedly telegraphed London to ask for morenaval forces to pressure China into negotiating with him for another treaty. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) supported Wade and conceived a plan toallywithJapanagainstChina,aschemehecalled“oneofthegreatestsecretsofStategoing.”⁵⁸Butthesecretaryofstateforforeignaffairs,EdwardHenryStanley(1826–93),didnotendorsethisaggressiveapproach.⁵⁹Underthecircumstances,WadehadnodesiretobeinvolvedintheSino-JapanesenegotiationsonKoreanaffairs, but after his conversation with Mori he reported to London that “the minister’s manner, rather than his language, made me mistrustful. I inferred that anexpedition of Corea is determined on and that the object of his confidential communications to me was to ascertain whether objection to the expedition would betakenbyEnglish,oranyotherforeignaction.”⁶⁰Wadecouldnothavebeenmorecorrect.OnJanuary6,1876,theJapaneseambassadorplenipotentiarytoChosŏn,KurodaKiyotaka(1840–1900),sailedfromTokyofortheKoreanPeninsula,leadingafleetoftwogunboatsandfourschooners.⁶¹Mori, accompanied by his interpreter, Tei Einei, and two secretaries, met with five Chinese ministers on January 10 at the Zongli Yamen to discuss Chosŏn’sstatus. Zhou Jiamei (1835–86) served as the secretary for the Chinese side. Mori, the youngest man in the room, was also the only person who knew internationallaw and had Western educational and diplomatic experience. Shortly after the talks started, the two sides realized that they were on diametrically opposed tracks.The conversation unfolded mainly between Mori and Shen Guifen (1818–81), who had previously worked at the Ministry of Rites. Mori asked why China, identi-fyingChosŏnasitsshuguo,nonethelessclaimedthatChosŏn’s“politics,religion,prohibitions,andlawsfallundertheprincipleofzizhu.”Shenexplained,“Theshuguoisnotlandunderthegovernanceofourcountry[Ch.,yuanbushiwoguoguanxiazhidi].Butitpaystributeontime,receivesourinvestiture,andacceptsourcountry’scalendar,andthishasmadeitourshuguo.”ShenfurtherinformedMorithatVietnam,Ryukyu,andBurmawerealsoChina’sshuguo,withdifferentschedulesforthepaymentoftribute.WhenMoriaskedwhetherashuguocouldnegotiatewithforeigncountriesontradewithoutinformingChina,Shenrepliedthat the country in question would manage its affairs by itself and China would not get involved, but that it would legally respond to any disputes arising betweentheshuguoandChina’streatypartners.ShenwarnedMorithatanyinvasionofashuguoofChinawouldnotbedefensibleandwouldcontravenethefirstarticleoftheSino-JapaneseTreatyof1871.⁶²Atthispointitbecameapparentthatthedisagreementbetweenthetwosideshingedontheirdifferentdefinitionsofthetermshuguo.ForMori,ashuguocouldmean a colony, a dependency, or a nation with semisovereign rights. In particular, he used the relationship between the Muhammad Ali dynasty of Egypt and theOttomanEmpire,thatbetweenHungaryandtheAustro-HungarianEmpire,andthatbetweenCanadaandtheBritishEmpireasthreeexamplesofshuguointheWestern context. The three examples were, however, completely lost in the Chinese translation because of the vast gap in international knowledge between thetwoparties.TheChineseministersretortedwithconvincingexamplesdrawnfromtheChinesecontexttoprovethatChosŏnwasinallsensesashuguoofChina.
The debate ended without agreement.Themeetinghavingfallenshortofhisexpectations,MoriacknowledgedthegulfbetweenthetwosidesandexpressedfrustrationwithChineseofficialdom.⁶³Inthe aftermath of the so-called Tongzhi Restoration—an attempt to strengthen the dynasty and traditional order in the 1860s—the Qing was facing increasinglyserious challenges from within as well as from outside the country. On the same day that Mori was arguing with the Zongli Yamen, Empress Dowagers Cian(1837–81) and Cixi (1835–1908), in the Forbidden City about two miles west of the Yamen, were tearfully beseeching two officials, Weng Tonghe (1830– 1904) andXiaTongshan(1830–80),toserveasteachersfortheyoungemperor,Guangxu,whowasDowagerCixi’snephew.⁶⁴Thepoliticalheartoftheempirewasvulner-able. It was not until 1898, three years after his empire was humiliated by Japan in the war that broke out in Chosŏn, that the emperor was able to launch a reformwith the strong support of Weng.After the meeting, Mori asked the Zongli Yamen to issue a passport to a Japanese assistant whom he wanted to send to Chosŏn via Mukden to inform the Japa-nese ambassador to Chosŏn about the Sino-Japanese meetings. He also expressed his own desire to visit Li Hongzhang at Baoding, Li’s political headquarters, toshow his gratitude for Li’s greetings. The Yamen refused to issue the passport because of the absence of relevant precedent, reiterating its assertion that ChosŏnwasChina’sshuguo.Thisresponsetriggeredanotherexchangeofverbaljouststhroughdiplomaticnotes.Moriarguedthat“Chosŏnisanindependentcountry,andthestatusofaso-calledshuguoofChinaisonlyanominaltitle[J.,kūmei;Ch.,kongming]….AnyJapanese-KoreancontactshavenothingtodowiththeSino-JapaneseTreaty.”⁶⁵Thisstatement,echoingLow’scommentsin1871,markedthecompleteconvergenceofJapaneseandWesternpolicieschallengingthenatureof the Sino-Korean relationship. Perceiving this alignment, the Yamen wrote to the emperor, expressing severe concern over the likely prospect of problemscausedbyJapan,acountrythat“hasrecentlyadoptedWesternpoliticsandcustomsandchangeditsowncostumesandcalendars.”⁶⁶Japanhadbecomeamajortroublemaker in China’s eyes.In order to inform Chosŏn of the situation, the Zongli Yamen asked the Ministry of Rites to immediately dispatch a copy of Mori’s note to Hansŏng. The notewas sent from Beijing on January 19, 1876, four days after Japanese naval forces had arrived at Pusan. The Yamen, completely blind to the Japanese advance onChosŏn, busied itself with arguing with Mori. Once the two sides had arrived at an utter impasse, two officers sent by Li Hongzhang arrived in Beijing to accom-pany Mori to Baoding. Both the Yamen and Mori were happy to hand the case to Li in hopes of winning a favorable ruling at Baoding.Li’s “Sincere Advice”: The Baoding NegotiationsThus began Li Hongzhang’s deep involvement in Chosŏn’s affairs as a provincial official. On January 10, while the Yamen squabbled with Mori, Li briefly ex-plained “some diplomatic ideas” regarding Chosŏn’s possible contacts with the West in his reply to a letter from Yi Yu-wŏn (1814–88), a Korean prime ministerwhohadvisitedBeijingin1875asatributaryemissary.⁶⁷Twoweekslater,whilehisletterwasonitswaytoHansŏng,LiwelcomedMoriatBaoding.Theconver-sations that ensued were all the more complicated in that they were conducted not in Chinese or Japanese but in English. Moreover, in their reports to their re-spective governments, written in their own languages instead of in English, both sides claimed to be prevailing over the other. Neither Beijing nor Tokyo had anaccuratepictureoftheactualprogressofthetalks.⁶⁸The first conversation, on January 24, lasted for more than six hours over a banquet at Li’s office. Li had invited two officials, Huang Pengnian and Huang Huil-ian, to attend the meeting as guests and assistants. While Huang Pengnian was an erudite Confucian scholar, Huang Huilian was Cantonese and had been edu-cated at an American missionary school in Shanghai; his first name, Huilian, was a Chinese transliteration of William, the name of the school’s headmaster,William Jones Boone (1811–64; known in Chinese as Wen Huilian). William Huang had visited British Guiana and been drafted by Beijing to serve as an
interpreter during the Second Opium War in 1860. It seems that Mori decided to speak with Li in English after learning of William Huang’s English proficiency, ashefeltthatEnglishwouldbetterallowhimtoconveytheprinciplesofinternationallawashebelievedtheyappliedtotheKoreanissue.⁶⁹ToMori’sargumentthatChosŏnwasanindependentcountryratherthanChina’sshuguo,Liresponded,EveryoneknowsthatChosŏnhasbeensubordinatetoChinaforthousandsofyears.Inthephrasesuoshubangtu[territorialpossessions]ofthe[Sino-Japanese]treaty,thetumeansChineseprovinces,namely,China’sinnerland[Ch.,neidi]andinnersubordinates[Ch.,neishu],onwhichtheChinesegov-ernmentleviestaxesandwhosepoliticalaffairsitmanages.ThebangreferstocountriessuchasChosŏnthatareChina’souterfanandoutersubordinates[Ch.,waishu],whosetaxesandpoliticalaffairsarealwaystheirownbusiness.Thisisaconvention,anditdoesnotstartwithourdynasty.ChosŏnisindeedChina’sshuguo.⁷⁰ThisinterpretationofsuoshubangtuimpliedthatalthoughChosŏndidnotliewithinChina’simmediateorbit,itwasnonethelesspartofthebroaderChineseem-pire. Mori realized that no agreement could be reached on this point, so he ended the argument with Li. In the subsequent discussion on the Kanghwa incident,whereas Li stressed several times that Japan should obey the Sino-Japanese Treaty of 1871 and international law, Mori, who had visited the prominent Britishphilosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) before returning to Japan and had seen the dramatic expansion of the Western colonial enterprise, re-sponded that state power was much more reliable than textual treaties. At the end, Mori asked Li what China would do if a war broke out between Japan andChosŏn. Li replied that not only China but also Russia would send troops to defend Chosŏn. Li then wrote out for Mori, under the title “Sincere Advice” (Ch.,Zhonggao), eight Chinese characters, which read, “Acting only to disturb harmony, brings no benefits at all” (Ch., Tushang heqi, haowu liyi). Mori did not men-tion Li’s warning in his reports to Tokyo. The next day, New Year’s Eve, Li visited Mori for a short conversation that did not touch on the Korean issue but in-cluded a discussion of Japan’s reforms. Li did not inform the Zongli Yamen of the details of this conversation, but Mori kept a full record in English, which indi-catestheepistemologicalgulfthatseparatedthetwomenandtheworldstheyrepresentedanddefended.⁷¹AsMoriandLiclosedtheirtalks,theJapanesefleetdropped anchor at the offing of Kanghwa Island.After Mori returned to Beijing, he resumed his debate with the Zongli Yamen. The Yamen emphasized to Mori that “solving its difficulties, resolving its dis-putes,andsecuringitssafetyandsecurity[Ch.,shuqinan,jieqifen,qiqianquan]aretheresponsibilitiestoChosŏnthatChinahastakenuponitself,andtheyarehowChinatreatsitsshuguo.ItisthelongstandingpolicyofChinatorefrainfromforcingitsshuguotodowhatitisreluctanttodoandtostandbywhenitrunsintotrouble.”⁷²Mori,however,continuedtoinsistthat“Chosŏnisindeedanindependentcountry,soJapanwillnottakeChosŏn’srelationswithChinaintocon-siderationinmattersbetweenJapanandChosŏn.Theso-calledshuguoisnomorethananominaltitle.Nothingshouldberelatedtothetreatyof1871.”⁷³Thirty-four days of intensive negotiations had brought the two sides nowhere.Old News and No News: The 1876 Imperial Mission to Chosŏn and the Limits of Zongfan CommunicationsThe Sino-Korean Zongfan rituals that took place in Hansŏng in 1876 showed how untenable Mori’s enthusiastic diplomatic rhetoric was. On February 16, twodays after the end of the Sino-Japanese debate in Beijing, the king held a grand ceremony in Hansŏng for the two imperial envoys coming to invest the crownprince. All procedures followed the precedents of investiture, and the host and guests alike performed the rituals according to code. The king expressed to the en-voys his sincere gratitude to the emperor and the Zongli Yamen for informing him of the Japanese activities in Beijing. The envoys, praising the stance thatChosŏn had taken against Japan’s sovereign letters, said that Japan’s forces had reportedly arrived in Kanghwa and wanted to establish a consulate there, and they
voiceduneasinessaboutthesituation.⁷⁴Infact,thekinghadalreadydispatchedtwoofficialstonegotiatewiththeJapaneseatKanghwabeforereceivingwordfrom Beijing. He did not solicit advice from the envoys, nor did the envoys show any interest in obtaining details of the negotiations. Some historians have arguedthatBeijingusedtheimperialenvoysto,amongotherthings,persuadeChosŏntoconcludeatreatywithJapan,⁷⁵butrecordsofthecontactbetweenthekingandthe envoys contradict this assertion.On February 27 Chosŏn signed a treaty with Japan that ended their eight-year dispute. That same day, the Ministry of Rites in Beijing dispatched, at the topspeedoffivehundredliperday,anotetoChosŏnalongwithacopyoftheBaodingconversationsbetweenLiandMori.Handicappedbythesluggishspeedofcommunications, the ministry, the Zongli Yamen, and Li Hongzhang could not follow the progress of the Japanese-Korean negotiations. Beijing did not receive areply to its February note to Chosŏn about Japan’s talks with China until May 31, three months after the conclusion of the Treaty of Kanghwa. By contrast, Moricould receive Tokyo’s instructions by telegram within ten days, and Thomas Wade, who closely monitored the negotiations, was able to have his report deliveredto London within eight days. Modern technology was changing international politics in an inconspicuous but concrete way, but no such improvements had yetreached the Sino-Korean channels of communication.A week after the treaty was signed, the Manchu general at Mukden, Chongshi (1820–76), asked the Zongli Yamen whether the Ministry of Rites had received anyresponse from the Koreans. Chongshi confessed that although Mukden bordered Chosŏn, the only information he had on Chosŏn consisted of rumors spread byChineseandKoreanmerchantsinthearea.Hehopedthatthetwoimperialenvoyscouldgivehimsomereliableupdates.⁷⁶Thegeneralwas,ofcourse,disap-pointed in this hope. In the Forbidden City, meanwhile, the two empress dowagers discussed the Korean situation with Guo Songtao (1818–91), a minister of theZongli Yamen who had been appointed the first minister to Britain. The dowagers disparaged Mori’s and Wade’s “cunning” personalities and called them “first-classbadmen”(Ch.,diyidenghuairen)whosemissionwasto“maketrouble.”⁷⁷LikeChongshi,thedowagersandGuowereunawarethattheTreatyofKanghwahad already been signed.At the time, China had no official channel for communications beyond the empire, although Western ministers had arrived in Beijing as early as 1861. Its firstminister to Japan would not set foot on Japanese soil until December 1877, almost five years after the arrival of the first Japanese minister in Beijing. A week afterGuo’s conversation with the dowagers, it was from Mori, one of the “first-class bad men,” that the Zongli Yamen and the Manchu court learned that Japan hadsigned a treaty with Chosŏn. And it was not for another month—and then through the German minister to Beijing, Max August von Brandt (1835–1920)—that theYamen first heard about the contents of the treaty. Only on April 17, when Mori submitted a full copy of the treaty to the Zongli Yamen, did the Chinese side finallysee what it entailed. China’s passive position vis-à-vis Chosŏn and the treaty system with Japan was laid bare. In the two decades after 1876, it would become in-creasingly clear that this was China’s normal state within the established framework.On April 21 Beijing at last received a note from the king, who briefly reviewed the treaty negotiations. The king never submitted a copy of the treaty to the em-peror, nor did the emperor ever request it or raise any questions about the agreement. The king reported that the mistrust between Chosŏn and Japan had evapo-rated thanks to the inauguration of the long-term friendship between them: “The bilateral contacts will be conducted by officials of the two countries on an equalfooting.AsitisnotthefirsttimethatwehavetradedwithJapan,wehaveallowedtheJapanesetotradeatourports,wheretheymustfollowourrules.”⁷⁸AlthoughthetreatyendowedJapanwiththerightofconsularjurisdictionandabolishedallformertradeconventionsandjunktrade(J.,saikensen),Chosŏn’sperceptionofthetreatywasstillrootedinconventionalkyorinnorms,ratherthaninanyunderstandingofinternationallaw.Itisdifficult,then,todefinethetreatyasatrulymodernone.⁷⁹
The Japanese Invention: The Birth of Chosŏn’s “Sovereignty” as a Textual DerivativeOn March 22, 1876, the Gaimushō released the contents of the Treaty of Kanghwa and distributed an English version among the foreign ministers in Tokyo. TheEnglish translation of article 1 reads,Chosŏn being an independent state enjoys the same sovereign rights as does Japan. In order to prove the sincerity of the friendship existing between thenations, their intercourse shall henceforward be carried on in terms of equality and courtesy, each avoiding the giving of offence by arrogance or manifes-tations of suspicion. In the first instance all rules and precedents that are apt to obstruct friendly intercourse shall be totally abrogated and, in their stead,rules,liberalandingeneralusagefittosecureafirmandperpetualpeace,shallbeestablished.⁸⁰Many diplomats at the time and scholars since then concluded that this article, and in particular the first sentence, explicitly defines Chosŏn as an independentstateunderthetermsofinternationallaw,althoughsomescholarshaverecognizedthattheEnglishtranslationofthefirstsentenceisnotprecise.⁸¹Giventhatthe original text of the treaty used only Japanese and Chinese, a comparison of the Japanese and Chinese texts of the first article and the English version revealscritical discrepancies in several key terms.The first sentence of the article in the Japanese version reads, “Chōsen koku wa jishu no kuni ni shite, Nihon koku to byōdō no ken o hoyū seri 朝鮮國ハ自主ノ邦ニシテ日本國ト平等ノ權ヲ保有セリ” (lit., The country of Chosŏn is a nation with the right of self-rule, possessing rights equal to Japan’s). The Chi-nese version of this sentence—“Chosŏn kug chaju ji bang, boyu yŏ Ilbon kug p’yŏngdŭng ji kwŏn 朝鮮國自主之邦保有與日本國平等之權”—has the samemeaning.⁸²ItisclearthattheGaimushōmadeadeliberatechoicetotranslatethetermjishu(K.,chaju;Ch.,zizhu)as“independence”andthephrasejishunokuni(K.,chajujibang;Ch.,zizhuzhibang)as“independentstate.”Moreimportantly,theEnglishtranslationintentionallyrenderedtheChinesecharacterken(K.,kwŏn;Ch.,quan)notsimplyas“right”butas“sovereignright.”Thesecondhalfofthesentence,whichliterallysaysthatChosŏn“possessesrightsequaltoJapan’s,”thusendsupclaimingthatChosŏn“enjoysthesamesovereignrightsasdoesJapan.”Laterinthearticle,theGaimushōtranslatedthephrasedōtōnoreigi(K.,tongdŭngjiye;Ch.,tongdengzhili),whichliterallymeans“equalrituals”or“equalcourtesy,”as“equalityandcourtesy.”Bychangingthetermdōtōfromanadjec-tive to a noun, the Gaimushō reinforced the claim inherent in its translation of the first sentence.Since the Western ministers in Tokyo could not read Chinese or Japanese texts, the Gaimushō may have hoped to mislead the English-speaking world by defin-ing Chosŏn’s sovereignty and independence in the English translation. Both the American minister, John Bingham (1815–1900), and the British minister, HarryParkes,acceptedtheprovidedtranslationandhelpeddisseminateitintheWest.⁸³Certainly,Chosŏn’ssovereignright,orsovereignty,wasnotcreatedbyJapan’ssubtle English translation; rather, Chosŏn always enjoyed sovereignty on its own territory, but this sovereign was subject to China’s emperorship in the Zongfanworld.⁸⁴Itwasnotuntil1882,whenChosŏnsignedatreatywiththeUnitedStates,thatits“sovereignright”wasexplicitlydefinedforthefirsttimeinbothChineseand English. In 1876, neither Beijing nor Hansŏng foresaw the problems caused by the English translation of the treaty. Japan believed that it had successfully re-solved the issue of Chosŏn’s status through the treaty and that it had prevailed over Beijing in the debate on the topic. In his final report to the Gaimushō on hismission to Beijing, Mori was self-congratulatory: “Suffice it to say,” he claimed, “that the Zongli Yamen has been convinced by my argument…. The only objectiveofthedebatewastocutofftheSino-Koreanrelationship,whichIhaveachieved.”⁸⁵Yethewouldsoonrealizethathehadbeentoooptimistic.Commodore Robert W. Shufeldt of the US Navy returned to East Asia in March 1880 in hopes of negotiating a treaty with Chosŏn. During the intervening fouryears,Chosŏnhaddispatchedonlyanenvoyofamity(K.,Susinsa)toJapanin1876inobservanceofconventions,whereasitcontinuedtosendannualtributary
emissaries to Beijing. Chosŏn believed that it had restored the pre-1876 order that was maintained by the policy of serving the great in its relations with China andthat of communicating with a neighboring country vis-à-vis Japan. The arrival of Shufeldt in the early 1880s created a stir in the hermit nation and became a test ofthe trilateral relations between Chosŏn, Japan, and China.
4
DEFINING CHOSŎN
Qing China’s Depiction of Chosŏn’s Status, 1862–76
For the Qing ruling house and intelligentsia, everyday familiarity collapsed on the very first day that the Westerners entered Beijing as permanent diplomatic representatives.¹ As the self-strengthening movement unfolded in the 1860s, Beijing was increasingly intrigued by the possibility of employing European methods to enhance China’s military and technical capabilities for the sake of China’s future. The innovations proposed by various reformers caught the attention of more open-minded Chinese officials who were interested in statecraft outside their ivory towers. This elite drew on knowledge from abroad and pioneered Chinese modernization, aware that the entrenched politico-cultural concept of all-under-Heaven embedded in a cosmopolitan, Confucian worldview was ineluctably giving way to more realistic world politics born of sophisticated foreign negotiations informed by Western norms. The elite realized that they must first learn those norms from their Western counterparts. In 1864 the Zongli Yamen published Wanguo gongfa (lit. the common law among ten thousand countries), the Chinese edition of Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law, which had appeared in English in 1836.² Translated by an American Presbyterian missionary in Beijing, William A. P. Martin (1827–1916; known in Chinese as Ding Weiliang), it was the first guide to international law in China and the Chinese world. The Chinese edition pointedly added a map of the world that presented it in the conventional arrangement of eastern and western hemispheres, which further eroded the Sinocentric view by portraying China as merely one country among others.³ The Great Qing began to transform its political and diplomatic norms by integrating notions of international law into its own constitutional and institutional systems.
However, the disintegration of the Qing’s old conceptualization of Western countries as barbarians did not lead to a similar breakdown in the Zongfan framework that bound together the Manchu and Korean courts. Their symbiotic legitimacy, which could not be redefined or circumscribed by international law, still strongly influenced their internal and external policies and behavior in the middle of the nineteenth century. In this sense, the two Opium Wars and the treaties from 1842 to 1860 did not simply mark the twilight of the Old and the dawn of the New, as the East-West dichotomy would have it.⁴ Rather, the treaty port network imposed from the outside and the time-honored Zongfan arrangement inside the Qing realm formed a dual system of two coexisting elements, and the former did not immediately begin to replace or incorporate the latter, as many scholars have retrospectively presumed. Since the 1860s, as contacts between Chosŏn and Western countries grew more frequent, both Beijing and Hansŏng found it increasingly difficult to define their Zongfan relationship and Chosŏn’s international status and state sovereignty. While the two countries asserted unanimously that Chosŏn was China’s shuguo or shubang (subordinate country) possessing the right of zizhu, China’s treaty counterparts treated Chosŏn as a state with independent sovereignty that maintained a merely ritual relationship to China. This chapter explores this diplomatic conundrum and its consequences.
Chosŏn as China’s Shuguo : The Sino-French Conflict of 1866
The Beginning of the Puzzle: The French Invasion and China’s Response
In 1866, France decided to launch an expedition against Chosŏn in response to the killing of French missionaries in anti-Catholic purges initiated by Yi Ha-ŭng (1820–98), better known by his title, Taewŏn’gun (Prince of the great court). The Taewŏn’gun had become the de facto regent after his twelve-year-old son, Yi Hŭi (King Kojong), assumed the throne in 1863 as the closest male relative and thus the legitimate successor of the late King Ikchong.⁵ During the decade of his
regency, the Taewŏn’gun carried out a series of domestic reforms, but as a follower of Confucianism he also regarded Western religions as heresies or evil ideas (K., sahak). In early 1866 he started to persecute converts to Christianity and Catholicism, leading to the execution of thirteen French missionaries and hundreds of native converts in a short time.⁶
When news of the purge reached Beijing, the French chargé d’affaires, Henri de Bellonet, decided to launch a punitive expedition against Chosŏn. On July 14, 1866, Bellonet sent the Zongli Yamen a letter threatening that France would invade and temporarily occupy Chosŏn and appoint a new king. He noted that the expedition would have nothing to do with China, as he had earlier been informed by the Yamen that Chosŏn managed its own affairs. Indeed, in 1865 Bellonet had asked the Yamen to issue a dispatch to Chosŏn to inform the king that French missionaries wanted to bring their teachings to the kingdom. The Yamen had declined to do so, explaining that "Chosŏn, as a shuguo of China, only uses the Chinese calendar, uses Chinese regnal titles, and pays annual tribute to China. Bellonet interpreted this response to mean that the Chinese government has no authority or power over Corea."⁷ From then on, both Western states and the Zongli Yamen had continuous difficulty pinning down Chosŏn’s status as China’s shuguo in terms that the other side could accurately understand.
The Zongli Yamen claimed both that Chosŏn was a shuguo of China and that because Chosŏn managed all its own affairs under the rubric of zizhu, China would not intervene in them. This statement was clear in Zongfan terms but came across as equivocal and paradoxical to Western ministers. While Bellonet acknowledged that Chosŏn had formerly assumed the bonds of vassalage to the Chinese empire, he asserted that at the present moment, we do not recognize any authority whatever of the Chinese government over the kingdom of Corea.⁸ This statement recognized Chosŏn as an independent nation, but the Yamen’s Chinese translation of it missed its political meaning. The Wanguo gongfa of 1864 did not provide the Yamen with a definition of shuguo that could be translated into appropriate Western terms.
What, then, caused this misunderstanding between France and China? This question is closely connected to the Western perception of the Sinocentric political arrangement. At least since the late eighteenth century, Western travelers, observers, and diplomats who witnessed the practice of Korea and other entities of sending emissaries with tribute to Beijing used the term tributary to describe the nature of the relationship between China and Korea, Vietnam, and other countries.⁹ Their descriptions constituted the first step toward using the terms tribute system or tributary system to refer to the Zongfan system in Western literature on China and East Asia. In the first half of the nineteenth century, when Western diplomats brought international law to East Asia, the Western understanding of this tribute system became increasingly skewed. As the Western states gradually integrated China and Japan into the family of nations defined according to European norms, they found that Chosŏn maintained a special relationship with China that they could not explain adequately within the framework of these norms. Thus, according to M. Frederick Nelson, "searching back into the categories which their international system listed, they hit upon that of suzerain and vassal as most nearly fitting this East Asiatic relationship, and they then proceeded to apply the legal attributes of vassalage to the non-legal status of a shu-pang [shubang, subordinate country]."¹⁰ The Sino-Korean relationship was thus depicted as a form of a suzerain-vassal relationship in order to fit it into a Western interpretive setting.¹¹ As this and the following chapters show, the special relationship between Egypt and the Ottoman Empire was seen as an instructive analogy, in part as a result of Japan’s strategy of using European legal terminology to undermine the Sino-Korean relationship.¹²
As the misunderstanding between the French and China shows, this suzerain-vassal rendering of the Zongfan order risked a legal quagmire regarding Chosŏn. Both China and Chosŏn declared that Chosŏn was China’s subordinate country with the right of autonomy; the Western countries and Japan interpreted this to mean that Korea was an independent sovereign state with all international rights. The confusion was exacerbated by the fact that Wanguo gongfa used Chinese Zongfan concepts to translate English legal terms. For example, the English term colony was rendered as pingfan (fence), shu-bang, or shuguo; dependency as
shubang; vassal state as fanshu (subordinate country or dependent country); sovereign states as zizhu zhi guo (countries with the right of self-rule); and right of sovereignty as zizhu zhi quan (right of self-rule).¹³ The discrepancies between the Chinese and European terms show that China’s perspective remained essentially familistic, whereas the Europeans and the Americans operated in a primarily legal context.¹⁴ Martin, the Wanguo gongfa translator, was not the first to adopt these Chinese terms in translation. As early as the 1830s, some Protestant missionaries, such as Karl Gützlaff (1803–51) from Prussia, rendered colony as fanshu guo in their Chinese-language magazines published in South China. For example, the September 1833 issue of Dong Xi-yang kao meiyue tongji zhuan (Eastern-Western monthly magazine) calls India Da Yingguo zhi fanshu guo (the subordinate country of Great Britain) and Siberia Eluosi fanshu guo (the subordinate country of Russia).¹⁵ Since the 1860s, the terminological inconsistency led to great confusion over the nature of the Zongfan relationship and growing conflicts between China, Korea, and other countries.
As a result, Western diplomats in East Asia widely perceived the Sino-Korean relationship as a nominal one, with China exercising no real authority over Korea.¹⁶ Misunderstandings persisted through the late 1880s and early 1890s, as William W. Rockhill (1854–1914) confessed in his study of Sino-Korean relations, which was aimed at clarifying what he described as a puzzle for Western nations—whether Korea was an integral part of the Chinese empire or a sovereign state enjoying absolute international rights. Rockhill argued that the Chinese term shuguo, generally but misleadingly converted into English terms such as vassal kingdom or fief, was the key-note to the whole system of Korean dependency.¹⁷ What led Rockhill to identify Korea’s status as a puzzle seems to have been its contrast with the European colonial experience of his day: the relationship between a European colonial power and its overseas colonies—that of Britain and India, or of France and Algeria—was clear, since the colony was undoubtedly an integral part of the empire, fully subject to the imperial administration. The questions regarding Sino-Korean relations raised in the early 1890s by George N. Curzon, who later served as viceroy of India, similarly reflected this colonial discourse.¹⁸ But although these Europeans could not reconcile Chosŏn’s status with their Eurocentric understanding of colonial relationships, they nonetheless regarded the Sino-Korean relationship as a legitimate one, which may explain why their states never publicly denied that Chosŏn was a dependency of China before 1895. The Sino-French negotiation over Chosŏn’s international position in 1866 was the beginning of the exposure of a range of conceptual, textual, ideological, and epistemological conflicts between China and its Western counterparts. Bellonet was thus among the first Westerners who encountered difficulties in dealing with the Zongfan order in practice.
On the Chinese side, the Zongli Yamen, as a temporary institution established on an ad hoc basis, had no right to communicate with Chosŏn, and until the end of the Zongfan relationship in 1895 it never gained that right. Rather, the Ministry of Rites continued to carry responsibility for Chosŏn’s affairs. The Zongli Yamen simply sent any cases involving Chosŏn to the Ministry of Rites for processing. The ministry, for its part, could not make changes to established imperial codes, formalities, or precedents regarding Chosŏn, so it often forwarded the cases to the emperor and the Grand Council to receive further instructions. This convention-driven arrangement persisted until 1882, when Beijing endowed Li Hongzhang—the Beiyang superintendent under the supervision of the Zongli Yamen—with the right to communicate with the king. Contacts between Chosŏn and Western states in the 1860s thus exposed China’s policy deficit in the uncharted territory between the Zongli Yamen and the Ministry of Rites, and this deficit endured for another three decades. Given this context, the Zongli Yamen pursued a policy of mediation (Ch., paijie) between Chosŏn and the West. It replied to Bellonet that the French should not rush to attack Chosŏn and that China would mediate between France and Chosŏn, but it did not claim responsibility for the killing of the French missionaries. In a memorial to the emperor and in a confidential letter to governors-general and governors of the coastal provinces and Manchu generals in Manchuria, the Yamen expressed serious concern over the French hostility toward Chosŏn and proclaimed that China could in no way sit it out if Chosŏn were to come under foreign attack.¹⁹ It also notified Chosŏn, via the Ministry of
Rites, of the possibility that French forces might invade the country.²⁰
Undeterred, Bellonet instructed Admiral Pierre-Gustave Roze (1812–83), commander of the French Far Eastern Squadron, to launch the expedition. On September 20 Roze led three warships from Zhifu (Chefoo, now Yantai) on the Shandong Peninsula across the Bohai Sea. They arrived at a small island off the coast of Inch’ŏn, where they made navigational charts of the waters along the coastlines. Roze refused to contact local officials while conducting these activities. At court, the Taewŏn’gun learned of the arrival of the foreign strange-shaped ships (K., iyang sŏn), but he nonetheless continued his anti-Catholic campaign by arresting and executing more converts. Ten days before the French forces arrived, the young king, at his father’s suggestion, had issued a decree of antiheresy (K., ch’ŏksa yunŭm) to further stoke anti-Catholic resentment.²¹
On October 1 the three primary members of the most recent tributary mission to Beijing—Yu Hu-bok, Sŏ Tang-po, and Hong Sun-hak—returned to Hansŏng and were granted an audience with the king. The mission had been charged with requesting the Qing to invest the daughter of the late official Min Ch’i-rok with the title of queen; she would later be known as Queen Min (1851–95). Yu made a point of informing the king and senior ministers that the foreigners in Beijing were beyond Chinese jurisdiction and were not afraid of the big country.²² Yu’s account may have given the court the impression that China had become a victim of Western invaders, and that Chosŏn would be next. This news reinforced the Taewŏn’gun’s anti-Catholic and xenophobic attitude, convincing him that Chosŏn’s security could be guaranteed only by resisting the barbarians of the ocean (K., yang’i).²³
Two weeks after Yu’s audience with the king, the French squadron reached Inch’ŏn and blockaded all entrances to the Han River of Hansŏng. In spite of Korean resistance, French marines landed on Korean soil and proceeded to loot the capital of Kanghwa Prefecture and other nearby towns. With the arrival of cold weather in early November, they withdrew back to Zhifu. The Western ministers in Beijing had assumed that the expedition would bring Chosŏn into the modern world. The American chargé d’affaires Samuel Wells Williams (1812–84), for instance, exclaimed that it is full time that Corea was introduced into the family of nations.²⁴ But Williams and his colleagues soon realized that the French had failed to conduct any negotiations with the Koreans, much less introduce into the country any ideas of the family of nations. Instead the military invasion provided the Taewŏn’gun with a further justification for his policy of countering barbarians and protecting the nation (K., yang’i poguk).²⁵
On November 1, 1866, while the battle with the French marines was raging in Kanghwa, the king held a grand ceremony in Hansŏng to welcome two Manchu envoys, Kuiling and Xiyuan, who came to invest the new queen. Following the customary ritual codes, the king went to the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country on the city’s outskirts to welcome the envoys. Afterward, inside the capital, the king performed the requisite ceremonies to receive the book of investiture. The investiture emphasized that the queen should assist the king in bringing prosperity to the country, which had been a loyal " fan and fence" (Ch., fanping) of China for generations.²⁶ In a domestic decree that the king issued after the grand ceremony to celebrate the investiture, he emphasized that Chosŏn, the lower country, appreciated the magnanimous favor of the central dynasty and the big country.²⁷ During the envoys’ three-day sojourn, all rituals were performed precisely according to precedent. In conversations between the king and the envoys, the ongoing war with the French, raging just twenty-five miles away, never came up. The boundary between Zongfan matters and diplomatic affairs was as clear as the two countries’ court-to-court and country-to-country relationships.
The arrival of an imperial mission in Chosŏn at this critical moment raised serious concerns among the French. Prince Gong explained that the envoys were on affairs of ceremonial, and in accordance with long-established usage, having no reference to the quarrel between France and Corea, but Bellonet was suspicious.²⁸ Prince Gong circulated his correspondence with Bellonet among the foreign ministers, which served to publicize in the diplomatic corps China’s
definition of the Sino-Korean relationship. While Prince Gong argued with Bellonet about the Korean issue, two Korean tributary missions arrived in Beijing in succession.
The first mission, headed by Han Mun-kyu, arrived on November 6 to receive the imperial calendar for the upcoming year. In the king’s memorial to the emperor that Han brought to Beijing, the king stated that Chosŏn had no wish to do business with foreign countries and that Catholicism and other foreign religions were not welcome in Chosŏn. In addition, Han brought to Wan Qingli, a minister of the Qing Ministry of Rites, a personal letter from Yi Hŭng-min (1809–81), a former tributary emissary who had become acquainted with Wan the previous year. In his letter, Yi tried to legitimize the Taewŏn’gun’s anti-Catholic policy and hoped Wan would take advantage of his position to discuss the issue with the emperor and the Zongli Yamen, in the hope that China would persuade foreigners not to visit Chosŏn. Realizing that the issue was beyond the jurisdiction of his ministry and personal correspondence, Wan forwarded the letter to the emperor, asking for instructions and suggesting that he relay the court’s recommendations to Chosŏn through his personal response to Yi.²⁹ The court did not take Wan up on his offer. The emperor’s decree to the king likewise skirted the issue, simply telling the king to secure Chosŏn without offering any specific strategy.
Two months after Han’s arrival, a second Korean mission, this one bearing the annual tribute, reached Beijing on February 1, 1867, three days before the Spring Festival. In his memorials to the emperor on the occasion of the lunar New Year, the king declared again that it was impossible for Chosŏn to trade with foreign barbarians such as the French or to allow them to spread the Gospel in the country. The king also reported that Yi Hŭng-min had been punished because his personal letter to high-ranking officials of the imperial dynasty had violated regulations. The Chinese court had no further instructions for the king. Meanwhile, the French did not follow their brief expedition with further campaigns against Chosŏn. The issue of Chosŏn’s status remained unsettled and soon proved confusing to the United States.
The Shuguo between Zizhu and Independence: American Views of Chosŏn’s Status, 1866–71
Shipwrecks and Savages: China’s Disavowal of Responsibility for Chosŏn
In July and September 1866, two American schooners, the Surprise and the General Sherman, were wrecked in Chosŏn, the former off the coast of the country and the latter in the Taedong River in P’yŏngyang. The crew of the Surprise was treated kindly and escorted safely to the Chinese side via Fenghuang Gate, but the members of the General Sherman ’s crew were mercilessly killed right in P’yŏngyang. After learning about the General Sherman case, the American minister in Beijing, Anson Burlingame (1820–70), immediately brought the issue to the attention of Prince Gong because Corea was formerly tributary to China. To Burlingame’s surprise, Prince Gong at once disavowed all responsibility for the Coreans, and stated that the only connection between the two countries was one of ceremonial. In a letter to Rear Admiral Henry H. Bell (1808–68), the acting commander of the US Asiatic Squadron, Burlingame affirmed that the Chinese government disavows any responsibility for that of Corea, and all jurisdiction over its people.³⁰ The case was thus passed on to Bell, who, in a confidential dispatch to the Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles (1802–78), suggested that the United States launch punitive action against Chosŏn.³¹ In fact, Secretary of State William H. Seward (1801–72) had proposed to the French representative in Washington that the United States and France initiate a combined action against Chosŏn, but France had declined.³² Bell’s proposed expedition did not take place either. In early 1867 the navy dispatched the USS Wachusett to Chosŏn under the command of Robert W. Shufeldt (1822–95) to investigate the General Sherman incident. But the expedition yielded nothing, as severe weather forced Shufeldt out of Chosŏn before he could receive an official response to his queries. To the United States, Chosŏn remained what American scholars would call a hermit nation.³³
American diplomats found themselves involved in another shipwreck in East Asia in March 1867, this time involving the schooner Rover in Taiwan (Formosa). The Rover foundered on the southern coast of the island, and the crew members who came ashore were ambushed and killed by aborigines known as the Koaluts. Believing that the incident was within his jurisdiction, Charles W. Le Gendre (1830–99), the American consul at Xiamen (Amoy), brought the matter to the attention of the governor-general in Fuzhou, the local officials of Taiwan Prefecture, and the Zongli Yamen. The local officials informed Le Gendre that the crew had met with their deaths in savage lands (Ch., shengfan jie) beyond the civilization of the sovereign (Ch., wanghua buji), not within the waters over which the Chinese government exercises jurisdiction, and that their murderers were savages rather than Chinese civilians (Ch., huamin). Therefore, articles 11 and 13 of the 1858 Sino-American Treaty regarding China’s jurisdiction did not apply, and the Chinese government had no responsibility to take action against the Koaluts as the consul had requested. Le Gendre, believing to the contrary that the savages were within China’s jurisdiction, warned his Chinese counterparts that other states could cite such a disavowal of responsibility as an excuse to occupy the savage lands.³⁴ Finally, the Chinese authorities dispatched soldiers to accompany Le Gendre to southern Taiwan, but the minister alone entered the Koaluts’ territory and concluded an agreement with the chieftain.³⁵ Le Gendre’s experience of negotiating with the Chinese side was not notable at the time and seemed unrelated to Chosŏn. But it would prove significant in the 1870s, when Tokyo hired Le Gendre to help reframe Japanese policy toward Taiwan, Ryukyu, Chosŏn, and China.
A Nominal Connection: Low’s Assessment of the Sino-Korean Relationship
Before Japan joined the Western states in challenging Chosŏn’s status, Frederick F. Low (1828–94), the American minister in Beijing and the former governor of California, organized an expedition to Chosŏn in 1871 with the aim of negotiating a treaty for the protection of shipwrecked mariners. His action pushed Beijing to clarify China’s definition of the Sino-Korean relationship. As Low saw it, Corea is substantially an independent nation and the Korean tribute to China "is sent rather as a quid pro quo for the privilege of trading with the Chinese than a governmental tribute."³⁶ Low nonetheless solicited the aid of the Zongli Yamen to obtain useful information about Chosŏn. In February 1871 Low delivered to the Yamen a letter that he hoped would be forwarded to the king of Chosŏn via the Ministry of Rites. After sending the letter to Chosŏn, the ministry noted, in a confidential memorial to the emperor, that "Chosŏn has used China’s ruling titles and calendars for a long time and proved the most loyal. All affairs regarding its government, religion, prohibitions, and laws are subject to its own management by the rule of zizhu, and none of these affairs has China hitherto interfered in."³⁷ These same words were used by the Zongli Yamen in its dispatch to Low in March.
Low decided, first, to interpret China’s position as affirming Chosŏn’s independent sovereignty, stating that although Corea is regarded as a country subordinate to China, yet she is wholly independent in everything that relates to her government, her religion, her prohibitions, and her laws; in none of these things has China hitherto interfered. In essence, he translated the Chinese term zizhu into full independence. Second, he concluded that the Chinese declaration aimed to guard against complications that may possibly grow out of an attempt by foreign nations to open intercourse with Corea, and relieve this Government of all responsibility for the acts of the Coreans, whether hostile or otherwise. Low thus interpreted Beijing’s declaration as a repudiation of responsibility for Chosŏn’s behavior. It seemed that it was time for him to sail for Chosŏn, a place that was, for him, more of a sealed book than Japan was before Commodore Perry’s visit.³⁸ Low determined to become another Perry.
Yet Low failed to crack the book. After arriving in Chosŏn in May, he was unable to establish official contacts with the Korean side. The expedition only intensified Chosŏn’s hostility toward Western countries. Chosŏn continued to identify itself as a subject of China that had no right to communicate with foreign countries—that is, to conduct diplomacy. This point was reiterated by the king in his memorial to the emperor in June 1871 in response to Low’s letter, forwarded from Beijing.³⁹ After the frustrating failure of his expedition, Low still hoped to contact Chosŏn through Beijing, and his conversations with the Zongli Yamen
provided him with further opportunities to reconceptualize the Sino-Korean relationship. He concluded that the relations between the two countries, established during the reign of the Ming Emperors, nominally continued unchanged, although, practically, they have little force.⁴⁰ Despite a sharp refutation from Prince Gong, Low continued to hold this opinion.
Between 1866 and 1871, the Western ministers’ perception of Chosŏn shifted: they no longer considered it a tributary of China but rather saw it as an independent state beyond Chinese jurisdiction. Several key terms of international law were now applied to the Sinocentric Zongfan order, even though nothing within this order had changed. In 1871 the Qing signed its first Western-style treaty with Japan that portrayed the two countries as equals. Over the next five years, Japan, in the midst of dramatic Westernizing reforms under Emperor Meiji (r. 1867– 1912), became the vanguard of the challenge to the Sino-Korean relationship, aided by its position as an insider in the East Asian community. The participation of the rising Japanese empire opened a new chapter in modern East Asian history.
The Shuguo between Chinese Legitimacy and International Law: The First Sino-Japanese Debate
Japan’s Contacts with Chosŏn and the Sino-Japanese Treaty of 1871
During the Japanese Tokugawa bakufu period (1603–1867), communications between Japan and Chosŏn were conducted through the Sō family in the domain of Tsushima. Chosŏn interacted with the Sō in a semi-Zongfan framework. The head of the Sō sent boats to Chosŏn for trade in accordance with Chosŏn’s regulations, and he presented himself as a subordinate in letters to the king. In return, when necessary, Chosŏn followed the policy of kyorin, communicating with a neighboring country, by dispatching messengers to Japan to consolidate the two countries’ friendly relations. All such messengers visited Kyoto and Edo (Tokyo) via Tsushima. Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan established the Gaimushō, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to manage foreign relations under newly adopted Western norms. While its relationships with other countries evolved steadily, Japan failed to modernize its relationship with Chosŏn. Chosŏn refused to accept Japan’s sovereign letters, figuratively closing the country’s door in Japan’s face.
In the meantime, Japan was approaching China to pursue an international status equal to it. In September 1871 the Japanese minister plenipotentiary, Date Munenari (1818–92), signed a treaty, written in both the Chinese and Japanese languages, with Li Hongzhang in Tianjin. The first article stated, Relations of amity shall henceforth be maintained in redoubled force between China and Japan, in measure as boundless as the heaven and the earth. In all that regards the territorial possessions of either country the two Governments shall treat each other with proper courtesy, without the slightest infringement or encroachment on either side, to the end that there may be for evermore peace between them undisturbed.⁴¹ The term territorial possessions and its applicability to Chosŏn later became a source of disagreement between the two countries. The term is a rough English equivalent of the Chinese suoshu bangtu. Suoshu means to belong to, but bangtu is too vague to be accurately defined in international law. Literally, bang means country and tu means land, but bangtu could mean country,land, or territorial possessions. Both China and Japan subsequently realized that the term failed to establish whether the countries serving as China’s outer fan, in particular Chosŏn, counted among China’s territorial possessions. Both sides used the term’s uncertain definition to their own advantage, resulting in fierce disputes when Japan began implementing an aggressive policy toward Ryukyu and Chosŏn in the 1870s.
An Ambush on the Chinese: Soejima’s Embassy to Beijing in 1873
In December 1871 a ship from Ryukyu was shipwrecked on the southern coast of Taiwan, where the aborigines killed fifty-four members of its crew. Since Japan was in the process of annexing Ryukyu by converting it into a Japanese domain (J., han), Tokyo regarded the incident as a good opportunity to finalize the matter by cutting off Ryukyu’s Zongfan relationship with China. In February 1873 Emperor Meiji appointed the minister of foreign affairs, Soejima Taneomi (1828–1905),
as ambassador extraordinary to China to ratify the Treaty of Tianjin of 1871. The emperor instructed Soejima to discuss the killings of the Ryukyuese sailors to determine whether the whole of Taiwan was under China’s jurisdiction.⁴² A key proponent of the Seikan ron (expedition against Korea), Soejima eagerly availed himself of this chance to glean information on China’s attitude toward Japanese-Korean contacts. Among the members of the Japanese mission was Japan’s newly appointed adviser on foreign policy toward Taiwan, Charles Le Gendre, whose experience was invaluable to Tokyo’s efforts to formulate and implement a new policy toward the Chinese Zongfan system.⁴³ It was through Western advisers such as Le Gendre who mastered modern Western norms regarding sovereignty and international law that Japan transformed itself into an outsider to the East Asian community in terms of its foreign policy.
Soejima arrived in Tianjin in April, and his visit marked the first time that a Japanese official showed up in China in a Western tailcoat. After ratifying the treaty, Soejima briefly discussed Japanese-Korean relations with Li Hongzhang. Li warned that Japan should be friendly to Chosŏn and that any Japanese expedition against it would violate the Sino-Japanese treaty.⁴⁴ In Beijing, with Le Gendre’s assistance, Soejima visited foreign legations in the city. The current British minister, Thomas F. Wade (1818–95), reported to London that the Japanese are also suspected of a design on Corea and that Soejima is evidently anxious for an assurance from the Chinese that Corea is an independent Kingdom, so independent of China, that is to say, as to make what may befall Corea no concern of the Chinese. Wade inferred that Japan would apply gunboat diplomacy to Korea.⁴⁵ According to Frederick Low, Soejima had only two questions of importance which he desires to discuss with the Chinese government. First, he wanted to know whether China is responsible for the acts of the aborigines on the island of Formosa. According to Low, If the answer is in the negative, notice will then be given that Japan proposed to send a military force to Formosa to chastise the savage and semi-civilized tribes that practically hold undisputed possession of the large part of the island. Second, Soejima wanted to ascertain the precise relations between China and Corea; whether the former claims to exercise such control over her tributary as to render China responsible for the acts of the Coreans, or whether other nations must look to Corea alone for redress for wrongs and outrages which her people may commit.⁴⁶
Soejima’s view of the likely relationship between China and its periphery—Taiwan and Chosŏn—matched Western countries’ conclusions regarding the limits of China’s jurisdiction over these regions. When Soejima solicited Low’s opinions on Chosŏn, Low showed him the Zongli Yamen’s dispatch of March 1871, mentioned earlier, which affirmed China’s noninterference in Chosŏn’s affairs in accordance with the principle of zizhu. Upon Low’s assertion that Chosŏn was wholly independent, Soejima made the judgment that Chosŏn lay "beyond the Qing’s sovereignty [J., shuken]."⁴⁷ The Japanese policy of challenging Chosŏn’s status as China’s shuguo thus began to converge with the policies pursued by the United States, France, Britain, and other Western states in China.
Soejima’s conclusion found support in a meeting at the Zongli Yamen on June 21, 1873, that brought together a Japanese representative, Yanagiwara Sakimitsu (1850–94), and the Chinese ministers Mao Changxi (1817–82) and Dong Xun (1807–92). Yanagiwara asked how China could justify claiming Chosŏn as a shuguo, since the Yamen had asserted in its 1871 note to the American minister that China never interfered with its internal politics, religion, prohibitions, and laws. Mao, drawing on an understanding of Sino-Korean contacts that he might have gained when working at the Ministry of Rites, explained that "the so-called shuguo referred only to investiture and tribute submission" and that China would not interfere with Chosŏn’s right to conduct negotiations over war and peace.⁴⁸ Mao’s response satisfied Soejima because it corroborated Low’s argument.⁴⁹ Soejima, along with his Western counterparts, was granted an audience with the Tongzhi emperor on June 29. It was the first imperial audience for Western ministers since the 1840s and it encouraged both sides to improve their understanding of each other.
Upon his return to Tokyo, Soejima stepped up his advocacy for an expedition to Korea, but the return of a Japanese mission to the United States and Europe halted his plan. The three key members of the mission, Iwakura Tomomi (1825– 83), Ōkubo Toshimichi (1830–78), and Kido Takayoshi (1833–77), argued that
Japan should focus on domestic reforms to reorganize its national politics and make its people rich.⁵⁰ As this policy prevailed, the proponents of the Seikan ron, such as Soejima, Saigō Takamori (1827–77), Itagaki Taisuke (1837–1919), and Etō Shinpei (1834–74), were pushed out of the cabinet. In December 1873 the young king of Chosŏn assumed direct rule and ended the regency of Taewŏn’gun. Tokyo tried to take advantage of this occasion to pursue a new diplomatic relationship with Hansŏng, but its efforts failed in the face of sharp resistance by local officials in Pusan, where the Koreans still preferred to communicate with the Japanese through the kyorin framework. Japan, it seemed, could not make any substantial progress on opening a new channel of communication with the Korean court.
The Birth of Chosŏn’s Sovereignty: The Second Sino-Japanese Debate and the Treaty of Kanghwa
Defining China’s Territory: Taiwan, Kanghwa, and Mori’s Visit to Beijing
In the summer of 1874, while Tokyo was sending troops to South Taiwan to deal with the territory in question beyond the jurisdiction of the Chinese government, it also sent Yanagiwara Sakimitsu and Ōkubo Toshimichi to Beijing for further negotiations about Taiwan.⁵¹ The Zongli Yamen told the Japanese representatives, Even if the aborigines are ‘barbarians,’ they are still China’s barbarians, and only China has the right to punish them if they are guilty. The Chinese ministers pointed to relevant rules of international law and Chinese historical evidence, such as local gazetteers, to bolster their point. Without close advice from Western advisers such as Le Gendre, the Japanese failed to prove that the aborigines’ area of residence in South Taiwan was beyond China’s jurisdiction. Under the mediation of Thomas Wade, the doyen of the diplomatic corps in Beijing, the Chinese and Japanese sides reached a succinct agreement. Interestingly, the third article of the agreement stated that all correspondence that this question has occasioned between the two governments shall be canceled, and the discussions dropped for evermore.⁵² In this way, Japan not only invalidated any documents that could expose its inferior position in the talks on the reach of China’s territory but also shifted future negotiations to the track of international law. To the Japanese, the negotiations indicated that only a Japan equipped with European norms could challenge the Chinese discourse, which helps explain why, over the following decade, Japan frequently solicited its Western advisers for suggestions regarding Japan’s foreign policy toward its neighbors.
A skirmish between Japan and Chosŏn near Kanghwa Island in September 1875 led to the resurgence of support for the Seikan ron in Japan. This time Iwakura and his fellow politicians endorsed the expedition, because Japan’s diplomatic situation was much improved. In addition to reaching an agreement with China about the Taiwan incident, Tokyo had resolved its territorial disputes with Russia over Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands by signing a treaty in St. Petersburg in May 1875, through which it obtained Russian acquiescence to its actions in Chosŏn. Meanwhile, in order to check Russia’s southern advance in East Asia during the Russo-British rivalry in Central Asia, Britain planned to occupy Port Hamilton, a small Korean island known as Kŏmundo near the Tsushima Strait.⁵³ This plan provided Japan with an excuse to initiate an expedition against Korea without triggering an intervention from these Western powers. In October 1875 Kido Takayoshi suggested that Japan should press China for an explanation of its relationship with Chosŏn; once Beijing had disavowed responsibility for Chosŏn’s foreign affairs, Japan could freely take action against Chosŏn.⁵⁴
The Japanese government appointed Mori Arinori (1847–89) as the minister plenipotentiary to Beijing. Educated in Britain and having worked in the United States, Mori was familiar with Western diplomatic rules and had consulted with Erasmus Peshine Smith (1814–82), the American special adviser to the Gaimushō on international law, regarding the Kanghwa incident. Sanjō Sanetomi (1837–91), chancellor of the realm, issued instructions to Mori’s embassy, and the most important among them was to "identify Chosŏn as an independent country [J., dokuritsu koku] and persuade China to help establish Japanese-Korean relations for the sake of Japan’s and China’s common interests. In short, Mori’s mission was to cut off the Sino-Korean relationship."⁵⁵ The foreign minister, Terashima
Munenori (1832–93), telegraphed the chargé d’affaires in Beijing, Tei Einei (1829–97), saying that since Soejima’s visit in 1873 had not confirmed that Chosŏn was not a " fan and subordinate" (J., hanzoku) of the Qing, Tei should be cautious about all contacts between Japan and the Qing regarding Chosŏn.⁵⁶
Another Ambush on the Chinese: Mori’s Debate with the Zongli Yamen
On January 2, 1876, the Qing court dispatched two envoys, Jihe and Wulasiconga, to Chosŏn to invest the king’s son, Yi Ch’ŏk, as the crown prince. Three Han Chinese grand secretaries—Mao Changxi, Li Hongzhang, and Zuo Zongtang (1812–85)—drafted the imperial edict of investiture in December 1875. Two days later Mori arrived in Beijing with the aim of denying this Sino-Korean relationship from the perspective of international law.
Mori paid his first visit to Thomas Wade, in the hope that the latter could mediate between Japan and China. Wade was impressed by Mori, but his situation made it impossible for him to assist Mori.⁵⁷ Wade’s relations with Beijing were strained due to an incident in the previous year in which a young British interpreter handpicked by Wade, Augustus R. Margary, had been killed on an expedition to Burma from Yunnan. Wade had repeatedly telegraphed London to ask for more naval forces to pressure China into negotiating with him for another treaty. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) supported Wade and conceived a plan to ally with Japan against China, a scheme he called one of the greatest secrets of State going.⁵⁸ But the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Edward Henry Stanley (1826–93), did not endorse this aggressive approach.⁵⁹ Under the circumstances, Wade had no desire to be involved in the Sino-Japanese negotiations on Korean affairs, but after his conversation with Mori he reported to London that the minister’s manner, rather than his language, made me mistrustful. I inferred that an expedition of Corea is determined on and that the object of his confidential communications to me was to ascertain whether objection to the expedition would be taken by English, or any other foreign action.⁶⁰ Wade could not have been more correct. On January 6, 1876, the Japanese ambassador plenipotentiary to Chosŏn, Kuroda Kiyotaka (1840–1900), sailed from Tokyo for the Korean Peninsula, leading a fleet of two gunboats and four schooners.⁶¹
Mori, accompanied by his interpreter, Tei Einei, and two secretaries, met with five Chinese ministers on January 10 at the Zongli Yamen to discuss Chosŏn’s status. Zhou Jiamei (1835–86) served as the secretary for the Chinese side. Mori, the youngest man in the room, was also the only person who knew international law and had Western educational and diplomatic experience. Shortly after the talks started, the two sides realized that they were on diametrically opposed tracks. The conversation unfolded mainly between Mori and Shen Guifen (1818–81), who had previously worked at the Ministry of Rites. Mori asked why China, identifying Chosŏn as its shuguo, nonetheless claimed that Chosŏn’s "politics, religion, prohibitions, and laws fall under the principle of zizhu . Shen explained, The shuguo is not land under the governance of our country [Ch., yuan bushi woguo guanxia zhi di]. But it pays tribute on time, receives our investiture, and accepts our country’s calendar, and this has made it our shuguo ." Shen further informed Mori that Vietnam, Ryukyu, and Burma were also China’s shuguo, with different schedules for the payment of tribute. When Mori asked whether a shuguo could negotiate with foreign countries on trade without informing China, Shen replied that the country in question would manage its affairs by itself and China would not get involved, but that it would legally respond to any disputes arising between the shuguo and China’s treaty partners. Shen warned Mori that any invasion of a shuguo of China would not be defensible and would contravene the first article of the Sino-Japanese Treaty of 1871.⁶²
At this point it became apparent that the disagreement between the two sides hinged on their different definitions of the term shuguo. For Mori, a shuguo could mean a colony, a dependency, or a nation with semisovereign rights. In particular, he used the relationship between the Muhammad Ali dynasty of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, that between Hungary and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and that between Canada and the British Empire as three examples of shuguo in the Western context. The three examples were, however, completely lost in the Chinese translation because of the vast gap in international knowledge between the two parties. The Chinese ministers retorted with convincing examples drawn from the Chinese context to prove that Chosŏn was in all senses a shuguo of China.
The debate ended without agreement.
The meeting having fallen short of his expectations, Mori acknowledged the gulf between the two sides and expressed frustration with Chinese officialdom.⁶³ In the aftermath of the so-called Tongzhi Restoration—an attempt to strengthen the dynasty and traditional order in the 1860s—the Qing was facing increasingly serious challenges from within as well as from outside the country. On the same day that Mori was arguing with the Zongli Yamen, Empress Dowagers Cian (1837–81) and Cixi (1835–1908), in the Forbidden City about two miles west of the Yamen, were tearfully beseeching two officials, Weng Tonghe (1830– 1904) and Xia Tongshan (1830–80), to serve as teachers for the young emperor, Guangxu, who was Dowager Cixi’s nephew.⁶⁴ The political heart of the empire was vulnerable. It was not until 1898, three years after his empire was humiliated by Japan in the war that broke out in Chosŏn, that the emperor was able to launch a reform with the strong support of Weng.
After the meeting, Mori asked the Zongli Yamen to issue a passport to a Japanese assistant whom he wanted to send to Chosŏn via Mukden to inform the Japanese ambassador to Chosŏn about the Sino-Japanese meetings. He also expressed his own desire to visit Li Hongzhang at Baoding, Li’s political headquarters, to show his gratitude for Li’s greetings. The Yamen refused to issue the passport because of the absence of relevant precedent, reiterating its assertion that Chosŏn was China’s shuguo. This response triggered another exchange of verbal jousts through diplomatic notes. Mori argued that "Chosŏn is an independent country, and the status of a so-called shuguo of China is only a nominal title [J., kūmei; Ch., kongming]…. Any Japanese-Korean contacts have nothing to do with the Sino-Japanese Treaty."⁶⁵ This statement, echoing Low’s comments in 1871, marked the complete convergence of Japanese and Western policies challenging the nature of the Sino-Korean relationship. Perceiving this alignment, the Yamen wrote to the emperor, expressing severe concern over the likely prospect of problems caused by Japan, a country that has recently adopted Western politics and customs and changed its own costumes and calendars.⁶⁶ Japan had become a major troublemaker in China’s eyes.
In order to inform Chosŏn of the situation, the Zongli Yamen asked the Ministry of Rites to immediately dispatch a copy of Mori’s note to Hansŏng. The note was sent from Beijing on January 19, 1876, four days after Japanese naval forces had arrived at Pusan. The Yamen, completely blind to the Japanese advance on Chosŏn, busied itself with arguing with Mori. Once the two sides had arrived at an utter impasse, two officers sent by Li Hongzhang arrived in Beijing to accompany Mori to Baoding. Both the Yamen and Mori were happy to hand the case to Li in hopes of winning a favorable ruling at Baoding.
Li’s Sincere Advice: The Baoding Negotiations
Thus began Li Hongzhang’s deep involvement in Chosŏn’s affairs as a provincial official. On January 10, while the Yamen squabbled with Mori, Li briefly explained some diplomatic ideas regarding Chosŏn’s possible contacts with the West in his reply to a letter from Yi Yu-wŏn (1814–88), a Korean prime minister who had visited Beijing in 1875 as a tributary emissary.⁶⁷ Two weeks later, while his letter was on its way to Hansŏng, Li welcomed Mori at Baoding. The conversations that ensued were all the more complicated in that they were conducted not in Chinese or Japanese but in English. Moreover, in their reports to their respective governments, written in their own languages instead of in English, both sides claimed to be prevailing over the other. Neither Beijing nor Tokyo had an accurate picture of the actual progress of the talks.⁶⁸
The first conversation, on January 24, lasted for more than six hours over a banquet at Li’s office. Li had invited two officials, Huang Pengnian and Huang Huilian, to attend the meeting as guests and assistants. While Huang Pengnian was an erudite Confucian scholar, Huang Huilian was Cantonese and had been educated at an American missionary school in Shanghai; his first name, Huilian, was a Chinese transliteration of William, the name of the school’s headmaster, William Jones Boone (1811–64; known in Chinese as Wen Huilian). William Huang had visited British Guiana and been drafted by Beijing to serve as an
interpreter during the Second Opium War in 1860. It seems that Mori decided to speak with Li in English after learning of William Huang’s English proficiency, as he felt that English would better allow him to convey the principles of international law as he believed they applied to the Korean issue.⁶⁹
To Mori’s argument that Chosŏn was an independent country rather than China’s shuguo, Li responded,
Everyone knows that Chosŏn has been subordinate to China for thousands of years. In the phrase suoshu bangtu [territorial possessions] of the [Sino-Japanese] treaty, the tu means Chinese provinces, namely, China’s inner land [Ch., neidi] and inner subordinates [Ch., neishu], on which the Chinese government levies taxes and whose political affairs it manages. The bang refers to countries such as Chosŏn that are China’s outer fan and outer subordinates [Ch., waishu], whose taxes and political affairs are always their own business. This is a convention, and it does not start with our dynasty. Chosŏn is indeed China’s shuguo.⁷⁰
This interpretation of suoshu bangtu implied that although Chosŏn did not lie within China’s immediate orbit, it was nonetheless part of the broader Chinese empire. Mori realized that no agreement could be reached on this point, so he ended the argument with Li. In the subsequent discussion on the Kanghwa incident, whereas Li stressed several times that Japan should obey the Sino-Japanese Treaty of 1871 and international law, Mori, who had visited the prominent British philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) before returning to Japan and had seen the dramatic expansion of the Western colonial enterprise, responded that state power was much more reliable than textual treaties. At the end, Mori asked Li what China would do if a war broke out between Japan and Chosŏn. Li replied that not only China but also Russia would send troops to defend Chosŏn. Li then wrote out for Mori, under the title Sincere Advice (Ch., Zhonggao), eight Chinese characters, which read, Acting only to disturb harmony, brings no benefits at all (Ch., Tushang heqi, haowu liyi). Mori did not mention Li’s warning in his reports to Tokyo. The next day, New Year’s Eve, Li visited Mori for a short conversation that did not touch on the Korean issue but included a discussion of Japan’s reforms. Li did not inform the Zongli Yamen of the details of this conversation, but Mori kept a full record in English, which indicates the epistemological gulf that separated the two men and the worlds they represented and defended.⁷¹ As Mori and Li closed their talks, the Japanese fleet dropped anchor at the offing of Kanghwa Island.
After Mori returned to Beijing, he resumed his debate with the Zongli Yamen. The Yamen emphasized to Mori that "solving its difficulties, resolving its disputes, and securing its safety and security [Ch., shu qi nan, jie qi fen, qi qi anquan] are the responsibilities to Chosŏn that China has taken upon itself, and they are how China treats its shuguo. It is the longstanding policy of China to refrain from forcing its shuguo to do what it is reluctant to do and to stand by when it runs into trouble."⁷² Mori, however, continued to insist that "Chosŏn is indeed an independent country, so Japan will not take Chosŏn’s relations with China into consideration in matters between Japan and Chosŏn. The so-called shuguo is no more than a nominal title. Nothing should be related to the treaty of 1871."⁷³ Thirty-four days of intensive negotiations had brought the two sides nowhere.
Old News and No News: The 1876 Imperial Mission to Chosŏn and the Limits of Zongfan Communications
The Sino-Korean Zongfan rituals that took place in Hansŏng in 1876 showed how untenable Mori’s enthusiastic diplomatic rhetoric was. On February 16, two days after the end of the Sino-Japanese debate in Beijing, the king held a grand ceremony in Hansŏng for the two imperial envoys coming to invest the crown prince. All procedures followed the precedents of investiture, and the host and guests alike performed the rituals according to code. The king expressed to the envoys his sincere gratitude to the emperor and the Zongli Yamen for informing him of the Japanese activities in Beijing. The envoys, praising the stance that Chosŏn had taken against Japan’s sovereign letters, said that Japan’s forces had reportedly arrived in Kanghwa and wanted to establish a consulate there, and they
voiced uneasiness about the situation.⁷⁴ In fact, the king had already dispatched two officials to negotiate with the Japanese at Kanghwa before receiving word from Beijing. He did not solicit advice from the envoys, nor did the envoys show any interest in obtaining details of the negotiations. Some historians have argued that Beijing used the imperial envoys to, among other things, persuade Chosŏn to conclude a treaty with Japan,⁷⁵ but records of the contact between the king and the envoys contradict this assertion.
On February 27 Chosŏn signed a treaty with Japan that ended their eight-year dispute. That same day, the Ministry of Rites in Beijing dispatched, at the top speed of five hundred li per day, a note to Chosŏn along with a copy of the Baoding conversations between Li and Mori. Handicapped by the sluggish speed of communications, the ministry, the Zongli Yamen, and Li Hongzhang could not follow the progress of the Japanese-Korean negotiations. Beijing did not receive a reply to its February note to Chosŏn about Japan’s talks with China until May 31, three months after the conclusion of the Treaty of Kanghwa. By contrast, Mori could receive Tokyo’s instructions by telegram within ten days, and Thomas Wade, who closely monitored the negotiations, was able to have his report delivered to London within eight days. Modern technology was changing international politics in an inconspicuous but concrete way, but no such improvements had yet reached the Sino-Korean channels of communication.
A week after the treaty was signed, the Manchu general at Mukden, Chongshi (1820–76), asked the Zongli Yamen whether the Ministry of Rites had received any response from the Koreans. Chongshi confessed that although Mukden bordered Chosŏn, the only information he had on Chosŏn consisted of rumors spread by Chinese and Korean merchants in the area. He hoped that the two imperial envoys could give him some reliable updates.⁷⁶ The general was, of course, disappointed in this hope. In the Forbidden City, meanwhile, the two empress dowagers discussed the Korean situation with Guo Songtao (1818–91), a minister of the Zongli Yamen who had been appointed the first minister to Britain. The dowagers disparaged Mori’s and Wade’s cunning personalities and called them first-class bad men (Ch., diyi deng huairen) whose mission was to make trouble.⁷⁷ Like Chongshi, the dowagers and Guo were unaware that the Treaty of Kanghwa had already been signed.
At the time, China had no official channel for communications beyond the empire, although Western ministers had arrived in Beijing as early as 1861. Its first minister to Japan would not set foot on Japanese soil until December 1877, almost five years after the arrival of the first Japanese minister in Beijing. A week after Guo’s conversation with the dowagers, it was from Mori, one of the first-class bad men, that the Zongli Yamen and the Manchu court learned that Japan had signed a treaty with Chosŏn. And it was not for another month—and then through the German minister to Beijing, Max August von Brandt (1835–1920)—that the Yamen first heard about the contents of the treaty. Only on April 17, when Mori submitted a full copy of the treaty to the Zongli Yamen, did the Chinese side finally see what it entailed. China’s passive position vis-à-vis Chosŏn and the treaty system with Japan was laid bare. In the two decades after 1876, it would become increasingly clear that this was China’s normal state within the established framework.
On April 21 Beijing at last received a note from the king, who briefly reviewed the treaty negotiations. The king never submitted a copy of the treaty to the emperor, nor did the emperor ever request it or raise any questions about the agreement. The king reported that the mistrust between Chosŏn and Japan had evaporated thanks to the inauguration of the long-term friendship between them: The bilateral contacts will be conducted by officials of the two countries on an equal footing. As it is not the first time that we have traded with Japan, we have allowed the Japanese to trade at our ports, where they must follow our rules.⁷⁸ Although the treaty endowed Japan with the right of consular jurisdiction and abolished all former trade conventions and junk trade (J., saiken sen), Chosŏn’s perception of the treaty was still rooted in conventional kyorin norms, rather than in any understanding of international law. It is difficult, then, to define the treaty as a truly modern one.⁷⁹
The Japanese Invention: The Birth of Chosŏn’s Sovereignty as a Textual Derivative
On March 22, 1876, the Gaimushō released the contents of the Treaty of Kanghwa and distributed an English version among the foreign ministers in Tokyo. The English translation of article 1 reads,
Chosŏn being an independent state enjoys the same sovereign rights as does Japan. In order to prove the sincerity of the friendship existing between the nations, their intercourse shall henceforward be carried on in terms of equality and courtesy, each avoiding the giving of offence by arrogance or manifestations of suspicion. In the first instance all rules and precedents that are apt to obstruct friendly intercourse shall be totally abrogated and, in their stead, rules, liberal and in general usage fit to secure a firm and perpetual peace, shall be established.⁸⁰
Many diplomats at the time and scholars since then concluded that this article, and in particular the first sentence, explicitly defines Chosŏn as an independent state under the terms of international law, although some scholars have recognized that the English translation of the first sentence is not precise.⁸¹ Given that the original text of the treaty used only Japanese and Chinese, a comparison of the Japanese and Chinese texts of the first article and the English version reveals critical discrepancies in several key terms.
The first sentence of the article in the Japanese version reads, Chōsen koku wa jishu no kuni ni shite, Nihon koku to byōdō no ken o hoyū seri 朝鮮國ハ 自主ノ邦ニシテ日本國ト平等ノ權ヲ保有セリ (lit., The country of Chosŏn is a nation with the right of self-rule, possessing rights equal to Japan’s). The Chinese version of this sentence—Chosŏn kug chaju ji bang, boyu yŏ Ilbon kug p’yŏngdŭng ji kwŏn 朝鮮國自主之邦保有與日本國平等之權—has the same meaning.⁸² It is clear that the Gaimushō made a deliberate choice to translate the term jishu (K., chaju; Ch., zizhu) as independence and the phrase jishu no kuni (K., chaju ji bang; Ch., zizhu zhi bang) as independent state. More importantly, the English translation intentionally rendered the Chinese character ken (K., kwŏn; Ch., quan) not simply as right but as sovereign right. The second half of the sentence, which literally says that Chosŏn possesses rights equal to Japan’s, thus ends up claiming that Chosŏn enjoys the same sovereign rights as does Japan. Later in the article, the Gaimushō translated the phrase dōtō no reigi (K., tongdŭng ji ye; Ch., tongdeng zhi li), which literally means equal rituals or equal courtesy, as equality and courtesy. By changing the term dōtō from an adjective to a noun, the Gaimushō reinforced the claim inherent in its translation of the first sentence.
Since the Western ministers in Tokyo could not read Chinese or Japanese texts, the Gaimushō may have hoped to mislead the English-speaking world by defining Chosŏn’s sovereignty and independence in the English translation. Both the American minister, John Bingham (1815–1900), and the British minister, Harry Parkes, accepted the provided translation and helped disseminate it in the West.⁸³ Certainly, Chosŏn’s sovereign right, or sovereignty, was not created by Japan’s subtle English translation; rather, Chosŏn always enjoyed sovereignty on its own territory, but this sovereign was subject to China’s emperorship in the Zongfan world.⁸⁴ It was not until 1882, when Chosŏn signed a treaty with the United States, that its sovereign right was explicitly defined for the first time in both Chinese and English. In 1876, neither Beijing nor Hansŏng foresaw the problems caused by the English translation of the treaty. Japan believed that it had successfully resolved the issue of Chosŏn’s status through the treaty and that it had prevailed over Beijing in the debate on the topic. In his final report to the Gaimushō on his mission to Beijing, Mori was self-congratulatory: Suffice it to say, he claimed, that the Zongli Yamen has been convinced by my argument…. The only objective of the debate was to cut off the Sino-Korean relationship, which I have achieved.⁸⁵ Yet he would soon realize that he had been too optimistic.
Commodore Robert W. Shufeldt of the US Navy returned to East Asia in March 1880 in hopes of negotiating a treaty with Chosŏn. During the intervening four years, Chosŏn had dispatched only an envoy of amity (K., Susin sa) to Japan in 1876 in observance of conventions, whereas it continued to send annual tributary
emissaries to Beijing. Chosŏn believed that it had restored the pre-1876 order that was maintained by the policy of serving the great in its relations with China and that of communicating with a neighboring country vis-à-vis Japan. The arrival of Shufeldt in the early 1880s created a stir in the hermit nation and became a test of the trilateral relations between Chosŏn, Japan, and China.
==
4
DEFINING CHOSŎN
Qing China’s Depiction of Chosŏn’s Status, 1862–76
For the Qing ruling house and intelligentsia, “everyday familiarity” collapsed on the very first day that the Westerners entered Beijing as permanent diplomatic
representatives.¹ As the self-strengthening movement unfolded in the 1860s, Beijing was increasingly intrigued by the possibility of employing European methods
to enhance China’s military and technical capabilities for the sake of China’s future. The innovations proposed by various reformers caught the attention of more
open-minded Chinese officials who were interested in statecraft outside their ivory towers. This elite drew on knowledge from abroad and pioneered Chinese
modernization, aware that the entrenched politico-cultural concept of all-under-Heaven embedded in a cosmopolitan, Confucian worldview was ineluctably giving
way to more realistic world politics born of sophisticated foreign negotiations informed by Western norms. The elite realized that they must first learn those
norms from their Western counterparts. In 1864 the Zongli Yamen published Wanguo gongfa (lit. “the common law among ten thousand countries”), the Chinese
edition of Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law, which had appeared in English in 1836.² Translated by an American Presbyterian missionary in Beijing,
William A. P. Martin (1827–1916; known in Chinese as Ding Weiliang), it was the first guide to international law in China and the Chinese world. The Chinese edi-
tion pointedly added a map of the world that presented it in the conventional arrangement of eastern and western hemispheres, which further eroded the Sinocen-
tric view by portraying China as merely one country among others.³ The Great Qing began to transform its political and diplomatic norms by integrating notions
of international law into its own constitutional and institutional systems.
However, the disintegration of the Qing’s old conceptualization of Western countries as barbarians did not lead to a similar breakdown in the Zongfan frame-
work that bound together the Manchu and Korean courts. Their symbiotic legitimacy, which could not be redefined or circumscribed by international law, still
strongly influenced their internal and external policies and behavior in the middle of the nineteenth century. In this sense, the two Opium Wars and the treaties
from 1842 to 1860 did not simply mark “the twilight of the Old” and “the dawn of the New,” as the East-West dichotomy would have it.⁴ Rather, the treaty port net-
work imposed from the outside and the time-honored Zongfan arrangement inside the Qing realm formed a dual system of two coexisting elements, and the for-
mer did not immediately begin to replace or incorporate the latter, as many scholars have retrospectively presumed. Since the 1860s, as contacts between Chosŏn
and Western countries grew more frequent, both Beijing and Hansŏng found it increasingly difficult to define their Zongfan relationship and Chosŏn’s interna-
tional status and state sovereignty. While the two countries asserted unanimously that Chosŏn was China’s shuguo or shubang (“subordinate country”) pos-
sessing the right of zizhu, China’s treaty counterparts treated Chosŏn as a state with independent sovereignty that maintained a merely ritual relationship to China.
This chapter explores this diplomatic conundrum and its consequences.
Chosŏn as China’s Shuguo : The Sino-French Conflict of 1866
The Beginning of the Puzzle: The French Invasion and China’s Response
In 1866, France decided to launch an expedition against Chosŏn in response to the killing of French missionaries in anti-Catholic purges initiated by Yi Ha-ŭng
(1820–98), better known by his title, Taewŏn’gun (Prince of the great court). The Taewŏn’gun had become the de facto regent after his twelve-year-old son, Yi Hŭi
(King Kojong), assumed the throne in 1863 as the closest male relative and thus the legitimate successor of the late King Ikchong.⁵ During the decade of his
regency, the Taewŏn’gun carried out a series of domestic reforms, but as a follower of Confucianism he also regarded Western religions as heresies or “evil ideas”
(K., sahak). In early 1866 he started to persecute converts to Christianity and Catholicism, leading to the execution of thirteen French missionaries and hundreds
of native converts in a short time.⁶
When news of the purge reached Beijing, the French chargé d’affaires, Henri de Bellonet, decided to launch a punitive expedition against Chosŏn. On July 14,
1866, Bellonet sent the Zongli Yamen a letter threatening that France would invade and temporarily occupy Chosŏn and appoint a new king. He noted that the
expedition would have nothing to do with China, as he had earlier been informed by the Yamen that Chosŏn managed its own affairs. Indeed, in 1865 Bellonet had
asked the Yamen to issue a dispatch to Chosŏn to inform the king that French missionaries wanted to bring their teachings to the kingdom. The Yamen had de-
clined to do so, explaining that “Chosŏn, as a shuguo of China, only uses the Chinese calendar, uses Chinese regnal titles, and pays annual tribute to China.” Bel-
lonet interpreted this response to mean that “the Chinese government has no authority or power over Corea.”⁷ From then on, both Western states and the Zongli
Yamen had continuous difficulty pinning down Chosŏn’s status as China’s shuguo in terms that the other side could accurately understand.
The Zongli Yamen claimed both that Chosŏn was a shuguo of China and that because Chosŏn managed all its own affairs under the rubric of zizhu, China would
not intervene in them. This statement was clear in Zongfan terms but came across as equivocal and paradoxical to Western ministers. While Bellonet acknowl-
edged that Chosŏn had “formerly assumed the bonds of vassalage to the Chinese empire,” he asserted that at the present moment, “we do not recognize any au-
thority whatever of the Chinese government over the kingdom of Corea.”⁸ This statement recognized Chosŏn as an independent nation, but the Yamen’s Chinese
translation of it missed its political meaning. The Wanguo gongfa of 1864 did not provide the Yamen with a definition of shuguo that could be translated into
appropriate Western terms.
What, then, caused this misunderstanding between France and China? This question is closely connected to the Western perception of the Sinocentric political
arrangement. At least since the late eighteenth century, Western travelers, observers, and diplomats who witnessed the practice of Korea and other entities of
sending emissaries with tribute to Beijing used the term “tributary” to describe the nature of the relationship between China and Korea, Vietnam, and other
countries.⁹ Their descriptions constituted the first step toward using the terms “tribute system” or “tributary system” to refer to the Zongfan system in Western
literature on China and East Asia. In the first half of the nineteenth century, when Western diplomats brought international law to East Asia, the Western under-
standing of this tribute system became increasingly skewed. As the Western states gradually integrated China and Japan into the family of nations defined accord-
ing to European norms, they found that Chosŏn maintained a special relationship with China that they could not explain adequately within the framework of these
norms. Thus, according to M. Frederick Nelson, “searching back into the categories which their international system listed, they hit upon that of suzerain and vas-
sal as most nearly fitting this East Asiatic relationship, and they then proceeded to apply the legal attributes of vassalage to the non-legal status of a shu-pang
[shubang, subordinate country].”¹⁰ The Sino-Korean relationship was thus depicted as a form of a suzerain-vassal relationship in order to fit it into a Western inter-
pretive setting.¹¹ As this and the following chapters show, the special relationship between Egypt and the Ottoman Empire was seen as an instructive analogy, in
part as a result of Japan’s strategy of using European legal terminology to undermine the Sino-Korean relationship.¹²
As the misunderstanding between the French and China shows, this suzerain-vassal rendering of the Zongfan order risked a legal quagmire regarding Chosŏn.
Both China and Chosŏn declared that Chosŏn was China’s subordinate country with the right of autonomy; the Western countries and Japan interpreted this to
mean that Korea was an independent sovereign state with all international rights. The confusion was exacerbated by the fact that Wanguo gongfa used Chinese
Zongfan concepts to translate English legal terms. For example, the English term “colony” was rendered as pingfan (fence), shu-bang, or shuguo; “dependency” as
shubang; “vassal state” as fanshu (subordinate country or dependent country); “sovereign states” as zizhu zhi guo (countries with the right of self-rule); and “right
of sovereignty” as zizhu zhi quan (right of self-rule).¹³ The discrepancies between the Chinese and European terms show that China’s perspective remained essen-
tially familistic, whereas the Europeans and the Americans operated in a primarily legal context.¹⁴ Martin, the Wanguo gongfa translator, was not the first to adopt
these Chinese terms in translation. As early as the 1830s, some Protestant missionaries, such as Karl Gützlaff (1803–51) from Prussia, rendered “colony” as fanshu
guo in their Chinese-language magazines published in South China. For example, the September 1833 issue of Dong Xi-yang kao meiyue tongji zhuan (Eastern-
Western monthly magazine) calls India Da Yingguo zhi fanshu guo (the subordinate country of Great Britain) and Siberia Eluosi fanshu guo (the subordinate country
of Russia).¹⁵ Since the 1860s, the terminological inconsistency led to great confusion over the nature of the Zongfan relationship and growing conflicts between
China, Korea, and other countries.
As a result, Western diplomats in East Asia widely perceived the Sino-Korean relationship as a “nominal” one, with China exercising “no real authority” over
Korea.¹⁶ Misunderstandings persisted through the late 1880s and early 1890s, as William W. Rockhill (1854–1914) confessed in his study of Sino-Korean relations,
which was aimed at clarifying what he described as “a puzzle for Western nations”—whether Korea was “an integral part of the Chinese empire” or “a sovereign
state enjoying absolute international rights.” Rockhill argued that the Chinese term shuguo, generally but misleadingly converted into English terms such as “vas-
sal kingdom” or “fief,” was “the key-note to the whole system of Korean dependency.”¹⁷ What led Rockhill to identify Korea’s status as a puzzle seems to have
been its contrast with the European colonial experience of his day: the relationship between a European colonial power and its overseas colonies—that of Britain
and India, or of France and Algeria—was clear, since the colony was undoubtedly an integral part of the empire, fully subject to the imperial administration. The
questions regarding Sino-Korean relations raised in the early 1890s by George N. Curzon, who later served as viceroy of India, similarly reflected this colonial
discourse.¹⁸ But although these Europeans could not reconcile Chosŏn’s status with their Eurocentric understanding of colonial relationships, they nonetheless
regarded the Sino-Korean relationship as a legitimate one, which may explain why their states never publicly denied that Chosŏn was a dependency of China be-
fore 1895. The Sino-French negotiation over Chosŏn’s international position in 1866 was the beginning of the exposure of a range of conceptual, textual, ideo-
logical, and epistemological conflicts between China and its Western counterparts. Bellonet was thus among the first Westerners who encountered difficulties in
dealing with the Zongfan order in practice.
On the Chinese side, the Zongli Yamen, as a temporary institution established on an ad hoc basis, had no right to communicate with Chosŏn, and until the end
of the Zongfan relationship in 1895 it never gained that right. Rather, the Ministry of Rites continued to carry responsibility for Chosŏn’s affairs. The Zongli Yamen
simply sent any cases involving Chosŏn to the Ministry of Rites for processing. The ministry, for its part, could not make changes to established imperial codes,
formalities, or precedents regarding Chosŏn, so it often forwarded the cases to the emperor and the Grand Council to receive further instructions. This conven-
tion-driv- arrangement persisted until 1882, when Beijing endowed Li Hongzhang—the Beiyang superintendent under the supervision of the Zongli Yamen—with
the right to communicate with the king. Contacts between Chosŏn and Western states in the 1860s thus exposed China’s policy deficit in the uncharted territory
between the Zongli Yamen and the Ministry of Rites, and this deficit endured for another three decades. Given this context, the Zongli Yamen pursued a policy of
“mediation” (Ch., paijie) between Chosŏn and the West. It replied to Bellonet that the French should not rush to attack Chosŏn and that China would mediate be-
tween France and Chosŏn, but it did not claim responsibility for the killing of the French missionaries. In a memorial to the emperor and in a confidential letter to
governors-general and governors of the coastal provinces and Manchu generals in Manchuria, the Yamen expressed serious concern over the French hostility to-
ward Chosŏn and proclaimed that China could “in no way sit it out” if Chosŏn were to come under foreign attack.¹⁹ It also notified Chosŏn, via the Ministry of
Rites, of the possibility that French forces might invade the country.²⁰
Undeterred, Bellonet instructed Admiral Pierre-Gustave Roze (1812–83), commander of the French Far Eastern Squadron, to launch the expedition. On Sep-
tember 20 Roze led three warships from Zhifu (Chefoo, now Yantai) on the Shandong Peninsula across the Bohai Sea. They arrived at a small island off the coast
of Inch’ŏn, where they made navigational charts of the waters along the coastlines. Roze refused to contact local officials while conducting these activities. At
court, the Taewŏn’gun learned of the arrival of the foreign “strange-shaped ships” (K., iyang sŏn), but he nonetheless continued his anti-Catholic campaign by ar-
resting and executing more converts. Ten days before the French forces arrived, the young king, at his father’s suggestion, had issued a “decree of antiheresy” (K.,
ch’ŏksa yunŭm) to further stoke anti-Catholic resentment.²¹
On October 1 the three primary members of the most recent tributary mission to Beijing—Yu Hu-bok, Sŏ Tang-po, and Hong Sun-hak—returned to Hansŏng
and were granted an audience with the king. The mission had been charged with requesting the Qing to invest the daughter of the late official Min Ch’i-rok with
the title of queen; she would later be known as Queen Min (1851–95). Yu made a point of informing the king and senior ministers that the foreigners in Beijing
were beyond Chinese jurisdiction and were not afraid of the “big country.”²² Yu’s account may have given the court the impression that China had become a vic-
tim of Western invaders, and that Chosŏn would be next. This news reinforced the Taewŏn’gun’s anti-Catholic and xenophobic attitude, convincing him that
Chosŏn’s security could be guaranteed only by resisting the “barbarians of the ocean” (K., yang’i).²³
Two weeks after Yu’s audience with the king, the French squadron reached Inch’ŏn and blockaded all entrances to the Han River of Hansŏng. In spite of Korean
resistance, French marines landed on Korean soil and proceeded to loot the capital of Kanghwa Prefecture and other nearby towns. With the arrival of cold weath-
er in early November, they withdrew back to Zhifu. The Western ministers in Beijing had assumed that the expedition would bring Chosŏn into the modern world.
The American chargé d’affaires Samuel Wells Williams (1812–84), for instance, exclaimed that “it is full time that Corea was introduced into the family of
nations.”²⁴ But Williams and his colleagues soon realized that the French had failed to conduct any negotiations with the Koreans, much less introduce into the
country any ideas of the family of nations. Instead the military invasion provided the Taewŏn’gun with a further justification for his policy of “countering barbar-
ians and protecting the nation” (K., yang’i poguk).²⁵
On November 1, 1866, while the battle with the French marines was raging in Kanghwa, the king held a grand ceremony in Hansŏng to welcome two Manchu en-
voys, Kuiling and Xiyuan, who came to invest the new queen. Following the customary ritual codes, the king went to the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized
Country on the city’s outskirts to welcome the envoys. Afterward, inside the capital, the king performed the requisite ceremonies to receive the book of investiture.
The investiture emphasized that the queen should assist the king in bringing prosperity to the country, which had been a loyal “ fan and fence” (Ch., fanping) of
China for generations.²⁶ In a domestic decree that the king issued after the grand ceremony to celebrate the investiture, he emphasized that Chosŏn, the “lower
country,” appreciated the magnanimous favor of the “central dynasty” and the “big country.”²⁷ During the envoys’ three-day sojourn, all rituals were performed
precisely according to precedent. In conversations between the king and the envoys, the ongoing war with the French, raging just twenty-five miles away, never
came up. The boundary between Zongfan matters and diplomatic affairs was as clear as the two countries’ court-to-court and country-to-country relationships.
The arrival of an imperial mission in Chosŏn at this critical moment raised serious concerns among the French. Prince Gong explained that the envoys “were
on affairs of ceremonial, and in accordance with long-established usage, having no reference to the quarrel between France and Corea,” but Bellonet was
suspicious.²⁸ Prince Gong circulated his correspondence with Bellonet among the foreign ministers, which served to publicize in the diplomatic corps China’s
definition of the Sino-Korean relationship. While Prince Gong argued with Bellonet about the Korean issue, two Korean tributary missions arrived in Beijing in
succession.
The first mission, headed by Han Mun-kyu, arrived on November 6 to receive the imperial calendar for the upcoming year. In the king’s memorial to the em-
peror that Han brought to Beijing, the king stated that Chosŏn had no wish to do business with foreign countries and that Catholicism and other foreign religions
were not welcome in Chosŏn. In addition, Han brought to Wan Qingli, a minister of the Qing Ministry of Rites, a personal letter from Yi Hŭng-min (1809–81), a
former tributary emissary who had become acquainted with Wan the previous year. In his letter, Yi tried to legitimize the Taewŏn’gun’s anti-Catholic policy and
hoped Wan would take advantage of his position to discuss the issue with the emperor and the Zongli Yamen, in the hope that China would persuade foreigners
not to visit Chosŏn. Realizing that the issue was beyond the jurisdiction of his ministry and personal correspondence, Wan forwarded the letter to the emperor,
asking for instructions and suggesting that he relay the court’s recommendations to Chosŏn through his personal response to Yi.²⁹ The court did not take Wan
up on his offer. The emperor’s decree to the king likewise skirted the issue, simply telling the king to secure Chosŏn without offering any specific strategy.
Two months after Han’s arrival, a second Korean mission, this one bearing the annual tribute, reached Beijing on February 1, 1867, three days before the Spring
Festival. In his memorials to the emperor on the occasion of the lunar New Year, the king declared again that it was impossible for Chosŏn to trade with “foreign
barbarians” such as the French or to allow them to spread the Gospel in the country. The king also reported that Yi Hŭng-min had been punished because his
personal letter to “high-ranking officials of the imperial dynasty” had violated regulations. The Chinese court had no further instructions for the king. Meanwhile,
the French did not follow their brief expedition with further campaigns against Chosŏn. The issue of Chosŏn’s status remained unsettled and soon proved con-
fusing to the United States.
The Shuguo between Zizhu and Independence: American Views of Chosŏn’s Status, 1866–71
Shipwrecks and Savages: China’s Disavowal of Responsibility for Chosŏn
In July and September 1866, two American schooners, the Surprise and the General Sherman, were wrecked in Chosŏn, the former off the coast of the country and
the latter in the Taedong River in P’yŏngyang. The crew of the Surprise was treated kindly and escorted safely to the Chinese side via Fenghuang Gate, but the
members of the General Sherman ’s crew were mercilessly killed right in P’yŏngyang. After learning about the General Sherman case, the American minister in Bei-
jing, Anson Burlingame (1820–70), immediately brought the issue to the attention of Prince Gong because “Corea was formerly tributary to China.” To
Burlingame’s surprise, Prince Gong “at once disavowed all responsibility for the Coreans, and stated that the only connection between the two countries was one
of ceremonial.” In a letter to Rear Admiral Henry H. Bell (1808–68), the acting commander of the US Asiatic Squadron, Burlingame affirmed that “the Chinese
government disavows any responsibility for that of Corea, and all jurisdiction over its people.”³⁰ The case was thus passed on to Bell, who, in a confidential dis-
patch to the Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles (1802–78), suggested that the United States launch punitive action against Chosŏn.³¹ In fact, Secretary of State
William H. Seward (1801–72) had proposed to the French representative in Washington that the United States and France initiate a combined action against
Chosŏn, but France had declined.³² Bell’s proposed expedition did not take place either. In early 1867 the navy dispatched the USS Wachusett to Chosŏn under
the command of Robert W. Shufeldt (1822–95) to investigate the General Sherman incident. But the expedition yielded nothing, as severe weather forced Shufeldt
out of Chosŏn before he could receive an official response to his queries. To the United States, Chosŏn remained what American scholars would call a “hermit
nation.”³³
American diplomats found themselves involved in another shipwreck in East Asia in March 1867, this time involving the schooner Rover in Taiwan (Formosa).
The Rover foundered on the southern coast of the island, and the crew members who came ashore were ambushed and killed by aborigines known as the Koaluts.
Believing that the incident was within his jurisdiction, Charles W. Le Gendre (1830–99), the American consul at Xiamen (Amoy), brought the matter to the atten-
tion of the governor-general in Fuzhou, the local officials of Taiwan Prefecture, and the Zongli Yamen. The local officials informed Le Gendre that the crew had
met with their deaths in “savage lands” (Ch., shengfan jie) “beyond the civilization of the sovereign” (Ch., wanghua buji), not “within the waters over which the Chi-
nese government exercises jurisdiction,” and that their murderers were “savages” rather than “Chinese civilians” (Ch., huamin). Therefore, articles 11 and 13 of the
1858 Sino-American Treaty regarding China’s jurisdiction did not apply, and the Chinese government had no responsibility to take action against the Koaluts as
the consul had requested. Le Gendre, believing to the contrary that the “savages” were within China’s jurisdiction, warned his Chinese counterparts that other
states could cite such a disavowal of responsibility as an excuse to occupy the “savage lands.”³⁴ Finally, the Chinese authorities dispatched soldiers to accom-
pany Le Gendre to southern Taiwan, but the minister alone entered the Koaluts’ territory and concluded an agreement with the chieftain.³⁵ Le Gendre’s experience
of negotiating with the Chinese side was not notable at the time and seemed unrelated to Chosŏn. But it would prove significant in the 1870s, when Tokyo hired
Le Gendre to help reframe Japanese policy toward Taiwan, Ryukyu, Chosŏn, and China.
A “Nominal” Connection: Low’s Assessment of the Sino-Korean Relationship
Before Japan joined the Western states in challenging Chosŏn’s status, Frederick F. Low (1828–94), the American minister in Beijing and the former governor of
California, organized an expedition to Chosŏn in 1871 with the aim of negotiating a treaty for the protection of shipwrecked mariners. His action pushed Beijing to
clarify China’s definition of the Sino-Korean relationship. As Low saw it, “Corea is substantially an independent nation” and the Korean tribute to China “is sent
rather as a quid pro quo for the privilege of trading with the Chinese than a governmental tribute.”³⁶ Low nonetheless solicited the aid of the Zongli Yamen to ob-
tain useful information about Chosŏn. In February 1871 Low delivered to the Yamen a letter that he hoped would be forwarded to the king of Chosŏn via the Min-
istry of Rites. After sending the letter to Chosŏn, the ministry noted, in a confidential memorial to the emperor, that “Chosŏn has used China’s ruling titles and
calendars for a long time and proved the most loyal. All affairs regarding its government, religion, prohibitions, and laws are subject to its own management by
the rule of zizhu, and none of these affairs has China hitherto interfered in.”³⁷ These same words were used by the Zongli Yamen in its dispatch to Low in March.
Low decided, first, to interpret China’s position as affirming Chosŏn’s independent sovereignty, stating that “although Corea is regarded as a country subor-
dinate to China, yet she is wholly independent in everything that relates to her government, her religion, her prohibitions, and her laws; in none of these things
has China hitherto interfered.” In essence, he translated the Chinese term zizhu into full independence. Second, he concluded that the Chinese declaration aimed
to “guard against complications that may possibly grow out of an attempt by foreign nations to open intercourse with Corea, and relieve this Government of all re-
sponsibility for the acts of the Coreans, whether hostile or otherwise.” Low thus interpreted Beijing’s declaration as a repudiation of responsibility for Chosŏn’s
behavior. It seemed that it was time for him to sail for Chosŏn, a place that was, for him, “more of a sealed book than Japan was before Commodore Perry’s
visit.”³⁸ Low determined to become another Perry.
Yet Low failed to crack the book. After arriving in Chosŏn in May, he was unable to establish official contacts with the Korean side. The expedition only inten-
sified Chosŏn’s hostility toward Western countries. Chosŏn continued to identify itself as “a subject of China” that had no right to “communicate with foreign
countries”—that is, to conduct diplomacy. This point was reiterated by the king in his memorial to the emperor in June 1871 in response to Low’s letter, forwarded
from Beijing.³⁹ After the frustrating failure of his expedition, Low still hoped to contact Chosŏn through Beijing, and his conversations with the Zongli Yamen
provided him with further opportunities to reconceptualize the Sino-Korean relationship. He concluded that the relations between the two countries, “established
during the reign of the Ming Emperors, nominally continued unchanged, although, practically, they have little force.”⁴⁰ Despite a sharp refutation from Prince
Gong, Low continued to hold this opinion.
Between 1866 and 1871, the Western ministers’ perception of Chosŏn shifted: they no longer considered it a tributary of China but rather saw it as an inde-
pendent state beyond Chinese jurisdiction. Several key terms of international law were now applied to the Sinocentric Zongfan order, even though nothing within
this order had changed. In 1871 the Qing signed its first Western-style treaty with Japan that portrayed the two countries as equals. Over the next five years, Japan,
in the midst of dramatic Westernizing reforms under Emperor Meiji (r. 1867– 1912), became the vanguard of the challenge to the Sino-Korean relationship, aided
by its position as an insider in the East Asian community. The participation of the rising Japanese empire opened a new chapter in modern East Asian history.
The Shuguo between Chinese Legitimacy and International Law: The First Sino-Japanese Debate
Japan’s Contacts with Chosŏn and the Sino-Japanese Treaty of 1871
During the Japanese Tokugawa bakufu period (1603–1867), communications between Japan and Chosŏn were conducted through the Sō family in the domain of
Tsushima. Chosŏn interacted with the Sō in a semi-Zongfan framework. The head of the Sō sent boats to Chosŏn for trade in accordance with Chosŏn’s regula-
tions, and he presented himself as a subordinate in letters to the king. In return, when necessary, Chosŏn followed the policy of kyorin, communicating with a
neighboring country, by dispatching messengers to Japan to consolidate the two countries’ friendly relations. All such messengers visited Kyoto and Edo (Tokyo)
via Tsushima. Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan established the Gaimushō, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to manage foreign relations under newly
adopted Western norms. While its relationships with other countries evolved steadily, Japan failed to modernize its relationship with Chosŏn. Chosŏn refused to
accept Japan’s sovereign letters, figuratively closing the country’s door in Japan’s face.
In the meantime, Japan was approaching China to pursue an international status equal to it. In September 1871 the Japanese minister plenipotentiary, Date
Munenari (1818–92), signed a treaty, written in both the Chinese and Japanese languages, with Li Hongzhang in Tianjin. The first article stated, “Relations of amity
shall henceforth be maintained in redoubled force between China and Japan, in measure as boundless as the heaven and the earth. In all that regards the terri-
torial possessions of either country the two Governments shall treat each other with proper courtesy, without the slightest infringement or encroachment on ei-
ther side, to the end that there may be for evermore peace between them undisturbed.”⁴¹ The term “territorial possessions” and its applicability to Chosŏn later
became a source of disagreement between the two countries. The term is a rough English equivalent of the Chinese suoshu bangtu. Suoshu means “to belong to,”
but bangtu is too vague to be accurately defined in international law. Literally, bang means “country” and tu means “land,” but bangtu could mean “country,”
“land,” or “territorial possessions.” Both China and Japan subsequently realized that the term failed to establish whether the countries serving as China’s outer
fan, in particular Chosŏn, counted among China’s “territorial possessions.” Both sides used the term’s uncertain definition to their own advantage, resulting in
fierce disputes when Japan began implementing an aggressive policy toward Ryukyu and Chosŏn in the 1870s.
An Ambush on the Chinese: Soejima’s Embassy to Beijing in 1873
In December 1871 a ship from Ryukyu was shipwrecked on the southern coast of Taiwan, where the aborigines killed fifty-four members of its crew. Since Japan
was in the process of annexing Ryukyu by converting it into a Japanese domain (J., han), Tokyo regarded the incident as a good opportunity to finalize the matter
by cutting off Ryukyu’s Zongfan relationship with China. In February 1873 Emperor Meiji appointed the minister of foreign affairs, Soejima Taneomi (1828–1905),
as ambassador extraordinary to China to ratify the Treaty of Tianjin of 1871. The emperor instructed Soejima to discuss the killings of the Ryukyuese sailors to
determine whether the whole of Taiwan was under China’s jurisdiction.⁴² A key proponent of the Seikan ron (expedition against Korea), Soejima eagerly availed
himself of this chance to glean information on China’s attitude toward Japanese-Korean contacts. Among the members of the Japanese mission was Japan’s newly
appointed adviser on foreign policy toward Taiwan, Charles Le Gendre, whose experience was invaluable to Tokyo’s efforts to formulate and implement a new pol-
icy toward the Chinese Zongfan system.⁴³ It was through Western advisers such as Le Gendre who mastered modern Western norms regarding sovereignty and
international law that Japan transformed itself into an outsider to the East Asian community in terms of its foreign policy.
Soejima arrived in Tianjin in April, and his visit marked the first time that a Japanese official showed up in China in a Western tailcoat. After ratifying the treaty,
Soejima briefly discussed Japanese-Korean relations with Li Hongzhang. Li warned that Japan should be friendly to Chosŏn and that any Japanese expedition
against it would violate the Sino-Japanese treaty.⁴⁴ In Beijing, with Le Gendre’s assistance, Soejima visited foreign legations in the city. The current British min-
ister, Thomas F. Wade (1818–95), reported to London that “the Japanese are also suspected of a design on Corea” and that Soejima “is evidently anxious for an
assurance from the Chinese that Corea is an independent Kingdom, so independent of China, that is to say, as to make what may befall Corea no concern of the
Chinese.” Wade inferred that Japan would apply gunboat diplomacy to Korea.⁴⁵ According to Frederick Low, Soejima had “only two questions of importance
which he desires to discuss with the Chinese government.” First, he wanted to know “whether China is responsible for the acts of the aborigines on the island of
Formosa.” According to Low, “If the answer is in the negative, notice will then be given that Japan proposed to send a military force to Formosa to chastise the
savage and semi-civilized tribes that practically hold undisputed possession of the large part of the island.” Second, Soejima wanted to “ascertain the precise rela-
tions between China and Corea; whether the former claims to exercise such control over her tributary as to render China responsible for the acts of the Coreans,
or whether other nations must look to Corea alone for redress for wrongs and outrages which her people may commit.”⁴⁶
Soejima’s view of the likely relationship between China and its periphery—Taiwan and Chosŏn—matched Western countries’ conclusions regarding the limits
of China’s jurisdiction over these regions. When Soejima solicited Low’s opinions on Chosŏn, Low showed him the Zongli Yamen’s dispatch of March 1871, men-
tioned earlier, which affirmed China’s noninterference in Chosŏn’s affairs in accordance with the principle of zizhu. Upon Low’s assertion that Chosŏn was
“wholly independent,” Soejima made the judgment that Chosŏn lay “beyond the Qing’s sovereignty [J., shuken].”⁴⁷ The Japanese policy of challenging Chosŏn’s
status as China’s shuguo thus began to converge with the policies pursued by the United States, France, Britain, and other Western states in China.
Soejima’s conclusion found support in a meeting at the Zongli Yamen on June 21, 1873, that brought together a Japanese representative, Yanagiwara Sakimitsu
(1850–94), and the Chinese ministers Mao Changxi (1817–82) and Dong Xun (1807–92). Yanagiwara asked how China could justify claiming Chosŏn as a shuguo,
since the Yamen had asserted in its 1871 note to the American minister that “China never interfered with its internal politics, religion, prohibitions, and laws.”
Mao, drawing on an understanding of Sino-Korean contacts that he might have gained when working at the Ministry of Rites, explained that “the so-called shuguo
referred only to investiture and tribute submission” and that China would not interfere with Chosŏn’s right to conduct negotiations over war and peace.⁴⁸ Mao’s
response satisfied Soejima because it corroborated Low’s argument.⁴⁹ Soejima, along with his Western counterparts, was granted an audience with the Tongzhi
emperor on June 29. It was the first imperial audience for Western ministers since the 1840s and it encouraged both sides to improve their understanding of each
other.
Upon his return to Tokyo, Soejima stepped up his advocacy for an expedition to Korea, but the return of a Japanese mission to the United States and Europe
halted his plan. The three key members of the mission, Iwakura Tomomi (1825– 83), Ōkubo Toshimichi (1830–78), and Kido Takayoshi (1833–77), argued that
Japan should focus on domestic reforms to “reorganize its national politics and make its people rich.”⁵⁰ As this policy prevailed, the proponents of the Seikan ron,
such as Soejima, Saigō Takamori (1827–77), Itagaki Taisuke (1837–1919), and Etō Shinpei (1834–74), were pushed out of the cabinet. In December 1873 the young
king of Chosŏn assumed direct rule and ended the regency of Taewŏn’gun. Tokyo tried to take advantage of this occasion to pursue a new diplomatic relationship
with Hansŏng, but its efforts failed in the face of sharp resistance by local officials in Pusan, where the Koreans still preferred to communicate with the Japanese
through the kyorin framework. Japan, it seemed, could not make any substantial progress on opening a new channel of communication with the Korean court.
The Birth of Chosŏn’s “Sovereignty”: The Second Sino-Japanese Debate and the Treaty of Kanghwa
Defining China’s Territory: Taiwan, Kanghwa, and Mori’s Visit to Beijing
In the summer of 1874, while Tokyo was sending troops to South Taiwan to deal with “the territory in question beyond the jurisdiction of the Chinese govern-
ment,” it also sent Yanagiwara Sakimitsu and Ōkubo Toshimichi to Beijing for further negotiations about Taiwan.⁵¹ The Zongli Yamen told the Japanese represen-
tatives, “Even if the aborigines are ‘barbarians,’ they are still China’s barbarians, and only China has the right to punish them if they are guilty.” The Chinese
ministers pointed to relevant rules of international law and Chinese historical evidence, such as local gazetteers, to bolster their point. Without close advice from
Western advisers such as Le Gendre, the Japanese failed to prove that the aborigines’ area of residence in South Taiwan was beyond China’s jurisdiction. Under
the mediation of Thomas Wade, the doyen of the diplomatic corps in Beijing, the Chinese and Japanese sides reached a succinct agreement. Interestingly, the
third article of the agreement stated that “all correspondence that this question has occasioned between the two governments shall be canceled, and the discus-
sions dropped for evermore.”⁵² In this way, Japan not only invalidated any documents that could expose its inferior position in the talks on the reach of China’s
territory but also shifted future negotiations to the track of international law. To the Japanese, the negotiations indicated that only a Japan equipped with European
norms could challenge the Chinese discourse, which helps explain why, over the following decade, Japan frequently solicited its Western advisers for suggestions
regarding Japan’s foreign policy toward its neighbors.
A skirmish between Japan and Chosŏn near Kanghwa Island in September 1875 led to the resurgence of support for the Seikan ron in Japan. This time Iwakura
and his fellow politicians endorsed the expedition, because Japan’s diplomatic situation was much improved. In addition to reaching an agreement with China
about the Taiwan incident, Tokyo had resolved its territorial disputes with Russia over Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands by signing a treaty in St. Petersburg in
May 1875, through which it obtained Russian acquiescence to its actions in Chosŏn. Meanwhile, in order to check Russia’s southern advance in East Asia during
the Russo-British rivalry in Central Asia, Britain planned to occupy Port Hamilton, a small Korean island known as Kŏmundo near the Tsushima Strait.⁵³ This plan
provided Japan with an excuse to initiate an expedition against Korea without triggering an intervention from these Western powers. In October 1875 Kido
Takayoshi suggested that Japan should press China for an explanation of its relationship with Chosŏn; once Beijing had disavowed responsibility for Chosŏn’s
foreign affairs, Japan could freely take action against Chosŏn.⁵⁴
The Japanese government appointed Mori Arinori (1847–89) as the minister plenipotentiary to Beijing. Educated in Britain and having worked in the United
States, Mori was familiar with Western diplomatic rules and had consulted with Erasmus Peshine Smith (1814–82), the American special adviser to the Gaimushō
on international law, regarding the Kanghwa incident. Sanjō Sanetomi (1837–91), chancellor of the realm, issued instructions to Mori’s embassy, and the most
important among them was to “identify Chosŏn as an independent country [J., dokuritsu koku]” and persuade China to help establish Japanese-Korean relations for
the sake of Japan’s and China’s common interests. In short, Mori’s mission was “to cut off the Sino-Korean relationship.”⁵⁵ The foreign minister, Terashima
Munenori (1832–93), telegraphed the chargé d’affaires in Beijing, Tei Einei (1829–97), saying that since Soejima’s visit in 1873 had not confirmed that Chosŏn was
not a “ fan and subordinate” (J., hanzoku) of the Qing, Tei should be cautious about all contacts between Japan and the Qing regarding Chosŏn.⁵⁶
Another Ambush on the Chinese: Mori’s Debate with the Zongli Yamen
On January 2, 1876, the Qing court dispatched two envoys, Jihe and Wulasiconga, to Chosŏn to invest the king’s son, Yi Ch’ŏk, as the crown prince. Three Han
Chinese grand secretaries—Mao Changxi, Li Hongzhang, and Zuo Zongtang (1812–85)—drafted the imperial edict of investiture in December 1875. Two days later
Mori arrived in Beijing with the aim of denying this Sino-Korean relationship from the perspective of international law.
Mori paid his first visit to Thomas Wade, in the hope that the latter could mediate between Japan and China. Wade was impressed by Mori, but his situation
made it impossible for him to assist Mori.⁵⁷ Wade’s relations with Beijing were strained due to an incident in the previous year in which a young British interpreter
handpicked by Wade, Augustus R. Margary, had been killed on an expedition to Burma from Yunnan. Wade had repeatedly telegraphed London to ask for more
naval forces to pressure China into negotiating with him for another treaty. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) supported Wade and conceived a plan to
ally with Japan against China, a scheme he called “one of the greatest secrets of State going.”⁵⁸ But the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Edward Henry Stanley
(1826–93), did not endorse this aggressive approach.⁵⁹ Under the circumstances, Wade had no desire to be involved in the Sino-Japanese negotiations on Korean
affairs, but after his conversation with Mori he reported to London that “the minister’s manner, rather than his language, made me mistrustful. I inferred that an
expedition of Corea is determined on and that the object of his confidential communications to me was to ascertain whether objection to the expedition would be
taken by English, or any other foreign action.”⁶⁰ Wade could not have been more correct. On January 6, 1876, the Japanese ambassador plenipotentiary to Chosŏn,
Kuroda Kiyotaka (1840–1900), sailed from Tokyo for the Korean Peninsula, leading a fleet of two gunboats and four schooners.⁶¹
Mori, accompanied by his interpreter, Tei Einei, and two secretaries, met with five Chinese ministers on January 10 at the Zongli Yamen to discuss Chosŏn’s
status. Zhou Jiamei (1835–86) served as the secretary for the Chinese side. Mori, the youngest man in the room, was also the only person who knew international
law and had Western educational and diplomatic experience. Shortly after the talks started, the two sides realized that they were on diametrically opposed tracks.
The conversation unfolded mainly between Mori and Shen Guifen (1818–81), who had previously worked at the Ministry of Rites. Mori asked why China, identi-
fying Chosŏn as its shuguo, nonetheless claimed that Chosŏn’s “politics, religion, prohibitions, and laws fall under the principle of zizhu .” Shen explained, “The
shuguo is not land under the governance of our country [Ch., yuan bushi woguo guanxia zhi di]. But it pays tribute on time, receives our investiture, and accepts our
country’s calendar, and this has made it our shuguo .” Shen further informed Mori that Vietnam, Ryukyu, and Burma were also China’s shuguo, with different
schedules for the payment of tribute. When Mori asked whether a shuguo could negotiate with foreign countries on trade without informing China, Shen replied
that the country in question would manage its affairs by itself and China would not get involved, but that it would legally respond to any disputes arising between
the shuguo and China’s treaty partners. Shen warned Mori that any invasion of a shuguo of China would not be defensible and would contravene the first article of
the Sino-Japanese Treaty of 1871.⁶²
At this point it became apparent that the disagreement between the two sides hinged on their different definitions of the term shuguo. For Mori, a shuguo could
mean a colony, a dependency, or a nation with semisovereign rights. In particular, he used the relationship between the Muhammad Ali dynasty of Egypt and the
Ottoman Empire, that between Hungary and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and that between Canada and the British Empire as three examples of shuguo in the
Western context. The three examples were, however, completely lost in the Chinese translation because of the vast gap in international knowledge between the
two parties. The Chinese ministers retorted with convincing examples drawn from the Chinese context to prove that Chosŏn was in all senses a shuguo of China.
The debate ended without agreement.
The meeting having fallen short of his expectations, Mori acknowledged the gulf between the two sides and expressed frustration with Chinese officialdom.⁶³ In
the aftermath of the so-called Tongzhi Restoration—an attempt to strengthen the dynasty and traditional order in the 1860s—the Qing was facing increasingly
serious challenges from within as well as from outside the country. On the same day that Mori was arguing with the Zongli Yamen, Empress Dowagers Cian
(1837–81) and Cixi (1835–1908), in the Forbidden City about two miles west of the Yamen, were tearfully beseeching two officials, Weng Tonghe (1830– 1904) and
Xia Tongshan (1830–80), to serve as teachers for the young emperor, Guangxu, who was Dowager Cixi’s nephew.⁶⁴ The political heart of the empire was vulner-
able. It was not until 1898, three years after his empire was humiliated by Japan in the war that broke out in Chosŏn, that the emperor was able to launch a reform
with the strong support of Weng.
After the meeting, Mori asked the Zongli Yamen to issue a passport to a Japanese assistant whom he wanted to send to Chosŏn via Mukden to inform the Japa-
nese ambassador to Chosŏn about the Sino-Japanese meetings. He also expressed his own desire to visit Li Hongzhang at Baoding, Li’s political headquarters, to
show his gratitude for Li’s greetings. The Yamen refused to issue the passport because of the absence of relevant precedent, reiterating its assertion that Chosŏn
was China’s shuguo. This response triggered another exchange of verbal jousts through diplomatic notes. Mori argued that “Chosŏn is an independent country,
and the status of a so-called shuguo of China is only a nominal title [J., kūmei; Ch., kongming]…. Any Japanese-Korean contacts have nothing to do with the Sino-
Japanese Treaty.”⁶⁵ This statement, echoing Low’s comments in 1871, marked the complete convergence of Japanese and Western policies challenging the nature
of the Sino-Korean relationship. Perceiving this alignment, the Yamen wrote to the emperor, expressing severe concern over the likely prospect of problems
caused by Japan, a country that “has recently adopted Western politics and customs and changed its own costumes and calendars.”⁶⁶ Japan had become a major
troublemaker in China’s eyes.
In order to inform Chosŏn of the situation, the Zongli Yamen asked the Ministry of Rites to immediately dispatch a copy of Mori’s note to Hansŏng. The note
was sent from Beijing on January 19, 1876, four days after Japanese naval forces had arrived at Pusan. The Yamen, completely blind to the Japanese advance on
Chosŏn, busied itself with arguing with Mori. Once the two sides had arrived at an utter impasse, two officers sent by Li Hongzhang arrived in Beijing to accom-
pany Mori to Baoding. Both the Yamen and Mori were happy to hand the case to Li in hopes of winning a favorable ruling at Baoding.
Li’s “Sincere Advice”: The Baoding Negotiations
Thus began Li Hongzhang’s deep involvement in Chosŏn’s affairs as a provincial official. On January 10, while the Yamen squabbled with Mori, Li briefly ex-
plained “some diplomatic ideas” regarding Chosŏn’s possible contacts with the West in his reply to a letter from Yi Yu-wŏn (1814–88), a Korean prime minister
who had visited Beijing in 1875 as a tributary emissary.⁶⁷ Two weeks later, while his letter was on its way to Hansŏng, Li welcomed Mori at Baoding. The conver-
sations that ensued were all the more complicated in that they were conducted not in Chinese or Japanese but in English. Moreover, in their reports to their re-
spective governments, written in their own languages instead of in English, both sides claimed to be prevailing over the other. Neither Beijing nor Tokyo had an
accurate picture of the actual progress of the talks.⁶⁸
The first conversation, on January 24, lasted for more than six hours over a banquet at Li’s office. Li had invited two officials, Huang Pengnian and Huang Huil-
ian, to attend the meeting as guests and assistants. While Huang Pengnian was an erudite Confucian scholar, Huang Huilian was Cantonese and had been edu-
cated at an American missionary school in Shanghai; his first name, Huilian, was a Chinese transliteration of William, the name of the school’s headmaster,
William Jones Boone (1811–64; known in Chinese as Wen Huilian). William Huang had visited British Guiana and been drafted by Beijing to serve as an
interpreter during the Second Opium War in 1860. It seems that Mori decided to speak with Li in English after learning of William Huang’s English proficiency, as
he felt that English would better allow him to convey the principles of international law as he believed they applied to the Korean issue.⁶⁹
To Mori’s argument that Chosŏn was an independent country rather than China’s shuguo, Li responded,
Everyone knows that Chosŏn has been subordinate to China for thousands of years. In the phrase suoshu bangtu [territorial possessions] of the [Sino-
Japanese] treaty, the tu means Chinese provinces, namely, China’s inner land [Ch., neidi] and inner subordinates [Ch., neishu], on which the Chinese gov-
ernment levies taxes and whose political affairs it manages. The bang refers to countries such as Chosŏn that are China’s outer fan and outer subordinates
[Ch., waishu], whose taxes and political affairs are always their own business. This is a convention, and it does not start with our dynasty. Chosŏn is indeed
China’s shuguo.⁷⁰
This interpretation of suoshu bangtu implied that although Chosŏn did not lie within China’s immediate orbit, it was nonetheless part of the broader Chinese em-
pire. Mori realized that no agreement could be reached on this point, so he ended the argument with Li. In the subsequent discussion on the Kanghwa incident,
whereas Li stressed several times that Japan should obey the Sino-Japanese Treaty of 1871 and international law, Mori, who had visited the prominent British
philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) before returning to Japan and had seen the dramatic expansion of the Western colonial enterprise, re-
sponded that state power was much more reliable than textual treaties. At the end, Mori asked Li what China would do if a war broke out between Japan and
Chosŏn. Li replied that not only China but also Russia would send troops to defend Chosŏn. Li then wrote out for Mori, under the title “Sincere Advice” (Ch.,
Zhonggao), eight Chinese characters, which read, “Acting only to disturb harmony, brings no benefits at all” (Ch., Tushang heqi, haowu liyi). Mori did not men-
tion Li’s warning in his reports to Tokyo. The next day, New Year’s Eve, Li visited Mori for a short conversation that did not touch on the Korean issue but in-
cluded a discussion of Japan’s reforms. Li did not inform the Zongli Yamen of the details of this conversation, but Mori kept a full record in English, which indi-
cates the epistemological gulf that separated the two men and the worlds they represented and defended.⁷¹ As Mori and Li closed their talks, the Japanese fleet
dropped anchor at the offing of Kanghwa Island.
After Mori returned to Beijing, he resumed his debate with the Zongli Yamen. The Yamen emphasized to Mori that “solving its difficulties, resolving its dis-
putes, and securing its safety and security [Ch., shu qi nan, jie qi fen, qi qi anquan] are the responsibilities to Chosŏn that China has taken upon itself, and they are
how China treats its shuguo. It is the longstanding policy of China to refrain from forcing its shuguo to do what it is reluctant to do and to stand by when it runs
into trouble.”⁷² Mori, however, continued to insist that “Chosŏn is indeed an independent country, so Japan will not take Chosŏn’s relations with China into con-
sideration in matters between Japan and Chosŏn. The so-called shuguo is no more than a nominal title. Nothing should be related to the treaty of 1871.”⁷³ Thirty-
four days of intensive negotiations had brought the two sides nowhere.
Old News and No News: The 1876 Imperial Mission to Chosŏn and the Limits of Zongfan Communications
The Sino-Korean Zongfan rituals that took place in Hansŏng in 1876 showed how untenable Mori’s enthusiastic diplomatic rhetoric was. On February 16, two
days after the end of the Sino-Japanese debate in Beijing, the king held a grand ceremony in Hansŏng for the two imperial envoys coming to invest the crown
prince. All procedures followed the precedents of investiture, and the host and guests alike performed the rituals according to code. The king expressed to the en-
voys his sincere gratitude to the emperor and the Zongli Yamen for informing him of the Japanese activities in Beijing. The envoys, praising the stance that
Chosŏn had taken against Japan’s sovereign letters, said that Japan’s forces had reportedly arrived in Kanghwa and wanted to establish a consulate there, and they
voiced uneasiness about the situation.⁷⁴ In fact, the king had already dispatched two officials to negotiate with the Japanese at Kanghwa before receiving word
from Beijing. He did not solicit advice from the envoys, nor did the envoys show any interest in obtaining details of the negotiations. Some historians have argued
that Beijing used the imperial envoys to, among other things, persuade Chosŏn to conclude a treaty with Japan,⁷⁵ but records of the contact between the king and
the envoys contradict this assertion.
On February 27 Chosŏn signed a treaty with Japan that ended their eight-year dispute. That same day, the Ministry of Rites in Beijing dispatched, at the top
speed of five hundred li per day, a note to Chosŏn along with a copy of the Baoding conversations between Li and Mori. Handicapped by the sluggish speed of
communications, the ministry, the Zongli Yamen, and Li Hongzhang could not follow the progress of the Japanese-Korean negotiations. Beijing did not receive a
reply to its February note to Chosŏn about Japan’s talks with China until May 31, three months after the conclusion of the Treaty of Kanghwa. By contrast, Mori
could receive Tokyo’s instructions by telegram within ten days, and Thomas Wade, who closely monitored the negotiations, was able to have his report delivered
to London within eight days. Modern technology was changing international politics in an inconspicuous but concrete way, but no such improvements had yet
reached the Sino-Korean channels of communication.
A week after the treaty was signed, the Manchu general at Mukden, Chongshi (1820–76), asked the Zongli Yamen whether the Ministry of Rites had received any
response from the Koreans. Chongshi confessed that although Mukden bordered Chosŏn, the only information he had on Chosŏn consisted of rumors spread by
Chinese and Korean merchants in the area. He hoped that the two imperial envoys could give him some reliable updates.⁷⁶ The general was, of course, disap-
pointed in this hope. In the Forbidden City, meanwhile, the two empress dowagers discussed the Korean situation with Guo Songtao (1818–91), a minister of the
Zongli Yamen who had been appointed the first minister to Britain. The dowagers disparaged Mori’s and Wade’s “cunning” personalities and called them “first-
class bad men” (Ch., diyi deng huairen) whose mission was to “make trouble.”⁷⁷ Like Chongshi, the dowagers and Guo were unaware that the Treaty of Kanghwa
had already been signed.
At the time, China had no official channel for communications beyond the empire, although Western ministers had arrived in Beijing as early as 1861. Its first
minister to Japan would not set foot on Japanese soil until December 1877, almost five years after the arrival of the first Japanese minister in Beijing. A week after
Guo’s conversation with the dowagers, it was from Mori, one of the “first-class bad men,” that the Zongli Yamen and the Manchu court learned that Japan had
signed a treaty with Chosŏn. And it was not for another month—and then through the German minister to Beijing, Max August von Brandt (1835–1920)—that the
Yamen first heard about the contents of the treaty. Only on April 17, when Mori submitted a full copy of the treaty to the Zongli Yamen, did the Chinese side finally
see what it entailed. China’s passive position vis-à-vis Chosŏn and the treaty system with Japan was laid bare. In the two decades after 1876, it would become in-
creasingly clear that this was China’s normal state within the established framework.
On April 21 Beijing at last received a note from the king, who briefly reviewed the treaty negotiations. The king never submitted a copy of the treaty to the em-
peror, nor did the emperor ever request it or raise any questions about the agreement. The king reported that the mistrust between Chosŏn and Japan had evapo-
rated thanks to the inauguration of the long-term friendship between them: “The bilateral contacts will be conducted by officials of the two countries on an equal
footing. As it is not the first time that we have traded with Japan, we have allowed the Japanese to trade at our ports, where they must follow our rules.”⁷⁸ Although
the treaty endowed Japan with the right of consular jurisdiction and abolished all former trade conventions and junk trade (J., saiken sen), Chosŏn’s perception of
the treaty was still rooted in conventional kyorin norms, rather than in any understanding of international law. It is difficult, then, to define the treaty as a truly
modern one.⁷⁹
The Japanese Invention: The Birth of Chosŏn’s “Sovereignty” as a Textual Derivative
On March 22, 1876, the Gaimushō released the contents of the Treaty of Kanghwa and distributed an English version among the foreign ministers in Tokyo. The
English translation of article 1 reads,
Chosŏn being an independent state enjoys the same sovereign rights as does Japan. In order to prove the sincerity of the friendship existing between the
nations, their intercourse shall henceforward be carried on in terms of equality and courtesy, each avoiding the giving of offence by arrogance or manifes-
tations of suspicion. In the first instance all rules and precedents that are apt to obstruct friendly intercourse shall be totally abrogated and, in their stead,
rules, liberal and in general usage fit to secure a firm and perpetual peace, shall be established.⁸⁰
Many diplomats at the time and scholars since then concluded that this article, and in particular the first sentence, explicitly defines Chosŏn as an independent
state under the terms of international law, although some scholars have recognized that the English translation of the first sentence is not precise.⁸¹ Given that
the original text of the treaty used only Japanese and Chinese, a comparison of the Japanese and Chinese texts of the first article and the English version reveals
critical discrepancies in several key terms.
The first sentence of the article in the Japanese version reads, “Chōsen koku wa jishu no kuni ni shite, Nihon koku to byōdō no ken o hoyū seri 朝鮮國ハ
自主ノ邦ニシテ日本國ト平等ノ權ヲ保有セリ” (lit., The country of Chosŏn is a nation with the right of self-rule, possessing rights equal to Japan’s). The Chi-
nese version of this sentence—“Chosŏn kug chaju ji bang, boyu yŏ Ilbon kug p’yŏngdŭng ji kwŏn 朝鮮國自主之邦保有與日本國平等之權”—has the same
meaning.⁸² It is clear that the Gaimushō made a deliberate choice to translate the term jishu (K., chaju; Ch., zizhu) as “independence” and the phrase jishu no kuni
(K., chaju ji bang; Ch., zizhu zhi bang) as “independent state.” More importantly, the English translation intentionally rendered the Chinese character ken (K., kwŏn;
Ch., quan) not simply as “right” but as “sovereign right.” The second half of the sentence, which literally says that Chosŏn “possesses rights equal to Japan’s,”
thus ends up claiming that Chosŏn “enjoys the same sovereign rights as does Japan.” Later in the article, the Gaimushō translated the phrase dōtō no reigi (K.,
tongdŭng ji ye; Ch., tongdeng zhi li), which literally means “equal rituals” or “equal courtesy,” as “equality and courtesy.” By changing the term dōtō from an adjec-
tive to a noun, the Gaimushō reinforced the claim inherent in its translation of the first sentence.
Since the Western ministers in Tokyo could not read Chinese or Japanese texts, the Gaimushō may have hoped to mislead the English-speaking world by defin-
ing Chosŏn’s sovereignty and independence in the English translation. Both the American minister, John Bingham (1815–1900), and the British minister, Harry
Parkes, accepted the provided translation and helped disseminate it in the West.⁸³ Certainly, Chosŏn’s sovereign right, or sovereignty, was not created by Japan’s
subtle English translation; rather, Chosŏn always enjoyed sovereignty on its own territory, but this sovereign was subject to China’s emperorship in the Zongfan
world.⁸⁴ It was not until 1882, when Chosŏn signed a treaty with the United States, that its “sovereign right” was explicitly defined for the first time in both Chinese
and English. In 1876, neither Beijing nor Hansŏng foresaw the problems caused by the English translation of the treaty. Japan believed that it had successfully re-
solved the issue of Chosŏn’s status through the treaty and that it had prevailed over Beijing in the debate on the topic. In his final report to the Gaimushō on his
mission to Beijing, Mori was self-congratulatory: “Suffice it to say,” he claimed, “that the Zongli Yamen has been convinced by my argument…. The only objective
of the debate was to cut off the Sino-Korean relationship, which I have achieved.”⁸⁵ Yet he would soon realize that he had been too optimistic.
Commodore Robert W. Shufeldt of the US Navy returned to East Asia in March 1880 in hopes of negotiating a treaty with Chosŏn. During the intervening four
years, Chosŏn had dispatched only an envoy of amity (K., Susin sa) to Japan in 1876 in observance of conventions, whereas it continued to send annual tributary
emissaries to Beijing. Chosŏn believed that it had restored the pre-1876 order that was maintained by the policy of serving the great in its relations with China and
that of communicating with a neighboring country vis-à-vis Japan. The arrival of Shufeldt in the early 1880s created a stir in the hermit nation and became a test of
the trilateral relations between Chosŏn, Japan, and China.
4
DEFINING CHOSŎN
Qing China’s Depiction of Chosŏn’s Status, 1862–76
For the Qing ruling house and intelligentsia, everyday familiarity collapsed on the very first day that the Westerners entered Beijing as permanent diplomatic representatives.¹ As the self-strengthening movement unfolded in the 1860s, Beijing was increasingly intrigued by the possibility of employing European methods to enhance China’s military and technical capabilities for the sake of China’s future. The innovations proposed by various reformers caught the attention of more open-minded Chinese officials who were interested in statecraft outside their ivory towers. This elite drew on knowledge from abroad and pioneered Chinese modernization, aware that the entrenched politico-cultural concept of all-under-Heaven embedded in a cosmopolitan, Confucian worldview was ineluctably giving way to more realistic world politics born of sophisticated foreign negotiations informed by Western norms. The elite realized that they must first learn those norms from their Western counterparts. In 1864 the Zongli Yamen published Wanguo gongfa (lit. the common law among ten thousand countries), the Chinese edition of Henry Wheaton’s Elements of International Law, which had appeared in English in 1836.² Translated by an American Presbyterian missionary in Beijing, William A. P. Martin (1827–1916; known in Chinese as Ding Weiliang), it was the first guide to international law in China and the Chinese world. The Chinese edition pointedly added a map of the world that presented it in the conventional arrangement of eastern and western hemispheres, which further eroded the Sinocentric view by portraying China as merely one country among others.³ The Great Qing began to transform its political and diplomatic norms by integrating notions of international law into its own constitutional and institutional systems.
However, the disintegration of the Qing’s old conceptualization of Western countries as barbarians did not lead to a similar breakdown in the Zongfan framework that bound together the Manchu and Korean courts. Their symbiotic legitimacy, which could not be redefined or circumscribed by international law, still strongly influenced their internal and external policies and behavior in the middle of the nineteenth century. In this sense, the two Opium Wars and the treaties from 1842 to 1860 did not simply mark the twilight of the Old and the dawn of the New, as the East-West dichotomy would have it.⁴ Rather, the treaty port network imposed from the outside and the time-honored Zongfan arrangement inside the Qing realm formed a dual system of two coexisting elements, and the former did not immediately begin to replace or incorporate the latter, as many scholars have retrospectively presumed. Since the 1860s, as contacts between Chosŏn and Western countries grew more frequent, both Beijing and Hansŏng found it increasingly difficult to define their Zongfan relationship and Chosŏn’s international status and state sovereignty. While the two countries asserted unanimously that Chosŏn was China’s shuguo or shubang (subordinate country) possessing the right of zizhu, China’s treaty counterparts treated Chosŏn as a state with independent sovereignty that maintained a merely ritual relationship to China. This chapter explores this diplomatic conundrum and its consequences.
Chosŏn as China’s Shuguo : The Sino-French Conflict of 1866
The Beginning of the Puzzle: The French Invasion and China’s Response
In 1866, France decided to launch an expedition against Chosŏn in response to the killing of French missionaries in anti-Catholic purges initiated by Yi Ha-ŭng (1820–98), better known by his title, Taewŏn’gun (Prince of the great court). The Taewŏn’gun had become the de facto regent after his twelve-year-old son, Yi Hŭi (King Kojong), assumed the throne in 1863 as the closest male relative and thus the legitimate successor of the late King Ikchong.⁵ During the decade of his
regency, the Taewŏn’gun carried out a series of domestic reforms, but as a follower of Confucianism he also regarded Western religions as heresies or evil ideas (K., sahak). In early 1866 he started to persecute converts to Christianity and Catholicism, leading to the execution of thirteen French missionaries and hundreds of native converts in a short time.⁶
When news of the purge reached Beijing, the French chargé d’affaires, Henri de Bellonet, decided to launch a punitive expedition against Chosŏn. On July 14, 1866, Bellonet sent the Zongli Yamen a letter threatening that France would invade and temporarily occupy Chosŏn and appoint a new king. He noted that the expedition would have nothing to do with China, as he had earlier been informed by the Yamen that Chosŏn managed its own affairs. Indeed, in 1865 Bellonet had asked the Yamen to issue a dispatch to Chosŏn to inform the king that French missionaries wanted to bring their teachings to the kingdom. The Yamen had declined to do so, explaining that "Chosŏn, as a shuguo of China, only uses the Chinese calendar, uses Chinese regnal titles, and pays annual tribute to China. Bellonet interpreted this response to mean that the Chinese government has no authority or power over Corea."⁷ From then on, both Western states and the Zongli Yamen had continuous difficulty pinning down Chosŏn’s status as China’s shuguo in terms that the other side could accurately understand.
The Zongli Yamen claimed both that Chosŏn was a shuguo of China and that because Chosŏn managed all its own affairs under the rubric of zizhu, China would not intervene in them. This statement was clear in Zongfan terms but came across as equivocal and paradoxical to Western ministers. While Bellonet acknowledged that Chosŏn had formerly assumed the bonds of vassalage to the Chinese empire, he asserted that at the present moment, we do not recognize any authority whatever of the Chinese government over the kingdom of Corea.⁸ This statement recognized Chosŏn as an independent nation, but the Yamen’s Chinese translation of it missed its political meaning. The Wanguo gongfa of 1864 did not provide the Yamen with a definition of shuguo that could be translated into appropriate Western terms.
What, then, caused this misunderstanding between France and China? This question is closely connected to the Western perception of the Sinocentric political arrangement. At least since the late eighteenth century, Western travelers, observers, and diplomats who witnessed the practice of Korea and other entities of sending emissaries with tribute to Beijing used the term tributary to describe the nature of the relationship between China and Korea, Vietnam, and other countries.⁹ Their descriptions constituted the first step toward using the terms tribute system or tributary system to refer to the Zongfan system in Western literature on China and East Asia. In the first half of the nineteenth century, when Western diplomats brought international law to East Asia, the Western understanding of this tribute system became increasingly skewed. As the Western states gradually integrated China and Japan into the family of nations defined according to European norms, they found that Chosŏn maintained a special relationship with China that they could not explain adequately within the framework of these norms. Thus, according to M. Frederick Nelson, "searching back into the categories which their international system listed, they hit upon that of suzerain and vassal as most nearly fitting this East Asiatic relationship, and they then proceeded to apply the legal attributes of vassalage to the non-legal status of a shu-pang [shubang, subordinate country]."¹⁰ The Sino-Korean relationship was thus depicted as a form of a suzerain-vassal relationship in order to fit it into a Western interpretive setting.¹¹ As this and the following chapters show, the special relationship between Egypt and the Ottoman Empire was seen as an instructive analogy, in part as a result of Japan’s strategy of using European legal terminology to undermine the Sino-Korean relationship.¹²
As the misunderstanding between the French and China shows, this suzerain-vassal rendering of the Zongfan order risked a legal quagmire regarding Chosŏn. Both China and Chosŏn declared that Chosŏn was China’s subordinate country with the right of autonomy; the Western countries and Japan interpreted this to mean that Korea was an independent sovereign state with all international rights. The confusion was exacerbated by the fact that Wanguo gongfa used Chinese Zongfan concepts to translate English legal terms. For example, the English term colony was rendered as pingfan (fence), shu-bang, or shuguo; dependency as
shubang; vassal state as fanshu (subordinate country or dependent country); sovereign states as zizhu zhi guo (countries with the right of self-rule); and right of sovereignty as zizhu zhi quan (right of self-rule).¹³ The discrepancies between the Chinese and European terms show that China’s perspective remained essentially familistic, whereas the Europeans and the Americans operated in a primarily legal context.¹⁴ Martin, the Wanguo gongfa translator, was not the first to adopt these Chinese terms in translation. As early as the 1830s, some Protestant missionaries, such as Karl Gützlaff (1803–51) from Prussia, rendered colony as fanshu guo in their Chinese-language magazines published in South China. For example, the September 1833 issue of Dong Xi-yang kao meiyue tongji zhuan (Eastern-Western monthly magazine) calls India Da Yingguo zhi fanshu guo (the subordinate country of Great Britain) and Siberia Eluosi fanshu guo (the subordinate country of Russia).¹⁵ Since the 1860s, the terminological inconsistency led to great confusion over the nature of the Zongfan relationship and growing conflicts between China, Korea, and other countries.
As a result, Western diplomats in East Asia widely perceived the Sino-Korean relationship as a nominal one, with China exercising no real authority over Korea.¹⁶ Misunderstandings persisted through the late 1880s and early 1890s, as William W. Rockhill (1854–1914) confessed in his study of Sino-Korean relations, which was aimed at clarifying what he described as a puzzle for Western nations—whether Korea was an integral part of the Chinese empire or a sovereign state enjoying absolute international rights. Rockhill argued that the Chinese term shuguo, generally but misleadingly converted into English terms such as vassal kingdom or fief, was the key-note to the whole system of Korean dependency.¹⁷ What led Rockhill to identify Korea’s status as a puzzle seems to have been its contrast with the European colonial experience of his day: the relationship between a European colonial power and its overseas colonies—that of Britain and India, or of France and Algeria—was clear, since the colony was undoubtedly an integral part of the empire, fully subject to the imperial administration. The questions regarding Sino-Korean relations raised in the early 1890s by George N. Curzon, who later served as viceroy of India, similarly reflected this colonial discourse.¹⁸ But although these Europeans could not reconcile Chosŏn’s status with their Eurocentric understanding of colonial relationships, they nonetheless regarded the Sino-Korean relationship as a legitimate one, which may explain why their states never publicly denied that Chosŏn was a dependency of China before 1895. The Sino-French negotiation over Chosŏn’s international position in 1866 was the beginning of the exposure of a range of conceptual, textual, ideological, and epistemological conflicts between China and its Western counterparts. Bellonet was thus among the first Westerners who encountered difficulties in dealing with the Zongfan order in practice.
On the Chinese side, the Zongli Yamen, as a temporary institution established on an ad hoc basis, had no right to communicate with Chosŏn, and until the end of the Zongfan relationship in 1895 it never gained that right. Rather, the Ministry of Rites continued to carry responsibility for Chosŏn’s affairs. The Zongli Yamen simply sent any cases involving Chosŏn to the Ministry of Rites for processing. The ministry, for its part, could not make changes to established imperial codes, formalities, or precedents regarding Chosŏn, so it often forwarded the cases to the emperor and the Grand Council to receive further instructions. This convention-driven arrangement persisted until 1882, when Beijing endowed Li Hongzhang—the Beiyang superintendent under the supervision of the Zongli Yamen—with the right to communicate with the king. Contacts between Chosŏn and Western states in the 1860s thus exposed China’s policy deficit in the uncharted territory between the Zongli Yamen and the Ministry of Rites, and this deficit endured for another three decades. Given this context, the Zongli Yamen pursued a policy of mediation (Ch., paijie) between Chosŏn and the West. It replied to Bellonet that the French should not rush to attack Chosŏn and that China would mediate between France and Chosŏn, but it did not claim responsibility for the killing of the French missionaries. In a memorial to the emperor and in a confidential letter to governors-general and governors of the coastal provinces and Manchu generals in Manchuria, the Yamen expressed serious concern over the French hostility toward Chosŏn and proclaimed that China could in no way sit it out if Chosŏn were to come under foreign attack.¹⁹ It also notified Chosŏn, via the Ministry of
Rites, of the possibility that French forces might invade the country.²⁰
Undeterred, Bellonet instructed Admiral Pierre-Gustave Roze (1812–83), commander of the French Far Eastern Squadron, to launch the expedition. On September 20 Roze led three warships from Zhifu (Chefoo, now Yantai) on the Shandong Peninsula across the Bohai Sea. They arrived at a small island off the coast of Inch’ŏn, where they made navigational charts of the waters along the coastlines. Roze refused to contact local officials while conducting these activities. At court, the Taewŏn’gun learned of the arrival of the foreign strange-shaped ships (K., iyang sŏn), but he nonetheless continued his anti-Catholic campaign by arresting and executing more converts. Ten days before the French forces arrived, the young king, at his father’s suggestion, had issued a decree of antiheresy (K., ch’ŏksa yunŭm) to further stoke anti-Catholic resentment.²¹
On October 1 the three primary members of the most recent tributary mission to Beijing—Yu Hu-bok, Sŏ Tang-po, and Hong Sun-hak—returned to Hansŏng and were granted an audience with the king. The mission had been charged with requesting the Qing to invest the daughter of the late official Min Ch’i-rok with the title of queen; she would later be known as Queen Min (1851–95). Yu made a point of informing the king and senior ministers that the foreigners in Beijing were beyond Chinese jurisdiction and were not afraid of the big country.²² Yu’s account may have given the court the impression that China had become a victim of Western invaders, and that Chosŏn would be next. This news reinforced the Taewŏn’gun’s anti-Catholic and xenophobic attitude, convincing him that Chosŏn’s security could be guaranteed only by resisting the barbarians of the ocean (K., yang’i).²³
Two weeks after Yu’s audience with the king, the French squadron reached Inch’ŏn and blockaded all entrances to the Han River of Hansŏng. In spite of Korean resistance, French marines landed on Korean soil and proceeded to loot the capital of Kanghwa Prefecture and other nearby towns. With the arrival of cold weather in early November, they withdrew back to Zhifu. The Western ministers in Beijing had assumed that the expedition would bring Chosŏn into the modern world. The American chargé d’affaires Samuel Wells Williams (1812–84), for instance, exclaimed that it is full time that Corea was introduced into the family of nations.²⁴ But Williams and his colleagues soon realized that the French had failed to conduct any negotiations with the Koreans, much less introduce into the country any ideas of the family of nations. Instead the military invasion provided the Taewŏn’gun with a further justification for his policy of countering barbarians and protecting the nation (K., yang’i poguk).²⁵
On November 1, 1866, while the battle with the French marines was raging in Kanghwa, the king held a grand ceremony in Hansŏng to welcome two Manchu envoys, Kuiling and Xiyuan, who came to invest the new queen. Following the customary ritual codes, the king went to the Hall of Admiring the Central Civilized Country on the city’s outskirts to welcome the envoys. Afterward, inside the capital, the king performed the requisite ceremonies to receive the book of investiture. The investiture emphasized that the queen should assist the king in bringing prosperity to the country, which had been a loyal " fan and fence" (Ch., fanping) of China for generations.²⁶ In a domestic decree that the king issued after the grand ceremony to celebrate the investiture, he emphasized that Chosŏn, the lower country, appreciated the magnanimous favor of the central dynasty and the big country.²⁷ During the envoys’ three-day sojourn, all rituals were performed precisely according to precedent. In conversations between the king and the envoys, the ongoing war with the French, raging just twenty-five miles away, never came up. The boundary between Zongfan matters and diplomatic affairs was as clear as the two countries’ court-to-court and country-to-country relationships.
The arrival of an imperial mission in Chosŏn at this critical moment raised serious concerns among the French. Prince Gong explained that the envoys were on affairs of ceremonial, and in accordance with long-established usage, having no reference to the quarrel between France and Corea, but Bellonet was suspicious.²⁸ Prince Gong circulated his correspondence with Bellonet among the foreign ministers, which served to publicize in the diplomatic corps China’s
definition of the Sino-Korean relationship. While Prince Gong argued with Bellonet about the Korean issue, two Korean tributary missions arrived in Beijing in succession.
The first mission, headed by Han Mun-kyu, arrived on November 6 to receive the imperial calendar for the upcoming year. In the king’s memorial to the emperor that Han brought to Beijing, the king stated that Chosŏn had no wish to do business with foreign countries and that Catholicism and other foreign religions were not welcome in Chosŏn. In addition, Han brought to Wan Qingli, a minister of the Qing Ministry of Rites, a personal letter from Yi Hŭng-min (1809–81), a former tributary emissary who had become acquainted with Wan the previous year. In his letter, Yi tried to legitimize the Taewŏn’gun’s anti-Catholic policy and hoped Wan would take advantage of his position to discuss the issue with the emperor and the Zongli Yamen, in the hope that China would persuade foreigners not to visit Chosŏn. Realizing that the issue was beyond the jurisdiction of his ministry and personal correspondence, Wan forwarded the letter to the emperor, asking for instructions and suggesting that he relay the court’s recommendations to Chosŏn through his personal response to Yi.²⁹ The court did not take Wan up on his offer. The emperor’s decree to the king likewise skirted the issue, simply telling the king to secure Chosŏn without offering any specific strategy.
Two months after Han’s arrival, a second Korean mission, this one bearing the annual tribute, reached Beijing on February 1, 1867, three days before the Spring Festival. In his memorials to the emperor on the occasion of the lunar New Year, the king declared again that it was impossible for Chosŏn to trade with foreign barbarians such as the French or to allow them to spread the Gospel in the country. The king also reported that Yi Hŭng-min had been punished because his personal letter to high-ranking officials of the imperial dynasty had violated regulations. The Chinese court had no further instructions for the king. Meanwhile, the French did not follow their brief expedition with further campaigns against Chosŏn. The issue of Chosŏn’s status remained unsettled and soon proved confusing to the United States.
The Shuguo between Zizhu and Independence: American Views of Chosŏn’s Status, 1866–71
Shipwrecks and Savages: China’s Disavowal of Responsibility for Chosŏn
In July and September 1866, two American schooners, the Surprise and the General Sherman, were wrecked in Chosŏn, the former off the coast of the country and the latter in the Taedong River in P’yŏngyang. The crew of the Surprise was treated kindly and escorted safely to the Chinese side via Fenghuang Gate, but the members of the General Sherman ’s crew were mercilessly killed right in P’yŏngyang. After learning about the General Sherman case, the American minister in Beijing, Anson Burlingame (1820–70), immediately brought the issue to the attention of Prince Gong because Corea was formerly tributary to China. To Burlingame’s surprise, Prince Gong at once disavowed all responsibility for the Coreans, and stated that the only connection between the two countries was one of ceremonial. In a letter to Rear Admiral Henry H. Bell (1808–68), the acting commander of the US Asiatic Squadron, Burlingame affirmed that the Chinese government disavows any responsibility for that of Corea, and all jurisdiction over its people.³⁰ The case was thus passed on to Bell, who, in a confidential dispatch to the Secretary of the Navy, Gideon Welles (1802–78), suggested that the United States launch punitive action against Chosŏn.³¹ In fact, Secretary of State William H. Seward (1801–72) had proposed to the French representative in Washington that the United States and France initiate a combined action against Chosŏn, but France had declined.³² Bell’s proposed expedition did not take place either. In early 1867 the navy dispatched the USS Wachusett to Chosŏn under the command of Robert W. Shufeldt (1822–95) to investigate the General Sherman incident. But the expedition yielded nothing, as severe weather forced Shufeldt out of Chosŏn before he could receive an official response to his queries. To the United States, Chosŏn remained what American scholars would call a hermit nation.³³
American diplomats found themselves involved in another shipwreck in East Asia in March 1867, this time involving the schooner Rover in Taiwan (Formosa). The Rover foundered on the southern coast of the island, and the crew members who came ashore were ambushed and killed by aborigines known as the Koaluts. Believing that the incident was within his jurisdiction, Charles W. Le Gendre (1830–99), the American consul at Xiamen (Amoy), brought the matter to the attention of the governor-general in Fuzhou, the local officials of Taiwan Prefecture, and the Zongli Yamen. The local officials informed Le Gendre that the crew had met with their deaths in savage lands (Ch., shengfan jie) beyond the civilization of the sovereign (Ch., wanghua buji), not within the waters over which the Chinese government exercises jurisdiction, and that their murderers were savages rather than Chinese civilians (Ch., huamin). Therefore, articles 11 and 13 of the 1858 Sino-American Treaty regarding China’s jurisdiction did not apply, and the Chinese government had no responsibility to take action against the Koaluts as the consul had requested. Le Gendre, believing to the contrary that the savages were within China’s jurisdiction, warned his Chinese counterparts that other states could cite such a disavowal of responsibility as an excuse to occupy the savage lands.³⁴ Finally, the Chinese authorities dispatched soldiers to accompany Le Gendre to southern Taiwan, but the minister alone entered the Koaluts’ territory and concluded an agreement with the chieftain.³⁵ Le Gendre’s experience of negotiating with the Chinese side was not notable at the time and seemed unrelated to Chosŏn. But it would prove significant in the 1870s, when Tokyo hired Le Gendre to help reframe Japanese policy toward Taiwan, Ryukyu, Chosŏn, and China.
A Nominal Connection: Low’s Assessment of the Sino-Korean Relationship
Before Japan joined the Western states in challenging Chosŏn’s status, Frederick F. Low (1828–94), the American minister in Beijing and the former governor of California, organized an expedition to Chosŏn in 1871 with the aim of negotiating a treaty for the protection of shipwrecked mariners. His action pushed Beijing to clarify China’s definition of the Sino-Korean relationship. As Low saw it, Corea is substantially an independent nation and the Korean tribute to China "is sent rather as a quid pro quo for the privilege of trading with the Chinese than a governmental tribute."³⁶ Low nonetheless solicited the aid of the Zongli Yamen to obtain useful information about Chosŏn. In February 1871 Low delivered to the Yamen a letter that he hoped would be forwarded to the king of Chosŏn via the Ministry of Rites. After sending the letter to Chosŏn, the ministry noted, in a confidential memorial to the emperor, that "Chosŏn has used China’s ruling titles and calendars for a long time and proved the most loyal. All affairs regarding its government, religion, prohibitions, and laws are subject to its own management by the rule of zizhu, and none of these affairs has China hitherto interfered in."³⁷ These same words were used by the Zongli Yamen in its dispatch to Low in March.
Low decided, first, to interpret China’s position as affirming Chosŏn’s independent sovereignty, stating that although Corea is regarded as a country subordinate to China, yet she is wholly independent in everything that relates to her government, her religion, her prohibitions, and her laws; in none of these things has China hitherto interfered. In essence, he translated the Chinese term zizhu into full independence. Second, he concluded that the Chinese declaration aimed to guard against complications that may possibly grow out of an attempt by foreign nations to open intercourse with Corea, and relieve this Government of all responsibility for the acts of the Coreans, whether hostile or otherwise. Low thus interpreted Beijing’s declaration as a repudiation of responsibility for Chosŏn’s behavior. It seemed that it was time for him to sail for Chosŏn, a place that was, for him, more of a sealed book than Japan was before Commodore Perry’s visit.³⁸ Low determined to become another Perry.
Yet Low failed to crack the book. After arriving in Chosŏn in May, he was unable to establish official contacts with the Korean side. The expedition only intensified Chosŏn’s hostility toward Western countries. Chosŏn continued to identify itself as a subject of China that had no right to communicate with foreign countries—that is, to conduct diplomacy. This point was reiterated by the king in his memorial to the emperor in June 1871 in response to Low’s letter, forwarded from Beijing.³⁹ After the frustrating failure of his expedition, Low still hoped to contact Chosŏn through Beijing, and his conversations with the Zongli Yamen
provided him with further opportunities to reconceptualize the Sino-Korean relationship. He concluded that the relations between the two countries, established during the reign of the Ming Emperors, nominally continued unchanged, although, practically, they have little force.⁴⁰ Despite a sharp refutation from Prince Gong, Low continued to hold this opinion.
Between 1866 and 1871, the Western ministers’ perception of Chosŏn shifted: they no longer considered it a tributary of China but rather saw it as an independent state beyond Chinese jurisdiction. Several key terms of international law were now applied to the Sinocentric Zongfan order, even though nothing within this order had changed. In 1871 the Qing signed its first Western-style treaty with Japan that portrayed the two countries as equals. Over the next five years, Japan, in the midst of dramatic Westernizing reforms under Emperor Meiji (r. 1867– 1912), became the vanguard of the challenge to the Sino-Korean relationship, aided by its position as an insider in the East Asian community. The participation of the rising Japanese empire opened a new chapter in modern East Asian history.
The Shuguo between Chinese Legitimacy and International Law: The First Sino-Japanese Debate
Japan’s Contacts with Chosŏn and the Sino-Japanese Treaty of 1871
During the Japanese Tokugawa bakufu period (1603–1867), communications between Japan and Chosŏn were conducted through the Sō family in the domain of Tsushima. Chosŏn interacted with the Sō in a semi-Zongfan framework. The head of the Sō sent boats to Chosŏn for trade in accordance with Chosŏn’s regulations, and he presented himself as a subordinate in letters to the king. In return, when necessary, Chosŏn followed the policy of kyorin, communicating with a neighboring country, by dispatching messengers to Japan to consolidate the two countries’ friendly relations. All such messengers visited Kyoto and Edo (Tokyo) via Tsushima. Following the Meiji Restoration of 1868, Japan established the Gaimushō, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to manage foreign relations under newly adopted Western norms. While its relationships with other countries evolved steadily, Japan failed to modernize its relationship with Chosŏn. Chosŏn refused to accept Japan’s sovereign letters, figuratively closing the country’s door in Japan’s face.
In the meantime, Japan was approaching China to pursue an international status equal to it. In September 1871 the Japanese minister plenipotentiary, Date Munenari (1818–92), signed a treaty, written in both the Chinese and Japanese languages, with Li Hongzhang in Tianjin. The first article stated, Relations of amity shall henceforth be maintained in redoubled force between China and Japan, in measure as boundless as the heaven and the earth. In all that regards the territorial possessions of either country the two Governments shall treat each other with proper courtesy, without the slightest infringement or encroachment on either side, to the end that there may be for evermore peace between them undisturbed.⁴¹ The term territorial possessions and its applicability to Chosŏn later became a source of disagreement between the two countries. The term is a rough English equivalent of the Chinese suoshu bangtu. Suoshu means to belong to, but bangtu is too vague to be accurately defined in international law. Literally, bang means country and tu means land, but bangtu could mean country, land, or territorial possessions. Both China and Japan subsequently realized that the term failed to establish whether the countries serving as China’s outer fan, in particular Chosŏn, counted among China’s territorial possessions. Both sides used the term’s uncertain definition to their own advantage, resulting in fierce disputes when Japan began implementing an aggressive policy toward Ryukyu and Chosŏn in the 1870s.
An Ambush on the Chinese: Soejima’s Embassy to Beijing in 1873
In December 1871 a ship from Ryukyu was shipwrecked on the southern coast of Taiwan, where the aborigines killed fifty-four members of its crew. Since Japan was in the process of annexing Ryukyu by converting it into a Japanese domain (J., han), Tokyo regarded the incident as a good opportunity to finalize the matter by cutting off Ryukyu’s Zongfan relationship with China. In February 1873 Emperor Meiji appointed the minister of foreign affairs, Soejima Taneomi (1828–1905),
as ambassador extraordinary to China to ratify the Treaty of Tianjin of 1871. The emperor instructed Soejima to discuss the killings of the Ryukyuese sailors to determine whether the whole of Taiwan was under China’s jurisdiction.⁴² A key proponent of the Seikan ron (expedition against Korea), Soejima eagerly availed himself of this chance to glean information on China’s attitude toward Japanese-Korean contacts. Among the members of the Japanese mission was Japan’s newly appointed adviser on foreign policy toward Taiwan, Charles Le Gendre, whose experience was invaluable to Tokyo’s efforts to formulate and implement a new policy toward the Chinese Zongfan system.⁴³ It was through Western advisers such as Le Gendre who mastered modern Western norms regarding sovereignty and international law that Japan transformed itself into an outsider to the East Asian community in terms of its foreign policy.
Soejima arrived in Tianjin in April, and his visit marked the first time that a Japanese official showed up in China in a Western tailcoat. After ratifying the treaty, Soejima briefly discussed Japanese-Korean relations with Li Hongzhang. Li warned that Japan should be friendly to Chosŏn and that any Japanese expedition against it would violate the Sino-Japanese treaty.⁴⁴ In Beijing, with Le Gendre’s assistance, Soejima visited foreign legations in the city. The current British minister, Thomas F. Wade (1818–95), reported to London that the Japanese are also suspected of a design on Corea and that Soejima is evidently anxious for an assurance from the Chinese that Corea is an independent Kingdom, so independent of China, that is to say, as to make what may befall Corea no concern of the Chinese. Wade inferred that Japan would apply gunboat diplomacy to Korea.⁴⁵ According to Frederick Low, Soejima had only two questions of importance which he desires to discuss with the Chinese government. First, he wanted to know whether China is responsible for the acts of the aborigines on the island of Formosa. According to Low, If the answer is in the negative, notice will then be given that Japan proposed to send a military force to Formosa to chastise the savage and semi-civilized tribes that practically hold undisputed possession of the large part of the island. Second, Soejima wanted to ascertain the precise relations between China and Corea; whether the former claims to exercise such control over her tributary as to render China responsible for the acts of the Coreans, or whether other nations must look to Corea alone for redress for wrongs and outrages which her people may commit.⁴⁶
Soejima’s view of the likely relationship between China and its periphery—Taiwan and Chosŏn—matched Western countries’ conclusions regarding the limits of China’s jurisdiction over these regions. When Soejima solicited Low’s opinions on Chosŏn, Low showed him the Zongli Yamen’s dispatch of March 1871, mentioned earlier, which affirmed China’s noninterference in Chosŏn’s affairs in accordance with the principle of zizhu. Upon Low’s assertion that Chosŏn was wholly independent, Soejima made the judgment that Chosŏn lay "beyond the Qing’s sovereignty [J., shuken]."⁴⁷ The Japanese policy of challenging Chosŏn’s status as China’s shuguo thus began to converge with the policies pursued by the United States, France, Britain, and other Western states in China.
Soejima’s conclusion found support in a meeting at the Zongli Yamen on June 21, 1873, that brought together a Japanese representative, Yanagiwara Sakimitsu (1850–94), and the Chinese ministers Mao Changxi (1817–82) and Dong Xun (1807–92). Yanagiwara asked how China could justify claiming Chosŏn as a shuguo, since the Yamen had asserted in its 1871 note to the American minister that China never interfered with its internal politics, religion, prohibitions, and laws. Mao, drawing on an understanding of Sino-Korean contacts that he might have gained when working at the Ministry of Rites, explained that "the so-called shuguo referred only to investiture and tribute submission" and that China would not interfere with Chosŏn’s right to conduct negotiations over war and peace.⁴⁸ Mao’s response satisfied Soejima because it corroborated Low’s argument.⁴⁹ Soejima, along with his Western counterparts, was granted an audience with the Tongzhi emperor on June 29. It was the first imperial audience for Western ministers since the 1840s and it encouraged both sides to improve their understanding of each other.
Upon his return to Tokyo, Soejima stepped up his advocacy for an expedition to Korea, but the return of a Japanese mission to the United States and Europe halted his plan. The three key members of the mission, Iwakura Tomomi (1825– 83), Ōkubo Toshimichi (1830–78), and Kido Takayoshi (1833–77), argued that
Japan should focus on domestic reforms to reorganize its national politics and make its people rich.⁵⁰ As this policy prevailed, the proponents of the Seikan ron, such as Soejima, Saigō Takamori (1827–77), Itagaki Taisuke (1837–1919), and Etō Shinpei (1834–74), were pushed out of the cabinet. In December 1873 the young king of Chosŏn assumed direct rule and ended the regency of Taewŏn’gun. Tokyo tried to take advantage of this occasion to pursue a new diplomatic relationship with Hansŏng, but its efforts failed in the face of sharp resistance by local officials in Pusan, where the Koreans still preferred to communicate with the Japanese through the kyorin framework. Japan, it seemed, could not make any substantial progress on opening a new channel of communication with the Korean court.
The Birth of Chosŏn’s Sovereignty: The Second Sino-Japanese Debate and the Treaty of Kanghwa
Defining China’s Territory: Taiwan, Kanghwa, and Mori’s Visit to Beijing
In the summer of 1874, while Tokyo was sending troops to South Taiwan to deal with the territory in question beyond the jurisdiction of the Chinese government, it also sent Yanagiwara Sakimitsu and Ōkubo Toshimichi to Beijing for further negotiations about Taiwan.⁵¹ The Zongli Yamen told the Japanese representatives, Even if the aborigines are ‘barbarians,’ they are still China’s barbarians, and only China has the right to punish them if they are guilty. The Chinese ministers pointed to relevant rules of international law and Chinese historical evidence, such as local gazetteers, to bolster their point. Without close advice from Western advisers such as Le Gendre, the Japanese failed to prove that the aborigines’ area of residence in South Taiwan was beyond China’s jurisdiction. Under the mediation of Thomas Wade, the doyen of the diplomatic corps in Beijing, the Chinese and Japanese sides reached a succinct agreement. Interestingly, the third article of the agreement stated that all correspondence that this question has occasioned between the two governments shall be canceled, and the discussions dropped for evermore.⁵² In this way, Japan not only invalidated any documents that could expose its inferior position in the talks on the reach of China’s territory but also shifted future negotiations to the track of international law. To the Japanese, the negotiations indicated that only a Japan equipped with European norms could challenge the Chinese discourse, which helps explain why, over the following decade, Japan frequently solicited its Western advisers for suggestions regarding Japan’s foreign policy toward its neighbors.
A skirmish between Japan and Chosŏn near Kanghwa Island in September 1875 led to the resurgence of support for the Seikan ron in Japan. This time Iwakura and his fellow politicians endorsed the expedition, because Japan’s diplomatic situation was much improved. In addition to reaching an agreement with China about the Taiwan incident, Tokyo had resolved its territorial disputes with Russia over Sakhalin Island and the Kuril Islands by signing a treaty in St. Petersburg in May 1875, through which it obtained Russian acquiescence to its actions in Chosŏn. Meanwhile, in order to check Russia’s southern advance in East Asia during the Russo-British rivalry in Central Asia, Britain planned to occupy Port Hamilton, a small Korean island known as Kŏmundo near the Tsushima Strait.⁵³ This plan provided Japan with an excuse to initiate an expedition against Korea without triggering an intervention from these Western powers. In October 1875 Kido Takayoshi suggested that Japan should press China for an explanation of its relationship with Chosŏn; once Beijing had disavowed responsibility for Chosŏn’s foreign affairs, Japan could freely take action against Chosŏn.⁵⁴
The Japanese government appointed Mori Arinori (1847–89) as the minister plenipotentiary to Beijing. Educated in Britain and having worked in the United States, Mori was familiar with Western diplomatic rules and had consulted with Erasmus Peshine Smith (1814–82), the American special adviser to the Gaimushō on international law, regarding the Kanghwa incident. Sanjō Sanetomi (1837–91), chancellor of the realm, issued instructions to Mori’s embassy, and the most important among them was to "identify Chosŏn as an independent country [J., dokuritsu koku] and persuade China to help establish Japanese-Korean relations for the sake of Japan’s and China’s common interests. In short, Mori’s mission was to cut off the Sino-Korean relationship."⁵⁵ The foreign minister, Terashima
Munenori (1832–93), telegraphed the chargé d’affaires in Beijing, Tei Einei (1829–97), saying that since Soejima’s visit in 1873 had not confirmed that Chosŏn was not a " fan and subordinate" (J., hanzoku) of the Qing, Tei should be cautious about all contacts between Japan and the Qing regarding Chosŏn.⁵⁶
Another Ambush on the Chinese: Mori’s Debate with the Zongli Yamen
On January 2, 1876, the Qing court dispatched two envoys, Jihe and Wulasiconga, to Chosŏn to invest the king’s son, Yi Ch’ŏk, as the crown prince. Three Han Chinese grand secretaries—Mao Changxi, Li Hongzhang, and Zuo Zongtang (1812–85)—drafted the imperial edict of investiture in December 1875. Two days later Mori arrived in Beijing with the aim of denying this Sino-Korean relationship from the perspective of international law.
Mori paid his first visit to Thomas Wade, in the hope that the latter could mediate between Japan and China. Wade was impressed by Mori, but his situation made it impossible for him to assist Mori.⁵⁷ Wade’s relations with Beijing were strained due to an incident in the previous year in which a young British interpreter handpicked by Wade, Augustus R. Margary, had been killed on an expedition to Burma from Yunnan. Wade had repeatedly telegraphed London to ask for more naval forces to pressure China into negotiating with him for another treaty. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) supported Wade and conceived a plan to ally with Japan against China, a scheme he called one of the greatest secrets of State going.⁵⁸ But the secretary of state for foreign affairs, Edward Henry Stanley (1826–93), did not endorse this aggressive approach.⁵⁹ Under the circumstances, Wade had no desire to be involved in the Sino-Japanese negotiations on Korean affairs, but after his conversation with Mori he reported to London that the minister’s manner, rather than his language, made me mistrustful. I inferred that an expedition of Corea is determined on and that the object of his confidential communications to me was to ascertain whether objection to the expedition would be taken by English, or any other foreign action.⁶⁰ Wade could not have been more correct. On January 6, 1876, the Japanese ambassador plenipotentiary to Chosŏn, Kuroda Kiyotaka (1840–1900), sailed from Tokyo for the Korean Peninsula, leading a fleet of two gunboats and four schooners.⁶¹
Mori, accompanied by his interpreter, Tei Einei, and two secretaries, met with five Chinese ministers on January 10 at the Zongli Yamen to discuss Chosŏn’s status. Zhou Jiamei (1835–86) served as the secretary for the Chinese side. Mori, the youngest man in the room, was also the only person who knew international law and had Western educational and diplomatic experience. Shortly after the talks started, the two sides realized that they were on diametrically opposed tracks. The conversation unfolded mainly between Mori and Shen Guifen (1818–81), who had previously worked at the Ministry of Rites. Mori asked why China, identifying Chosŏn as its shuguo, nonetheless claimed that Chosŏn’s "politics, religion, prohibitions, and laws fall under the principle of zizhu . Shen explained, The shuguo is not land under the governance of our country [Ch., yuan bushi woguo guanxia zhi di]. But it pays tribute on time, receives our investiture, and accepts our country’s calendar, and this has made it our shuguo ." Shen further informed Mori that Vietnam, Ryukyu, and Burma were also China’s shuguo, with different schedules for the payment of tribute. When Mori asked whether a shuguo could negotiate with foreign countries on trade without informing China, Shen replied that the country in question would manage its affairs by itself and China would not get involved, but that it would legally respond to any disputes arising between the shuguo and China’s treaty partners. Shen warned Mori that any invasion of a shuguo of China would not be defensible and would contravene the first article of the Sino-Japanese Treaty of 1871.⁶²
At this point it became apparent that the disagreement between the two sides hinged on their different definitions of the term shuguo. For Mori, a shuguo could mean a colony, a dependency, or a nation with semisovereign rights. In particular, he used the relationship between the Muhammad Ali dynasty of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire, that between Hungary and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and that between Canada and the British Empire as three examples of shuguo in the Western context. The three examples were, however, completely lost in the Chinese translation because of the vast gap in international knowledge between the two parties. The Chinese ministers retorted with convincing examples drawn from the Chinese context to prove that Chosŏn was in all senses a shuguo of China.
The debate ended without agreement.
The meeting having fallen short of his expectations, Mori acknowledged the gulf between the two sides and expressed frustration with Chinese officialdom.⁶³ In the aftermath of the so-called Tongzhi Restoration—an attempt to strengthen the dynasty and traditional order in the 1860s—the Qing was facing increasingly serious challenges from within as well as from outside the country. On the same day that Mori was arguing with the Zongli Yamen, Empress Dowagers Cian (1837–81) and Cixi (1835–1908), in the Forbidden City about two miles west of the Yamen, were tearfully beseeching two officials, Weng Tonghe (1830– 1904) and Xia Tongshan (1830–80), to serve as teachers for the young emperor, Guangxu, who was Dowager Cixi’s nephew.⁶⁴ The political heart of the empire was vulnerable. It was not until 1898, three years after his empire was humiliated by Japan in the war that broke out in Chosŏn, that the emperor was able to launch a reform with the strong support of Weng.
After the meeting, Mori asked the Zongli Yamen to issue a passport to a Japanese assistant whom he wanted to send to Chosŏn via Mukden to inform the Japanese ambassador to Chosŏn about the Sino-Japanese meetings. He also expressed his own desire to visit Li Hongzhang at Baoding, Li’s political headquarters, to show his gratitude for Li’s greetings. The Yamen refused to issue the passport because of the absence of relevant precedent, reiterating its assertion that Chosŏn was China’s shuguo. This response triggered another exchange of verbal jousts through diplomatic notes. Mori argued that "Chosŏn is an independent country, and the status of a so-called shuguo of China is only a nominal title [J., kūmei; Ch., kongming]…. Any Japanese-Korean contacts have nothing to do with the Sino-Japanese Treaty."⁶⁵ This statement, echoing Low’s comments in 1871, marked the complete convergence of Japanese and Western policies challenging the nature of the Sino-Korean relationship. Perceiving this alignment, the Yamen wrote to the emperor, expressing severe concern over the likely prospect of problems caused by Japan, a country that has recently adopted Western politics and customs and changed its own costumes and calendars.⁶⁶ Japan had become a major troublemaker in China’s eyes.
In order to inform Chosŏn of the situation, the Zongli Yamen asked the Ministry of Rites to immediately dispatch a copy of Mori’s note to Hansŏng. The note was sent from Beijing on January 19, 1876, four days after Japanese naval forces had arrived at Pusan. The Yamen, completely blind to the Japanese advance on Chosŏn, busied itself with arguing with Mori. Once the two sides had arrived at an utter impasse, two officers sent by Li Hongzhang arrived in Beijing to accompany Mori to Baoding. Both the Yamen and Mori were happy to hand the case to Li in hopes of winning a favorable ruling at Baoding.
Li’s Sincere Advice: The Baoding Negotiations
Thus began Li Hongzhang’s deep involvement in Chosŏn’s affairs as a provincial official. On January 10, while the Yamen squabbled with Mori, Li briefly explained some diplomatic ideas regarding Chosŏn’s possible contacts with the West in his reply to a letter from Yi Yu-wŏn (1814–88), a Korean prime minister who had visited Beijing in 1875 as a tributary emissary.⁶⁷ Two weeks later, while his letter was on its way to Hansŏng, Li welcomed Mori at Baoding. The conversations that ensued were all the more complicated in that they were conducted not in Chinese or Japanese but in English. Moreover, in their reports to their respective governments, written in their own languages instead of in English, both sides claimed to be prevailing over the other. Neither Beijing nor Tokyo had an accurate picture of the actual progress of the talks.⁶⁸
The first conversation, on January 24, lasted for more than six hours over a banquet at Li’s office. Li had invited two officials, Huang Pengnian and Huang Huilian, to attend the meeting as guests and assistants. While Huang Pengnian was an erudite Confucian scholar, Huang Huilian was Cantonese and had been educated at an American missionary school in Shanghai; his first name, Huilian, was a Chinese transliteration of William, the name of the school’s headmaster, William Jones Boone (1811–64; known in Chinese as Wen Huilian). William Huang had visited British Guiana and been drafted by Beijing to serve as an
interpreter during the Second Opium War in 1860. It seems that Mori decided to speak with Li in English after learning of William Huang’s English proficiency, as he felt that English would better allow him to convey the principles of international law as he believed they applied to the Korean issue.⁶⁹
To Mori’s argument that Chosŏn was an independent country rather than China’s shuguo, Li responded,
Everyone knows that Chosŏn has been subordinate to China for thousands of years. In the phrase suoshu bangtu [territorial possessions] of the [Sino-Japanese] treaty, the tu means Chinese provinces, namely, China’s inner land [Ch., neidi] and inner subordinates [Ch., neishu], on which the Chinese government levies taxes and whose political affairs it manages. The bang refers to countries such as Chosŏn that are China’s outer fan and outer subordinates [Ch., waishu], whose taxes and political affairs are always their own business. This is a convention, and it does not start with our dynasty. Chosŏn is indeed China’s shuguo.⁷⁰
This interpretation of suoshu bangtu implied that although Chosŏn did not lie within China’s immediate orbit, it was nonetheless part of the broader Chinese empire. Mori realized that no agreement could be reached on this point, so he ended the argument with Li. In the subsequent discussion on the Kanghwa incident, whereas Li stressed several times that Japan should obey the Sino-Japanese Treaty of 1871 and international law, Mori, who had visited the prominent British philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) before returning to Japan and had seen the dramatic expansion of the Western colonial enterprise, responded that state power was much more reliable than textual treaties. At the end, Mori asked Li what China would do if a war broke out between Japan and Chosŏn. Li replied that not only China but also Russia would send troops to defend Chosŏn. Li then wrote out for Mori, under the title Sincere Advice (Ch., Zhonggao), eight Chinese characters, which read, Acting only to disturb harmony, brings no benefits at all (Ch., Tushang heqi, haowu liyi). Mori did not mention Li’s warning in his reports to Tokyo. The next day, New Year’s Eve, Li visited Mori for a short conversation that did not touch on the Korean issue but included a discussion of Japan’s reforms. Li did not inform the Zongli Yamen of the details of this conversation, but Mori kept a full record in English, which indicates the epistemological gulf that separated the two men and the worlds they represented and defended.⁷¹ As Mori and Li closed their talks, the Japanese fleet dropped anchor at the offing of Kanghwa Island.
After Mori returned to Beijing, he resumed his debate with the Zongli Yamen. The Yamen emphasized to Mori that "solving its difficulties, resolving its disputes, and securing its safety and security [Ch., shu qi nan, jie qi fen, qi qi anquan] are the responsibilities to Chosŏn that China has taken upon itself, and they are how China treats its shuguo. It is the longstanding policy of China to refrain from forcing its shuguo to do what it is reluctant to do and to stand by when it runs into trouble."⁷² Mori, however, continued to insist that "Chosŏn is indeed an independent country, so Japan will not take Chosŏn’s relations with China into consideration in matters between Japan and Chosŏn. The so-called shuguo is no more than a nominal title. Nothing should be related to the treaty of 1871."⁷³ Thirty-four days of intensive negotiations had brought the two sides nowhere.
Old News and No News: The 1876 Imperial Mission to Chosŏn and the Limits of Zongfan Communications
The Sino-Korean Zongfan rituals that took place in Hansŏng in 1876 showed how untenable Mori’s enthusiastic diplomatic rhetoric was. On February 16, two days after the end of the Sino-Japanese debate in Beijing, the king held a grand ceremony in Hansŏng for the two imperial envoys coming to invest the crown prince. All procedures followed the precedents of investiture, and the host and guests alike performed the rituals according to code. The king expressed to the envoys his sincere gratitude to the emperor and the Zongli Yamen for informing him of the Japanese activities in Beijing. The envoys, praising the stance that Chosŏn had taken against Japan’s sovereign letters, said that Japan’s forces had reportedly arrived in Kanghwa and wanted to establish a consulate there, and they
voiced uneasiness about the situation.⁷⁴ In fact, the king had already dispatched two officials to negotiate with the Japanese at Kanghwa before receiving word from Beijing. He did not solicit advice from the envoys, nor did the envoys show any interest in obtaining details of the negotiations. Some historians have argued that Beijing used the imperial envoys to, among other things, persuade Chosŏn to conclude a treaty with Japan,⁷⁵ but records of the contact between the king and the envoys contradict this assertion.
On February 27 Chosŏn signed a treaty with Japan that ended their eight-year dispute. That same day, the Ministry of Rites in Beijing dispatched, at the top speed of five hundred li per day, a note to Chosŏn along with a copy of the Baoding conversations between Li and Mori. Handicapped by the sluggish speed of communications, the ministry, the Zongli Yamen, and Li Hongzhang could not follow the progress of the Japanese-Korean negotiations. Beijing did not receive a reply to its February note to Chosŏn about Japan’s talks with China until May 31, three months after the conclusion of the Treaty of Kanghwa. By contrast, Mori could receive Tokyo’s instructions by telegram within ten days, and Thomas Wade, who closely monitored the negotiations, was able to have his report delivered to London within eight days. Modern technology was changing international politics in an inconspicuous but concrete way, but no such improvements had yet reached the Sino-Korean channels of communication.
A week after the treaty was signed, the Manchu general at Mukden, Chongshi (1820–76), asked the Zongli Yamen whether the Ministry of Rites had received any response from the Koreans. Chongshi confessed that although Mukden bordered Chosŏn, the only information he had on Chosŏn consisted of rumors spread by Chinese and Korean merchants in the area. He hoped that the two imperial envoys could give him some reliable updates.⁷⁶ The general was, of course, disappointed in this hope. In the Forbidden City, meanwhile, the two empress dowagers discussed the Korean situation with Guo Songtao (1818–91), a minister of the Zongli Yamen who had been appointed the first minister to Britain. The dowagers disparaged Mori’s and Wade’s cunning personalities and called them first-class bad men (Ch., diyi deng huairen) whose mission was to make trouble.⁷⁷ Like Chongshi, the dowagers and Guo were unaware that the Treaty of Kanghwa had already been signed.
At the time, China had no official channel for communications beyond the empire, although Western ministers had arrived in Beijing as early as 1861. Its first minister to Japan would not set foot on Japanese soil until December 1877, almost five years after the arrival of the first Japanese minister in Beijing. A week after Guo’s conversation with the dowagers, it was from Mori, one of the first-class bad men, that the Zongli Yamen and the Manchu court learned that Japan had signed a treaty with Chosŏn. And it was not for another month—and then through the German minister to Beijing, Max August von Brandt (1835–1920)—that the Yamen first heard about the contents of the treaty. Only on April 17, when Mori submitted a full copy of the treaty to the Zongli Yamen, did the Chinese side finally see what it entailed. China’s passive position vis-à-vis Chosŏn and the treaty system with Japan was laid bare. In the two decades after 1876, it would become increasingly clear that this was China’s normal state within the established framework.
On April 21 Beijing at last received a note from the king, who briefly reviewed the treaty negotiations. The king never submitted a copy of the treaty to the emperor, nor did the emperor ever request it or raise any questions about the agreement. The king reported that the mistrust between Chosŏn and Japan had evaporated thanks to the inauguration of the long-term friendship between them: The bilateral contacts will be conducted by officials of the two countries on an equal footing. As it is not the first time that we have traded with Japan, we have allowed the Japanese to trade at our ports, where they must follow our rules.⁷⁸ Although the treaty endowed Japan with the right of consular jurisdiction and abolished all former trade conventions and junk trade (J., saiken sen), Chosŏn’s perception of the treaty was still rooted in conventional kyorin norms, rather than in any understanding of international law. It is difficult, then, to define the treaty as a truly modern one.⁷⁹
The Japanese Invention: The Birth of Chosŏn’s Sovereignty as a Textual Derivative
On March 22, 1876, the Gaimushō released the contents of the Treaty of Kanghwa and distributed an English version among the foreign ministers in Tokyo. The English translation of article 1 reads,
Chosŏn being an independent state enjoys the same sovereign rights as does Japan. In order to prove the sincerity of the friendship existing between the nations, their intercourse shall henceforward be carried on in terms of equality and courtesy, each avoiding the giving of offence by arrogance or manifestations of suspicion. In the first instance all rules and precedents that are apt to obstruct friendly intercourse shall be totally abrogated and, in their stead, rules, liberal and in general usage fit to secure a firm and perpetual peace, shall be established.⁸⁰
Many diplomats at the time and scholars since then concluded that this article, and in particular the first sentence, explicitly defines Chosŏn as an independent state under the terms of international law, although some scholars have recognized that the English translation of the first sentence is not precise.⁸¹ Given that the original text of the treaty used only Japanese and Chinese, a comparison of the Japanese and Chinese texts of the first article and the English version reveals critical discrepancies in several key terms.
The first sentence of the article in the Japanese version reads, Chōsen koku wa jishu no kuni ni shite, Nihon koku to byōdō no ken o hoyū seri 朝鮮國ハ 自主ノ邦ニシテ日本國ト平等ノ權ヲ保有セリ (lit., The country of Chosŏn is a nation with the right of self-rule, possessing rights equal to Japan’s). The Chinese version of this sentence—Chosŏn kug chaju ji bang, boyu yŏ Ilbon kug p’yŏngdŭng ji kwŏn 朝鮮國自主之邦保有與日本國平等之權—has the same meaning.⁸² It is clear that the Gaimushō made a deliberate choice to translate the term jishu (K., chaju; Ch., zizhu) as independence and the phrase jishu no kuni (K., chaju ji bang; Ch., zizhu zhi bang) as independent state. More importantly, the English translation intentionally rendered the Chinese character ken (K., kwŏn; Ch., quan) not simply as right but as sovereign right. The second half of the sentence, which literally says that Chosŏn possesses rights equal to Japan’s, thus ends up claiming that Chosŏn enjoys the same sovereign rights as does Japan. Later in the article, the Gaimushō translated the phrase dōtō no reigi (K., tongdŭng ji ye; Ch., tongdeng zhi li), which literally means equal rituals or equal courtesy, as equality and courtesy. By changing the term dōtō from an adjective to a noun, the Gaimushō reinforced the claim inherent in its translation of the first sentence.
Since the Western ministers in Tokyo could not read Chinese or Japanese texts, the Gaimushō may have hoped to mislead the English-speaking world by defining Chosŏn’s sovereignty and independence in the English translation. Both the American minister, John Bingham (1815–1900), and the British minister, Harry Parkes, accepted the provided translation and helped disseminate it in the West.⁸³ Certainly, Chosŏn’s sovereign right, or sovereignty, was not created by Japan’s subtle English translation; rather, Chosŏn always enjoyed sovereignty on its own territory, but this sovereign was subject to China’s emperorship in the Zongfan world.⁸⁴ It was not until 1882, when Chosŏn signed a treaty with the United States, that its sovereign right was explicitly defined for the first time in both Chinese and English. In 1876, neither Beijing nor Hansŏng foresaw the problems caused by the English translation of the treaty. Japan believed that it had successfully resolved the issue of Chosŏn’s status through the treaty and that it had prevailed over Beijing in the debate on the topic. In his final report to the Gaimushō on his mission to Beijing, Mori was self-congratulatory: Suffice it to say, he claimed, that the Zongli Yamen has been convinced by my argument…. The only objective of the debate was to cut off the Sino-Korean relationship, which I have achieved.⁸⁵ Yet he would soon realize that he had been too optimistic.
Commodore Robert W. Shufeldt of the US Navy returned to East Asia in March 1880 in hopes of negotiating a treaty with Chosŏn. During the intervening four years, Chosŏn had dispatched only an envoy of amity (K., Susin sa) to Japan in 1876 in observance of conventions, whereas it continued to send annual tributary
emissaries to Beijing. Chosŏn believed that it had restored the pre-1876 order that was maintained by the policy of serving the great in its relations with China and that of communicating with a neighboring country vis-à-vis Japan. The arrival of Shufeldt in the early 1880s created a stir in the hermit nation and became a test of the trilateral relations between Chosŏn, Japan, and China.
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5SUPERVISINGCHOSŎNQing China’s Patriarchal Role in Chosŏn, 1877–84In the late 1870s and early 1880s, with China’s vigorous encouragement, Chosŏn launched reforms to fortify itself domestically. However, the reform programscaused a backlash, prompting student petitions and eventually a bloody mutiny. China sent troops to Chosŏn in 1882 to help the Korean court suppress themutiny, and it subsequently became deeply enmeshed in Chosŏn’s domestic and foreign affairs. In the course of these events, China availed itself of its superiorposition to introduce Chosŏn into the family of nations, in particular through the negotiation of the Korean-American treaty in 1882. From the perspective of Japanand the Western states, China’s involvement represented a fundamental change in China’s traditional policy toward Korea, and it triggered a wave of intense polit-ical and diplomatic struggles between the various powers on the peninsula. To meet these new challenges, China and Chosŏn signed several commercial agree-ments to maintain and adjust their relations.A pair of coexisting and correlated dual diplomatic networks developed between China and Chosŏn. The first dual network encompassed the Sino-Korean Zong-fan system, on the one hand, and the newly imported treaty system that connected China, Chosŏn, and their treaty counterparts, on the other. This network, whichI call the outer dual network, operated between the politico-cultural Chinese empire and the world beyond the empire, and both China and Chosŏn had to dealindependently with the treaty aspects of this network. The second dual network, which I call the inner network, functioned within the Chinese empire and com-prised, first, the conventional system of court-to-court interactions between the imperial court in Beijing and the royal court in Hansŏng, and, second, the newlyfounded state-to-state system between China and Chosŏn, in which the latter was theoretically equal to the former according to international law. Through theouter and inner dual networks, both China and Chosŏn modified and revised their policies toward each other.Opening Chosŏn to the West: China and the Korean-American NegotiationsFrom Tokyo to Pusan and Tianjin: The Shufeldt-Li Agreement of 1880By the late 1870s, China was aware of the grave challenges Chosŏn was facing from other countries, and it began to persuade Chosŏn to open its doors by negoti-ating treaties with Western states. Since Zongfan conventions prevented both the Zongli Yamen and the Ministry of Rites from making such a request of an outerfan,LiHongzhangpersonallytookonthetaskofcajolingChosŏn.LiusedhispersonalcorrespondencewiththeKoreanministerYiYu-wŏn,mentionedinthepreviouschapter,forthispurpose,butYiwasnotenthusiasticaboutcontactingtheWestern“barbarians.”¹InMarch1880thenavycommanderRobertShufeldtarrivedinNagasakiwiththeUSSTiconderoga.TheAmericanministerJohnBinghamapproachedtheJapaneseforeignminister,InoueKaoru(1835–1915),toaskforJapan’sgoodofficesinintroducingShufeldttoChosŏn.²InouewasworriedthatJapan’sactingasago-betweenmightharmitsfragilerelationswithChosŏn,buthe decided to send a letter from Shufeldt to the Korean court through the Japanese consul at Pusan, Kondō Masuki (1840–92), and the chargé d’affaires at Han-sŏng, Hanabusa Yoshimoto (1842–1917). Expecting to have further contact with the Koreans, Shufeldt went to Pusan, but he soon received his unopened letterback.Chosŏn’srebuffincurredBingham’swrathandendedJapan’sroleasmediator.³While Shufeldt was waiting in Nagasaki, the Chinese consul in the city, Yu Qiong, decided that it would be a good idea to grant the United States entrance intoChosŏn in order to check Russia, which was on the brink of war with China following the Ili incident on China’s northwestern frontier in Xinjiang. Yu contacted
the Chinese minister in Tokyo, He Ruzhang (1838–91), who immediately forwarded the news to the Zongli Yamen and Li Hongzhang. Li quickly decided to inviteShufeldt to Tianjin, and the latter happily accepted the invitation. After a meeting with Li in August, Shufeldt reported that Li had promised “he would use hisinfluence with the Government of Corea to accede to the friendly request” made by Shufeldt “in behalf of the Government of the United States to open negoti-ationswithaviewtosuchatreaty[withKorea].”⁴Undertheagreement,ShufeldtreturnedtotheUnitedStatestosecuremoresupportfromtheDepartmentofState, while Li turned his attention to coaxing Chosŏn to allow the United States in.Behind a Cloak: Preparations for Chosŏn’s Training Program in TianjinThe ruling house of Chosŏn was not blind to the encroaching West. In 1879 the Korean emissary Yi Yong-suk (1818–?) informed the Chinese official You Zhikai(1816–99) at Yongping near Beijing that Chosŏn hoped to dispatch trainees to Tianjin to obtain advanced military and industrial skills, following the “precedent offoreign countries sending students to China for learning.” Yi asked You to take the proposal to Li Hongzhang. Li heartily endorsed the plan. In a confidential lettertoYou,whichwasfinallyforwardedtothekingviaYi,LisuggestedthatChosŏnshouldsubmitadetailedproposaltotheMinistryofRitesinBeijing.⁵Shortlythereafter the king sent Pyŏn Wŏn-kyu (1837–96) as an emissary to Beijing to discuss the plan, while the Chinese court put Li in charge of the training programthatwouldencourageChosŏn“tofollowthemainstreamoftheworld.”⁶In his summer office in Tianjin, Li underscored to Pyŏn that the best survival strategy for Chosŏn was “to trade with the Westerners.” With Li’s support, Pyŏnand several Chinese officials drafted an outline of the training program that broke several two-hundred-year-old Zongfan conventions. In addition to granting theKorean trainees, interpreters, and superintendents the special right to visit Tianjin via the maritime route, which had not happened since 1637, the outline requiredall program members to obtain passes from the office of the Beiyang superintendent, which would be filed at the Ministry of Rites. Given that this would be thefirst time Korean visitors had resided in a Chinese city outside Beijing since at least 1644, the outline prescribed that the trainees must “obey the Chinese rulesandconventions”(Ch.,zunshouZhongguoguiju);otherwisetheywouldbesentbytheChineseofficialstotheirKoreansuperintendentsforpunishmentaccordingto Korean regulations. In this case, then, China endowed the Korean side with a right similar to the consular jurisdiction that it had conferred on its Western treatypartners.The outline also required the king to send official correspondence on military training, weapon procurement, and other military affairs to both the Ministry ofRites and the Beiyang superintendent. The position of the Beiyang superintendent, as a subordinate official under the Zongli Yamen, was a secondary post held bythe governor-general of Zhili, a post occupied almost exclusively by Li until 1894. According to Zongfan regulations, the superintendent should not be involved inZongfan affairs with Chosŏn. However, since Li’s meeting with Mori in 1876, this rule had been eclipsed by the growth of Li’s authority—itself a result of theZongli Yamen’s ambiguous definition of the Sino-Korean relationship, on the one hand, and the silence of the Ministry of Rites on affairs beyond the conventionalcourt-to-court track, on the other. In a confidential memorial in February 1881 the Zongli Yamen pointed out that “it is extremely urgent for Chosŏn to conductdiplomacy[Ch.,waijiao]withothercountries”andrequestedthattheQingcourtmakechangestooldregulationsinordertoendowtheBeiyangsuperintendentwithgreaterprivileges.⁷Withtheemperor’sendorsement,thesuperintendentgainedtherighttocommunicatedirectlywith—ratherthansimplyreceivenotesfrom—the king on issues concerning not only the training program but also foreign affairs. The superintendent became the de jure mentor for Chosŏn’s self-strengthening program. The king responded favorably, indicating to Li a strong intention of opening Chosŏn to Western countries and wanting to commission LitomakethefirstmovetowardinitiatingtreatynegotiationswiththeUnitedStates.⁸
Modernity versus Heresy: China’s Prescriptions and Korean ResistanceAs the king was deciding to open up his country to foreigners, Chosŏn was caught in a series of dramatic political events that had strong ripple effects. The se-quence of events was initiated by Chinese diplomats in Japan, who forwarded their advice regarding Chosŏn’s policy to the king through the Korean envoy ofamity to Japan, Kim Hong-jip (1842–96). When Kim visited Tokyo in late 1880, the Chinese minister, He Ruzhang, and the counselor of the Chinese legation,Huang Zunxian, had intensive talks with him. Their conversations took place in the Zongfan context, in which each party identified the other as a member of the“samefamily”(Ch.,yijia)andsawChosŏnasnodifferentfroman“innersubordinate”ofChina.ThetwoChinesediplomatstriedtoconvinceKimthatChosŏnshould abandon its parochialism and sign treaties with Western countries, beginning with the United States, in order to prevent a Russian onslaught. Kim agreedwith the two officials, as did his Japanese counterparts at the Gaimushō.BeforeKimleftTokyo,Huanggavehimatreatiseentitled“AStrategyforChosŏn”(Ch.,Chaoxiancelue),inwhichHuangarguedthatChosŏnshouldchecktheRussianthreatby“havingintimaterelationswithChina,associatingwithJapan,andallyingwiththeUnitedStates”(Ch.,qinZhongguo,jieRiben,lianMeiguo).Thetreatise prescribed strategies aimed at ameliorating Chosŏn’s perilous situation and encouraged it to launch a self-strengthening program. Chosŏn, Huang pro-posed, should ask China to allow its emissaries to stay in Beijing permanently, dispatch emissaries to reside in Tokyo and Washington, propose to expand tradeat Fenghuang City, send trainees and students to China for training in military skills and Western languages, and invite Westerners to assist Chosŏn with educa-tional reforms. In short, Chosŏn should immediately join the family of nations to bolster its diplomatic, military, and economic power. In order to present Chosŏntotheworldassoonaspossible,HuangevensuggestedthattheKoreanarmyandnavyforces“useChina’sdragonflagasthenationalflag.”⁹Encouraged by Huang’s passionate words, the king sent a secret commissioner to Tokyo to visit Huang and He Ruzhang with private letters that signaled hisintention of negotiating a treaty with the United States. With Chosŏn’s opening in sight, He composed a treatise, “On Managing Chosŏn’s Diplomacy” (Ch.,ZhuchiChaoxianwaijiaoyi),fortheconsiderationofBeijingandLiHongzhang.TheministerelaboratedonhisandHuang’sideasbylayingoutthreepoliciesinorder of priority. The top-choice policy, which he admitted would be difficult to put into practice right away, was to follow the example of Mongolia and Tibet bydispatchingan“imperialresident”(Ch.,banshidachen)toresidepermanentlyinChosŏn—aplacethathadbeen“almostnodifferentfromtheinnerprefecturesandcounties”(Ch.,jiwuyineidijunxian)duringtheQianlongperiod—andtomanageits“domesticpoliticsandforeigntreaties”(Ch.,neiguozhizhengzhi,waiguozhitiaoyue).ThisproposalmayhaveresembledtheEuropeanconceptofcolonialism,butitrepresentedHe’sunderstandingoftheZongfansystem,andthisper-ception obtained legitimacy from the Qing’s management of Mongolia and Tibet. The second potential policy was to dispatch a skilled official to Chosŏn to assistit in negotiating treaties with other countries. This policy, He said, was the most practical one, as it could demonstrate Chosŏn’s status as China’s subordinateand avoid possible problems caused by Chosŏn’s self-rule. Finally, the third-priority policy involved the Chinese court ordering the king to sign treaties with othercountriesandspecifyinginthefirstarticleofeachtreatythatChosŏnwasconcludingthetreatyonChina’sorders.¹⁰Ashistoryunfolded,Beijingwouldeventuallyendorse the second and third proposals.The king was confident about the Chinese proposals and enthusiastically launched reforms after Pyŏn Wŏn-kyu returned home from Tianjin with the outline ofthe training program. On January 19, 1881, Chosŏn established the Office for Managing State Affairs (K., T’ongni kimu amun) in imitation of China’s ZongliYamen, laying the institutional cornerstone for the modernization of the country. This institution comprised twelve departments, the first among them being theDepartmentofServingtheGreat(K.,Sadaesa).¹¹Atthesametime,thekingappointedtwelveofficialsasinspectorsofDongnaePrefecture(K.,Dongnaebuamhaengŏsa)tovisitJapanandobserveJapanesepolitics,society,foreignrelations,andtrade.Themission,laterknownas“theinspectionmissionofthecourt
officials”(K.,Chosasich’aldan)or“thegentlemen’ssightinggroup”(K.,Sinsayuramdan)hadatotalofsixty-fourmembers.ItvisitedNagasaki,Osaka,Kyoto,Kobe, Yokohama, and Tokyo between May and October 1881 and was granted audiences with senior Japanese officials. In October, when another mission headedby Cho Pyŏng-ho (1847–1910) and Yi Cho-yŏn (1843–84) as envoys of amity arrived in Japan for negotiations over duty tariffs, the inspection mission returned toHansŏng, submitting to the king sixty-four reports and seventeen additional memorandums. The officials expressed their belief that bringing Chosŏn into themodernworldandintoallianceswithothercountriesofferedthebestwayforthecountrytosurvivethegrowingJapanesethreat.¹²Theirconclusionsjustifiedtheking’s policy of reforms and opening up.The domestic situation, however, was not conducive to the realization of officials’ strategic goals. Before the mission returned home, the king had arrested sev-eral officials headed by An Ki-yŏng (1819–81) of the Taewŏn’gun clan and charged them with planning a coup. Simultaneously, a nationwide protest among theliterati against the king’s reforms became more dramatic and provocative. In late 1880 some officials asked the king to reject Huang Zunxian’s ideas, which theybelievedwentagainstthedoctrinesofConfucianism.¹³InMarch1881aConfucianstudentfromKyŏngsang,YiMan-son,submittedapetitioncosignedbytenthousand fellow students, calling on the king to burn Huang’s treatise and to reaffirm Confucianism. At court, the official Hwang Chae-hyŏn argued that the kingshould “reject heretical thought” by publicly burning not only Huang’s treatise but all books and newspapers on international law and foreign history and geog-raphy. In order to sidestep the literati’s moral charges, the king issued a “decree of antiheresy” that endorsed the defense of Confucianism and rejected hereticalideas.¹⁴YetthisactionseemedonlytoencouragemorestudentstotraveltoHansŏngtosubmitpetitions.The literati protest reached its zenith in late August with the petitions of two students, Hong Chae-hak and Sin Sŏp. Besides appealing to the king to abolish theOffice for Managing State Affairs and to restore old institutions, Hong accused the king of having taken no measures to “defend correct teaching and reject het-erodoxy”(K.,wijŏngch’ŏksa).Sin,forhispart,depictedLiHongzhang’sletterstoYiYu-wŏnandHuang’streatiseaselementsofthesameintrigueagainstChosŏn.¹⁵InearlySeptemberHongwasbeheadedfor“offendingthesovereign,”andYiYu-wŏnwasexiled.Theprotestsdeclined.ThekingandtheMinclan,along with their program of reaching out, survived the turmoil and prevailed over other political cliques in fierce partisan struggles.Amid the turbulence, in late July the king welcomed two imperial envoys from Beijing, who brought an edict about the death of Empress Dowager Cian. Themonarch held a grand ceremony at the palace, where he performed rituals to the imperial documents. Afterward, he paid a visit to the envoys at their residenceandthensentthemoffinperson.TheconversationsbetweenthekingandtheenvoysdidnottouchonChosŏn’sdomesticorforeignaffairs.¹⁶TheZongfanmechanism continued to function smoothly, reaffirming its rituals, the autonomous right and dignity of the sovereign of Chosŏn, and the nature of the Zongfanrelationship.Secret Diplomacy: Chosŏn’s Commissioning of China to Negotiate with the United StatesOnNovember18,1881,theemissaryofsuperintendingtheselectedtrainees(K.,Yŏngsŏnsa),KimYun-sik(1835–1922),leftHansŏngforChina,bringingwithhimstudents who were to learn military skills and Western languages under the auspices of the new training program. Although the mission was unlike any that hadgonetoChinabefore,itmostlyactedlikeaconventionaltributaryone,withKimtreatedasastandardtributaryemissaryintermsofhistravelingexpenses.¹⁷Notmany young Koreans wanted to study in China: four days before his departure, Kim was still busy recruiting trainees. Of the more than thirty young men he inter-viewed, only six volunteered to go. Not until early December, when Kim reached Ŭiju, did he finally have the thirty-eight trainees China had suggested. Like thetributary missions in the eighteenth century, Kim’s spent fifty days covering more than 950 miles from Hansŏng to Beijing via the overland route (the maritimeroute, which they had planned to take with Beijing’s special approval, was not feasible in winter). The mission arrived in Beijing on January 6, 1882, and Kim
submittedtheking’snotestotheMinistryofRitesafterthegroupwaslodgedattheForeignEmissaries’CommonAccommodations.¹⁸Leaving his mission in Beijing, Kim visited Li Hongzhang at Baoding with a confidential memorandum, which asked Li to assume, in secret, the task of negoti-atingChosŏn’streatywiththeUnitedStates;thistreatywasthentoserveasaprototypeforsubsequenttreatieswithothercountries.¹⁹EmphasizingthatwhathedidforChosŏnwas“legitimateandrighteous”(Ch.,mingzhengyishun),asKim,too,believed,LigaveKimapamphletaboutChosŏn’spotentialtreatieswithWesterncountriesthathadbeendraftedbyMaJianzhong(1845–1900),aprotégéofLi’swhohadbeeneducatedinFrance.²⁰LifurtherdiscussedwithKimkeyis-sues regarding Chosŏn’s reforms, such as regulating tariffs, setting up a system of maritime customs and hiring Western staff to manage it, designing a nationalflag for Chosŏn for maritime identification, allowing the Japanese minister to reside in Hansŏng, and continuing to use the king’s invested rank in his contactswith the Japanese sovereign. The most urgent goal of the two sides, then, was to negotiate and conclude a treaty with the United States rather than to teach theKorean trainees in China.Within the Zongfan context, the Korean side abandoned its right of negotiation from the beginning. In late January, Beijing granted Li control over Chosŏn’streatynegotiationswiththeUnitedStatesinorderto“maintainthefanandshuguoandconsolidateChina’sborder.”²¹LialsoreceivedaletterfromShufeldt,whohad returned to China in June 1881 and waited in Tianjin for news from the Korean side. Shufeldt had been appointed by Washington as a special envoy to ChosŏntopursueatreatyofamityaimedataddressingtheissueofAmericanshipwrecksontheKoreancoast.²²AfterthemeetingwithKim,LiinvitedShufeldttoBaodingto discuss the details of the forthcoming treaty negotiations, but Shufeldt decided first to visit the American legation in Beijing to solicit advice from the chargéd’affaires, Chester Holcombe (1842–1912).Unlike Shufeldt, Holcombe was aware of the critical devolution of Beijing’s negotiating power to Li and doubted it would be possible to persuade Chosŏn toconclude a treaty without the involvement of the central government in Beijing because Li was “only a provincial officer and not a member of the Central Govern-ment.” To seek clarity on this question, Holcombe visited the Zongli Yamen, where he was informed that Prince Gong had transferred responsibility for Koreanforeign affairs from the Ministry of Rites to the Zongli Yamen in 1881, which meant that Li as a subordinate of the Yamen was authorized to deal with Korean af-fairs. Holcombe also learned that China had advised Chosŏn to conclude a treaty with the United States because China believed that “sooner or later the auton-omy of Corea would be threatened by the aggressions of Russia and/or Japan, and that this serious danger could be best met by bringing the peninsular Kingdominto the family of nations.” Although the Yamen confirmed to him that China was ready “to aid the United States in any proper way to open friendly and commer-cial relations with Corea,” Holcombe was worried that Beijing might “see fit to assume an entirely different attitude and policy in this business.” His distrustseemstohaveaffectedShufeldt,whorepliedtoLithathepreferredtokeeptheprospectivetreatynegotiationssecretbynotvisitingBaoding.²³For his part, after his meetings with Li at Baoding, Kim visited Tianjin for a week, sending five students to the Navy and Torpedo School for English-languagetraining. China decided to cover the Korean students’ meals and other costs because the students were also “loyal children of the Heavenly Dynasty.” It was with-in this conventional politico-cultural context of the Chinese empire that Chinese officials enthusiastically engaged in Chosŏn’s program of building its strengthand reaching out to the West. Before he could place additional students in schools, Kim received confidential orders from the king to consult with Li over treatynegotiations with the United States. Kim immediately returned to Baoding, where he and Li discussed initiating negotiations with Shufeldt in order to prevent himfrom sailing directly for Chosŏn. This plan required a Korean envoy plenipotentiary. Given the limited time, Li proposed that Kim follow the king’s secret instruc-tion to adapt strategies for situations and serve as the plenipotentiary himself, but Kim declined. The only solution, then, was to quickly send a messenger to Han-sŏng to ask the king to dispatch a plenipotentiary to Tianjin. Li cautioned that the plenipotentiary should come ostensibly to supervise the Korean trainees and
keephistruemissionsecret.²⁴Opening Chosŏn’s Doors: The Sino-American Treaty NegotiationsLi Hongzhang took up the task of composing a draft treaty primarily on the basis of a model proposed by Huang Zunxian. Li suggested that the treaty should de-finetheSino-Koreanrelationshipbystatingthat“Chosŏn,beingashuguoofChina,possessestherightofzizhuastoitsdiplomaticanddomesticaffairs,andthisright shall not be challenged by other nations.” Kim endorsed this “legitimate and justifiable” statement. In a confidential report to the king, Kim revealed the truereason for his approval: the statement meant that Chosŏn could use China’s diplomatic relations with other countries for its own great benefit, and the affir-mationofitsrightofzizhuwouldpreserveChosŏn’sequalityinitscontactswithothercountries.²⁵Kim’scommentsindicatethattheuseoftermsdrawnfromtheZongfan discourse—which in the end appeared not in the Korean-American treaty but in the Sino-Korean commercial regulations signed in the same year—werenot uni-laterally imposed on Chosŏn by China in order to strengthen China’s “suzerainty” at the cost of Chosŏn’s sovereignty and independence. Rather, eachparty to the Zongfan arrangement could exploit the relationship for its own benefit.Another critical aspect of the discussion between Li and Kim focused on the prospect of granting an American right of consular jurisdiction. Huang, in his draft,suggested that Chosŏn temporarily allow American consuls to manage the affairs of American citizens in Chosŏn. Backing this idea, Li explained that “accordingto international conventions, foreigners living in treaty ports and hinterlands of a country are subject to the management of the officials of their own countriesresiding in the places of the said country. The local officials of the host country are not able to manage people of other nations due to the different laws, punish-ments, customs, and proprieties between the East and the West.” For Li and Huang, consular jurisdiction was thus merely a way of managing foreigners ratherthan a clause undermining the sovereignty of a country. Kim agreed with this view, confirming that “our humble country is not familiar with foreign situations, sotherewillbemanyproblemsevenifourcountrycouldmanageforeignersbyitself.”²⁶ThetwosidesthusdecidedtogranttheUnitedStatestherightofconsularjurisdiction, even though Shufeldt had not asked for this right. Because the Korean-American treaty was a prototype for future treaties between Chosŏn and othercountries, China gained this right too, through the commercial regulations examined later in this chapter. This episode calls into question the assumption that theWestern powers always obtained extraterritoriality in East Asia by force. It further casts doubt on the notion that extraterritoriality can be uniformly regarded as ahallmarkofimperialism,ashistoricalnarrativesofEastAsiancountrieshavetypicallycharged.²⁷After composing a draft treaty with Li, Kim returned to Tianjin, where a special envoy of the king, Yi Ŭng-jun, was waiting for him with a sovereign letter statingthat the dispatch of a plenipotentiary was impossible and that it would be better for the Americans to travel to Chosŏn for further communication. When Kimasked the Chinese chief of the Tianjin Customs, Zhou Fu (1837–1921), to forward the message to Li, Zhou repeated the suggestion that Kim himself act as theplenipotentiary. Kim again refused, believing it would be better for China to negotiate on behalf of his country. Zhou also questioned the phrase “independenceandhalf-autonomy”(Ch.,dulibanzhu)thatappearedinaKoreannoteexplainingthetermzizhuintheKorean-JapaneseTreatyof1876.Zhouwarnedthatthestate-ment, which seemed to claim much greater independence than was foreseen by Kim and Li, was a “Japanese plot” and could only damage Chosŏn’s interests. Inresponse,KimconfirmedthatChosŏnwouldnotclaimtobe“independentandautonomous”(K.,chajont’ŭknip)initstreatywiththeUnitedStates.²⁸Soon thereafter, the treaty negotiations between Li Hongzhang and Shufeldt opened. Whether the treaty should include a clause defining Chosŏn as China’sshuguobecamethemostcontroversialissue.ThefirstarticleofLi’sdraft,asLiandKimhaddiscussed,statedthat“ChosŏnisChina’sshubangandalwaysenjoystherightofzizhuinitsdomesticandforeignaffairs.”²⁹Shufeldtobjectedtothisstatement,sothetwosidesdrewupadrafttreatywithfifteenarticles,leavingthefirst one blank. According to the Sino-Korean plan, if it proved impossible to include the statement in the final version of the treaty, Chosŏn would send a special
notetotheUSgovernmenttoarticulateitsstatusasChina’sshuguo.KimdidnotholdanyconversationswithShufeldt,nordidheparticipateinthenegotiations.On April 21, 1882, Li gave Kim and Yi Ŭng-jun a copy of the draft treaty and instructed Yi to return to Chosŏn immediately from Tianjin by a Chinese steamer. AtKim’s request, Li instructed Ma Jianzhong, who was “very skilled in international law,” to accompany Shufeldt to Inch’ŏn to ensure that everything would gosmoothly. In the meantime, two Korean officials, Ŏ Yun-jung (1848–96) and Yi Cho-yŏn, left Hansŏng for Tianjin as officials of examination and selection (K.,kosŏnkwan),notastheplenipotentiariesthatLi,Kim,andShufeldtdesperatelywanted.On May 8 Ma Jianzhong and the Chinese admiral Ding Ruchang (1836–95) arrived at Inch’ŏn, where Ma met with the Japanese minister, Hanabusa Yoshimoto,whohadarrivedadayearlierinthehopeofinfluencingthenegotiations.Fourdayslater,ShufeldtarrivedontheUSSSwataraandnegotiatedwiththeKoreanplenipotentiaries, Kim Hong-jip and Sin Hŏn (1810–84), the latter of whom had signed the Treaty of Kanghwa in 1876. The negotiations ended on May 22 with atreaty of fourteen articles, omitting the first article about Chosŏn’s status that Li had proposed. For Chosŏn’s national flag, Ma suggested Yi Ŭng-jun’s design oftheTaijiandeighttrigramsasthebasicmodel.³⁰AfterShufeldtleftforShanghaiwithacopyofthetreaty,MaremainedinInch’ŏntohelpChosŏnnegotiatetreatieswithBritainandotherstates.³¹Followingthemiddlecourse,asdeterminedbyLi,Ma,andKim,thekingsentadispatchthatMahaddraftedtotheUSpresident Chester Arthur on May 29, claiming that “Corea is a tributary of China, but in regard to both internal administration and foreign intercourse it enjoyscompleteindependence.”³²Thekingsentthesameannouncementtothesovereignsofothertreatycountries,includingBritain(June6,1882),Germany(Novem-ber 26, 1883), Italy (June 26, 1884), Russia (July 7, 1884), and France (June 4, 1886). As the hermit nation entered the family of nations, its de jure independent sta-tusasasovereignstateintermsofinternationallawanditsdefactoanddejuredependentstatusasasubordinateofChinainaccordancewithZongfanprin-ciples became one of the most controversial and perplexing issues for Western states in East Asia. The new situation also complicated Sino-Korean relations asChosŏn moved toward modifying its relations with China.Protecting Chosŏn as the Patriarch: The Chinese Military Intervention in 1882Challenges from Within: The King’s Requests for ChangeBy the time Chosŏn concluded its treaty with the United States, more than one-third of the Korean trainees in Tianjin had returned home. The training programhad provided cover for Korean-American treaty negotiations and a new channel of communication outside the Zongfan mechanism, but it was never indepen-dently a focus for either the Chinese or the Korean side. Ŏ Yun-jung and Yi Cho-yŏn, the two Korean officials who had nominally been sent to evaluate the traineesin Tianjin, also ignored the training program in order to focus on their true diplomatic mission. In May 1882 Ŏ and Yi submitted four detailed requests from theking to the acting Beiyang superintendent, Zhang Shusheng (1824–84), who had assumed Li Hongzhang’s position when Li returned to his hometown in Anhuifor one hundred days of mourning for his mother.The first request proposed that the two countries negotiate a treaty in keeping with the new international situation. The second recommended that the two sidesclose the markets on the northeastern border of Manchuria in order to prevent Russian interference. The third request offered to replace Chosŏn’s periodic dis-patch of emissaries to Beijing with representatives who would reside in the capital permanently, receiving imperial edicts and calendars and making China’s dis-patch of imperial envoys to Chosŏn unnecessary. The fourth request further specified that the Korean emissaries residing in Beijing would be responsible for theirowntravelexpensesandmeals,effectivelymakingthemnodifferentfromtheministersofothercountries.³³TheseboldrequestsreflectedHuangZunxian’sblue-print for Korea’s reforms as laid out in his “A Strategy for Chosŏn” in late 1880, and they were aimed at replacing certain Zongfan conventions with Western
diplomatic principles as practiced between sovereign states.Concluding a treaty with China was Chosŏn’s primary goal. For that purpose, Ŏ discussed with Zhou Fu key issues such as the posting of permanent emis-sariesinBeijing,thegrantingofmost-favored-nationstatustoChina,andthedefinitionofChosŏn’sstatusasChina’sshuguointhetreaty.Thetwosidesagreedthat China’s foreign affairs vis-à-vis Chosŏn would be managed by the Zongli Yamen and the Beiyang superintendent, whereas bilateral tributary affairs would re-main under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Rites. This discussion set the tone for the treaty. In June 1882 Ŏ arrived in Beijing, where he was lodged at the For-eign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations by the Ministry of Rites. The ministry, following Zongfan conventions, presented Ŏ with silver, sheep, wine, andmeals. In the meantime, Yi Ŭng-jun, another special emissary of the king, arrived in Beijing with a note expressing the king’s sincere gratitude to the emperor andthe“centraldynasty”forprotectingthe“smallcountry”andthefaninthenegotiationswiththeUnitedStates.YiwasalsolodgedattheCommonAccommo-dations and showered with silver, sheep, wine, and meals.Although granting the king’s requests would weaken the role of the Ministry of Rites, the cases of Ryukyu, Burma, and Vietnam—which by 1882 had been orwere being separated from the Sinocentric realm and colonized by other states—had made the ministry realize that many issues lay beyond the capacity of theZongfan mechanism to address effectively. The ministry passed the king’s requests to the emperor and suggested that he instruct all officials familiar with foreignaffairs, especially Li Hongzhang, to participate in a confidential discussion on the matter. Baoting (1840–90), a Manchu minister of the ministry, presented amemorial to the emperor to detail the ministry’s preferences.AccordingtoBaoting,Chosŏn,thefirstshuguoof“foreignbarbarians”thathadsubordinateditselftotheGreatQingduringtheHongtaijiperiod,wasfarmoreimportantthanthe“countriesintheSouthSea”(Ch.,Nanyangzhuguo,SoutheastAsia).AfterJapan’sinvasionofRyukyu,Britain’sofBurma,andFrance’sofViet-nam, all of which China failed to resist, Chosŏn’s respect for China had diminished, but it had not betrayed China because of Chosŏn’s weakness and still re-spected China’s virtues.BaotingarguedthatrefusingtolettheshuguotradeatChina’streatyportsandpursuesharedcommercialinterestswithother“barbariansfromafar”(Ch.,yuanyi)wouldbeunfairtoChosŏnandmightpushittotheJapaneseside.ButpermittingChosŏn’semissariestoresideinBeijingpermanentlywouldputChosŏnon an equal footing with other countries with representatives in China and might make it as aggressive as the “British barbarians” had become. Baoting urged theMinistry of Rites to retain its right to administer Chosŏn but to continue to forward matters concerning trade to the Zongli Yamen. Even if Korean emissaries werepermitted to reside permanently in Beijing, China should not allow Chosŏn to build a legation in the city. Instead, the emissaries should be lodged at the Com-mon Accommodations to emphasize that China and Chosŏn remained members of the same family. Baoting also proposed that Beijing use Chosŏn’s intention ofexploiting China’s power to check other countries as an opportunity to dispatch thousands of soldiers to Chosŏn to garrison its military forts in order to “protectitandplaceitunderChina’sinfluence”(Ch.,yuhubizhizhongyukongzhizhidao).³⁴Baoting’s opinions had a strong impact on the Qing court’s decision. The court promptly issued an edict declining Chosŏn’s request to place permanent emis-sariesinBeijingbecauseof“variouspotentialinconveniences”andthefactthat“Chosŏnhasbeenafanforalongtime,andallritualshaveregulations.”Italsodecided that the Zongli Yamen should be in charge of China’s trade affairs with Chosŏn and the Ministry of Rites should continue to manage tributary affairs.Nevertheless,thecourtagreedtomakechangestosomeconventionsandinstructedtheBeiyangsuperintendenttonegotiateacommercialtreatywithChosŏn.³⁵This imperial order further augmented the superintendent’s importance as the most powerful agent of Sino-Korean contacts beyond the court-to-court tributarytrack. Two weeks later, Baoting submitted another memorial to the emperor to argue that China should help Chosŏn strengthen its maritime defenses. To
underlineChosŏn’scriticalposition,BaotingwentasfarastoclaimthatChina“wouldratherloseYunnanandGuizhouthanChosŏn”(Ch.,jishiYunGui,bukeshiChaoxian).TheemperorcommentedthatthecomparisonbetweenYunnanandGuizhouProvincesandChosŏnwasinappropriate,butheshowedseriouscon-cernoverthesecurityofChina’sshuguo.³⁶Justifying China’s Status as the Patriarch: The Dispatch of Chinese Troops to ChosŏnWhile Chosŏn was successfully persuading China to sign a treaty with it, back home it was teetering on the brink of political upheaval. On July 23, 1882, a mutiny,known as the Imo incident, broke out in Hansŏng over the unfair distribution of rations of rice among troops after a severe drought. Hundreds of soldiers of amilitary unit called Muwiyŏng attacked the Japanese legation, killing several Japanese, including Lieutenant Horimoto Reizō, who had been teaching Chosŏn’sSpecial Skills Army (K., Pyŏlgi gun) since 1881. After occupying the palace, the rebels held the king captive and killed several high-ranking officials who had beenprominent pillars of Queen Min’s clan in the partisan struggles at the court. The king’s father, the Taewŏn’gun, seized the opportunity to restore his regency andretaliatedagainstthequeen’sclanbyannouncingthatthequeenwasdead.Infact,shehadescapedthecapitalandhadhiddeninCh’ungjuPrefecture.³⁷TheJapa-nese chargé d’affaires, Hanabusa Yoshimoto, fled to Inch’ŏn, where he boarded a British steamer to Nagasaki and telegraphed news of the uprising to Tokyo.Tokyo instructed Hanabusa to return to Inch’ŏn with navy forces to seek justice and compensation for the killings of the Japanese. The Chinese minister inTokyo, Li Shuchang (1837–96), telegraphed Beijing, likewise to request the immediate dispatch of troops to Chosŏn. In Beijing the German minister, Max Augustvon Brandt, and the inspector general of the imperial customs, Robert Hart (1835–1911), informed the Zongli Yamen about the mutiny on August 2 and 3, at thesame time that copies of the German-Korean and British-Korean treaties, along with the Korean king’s dispatches to the German and British sovereigns claimingChosŏn’sstatusasChina’sshuguo,reachedtheZongliYamen.³⁸Withindays,BeijingwasinfullalarmoverthesituationinKorea.When Zhang Shusheng, who commanded the Beiyang Navy in Tianjin, instructed General Wu Changqing (1829–84) to be ready for military action, he was influ-enced in large part by the Korean officials Kim Yun-sik and Ŏ Yun-jung, who were in Tianjin at the time. As fervent proponents of the king’s policy of opening up,Kim and Ŏ linked the mutiny with the aborted coup of the previous year, which had been linked to the Taewŏn’gun. They asked Zhang to send warships and sol-diers to suppress the uprising and to check Japanese intrigue. Accusing the Taewŏn’gun of plotting against the king, Kim even secretly proposed to kill theTaewŏn’gunwhentheChinesetroopsoccupiedHansŏnginorderto“erasethebaneofthecountry.”³⁹Handicappedbythelimitedchannelsofcommunicationand intelligence gathering, China was so unfamiliar with Chosŏn’s domestic situation that Zhang and his Chinese colleagues became dependent on Kim’s andŎ’s biased information. The Chinese concluded that the Taewŏn’gun would dethrone the king if China failed to take action in time.Beijing decided to exercise its patriarchal authority immediately. The Guangxu emperor instructed the Zongli Yamen and Zhang to send forces to Chosŏn underthe leadership of Ma Jianzhong and Ding Ruchang to “cherish the small country,” halt the “Japanese plot,” and “protect the Japanese people along the samelines.” The military action acquired legitimacy from the rationales of the Zongfan arrangement. Zhang assembled thirteen warships and merchant ships underAdmiral Ding’s command and summoned four thousand soldiers, placing them under General Wu’s command. Zhang also ordered Kim and Ŏ to return toChosŏn together with the Chinese troops to serve as their guides. Meanwhile, Ma conducted a reconnaissance mission in Inch’ŏn that included several long con-versations with Ŏ. Ŏ’s personal resentment of the Taewŏn’gun deeply influenced Ma’s judgment on the matter in his report to Zhang, confirming the Chineseside’s earlier evaluation of the Korean situation. General Wu soon left Tianjin for Yantai, from where he would continue to Chosŏn with his fleet and officers, in-cluding the twenty-four-year-old Yuan Shikai. During the trip to Chosŏn, Yuan told Kim that he wanted to lead hundreds of warriors to seize Hansŏng, which im-pressedKimconsiderably.⁴⁰YuanwouldlaterresideinChosŏnformorethanadecadeandsignificantlyshapethefutureofthecountry.
Japan, too, considered its action of sending troops to Chosŏn legal and legitimate. Inoue Kaoru informed the foreign ministers in Tokyo that Japan’s operationwas “completely based upon pacifism,” and the aim of its warships and troops was to protect the Japanese embassy and citizens. The deputy foreign minister,Yoshida Kyonari (1845–91), declined Li Shuchang’s offer of China’s mediation. Very soon Inoue was giving Hanabusa detailed instructions on military operationsandthetermsofcompensation,allofwhichwereaimedatdealingwiththesituationunilaterallyandbyforce,ratherthanthroughChinaorothercountries.⁴¹Asaresult, the ideological conflict between China and Japan regarding Chosŏn’s status evolved into a military rivalry on the peninsula.ForChina,sendingtroopstoitsshuguowaslegitimateandnecessary.AstheZongliYamenputittoMoriin1876,Chinahadlongbeforeassumedresponsibilityfor helping Chosŏn “solve its difficulties, resolve its disputes, and secure its safety and security.” Reviewing this point in his notes to Yoshida, Li Shuchang statedthatChina’sactionsfollowed“theruleofcherishingthesmall.”Chinahadto“suppresstherebellionforthesakeoftheshubang”andprotecttheJapaneselega-tion in Hansŏng at the same time. The minister used a metaphor to explain the rationale behind China’s operation, describing China as the “patriarch of a family”(Ch.,jiazhang)whohadtheobligationtoinvestigatewhythebelongingsof“otherpeople”—thatis,Japan—leftatthe“housesofhissonsorbrothers”(Ch.,zidijia),namely,Chosŏn,hadbeenstolen.⁴²ThismetaphorcrystallizedChina’srolevis-à-visKoreawithintheZongfanworld.ItalsoclearlydemonstratedthatChi-na’s understanding of the mutiny and its decision to send troops to Chosŏn were not related to international law.Japan had difficulty rebuffing China’s statement and worried that the situation in Chosŏn might draw Japan into the abyss of a war with the powerful China.Having consulted with Charles Le Gendre about the Taiwan issue in 1872, the Gaimushō again resorted to its foreign intellectual resources, soliciting advice fromthe French jurist and legal adviser to the government, Gustave Boissonade (1825–1910). Bois-sonade suggested that Japan could insist that Chosŏn was an “inde-pendent country” and “only focus on negotiation with Chosŏn.” He mentioned the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and Egypt as an analogy for theSino-Korean relationship, as Mori had done in 1876. Since Britain and France had directly intervened in the mutiny of Egypt in January 1882, regardless of the Ot-tomans’attitude,JapancoulddirectlyinterveneintherebellioninChosŏnwithoutregardtoChina’sresponse.⁴³InBeijing,InspectorGeneralHartalsobelievedthat“ChinaandJapanaboutCoreawilljustbeinmuchthesamepositionasTurkeyandEnglandaboutEgypt.”⁴⁴Inthiscontext,then,thetrilateralrelationshipbetween China, Chosŏn, and Japan became analogous to the one between the Ottoman Empire, European powers represented by Britain and France, and Africancountries such as Egypt and Tunisia, reflecting the connection between the transformation of the East Asian community and the rise of new imperialism in worldhistory.⁴⁵TheEuropeancolonialexperienceinAfricathusmadeacriticalintellectualcontributiontothedevelopmentoftheJapanesecolonialenterpriseinEastAsia.The Chinese side was not blind to the emergence of the new colonial model practiced by European states. Li Shuchang, from Tokyo, suggested to the ZongliYamen that after suppressing the mutiny China should manage and supervise all of Chosŏn’s affairs in order to ensure peace in its domestic situation as well asits foreign relations. He further proposed that China should “directly abolish the kingship and convert the country into prefectures and counties [of China]” (Ch.,zhifeiqiwangerjunxianzhi),imitatingtheapproachofBritaininIndia,inordertoresolveonceandforallthethornyquestionofChosŏn’sstatusbetweenChinaandotherstates.⁴⁶China’spossibleprovincializationofKoreawasthustosomedegreeequatedtoandevenjustifiedbythecolonialismpracticedbyEuropeanpowers. Yet Li himself concluded that China would be unable to take the proposed action because it would violate China’s self-imposed rule of humanity andvirtue.⁴⁷UntiltheoutbreakoftheSino-JapaneseWarin1894,ChinaneverinitiatedanyplantocolonizeChosŏn;rather,ittriedtoprotectandsupervisethecoun-try along Zongfan lines.ArrivinginChosŏnalmostamonthaftertheuprising,GeneralWuandhisassistantswerewelcomedbytheKoreanofficials.⁴⁸TheChineseofficialsused
China’s uniquely favorable position and authority to quickly end the political turmoil by occupying the capital, capturing the Taewŏn’gun and sending him to Tian-jin in China, restoring the king and the queen, and supporting Chosŏn in signing two conventions with Japan. Afterward, the king dispatched missions to Beijingand Tokyo along conventional lines to brief the two governments on the incident. At the end of September, the Zongli Yamen distributed a note to seven foreignministersinBeijing,informingthemabouttheChineseinterventionandreemphasizingthat“Chosŏn,beingashuguoofourGreatQing,hasmaintaineditsstatusasfanforgenerations,andthecourtregardsitasaninnersubordinate[Ch.,neifu]thatsharessolidaritywithus.”⁴⁹TheYamenalsoannouncedthattheChinesetroops would remain in Chosŏn to ensure the stability and security of the country.A thornier issue for Beijing was how to deal with the Taewŏn’gun, who had been sent from Tianjin to Baoding. After reassuming the position of the Beiyang su-perintendent, Li Hongzhang endorsed Zhang Shusheng’s proposal that Beijing should detain the Taewŏn’gun in China forever and allow the king to regularlysend officials to visit him. Li cited a similar historical case from the early fourteenth century, when the Mongol court of the Yuan Dynasty exiled King Ch’unghye(r.1330–32,1339–43)ofKoryŏKoreatoGuangdongProvinceinChina.⁵⁰Initscontemporaryreactiontothepoliticalturmoilofitsouterfan,theQingcouldpointtohistoricalprecedenttoarguethatitretainedthefullylegalpowertopunishanyofficialofthefanandeventodeposetheking,ifnecessary.TheQing’sdecisionto dethrone the last king of the Lê Dynasty of Annam in 1789 was also a clear demonstration of this power. It was in this context that in 1886 Yuan Shikai enthusi-asticallyproposedtoLiHongzhangthatChinashouldreplacethekingofChosŏnwithanablemanfromtheKoreanroyalfamily.⁵¹Intheend,afterholdingtheTaewŏn’gun for three years, Beijing released him back to Chosŏn in October 1885, when Yuan Shikai was promoted to the position of an imperial resident in thecountry.China’s military intervention in 1882 was a turning point in Qing-Chosŏn relations, yet in a fundamental sense it was only a public presentation of the under-lying nature of the supreme and patriarchal power the Qing had wielded over its subordinate country since 1637. The assertion that China’s superiority was merely“titular”anditsactofdetainingtheTaewŏn’gun“inconceivable”isafarcryfromthetruth.⁵²SoistheargumentthatthroughthisparticularinterventiontheQingbecame a colonial power that inflicted Western-style imperialism on Chosŏn.Defining Chosŏn through Treaties: The Sino-Korean Regulations and Their ConsequencesComplicating the Zongfan Order: The First Sino-Korean TreatyAs Chosŏn’s troubles seemed to continue, many Chinese officials advocated establishing stronger relations with the country. On February 28, 1882, Wu Dacheng(1835–1902), an assistant official of border affairs in Jilin in Manchuria, stressed in a memorial to the emperor that China’s self-strengthening enterprise was alsoaimed at protecting Chosŏn and checking Japan and Russia. Wu argued that Beijing should dispatch imperial commissioners to Chosŏn to push the Koreans todetermine whether such harbors as Wŏnsan (known in Russian as Lazarev), a port in northeastern Korea being surveyed by Russia, could become trade ports.Chosŏn, Wu proposed, should allow the China Merchants Steamship Navigation Company (Ch., Lunchuan zhaoshang ju) to survey the coastal conditions withthe aim of establishing Chinese trade posts. In return, he suggested allowing Korean merchants to trade in Tianjin, Yantai, Shanghai, and other trade ports ofChina.WujustifiedhisproposalbyinvokingChina’sZongfanrelationswithChosŏn,the“outerfan”that“hadbeenasubordinatetoourdynastyformorethantwohundredyears.”⁵³Internationallawwasofnoconcerntohim.In order to help Chosŏn overcome the financial crisis triggered by the turmoil, China loaned the country 0.5 million taels of silver at the request of leading Ko-rean officials Cho Yŏng-ha (1845–84) and Kim Hong-jip, who negotiated the loan with their Chinese counterparts Ma Jianzhong and Tang Tingshu (1832–92).
Tang was the chief of the Kaiping Mining Administration (Ch., Kaiping kuangwu ju), a modern engineering and mining company founded by Li Hongzhang inZhili Province in 1878. According to their agreement, 0.3 million of the loan would come from the China Merchants Steamship Navigation Company and 0.2 mil-lion from the Kaiping Mining Administration. Chosŏn’s tariffs and taxes on red ginseng would serve as mortgage, and it would pay off the loan in twelve years at0.8 percent interest. In return, the two Chinese creditors supervised by Li were granted economic privileges in Chosŏn. The Navigation Company gained the rightto rent land at Chosŏn’s treaty ports for its factories and offices, while Kaiping Mining could freely prospect for minerals in the hinterland of the country. Chinesecommercial power thus quickly expanded into Chosŏn. In addition, China agreed to provide Chosŏn with military supplies for its poorly equipped troops. In Octo-ber 1882 Li Hongzhang gave Chosŏn ten twelve-pound cannons, three thousand cannonballs, 4,500 pounds of cannon powder, 1,500 pounds of bullet powder,onethousandBritishrifles,tenthousandpoundsofriflepowder,andonemillionbulletsfromtheTianjinArsenals.⁵⁴AmonthlaterChosŏn’smilitaryandindus-trialtrainingprograminTianjinendedwiththeking’srecalloftherestoftheapprentices.⁵⁵Fromthatpointon,Chosŏnhadtoinviteforeignadviserstothecoun-trytotrainitsforces,leavingthecountrymorevulnerabletooutsideinfluences.⁵⁶After China quelled the mutiny in Chosŏn in the summer of 1882, the two countries resumed their negotiations for a commercial treaty in Tianjin, with Ŏ Yun-jung representing Chosŏn and Zhou Fu and Ma Jianzhong representing China. From the beginning of their meetings in May 1882, before the rebellion, the twosidesagreedonclarifyinginthetreatythatChosŏnwasChina’sshuguowiththerightofzizhu,notanindependentcountry.AfterreviewingtheChinesedraft,enti-tled “Regulations for Maritime and Overland Trade between Chinese and Chosŏn Subjects” (Ch., Zhongguo Chaoxian shangmin shuilu maoyi zhangcheng, here-after “the Sino-Korean Regulations”), Ŏ questioned some of its elements, in particular the imbalance in consular jurisdiction enshrined in article 2 and the open-ing of Hansŏng as a trade city for Chinese merchants and the permission for Chinese merchants to trade in Chosŏn’s hinterlands that were provided by article 4.QuotingZongfanregulations,ZhouandMarespondedthatthistreatywasdifferentfromthosesignedbetweenChinaand“friendlynations”(Ch.,yuguo,suchasBritain,France,andtheUnitedStates);inthiscase,thetwocountriesshouldupholdtheir“veritableorthodoxlegitimacy”(Ch.,shizaizhimingfen)inanestab-lishedcontext.TheChineseresponsehelpsexplainwhythepartiesdecidedtocallthedocument“regulations”(Ch.,zhangcheng)ratherthana“treaty”(Ch.,tiaoyue).Intheend,ZhouandMaagreedtoalterseveraltermsbutsuccessfullyaddedapreamblespecifyingthattheregulationsappliedonlytoChina’ssubor-dinatecountriesandwereexemptfromthemost-favored-nationrule.TheKoreansideendorsedtherevisedtext.⁵⁷In a memorial to Beijing, Li Hongzhang summarized the regulations and emphasized that the preamble would “clarify and define the orthodox legitimacy” (Ch.,zhengmingdingfen)betweenChinaanditsshuguo.⁵⁸Lididnotmentionthatarticle7endowedChinesewarshipswiththerighttocruiseinChosŏn’swatersandtocast anchor at any of its ports in the interests of Chosŏn’s security. This article impinged on Chosŏn’s sovereignty, but Ŏ and his Korean colleagues, like Li andhis Chinese colleagues, regarded it as part of the favorable protection that the upper country generously offered to the subordinate country. These scholar-officials, including the French-educated Ma Jianzhong, did not interpret the regulations’ terms with reference to international law. In the aftermath of the mutiny,China was the only power that Chosŏn could trust as it wrestled with multiple crises. Yet not all Koreans applauded the treaty dictated by the Chinese. For exam-ple, Yun Ch’i-ho (1865–1945), who had served as the assistant to Ŏ Yun-jung in the “gentlemen’s sighting group” to Japan to observe Japanese politics and societyin 1881 and was visiting Tokyo when the Sino-Korean Regulations were signed, reported feeling “extremely sad” that the treaty placed Chosŏn in such an inferiorpositionvis-à-visChina.⁵⁹HavingbeenexposedtoWesternandJapanesemodernityandcivilization,youngKoreanscholarssuchasYunbelievedthatsuchun-equal arrangements between the two nations should be abandoned, signaling the rise of modern nationalism and national identity among these Korean intel-lectuals. Yun later became a leading figure in Korean modernization.
By concluding the regulations with Chosŏn, China fulfilled the majority of the requests that the king had made in the spring of 1882 (discussed earlier), chang-ing or permanently abolishing certain conventions that had been in place for 245 years, since 1637. Scholars who embrace theories of power politics prefer tointerpret the treaty as a tool by which China, the preponderant side in geopolitical terms, strengthened its control over Chosŏn, consolidating its suzerainty andeven becoming another imperialist power pursuing its own commercial interests on the peninsula. From this perspective, China brought “multilateral imperi-alism”toKoreainexactlythesamewayinwhichChinaitselfhadbeenintroducedtotheconceptbyitsWesterncounterparts.⁶⁰However,theManchucourtofChina in the 1880s still primarily followed conventional Zongfan rules and precedents in its policies toward Chosŏn, and these often contradicted internationallaw and local Chinese officials’ practical concerns over Sino-Korean contacts. For instance, on March 14, 1882, several months before the conclusion of the Sino-Korean Regulations, the Qing court learned from the Manchu general of Jilin, Ming’an (1828–1911), and his assistant Wu Dacheng that Chosŏn peasants keptcrossing the border to cultivate wilderness areas in Jilin and that this trespassing was causing serious problems. The eleven-year-old Emperor Guangxu, under thetutelage of his mentors, responded, “Regarding these poor Chosŏn peasants, in the eyes of the local officials, there is certainly a line between them and us, but inthe eyes of the court, there is originally no difference between the inside and the outside. Thus, these peasants should be managed well and not be punished byadditionalrules,aslongastheyhavenointentionofencroachingonourborders.”⁶¹This policy bears a striking similarity to Emperor Yongzheng’s decision of 1727 to demarcate a new borderline with Annam on the basis of the idea that all landsofChina’souterfanwereundertheemperor’sjurisdiction.From1727to1882,thepolitico-culturalideologyofall-under-HeavenasembracedbytheChinesecourt remained unchanged. Although the Kangxi emperor had established himself as a student of both Chinese and Western learning, in particular in the fields ofmathematics and astronomy, in his active communications with the Jesuits, almost all emperors after him left such Sino-Western intellectual exchange to theImperialAstronomicalBureau.⁶²Untilthelatenineteenthcentury,theyoungemperors—TongzhiandGuangxu—studiedonlyConfucianclassicsandChinesehistoryintheirdailylessonsatcourt(Ch.,rijiang).EventhoughEuropeanandAmericanministersstartedtoresideinBeijingandChinalaunchedaself-strengthening movement in the 1860s, the Manchu court did not train emperors in international knowledge commensurate with China’s needs and changing situ-ation. The imperial civil-service examinations that selected officials for the Qing bureaucracy still tested the candidates only on the Confucian classics and showedno hint of change. The Guangxu emperor, along with his tutors, in particular Weng Tonghe, remained confined to this educational milieu. The first textbook onWesternhistoryandinternationallawaimedatintroducingGuangxutoEuropeanandAmericanhistorysincetheAgeofDiscovery,titledLecturesonWesternHis-tory(Ch.,Xishijiangyi),didnotreachtheemperoruntilNovember1907,ayearbeforehedied.⁶³When the young Guangxu emperor approved the Sino-Korean Regulations in 1882, he adopted a typically Confucian tone to emphasize that “Chosŏn is ourshuguoandexistsaseasternbarbariansfaraway”(Ch.,Chaoxianweiwoshuguo,pizaidongyi).⁶⁴Theconventionaldiscourseonthecivilized–barbariandistinc-tion was still firmly rooted at the court, at least in the minds of core leaders. For the Manchu ruling house of the Chinese empire, this discourse concerned not somuch practical diplomatic negotiations at the provincial level as statecraft from the court’s perspective. Qing China in the 1880s continued to act as the MiddleKingdom,theuppercountry,andtheHeavenlyDynastyintheSino-KoreanZongfanframework.AslongasChosŏnwasashuguo,China’scentralitywouldpersistand China’s Western-oriented diplomacy would accordingly be circumscribed. In this sense, China’s transformation into a modern state occurred with the invo-lution of the universal politico-cultural Chinese empire, which revealed the discrepancy between provincial diplomatic practices and the court’s ideological normsin the late nineteenth century and highlighted the significance of Chosŏn for the rise of a modern Chinese state.Complementing the Zongfan Order: The Ritual Crisis and the Sino-Korean Border Treaties
By adopting the form, though not the name, of a Western-style treaty, the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations helped lay out the inner dual network—introduced at thebeginning of this chapter—of Sino-Korean contacts. In addition to maintaining the court-to-court system described in chapter 2, the two countries now had to ad-just to the newly created state-to-state system, in which both countries were treated by their Japanese and Western treaty counterparts as independent sovereignstates that were theoretically equal to each other. This inner dual network introduced the two countries to a more complicated situation in the new setting of in-ternational politics, as the ritual crisis that unfolded in China in late 1882 demonstrates.The crisis started with questions regarding the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations raised by the Manchu general in Mukden, Chongqi (1830–1900). In three palacememorials in December 1882, Chongqi protested article 2, according to which the Chinese commissioners of trade at the treaty ports of Chosŏn “will, in theirdealings with Chosŏn’s officials, be on a footing of perfect equality, and are to be treated with the consideration due to the observance of etiquette,” while theChosŏncommissionersatChineseports“arelikewisetobetreatedonafootingofequalityintheirdealingswiththelocalauthorities,namely,thetaotai[daotai,circuitintendant],theprefect,andthemagistratesoftheplace.”RecallingthatChosŏnbecameafanandsubjectoftheGreatQingin1637andthattheKoreanofficials were “ministers of ministers” and thus ranked below their Chinese counterparts, Chongqi pointed out that equality between Chosŏn commissioners andChina’s local authorities meant that the emperor himself would be on a footing of equality with the king. The assumption of equality thus severely undermined theestablishedorder,and“undernocircumstancesshouldsuchtreatmentbeextendedtoChosŏn.”Theterm“equality”(Ch.,pingxing)inthearticleshould,arguedChongqi,bedeletedforthesakeof“moralprinciples”(Ch.,lunji)andChina’s“nationalpolity”(Ch.,guoti).MukdenwouldtreattheChosŏncommissionersalongconventionallinesinordertodefend“decorum”(Ch.,titong).The general also questioned article 5, which canceled the requirement of official supervision of trade at the border and allowed local people to trade freely atZhamen and Ŭiju on the two sides of the Yalu River and at Hunchun and Hoeryŏng on the two sides of the Tumen River. Chongqi agreed that outdated rulesought to be rescinded, but he insisted that land border security should be strengthened by maintaining the existing patrols along the Chinese side. His concernsabout unpredictable threats from Chosŏn itself and from the treaty powers present in Chosŏn were heightened by his perception of the uniqueness and impor-tanceoftheMukdenarea,theQing’s“ancestralterritory.”⁶⁵Chongqi’s worries triggered a heated debate among the Ministry of Rites, the Zongli Yamen, and the Beiyang superintendent. Since the overland border traderegulations would soon be renegotiated at Mukden after a joint Sino-Korean investigation, the issue of the performance of equal rituals became the hottest topicin the discussion. Li Hongzhang argued that the imperial code did not regulate ritual performances between local Chinese officials and foreign tributary emis-saries,buthenotedthatlocalofficialstreatedtheemissariesofVietnam,Siam,andRyukyuwith“ritualsofequality”(Ch.,pingli),whichshouldbeapplicabletoChosŏn too. Li also solicited theoretical support from the classics of the Zhou Dynasty and drew an analogy between the statuses of the authorities of the Qingand those of Chosŏn. According to this analogy, the king, as an “outer vassal” of the Son of Heaven, was equal to China’s governors-general and governors whowere “inner vassals”; meanwhile, Chosŏn’s officials were equal to Chinese officials below the ranks of governor and governor-general. Accordingly, in China, theChosŏncommissionersshouldperform“ritualsofsubordination”(Ch.,shuli)totheChinesegovernors-general,governors,andotherofficialswithhigherranks,andritualsofequalitytosuchlocalofficialsastaotaiandprefects.TheyshouldalsoperformritualsofequalitytoWesternministersinTianjin,wherethecommis-sioners would reside. In Chosŏn, on the other hand, the Chinese commissioners should perform rituals of equality to Korean officials whose rank was inferior tothat of the cabinet, Ŭijŏngbu.Inhissuggestions,LiHongzhangtriedtopursueameanbetweenZongfanritualsembodyingthe“ancestralsystem”(Ch.,zuzhi)andWestern-styleetiquette
between foreign ministers and the host country. Agreeing that Chosŏn’s commissioners could get favorable treatment since they were not tributary emissaries,theMinistryofRitesproposedthatwhenChinesecommissionersatorbelowtherankoftaotaivisitedtheking,theyshouldperform“guest-hostrituals”(Ch.,binzhuli),aproposalthatinvolvedaslightchangetocertainrulesoftheimperialcode.⁶⁶InFebruary1883thecourt,viatheZongliYamen,endorsedLi’sandtheministry’ssolutionstotheritualcrisisandsetupanewframeworkforritualperformancesbetweenvariousofficialsofthetwocountries(seefigure5.1).Asthediplomatic corps formed in Hansŏng, the new ritual arrangements would cause increasing conflicts between China, Chosŏn, Japan, and Western states in the fol-lowing decade, demonstrating the strong influence of the dynamics of the inner dual network over the practices of the outer dual network between China andChosŏn.Chongqi found the new ritual code a good resolution to the problems he had noted. He went on to strengthen border security and maintain the “proper sys-tem” as he had wished by signing a convention with the Korean representative Ŏ Yun-jung in March 1883. The convention, “Regulations for Trade at the Borderbetween Mukden and Chosŏn” (Ch., Fengtian yu Chaoxian bianmin jiaoyi zhangcheng), governed trade at the Zhongjiang (middle river) area of the Yalu River.Several articles were specifically aimed at upholding Zongfan conventions. Echoing the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations, the preamble of the Mukden-Chosŏn Reg-ulations stated that the border trade at Zhongjiang “is not on the same footing as the trade carried on at the treaty ports, inasmuch as it was originally establishedbytheHeavenlyDynastyasabenefittoitsshuguowiththedistinctunderstandingthatitshouldbeaconveniencetothepopulation…andthatothernationsarenot concerned in these rules.” According to articles 8 and 19, China would not impose taxes on Chosŏn’s annual tributes and routine goods and would send sol-diers to escort Chosŏn’s tributary missions to Beijing from Fenghuang City, precisely as China had done for more than two centuries. Article 23 dictated that bilat-eral correspondence should be conducted in accordance with the established system, in which Chosŏn should call China the “upper country” or “Heavenly Dy-nasty”andavoidsuchabbreviatedcharactersaszhong(forZhongguo,the“MiddleKingdom,”inreferencetoChina)ordong(forDongguo,the“easterncountry,”inreferencetoChosŏn).Fortheirpart,ChineseofficialswouldaddressChosŏnas“thecountryofChosŏn”or“yourhonorablecountry.”⁶⁷
FIGURE5.1.TherulesofritualperformancebetweenChinaandChosŏnafter1883.Sreferstoritualsofsubordination,Ereferstoritualsofequality,andG-Hreferstoguest-hostrituals.ForeignministersinChinasometimesusedtheritualsofequalityintheirdealingswithChinesetaotai,prefects,magistrates,andother local officials.Several months later, the two countries signed a third treaty, entitled “Regulations for Trade at the Border between Jilin and Chosŏn Whenever Necessary” (Ch.,Jilin Chaoxian shangmin suishi maoyi zhangcheng). This treaty was a short version of the one governing trade between Mukden and Chosŏn and laid down theformat of bilateral official correspondence in accordance with Zongfan hierarchy in the same way.By the end of 1883, then, China and Chosŏn had signed three treaties, or regulations, that were firmly rooted in the Zongfan discourse. The sophisticated normsused in these texts continued to serve as a way of institutionalizing the hierarchical relationship, centering the Middle Kingdom, and articulating the parties’ iden-tities in the Chinese world, just as the Zongfan discourse had done in the 1630s, 1760s, and 1860s. Simultaneously, however, the new rules made adjustments tothe traditional mechanism by introducing a new political and commercial network into the borderland between the two countries in Manchuria. This change ex-tended China’s modern diplomacy, which had been practiced primarily in inner China’s coastal areas, into Manchuria, along with the considerable influence of itshuman agents such as Li Hongzhang. The three treaties therefore laid the legal foundation for state-to-state contacts between the two countries in the following,and final, decade of their longstanding Zongfan relationship. The border areas of Manchuria became a test field where the two countries negotiated the reach oftheir respective sovereignties between tradition and modernity, as discussed in chapter 6.Joining Chosŏn’s Foreign Network: The Chinese Commissioners and the Chinese SettlementsStruggling for Authority: The Chinese Commissioner of Trade in ChosŏnAfter the mutiny of 1882, Chosŏn asked China to send specialists on diplomacy and trade to assist it in establishing a system of maritime customs. The requestwas made by the king, endorsed by China’s court, and executed by both countries within the Zongfan framework. Consequently, Chosŏn’s maritime customs sys-tem became a sub-branch of China’s imperial customs, and its annual reports were affiliated with those of imperial customs until 1895. In November 1882 LiHongzhang appointed Ma Jianchang (1840–1939), Ma Jianzhong’s brother, and Paul Georg von Möllendorff (1847–1901), a German national who worked as anassistantintheChineseMaritimeCustomsofficeinBeijing,asforeignadviserstotheking.⁶⁸MaandMöllendorfftookuptheirpostsinearly1883,followedbythe first group of representatives from Western treaty nations and China.The first US envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary, Lucius H. Foote (1826–1913), and the first Chinese commissioner of trade, Chen Shu-tang, werethe two most important figures among the diplomats now arriving in Chosŏn, and they took diametrically different approaches to defining Chosŏn’s status. Be-fore he departed for Chosŏn in March 1883, Foote received instructions from Secretary of State Frederick Frelinghuysen (1817–85), emphasizing that the Americantreaty negotiations with Chosŏn “were conducted as between two independent and sovereign nations…. As far as we are concerned Corea is an independentsovereign power, with all the attendant rights, privileges, duties and responsibilities: in her relations to China we have no desire to interfere unless action shouldbe taken prejudicial to the rights of the United States.” The instructions reminded Foote that “for all purposes of intercourse between the United States and Coreathe King is a sovereign, and that with sovereign states only do the United States treat. Further the representatives of the United States in China will treat the Core-anrepresentativesthereasinthepositionassignedthembytheChinesegovernment.”⁶⁹OtherWesterncountriesimitatedthispragmaticpolicy.Chen Shutang’s appointment and authority derived from the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations. Article 1 of the treaty endowed the Beiyang superintendent with the
powertoappointcommissionersoftrade(Ch.,shangwuweiyuan)toresideatChosŏn’streatyportsandexercisejurisdictionoverChinesemerchants,whileChosŏn would send similar commissioners of trade to Tianjin and other Chinese treaty ports for the sake of its own merchants. Chen was a Han Chinese officialand had served as consul-general in San Francisco from January 1880 to April 1882. He arrived in Hansŏng in October 1883 and opened his office with ten thou-sand taels of silver that he had received from Shanghai Maritime Customs. His expenditures would be covered by Beijing’s budget for overseas missions. As asecond-ranktaotai,Chenheldtheofficialtitle“commissionerofcommercialaffairsinChosŏn”(Ch.,ZongbanChaoxianshangwuweiyuan).⁷⁰Hewasnotanenvoyof the imperial court, but his position carried imperial authority. As Beijing clarified to Chosŏn, Chen was “slightly different” from China’s representatives to othercountries, but the “rationale [for his dispatch] is generally the same.” Invoking again the notion that “Chosŏn is a subordinate country of China,” Beijing con-cluded that Chen should be the “center of the guests” and instructed Chosŏn’s foreign office to give him favorable treatment whenever there was a banquet forforeignministers.⁷¹ChenhimselfwasalsoabelieverinChina’ssuperiority.HepostedanotificationonthewallofHansŏng’ssoutherngate,statingthat“ChosŏnisashuguoofChina” and calling on all merchants intending to trade in Chosŏn to follow the established rituals and to report to him in case of any disputes with others in thecountry.Thetextsoughtto“highlightthefriendshipwiththeshuguothatusesthesamelanguage”(Ch.,zhaoshuguotongwenzhiyi)andto“cherishtheaffectionwithinafamilythatrespectsacommonpatriarch”(Ch.,zhongyijiagongzhuzhiqing).⁷²Chen’sstridencyantagonizedtheAmericanministerandKoreanofficials,but he refused to change his tone. As in the case of Ma Jianzhong, who had studied in France, Chen’s diplomatic experience in the United States seemed to haveno effect on his line of reasoning in Chosŏn.Inpractice,ChenactedasaChineseconsulandplannedtobuildhisofficialresidenceinthestyleofa“Chineseconsulate”(Ch.,Zhongguogongguan).⁷³Yethewas not a consul, and his official title did not put him in charge of foreign affairs. Instead of contacting Chen, then, the Japanese and Western ministers broughtdiplomatic matters concerning China directly to Chosŏn’s Foreign Office, the T’ongni amun (K., T’ongni kyosŏp t’ongsang samu amun). Chosŏn also expressed adesireforindependencefromChineseinvolvementbysendingaspecialmissiontotheUnitedStatesinthefallof1883.⁷⁴ChenfeltsomarginalizedthatinSep-tember 1884 he complained to Li Hongzhang that his awkward position was causing him to be snubbed by the Japanese and British ministers. Chen tried to jus-tify his authority by invoking the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations, but other ministers responded that the treaty, as its preamble stated, was effective only betweenChina and Korea. After consulting with Li and Foote, Chen updated his title to “general commissioner of foreign and commercial affairs at Chosŏn’s ports” (Ch.,ZongbanChaoxiangekoujiaoshetongshangshiwu)inNovember1884.According to Chen, this title perfectly fit the established “system,” in accordance with which he, as an official of the “upper country,” could discuss certain af-fairsofChina’sshuguowithhisJapaneseandWesterncounterparts.Unsurprisingly,byfailingtodrawaclearlinebetweenChineseandKoreanaffairsattheports,the new title aroused deep concern among Western ministers, including the first British minister to Chosŏn, Harry Parkes, who had been wondering aboutChosŏn’sinternationalpositionforyears.TheZongliYamenclarifiedtoParkesthat“ChosŏnisashuguoofChina,whichmeansthatthecommissionershouldnot be understood as a minister to the country, but since Chen has been appointed by the emperor to be in charge of diplomatic affairs and he holds a second-ranktaotai,hispositionisequaltothatoftheconsuls-generalofothercountries.”⁷⁵ThisdescriptionthusstrategicallydefinedChenasaconsul-general.Questionable Imperialism: Chinese Settlements in ChosŏnChen arrived in Hansŏng without a clear mission from Beijing or Tianjin, so he alone had to decide what to do. Beijing’s original plan had been to place Chen incharge of Chinese business in Inch’ŏn too, but Chen realized that it was impossible for him to perform duties in both Hansŏng and Inch’ŏn. A series of
commercial and diplomatic events involving Chinese merchants and citizens in Inch’ŏn and other treaty ports reached Chen’s desk right after he opened his of-fice, so he sent an assistant, Li Nairong, to Inch’ŏn as the first Chinese representative at that port. Due to his lack of an official status, Li Nairong found himself inthesameuncomfortablesituationasChenhad.ChencalledLiaconsul(Ch.,lingshi)insteadofacommissioner(Ch.,lishi)infrontoftheJapaneseconsulandthecommissioner of Inch’ŏn maritime customs, although Li was not, strictly speaking, a consul. Since the Chinese terms for “commissioner” and “consul” have verysimilar pronunciations, Chen may have planned to use the phonological likeness to tacitly confer on Li Nairong a clear status commensurate with internationalpractice.LiNaironglatertoldChenthatitwouldbebettertoclarifyhisofficialrankascommissionerratherthanconsultotheKoreanside.⁷⁶In February 1884 Chen informed Min Yŏng-muk (1826–84), Queen Min’s nephew and the minister of Chosŏn’s Foreign Office, that Li and other Chinese offi-cialsresidinginKoreantreatyportsheldthetitleof“commissionerofChinesemerchants’affairs”(Ch.,huashangshiwuguan).Thesecommissioners,saidChen,wereequaltoChosŏnofficialsandforeignconsulsandwereinchargeofallaffairsconcerningChinesemerchantsinChosŏn.⁷⁷LiNairongwasthustransformedfrom Chen’s private assistant to a diplomatic representative of the Chinese state. As Kirk W. Larsen points out, “Chen was successful … in establishing and pro-motinganofficialQingdiplomaticandcommercialpresenceinKorea.”⁷⁸Li Nairong found his understaffed office in Inch’ŏn unable to handle the increase in Chinese business and Sino-Japanese conflicts at the port. Japan hadopened more than one hundred stores in the city since 1876, and Japanese residents outnumbered the Koreans, Chinese, and Westerners. But now growing num-bers of Chinese merchants, in particular from Shandong, Zhejiang, and Guangdong Provinces, were coming to seek their fortunes in the city, and these busi-nessmenorganizedcompaniessuchasTongshuntaihao(theCompanyofUnion,Prosperity,andPeace)tochallengeJapan’smonopolyinlocaltrade.⁷⁹Withinasingle month, from October to November 1883, the number of Chinese stores in Inch’ŏn increased from two to seven and that of Chinese merchants from aboutten to more than sixty. According to Chinese statistics, from 1883 to 1884 the number of Chinese in Inch’ŏn rose from 63 to 235 and that of Chinese in Hansŏngfrom26to352.⁸⁰SomeChinesemerchantsinInch’ŏnhadstartedtoextendtheirbusinessestoHansŏng.ChenShutangandLiNairongwerethusfacinganewChinese presence in Chosŏn. In addition, hundreds of Chinese sailors working on Chinese and Japanese cargo ships frequently passed through Inch’ŏn, giving amajor boost to local bars and brothels. These sailors were troublemakers not only in Korean and Japanese eyes but also from the perspective of the Chinese, be-cause Chinese officials at the port did not have a full roster of these Chinese citizens and therefore did not know whom to prosecute if any of them were involvedin local conflicts. In an attempt to control the sailors, Li followed international conventions by requesting that all Chinese citizens visiting Inch’ŏn, including civil-iansandsoldiers,registerwithhisoffice.⁸¹Given the growing number of Chinese merchants in Inch’ŏn and the expansion of their businesses, Chen Shutang felt it was necessary to set up a Chinese set-tlement for trade purposes. He found legal support in article 4 of the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations, which stated that “the merchants of either country who mayproceed to the open ports of the other country for trade will be allowed to rent land or houses and erect buildings.” In December 1883 Chen and Möllendorff, theassistant minister of Chosŏn’s Foreign Office, conducted a field investigation in Inch’ŏn and decided to secure a foundation for a Chinese settlement. Many partsof the area lay on hillsides or in marshland, so the project required land reclamation (see map 5.1). Li Nairong and the commissioner of Inch’ŏn maritime cus-tomsmadeamapoftheChinesesettlement,andLiaskedlocalChinesemerchantstoprovidefinancialsupportforthelandreclamationproject.⁸²
MAP5.1.TheChinesesettlementinInch’oȈnintheearly1890s.1meter=39.37inches.PlanofSettlementsinChemulpo[Inch’oȈn],handwrittenmap,preservedat the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University. Copyright Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies.Chen found the name of the settlement a challenge. In his notes to the Korean side, Chen—unlike his Chinese or Korean colleagues—avoided the term “settle-ment”(Ch.,zujie),insteadcallingit“landsandboundary”(Ch.,dijie,whichgenerallymeans“land”).InalettertoLiNaironginDecember1883,Chensaidhehadbeenconsideringwhetherthesettlementshouldbecalled“LandsoftheGreatQing”(Ch.,DaQingdijie)or“LandsoftheChinesemerchants”(Ch.,Huashangdijie).Confessingthathethoughttheformerwas“notperfect,”Chendecidedonthelatter,asitwouldnottakeadvantageofChosŏnandwouldmaintainthe“faceoftheuppercountry.”⁸³Chen’sweighingofsemanticoptions,likehismaneuveringsaroundtheterm“commissioner,”betrayedtheproblemsoftheouterdual network between China and Chosŏn—that is, the overlapping operation of the Zongfan framework and the treaty system in the two countries’ foreign
relations.Chosŏn, however, did not endorse Chen’s plan to distinguish the Sino-Korean relationship in this particular case. When Min Yŏng-muk heard Chen’s argumentthat the regulations governing the Chinese merchants’ settlement should be different from those used for other countries in accordance with the “system,” Minretortedthattherewasnodifferencebetweenthetwo.⁸⁴OnApril2,1884,MinandChensignedthe“RegulationsfortheChineseMerchantsSettlementinInch’ŏn” (Ch., Renchuan kou huashang dijie zhangcheng), which was based on the draft Chen had presented to Min in February. The text was written only in Chi-nese and officially called the settlement “Lands of the Chinese Merchants,” as Chen had proposed, but it omitted Chen’s preamble, which imitated the preambleto the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations by emphasizing that Sino-Korean trade was different from that between Chosŏn and other countries and that the regulationswouldapplyonlytotheformer.⁸⁵Withoutthepreamble,thetwocountries’state-to-staterelationstookcenterstage.While Chen was opening the Chinese settlement in Inch’ŏn, an event occurred in Pusan that further legitimized his agenda of expanding this model to othertreaty ports. In early November 1883 a Chinese grocery store in Kōbe, Japan, called Dexing hao (Store of Merit and Prosperity) had sent two agents to Pusan toopen a branch in the Japanese settlement there, but the branch was suddenly shut down by the Japanese consul. As soon as he returned to Hansŏng, Chen raisedthecasewithMinYŏng-muk.Minexplainedthathewouldpreferto“selectasettlement[K.,chogye]fortheChinesemerchantswheretheycanquicklyopentheirstores,” rather than negotiate with the Japanese to allow the Chinese merchants to do business in the Japanese settlement in Pusan. Chen applauded this pro-posalandvolunteeredtovisitPusantogetherwithaKoreanofficialforajointfieldinvestigation.MinagainappointedMöllendorfftoaccompanyChen.⁸⁶Inthemeantime, the Chinese minister to Japan, Li Shuchang, suggested to the Zongli Yamen that Beijing should “instruct Chosŏn’s Foreign Office to establish ChinesesettlementsinPusanandotherports.”⁸⁷Li’sproposalfitChen’sagendaperfectly.Asaresult,ChinaopenedsettlementsinPusanandWŏnsan.Observing that China became active in Chosŏn after a series of crises beginning in 1882, scholars have generally interpreted the phenomenon as a fundamentalchangeinChina’sforeignpolicytowardChosŏnandhavedescribedChinaaspracticingimperialismunderthecloakofsuzerainty.⁸⁸Twoissuesconcerningthesovereignty of Chosŏn are worth discussing here: Chinese and Korean perceptions of the Chinese settlements and the extraterritoriality that Chinese citizens en-joyed in their settlements.The negotiations between Chen and Min suggest that neither side perceived the settlements as a symbol of imperialist expansion that would damage Chosŏn’ssovereignty or help China gain geopolitical hegemony on the peninsula. Min’s proposal to open another Chinese settlement in Pusan in order to avoid cases likethat of Dexing hao shows that he considered such settlements only pieces of rented land for whose use the Chinese, the Japanese, and other foreigners had to payeveryyear.⁸⁹Theterm“sovereignty”neverenteredMin’sandChen’scorrespondence,andtheterm“settlement”carriedameaningthatwasverydifferentfromthat which it would later convey in the strongly nationalist historical context of the twentieth century. The issue of establishing police forces in the Chinese settle-ment in Inch’ŏn, which involved Chinese, Korean, and British citizens, is another case that demonstrates the difference between China’s understanding of settle-mentandthatofscholarsinaninternationallawcontext.⁹⁰Furthermore, it is important to note that Chosŏn had the legal option of opening its own settlements at China’s ports in accordance with article 4 of the 1882Sino-Korean Regulations. Once the regulations went into effect, many Korean merchants traveled to Chinese ports, some even going as far as Gansu, Shaanxi,andSichuan,tosellginseng.In1885Chosŏndispatchedacommercialcommissioner(K.,sangmuwiwŏn)toTianjinasacounterpartofChenShutang.HadtheKorean merchants formed a strong and sizeable community in Tianjin, Shanghai, or other ports, as the Chinese did in Inch’ŏn and Pusan, Chosŏn could haveestablished settlements at those Chinese ports through negotiations with Beijing. It was only Chosŏn’s limited overseas commercial activity that made this
scenario impracticable.In terms of extraterritoriality, it is true that Chinese citizens held this right within Chinese settlements in Chosŏn, whereas Chosŏn merchants at Chinese treatyports, according to article 2 of the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations, were under local Chinese jurisdiction, a difference that highlighted the unequal nature of theirterms. However, in addition to the connection between article 2 of the Sino-Korean Regulations and the extraterritoriality granted to American citizens in the Ko-rean-Amer-ican treaty discussed earlier in this chapter, we should keep in mind that Koreans who conducted illegal trade in Qing China outside of the treaty portsalways enjoyed extraterritoriality. The case of Korean merchants illegally visiting Gansu and Sichuan Provinces illustrates this point.After China opened its treaty ports to Koreans as required by the Sino-Korean Regulations, the number of Koreans traveling to Gansu and Sichuan to sell gin-seng without passports issued by the Korean commissioners and local Chinese officials increased sharply. In June 1883 the officials of Langzhong County inSichuansentthreesuchunauthorizedKoreanginsengmerchantstoNanbuCounty,fromwheretheyweresentfurthertoChengdu,theprovincialcapital.⁹¹Atal-most the same time, Gansu also sent a Korean merchant, Mun So-wun, who had sold ginseng illegally in the province, to the Ministry of Rites in Beijing; the min-istrytransferredhimtoTianjin,fromwherehecouldboardashipforChosŏn.TheofficialsinSichuandidnotdetainthese“peopleofthefan”(Ch.,fanfurenmin)whohadtraveledthousandsofmilestomakeaprofit,andtheypreferredto“followtheWesternexample”(Ch.,zhaoTaixiyili)bysendingthemtoBeijing.Sincearticle 4 of the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations regarding trade licenses and passports did not address this scenario, the Ministry of Rites, the Zongli Yamen, andthe Beiyang superintendent eventually instructed the local officials to send Korean violators to the Korean commercial commissioners at Chinese treaty ports,from where they would be deported to Chosŏn for punishment.In these cases, the Chinese side regarded the Korean violators as guilty of a crime punishable by the laws of their own country, and therefore the Korean sidehadtotakethenecessarystepsforextraditionbasedonarticle2oftheregulations.⁹²TheseKoreancitizens,or“criminals,”werethusexemptfromChinesejuris-diction, which in the Zongfan context was seen as a manifestation of China’s favor to the small country. Beijing particularly instructed local officials to treat theKorean violators well as a way of cherishing the subordinate country. For its part, Chosŏn also used Zongfan terminology to describe China’s clemency as ademonstrationofChina’s“extremesolicitude”tothe“smallcountry.”⁹³Intheirbilateralcommunicationsaboutsuchcases,nomentionwasmadeofChosŏn’sor China’s sovereignty or international law. If extraterritoriality were to imply imperialism, one would have to conclude that the Qing and Chosŏn practiced imperi-alism on each other.
5
SUPERVISING CHOSŎN
Qing China’s Patriarchal Role in Chosŏn, 1877–84
In the late 1870s and early 1880s, with China’s vigorous encouragement, Chosŏn launched reforms to fortify itself domestically. However, the reform programs caused a backlash, prompting student petitions and eventually a bloody mutiny. China sent troops to Chosŏn in 1882 to help the Korean court suppress the mutiny, and it subsequently became deeply enmeshed in Chosŏn’s domestic and foreign affairs. In the course of these events, China availed itself of its superior position to introduce Chosŏn into the family of nations, in particular through the negotiation of the Korean-American treaty in 1882. From the perspective of Japan and the Western states, China’s involvement represented a fundamental change in China’s traditional policy toward Korea, and it triggered a wave of intense political and diplomatic struggles between the various powers on the peninsula. To meet these new challenges, China and Chosŏn signed several commercial agreements to maintain and adjust their relations.
A pair of coexisting and correlated dual diplomatic networks developed between China and Chosŏn. The first dual network encompassed the Sino-Korean Zongfan system, on the one hand, and the newly imported treaty system that connected China, Chosŏn, and their treaty counterparts, on the other. This network, which I call the outer dual network, operated between the politico-cultural Chinese empire and the world beyond the empire, and both China and Chosŏn had to deal independently with the treaty aspects of this network. The second dual network, which I call the inner network, functioned within the Chinese empire and comprised, first, the conventional system of court-to-court interactions between the imperial court in Beijing and the royal court in Hansŏng, and, second, the newly founded state-to-state system between China and Chosŏn, in which the latter was theoretically equal to the former according to international law. Through the outer and inner dual networks, both China and Chosŏn modified and revised their policies toward each other.
Opening Chosŏn to the West: China and the Korean-American Negotiations
From Tokyo to Pusan and Tianjin: The Shufeldt-Li Agreement of 1880
By the late 1870s, China was aware of the grave challenges Chosŏn was facing from other countries, and it began to persuade Chosŏn to open its doors by negotiating treaties with Western states. Since Zongfan conventions prevented both the Zongli Yamen and the Ministry of Rites from making such a request of an outer fan, Li Hongzhang personally took on the task of cajoling Chosŏn. Li used his personal correspondence with the Korean minister Yi Yu-wŏn, mentioned in the previous chapter, for this purpose, but Yi was not enthusiastic about contacting the Western barbarians.¹ In March 1880 the navy commander Robert Shufeldt arrived in Nagasaki with the USS Ticonderoga. The American minister John Bingham approached the Japanese foreign minister, Inoue Kaoru (1835–1915), to ask for Japan’s good offices in introducing Shufeldt to Chosŏn.² Inoue was worried that Japan’s acting as a go-between might harm its fragile relations with Chosŏn, but he decided to send a letter from Shufeldt to the Korean court through the Japanese consul at Pusan, Kondō Masuki (1840–92), and the chargé d’affaires at Hansŏng, Hanabusa Yoshimoto (1842–1917). Expecting to have further contact with the Koreans, Shufeldt went to Pusan, but he soon received his unopened letter back. Chosŏn’s rebuff incurred Bingham’s wrath and ended Japan’s role as mediator.³
While Shufeldt was waiting in Nagasaki, the Chinese consul in the city, Yu Qiong, decided that it would be a good idea to grant the United States entrance into Chosŏn in order to check Russia, which was on the brink of war with China following the Ili incident on China’s northwestern frontier in Xinjiang. Yu contacted
the Chinese minister in Tokyo, He Ruzhang (1838–91), who immediately forwarded the news to the Zongli Yamen and Li Hongzhang. Li quickly decided to invite Shufeldt to Tianjin, and the latter happily accepted the invitation. After a meeting with Li in August, Shufeldt reported that Li had promised he would use his influence with the Government of Corea to accede to the friendly request made by Shufeldt in behalf of the Government of the United States to open negotiations with a view to such a treaty [with Korea].⁴ Under the agreement, Shufeldt returned to the United States to secure more support from the Department of State, while Li turned his attention to coaxing Chosŏn to allow the United States in.
Behind a Cloak: Preparations for Chosŏn’s Training Program in Tianjin
The ruling house of Chosŏn was not blind to the encroaching West. In 1879 the Korean emissary Yi Yong-suk (1818–?) informed the Chinese official You Zhikai (1816–99) at Yongping near Beijing that Chosŏn hoped to dispatch trainees to Tianjin to obtain advanced military and industrial skills, following the precedent of foreign countries sending students to China for learning. Yi asked You to take the proposal to Li Hongzhang. Li heartily endorsed the plan. In a confidential letter to You, which was finally forwarded to the king via Yi, Li suggested that Chosŏn should submit a detailed proposal to the Ministry of Rites in Beijing.⁵ Shortly thereafter the king sent Pyŏn Wŏn-kyu (1837–96) as an emissary to Beijing to discuss the plan, while the Chinese court put Li in charge of the training program that would encourage Chosŏn to follow the mainstream of the world.⁶
In his summer office in Tianjin, Li underscored to Pyŏn that the best survival strategy for Chosŏn was to trade with the Westerners. With Li’s support, Pyŏn and several Chinese officials drafted an outline of the training program that broke several two-hundred-year-old Zongfan conventions. In addition to granting the Korean trainees, interpreters, and superintendents the special right to visit Tianjin via the maritime route, which had not happened since 1637, the outline required all program members to obtain passes from the office of the Beiyang superintendent, which would be filed at the Ministry of Rites. Given that this would be the first time Korean visitors had resided in a Chinese city outside Beijing since at least 1644, the outline prescribed that the trainees must obey the Chinese rules and conventions (Ch., zunshou Zhongguo guiju); otherwise they would be sent by the Chinese officials to their Korean superintendents for punishment according to Korean regulations. In this case, then, China endowed the Korean side with a right similar to the consular jurisdiction that it had conferred on its Western treaty partners.
The outline also required the king to send official correspondence on military training, weapon procurement, and other military affairs to both the Ministry of Rites and the Beiyang superintendent. The position of the Beiyang superintendent, as a subordinate official under the Zongli Yamen, was a secondary post held by the governor-general of Zhili, a post occupied almost exclusively by Li until 1894. According to Zongfan regulations, the superintendent should not be involved in Zongfan affairs with Chosŏn. However, since Li’s meeting with Mori in 1876, this rule had been eclipsed by the growth of Li’s authority—itself a result of the Zongli Yamen’s ambiguous definition of the Sino-Korean relationship, on the one hand, and the silence of the Ministry of Rites on affairs beyond the conventional court-to-court track, on the other. In a confidential memorial in February 1881 the Zongli Yamen pointed out that "it is extremely urgent for Chosŏn to conduct diplomacy [Ch., waijiao] with other countries" and requested that the Qing court make changes to old regulations in order to endow the Beiyang superintendent with greater privileges.⁷ With the emperor’s endorsement, the superintendent gained the right to communicate directly with—rather than simply receive notes from—the king on issues concerning not only the training program but also foreign affairs. The superintendent became the de jure mentor for Chosŏn’s self-strengthening program. The king responded favorably, indicating to Li a strong intention of opening Chosŏn to Western countries and wanting to commission Li to make the first move toward initiating treaty negotiations with the United States.⁸
Modernity versus Heresy: China’s Prescriptions and Korean Resistance
As the king was deciding to open up his country to foreigners, Chosŏn was caught in a series of dramatic political events that had strong ripple effects. The sequence of events was initiated by Chinese diplomats in Japan, who forwarded their advice regarding Chosŏn’s policy to the king through the Korean envoy of amity to Japan, Kim Hong-jip (1842–96). When Kim visited Tokyo in late 1880, the Chinese minister, He Ruzhang, and the counselor of the Chinese legation, Huang Zunxian, had intensive talks with him. Their conversations took place in the Zongfan context, in which each party identified the other as a member of the same family (Ch., yijia) and saw Chosŏn as no different from an inner subordinate of China. The two Chinese diplomats tried to convince Kim that Chosŏn should abandon its parochialism and sign treaties with Western countries, beginning with the United States, in order to prevent a Russian onslaught. Kim agreed with the two officials, as did his Japanese counterparts at the Gaimushō.
Before Kim left Tokyo, Huang gave him a treatise entitled A Strategy for Chosŏn (Ch., Chaoxian celue), in which Huang argued that Chosŏn should check the Russian threat by having intimate relations with China, associating with Japan, and allying with the United States (Ch., qin Zhongguo, jie Riben, lian Meiguo). The treatise prescribed strategies aimed at ameliorating Chosŏn’s perilous situation and encouraged it to launch a self-strengthening program. Chosŏn, Huang proposed, should ask China to allow its emissaries to stay in Beijing permanently, dispatch emissaries to reside in Tokyo and Washington, propose to expand trade at Fenghuang City, send trainees and students to China for training in military skills and Western languages, and invite Westerners to assist Chosŏn with educational reforms. In short, Chosŏn should immediately join the family of nations to bolster its diplomatic, military, and economic power. In order to present Chosŏn to the world as soon as possible, Huang even suggested that the Korean army and navy forces use China’s dragon flag as the national flag.⁹
Encouraged by Huang’s passionate words, the king sent a secret commissioner to Tokyo to visit Huang and He Ruzhang with private letters that signaled his intention of negotiating a treaty with the United States. With Chosŏn’s opening in sight, He composed a treatise, On Managing Chosŏn’s Diplomacy (Ch., Zhuchi Chaoxian waijiao yi), for the consideration of Beijing and Li Hongzhang. The minister elaborated on his and Huang’s ideas by laying out three policies in order of priority. The top-choice policy, which he admitted would be difficult to put into practice right away, was to follow the example of Mongolia and Tibet by dispatching an imperial resident (Ch., banshi dachen) to reside permanently in Chosŏn—a place that had been almost no different from the inner prefectures and counties (Ch., ji wuyi neidi junxian) during the Qianlong period—and to manage its domestic politics and foreign treaties (Ch., neiguo zhi zhengzhi, waiguo zhi tiaoyue). This proposal may have resembled the European concept of colonialism, but it represented He’s understanding of the Zongfan system, and this perception obtained legitimacy from the Qing’s management of Mongolia and Tibet. The second potential policy was to dispatch a skilled official to Chosŏn to assist it in negotiating treaties with other countries. This policy, He said, was the most practical one, as it could demonstrate Chosŏn’s status as China’s subordinate and avoid possible problems caused by Chosŏn’s self-rule. Finally, the third-priority policy involved the Chinese court ordering the king to sign treaties with other countries and specifying in the first article of each treaty that Chosŏn was concluding the treaty on China’s orders.¹⁰ As history unfolded, Beijing would eventually endorse the second and third proposals.
The king was confident about the Chinese proposals and enthusiastically launched reforms after Pyŏn Wŏn-kyu returned home from Tianjin with the outline of the training program. On January 19, 1881, Chosŏn established the Office for Managing State Affairs (K., T’ongni kimu amun) in imitation of China’s Zongli Yamen, laying the institutional cornerstone for the modernization of the country. This institution comprised twelve departments, the first among them being the Department of Serving the Great (K., Sadae sa).¹¹ At the same time, the king appointed twelve officials as inspectors of Dongnae Prefecture (K., Dongnaebu amhaeng ŏsa) to visit Japan and observe Japanese politics, society, foreign relations, and trade. The mission, later known as "the inspection mission of the court
officials" (K., Chosa sich’al dan) or the gentlemen’s sighting group (K., Sinsa yuram dan) had a total of sixty-four members. It visited Nagasaki, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Yokohama, and Tokyo between May and October 1881 and was granted audiences with senior Japanese officials. In October, when another mission headed by Cho Pyŏng-ho (1847–1910) and Yi Cho-yŏn (1843–84) as envoys of amity arrived in Japan for negotiations over duty tariffs, the inspection mission returned to Hansŏng, submitting to the king sixty-four reports and seventeen additional memorandums. The officials expressed their belief that bringing Chosŏn into the modern world and into alliances with other countries offered the best way for the country to survive the growing Japanese threat.¹² Their conclusions justified the king’s policy of reforms and opening up.
The domestic situation, however, was not conducive to the realization of officials’ strategic goals. Before the mission returned home, the king had arrested several officials headed by An Ki-yŏng (1819–81) of the Taewŏn’gun clan and charged them with planning a coup. Simultaneously, a nationwide protest among the literati against the king’s reforms became more dramatic and provocative. In late 1880 some officials asked the king to reject Huang Zunxian’s ideas, which they believed went against the doctrines of Confucianism.¹³ In March 1881 a Confucian student from Kyŏngsang, Yi Man-son, submitted a petition cosigned by ten thousand fellow students, calling on the king to burn Huang’s treatise and to reaffirm Confucianism. At court, the official Hwang Chae-hyŏn argued that the king should reject heretical thought by publicly burning not only Huang’s treatise but all books and newspapers on international law and foreign history and geography. In order to sidestep the literati’s moral charges, the king issued a decree of antiheresy that endorsed the defense of Confucianism and rejected heretical ideas.¹⁴ Yet this action seemed only to encourage more students to travel to Hansŏng to submit petitions.
The literati protest reached its zenith in late August with the petitions of two students, Hong Chae-hak and Sin Sŏp. Besides appealing to the king to abolish the Office for Managing State Affairs and to restore old institutions, Hong accused the king of having taken no measures to defend correct teaching and reject heterodoxy (K., wijŏng ch’ŏksa). Sin, for his part, depicted Li Hongzhang’s letters to Yi Yu-wŏn and Huang’s treatise as elements of the same intrigue against Chosŏn.¹⁵ In early September Hong was beheaded for offending the sovereign, and Yi Yu-wŏn was exiled. The protests declined. The king and the Min clan, along with their program of reaching out, survived the turmoil and prevailed over other political cliques in fierce partisan struggles.
Amid the turbulence, in late July the king welcomed two imperial envoys from Beijing, who brought an edict about the death of Empress Dowager Cian. The monarch held a grand ceremony at the palace, where he performed rituals to the imperial documents. Afterward, he paid a visit to the envoys at their residence and then sent them off in person. The conversations between the king and the envoys did not touch on Chosŏn’s domestic or foreign affairs.¹⁶ The Zongfan mechanism continued to function smoothly, reaffirming its rituals, the autonomous right and dignity of the sovereign of Chosŏn, and the nature of the Zongfan relationship.
Secret Diplomacy: Chosŏn’s Commissioning of China to Negotiate with the United States
On November 18, 1881, the emissary of superintending the selected trainees (K., Yŏngsŏn sa), Kim Yun-sik (1835–1922), left Hansŏng for China, bringing with him students who were to learn military skills and Western languages under the auspices of the new training program. Although the mission was unlike any that had gone to China before, it mostly acted like a conventional tributary one, with Kim treated as a standard tributary emissary in terms of his traveling expenses.¹⁷ Not many young Koreans wanted to study in China: four days before his departure, Kim was still busy recruiting trainees. Of the more than thirty young men he interviewed, only six volunteered to go. Not until early December, when Kim reached Ŭiju, did he finally have the thirty-eight trainees China had suggested. Like the tributary missions in the eighteenth century, Kim’s spent fifty days covering more than 950 miles from Hansŏng to Beijing via the overland route (the maritime route, which they had planned to take with Beijing’s special approval, was not feasible in winter). The mission arrived in Beijing on January 6, 1882, and Kim
submitted the king’s notes to the Ministry of Rites after the group was lodged at the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations.¹⁸
Leaving his mission in Beijing, Kim visited Li Hongzhang at Baoding with a confidential memorandum, which asked Li to assume, in secret, the task of negotiating Chosŏn’s treaty with the United States; this treaty was then to serve as a prototype for subsequent treaties with other countries.¹⁹ Emphasizing that what he did for Chosŏn was legitimate and righteous (Ch., mingzheng yishun), as Kim, too, believed, Li gave Kim a pamphlet about Chosŏn’s potential treaties with Western countries that had been drafted by Ma Jianzhong (1845–1900), a protégé of Li’s who had been educated in France.²⁰ Li further discussed with Kim key issues regarding Chosŏn’s reforms, such as regulating tariffs, setting up a system of maritime customs and hiring Western staff to manage it, designing a national flag for Chosŏn for maritime identification, allowing the Japanese minister to reside in Hansŏng, and continuing to use the king’s invested rank in his contacts with the Japanese sovereign. The most urgent goal of the two sides, then, was to negotiate and conclude a treaty with the United States rather than to teach the Korean trainees in China.
Within the Zongfan context, the Korean side abandoned its right of negotiation from the beginning. In late January, Beijing granted Li control over Chosŏn’s treaty negotiations with the United States in order to "maintain the fan and shuguo and consolidate China’s border."²¹ Li also received a letter from Shufeldt, who had returned to China in June 1881 and waited in Tianjin for news from the Korean side. Shufeldt had been appointed by Washington as a special envoy to Chosŏn to pursue a treaty of amity aimed at addressing the issue of American shipwrecks on the Korean coast.²² After the meeting with Kim, Li invited Shufeldt to Baoding to discuss the details of the forthcoming treaty negotiations, but Shufeldt decided first to visit the American legation in Beijing to solicit advice from the chargé d’affaires, Chester Holcombe (1842–1912).
Unlike Shufeldt, Holcombe was aware of the critical devolution of Beijing’s negotiating power to Li and doubted it would be possible to persuade Chosŏn to conclude a treaty without the involvement of the central government in Beijing because Li was only a provincial officer and not a member of the Central Government. To seek clarity on this question, Holcombe visited the Zongli Yamen, where he was informed that Prince Gong had transferred responsibility for Korean foreign affairs from the Ministry of Rites to the Zongli Yamen in 1881, which meant that Li as a subordinate of the Yamen was authorized to deal with Korean affairs. Holcombe also learned that China had advised Chosŏn to conclude a treaty with the United States because China believed that sooner or later the autonomy of Corea would be threatened by the aggressions of Russia and/or Japan, and that this serious danger could be best met by bringing the peninsular Kingdom into the family of nations. Although the Yamen confirmed to him that China was ready to aid the United States in any proper way to open friendly and commercial relations with Corea, Holcombe was worried that Beijing might see fit to assume an entirely different attitude and policy in this business. His distrust seems to have affected Shufeldt, who replied to Li that he preferred to keep the prospective treaty negotiations secret by not visiting Baoding.²³
For his part, after his meetings with Li at Baoding, Kim visited Tianjin for a week, sending five students to the Navy and Torpedo School for English-language training. China decided to cover the Korean students’ meals and other costs because the students were also loyal children of the Heavenly Dynasty. It was within this conventional politico-cultural context of the Chinese empire that Chinese officials enthusiastically engaged in Chosŏn’s program of building its strength and reaching out to the West. Before he could place additional students in schools, Kim received confidential orders from the king to consult with Li over treaty negotiations with the United States. Kim immediately returned to Baoding, where he and Li discussed initiating negotiations with Shufeldt in order to prevent him from sailing directly for Chosŏn. This plan required a Korean envoy plenipotentiary. Given the limited time, Li proposed that Kim follow the king’s secret instruction to adapt strategies for situations and serve as the plenipotentiary himself, but Kim declined. The only solution, then, was to quickly send a messenger to Hansŏng to ask the king to dispatch a plenipotentiary to Tianjin. Li cautioned that the plenipotentiary should come ostensibly to supervise the Korean trainees and
Opening Chosŏn’s Doors: The Sino-American Treaty Negotiations
Li Hongzhang took up the task of composing a draft treaty primarily on the basis of a model proposed by Huang Zunxian. Li suggested that the treaty should define the Sino-Korean relationship by stating that "Chosŏn, being a shuguo of China, possesses the right of zizhu as to its diplomatic and domestic affairs, and this right shall not be challenged by other nations. Kim endorsed this legitimate and justifiable" statement. In a confidential report to the king, Kim revealed the true reason for his approval: the statement meant that Chosŏn could use China’s diplomatic relations with other countries for its own great benefit, and the affirmation of its right of zizhu would preserve Chosŏn’s equality in its contacts with other countries.²⁵ Kim’s comments indicate that the use of terms drawn from the Zongfan discourse—which in the end appeared not in the Korean-American treaty but in the Sino-Korean commercial regulations signed in the same year—were not uni-laterally imposed on Chosŏn by China in order to strengthen China’s suzerainty at the cost of Chosŏn’s sovereignty and independence. Rather, each party to the Zongfan arrangement could exploit the relationship for its own benefit.
Another critical aspect of the discussion between Li and Kim focused on the prospect of granting an American right of consular jurisdiction. Huang, in his draft, suggested that Chosŏn temporarily allow American consuls to manage the affairs of American citizens in Chosŏn. Backing this idea, Li explained that according to international conventions, foreigners living in treaty ports and hinterlands of a country are subject to the management of the officials of their own countries residing in the places of the said country. The local officials of the host country are not able to manage people of other nations due to the different laws, punishments, customs, and proprieties between the East and the West. For Li and Huang, consular jurisdiction was thus merely a way of managing foreigners rather than a clause undermining the sovereignty of a country. Kim agreed with this view, confirming that our humble country is not familiar with foreign situations, so there will be many problems even if our country could manage foreigners by itself.²⁶ The two sides thus decided to grant the United States the right of consular jurisdiction, even though Shufeldt had not asked for this right. Because the Korean-American treaty was a prototype for future treaties between Chosŏn and other countries, China gained this right too, through the commercial regulations examined later in this chapter. This episode calls into question the assumption that the Western powers always obtained extraterritoriality in East Asia by force. It further casts doubt on the notion that extraterritoriality can be uniformly regarded as a hallmark of imperialism, as historical narratives of East Asian countries have typically charged.²⁷
After composing a draft treaty with Li, Kim returned to Tianjin, where a special envoy of the king, Yi Ŭng-jun, was waiting for him with a sovereign letter stating that the dispatch of a plenipotentiary was impossible and that it would be better for the Americans to travel to Chosŏn for further communication. When Kim asked the Chinese chief of the Tianjin Customs, Zhou Fu (1837–1921), to forward the message to Li, Zhou repeated the suggestion that Kim himself act as the plenipotentiary. Kim again refused, believing it would be better for China to negotiate on behalf of his country. Zhou also questioned the phrase independence and half-autonomy (Ch., duli banzhu) that appeared in a Korean note explaining the term zizhu in the Korean-Japanese Treaty of 1876. Zhou warned that the statement, which seemed to claim much greater independence than was foreseen by Kim and Li, was a Japanese plot and could only damage Chosŏn’s interests. In response, Kim confirmed that Chosŏn would not claim to be independent and autonomous (K., chajon t’ŭknip) in its treaty with the United States.²⁸
Soon thereafter, the treaty negotiations between Li Hongzhang and Shufeldt opened. Whether the treaty should include a clause defining Chosŏn as China’s shuguo became the most controversial issue. The first article of Li’s draft, as Li and Kim had discussed, stated that "Chosŏn is China’s shubang and always enjoys the right of zizhu in its domestic and foreign affairs."²⁹ Shufeldt objected to this statement, so the two sides drew up a draft treaty with fifteen articles, leaving the first one blank. According to the Sino-Korean plan, if it proved impossible to include the statement in the final version of the treaty, Chosŏn would send a special
note to the US government to articulate its status as China’s shuguo. Kim did not hold any conversations with Shufeldt, nor did he participate in the negotiations. On April 21, 1882, Li gave Kim and Yi Ŭng-jun a copy of the draft treaty and instructed Yi to return to Chosŏn immediately from Tianjin by a Chinese steamer. At Kim’s request, Li instructed Ma Jianzhong, who was very skilled in international law, to accompany Shufeldt to Inch’ŏn to ensure that everything would go smoothly. In the meantime, two Korean officials, Ŏ Yun-jung (1848–96) and Yi Cho-yŏn, left Hansŏng for Tianjin as officials of examination and selection (K., kosŏn kwan), not as the plenipotentiaries that Li, Kim, and Shufeldt desperately wanted.
On May 8 Ma Jianzhong and the Chinese admiral Ding Ruchang (1836–95) arrived at Inch’ŏn, where Ma met with the Japanese minister, Hanabusa Yoshimoto, who had arrived a day earlier in the hope of influencing the negotiations. Four days later, Shufeldt arrived on the USS Swatara and negotiated with the Korean plenipotentiaries, Kim Hong-jip and Sin Hŏn (1810–84), the latter of whom had signed the Treaty of Kanghwa in 1876. The negotiations ended on May 22 with a treaty of fourteen articles, omitting the first article about Chosŏn’s status that Li had proposed. For Chosŏn’s national flag, Ma suggested Yi Ŭng-jun’s design of the Taiji and eight trigrams as the basic model.³⁰ After Shufeldt left for Shanghai with a copy of the treaty, Ma remained in Inch’ŏn to help Chosŏn negotiate treaties with Britain and other states.³¹ Following the middle course, as determined by Li, Ma, and Kim, the king sent a dispatch that Ma had drafted to the US president Chester Arthur on May 29, claiming that Corea is a tributary of China, but in regard to both internal administration and foreign intercourse it enjoys complete independence.³² The king sent the same announcement to the sovereigns of other treaty countries, including Britain (June 6, 1882), Germany (November 26, 1883), Italy (June 26, 1884), Russia (July 7, 1884), and France (June 4, 1886). As the hermit nation entered the family of nations, its de jure independent status as a sovereign state in terms of international law and its de facto and de jure dependent status as a subordinate of China in accordance with Zongfan principles became one of the most controversial and perplexing issues for Western states in East Asia. The new situation also complicated Sino-Korean relations as Chosŏn moved toward modifying its relations with China.
Protecting Chosŏn as the Patriarch: The Chinese Military Intervention in 1882
Challenges from Within: The King’s Requests for Change
By the time Chosŏn concluded its treaty with the United States, more than one-third of the Korean trainees in Tianjin had returned home. The training program had provided cover for Korean-American treaty negotiations and a new channel of communication outside the Zongfan mechanism, but it was never independently a focus for either the Chinese or the Korean side. Ŏ Yun-jung and Yi Cho-yŏn, the two Korean officials who had nominally been sent to evaluate the trainees in Tianjin, also ignored the training program in order to focus on their true diplomatic mission. In May 1882 Ŏ and Yi submitted four detailed requests from the king to the acting Beiyang superintendent, Zhang Shusheng (1824–84), who had assumed Li Hongzhang’s position when Li returned to his hometown in Anhui for one hundred days of mourning for his mother.
The first request proposed that the two countries negotiate a treaty in keeping with the new international situation. The second recommended that the two sides close the markets on the northeastern border of Manchuria in order to prevent Russian interference. The third request offered to replace Chosŏn’s periodic dispatch of emissaries to Beijing with representatives who would reside in the capital permanently, receiving imperial edicts and calendars and making China’s dispatch of imperial envoys to Chosŏn unnecessary. The fourth request further specified that the Korean emissaries residing in Beijing would be responsible for their own travel expenses and meals, effectively making them no different from the ministers of other countries.³³ These bold requests reflected Huang Zunxian’s blueprint for Korea’s reforms as laid out in his A Strategy for Chosŏn in late 1880, and they were aimed at replacing certain Zongfan conventions with Western
diplomatic principles as practiced between sovereign states.
Concluding a treaty with China was Chosŏn’s primary goal. For that purpose, Ŏ discussed with Zhou Fu key issues such as the posting of permanent emissaries in Beijing, the granting of most-favored-nation status to China, and the definition of Chosŏn’s status as China’s shuguo in the treaty. The two sides agreed that China’s foreign affairs vis-à-vis Chosŏn would be managed by the Zongli Yamen and the Beiyang superintendent, whereas bilateral tributary affairs would remain under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Rites. This discussion set the tone for the treaty. In June 1882 Ŏ arrived in Beijing, where he was lodged at the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations by the Ministry of Rites. The ministry, following Zongfan conventions, presented Ŏ with silver, sheep, wine, and meals. In the meantime, Yi Ŭng-jun, another special emissary of the king, arrived in Beijing with a note expressing the king’s sincere gratitude to the emperor and the central dynasty for protecting the small country and the fan in the negotiations with the United States. Yi was also lodged at the Common Accommodations and showered with silver, sheep, wine, and meals.
Although granting the king’s requests would weaken the role of the Ministry of Rites, the cases of Ryukyu, Burma, and Vietnam—which by 1882 had been or were being separated from the Sinocentric realm and colonized by other states—had made the ministry realize that many issues lay beyond the capacity of the Zongfan mechanism to address effectively. The ministry passed the king’s requests to the emperor and suggested that he instruct all officials familiar with foreign affairs, especially Li Hongzhang, to participate in a confidential discussion on the matter. Baoting (1840–90), a Manchu minister of the ministry, presented a memorial to the emperor to detail the ministry’s preferences.
According to Baoting, Chosŏn, the first shuguo of foreign barbarians that had subordinated itself to the Great Qing during the Hongtaiji period, was far more important than the countries in the South Sea (Ch., Nanyang zhuguo, Southeast Asia). After Japan’s invasion of Ryukyu, Britain’s of Burma, and France’s of Vietnam, all of which China failed to resist, Chosŏn’s respect for China had diminished, but it had not betrayed China because of Chosŏn’s weakness and still respected China’s virtues.
Baoting argued that refusing to let the shuguo trade at China’s treaty ports and pursue shared commercial interests with other barbarians from afar (Ch., yuanyi) would be unfair to Chosŏn and might push it to the Japanese side. But permitting Chosŏn’s emissaries to reside in Beijing permanently would put Chosŏn on an equal footing with other countries with representatives in China and might make it as aggressive as the British barbarians had become. Baoting urged the Ministry of Rites to retain its right to administer Chosŏn but to continue to forward matters concerning trade to the Zongli Yamen. Even if Korean emissaries were permitted to reside permanently in Beijing, China should not allow Chosŏn to build a legation in the city. Instead, the emissaries should be lodged at the Common Accommodations to emphasize that China and Chosŏn remained members of the same family. Baoting also proposed that Beijing use Chosŏn’s intention of exploiting China’s power to check other countries as an opportunity to dispatch thousands of soldiers to Chosŏn to garrison its military forts in order to protect it and place it under China’s influence (Ch., yu hubi zhi zhong yu kongzhi zhi dao).³⁴
Baoting’s opinions had a strong impact on the Qing court’s decision. The court promptly issued an edict declining Chosŏn’s request to place permanent emissaries in Beijing because of various potential inconveniences and the fact that "Chosŏn has been a fan for a long time, and all rituals have regulations." It also decided that the Zongli Yamen should be in charge of China’s trade affairs with Chosŏn and the Ministry of Rites should continue to manage tributary affairs. Nevertheless, the court agreed to make changes to some conventions and instructed the Beiyang superintendent to negotiate a commercial treaty with Chosŏn.³⁵ This imperial order further augmented the superintendent’s importance as the most powerful agent of Sino-Korean contacts beyond the court-to-court tributary track. Two weeks later, Baoting submitted another memorial to the emperor to argue that China should help Chosŏn strengthen its maritime defenses. To
underline Chosŏn’s critical position, Baoting went as far as to claim that China would rather lose Yunnan and Guizhou than Chosŏn (Ch., jishi Yun Gui, buke shi Chaoxian). The emperor commented that the comparison between Yunnan and Guizhou Provinces and Chosŏn was inappropriate, but he showed serious concern over the security of China’s shuguo.³⁶
Justifying China’s Status as the Patriarch: The Dispatch of Chinese Troops to Chosŏn
While Chosŏn was successfully persuading China to sign a treaty with it, back home it was teetering on the brink of political upheaval. On July 23, 1882, a mutiny, known as the Imo incident, broke out in Hansŏng over the unfair distribution of rations of rice among troops after a severe drought. Hundreds of soldiers of a military unit called Muwiyŏng attacked the Japanese legation, killing several Japanese, including Lieutenant Horimoto Reizō, who had been teaching Chosŏn’s Special Skills Army (K., Pyŏlgi gun) since 1881. After occupying the palace, the rebels held the king captive and killed several high-ranking officials who had been prominent pillars of Queen Min’s clan in the partisan struggles at the court. The king’s father, the Taewŏn’gun, seized the opportunity to restore his regency and retaliated against the queen’s clan by announcing that the queen was dead. In fact, she had escaped the capital and had hidden in Ch’ungju Prefecture.³⁷ The Japanese chargé d’affaires, Hanabusa Yoshimoto, fled to Inch’ŏn, where he boarded a British steamer to Nagasaki and telegraphed news of the uprising to Tokyo.
Tokyo instructed Hanabusa to return to Inch’ŏn with navy forces to seek justice and compensation for the killings of the Japanese. The Chinese minister in Tokyo, Li Shuchang (1837–96), telegraphed Beijing, likewise to request the immediate dispatch of troops to Chosŏn. In Beijing the German minister, Max August von Brandt, and the inspector general of the imperial customs, Robert Hart (1835–1911), informed the Zongli Yamen about the mutiny on August 2 and 3, at the same time that copies of the German-Korean and British-Korean treaties, along with the Korean king’s dispatches to the German and British sovereigns claiming Chosŏn’s status as China’s shuguo, reached the Zongli Yamen.³⁸ Within days, Beijing was in full alarm over the situation in Korea.
When Zhang Shusheng, who commanded the Beiyang Navy in Tianjin, instructed General Wu Changqing (1829–84) to be ready for military action, he was influenced in large part by the Korean officials Kim Yun-sik and Ŏ Yun-jung, who were in Tianjin at the time. As fervent proponents of the king’s policy of opening up, Kim and Ŏ linked the mutiny with the aborted coup of the previous year, which had been linked to the Taewŏn’gun. They asked Zhang to send warships and soldiers to suppress the uprising and to check Japanese intrigue. Accusing the Taewŏn’gun of plotting against the king, Kim even secretly proposed to kill the Taewŏn’gun when the Chinese troops occupied Hansŏng in order to erase the bane of the country.³⁹ Handicapped by the limited channels of communication and intelligence gathering, China was so unfamiliar with Chosŏn’s domestic situation that Zhang and his Chinese colleagues became dependent on Kim’s and Ŏ’s biased information. The Chinese concluded that the Taewŏn’gun would dethrone the king if China failed to take action in time.
Beijing decided to exercise its patriarchal authority immediately. The Guangxu emperor instructed the Zongli Yamen and Zhang to send forces to Chosŏn under the leadership of Ma Jianzhong and Ding Ruchang to cherish the small country, halt the Japanese plot, and protect the Japanese people along the same lines. The military action acquired legitimacy from the rationales of the Zongfan arrangement. Zhang assembled thirteen warships and merchant ships under Admiral Ding’s command and summoned four thousand soldiers, placing them under General Wu’s command. Zhang also ordered Kim and Ŏ to return to Chosŏn together with the Chinese troops to serve as their guides. Meanwhile, Ma conducted a reconnaissance mission in Inch’ŏn that included several long conversations with Ŏ. Ŏ’s personal resentment of the Taewŏn’gun deeply influenced Ma’s judgment on the matter in his report to Zhang, confirming the Chinese side’s earlier evaluation of the Korean situation. General Wu soon left Tianjin for Yantai, from where he would continue to Chosŏn with his fleet and officers, including the twenty-four-year-old Yuan Shikai. During the trip to Chosŏn, Yuan told Kim that he wanted to lead hundreds of warriors to seize Hansŏng, which impressed Kim considerably.⁴⁰ Yuan would later reside in Chosŏn for more than a decade and significantly shape the future of the country.
Japan, too, considered its action of sending troops to Chosŏn legal and legitimate. Inoue Kaoru informed the foreign ministers in Tokyo that Japan’s operation was completely based upon pacifism, and the aim of its warships and troops was to protect the Japanese embassy and citizens. The deputy foreign minister, Yoshida Kyonari (1845–91), declined Li Shuchang’s offer of China’s mediation. Very soon Inoue was giving Hanabusa detailed instructions on military operations and the terms of compensation, all of which were aimed at dealing with the situation unilaterally and by force, rather than through China or other countries.⁴¹ As a result, the ideological conflict between China and Japan regarding Chosŏn’s status evolved into a military rivalry on the peninsula.
For China, sending troops to its shuguo was legitimate and necessary. As the Zongli Yamen put it to Mori in 1876, China had long before assumed responsibility for helping Chosŏn solve its difficulties, resolve its disputes, and secure its safety and security. Reviewing this point in his notes to Yoshida, Li Shuchang stated that China’s actions followed the rule of cherishing the small. China had to "suppress the rebellion for the sake of the shubang and protect the Japanese legation in Hansŏng at the same time. The minister used a metaphor to explain the rationale behind China’s operation, describing China as the patriarch of a family" (Ch., jiazhang) who had the obligation to investigate why the belongings of other people—that is, Japan—left at the houses of his sons or brothers (Ch., zidi jia), namely, Chosŏn, had been stolen.⁴² This metaphor crystallized China’s role vis-à-vis Korea within the Zongfan world. It also clearly demonstrated that China’s understanding of the mutiny and its decision to send troops to Chosŏn were not related to international law.
Japan had difficulty rebuffing China’s statement and worried that the situation in Chosŏn might draw Japan into the abyss of a war with the powerful China. Having consulted with Charles Le Gendre about the Taiwan issue in 1872, the Gaimushō again resorted to its foreign intellectual resources, soliciting advice from the French jurist and legal adviser to the government, Gustave Boissonade (1825–1910). Bois-sonade suggested that Japan could insist that Chosŏn was an independent country and only focus on negotiation with Chosŏn. He mentioned the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and Egypt as an analogy for the Sino-Korean relationship, as Mori had done in 1876. Since Britain and France had directly intervened in the mutiny of Egypt in January 1882, regardless of the Ottomans’ attitude, Japan could directly intervene in the rebellion in Chosŏn without regard to China’s response.⁴³ In Beijing, Inspector General Hart also believed that China and Japan about Corea will just be in much the same position as Turkey and England about Egypt.⁴⁴ In this context, then, the trilateral relationship between China, Chosŏn, and Japan became analogous to the one between the Ottoman Empire, European powers represented by Britain and France, and African countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, reflecting the connection between the transformation of the East Asian community and the rise of new imperialism in world history.⁴⁵ The European colonial experience in Africa thus made a critical intellectual contribution to the development of the Japanese colonial enterprise in East Asia.
The Chinese side was not blind to the emergence of the new colonial model practiced by European states. Li Shuchang, from Tokyo, suggested to the Zongli Yamen that after suppressing the mutiny China should manage and supervise all of Chosŏn’s affairs in order to ensure peace in its domestic situation as well as its foreign relations. He further proposed that China should directly abolish the kingship and convert the country into prefectures and counties [of China] (Ch., zhi fei qiwang er junxian zhi), imitating the approach of Britain in India, in order to resolve once and for all the thorny question of Chosŏn’s status between China and other states.⁴⁶ China’s possible provincialization of Korea was thus to some degree equated to and even justified by the colonialism practiced by European powers. Yet Li himself concluded that China would be unable to take the proposed action because it would violate China’s self-imposed rule of humanity and virtue.⁴⁷ Until the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, China never initiated any plan to colonize Chosŏn; rather, it tried to protect and supervise the country along Zongfan lines.
Arriving in Chosŏn almost a month after the uprising, General Wu and his assistants were welcomed by the Korean officials.⁴⁸ The Chinese officials used
China’s uniquely favorable position and authority to quickly end the political turmoil by occupying the capital, capturing the Taewŏn’gun and sending him to Tianjin in China, restoring the king and the queen, and supporting Chosŏn in signing two conventions with Japan. Afterward, the king dispatched missions to Beijing and Tokyo along conventional lines to brief the two governments on the incident. At the end of September, the Zongli Yamen distributed a note to seven foreign ministers in Beijing, informing them about the Chinese intervention and reemphasizing that "Chosŏn, being a shuguo of our Great Qing, has maintained its status as fan for generations, and the court regards it as an inner subordinate [Ch., neifu] that shares solidarity with us."⁴⁹ The Yamen also announced that the Chinese troops would remain in Chosŏn to ensure the stability and security of the country.
A thornier issue for Beijing was how to deal with the Taewŏn’gun, who had been sent from Tianjin to Baoding. After reassuming the position of the Beiyang superintendent, Li Hongzhang endorsed Zhang Shusheng’s proposal that Beijing should detain the Taewŏn’gun in China forever and allow the king to regularly send officials to visit him. Li cited a similar historical case from the early fourteenth century, when the Mongol court of the Yuan Dynasty exiled King Ch’unghye (r. 1330–32, 1339–43) of Koryŏ Korea to Guangdong Province in China.⁵⁰ In its contemporary reaction to the political turmoil of its outer fan, the Qing could point to historical precedent to argue that it retained the fully legal power to punish any official of the fan and even to depose the king, if necessary. The Qing’s decision to dethrone the last king of the Lê Dynasty of Annam in 1789 was also a clear demonstration of this power. It was in this context that in 1886 Yuan Shikai enthusiastically proposed to Li Hongzhang that China should replace the king of Chosŏn with an able man from the Korean royal family.⁵¹ In the end, after holding the Taewŏn’gun for three years, Beijing released him back to Chosŏn in October 1885, when Yuan Shikai was promoted to the position of an imperial resident in the country.
China’s military intervention in 1882 was a turning point in Qing-Chosŏn relations, yet in a fundamental sense it was only a public presentation of the underlying nature of the supreme and patriarchal power the Qing had wielded over its subordinate country since 1637. The assertion that China’s superiority was merely titular and its act of detaining the Taewŏn’gun inconceivable is a far cry from the truth.⁵² So is the argument that through this particular intervention the Qing became a colonial power that inflicted Western-style imperialism on Chosŏn.
Defining Chosŏn through Treaties: The Sino-Korean Regulations and Their Consequences
Complicating the Zongfan Order: The First Sino-Korean Treaty
As Chosŏn’s troubles seemed to continue, many Chinese officials advocated establishing stronger relations with the country. On February 28, 1882, Wu Dacheng (1835–1902), an assistant official of border affairs in Jilin in Manchuria, stressed in a memorial to the emperor that China’s self-strengthening enterprise was also aimed at protecting Chosŏn and checking Japan and Russia. Wu argued that Beijing should dispatch imperial commissioners to Chosŏn to push the Koreans to determine whether such harbors as Wŏnsan (known in Russian as Lazarev), a port in northeastern Korea being surveyed by Russia, could become trade ports. Chosŏn, Wu proposed, should allow the China Merchants Steamship Navigation Company (Ch., Lunchuan zhaoshang ju) to survey the coastal conditions with the aim of establishing Chinese trade posts. In return, he suggested allowing Korean merchants to trade in Tianjin, Yantai, Shanghai, and other trade ports of China. Wu justified his proposal by invoking China’s Zongfan relations with Chosŏn, the "outer fan that had been a subordinate to our dynasty for more than two hundred years."⁵³ International law was of no concern to him.
In order to help Chosŏn overcome the financial crisis triggered by the turmoil, China loaned the country 0.5 million taels of silver at the request of leading Korean officials Cho Yŏng-ha (1845–84) and Kim Hong-jip, who negotiated the loan with their Chinese counterparts Ma Jianzhong and Tang Tingshu (1832–92).
Tang was the chief of the Kaiping Mining Administration (Ch., Kaiping kuangwu ju), a modern engineering and mining company founded by Li Hongzhang in Zhili Province in 1878. According to their agreement, 0.3 million of the loan would come from the China Merchants Steamship Navigation Company and 0.2 million from the Kaiping Mining Administration. Chosŏn’s tariffs and taxes on red ginseng would serve as mortgage, and it would pay off the loan in twelve years at 0.8 percent interest. In return, the two Chinese creditors supervised by Li were granted economic privileges in Chosŏn. The Navigation Company gained the right to rent land at Chosŏn’s treaty ports for its factories and offices, while Kaiping Mining could freely prospect for minerals in the hinterland of the country. Chinese commercial power thus quickly expanded into Chosŏn. In addition, China agreed to provide Chosŏn with military supplies for its poorly equipped troops. In October 1882 Li Hongzhang gave Chosŏn ten twelve-pound cannons, three thousand cannonballs, 4,500 pounds of cannon powder, 1,500 pounds of bullet powder, one thousand British rifles, ten thousand pounds of rifle powder, and one million bullets from the Tianjin Arsenals.⁵⁴ A month later Chosŏn’s military and industrial training program in Tianjin ended with the king’s recall of the rest of the apprentices.⁵⁵ From that point on, Chosŏn had to invite foreign advisers to the country to train its forces, leaving the country more vulnerable to outside influences.⁵⁶
After China quelled the mutiny in Chosŏn in the summer of 1882, the two countries resumed their negotiations for a commercial treaty in Tianjin, with Ŏ Yun-jung representing Chosŏn and Zhou Fu and Ma Jianzhong representing China. From the beginning of their meetings in May 1882, before the rebellion, the two sides agreed on clarifying in the treaty that Chosŏn was China’s shuguo with the right of zizhu, not an independent country. After reviewing the Chinese draft, entitled Regulations for Maritime and Overland Trade between Chinese and Chosŏn Subjects (Ch., Zhongguo Chaoxian shangmin shuilu maoyi zhangcheng, hereafter the Sino-Korean Regulations), Ŏ questioned some of its elements, in particular the imbalance in consular jurisdiction enshrined in article 2 and the opening of Hansŏng as a trade city for Chinese merchants and the permission for Chinese merchants to trade in Chosŏn’s hinterlands that were provided by article 4. Quoting Zongfan regulations, Zhou and Ma responded that this treaty was different from those signed between China and friendly nations (Ch., yuguo, such as Britain, France, and the United States); in this case, the two countries should uphold their veritable orthodox legitimacy (Ch., shizai zhi mingfen) in an established context. The Chinese response helps explain why the parties decided to call the document regulations (Ch., zhangcheng) rather than a treaty (Ch., tiaoyue). In the end, Zhou and Ma agreed to alter several terms but successfully added a preamble specifying that the regulations applied only to China’s subordinate countries and were exempt from the most-favored-nation rule. The Korean side endorsed the revised text.⁵⁷
In a memorial to Beijing, Li Hongzhang summarized the regulations and emphasized that the preamble would clarify and define the orthodox legitimacy (Ch., zhengming dingfen) between China and its shuguo.⁵⁸ Li did not mention that article 7 endowed Chinese warships with the right to cruise in Chosŏn’s waters and to cast anchor at any of its ports in the interests of Chosŏn’s security. This article impinged on Chosŏn’s sovereignty, but Ŏ and his Korean colleagues, like Li and his Chinese colleagues, regarded it as part of the favorable protection that the upper country generously offered to the subordinate country. These scholar-officials, including the French-educated Ma Jianzhong, did not interpret the regulations’ terms with reference to international law. In the aftermath of the mutiny, China was the only power that Chosŏn could trust as it wrestled with multiple crises. Yet not all Koreans applauded the treaty dictated by the Chinese. For example, Yun Ch’i-ho (1865–1945), who had served as the assistant to Ŏ Yun-jung in the gentlemen’s sighting group to Japan to observe Japanese politics and society in 1881 and was visiting Tokyo when the Sino-Korean Regulations were signed, reported feeling extremely sad that the treaty placed Chosŏn in such an inferior position vis-à-vis China.⁵⁹ Having been exposed to Western and Japanese modernity and civilization, young Korean scholars such as Yun believed that such unequal arrangements between the two nations should be abandoned, signaling the rise of modern nationalism and national identity among these Korean intellectuals. Yun later became a leading figure in Korean modernization.
By concluding the regulations with Chosŏn, China fulfilled the majority of the requests that the king had made in the spring of 1882 (discussed earlier), changing or permanently abolishing certain conventions that had been in place for 245 years, since 1637. Scholars who embrace theories of power politics prefer to interpret the treaty as a tool by which China, the preponderant side in geopolitical terms, strengthened its control over Chosŏn, consolidating its suzerainty and even becoming another imperialist power pursuing its own commercial interests on the peninsula. From this perspective, China brought multilateral imperialism to Korea in exactly the same way in which China itself had been introduced to the concept by its Western counterparts.⁶⁰ However, the Manchu court of China in the 1880s still primarily followed conventional Zongfan rules and precedents in its policies toward Chosŏn, and these often contradicted international law and local Chinese officials’ practical concerns over Sino-Korean contacts. For instance, on March 14, 1882, several months before the conclusion of the Sino-Korean Regulations, the Qing court learned from the Manchu general of Jilin, Ming’an (1828–1911), and his assistant Wu Dacheng that Chosŏn peasants kept crossing the border to cultivate wilderness areas in Jilin and that this trespassing was causing serious problems. The eleven-year-old Emperor Guangxu, under the tutelage of his mentors, responded, Regarding these poor Chosŏn peasants, in the eyes of the local officials, there is certainly a line between them and us, but in the eyes of the court, there is originally no difference between the inside and the outside. Thus, these peasants should be managed well and not be punished by additional rules, as long as they have no intention of encroaching on our borders.⁶¹
This policy bears a striking similarity to Emperor Yongzheng’s decision of 1727 to demarcate a new borderline with Annam on the basis of the idea that all lands of China’s outer fan were under the emperor’s jurisdiction. From 1727 to 1882, the politico-cultural ideology of all-under-Heaven as embraced by the Chinese court remained unchanged. Although the Kangxi emperor had established himself as a student of both Chinese and Western learning, in particular in the fields of mathematics and astronomy, in his active communications with the Jesuits, almost all emperors after him left such Sino-Western intellectual exchange to the Imperial Astronomical Bureau.⁶² Until the late nineteenth century, the young emperors—Tongzhi and Guangxu—studied only Confucian classics and Chinese history in their daily lessons at court (Ch., rijiang). Even though European and American ministers started to reside in Beijing and China launched a self-strengthening movement in the 1860s, the Manchu court did not train emperors in international knowledge commensurate with China’s needs and changing situation. The imperial civil-service examinations that selected officials for the Qing bureaucracy still tested the candidates only on the Confucian classics and showed no hint of change. The Guangxu emperor, along with his tutors, in particular Weng Tonghe, remained confined to this educational milieu. The first textbook on Western history and international law aimed at introducing Guangxu to European and American history since the Age of Discovery, titled Lectures on Western History (Ch., Xishi jiangyi), did not reach the emperor until November 1907, a year before he died.⁶³
When the young Guangxu emperor approved the Sino-Korean Regulations in 1882, he adopted a typically Confucian tone to emphasize that "Chosŏn is our shuguo and exists as eastern barbarians far away" (Ch., Chaoxian wei wo shuguo, pizai dongyi).⁶⁴ The conventional discourse on the civilized–barbarian distinction was still firmly rooted at the court, at least in the minds of core leaders. For the Manchu ruling house of the Chinese empire, this discourse concerned not so much practical diplomatic negotiations at the provincial level as statecraft from the court’s perspective. Qing China in the 1880s continued to act as the Middle Kingdom, the upper country, and the Heavenly Dynasty in the Sino-Korean Zongfan framework. As long as Chosŏn was a shuguo, China’s centrality would persist and China’s Western-oriented diplomacy would accordingly be circumscribed. In this sense, China’s transformation into a modern state occurred with the involution of the universal politico-cultural Chinese empire, which revealed the discrepancy between provincial diplomatic practices and the court’s ideological norms in the late nineteenth century and highlighted the significance of Chosŏn for the rise of a modern Chinese state.
Complementing the Zongfan Order: The Ritual Crisis and the Sino-Korean Border Treaties
By adopting the form, though not the name, of a Western-style treaty, the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations helped lay out the inner dual network—introduced at the beginning of this chapter—of Sino-Korean contacts. In addition to maintaining the court-to-court system described in chapter 2, the two countries now had to adjust to the newly created state-to-state system, in which both countries were treated by their Japanese and Western treaty counterparts as independent sovereign states that were theoretically equal to each other. This inner dual network introduced the two countries to a more complicated situation in the new setting of international politics, as the ritual crisis that unfolded in China in late 1882 demonstrates.
The crisis started with questions regarding the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations raised by the Manchu general in Mukden, Chongqi (1830–1900). In three palace memorials in December 1882, Chongqi protested article 2, according to which the Chinese commissioners of trade at the treaty ports of Chosŏn will, in their dealings with Chosŏn’s officials, be on a footing of perfect equality, and are to be treated with the consideration due to the observance of etiquette, while the Chosŏn commissioners at Chinese ports "are likewise to be treated on a footing of equality in their dealings with the local authorities, namely, the taotai [daotai, circuit intendant], the prefect, and the magistrates of the place." Recalling that Chosŏn became a fan and subject of the Great Qing in 1637 and that the Korean officials were ministers of ministers and thus ranked below their Chinese counterparts, Chongqi pointed out that equality between Chosŏn commissioners and China’s local authorities meant that the emperor himself would be on a footing of equality with the king. The assumption of equality thus severely undermined the established order, and under no circumstances should such treatment be extended to Chosŏn. The term equality (Ch., pingxing) in the article should, argued Chongqi, be deleted for the sake of moral principles (Ch., lunji) and China’s national polity (Ch., guoti). Mukden would treat the Chosŏn commissioners along conventional lines in order to defend decorum (Ch., titong).
The general also questioned article 5, which canceled the requirement of official supervision of trade at the border and allowed local people to trade freely at Zhamen and Ŭiju on the two sides of the Yalu River and at Hunchun and Hoeryŏng on the two sides of the Tumen River. Chongqi agreed that outdated rules ought to be rescinded, but he insisted that land border security should be strengthened by maintaining the existing patrols along the Chinese side. His concerns about unpredictable threats from Chosŏn itself and from the treaty powers present in Chosŏn were heightened by his perception of the uniqueness and importance of the Mukden area, the Qing’s ancestral territory.⁶⁵
Chongqi’s worries triggered a heated debate among the Ministry of Rites, the Zongli Yamen, and the Beiyang superintendent. Since the overland border trade regulations would soon be renegotiated at Mukden after a joint Sino-Korean investigation, the issue of the performance of equal rituals became the hottest topic in the discussion. Li Hongzhang argued that the imperial code did not regulate ritual performances between local Chinese officials and foreign tributary emissaries, but he noted that local officials treated the emissaries of Vietnam, Siam, and Ryukyu with rituals of equality (Ch., pingli), which should be applicable to Chosŏn too. Li also solicited theoretical support from the classics of the Zhou Dynasty and drew an analogy between the statuses of the authorities of the Qing and those of Chosŏn. According to this analogy, the king, as an outer vassal of the Son of Heaven, was equal to China’s governors-general and governors who were inner vassals; meanwhile, Chosŏn’s officials were equal to Chinese officials below the ranks of governor and governor-general. Accordingly, in China, the Chosŏn commissioners should perform rituals of subordination (Ch., shuli) to the Chinese governors-general, governors, and other officials with higher ranks, and rituals of equality to such local officials as taotai and prefects. They should also perform rituals of equality to Western ministers in Tianjin, where the commissioners would reside. In Chosŏn, on the other hand, the Chinese commissioners should perform rituals of equality to Korean officials whose rank was inferior to that of the cabinet, Ŭijŏngbu.
In his suggestions, Li Hongzhang tried to pursue a mean between Zongfan rituals embodying the ancestral system (Ch., zuzhi) and Western-style etiquette
between foreign ministers and the host country. Agreeing that Chosŏn’s commissioners could get favorable treatment since they were not tributary emissaries, the Ministry of Rites proposed that when Chinese commissioners at or below the rank of taotai visited the king, they should perform guest-host rituals (Ch., binzhu li), a proposal that involved a slight change to certain rules of the imperial code.⁶⁶ In February 1883 the court, via the Zongli Yamen, endorsed Li’s and the ministry’s solutions to the ritual crisis and set up a new framework for ritual performances between various officials of the two countries (see figure 5.1). As the diplomatic corps formed in Hansŏng, the new ritual arrangements would cause increasing conflicts between China, Chosŏn, Japan, and Western states in the following decade, demonstrating the strong influence of the dynamics of the inner dual network over the practices of the outer dual network between China and Chosŏn.
Chongqi found the new ritual code a good resolution to the problems he had noted. He went on to strengthen border security and maintain the proper system as he had wished by signing a convention with the Korean representative Ŏ Yun-jung in March 1883. The convention, Regulations for Trade at the Border between Mukden and Chosŏn (Ch., Fengtian yu Chaoxian bianmin jiaoyi zhangcheng), governed trade at the Zhongjiang (middle river) area of the Yalu River. Several articles were specifically aimed at upholding Zongfan conventions. Echoing the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations, the preamble of the Mukden-Chosŏn Regulations stated that the border trade at Zhongjiang "is not on the same footing as the trade carried on at the treaty ports, inasmuch as it was originally established by the Heavenly Dynasty as a benefit to its shuguo with the distinct understanding that it should be a convenience to the population … and that other nations are not concerned in these rules. According to articles 8 and 19, China would not impose taxes on Chosŏn’s annual tributes and routine goods and would send soldiers to escort Chosŏn’s tributary missions to Beijing from Fenghuang City, precisely as China had done for more than two centuries. Article 23 dictated that bilateral correspondence should be conducted in accordance with the established system, in which Chosŏn should call China the upper country or Heavenly Dynasty" and avoid such abbreviated characters as zhong (for Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom, in reference to China) or dong (for Dongguo, the eastern country, in reference to Chosŏn). For their part, Chinese officials would address Chosŏn as the country of Chosŏn or your honorable country.⁶⁷
FIGURE 5.1. The rules of ritual performance between China and Chosŏn after 1883. S refers to rituals of subordination, E refers to rituals of equality, and G-H refers to guest-host rituals. Foreign ministers in China sometimes used the rituals of equality in their dealings with Chinese taotai, prefects, magistrates, and other local officials.
Several months later, the two countries signed a third treaty, entitled Regulations for Trade at the Border between Jilin and Chosŏn Whenever Necessary (Ch., Jilin Chaoxian shangmin suishi maoyi zhangcheng). This treaty was a short version of the one governing trade between Mukden and Chosŏn and laid down the format of bilateral official correspondence in accordance with Zongfan hierarchy in the same way.
By the end of 1883, then, China and Chosŏn had signed three treaties, or regulations, that were firmly rooted in the Zongfan discourse. The sophisticated norms used in these texts continued to serve as a way of institutionalizing the hierarchical relationship, centering the Middle Kingdom, and articulating the parties’ identities in the Chinese world, just as the Zongfan discourse had done in the 1630s, 1760s, and 1860s. Simultaneously, however, the new rules made adjustments to the traditional mechanism by introducing a new political and commercial network into the borderland between the two countries in Manchuria. This change extended China’s modern diplomacy, which had been practiced primarily in inner China’s coastal areas, into Manchuria, along with the considerable influence of its human agents such as Li Hongzhang. The three treaties therefore laid the legal foundation for state-to-state contacts between the two countries in the following, and final, decade of their longstanding Zongfan relationship. The border areas of Manchuria became a test field where the two countries negotiated the reach of their respective sovereignties between tradition and modernity, as discussed in chapter 6.
Joining Chosŏn’s Foreign Network: The Chinese Commissioners and the Chinese Settlements
Struggling for Authority: The Chinese Commissioner of Trade in Chosŏn
After the mutiny of 1882, Chosŏn asked China to send specialists on diplomacy and trade to assist it in establishing a system of maritime customs. The request was made by the king, endorsed by China’s court, and executed by both countries within the Zongfan framework. Consequently, Chosŏn’s maritime customs system became a sub-branch of China’s imperial customs, and its annual reports were affiliated with those of imperial customs until 1895. In November 1882 Li Hongzhang appointed Ma Jianchang (1840–1939), Ma Jianzhong’s brother, and Paul Georg von Möllendorff (1847–1901), a German national who worked as an assistant in the Chinese Maritime Customs office in Beijing, as foreign advisers to the king.⁶⁸ Ma and Möllendorff took up their posts in early 1883, followed by the first group of representatives from Western treaty nations and China.
The first US envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary, Lucius H. Foote (1826–1913), and the first Chinese commissioner of trade, Chen Shu-tang, were the two most important figures among the diplomats now arriving in Chosŏn, and they took diametrically different approaches to defining Chosŏn’s status. Before he departed for Chosŏn in March 1883, Foote received instructions from Secretary of State Frederick Frelinghuysen (1817–85), emphasizing that the American treaty negotiations with Chosŏn were conducted as between two independent and sovereign nations…. As far as we are concerned Corea is an independent sovereign power, with all the attendant rights, privileges, duties and responsibilities: in her relations to China we have no desire to interfere unless action should be taken prejudicial to the rights of the United States. The instructions reminded Foote that for all purposes of intercourse between the United States and Corea the King is a sovereign, and that with sovereign states only do the United States treat. Further the representatives of the United States in China will treat the Corean representatives there as in the position assigned them by the Chinese government.⁶⁹ Other Western countries imitated this pragmatic policy.
Chen Shutang’s appointment and authority derived from the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations. Article 1 of the treaty endowed the Beiyang superintendent with the
power to appoint commissioners of trade (Ch., shangwu weiyuan) to reside at Chosŏn’s treaty ports and exercise jurisdiction over Chinese merchants, while Chosŏn would send similar commissioners of trade to Tianjin and other Chinese treaty ports for the sake of its own merchants. Chen was a Han Chinese official and had served as consul-general in San Francisco from January 1880 to April 1882. He arrived in Hansŏng in October 1883 and opened his office with ten thousand taels of silver that he had received from Shanghai Maritime Customs. His expenditures would be covered by Beijing’s budget for overseas missions. As a second-rank taotai, Chen held the official title commissioner of commercial affairs in Chosŏn (Ch., Zongban Chaoxian shangwu weiyuan).⁷⁰ He was not an envoy of the imperial court, but his position carried imperial authority. As Beijing clarified to Chosŏn, Chen was slightly different from China’s representatives to other countries, but the rationale [for his dispatch] is generally the same. Invoking again the notion that Chosŏn is a subordinate country of China, Beijing concluded that Chen should be the center of the guests and instructed Chosŏn’s foreign office to give him favorable treatment whenever there was a banquet for foreign ministers.⁷¹
Chen himself was also a believer in China’s superiority. He posted a notification on the wall of Hansŏng’s southern gate, stating that "Chosŏn is a shuguo of China and calling on all merchants intending to trade in Chosŏn to follow the established rituals and to report to him in case of any disputes with others in the country. The text sought to highlight the friendship with the shuguo that uses the same language" (Ch., zhao shuguo tongwen zhi yi) and to cherish the affection within a family that respects a common patriarch (Ch., zhong yijia gongzhu zhi qing).⁷² Chen’s stridency antagonized the American minister and Korean officials, but he refused to change his tone. As in the case of Ma Jianzhong, who had studied in France, Chen’s diplomatic experience in the United States seemed to have no effect on his line of reasoning in Chosŏn.
In practice, Chen acted as a Chinese consul and planned to build his official residence in the style of a Chinese consulate (Ch., Zhongguo gongguan).⁷³ Yet he was not a consul, and his official title did not put him in charge of foreign affairs. Instead of contacting Chen, then, the Japanese and Western ministers brought diplomatic matters concerning China directly to Chosŏn’s Foreign Office, the T’ongni amun (K., T’ongni kyosŏp t’ongsang samu amun). Chosŏn also expressed a desire for independence from Chinese involvement by sending a special mission to the United States in the fall of 1883.⁷⁴ Chen felt so marginalized that in September 1884 he complained to Li Hongzhang that his awkward position was causing him to be snubbed by the Japanese and British ministers. Chen tried to justify his authority by invoking the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations, but other ministers responded that the treaty, as its preamble stated, was effective only between China and Korea. After consulting with Li and Foote, Chen updated his title to general commissioner of foreign and commercial affairs at Chosŏn’s ports (Ch., Zongban Chaoxian gekou jiaoshe tongshang shiwu) in November 1884.
According to Chen, this title perfectly fit the established system, in accordance with which he, as an official of the upper country, could discuss certain affairs of China’s shuguo with his Japanese and Western counterparts. Unsurprisingly, by failing to draw a clear line between Chinese and Korean affairs at the ports, the new title aroused deep concern among Western ministers, including the first British minister to Chosŏn, Harry Parkes, who had been wondering about Chosŏn’s international position for years. The Zongli Yamen clarified to Parkes that "Chosŏn is a shuguo of China, which means that the commissioner should not be understood as a minister to the country, but since Chen has been appointed by the emperor to be in charge of diplomatic affairs and he holds a second-rank taotai, his position is equal to that of the consuls-general of other countries."⁷⁵ This description thus strategically defined Chen as a consul-general.
Questionable Imperialism: Chinese Settlements in Chosŏn
Chen arrived in Hansŏng without a clear mission from Beijing or Tianjin, so he alone had to decide what to do. Beijing’s original plan had been to place Chen in charge of Chinese business in Inch’ŏn too, but Chen realized that it was impossible for him to perform duties in both Hansŏng and Inch’ŏn. A series of
commercial and diplomatic events involving Chinese merchants and citizens in Inch’ŏn and other treaty ports reached Chen’s desk right after he opened his office, so he sent an assistant, Li Nairong, to Inch’ŏn as the first Chinese representative at that port. Due to his lack of an official status, Li Nairong found himself in the same uncomfortable situation as Chen had. Chen called Li a consul (Ch., lingshi) instead of a commissioner (Ch., lishi) in front of the Japanese consul and the commissioner of Inch’ŏn maritime customs, although Li was not, strictly speaking, a consul. Since the Chinese terms for commissioner and consul have very similar pronunciations, Chen may have planned to use the phonological likeness to tacitly confer on Li Nairong a clear status commensurate with international practice. Li Nairong later told Chen that it would be better to clarify his official rank as commissioner rather than consul to the Korean side.⁷⁶
In February 1884 Chen informed Min Yŏng-muk (1826–84), Queen Min’s nephew and the minister of Chosŏn’s Foreign Office, that Li and other Chinese officials residing in Korean treaty ports held the title of commissioner of Chinese merchants’ affairs (Ch., huashang shiwu guan). These commissioners, said Chen, were equal to Chosŏn officials and foreign consuls and were in charge of all affairs concerning Chinese merchants in Chosŏn.⁷⁷ Li Nairong was thus transformed from Chen’s private assistant to a diplomatic representative of the Chinese state. As Kirk W. Larsen points out, Chen was successful … in establishing and promoting an official Qing diplomatic and commercial presence in Korea.⁷⁸
Li Nairong found his understaffed office in Inch’ŏn unable to handle the increase in Chinese business and Sino-Japanese conflicts at the port. Japan had opened more than one hundred stores in the city since 1876, and Japanese residents outnumbered the Koreans, Chinese, and Westerners. But now growing numbers of Chinese merchants, in particular from Shandong, Zhejiang, and Guangdong Provinces, were coming to seek their fortunes in the city, and these businessmen organized companies such as Tongshuntai hao (the Company of Union, Prosperity, and Peace) to challenge Japan’s monopoly in local trade.⁷⁹ Within a single month, from October to November 1883, the number of Chinese stores in Inch’ŏn increased from two to seven and that of Chinese merchants from about ten to more than sixty. According to Chinese statistics, from 1883 to 1884 the number of Chinese in Inch’ŏn rose from 63 to 235 and that of Chinese in Hansŏng from 26 to 352.⁸⁰ Some Chinese merchants in Inch’ŏn had started to extend their businesses to Hansŏng. Chen Shutang and Li Nairong were thus facing a new Chinese presence in Chosŏn. In addition, hundreds of Chinese sailors working on Chinese and Japanese cargo ships frequently passed through Inch’ŏn, giving a major boost to local bars and brothels. These sailors were troublemakers not only in Korean and Japanese eyes but also from the perspective of the Chinese, because Chinese officials at the port did not have a full roster of these Chinese citizens and therefore did not know whom to prosecute if any of them were involved in local conflicts. In an attempt to control the sailors, Li followed international conventions by requesting that all Chinese citizens visiting Inch’ŏn, including civilians and soldiers, register with his office.⁸¹
Given the growing number of Chinese merchants in Inch’ŏn and the expansion of their businesses, Chen Shutang felt it was necessary to set up a Chinese settlement for trade purposes. He found legal support in article 4 of the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations, which stated that the merchants of either country who may proceed to the open ports of the other country for trade will be allowed to rent land or houses and erect buildings. In December 1883 Chen and Möllendorff, the assistant minister of Chosŏn’s Foreign Office, conducted a field investigation in Inch’ŏn and decided to secure a foundation for a Chinese settlement. Many parts of the area lay on hillsides or in marshland, so the project required land reclamation (see map 5.1). Li Nairong and the commissioner of Inch’ŏn maritime customs made a map of the Chinese settlement, and Li asked local Chinese merchants to provide financial support for the land reclamation project.⁸²
MAP 5.1. The Chinese settlement in Inch’oȈn in the early 1890s. 1 meter = 39.37 inches. Plan of Settlements in Chemulpo [Inch’oȈn], handwritten map, preserved at the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University. Copyright Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies.
Chen found the name of the settlement a challenge. In his notes to the Korean side, Chen—unlike his Chinese or Korean colleagues—avoided the term settlement (Ch., zujie), instead calling it lands and boundary (Ch., dijie, which generally means land). In a letter to Li Nairong in December 1883, Chen said he had been considering whether the settlement should be called Lands of the Great Qing (Ch., Da Qing dijie) or Lands of the Chinese merchants (Ch., Huashang dijie). Confessing that he thought the former was not perfect, Chen decided on the latter, as it would not take advantage of Chosŏn and would maintain the face of the upper country.⁸³ Chen’s weighing of semantic options, like his maneuverings around the term commissioner, betrayed the problems of the outer dual network between China and Chosŏn—that is, the overlapping operation of the Zongfan framework and the treaty system in the two countries’ foreign
relations.
Chosŏn, however, did not endorse Chen’s plan to distinguish the Sino-Korean relationship in this particular case. When Min Yŏng-muk heard Chen’s argument that the regulations governing the Chinese merchants’ settlement should be different from those used for other countries in accordance with the system, Min retorted that there was no difference between the two.⁸⁴ On April 2, 1884, Min and Chen signed the Regulations for the Chinese Merchants Settlement in Inch’ŏn (Ch., Renchuan kou huashang dijie zhangcheng), which was based on the draft Chen had presented to Min in February. The text was written only in Chinese and officially called the settlement Lands of the Chinese Merchants, as Chen had proposed, but it omitted Chen’s preamble, which imitated the preamble to the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations by emphasizing that Sino-Korean trade was different from that between Chosŏn and other countries and that the regulations would apply only to the former.⁸⁵ Without the preamble, the two countries’ state-to-state relations took center stage.
While Chen was opening the Chinese settlement in Inch’ŏn, an event occurred in Pusan that further legitimized his agenda of expanding this model to other treaty ports. In early November 1883 a Chinese grocery store in Kōbe, Japan, called Dexing hao (Store of Merit and Prosperity) had sent two agents to Pusan to open a branch in the Japanese settlement there, but the branch was suddenly shut down by the Japanese consul. As soon as he returned to Hansŏng, Chen raised the case with Min Yŏng-muk. Min explained that he would prefer to "select a settlement [K., chogye] for the Chinese merchants where they can quickly open their stores," rather than negotiate with the Japanese to allow the Chinese merchants to do business in the Japanese settlement in Pusan. Chen applauded this proposal and volunteered to visit Pusan together with a Korean official for a joint field investigation. Min again appointed Möllendorff to accompany Chen.⁸⁶ In the meantime, the Chinese minister to Japan, Li Shuchang, suggested to the Zongli Yamen that Beijing should instruct Chosŏn’s Foreign Office to establish Chinese settlements in Pusan and other ports.⁸⁷ Li’s proposal fit Chen’s agenda perfectly. As a result, China opened settlements in Pusan and Wŏnsan.
Observing that China became active in Chosŏn after a series of crises beginning in 1882, scholars have generally interpreted the phenomenon as a fundamental change in China’s foreign policy toward Chosŏn and have described China as practicing imperialism under the cloak of suzerainty.⁸⁸ Two issues concerning the sovereignty of Chosŏn are worth discussing here: Chinese and Korean perceptions of the Chinese settlements and the extraterritoriality that Chinese citizens enjoyed in their settlements.
The negotiations between Chen and Min suggest that neither side perceived the settlements as a symbol of imperialist expansion that would damage Chosŏn’s sovereignty or help China gain geopolitical hegemony on the peninsula. Min’s proposal to open another Chinese settlement in Pusan in order to avoid cases like that of Dexing hao shows that he considered such settlements only pieces of rented land for whose use the Chinese, the Japanese, and other foreigners had to pay every year.⁸⁹ The term sovereignty never entered Min’s and Chen’s correspondence, and the term settlement carried a meaning that was very different from that which it would later convey in the strongly nationalist historical context of the twentieth century. The issue of establishing police forces in the Chinese settlement in Inch’ŏn, which involved Chinese, Korean, and British citizens, is another case that demonstrates the difference between China’s understanding of settlement and that of scholars in an international law context.⁹⁰
Furthermore, it is important to note that Chosŏn had the legal option of opening its own settlements at China’s ports in accordance with article 4 of the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations. Once the regulations went into effect, many Korean merchants traveled to Chinese ports, some even going as far as Gansu, Shaanxi, and Sichuan, to sell ginseng. In 1885 Chosŏn dispatched a commercial commissioner (K., sangmu wiwŏn) to Tianjin as a counterpart of Chen Shutang. Had the Korean merchants formed a strong and sizeable community in Tianjin, Shanghai, or other ports, as the Chinese did in Inch’ŏn and Pusan, Chosŏn could have established settlements at those Chinese ports through negotiations with Beijing. It was only Chosŏn’s limited overseas commercial activity that made this
scenario impracticable.
In terms of extraterritoriality, it is true that Chinese citizens held this right within Chinese settlements in Chosŏn, whereas Chosŏn merchants at Chinese treaty ports, according to article 2 of the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations, were under local Chinese jurisdiction, a difference that highlighted the unequal nature of their terms. However, in addition to the connection between article 2 of the Sino-Korean Regulations and the extraterritoriality granted to American citizens in the Korean-American treaty discussed earlier in this chapter, we should keep in mind that Koreans who conducted illegal trade in Qing China outside of the treaty ports always enjoyed extraterritoriality. The case of Korean merchants illegally visiting Gansu and Sichuan Provinces illustrates this point.
After China opened its treaty ports to Koreans as required by the Sino-Korean Regulations, the number of Koreans traveling to Gansu and Sichuan to sell ginseng without passports issued by the Korean commissioners and local Chinese officials increased sharply. In June 1883 the officials of Langzhong County in Sichuan sent three such unauthorized Korean ginseng merchants to Nanbu County, from where they were sent further to Chengdu, the provincial capital.⁹¹ At almost the same time, Gansu also sent a Korean merchant, Mun So-wun, who had sold ginseng illegally in the province, to the Ministry of Rites in Beijing; the ministry transferred him to Tianjin, from where he could board a ship for Chosŏn. The officials in Sichuan did not detain these "people of the fan " (Ch., fanfu renmin) who had traveled thousands of miles to make a profit, and they preferred to follow the Western example (Ch., zhao Taixi yili) by sending them to Beijing. Since article 4 of the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations regarding trade licenses and passports did not address this scenario, the Ministry of Rites, the Zongli Yamen, and the Beiyang superintendent eventually instructed the local officials to send Korean violators to the Korean commercial commissioners at Chinese treaty ports, from where they would be deported to Chosŏn for punishment.
In these cases, the Chinese side regarded the Korean violators as guilty of a crime punishable by the laws of their own country, and therefore the Korean side had to take the necessary steps for extradition based on article 2 of the regulations.⁹² These Korean citizens, or criminals, were thus exempt from Chinese jurisdiction, which in the Zongfan context was seen as a manifestation of China’s favor to the small country. Beijing particularly instructed local officials to treat the Korean violators well as a way of cherishing the subordinate country. For its part, Chosŏn also used Zongfan terminology to describe China’s clemency as a demonstration of China’s extreme solicitude to the small country.⁹³ In their bilateral communications about such cases, no mention was made of Chosŏn’s or China’s sovereignty or international law. If extraterritoriality were to imply imperialism, one would have to conclude that the Qing and Chosŏn practiced imperialism on each other.
==
5
SUPERVISING CHOSŎN
Qing China’s Patriarchal Role in Chosŏn, 1877–84
In the late 1870s and early 1880s, with China’s vigorous encouragement, Chosŏn launched reforms to fortify itself domestically. However, the reform programs
caused a backlash, prompting student petitions and eventually a bloody mutiny. China sent troops to Chosŏn in 1882 to help the Korean court suppress the
mutiny, and it subsequently became deeply enmeshed in Chosŏn’s domestic and foreign affairs. In the course of these events, China availed itself of its superior
position to introduce Chosŏn into the family of nations, in particular through the negotiation of the Korean-American treaty in 1882. From the perspective of Japan
and the Western states, China’s involvement represented a fundamental change in China’s traditional policy toward Korea, and it triggered a wave of intense polit-
ical and diplomatic struggles between the various powers on the peninsula. To meet these new challenges, China and Chosŏn signed several commercial agree-
ments to maintain and adjust their relations.
A pair of coexisting and correlated dual diplomatic networks developed between China and Chosŏn. The first dual network encompassed the Sino-Korean Zong-
fan system, on the one hand, and the newly imported treaty system that connected China, Chosŏn, and their treaty counterparts, on the other. This network, which
I call the outer dual network, operated between the politico-cultural Chinese empire and the world beyond the empire, and both China and Chosŏn had to deal
independently with the treaty aspects of this network. The second dual network, which I call the inner network, functioned within the Chinese empire and com-
prised, first, the conventional system of court-to-court interactions between the imperial court in Beijing and the royal court in Hansŏng, and, second, the newly
founded state-to-state system between China and Chosŏn, in which the latter was theoretically equal to the former according to international law. Through the
outer and inner dual networks, both China and Chosŏn modified and revised their policies toward each other.
Opening Chosŏn to the West: China and the Korean-American Negotiations
From Tokyo to Pusan and Tianjin: The Shufeldt-Li Agreement of 1880
By the late 1870s, China was aware of the grave challenges Chosŏn was facing from other countries, and it began to persuade Chosŏn to open its doors by negoti-
ating treaties with Western states. Since Zongfan conventions prevented both the Zongli Yamen and the Ministry of Rites from making such a request of an outer
fan, Li Hongzhang personally took on the task of cajoling Chosŏn. Li used his personal correspondence with the Korean minister Yi Yu-wŏn, mentioned in the
previous chapter, for this purpose, but Yi was not enthusiastic about contacting the Western “barbarians.”¹ In March 1880 the navy commander Robert Shufeldt
arrived in Nagasaki with the USS Ticonderoga. The American minister John Bingham approached the Japanese foreign minister, Inoue Kaoru (1835–1915), to ask for
Japan’s good offices in introducing Shufeldt to Chosŏn.² Inoue was worried that Japan’s acting as a go-between might harm its fragile relations with Chosŏn, but
he decided to send a letter from Shufeldt to the Korean court through the Japanese consul at Pusan, Kondō Masuki (1840–92), and the chargé d’affaires at Han-
sŏng, Hanabusa Yoshimoto (1842–1917). Expecting to have further contact with the Koreans, Shufeldt went to Pusan, but he soon received his unopened letter
back. Chosŏn’s rebuff incurred Bingham’s wrath and ended Japan’s role as mediator.³
While Shufeldt was waiting in Nagasaki, the Chinese consul in the city, Yu Qiong, decided that it would be a good idea to grant the United States entrance into
Chosŏn in order to check Russia, which was on the brink of war with China following the Ili incident on China’s northwestern frontier in Xinjiang. Yu contacted
the Chinese minister in Tokyo, He Ruzhang (1838–91), who immediately forwarded the news to the Zongli Yamen and Li Hongzhang. Li quickly decided to invite
Shufeldt to Tianjin, and the latter happily accepted the invitation. After a meeting with Li in August, Shufeldt reported that Li had promised “he would use his
influence with the Government of Corea to accede to the friendly request” made by Shufeldt “in behalf of the Government of the United States to open negoti-
ations with a view to such a treaty [with Korea].”⁴ Under the agreement, Shufeldt returned to the United States to secure more support from the Department of
State, while Li turned his attention to coaxing Chosŏn to allow the United States in.
Behind a Cloak: Preparations for Chosŏn’s Training Program in Tianjin
The ruling house of Chosŏn was not blind to the encroaching West. In 1879 the Korean emissary Yi Yong-suk (1818–?) informed the Chinese official You Zhikai
(1816–99) at Yongping near Beijing that Chosŏn hoped to dispatch trainees to Tianjin to obtain advanced military and industrial skills, following the “precedent of
foreign countries sending students to China for learning.” Yi asked You to take the proposal to Li Hongzhang. Li heartily endorsed the plan. In a confidential letter
to You, which was finally forwarded to the king via Yi, Li suggested that Chosŏn should submit a detailed proposal to the Ministry of Rites in Beijing.⁵ Shortly
thereafter the king sent Pyŏn Wŏn-kyu (1837–96) as an emissary to Beijing to discuss the plan, while the Chinese court put Li in charge of the training program
that would encourage Chosŏn “to follow the mainstream of the world.”⁶
In his summer office in Tianjin, Li underscored to Pyŏn that the best survival strategy for Chosŏn was “to trade with the Westerners.” With Li’s support, Pyŏn
and several Chinese officials drafted an outline of the training program that broke several two-hundred-year-old Zongfan conventions. In addition to granting the
Korean trainees, interpreters, and superintendents the special right to visit Tianjin via the maritime route, which had not happened since 1637, the outline required
all program members to obtain passes from the office of the Beiyang superintendent, which would be filed at the Ministry of Rites. Given that this would be the
first time Korean visitors had resided in a Chinese city outside Beijing since at least 1644, the outline prescribed that the trainees must “obey the Chinese rules
and conventions” (Ch., zunshou Zhongguo guiju); otherwise they would be sent by the Chinese officials to their Korean superintendents for punishment according
to Korean regulations. In this case, then, China endowed the Korean side with a right similar to the consular jurisdiction that it had conferred on its Western treaty
partners.
The outline also required the king to send official correspondence on military training, weapon procurement, and other military affairs to both the Ministry of
Rites and the Beiyang superintendent. The position of the Beiyang superintendent, as a subordinate official under the Zongli Yamen, was a secondary post held by
the governor-general of Zhili, a post occupied almost exclusively by Li until 1894. According to Zongfan regulations, the superintendent should not be involved in
Zongfan affairs with Chosŏn. However, since Li’s meeting with Mori in 1876, this rule had been eclipsed by the growth of Li’s authority—itself a result of the
Zongli Yamen’s ambiguous definition of the Sino-Korean relationship, on the one hand, and the silence of the Ministry of Rites on affairs beyond the conventional
court-to-court track, on the other. In a confidential memorial in February 1881 the Zongli Yamen pointed out that “it is extremely urgent for Chosŏn to conduct
diplomacy [Ch., waijiao] with other countries” and requested that the Qing court make changes to old regulations in order to endow the Beiyang superintendent
with greater privileges.⁷ With the emperor’s endorsement, the superintendent gained the right to communicate directly with—rather than simply receive notes
from—the king on issues concerning not only the training program but also foreign affairs. The superintendent became the de jure mentor for Chosŏn’s self-
strengthening program. The king responded favorably, indicating to Li a strong intention of opening Chosŏn to Western countries and wanting to commission Li
to make the first move toward initiating treaty negotiations with the United States.⁸
Modernity versus Heresy: China’s Prescriptions and Korean Resistance
As the king was deciding to open up his country to foreigners, Chosŏn was caught in a series of dramatic political events that had strong ripple effects. The se-
quence of events was initiated by Chinese diplomats in Japan, who forwarded their advice regarding Chosŏn’s policy to the king through the Korean envoy of
amity to Japan, Kim Hong-jip (1842–96). When Kim visited Tokyo in late 1880, the Chinese minister, He Ruzhang, and the counselor of the Chinese legation,
Huang Zunxian, had intensive talks with him. Their conversations took place in the Zongfan context, in which each party identified the other as a member of the
“same family” (Ch., yijia) and saw Chosŏn as no different from an “inner subordinate” of China. The two Chinese diplomats tried to convince Kim that Chosŏn
should abandon its parochialism and sign treaties with Western countries, beginning with the United States, in order to prevent a Russian onslaught. Kim agreed
with the two officials, as did his Japanese counterparts at the Gaimushō.
Before Kim left Tokyo, Huang gave him a treatise entitled “A Strategy for Chosŏn” (Ch., Chaoxian celue), in which Huang argued that Chosŏn should check the
Russian threat by “having intimate relations with China, associating with Japan, and allying with the United States” (Ch., qin Zhongguo, jie Riben, lian Meiguo). The
treatise prescribed strategies aimed at ameliorating Chosŏn’s perilous situation and encouraged it to launch a self-strengthening program. Chosŏn, Huang pro-
posed, should ask China to allow its emissaries to stay in Beijing permanently, dispatch emissaries to reside in Tokyo and Washington, propose to expand trade
at Fenghuang City, send trainees and students to China for training in military skills and Western languages, and invite Westerners to assist Chosŏn with educa-
tional reforms. In short, Chosŏn should immediately join the family of nations to bolster its diplomatic, military, and economic power. In order to present Chosŏn
to the world as soon as possible, Huang even suggested that the Korean army and navy forces “use China’s dragon flag as the national flag.”⁹
Encouraged by Huang’s passionate words, the king sent a secret commissioner to Tokyo to visit Huang and He Ruzhang with private letters that signaled his
intention of negotiating a treaty with the United States. With Chosŏn’s opening in sight, He composed a treatise, “On Managing Chosŏn’s Diplomacy” (Ch.,
Zhuchi Chaoxian waijiao yi), for the consideration of Beijing and Li Hongzhang. The minister elaborated on his and Huang’s ideas by laying out three policies in
order of priority. The top-choice policy, which he admitted would be difficult to put into practice right away, was to follow the example of Mongolia and Tibet by
dispatching an “imperial resident” (Ch., banshi dachen) to reside permanently in Chosŏn—a place that had been “almost no different from the inner prefectures
and counties” (Ch., ji wuyi neidi junxian) during the Qianlong period—and to manage its “domestic politics and foreign treaties” (Ch., neiguo zhi zhengzhi, waiguo
zhi tiaoyue). This proposal may have resembled the European concept of colonialism, but it represented He’s understanding of the Zongfan system, and this per-
ception obtained legitimacy from the Qing’s management of Mongolia and Tibet. The second potential policy was to dispatch a skilled official to Chosŏn to assist
it in negotiating treaties with other countries. This policy, He said, was the most practical one, as it could demonstrate Chosŏn’s status as China’s subordinate
and avoid possible problems caused by Chosŏn’s self-rule. Finally, the third-priority policy involved the Chinese court ordering the king to sign treaties with other
countries and specifying in the first article of each treaty that Chosŏn was concluding the treaty on China’s orders.¹⁰ As history unfolded, Beijing would eventually
endorse the second and third proposals.
The king was confident about the Chinese proposals and enthusiastically launched reforms after Pyŏn Wŏn-kyu returned home from Tianjin with the outline of
the training program. On January 19, 1881, Chosŏn established the Office for Managing State Affairs (K., T’ongni kimu amun) in imitation of China’s Zongli
Yamen, laying the institutional cornerstone for the modernization of the country. This institution comprised twelve departments, the first among them being the
Department of Serving the Great (K., Sadae sa).¹¹ At the same time, the king appointed twelve officials as inspectors of Dongnae Prefecture (K., Dongnaebu
amhaeng ŏsa) to visit Japan and observe Japanese politics, society, foreign relations, and trade. The mission, later known as “the inspection mission of the court
officials” (K., Chosa sich’al dan) or “the gentlemen’s sighting group” (K., Sinsa yuram dan) had a total of sixty-four members. It visited Nagasaki, Osaka, Kyoto,
Kobe, Yokohama, and Tokyo between May and October 1881 and was granted audiences with senior Japanese officials. In October, when another mission headed
by Cho Pyŏng-ho (1847–1910) and Yi Cho-yŏn (1843–84) as envoys of amity arrived in Japan for negotiations over duty tariffs, the inspection mission returned to
Hansŏng, submitting to the king sixty-four reports and seventeen additional memorandums. The officials expressed their belief that bringing Chosŏn into the
modern world and into alliances with other countries offered the best way for the country to survive the growing Japanese threat.¹² Their conclusions justified the
king’s policy of reforms and opening up.
The domestic situation, however, was not conducive to the realization of officials’ strategic goals. Before the mission returned home, the king had arrested sev-
eral officials headed by An Ki-yŏng (1819–81) of the Taewŏn’gun clan and charged them with planning a coup. Simultaneously, a nationwide protest among the
literati against the king’s reforms became more dramatic and provocative. In late 1880 some officials asked the king to reject Huang Zunxian’s ideas, which they
believed went against the doctrines of Confucianism.¹³ In March 1881 a Confucian student from Kyŏngsang, Yi Man-son, submitted a petition cosigned by ten
thousand fellow students, calling on the king to burn Huang’s treatise and to reaffirm Confucianism. At court, the official Hwang Chae-hyŏn argued that the king
should “reject heretical thought” by publicly burning not only Huang’s treatise but all books and newspapers on international law and foreign history and geog-
raphy. In order to sidestep the literati’s moral charges, the king issued a “decree of antiheresy” that endorsed the defense of Confucianism and rejected heretical
ideas.¹⁴ Yet this action seemed only to encourage more students to travel to Hansŏng to submit petitions.
The literati protest reached its zenith in late August with the petitions of two students, Hong Chae-hak and Sin Sŏp. Besides appealing to the king to abolish the
Office for Managing State Affairs and to restore old institutions, Hong accused the king of having taken no measures to “defend correct teaching and reject het-
erodoxy” (K., wijŏng ch’ŏksa). Sin, for his part, depicted Li Hongzhang’s letters to Yi Yu-wŏn and Huang’s treatise as elements of the same intrigue against
Chosŏn.¹⁵ In early September Hong was beheaded for “offending the sovereign,” and Yi Yu-wŏn was exiled. The protests declined. The king and the Min clan,
along with their program of reaching out, survived the turmoil and prevailed over other political cliques in fierce partisan struggles.
Amid the turbulence, in late July the king welcomed two imperial envoys from Beijing, who brought an edict about the death of Empress Dowager Cian. The
monarch held a grand ceremony at the palace, where he performed rituals to the imperial documents. Afterward, he paid a visit to the envoys at their residence
and then sent them off in person. The conversations between the king and the envoys did not touch on Chosŏn’s domestic or foreign affairs.¹⁶ The Zongfan
mechanism continued to function smoothly, reaffirming its rituals, the autonomous right and dignity of the sovereign of Chosŏn, and the nature of the Zongfan
relationship.
Secret Diplomacy: Chosŏn’s Commissioning of China to Negotiate with the United States
On November 18, 1881, the emissary of superintending the selected trainees (K., Yŏngsŏn sa), Kim Yun-sik (1835–1922), left Hansŏng for China, bringing with him
students who were to learn military skills and Western languages under the auspices of the new training program. Although the mission was unlike any that had
gone to China before, it mostly acted like a conventional tributary one, with Kim treated as a standard tributary emissary in terms of his traveling expenses.¹⁷ Not
many young Koreans wanted to study in China: four days before his departure, Kim was still busy recruiting trainees. Of the more than thirty young men he inter-
viewed, only six volunteered to go. Not until early December, when Kim reached Ŭiju, did he finally have the thirty-eight trainees China had suggested. Like the
tributary missions in the eighteenth century, Kim’s spent fifty days covering more than 950 miles from Hansŏng to Beijing via the overland route (the maritime
route, which they had planned to take with Beijing’s special approval, was not feasible in winter). The mission arrived in Beijing on January 6, 1882, and Kim
submitted the king’s notes to the Ministry of Rites after the group was lodged at the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations.¹⁸
Leaving his mission in Beijing, Kim visited Li Hongzhang at Baoding with a confidential memorandum, which asked Li to assume, in secret, the task of negoti-
ating Chosŏn’s treaty with the United States; this treaty was then to serve as a prototype for subsequent treaties with other countries.¹⁹ Emphasizing that what he
did for Chosŏn was “legitimate and righteous” (Ch., mingzheng yishun), as Kim, too, believed, Li gave Kim a pamphlet about Chosŏn’s potential treaties with
Western countries that had been drafted by Ma Jianzhong (1845–1900), a protégé of Li’s who had been educated in France.²⁰ Li further discussed with Kim key is-
sues regarding Chosŏn’s reforms, such as regulating tariffs, setting up a system of maritime customs and hiring Western staff to manage it, designing a national
flag for Chosŏn for maritime identification, allowing the Japanese minister to reside in Hansŏng, and continuing to use the king’s invested rank in his contacts
with the Japanese sovereign. The most urgent goal of the two sides, then, was to negotiate and conclude a treaty with the United States rather than to teach the
Korean trainees in China.
Within the Zongfan context, the Korean side abandoned its right of negotiation from the beginning. In late January, Beijing granted Li control over Chosŏn’s
treaty negotiations with the United States in order to “maintain the fan and shuguo and consolidate China’s border.”²¹ Li also received a letter from Shufeldt, who
had returned to China in June 1881 and waited in Tianjin for news from the Korean side. Shufeldt had been appointed by Washington as a special envoy to Chosŏn
to pursue a treaty of amity aimed at addressing the issue of American shipwrecks on the Korean coast.²² After the meeting with Kim, Li invited Shufeldt to Baoding
to discuss the details of the forthcoming treaty negotiations, but Shufeldt decided first to visit the American legation in Beijing to solicit advice from the chargé
d’affaires, Chester Holcombe (1842–1912).
Unlike Shufeldt, Holcombe was aware of the critical devolution of Beijing’s negotiating power to Li and doubted it would be possible to persuade Chosŏn to
conclude a treaty without the involvement of the central government in Beijing because Li was “only a provincial officer and not a member of the Central Govern-
ment.” To seek clarity on this question, Holcombe visited the Zongli Yamen, where he was informed that Prince Gong had transferred responsibility for Korean
foreign affairs from the Ministry of Rites to the Zongli Yamen in 1881, which meant that Li as a subordinate of the Yamen was authorized to deal with Korean af-
fairs. Holcombe also learned that China had advised Chosŏn to conclude a treaty with the United States because China believed that “sooner or later the auton-
omy of Corea would be threatened by the aggressions of Russia and/or Japan, and that this serious danger could be best met by bringing the peninsular Kingdom
into the family of nations.” Although the Yamen confirmed to him that China was ready “to aid the United States in any proper way to open friendly and commer-
cial relations with Corea,” Holcombe was worried that Beijing might “see fit to assume an entirely different attitude and policy in this business.” His distrust
seems to have affected Shufeldt, who replied to Li that he preferred to keep the prospective treaty negotiations secret by not visiting Baoding.²³
For his part, after his meetings with Li at Baoding, Kim visited Tianjin for a week, sending five students to the Navy and Torpedo School for English-language
training. China decided to cover the Korean students’ meals and other costs because the students were also “loyal children of the Heavenly Dynasty.” It was with-
in this conventional politico-cultural context of the Chinese empire that Chinese officials enthusiastically engaged in Chosŏn’s program of building its strength
and reaching out to the West. Before he could place additional students in schools, Kim received confidential orders from the king to consult with Li over treaty
negotiations with the United States. Kim immediately returned to Baoding, where he and Li discussed initiating negotiations with Shufeldt in order to prevent him
from sailing directly for Chosŏn. This plan required a Korean envoy plenipotentiary. Given the limited time, Li proposed that Kim follow the king’s secret instruc-
tion to adapt strategies for situations and serve as the plenipotentiary himself, but Kim declined. The only solution, then, was to quickly send a messenger to Han-
sŏng to ask the king to dispatch a plenipotentiary to Tianjin. Li cautioned that the plenipotentiary should come ostensibly to supervise the Korean trainees and
keep his true mission secret.²⁴
Opening Chosŏn’s Doors: The Sino-American Treaty Negotiations
Li Hongzhang took up the task of composing a draft treaty primarily on the basis of a model proposed by Huang Zunxian. Li suggested that the treaty should de-
fine the Sino-Korean relationship by stating that “Chosŏn, being a shuguo of China, possesses the right of zizhu as to its diplomatic and domestic affairs, and this
right shall not be challenged by other nations.” Kim endorsed this “legitimate and justifiable” statement. In a confidential report to the king, Kim revealed the true
reason for his approval: the statement meant that Chosŏn could use China’s diplomatic relations with other countries for its own great benefit, and the affir-
mation of its right of zizhu would preserve Chosŏn’s equality in its contacts with other countries.²⁵ Kim’s comments indicate that the use of terms drawn from the
Zongfan discourse—which in the end appeared not in the Korean-American treaty but in the Sino-Korean commercial regulations signed in the same year—were
not uni-laterally imposed on Chosŏn by China in order to strengthen China’s “suzerainty” at the cost of Chosŏn’s sovereignty and independence. Rather, each
party to the Zongfan arrangement could exploit the relationship for its own benefit.
Another critical aspect of the discussion between Li and Kim focused on the prospect of granting an American right of consular jurisdiction. Huang, in his draft,
suggested that Chosŏn temporarily allow American consuls to manage the affairs of American citizens in Chosŏn. Backing this idea, Li explained that “according
to international conventions, foreigners living in treaty ports and hinterlands of a country are subject to the management of the officials of their own countries
residing in the places of the said country. The local officials of the host country are not able to manage people of other nations due to the different laws, punish-
ments, customs, and proprieties between the East and the West.” For Li and Huang, consular jurisdiction was thus merely a way of managing foreigners rather
than a clause undermining the sovereignty of a country. Kim agreed with this view, confirming that “our humble country is not familiar with foreign situations, so
there will be many problems even if our country could manage foreigners by itself.”²⁶ The two sides thus decided to grant the United States the right of consular
jurisdiction, even though Shufeldt had not asked for this right. Because the Korean-American treaty was a prototype for future treaties between Chosŏn and other
countries, China gained this right too, through the commercial regulations examined later in this chapter. This episode calls into question the assumption that the
Western powers always obtained extraterritoriality in East Asia by force. It further casts doubt on the notion that extraterritoriality can be uniformly regarded as a
hallmark of imperialism, as historical narratives of East Asian countries have typically charged.²⁷
After composing a draft treaty with Li, Kim returned to Tianjin, where a special envoy of the king, Yi Ŭng-jun, was waiting for him with a sovereign letter stating
that the dispatch of a plenipotentiary was impossible and that it would be better for the Americans to travel to Chosŏn for further communication. When Kim
asked the Chinese chief of the Tianjin Customs, Zhou Fu (1837–1921), to forward the message to Li, Zhou repeated the suggestion that Kim himself act as the
plenipotentiary. Kim again refused, believing it would be better for China to negotiate on behalf of his country. Zhou also questioned the phrase “independence
and half-autonomy” (Ch., duli banzhu) that appeared in a Korean note explaining the term zizhu in the Korean-Japanese Treaty of 1876. Zhou warned that the state-
ment, which seemed to claim much greater independence than was foreseen by Kim and Li, was a “Japanese plot” and could only damage Chosŏn’s interests. In
response, Kim confirmed that Chosŏn would not claim to be “independent and autonomous” (K., chajon t’ŭknip) in its treaty with the United States.²⁸
Soon thereafter, the treaty negotiations between Li Hongzhang and Shufeldt opened. Whether the treaty should include a clause defining Chosŏn as China’s
shuguo became the most controversial issue. The first article of Li’s draft, as Li and Kim had discussed, stated that “Chosŏn is China’s shubang and always enjoys
the right of zizhu in its domestic and foreign affairs.”²⁹ Shufeldt objected to this statement, so the two sides drew up a draft treaty with fifteen articles, leaving the
first one blank. According to the Sino-Korean plan, if it proved impossible to include the statement in the final version of the treaty, Chosŏn would send a special
note to the US government to articulate its status as China’s shuguo. Kim did not hold any conversations with Shufeldt, nor did he participate in the negotiations.
On April 21, 1882, Li gave Kim and Yi Ŭng-jun a copy of the draft treaty and instructed Yi to return to Chosŏn immediately from Tianjin by a Chinese steamer. At
Kim’s request, Li instructed Ma Jianzhong, who was “very skilled in international law,” to accompany Shufeldt to Inch’ŏn to ensure that everything would go
smoothly. In the meantime, two Korean officials, Ŏ Yun-jung (1848–96) and Yi Cho-yŏn, left Hansŏng for Tianjin as officials of examination and selection (K.,
kosŏn kwan), not as the plenipotentiaries that Li, Kim, and Shufeldt desperately wanted.
On May 8 Ma Jianzhong and the Chinese admiral Ding Ruchang (1836–95) arrived at Inch’ŏn, where Ma met with the Japanese minister, Hanabusa Yoshimoto,
who had arrived a day earlier in the hope of influencing the negotiations. Four days later, Shufeldt arrived on the USS Swatara and negotiated with the Korean
plenipotentiaries, Kim Hong-jip and Sin Hŏn (1810–84), the latter of whom had signed the Treaty of Kanghwa in 1876. The negotiations ended on May 22 with a
treaty of fourteen articles, omitting the first article about Chosŏn’s status that Li had proposed. For Chosŏn’s national flag, Ma suggested Yi Ŭng-jun’s design of
the Taiji and eight trigrams as the basic model.³⁰ After Shufeldt left for Shanghai with a copy of the treaty, Ma remained in Inch’ŏn to help Chosŏn negotiate
treaties with Britain and other states.³¹ Following the middle course, as determined by Li, Ma, and Kim, the king sent a dispatch that Ma had drafted to the US
president Chester Arthur on May 29, claiming that “Corea is a tributary of China, but in regard to both internal administration and foreign intercourse it enjoys
complete independence.”³² The king sent the same announcement to the sovereigns of other treaty countries, including Britain (June 6, 1882), Germany (Novem-
ber 26, 1883), Italy (June 26, 1884), Russia (July 7, 1884), and France (June 4, 1886). As the hermit nation entered the family of nations, its de jure independent sta-
tus as a sovereign state in terms of international law and its de facto and de jure dependent status as a subordinate of China in accordance with Zongfan prin-
ciples became one of the most controversial and perplexing issues for Western states in East Asia. The new situation also complicated Sino-Korean relations as
Chosŏn moved toward modifying its relations with China.
Protecting Chosŏn as the Patriarch: The Chinese Military Intervention in 1882
Challenges from Within: The King’s Requests for Change
By the time Chosŏn concluded its treaty with the United States, more than one-third of the Korean trainees in Tianjin had returned home. The training program
had provided cover for Korean-American treaty negotiations and a new channel of communication outside the Zongfan mechanism, but it was never indepen-
dently a focus for either the Chinese or the Korean side. Ŏ Yun-jung and Yi Cho-yŏn, the two Korean officials who had nominally been sent to evaluate the trainees
in Tianjin, also ignored the training program in order to focus on their true diplomatic mission. In May 1882 Ŏ and Yi submitted four detailed requests from the
king to the acting Beiyang superintendent, Zhang Shusheng (1824–84), who had assumed Li Hongzhang’s position when Li returned to his hometown in Anhui
for one hundred days of mourning for his mother.
The first request proposed that the two countries negotiate a treaty in keeping with the new international situation. The second recommended that the two sides
close the markets on the northeastern border of Manchuria in order to prevent Russian interference. The third request offered to replace Chosŏn’s periodic dis-
patch of emissaries to Beijing with representatives who would reside in the capital permanently, receiving imperial edicts and calendars and making China’s dis-
patch of imperial envoys to Chosŏn unnecessary. The fourth request further specified that the Korean emissaries residing in Beijing would be responsible for their
own travel expenses and meals, effectively making them no different from the ministers of other countries.³³ These bold requests reflected Huang Zunxian’s blue-
print for Korea’s reforms as laid out in his “A Strategy for Chosŏn” in late 1880, and they were aimed at replacing certain Zongfan conventions with Western
diplomatic principles as practiced between sovereign states.
Concluding a treaty with China was Chosŏn’s primary goal. For that purpose, Ŏ discussed with Zhou Fu key issues such as the posting of permanent emis-
saries in Beijing, the granting of most-favored-nation status to China, and the definition of Chosŏn’s status as China’s shuguo in the treaty. The two sides agreed
that China’s foreign affairs vis-à-vis Chosŏn would be managed by the Zongli Yamen and the Beiyang superintendent, whereas bilateral tributary affairs would re-
main under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Rites. This discussion set the tone for the treaty. In June 1882 Ŏ arrived in Beijing, where he was lodged at the For-
eign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations by the Ministry of Rites. The ministry, following Zongfan conventions, presented Ŏ with silver, sheep, wine, and
meals. In the meantime, Yi Ŭng-jun, another special emissary of the king, arrived in Beijing with a note expressing the king’s sincere gratitude to the emperor and
the “central dynasty” for protecting the “small country” and the fan in the negotiations with the United States. Yi was also lodged at the Common Accommo-
dations and showered with silver, sheep, wine, and meals.
Although granting the king’s requests would weaken the role of the Ministry of Rites, the cases of Ryukyu, Burma, and Vietnam—which by 1882 had been or
were being separated from the Sinocentric realm and colonized by other states—had made the ministry realize that many issues lay beyond the capacity of the
Zongfan mechanism to address effectively. The ministry passed the king’s requests to the emperor and suggested that he instruct all officials familiar with foreign
affairs, especially Li Hongzhang, to participate in a confidential discussion on the matter. Baoting (1840–90), a Manchu minister of the ministry, presented a
memorial to the emperor to detail the ministry’s preferences.
According to Baoting, Chosŏn, the first shuguo of “foreign barbarians” that had subordinated itself to the Great Qing during the Hongtaiji period, was far more
important than the “countries in the South Sea” (Ch., Nanyang zhuguo, Southeast Asia). After Japan’s invasion of Ryukyu, Britain’s of Burma, and France’s of Viet-
nam, all of which China failed to resist, Chosŏn’s respect for China had diminished, but it had not betrayed China because of Chosŏn’s weakness and still re-
spected China’s virtues.
Baoting argued that refusing to let the shuguo trade at China’s treaty ports and pursue shared commercial interests with other “barbarians from afar” (Ch.,
yuanyi) would be unfair to Chosŏn and might push it to the Japanese side. But permitting Chosŏn’s emissaries to reside in Beijing permanently would put Chosŏn
on an equal footing with other countries with representatives in China and might make it as aggressive as the “British barbarians” had become. Baoting urged the
Ministry of Rites to retain its right to administer Chosŏn but to continue to forward matters concerning trade to the Zongli Yamen. Even if Korean emissaries were
permitted to reside permanently in Beijing, China should not allow Chosŏn to build a legation in the city. Instead, the emissaries should be lodged at the Com-
mon Accommodations to emphasize that China and Chosŏn remained members of the same family. Baoting also proposed that Beijing use Chosŏn’s intention of
exploiting China’s power to check other countries as an opportunity to dispatch thousands of soldiers to Chosŏn to garrison its military forts in order to “protect
it and place it under China’s influence” (Ch., yu hubi zhi zhong yu kongzhi zhi dao).³⁴
Baoting’s opinions had a strong impact on the Qing court’s decision. The court promptly issued an edict declining Chosŏn’s request to place permanent emis-
saries in Beijing because of “various potential inconveniences” and the fact that “Chosŏn has been a fan for a long time, and all rituals have regulations.” It also
decided that the Zongli Yamen should be in charge of China’s trade affairs with Chosŏn and the Ministry of Rites should continue to manage tributary affairs.
Nevertheless, the court agreed to make changes to some conventions and instructed the Beiyang superintendent to negotiate a commercial treaty with Chosŏn.³⁵
This imperial order further augmented the superintendent’s importance as the most powerful agent of Sino-Korean contacts beyond the court-to-court tributary
track. Two weeks later, Baoting submitted another memorial to the emperor to argue that China should help Chosŏn strengthen its maritime defenses. To
underline Chosŏn’s critical position, Baoting went as far as to claim that China “would rather lose Yunnan and Guizhou than Chosŏn” (Ch., jishi Yun Gui, buke shi
Chaoxian). The emperor commented that the comparison between Yunnan and Guizhou Provinces and Chosŏn was inappropriate, but he showed serious con-
cern over the security of China’s shuguo.³⁶
Justifying China’s Status as the Patriarch: The Dispatch of Chinese Troops to Chosŏn
While Chosŏn was successfully persuading China to sign a treaty with it, back home it was teetering on the brink of political upheaval. On July 23, 1882, a mutiny,
known as the Imo incident, broke out in Hansŏng over the unfair distribution of rations of rice among troops after a severe drought. Hundreds of soldiers of a
military unit called Muwiyŏng attacked the Japanese legation, killing several Japanese, including Lieutenant Horimoto Reizō, who had been teaching Chosŏn’s
Special Skills Army (K., Pyŏlgi gun) since 1881. After occupying the palace, the rebels held the king captive and killed several high-ranking officials who had been
prominent pillars of Queen Min’s clan in the partisan struggles at the court. The king’s father, the Taewŏn’gun, seized the opportunity to restore his regency and
retaliated against the queen’s clan by announcing that the queen was dead. In fact, she had escaped the capital and had hidden in Ch’ungju Prefecture.³⁷ The Japa-
nese chargé d’affaires, Hanabusa Yoshimoto, fled to Inch’ŏn, where he boarded a British steamer to Nagasaki and telegraphed news of the uprising to Tokyo.
Tokyo instructed Hanabusa to return to Inch’ŏn with navy forces to seek justice and compensation for the killings of the Japanese. The Chinese minister in
Tokyo, Li Shuchang (1837–96), telegraphed Beijing, likewise to request the immediate dispatch of troops to Chosŏn. In Beijing the German minister, Max August
von Brandt, and the inspector general of the imperial customs, Robert Hart (1835–1911), informed the Zongli Yamen about the mutiny on August 2 and 3, at the
same time that copies of the German-Korean and British-Korean treaties, along with the Korean king’s dispatches to the German and British sovereigns claiming
Chosŏn’s status as China’s shuguo, reached the Zongli Yamen.³⁸ Within days, Beijing was in full alarm over the situation in Korea.
When Zhang Shusheng, who commanded the Beiyang Navy in Tianjin, instructed General Wu Changqing (1829–84) to be ready for military action, he was influ-
enced in large part by the Korean officials Kim Yun-sik and Ŏ Yun-jung, who were in Tianjin at the time. As fervent proponents of the king’s policy of opening up,
Kim and Ŏ linked the mutiny with the aborted coup of the previous year, which had been linked to the Taewŏn’gun. They asked Zhang to send warships and sol-
diers to suppress the uprising and to check Japanese intrigue. Accusing the Taewŏn’gun of plotting against the king, Kim even secretly proposed to kill the
Taewŏn’gun when the Chinese troops occupied Hansŏng in order to “erase the bane of the country.”³⁹ Handicapped by the limited channels of communication
and intelligence gathering, China was so unfamiliar with Chosŏn’s domestic situation that Zhang and his Chinese colleagues became dependent on Kim’s and
Ŏ’s biased information. The Chinese concluded that the Taewŏn’gun would dethrone the king if China failed to take action in time.
Beijing decided to exercise its patriarchal authority immediately. The Guangxu emperor instructed the Zongli Yamen and Zhang to send forces to Chosŏn under
the leadership of Ma Jianzhong and Ding Ruchang to “cherish the small country,” halt the “Japanese plot,” and “protect the Japanese people along the same
lines.” The military action acquired legitimacy from the rationales of the Zongfan arrangement. Zhang assembled thirteen warships and merchant ships under
Admiral Ding’s command and summoned four thousand soldiers, placing them under General Wu’s command. Zhang also ordered Kim and Ŏ to return to
Chosŏn together with the Chinese troops to serve as their guides. Meanwhile, Ma conducted a reconnaissance mission in Inch’ŏn that included several long con-
versations with Ŏ. Ŏ’s personal resentment of the Taewŏn’gun deeply influenced Ma’s judgment on the matter in his report to Zhang, confirming the Chinese
side’s earlier evaluation of the Korean situation. General Wu soon left Tianjin for Yantai, from where he would continue to Chosŏn with his fleet and officers, in-
cluding the twenty-four-year-old Yuan Shikai. During the trip to Chosŏn, Yuan told Kim that he wanted to lead hundreds of warriors to seize Hansŏng, which im-
pressed Kim considerably.⁴⁰ Yuan would later reside in Chosŏn for more than a decade and significantly shape the future of the country.
Japan, too, considered its action of sending troops to Chosŏn legal and legitimate. Inoue Kaoru informed the foreign ministers in Tokyo that Japan’s operation
was “completely based upon pacifism,” and the aim of its warships and troops was to protect the Japanese embassy and citizens. The deputy foreign minister,
Yoshida Kyonari (1845–91), declined Li Shuchang’s offer of China’s mediation. Very soon Inoue was giving Hanabusa detailed instructions on military operations
and the terms of compensation, all of which were aimed at dealing with the situation unilaterally and by force, rather than through China or other countries.⁴¹ As a
result, the ideological conflict between China and Japan regarding Chosŏn’s status evolved into a military rivalry on the peninsula.
For China, sending troops to its shuguo was legitimate and necessary. As the Zongli Yamen put it to Mori in 1876, China had long before assumed responsibility
for helping Chosŏn “solve its difficulties, resolve its disputes, and secure its safety and security.” Reviewing this point in his notes to Yoshida, Li Shuchang stated
that China’s actions followed “the rule of cherishing the small.” China had to “suppress the rebellion for the sake of the shubang ” and protect the Japanese lega-
tion in Hansŏng at the same time. The minister used a metaphor to explain the rationale behind China’s operation, describing China as the “patriarch of a family”
(Ch., jiazhang) who had the obligation to investigate why the belongings of “other people”—that is, Japan—left at the “houses of his sons or brothers” (Ch., zidi
jia), namely, Chosŏn, had been stolen.⁴² This metaphor crystallized China’s role vis-à-vis Korea within the Zongfan world. It also clearly demonstrated that Chi-
na’s understanding of the mutiny and its decision to send troops to Chosŏn were not related to international law.
Japan had difficulty rebuffing China’s statement and worried that the situation in Chosŏn might draw Japan into the abyss of a war with the powerful China.
Having consulted with Charles Le Gendre about the Taiwan issue in 1872, the Gaimushō again resorted to its foreign intellectual resources, soliciting advice from
the French jurist and legal adviser to the government, Gustave Boissonade (1825–1910). Bois-sonade suggested that Japan could insist that Chosŏn was an “inde-
pendent country” and “only focus on negotiation with Chosŏn.” He mentioned the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and Egypt as an analogy for the
Sino-Korean relationship, as Mori had done in 1876. Since Britain and France had directly intervened in the mutiny of Egypt in January 1882, regardless of the Ot-
tomans’ attitude, Japan could directly intervene in the rebellion in Chosŏn without regard to China’s response.⁴³ In Beijing, Inspector General Hart also believed
that “China and Japan about Corea will just be in much the same position as Turkey and England about Egypt.”⁴⁴ In this context, then, the trilateral relationship
between China, Chosŏn, and Japan became analogous to the one between the Ottoman Empire, European powers represented by Britain and France, and African
countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, reflecting the connection between the transformation of the East Asian community and the rise of new imperialism in world
history.⁴⁵ The European colonial experience in Africa thus made a critical intellectual contribution to the development of the Japanese colonial enterprise in East
Asia.
The Chinese side was not blind to the emergence of the new colonial model practiced by European states. Li Shuchang, from Tokyo, suggested to the Zongli
Yamen that after suppressing the mutiny China should manage and supervise all of Chosŏn’s affairs in order to ensure peace in its domestic situation as well as
its foreign relations. He further proposed that China should “directly abolish the kingship and convert the country into prefectures and counties [of China]” (Ch.,
zhi fei qiwang er junxian zhi), imitating the approach of Britain in India, in order to resolve once and for all the thorny question of Chosŏn’s status between China
and other states.⁴⁶ China’s possible provincialization of Korea was thus to some degree equated to and even justified by the colonialism practiced by European
powers. Yet Li himself concluded that China would be unable to take the proposed action because it would violate China’s self-imposed rule of humanity and
virtue.⁴⁷ Until the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, China never initiated any plan to colonize Chosŏn; rather, it tried to protect and supervise the coun-
try along Zongfan lines.
Arriving in Chosŏn almost a month after the uprising, General Wu and his assistants were welcomed by the Korean officials.⁴⁸ The Chinese officials used
China’s uniquely favorable position and authority to quickly end the political turmoil by occupying the capital, capturing the Taewŏn’gun and sending him to Tian-
jin in China, restoring the king and the queen, and supporting Chosŏn in signing two conventions with Japan. Afterward, the king dispatched missions to Beijing
and Tokyo along conventional lines to brief the two governments on the incident. At the end of September, the Zongli Yamen distributed a note to seven foreign
ministers in Beijing, informing them about the Chinese intervention and reemphasizing that “Chosŏn, being a shuguo of our Great Qing, has maintained its status
as fan for generations, and the court regards it as an inner subordinate [Ch., neifu] that shares solidarity with us.”⁴⁹ The Yamen also announced that the Chinese
troops would remain in Chosŏn to ensure the stability and security of the country.
A thornier issue for Beijing was how to deal with the Taewŏn’gun, who had been sent from Tianjin to Baoding. After reassuming the position of the Beiyang su-
perintendent, Li Hongzhang endorsed Zhang Shusheng’s proposal that Beijing should detain the Taewŏn’gun in China forever and allow the king to regularly
send officials to visit him. Li cited a similar historical case from the early fourteenth century, when the Mongol court of the Yuan Dynasty exiled King Ch’unghye
(r. 1330–32, 1339–43) of Koryŏ Korea to Guangdong Province in China.⁵⁰ In its contemporary reaction to the political turmoil of its outer fan, the Qing could point
to historical precedent to argue that it retained the fully legal power to punish any official of the fan and even to depose the king, if necessary. The Qing’s decision
to dethrone the last king of the Lê Dynasty of Annam in 1789 was also a clear demonstration of this power. It was in this context that in 1886 Yuan Shikai enthusi-
astically proposed to Li Hongzhang that China should replace the king of Chosŏn with an able man from the Korean royal family.⁵¹ In the end, after holding the
Taewŏn’gun for three years, Beijing released him back to Chosŏn in October 1885, when Yuan Shikai was promoted to the position of an imperial resident in the
country.
China’s military intervention in 1882 was a turning point in Qing-Chosŏn relations, yet in a fundamental sense it was only a public presentation of the under-
lying nature of the supreme and patriarchal power the Qing had wielded over its subordinate country since 1637. The assertion that China’s superiority was merely
“titular” and its act of detaining the Taewŏn’gun “inconceivable” is a far cry from the truth.⁵² So is the argument that through this particular intervention the Qing
became a colonial power that inflicted Western-style imperialism on Chosŏn.
Defining Chosŏn through Treaties: The Sino-Korean Regulations and Their Consequences
Complicating the Zongfan Order: The First Sino-Korean Treaty
As Chosŏn’s troubles seemed to continue, many Chinese officials advocated establishing stronger relations with the country. On February 28, 1882, Wu Dacheng
(1835–1902), an assistant official of border affairs in Jilin in Manchuria, stressed in a memorial to the emperor that China’s self-strengthening enterprise was also
aimed at protecting Chosŏn and checking Japan and Russia. Wu argued that Beijing should dispatch imperial commissioners to Chosŏn to push the Koreans to
determine whether such harbors as Wŏnsan (known in Russian as Lazarev), a port in northeastern Korea being surveyed by Russia, could become trade ports.
Chosŏn, Wu proposed, should allow the China Merchants Steamship Navigation Company (Ch., Lunchuan zhaoshang ju) to survey the coastal conditions with
the aim of establishing Chinese trade posts. In return, he suggested allowing Korean merchants to trade in Tianjin, Yantai, Shanghai, and other trade ports of
China. Wu justified his proposal by invoking China’s Zongfan relations with Chosŏn, the “outer fan ” that “had been a subordinate to our dynasty for more than
two hundred years.”⁵³ International law was of no concern to him.
In order to help Chosŏn overcome the financial crisis triggered by the turmoil, China loaned the country 0.5 million taels of silver at the request of leading Ko-
rean officials Cho Yŏng-ha (1845–84) and Kim Hong-jip, who negotiated the loan with their Chinese counterparts Ma Jianzhong and Tang Tingshu (1832–92).
Tang was the chief of the Kaiping Mining Administration (Ch., Kaiping kuangwu ju), a modern engineering and mining company founded by Li Hongzhang in
Zhili Province in 1878. According to their agreement, 0.3 million of the loan would come from the China Merchants Steamship Navigation Company and 0.2 mil-
lion from the Kaiping Mining Administration. Chosŏn’s tariffs and taxes on red ginseng would serve as mortgage, and it would pay off the loan in twelve years at
0.8 percent interest. In return, the two Chinese creditors supervised by Li were granted economic privileges in Chosŏn. The Navigation Company gained the right
to rent land at Chosŏn’s treaty ports for its factories and offices, while Kaiping Mining could freely prospect for minerals in the hinterland of the country. Chinese
commercial power thus quickly expanded into Chosŏn. In addition, China agreed to provide Chosŏn with military supplies for its poorly equipped troops. In Octo-
ber 1882 Li Hongzhang gave Chosŏn ten twelve-pound cannons, three thousand cannonballs, 4,500 pounds of cannon powder, 1,500 pounds of bullet powder,
one thousand British rifles, ten thousand pounds of rifle powder, and one million bullets from the Tianjin Arsenals.⁵⁴ A month later Chosŏn’s military and indus-
trial training program in Tianjin ended with the king’s recall of the rest of the apprentices.⁵⁵ From that point on, Chosŏn had to invite foreign advisers to the coun-
try to train its forces, leaving the country more vulnerable to outside influences.⁵⁶
After China quelled the mutiny in Chosŏn in the summer of 1882, the two countries resumed their negotiations for a commercial treaty in Tianjin, with Ŏ Yun-
jung representing Chosŏn and Zhou Fu and Ma Jianzhong representing China. From the beginning of their meetings in May 1882, before the rebellion, the two
sides agreed on clarifying in the treaty that Chosŏn was China’s shuguo with the right of zizhu, not an independent country. After reviewing the Chinese draft, enti-
tled “Regulations for Maritime and Overland Trade between Chinese and Chosŏn Subjects” (Ch., Zhongguo Chaoxian shangmin shuilu maoyi zhangcheng, here-
after “the Sino-Korean Regulations”), Ŏ questioned some of its elements, in particular the imbalance in consular jurisdiction enshrined in article 2 and the open-
ing of Hansŏng as a trade city for Chinese merchants and the permission for Chinese merchants to trade in Chosŏn’s hinterlands that were provided by article 4.
Quoting Zongfan regulations, Zhou and Ma responded that this treaty was different from those signed between China and “friendly nations” (Ch., yuguo, such as
Britain, France, and the United States); in this case, the two countries should uphold their “veritable orthodox legitimacy” (Ch., shizai zhi mingfen) in an estab-
lished context. The Chinese response helps explain why the parties decided to call the document “regulations” (Ch., zhangcheng) rather than a “treaty” (Ch.,
tiaoyue). In the end, Zhou and Ma agreed to alter several terms but successfully added a preamble specifying that the regulations applied only to China’s subor-
dinate countries and were exempt from the most-favored-nation rule. The Korean side endorsed the revised text.⁵⁷
In a memorial to Beijing, Li Hongzhang summarized the regulations and emphasized that the preamble would “clarify and define the orthodox legitimacy” (Ch.,
zhengming dingfen) between China and its shuguo.⁵⁸ Li did not mention that article 7 endowed Chinese warships with the right to cruise in Chosŏn’s waters and to
cast anchor at any of its ports in the interests of Chosŏn’s security. This article impinged on Chosŏn’s sovereignty, but Ŏ and his Korean colleagues, like Li and
his Chinese colleagues, regarded it as part of the favorable protection that the upper country generously offered to the subordinate country. These scholar-
officials, including the French-educated Ma Jianzhong, did not interpret the regulations’ terms with reference to international law. In the aftermath of the mutiny,
China was the only power that Chosŏn could trust as it wrestled with multiple crises. Yet not all Koreans applauded the treaty dictated by the Chinese. For exam-
ple, Yun Ch’i-ho (1865–1945), who had served as the assistant to Ŏ Yun-jung in the “gentlemen’s sighting group” to Japan to observe Japanese politics and society
in 1881 and was visiting Tokyo when the Sino-Korean Regulations were signed, reported feeling “extremely sad” that the treaty placed Chosŏn in such an inferior
position vis-à-vis China.⁵⁹ Having been exposed to Western and Japanese modernity and civilization, young Korean scholars such as Yun believed that such un-
equal arrangements between the two nations should be abandoned, signaling the rise of modern nationalism and national identity among these Korean intel-
lectuals. Yun later became a leading figure in Korean modernization.
By concluding the regulations with Chosŏn, China fulfilled the majority of the requests that the king had made in the spring of 1882 (discussed earlier), chang-
ing or permanently abolishing certain conventions that had been in place for 245 years, since 1637. Scholars who embrace theories of power politics prefer to
interpret the treaty as a tool by which China, the preponderant side in geopolitical terms, strengthened its control over Chosŏn, consolidating its suzerainty and
even becoming another imperialist power pursuing its own commercial interests on the peninsula. From this perspective, China brought “multilateral imperi-
alism” to Korea in exactly the same way in which China itself had been introduced to the concept by its Western counterparts.⁶⁰ However, the Manchu court of
China in the 1880s still primarily followed conventional Zongfan rules and precedents in its policies toward Chosŏn, and these often contradicted international
law and local Chinese officials’ practical concerns over Sino-Korean contacts. For instance, on March 14, 1882, several months before the conclusion of the Sino-
Korean Regulations, the Qing court learned from the Manchu general of Jilin, Ming’an (1828–1911), and his assistant Wu Dacheng that Chosŏn peasants kept
crossing the border to cultivate wilderness areas in Jilin and that this trespassing was causing serious problems. The eleven-year-old Emperor Guangxu, under the
tutelage of his mentors, responded, “Regarding these poor Chosŏn peasants, in the eyes of the local officials, there is certainly a line between them and us, but in
the eyes of the court, there is originally no difference between the inside and the outside. Thus, these peasants should be managed well and not be punished by
additional rules, as long as they have no intention of encroaching on our borders.”⁶¹
This policy bears a striking similarity to Emperor Yongzheng’s decision of 1727 to demarcate a new borderline with Annam on the basis of the idea that all lands
of China’s outer fan were under the emperor’s jurisdiction. From 1727 to 1882, the politico-cultural ideology of all-under-Heaven as embraced by the Chinese
court remained unchanged. Although the Kangxi emperor had established himself as a student of both Chinese and Western learning, in particular in the fields of
mathematics and astronomy, in his active communications with the Jesuits, almost all emperors after him left such Sino-Western intellectual exchange to the
Imperial Astronomical Bureau.⁶² Until the late nineteenth century, the young emperors—Tongzhi and Guangxu—studied only Confucian classics and Chinese
history in their daily lessons at court (Ch., rijiang). Even though European and American ministers started to reside in Beijing and China launched a self-
strengthening movement in the 1860s, the Manchu court did not train emperors in international knowledge commensurate with China’s needs and changing situ-
ation. The imperial civil-service examinations that selected officials for the Qing bureaucracy still tested the candidates only on the Confucian classics and showed
no hint of change. The Guangxu emperor, along with his tutors, in particular Weng Tonghe, remained confined to this educational milieu. The first textbook on
Western history and international law aimed at introducing Guangxu to European and American history since the Age of Discovery, titled Lectures on Western His-
tory (Ch., Xishi jiangyi), did not reach the emperor until November 1907, a year before he died.⁶³
When the young Guangxu emperor approved the Sino-Korean Regulations in 1882, he adopted a typically Confucian tone to emphasize that “Chosŏn is our
shuguo and exists as eastern barbarians far away” (Ch., Chaoxian wei wo shuguo, pizai dongyi).⁶⁴ The conventional discourse on the civilized–barbarian distinc-
tion was still firmly rooted at the court, at least in the minds of core leaders. For the Manchu ruling house of the Chinese empire, this discourse concerned not so
much practical diplomatic negotiations at the provincial level as statecraft from the court’s perspective. Qing China in the 1880s continued to act as the Middle
Kingdom, the upper country, and the Heavenly Dynasty in the Sino-Korean Zongfan framework. As long as Chosŏn was a shuguo, China’s centrality would persist
and China’s Western-oriented diplomacy would accordingly be circumscribed. In this sense, China’s transformation into a modern state occurred with the invo-
lution of the universal politico-cultural Chinese empire, which revealed the discrepancy between provincial diplomatic practices and the court’s ideological norms
in the late nineteenth century and highlighted the significance of Chosŏn for the rise of a modern Chinese state.
Complementing the Zongfan Order: The Ritual Crisis and the Sino-Korean Border Treaties
By adopting the form, though not the name, of a Western-style treaty, the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations helped lay out the inner dual network—introduced at the
beginning of this chapter—of Sino-Korean contacts. In addition to maintaining the court-to-court system described in chapter 2, the two countries now had to ad-
just to the newly created state-to-state system, in which both countries were treated by their Japanese and Western treaty counterparts as independent sovereign
states that were theoretically equal to each other. This inner dual network introduced the two countries to a more complicated situation in the new setting of in-
ternational politics, as the ritual crisis that unfolded in China in late 1882 demonstrates.
The crisis started with questions regarding the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations raised by the Manchu general in Mukden, Chongqi (1830–1900). In three palace
memorials in December 1882, Chongqi protested article 2, according to which the Chinese commissioners of trade at the treaty ports of Chosŏn “will, in their
dealings with Chosŏn’s officials, be on a footing of perfect equality, and are to be treated with the consideration due to the observance of etiquette,” while the
Chosŏn commissioners at Chinese ports “are likewise to be treated on a footing of equality in their dealings with the local authorities, namely, the taotai [daotai,
circuit intendant], the prefect, and the magistrates of the place.” Recalling that Chosŏn became a fan and subject of the Great Qing in 1637 and that the Korean
officials were “ministers of ministers” and thus ranked below their Chinese counterparts, Chongqi pointed out that equality between Chosŏn commissioners and
China’s local authorities meant that the emperor himself would be on a footing of equality with the king. The assumption of equality thus severely undermined the
established order, and “under no circumstances should such treatment be extended to Chosŏn.” The term “equality” (Ch., pingxing) in the article should, argued
Chongqi, be deleted for the sake of “moral principles” (Ch., lunji) and China’s “national polity” (Ch., guoti). Mukden would treat the Chosŏn commissioners along
conventional lines in order to defend “decorum” (Ch., titong).
The general also questioned article 5, which canceled the requirement of official supervision of trade at the border and allowed local people to trade freely at
Zhamen and Ŭiju on the two sides of the Yalu River and at Hunchun and Hoeryŏng on the two sides of the Tumen River. Chongqi agreed that outdated rules
ought to be rescinded, but he insisted that land border security should be strengthened by maintaining the existing patrols along the Chinese side. His concerns
about unpredictable threats from Chosŏn itself and from the treaty powers present in Chosŏn were heightened by his perception of the uniqueness and impor-
tance of the Mukden area, the Qing’s “ancestral territory.”⁶⁵
Chongqi’s worries triggered a heated debate among the Ministry of Rites, the Zongli Yamen, and the Beiyang superintendent. Since the overland border trade
regulations would soon be renegotiated at Mukden after a joint Sino-Korean investigation, the issue of the performance of equal rituals became the hottest topic
in the discussion. Li Hongzhang argued that the imperial code did not regulate ritual performances between local Chinese officials and foreign tributary emis-
saries, but he noted that local officials treated the emissaries of Vietnam, Siam, and Ryukyu with “rituals of equality” (Ch., pingli), which should be applicable to
Chosŏn too. Li also solicited theoretical support from the classics of the Zhou Dynasty and drew an analogy between the statuses of the authorities of the Qing
and those of Chosŏn. According to this analogy, the king, as an “outer vassal” of the Son of Heaven, was equal to China’s governors-general and governors who
were “inner vassals”; meanwhile, Chosŏn’s officials were equal to Chinese officials below the ranks of governor and governor-general. Accordingly, in China, the
Chosŏn commissioners should perform “rituals of subordination” (Ch., shuli) to the Chinese governors-general, governors, and other officials with higher ranks,
and rituals of equality to such local officials as taotai and prefects. They should also perform rituals of equality to Western ministers in Tianjin, where the commis-
sioners would reside. In Chosŏn, on the other hand, the Chinese commissioners should perform rituals of equality to Korean officials whose rank was inferior to
that of the cabinet, Ŭijŏngbu.
In his suggestions, Li Hongzhang tried to pursue a mean between Zongfan rituals embodying the “ancestral system” (Ch., zuzhi) and Western-style etiquette
between foreign ministers and the host country. Agreeing that Chosŏn’s commissioners could get favorable treatment since they were not tributary emissaries,
the Ministry of Rites proposed that when Chinese commissioners at or below the rank of taotai visited the king, they should perform “guest-host rituals” (Ch.,
binzhu li), a proposal that involved a slight change to certain rules of the imperial code.⁶⁶ In February 1883 the court, via the Zongli Yamen, endorsed Li’s and the
ministry’s solutions to the ritual crisis and set up a new framework for ritual performances between various officials of the two countries (see figure 5.1). As the
diplomatic corps formed in Hansŏng, the new ritual arrangements would cause increasing conflicts between China, Chosŏn, Japan, and Western states in the fol-
lowing decade, demonstrating the strong influence of the dynamics of the inner dual network over the practices of the outer dual network between China and
Chosŏn.
Chongqi found the new ritual code a good resolution to the problems he had noted. He went on to strengthen border security and maintain the “proper sys-
tem” as he had wished by signing a convention with the Korean representative Ŏ Yun-jung in March 1883. The convention, “Regulations for Trade at the Border
between Mukden and Chosŏn” (Ch., Fengtian yu Chaoxian bianmin jiaoyi zhangcheng), governed trade at the Zhongjiang (middle river) area of the Yalu River.
Several articles were specifically aimed at upholding Zongfan conventions. Echoing the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations, the preamble of the Mukden-Chosŏn Reg-
ulations stated that the border trade at Zhongjiang “is not on the same footing as the trade carried on at the treaty ports, inasmuch as it was originally established
by the Heavenly Dynasty as a benefit to its shuguo with the distinct understanding that it should be a convenience to the population … and that other nations are
not concerned in these rules.” According to articles 8 and 19, China would not impose taxes on Chosŏn’s annual tributes and routine goods and would send sol-
diers to escort Chosŏn’s tributary missions to Beijing from Fenghuang City, precisely as China had done for more than two centuries. Article 23 dictated that bilat-
eral correspondence should be conducted in accordance with the established system, in which Chosŏn should call China the “upper country” or “Heavenly Dy-
nasty” and avoid such abbreviated characters as zhong (for Zhongguo, the “Middle Kingdom,” in reference to China) or dong (for Dongguo, the “eastern country,”
in reference to Chosŏn). For their part, Chinese officials would address Chosŏn as “the country of Chosŏn” or “your honorable country.”⁶⁷
FIGURE 5.1. The rules of ritual performance between China and Chosŏn after 1883. S refers to rituals of subordination, E refers to rituals of equality, and G-H
refers to guest-host rituals. Foreign ministers in China sometimes used the rituals of equality in their dealings with Chinese taotai, prefects, magistrates, and
other local officials.
Several months later, the two countries signed a third treaty, entitled “Regulations for Trade at the Border between Jilin and Chosŏn Whenever Necessary” (Ch.,
Jilin Chaoxian shangmin suishi maoyi zhangcheng). This treaty was a short version of the one governing trade between Mukden and Chosŏn and laid down the
format of bilateral official correspondence in accordance with Zongfan hierarchy in the same way.
By the end of 1883, then, China and Chosŏn had signed three treaties, or regulations, that were firmly rooted in the Zongfan discourse. The sophisticated norms
used in these texts continued to serve as a way of institutionalizing the hierarchical relationship, centering the Middle Kingdom, and articulating the parties’ iden-
tities in the Chinese world, just as the Zongfan discourse had done in the 1630s, 1760s, and 1860s. Simultaneously, however, the new rules made adjustments to
the traditional mechanism by introducing a new political and commercial network into the borderland between the two countries in Manchuria. This change ex-
tended China’s modern diplomacy, which had been practiced primarily in inner China’s coastal areas, into Manchuria, along with the considerable influence of its
human agents such as Li Hongzhang. The three treaties therefore laid the legal foundation for state-to-state contacts between the two countries in the following,
and final, decade of their longstanding Zongfan relationship. The border areas of Manchuria became a test field where the two countries negotiated the reach of
their respective sovereignties between tradition and modernity, as discussed in chapter 6.
Joining Chosŏn’s Foreign Network: The Chinese Commissioners and the Chinese Settlements
Struggling for Authority: The Chinese Commissioner of Trade in Chosŏn
After the mutiny of 1882, Chosŏn asked China to send specialists on diplomacy and trade to assist it in establishing a system of maritime customs. The request
was made by the king, endorsed by China’s court, and executed by both countries within the Zongfan framework. Consequently, Chosŏn’s maritime customs sys-
tem became a sub-branch of China’s imperial customs, and its annual reports were affiliated with those of imperial customs until 1895. In November 1882 Li
Hongzhang appointed Ma Jianchang (1840–1939), Ma Jianzhong’s brother, and Paul Georg von Möllendorff (1847–1901), a German national who worked as an
assistant in the Chinese Maritime Customs office in Beijing, as foreign advisers to the king.⁶⁸ Ma and Möllendorff took up their posts in early 1883, followed by
the first group of representatives from Western treaty nations and China.
The first US envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary, Lucius H. Foote (1826–1913), and the first Chinese commissioner of trade, Chen Shu-tang, were
the two most important figures among the diplomats now arriving in Chosŏn, and they took diametrically different approaches to defining Chosŏn’s status. Be-
fore he departed for Chosŏn in March 1883, Foote received instructions from Secretary of State Frederick Frelinghuysen (1817–85), emphasizing that the American
treaty negotiations with Chosŏn “were conducted as between two independent and sovereign nations…. As far as we are concerned Corea is an independent
sovereign power, with all the attendant rights, privileges, duties and responsibilities: in her relations to China we have no desire to interfere unless action should
be taken prejudicial to the rights of the United States.” The instructions reminded Foote that “for all purposes of intercourse between the United States and Corea
the King is a sovereign, and that with sovereign states only do the United States treat. Further the representatives of the United States in China will treat the Core-
an representatives there as in the position assigned them by the Chinese government.”⁶⁹ Other Western countries imitated this pragmatic policy.
Chen Shutang’s appointment and authority derived from the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations. Article 1 of the treaty endowed the Beiyang superintendent with the
power to appoint commissioners of trade (Ch., shangwu weiyuan) to reside at Chosŏn’s treaty ports and exercise jurisdiction over Chinese merchants, while
Chosŏn would send similar commissioners of trade to Tianjin and other Chinese treaty ports for the sake of its own merchants. Chen was a Han Chinese official
and had served as consul-general in San Francisco from January 1880 to April 1882. He arrived in Hansŏng in October 1883 and opened his office with ten thou-
sand taels of silver that he had received from Shanghai Maritime Customs. His expenditures would be covered by Beijing’s budget for overseas missions. As a
second-rank taotai, Chen held the official title “commissioner of commercial affairs in Chosŏn” (Ch., Zongban Chaoxian shangwu weiyuan).⁷⁰ He was not an envoy
of the imperial court, but his position carried imperial authority. As Beijing clarified to Chosŏn, Chen was “slightly different” from China’s representatives to other
countries, but the “rationale [for his dispatch] is generally the same.” Invoking again the notion that “Chosŏn is a subordinate country of China,” Beijing con-
cluded that Chen should be the “center of the guests” and instructed Chosŏn’s foreign office to give him favorable treatment whenever there was a banquet for
foreign ministers.⁷¹
Chen himself was also a believer in China’s superiority. He posted a notification on the wall of Hansŏng’s southern gate, stating that “Chosŏn is a shuguo of
China” and calling on all merchants intending to trade in Chosŏn to follow the established rituals and to report to him in case of any disputes with others in the
country. The text sought to “highlight the friendship with the shuguo that uses the same language” (Ch., zhao shuguo tongwen zhi yi) and to “cherish the affection
within a family that respects a common patriarch” (Ch., zhong yijia gongzhu zhi qing).⁷² Chen’s stridency antagonized the American minister and Korean officials,
but he refused to change his tone. As in the case of Ma Jianzhong, who had studied in France, Chen’s diplomatic experience in the United States seemed to have
no effect on his line of reasoning in Chosŏn.
In practice, Chen acted as a Chinese consul and planned to build his official residence in the style of a “Chinese consulate” (Ch., Zhongguo gongguan).⁷³ Yet he
was not a consul, and his official title did not put him in charge of foreign affairs. Instead of contacting Chen, then, the Japanese and Western ministers brought
diplomatic matters concerning China directly to Chosŏn’s Foreign Office, the T’ongni amun (K., T’ongni kyosŏp t’ongsang samu amun). Chosŏn also expressed a
desire for independence from Chinese involvement by sending a special mission to the United States in the fall of 1883.⁷⁴ Chen felt so marginalized that in Sep-
tember 1884 he complained to Li Hongzhang that his awkward position was causing him to be snubbed by the Japanese and British ministers. Chen tried to jus-
tify his authority by invoking the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations, but other ministers responded that the treaty, as its preamble stated, was effective only between
China and Korea. After consulting with Li and Foote, Chen updated his title to “general commissioner of foreign and commercial affairs at Chosŏn’s ports” (Ch.,
Zongban Chaoxian gekou jiaoshe tongshang shiwu) in November 1884.
According to Chen, this title perfectly fit the established “system,” in accordance with which he, as an official of the “upper country,” could discuss certain af-
fairs of China’s shuguo with his Japanese and Western counterparts. Unsurprisingly, by failing to draw a clear line between Chinese and Korean affairs at the ports,
the new title aroused deep concern among Western ministers, including the first British minister to Chosŏn, Harry Parkes, who had been wondering about
Chosŏn’s international position for years. The Zongli Yamen clarified to Parkes that “Chosŏn is a shuguo of China, which means that the commissioner should
not be understood as a minister to the country, but since Chen has been appointed by the emperor to be in charge of diplomatic affairs and he holds a second-
rank taotai, his position is equal to that of the consuls-general of other countries.”⁷⁵ This description thus strategically defined Chen as a consul-general.
Questionable Imperialism: Chinese Settlements in Chosŏn
Chen arrived in Hansŏng without a clear mission from Beijing or Tianjin, so he alone had to decide what to do. Beijing’s original plan had been to place Chen in
charge of Chinese business in Inch’ŏn too, but Chen realized that it was impossible for him to perform duties in both Hansŏng and Inch’ŏn. A series of
commercial and diplomatic events involving Chinese merchants and citizens in Inch’ŏn and other treaty ports reached Chen’s desk right after he opened his of-
fice, so he sent an assistant, Li Nairong, to Inch’ŏn as the first Chinese representative at that port. Due to his lack of an official status, Li Nairong found himself in
the same uncomfortable situation as Chen had. Chen called Li a consul (Ch., lingshi) instead of a commissioner (Ch., lishi) in front of the Japanese consul and the
commissioner of Inch’ŏn maritime customs, although Li was not, strictly speaking, a consul. Since the Chinese terms for “commissioner” and “consul” have very
similar pronunciations, Chen may have planned to use the phonological likeness to tacitly confer on Li Nairong a clear status commensurate with international
practice. Li Nairong later told Chen that it would be better to clarify his official rank as commissioner rather than consul to the Korean side.⁷⁶
In February 1884 Chen informed Min Yŏng-muk (1826–84), Queen Min’s nephew and the minister of Chosŏn’s Foreign Office, that Li and other Chinese offi-
cials residing in Korean treaty ports held the title of “commissioner of Chinese merchants’ affairs” (Ch., huashang shiwu guan). These commissioners, said Chen,
were equal to Chosŏn officials and foreign consuls and were in charge of all affairs concerning Chinese merchants in Chosŏn.⁷⁷ Li Nairong was thus transformed
from Chen’s private assistant to a diplomatic representative of the Chinese state. As Kirk W. Larsen points out, “Chen was successful … in establishing and pro-
moting an official Qing diplomatic and commercial presence in Korea.”⁷⁸
Li Nairong found his understaffed office in Inch’ŏn unable to handle the increase in Chinese business and Sino-Japanese conflicts at the port. Japan had
opened more than one hundred stores in the city since 1876, and Japanese residents outnumbered the Koreans, Chinese, and Westerners. But now growing num-
bers of Chinese merchants, in particular from Shandong, Zhejiang, and Guangdong Provinces, were coming to seek their fortunes in the city, and these busi-
nessmen organized companies such as Tongshuntai hao (the Company of Union, Prosperity, and Peace) to challenge Japan’s monopoly in local trade.⁷⁹ Within a
single month, from October to November 1883, the number of Chinese stores in Inch’ŏn increased from two to seven and that of Chinese merchants from about
ten to more than sixty. According to Chinese statistics, from 1883 to 1884 the number of Chinese in Inch’ŏn rose from 63 to 235 and that of Chinese in Hansŏng
from 26 to 352.⁸⁰ Some Chinese merchants in Inch’ŏn had started to extend their businesses to Hansŏng. Chen Shutang and Li Nairong were thus facing a new
Chinese presence in Chosŏn. In addition, hundreds of Chinese sailors working on Chinese and Japanese cargo ships frequently passed through Inch’ŏn, giving a
major boost to local bars and brothels. These sailors were troublemakers not only in Korean and Japanese eyes but also from the perspective of the Chinese, be-
cause Chinese officials at the port did not have a full roster of these Chinese citizens and therefore did not know whom to prosecute if any of them were involved
in local conflicts. In an attempt to control the sailors, Li followed international conventions by requesting that all Chinese citizens visiting Inch’ŏn, including civil-
ians and soldiers, register with his office.⁸¹
Given the growing number of Chinese merchants in Inch’ŏn and the expansion of their businesses, Chen Shutang felt it was necessary to set up a Chinese set-
tlement for trade purposes. He found legal support in article 4 of the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations, which stated that “the merchants of either country who may
proceed to the open ports of the other country for trade will be allowed to rent land or houses and erect buildings.” In December 1883 Chen and Möllendorff, the
assistant minister of Chosŏn’s Foreign Office, conducted a field investigation in Inch’ŏn and decided to secure a foundation for a Chinese settlement. Many parts
of the area lay on hillsides or in marshland, so the project required land reclamation (see map 5.1). Li Nairong and the commissioner of Inch’ŏn maritime cus-
toms made a map of the Chinese settlement, and Li asked local Chinese merchants to provide financial support for the land reclamation project.⁸²
MAP 5.1. The Chinese settlement in Inch’oȈn in the early 1890s. 1 meter = 39.37 inches. Plan of Settlements in Chemulpo [Inch’oȈn], handwritten map, preserved
at the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University. Copyright Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies.
Chen found the name of the settlement a challenge. In his notes to the Korean side, Chen—unlike his Chinese or Korean colleagues—avoided the term “settle-
ment” (Ch., zujie), instead calling it “lands and boundary” (Ch., dijie, which generally means “land”). In a letter to Li Nairong in December 1883, Chen said he had
been considering whether the settlement should be called “Lands of the Great Qing” (Ch., Da Qing dijie) or “Lands of the Chinese merchants” (Ch., Huashang
dijie). Confessing that he thought the former was “not perfect,” Chen decided on the latter, as it would not take advantage of Chosŏn and would maintain the
“face of the upper country.”⁸³ Chen’s weighing of semantic options, like his maneuverings around the term “commissioner,” betrayed the problems of the outer
dual network between China and Chosŏn—that is, the overlapping operation of the Zongfan framework and the treaty system in the two countries’ foreign
relations.
Chosŏn, however, did not endorse Chen’s plan to distinguish the Sino-Korean relationship in this particular case. When Min Yŏng-muk heard Chen’s argument
that the regulations governing the Chinese merchants’ settlement should be different from those used for other countries in accordance with the “system,” Min
retorted that there was no difference between the two.⁸⁴ On April 2, 1884, Min and Chen signed the “Regulations for the Chinese Merchants Settlement in
Inch’ŏn” (Ch., Renchuan kou huashang dijie zhangcheng), which was based on the draft Chen had presented to Min in February. The text was written only in Chi-
nese and officially called the settlement “Lands of the Chinese Merchants,” as Chen had proposed, but it omitted Chen’s preamble, which imitated the preamble
to the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations by emphasizing that Sino-Korean trade was different from that between Chosŏn and other countries and that the regulations
would apply only to the former.⁸⁵ Without the preamble, the two countries’ state-to-state relations took center stage.
While Chen was opening the Chinese settlement in Inch’ŏn, an event occurred in Pusan that further legitimized his agenda of expanding this model to other
treaty ports. In early November 1883 a Chinese grocery store in Kōbe, Japan, called Dexing hao (Store of Merit and Prosperity) had sent two agents to Pusan to
open a branch in the Japanese settlement there, but the branch was suddenly shut down by the Japanese consul. As soon as he returned to Hansŏng, Chen raised
the case with Min Yŏng-muk. Min explained that he would prefer to “select a settlement [K., chogye] for the Chinese merchants where they can quickly open their
stores,” rather than negotiate with the Japanese to allow the Chinese merchants to do business in the Japanese settlement in Pusan. Chen applauded this pro-
posal and volunteered to visit Pusan together with a Korean official for a joint field investigation. Min again appointed Möllendorff to accompany Chen.⁸⁶ In the
meantime, the Chinese minister to Japan, Li Shuchang, suggested to the Zongli Yamen that Beijing should “instruct Chosŏn’s Foreign Office to establish Chinese
settlements in Pusan and other ports.”⁸⁷ Li’s proposal fit Chen’s agenda perfectly. As a result, China opened settlements in Pusan and Wŏnsan.
Observing that China became active in Chosŏn after a series of crises beginning in 1882, scholars have generally interpreted the phenomenon as a fundamental
change in China’s foreign policy toward Chosŏn and have described China as practicing imperialism under the cloak of suzerainty.⁸⁸ Two issues concerning the
sovereignty of Chosŏn are worth discussing here: Chinese and Korean perceptions of the Chinese settlements and the extraterritoriality that Chinese citizens en-
joyed in their settlements.
The negotiations between Chen and Min suggest that neither side perceived the settlements as a symbol of imperialist expansion that would damage Chosŏn’s
sovereignty or help China gain geopolitical hegemony on the peninsula. Min’s proposal to open another Chinese settlement in Pusan in order to avoid cases like
that of Dexing hao shows that he considered such settlements only pieces of rented land for whose use the Chinese, the Japanese, and other foreigners had to pay
every year.⁸⁹ The term “sovereignty” never entered Min’s and Chen’s correspondence, and the term “settlement” carried a meaning that was very different from
that which it would later convey in the strongly nationalist historical context of the twentieth century. The issue of establishing police forces in the Chinese settle-
ment in Inch’ŏn, which involved Chinese, Korean, and British citizens, is another case that demonstrates the difference between China’s understanding of settle-
ment and that of scholars in an international law context.⁹⁰
Furthermore, it is important to note that Chosŏn had the legal option of opening its own settlements at China’s ports in accordance with article 4 of the 1882
Sino-Korean Regulations. Once the regulations went into effect, many Korean merchants traveled to Chinese ports, some even going as far as Gansu, Shaanxi,
and Sichuan, to sell ginseng. In 1885 Chosŏn dispatched a commercial commissioner (K., sangmu wiwŏn) to Tianjin as a counterpart of Chen Shutang. Had the
Korean merchants formed a strong and sizeable community in Tianjin, Shanghai, or other ports, as the Chinese did in Inch’ŏn and Pusan, Chosŏn could have
established settlements at those Chinese ports through negotiations with Beijing. It was only Chosŏn’s limited overseas commercial activity that made this
scenario impracticable.
In terms of extraterritoriality, it is true that Chinese citizens held this right within Chinese settlements in Chosŏn, whereas Chosŏn merchants at Chinese treaty
ports, according to article 2 of the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations, were under local Chinese jurisdiction, a difference that highlighted the unequal nature of their
terms. However, in addition to the connection between article 2 of the Sino-Korean Regulations and the extraterritoriality granted to American citizens in the Ko-
rean-Amer-ican treaty discussed earlier in this chapter, we should keep in mind that Koreans who conducted illegal trade in Qing China outside of the treaty ports
always enjoyed extraterritoriality. The case of Korean merchants illegally visiting Gansu and Sichuan Provinces illustrates this point.
After China opened its treaty ports to Koreans as required by the Sino-Korean Regulations, the number of Koreans traveling to Gansu and Sichuan to sell gin-
seng without passports issued by the Korean commissioners and local Chinese officials increased sharply. In June 1883 the officials of Langzhong County in
Sichuan sent three such unauthorized Korean ginseng merchants to Nanbu County, from where they were sent further to Chengdu, the provincial capital.⁹¹ At al-
most the same time, Gansu also sent a Korean merchant, Mun So-wun, who had sold ginseng illegally in the province, to the Ministry of Rites in Beijing; the min-
istry transferred him to Tianjin, from where he could board a ship for Chosŏn. The officials in Sichuan did not detain these “people of the fan ” (Ch., fanfu renmin)
who had traveled thousands of miles to make a profit, and they preferred to “follow the Western example” (Ch., zhao Taixi yili) by sending them to Beijing. Since
article 4 of the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations regarding trade licenses and passports did not address this scenario, the Ministry of Rites, the Zongli Yamen, and
the Beiyang superintendent eventually instructed the local officials to send Korean violators to the Korean commercial commissioners at Chinese treaty ports,
from where they would be deported to Chosŏn for punishment.
In these cases, the Chinese side regarded the Korean violators as guilty of a crime punishable by the laws of their own country, and therefore the Korean side
had to take the necessary steps for extradition based on article 2 of the regulations.⁹² These Korean citizens, or “criminals,” were thus exempt from Chinese juris-
diction, which in the Zongfan context was seen as a manifestation of China’s favor to the small country. Beijing particularly instructed local officials to treat the
Korean violators well as a way of cherishing the subordinate country. For its part, Chosŏn also used Zongfan terminology to describe China’s clemency as a
demonstration of China’s “extreme solicitude” to the “small country.”⁹³ In their bilateral communications about such cases, no mention was made of Chosŏn’s
or China’s sovereignty or international law. If extraterritoriality were to imply imperialism, one would have to conclude that the Qing and Chosŏn practiced imperi-
alism on each other.
5
SUPERVISING CHOSŎN
Qing China’s Patriarchal Role in Chosŏn, 1877–84
In the late 1870s and early 1880s, with China’s vigorous encouragement, Chosŏn launched reforms to fortify itself domestically. However, the reform programs caused a backlash, prompting student petitions and eventually a bloody mutiny. China sent troops to Chosŏn in 1882 to help the Korean court suppress the mutiny, and it subsequently became deeply enmeshed in Chosŏn’s domestic and foreign affairs. In the course of these events, China availed itself of its superior position to introduce Chosŏn into the family of nations, in particular through the negotiation of the Korean-American treaty in 1882. From the perspective of Japan and the Western states, China’s involvement represented a fundamental change in China’s traditional policy toward Korea, and it triggered a wave of intense political and diplomatic struggles between the various powers on the peninsula. To meet these new challenges, China and Chosŏn signed several commercial agreements to maintain and adjust their relations.
A pair of coexisting and correlated dual diplomatic networks developed between China and Chosŏn. The first dual network encompassed the Sino-Korean Zongfan system, on the one hand, and the newly imported treaty system that connected China, Chosŏn, and their treaty counterparts, on the other. This network, which I call the outer dual network, operated between the politico-cultural Chinese empire and the world beyond the empire, and both China and Chosŏn had to deal independently with the treaty aspects of this network. The second dual network, which I call the inner network, functioned within the Chinese empire and comprised, first, the conventional system of court-to-court interactions between the imperial court in Beijing and the royal court in Hansŏng, and, second, the newly founded state-to-state system between China and Chosŏn, in which the latter was theoretically equal to the former according to international law. Through the outer and inner dual networks, both China and Chosŏn modified and revised their policies toward each other.
Opening Chosŏn to the West: China and the Korean-American Negotiations
From Tokyo to Pusan and Tianjin: The Shufeldt-Li Agreement of 1880
By the late 1870s, China was aware of the grave challenges Chosŏn was facing from other countries, and it began to persuade Chosŏn to open its doors by negotiating treaties with Western states. Since Zongfan conventions prevented both the Zongli Yamen and the Ministry of Rites from making such a request of an outer fan, Li Hongzhang personally took on the task of cajoling Chosŏn. Li used his personal correspondence with the Korean minister Yi Yu-wŏn, mentioned in the previous chapter, for this purpose, but Yi was not enthusiastic about contacting the Western barbarians.¹ In March 1880 the navy commander Robert Shufeldt arrived in Nagasaki with the USS Ticonderoga. The American minister John Bingham approached the Japanese foreign minister, Inoue Kaoru (1835–1915), to ask for Japan’s good offices in introducing Shufeldt to Chosŏn.² Inoue was worried that Japan’s acting as a go-between might harm its fragile relations with Chosŏn, but he decided to send a letter from Shufeldt to the Korean court through the Japanese consul at Pusan, Kondō Masuki (1840–92), and the chargé d’affaires at Hansŏng, Hanabusa Yoshimoto (1842–1917). Expecting to have further contact with the Koreans, Shufeldt went to Pusan, but he soon received his unopened letter back. Chosŏn’s rebuff incurred Bingham’s wrath and ended Japan’s role as mediator.³
While Shufeldt was waiting in Nagasaki, the Chinese consul in the city, Yu Qiong, decided that it would be a good idea to grant the United States entrance into Chosŏn in order to check Russia, which was on the brink of war with China following the Ili incident on China’s northwestern frontier in Xinjiang. Yu contacted
the Chinese minister in Tokyo, He Ruzhang (1838–91), who immediately forwarded the news to the Zongli Yamen and Li Hongzhang. Li quickly decided to invite Shufeldt to Tianjin, and the latter happily accepted the invitation. After a meeting with Li in August, Shufeldt reported that Li had promised he would use his influence with the Government of Corea to accede to the friendly request made by Shufeldt in behalf of the Government of the United States to open negotiations with a view to such a treaty [with Korea].⁴ Under the agreement, Shufeldt returned to the United States to secure more support from the Department of State, while Li turned his attention to coaxing Chosŏn to allow the United States in.
Behind a Cloak: Preparations for Chosŏn’s Training Program in Tianjin
The ruling house of Chosŏn was not blind to the encroaching West. In 1879 the Korean emissary Yi Yong-suk (1818–?) informed the Chinese official You Zhikai (1816–99) at Yongping near Beijing that Chosŏn hoped to dispatch trainees to Tianjin to obtain advanced military and industrial skills, following the precedent of foreign countries sending students to China for learning. Yi asked You to take the proposal to Li Hongzhang. Li heartily endorsed the plan. In a confidential letter to You, which was finally forwarded to the king via Yi, Li suggested that Chosŏn should submit a detailed proposal to the Ministry of Rites in Beijing.⁵ Shortly thereafter the king sent Pyŏn Wŏn-kyu (1837–96) as an emissary to Beijing to discuss the plan, while the Chinese court put Li in charge of the training program that would encourage Chosŏn to follow the mainstream of the world.⁶
In his summer office in Tianjin, Li underscored to Pyŏn that the best survival strategy for Chosŏn was to trade with the Westerners. With Li’s support, Pyŏn and several Chinese officials drafted an outline of the training program that broke several two-hundred-year-old Zongfan conventions. In addition to granting the Korean trainees, interpreters, and superintendents the special right to visit Tianjin via the maritime route, which had not happened since 1637, the outline required all program members to obtain passes from the office of the Beiyang superintendent, which would be filed at the Ministry of Rites. Given that this would be the first time Korean visitors had resided in a Chinese city outside Beijing since at least 1644, the outline prescribed that the trainees must obey the Chinese rules and conventions (Ch., zunshou Zhongguo guiju); otherwise they would be sent by the Chinese officials to their Korean superintendents for punishment according to Korean regulations. In this case, then, China endowed the Korean side with a right similar to the consular jurisdiction that it had conferred on its Western treaty partners.
The outline also required the king to send official correspondence on military training, weapon procurement, and other military affairs to both the Ministry of Rites and the Beiyang superintendent. The position of the Beiyang superintendent, as a subordinate official under the Zongli Yamen, was a secondary post held by the governor-general of Zhili, a post occupied almost exclusively by Li until 1894. According to Zongfan regulations, the superintendent should not be involved in Zongfan affairs with Chosŏn. However, since Li’s meeting with Mori in 1876, this rule had been eclipsed by the growth of Li’s authority—itself a result of the Zongli Yamen’s ambiguous definition of the Sino-Korean relationship, on the one hand, and the silence of the Ministry of Rites on affairs beyond the conventional court-to-court track, on the other. In a confidential memorial in February 1881 the Zongli Yamen pointed out that "it is extremely urgent for Chosŏn to conduct diplomacy [Ch., waijiao] with other countries" and requested that the Qing court make changes to old regulations in order to endow the Beiyang superintendent with greater privileges.⁷ With the emperor’s endorsement, the superintendent gained the right to communicate directly with—rather than simply receive notes from—the king on issues concerning not only the training program but also foreign affairs. The superintendent became the de jure mentor for Chosŏn’s self-strengthening program. The king responded favorably, indicating to Li a strong intention of opening Chosŏn to Western countries and wanting to commission Li to make the first move toward initiating treaty negotiations with the United States.⁸
Modernity versus Heresy: China’s Prescriptions and Korean Resistance
As the king was deciding to open up his country to foreigners, Chosŏn was caught in a series of dramatic political events that had strong ripple effects. The sequence of events was initiated by Chinese diplomats in Japan, who forwarded their advice regarding Chosŏn’s policy to the king through the Korean envoy of amity to Japan, Kim Hong-jip (1842–96). When Kim visited Tokyo in late 1880, the Chinese minister, He Ruzhang, and the counselor of the Chinese legation, Huang Zunxian, had intensive talks with him. Their conversations took place in the Zongfan context, in which each party identified the other as a member of the same family (Ch., yijia) and saw Chosŏn as no different from an inner subordinate of China. The two Chinese diplomats tried to convince Kim that Chosŏn should abandon its parochialism and sign treaties with Western countries, beginning with the United States, in order to prevent a Russian onslaught. Kim agreed with the two officials, as did his Japanese counterparts at the Gaimushō.
Before Kim left Tokyo, Huang gave him a treatise entitled A Strategy for Chosŏn (Ch., Chaoxian celue), in which Huang argued that Chosŏn should check the Russian threat by having intimate relations with China, associating with Japan, and allying with the United States (Ch., qin Zhongguo, jie Riben, lian Meiguo). The treatise prescribed strategies aimed at ameliorating Chosŏn’s perilous situation and encouraged it to launch a self-strengthening program. Chosŏn, Huang proposed, should ask China to allow its emissaries to stay in Beijing permanently, dispatch emissaries to reside in Tokyo and Washington, propose to expand trade at Fenghuang City, send trainees and students to China for training in military skills and Western languages, and invite Westerners to assist Chosŏn with educational reforms. In short, Chosŏn should immediately join the family of nations to bolster its diplomatic, military, and economic power. In order to present Chosŏn to the world as soon as possible, Huang even suggested that the Korean army and navy forces use China’s dragon flag as the national flag.⁹
Encouraged by Huang’s passionate words, the king sent a secret commissioner to Tokyo to visit Huang and He Ruzhang with private letters that signaled his intention of negotiating a treaty with the United States. With Chosŏn’s opening in sight, He composed a treatise, On Managing Chosŏn’s Diplomacy (Ch., Zhuchi Chaoxian waijiao yi), for the consideration of Beijing and Li Hongzhang. The minister elaborated on his and Huang’s ideas by laying out three policies in order of priority. The top-choice policy, which he admitted would be difficult to put into practice right away, was to follow the example of Mongolia and Tibet by dispatching an imperial resident (Ch., banshi dachen) to reside permanently in Chosŏn—a place that had been almost no different from the inner prefectures and counties (Ch., ji wuyi neidi junxian) during the Qianlong period—and to manage its domestic politics and foreign treaties (Ch., neiguo zhi zhengzhi, waiguo zhi tiaoyue). This proposal may have resembled the European concept of colonialism, but it represented He’s understanding of the Zongfan system, and this perception obtained legitimacy from the Qing’s management of Mongolia and Tibet. The second potential policy was to dispatch a skilled official to Chosŏn to assist it in negotiating treaties with other countries. This policy, He said, was the most practical one, as it could demonstrate Chosŏn’s status as China’s subordinate and avoid possible problems caused by Chosŏn’s self-rule. Finally, the third-priority policy involved the Chinese court ordering the king to sign treaties with other countries and specifying in the first article of each treaty that Chosŏn was concluding the treaty on China’s orders.¹⁰ As history unfolded, Beijing would eventually endorse the second and third proposals.
The king was confident about the Chinese proposals and enthusiastically launched reforms after Pyŏn Wŏn-kyu returned home from Tianjin with the outline of the training program. On January 19, 1881, Chosŏn established the Office for Managing State Affairs (K., T’ongni kimu amun) in imitation of China’s Zongli Yamen, laying the institutional cornerstone for the modernization of the country. This institution comprised twelve departments, the first among them being the Department of Serving the Great (K., Sadae sa).¹¹ At the same time, the king appointed twelve officials as inspectors of Dongnae Prefecture (K., Dongnaebu amhaeng ŏsa) to visit Japan and observe Japanese politics, society, foreign relations, and trade. The mission, later known as "the inspection mission of the court
officials" (K., Chosa sich’al dan) or the gentlemen’s sighting group (K., Sinsa yuram dan) had a total of sixty-four members. It visited Nagasaki, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Yokohama, and Tokyo between May and October 1881 and was granted audiences with senior Japanese officials. In October, when another mission headed by Cho Pyŏng-ho (1847–1910) and Yi Cho-yŏn (1843–84) as envoys of amity arrived in Japan for negotiations over duty tariffs, the inspection mission returned to Hansŏng, submitting to the king sixty-four reports and seventeen additional memorandums. The officials expressed their belief that bringing Chosŏn into the modern world and into alliances with other countries offered the best way for the country to survive the growing Japanese threat.¹² Their conclusions justified the king’s policy of reforms and opening up.
The domestic situation, however, was not conducive to the realization of officials’ strategic goals. Before the mission returned home, the king had arrested several officials headed by An Ki-yŏng (1819–81) of the Taewŏn’gun clan and charged them with planning a coup. Simultaneously, a nationwide protest among the literati against the king’s reforms became more dramatic and provocative. In late 1880 some officials asked the king to reject Huang Zunxian’s ideas, which they believed went against the doctrines of Confucianism.¹³ In March 1881 a Confucian student from Kyŏngsang, Yi Man-son, submitted a petition cosigned by ten thousand fellow students, calling on the king to burn Huang’s treatise and to reaffirm Confucianism. At court, the official Hwang Chae-hyŏn argued that the king should reject heretical thought by publicly burning not only Huang’s treatise but all books and newspapers on international law and foreign history and geography. In order to sidestep the literati’s moral charges, the king issued a decree of antiheresy that endorsed the defense of Confucianism and rejected heretical ideas.¹⁴ Yet this action seemed only to encourage more students to travel to Hansŏng to submit petitions.
The literati protest reached its zenith in late August with the petitions of two students, Hong Chae-hak and Sin Sŏp. Besides appealing to the king to abolish the Office for Managing State Affairs and to restore old institutions, Hong accused the king of having taken no measures to defend correct teaching and reject heterodoxy (K., wijŏng ch’ŏksa). Sin, for his part, depicted Li Hongzhang’s letters to Yi Yu-wŏn and Huang’s treatise as elements of the same intrigue against Chosŏn.¹⁵ In early September Hong was beheaded for offending the sovereign, and Yi Yu-wŏn was exiled. The protests declined. The king and the Min clan, along with their program of reaching out, survived the turmoil and prevailed over other political cliques in fierce partisan struggles.
Amid the turbulence, in late July the king welcomed two imperial envoys from Beijing, who brought an edict about the death of Empress Dowager Cian. The monarch held a grand ceremony at the palace, where he performed rituals to the imperial documents. Afterward, he paid a visit to the envoys at their residence and then sent them off in person. The conversations between the king and the envoys did not touch on Chosŏn’s domestic or foreign affairs.¹⁶ The Zongfan mechanism continued to function smoothly, reaffirming its rituals, the autonomous right and dignity of the sovereign of Chosŏn, and the nature of the Zongfan relationship.
Secret Diplomacy: Chosŏn’s Commissioning of China to Negotiate with the United States
On November 18, 1881, the emissary of superintending the selected trainees (K., Yŏngsŏn sa), Kim Yun-sik (1835–1922), left Hansŏng for China, bringing with him students who were to learn military skills and Western languages under the auspices of the new training program. Although the mission was unlike any that had gone to China before, it mostly acted like a conventional tributary one, with Kim treated as a standard tributary emissary in terms of his traveling expenses.¹⁷ Not many young Koreans wanted to study in China: four days before his departure, Kim was still busy recruiting trainees. Of the more than thirty young men he interviewed, only six volunteered to go. Not until early December, when Kim reached Ŭiju, did he finally have the thirty-eight trainees China had suggested. Like the tributary missions in the eighteenth century, Kim’s spent fifty days covering more than 950 miles from Hansŏng to Beijing via the overland route (the maritime route, which they had planned to take with Beijing’s special approval, was not feasible in winter). The mission arrived in Beijing on January 6, 1882, and Kim
submitted the king’s notes to the Ministry of Rites after the group was lodged at the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations.¹⁸
Leaving his mission in Beijing, Kim visited Li Hongzhang at Baoding with a confidential memorandum, which asked Li to assume, in secret, the task of negotiating Chosŏn’s treaty with the United States; this treaty was then to serve as a prototype for subsequent treaties with other countries.¹⁹ Emphasizing that what he did for Chosŏn was legitimate and righteous (Ch., mingzheng yishun), as Kim, too, believed, Li gave Kim a pamphlet about Chosŏn’s potential treaties with Western countries that had been drafted by Ma Jianzhong (1845–1900), a protégé of Li’s who had been educated in France.²⁰ Li further discussed with Kim key issues regarding Chosŏn’s reforms, such as regulating tariffs, setting up a system of maritime customs and hiring Western staff to manage it, designing a national flag for Chosŏn for maritime identification, allowing the Japanese minister to reside in Hansŏng, and continuing to use the king’s invested rank in his contacts with the Japanese sovereign. The most urgent goal of the two sides, then, was to negotiate and conclude a treaty with the United States rather than to teach the Korean trainees in China.
Within the Zongfan context, the Korean side abandoned its right of negotiation from the beginning. In late January, Beijing granted Li control over Chosŏn’s treaty negotiations with the United States in order to "maintain the fan and shuguo and consolidate China’s border."²¹ Li also received a letter from Shufeldt, who had returned to China in June 1881 and waited in Tianjin for news from the Korean side. Shufeldt had been appointed by Washington as a special envoy to Chosŏn to pursue a treaty of amity aimed at addressing the issue of American shipwrecks on the Korean coast.²² After the meeting with Kim, Li invited Shufeldt to Baoding to discuss the details of the forthcoming treaty negotiations, but Shufeldt decided first to visit the American legation in Beijing to solicit advice from the chargé d’affaires, Chester Holcombe (1842–1912).
Unlike Shufeldt, Holcombe was aware of the critical devolution of Beijing’s negotiating power to Li and doubted it would be possible to persuade Chosŏn to conclude a treaty without the involvement of the central government in Beijing because Li was only a provincial officer and not a member of the Central Government. To seek clarity on this question, Holcombe visited the Zongli Yamen, where he was informed that Prince Gong had transferred responsibility for Korean foreign affairs from the Ministry of Rites to the Zongli Yamen in 1881, which meant that Li as a subordinate of the Yamen was authorized to deal with Korean affairs. Holcombe also learned that China had advised Chosŏn to conclude a treaty with the United States because China believed that sooner or later the autonomy of Corea would be threatened by the aggressions of Russia and/or Japan, and that this serious danger could be best met by bringing the peninsular Kingdom into the family of nations. Although the Yamen confirmed to him that China was ready to aid the United States in any proper way to open friendly and commercial relations with Corea, Holcombe was worried that Beijing might see fit to assume an entirely different attitude and policy in this business. His distrust seems to have affected Shufeldt, who replied to Li that he preferred to keep the prospective treaty negotiations secret by not visiting Baoding.²³
For his part, after his meetings with Li at Baoding, Kim visited Tianjin for a week, sending five students to the Navy and Torpedo School for English-language training. China decided to cover the Korean students’ meals and other costs because the students were also loyal children of the Heavenly Dynasty. It was within this conventional politico-cultural context of the Chinese empire that Chinese officials enthusiastically engaged in Chosŏn’s program of building its strength and reaching out to the West. Before he could place additional students in schools, Kim received confidential orders from the king to consult with Li over treaty negotiations with the United States. Kim immediately returned to Baoding, where he and Li discussed initiating negotiations with Shufeldt in order to prevent him from sailing directly for Chosŏn. This plan required a Korean envoy plenipotentiary. Given the limited time, Li proposed that Kim follow the king’s secret instruction to adapt strategies for situations and serve as the plenipotentiary himself, but Kim declined. The only solution, then, was to quickly send a messenger to Hansŏng to ask the king to dispatch a plenipotentiary to Tianjin. Li cautioned that the plenipotentiary should come ostensibly to supervise the Korean trainees and
keep his true mission secret.²⁴
Opening Chosŏn’s Doors: The Sino-American Treaty Negotiations
Li Hongzhang took up the task of composing a draft treaty primarily on the basis of a model proposed by Huang Zunxian. Li suggested that the treaty should define the Sino-Korean relationship by stating that "Chosŏn, being a shuguo of China, possesses the right of zizhu as to its diplomatic and domestic affairs, and this right shall not be challenged by other nations. Kim endorsed this legitimate and justifiable" statement. In a confidential report to the king, Kim revealed the true reason for his approval: the statement meant that Chosŏn could use China’s diplomatic relations with other countries for its own great benefit, and the affirmation of its right of zizhu would preserve Chosŏn’s equality in its contacts with other countries.²⁵ Kim’s comments indicate that the use of terms drawn from the Zongfan discourse—which in the end appeared not in the Korean-American treaty but in the Sino-Korean commercial regulations signed in the same year—were not uni-laterally imposed on Chosŏn by China in order to strengthen China’s suzerainty at the cost of Chosŏn’s sovereignty and independence. Rather, each party to the Zongfan arrangement could exploit the relationship for its own benefit.
Another critical aspect of the discussion between Li and Kim focused on the prospect of granting an American right of consular jurisdiction. Huang, in his draft, suggested that Chosŏn temporarily allow American consuls to manage the affairs of American citizens in Chosŏn. Backing this idea, Li explained that according to international conventions, foreigners living in treaty ports and hinterlands of a country are subject to the management of the officials of their own countries residing in the places of the said country. The local officials of the host country are not able to manage people of other nations due to the different laws, punishments, customs, and proprieties between the East and the West. For Li and Huang, consular jurisdiction was thus merely a way of managing foreigners rather than a clause undermining the sovereignty of a country. Kim agreed with this view, confirming that our humble country is not familiar with foreign situations, so there will be many problems even if our country could manage foreigners by itself.²⁶ The two sides thus decided to grant the United States the right of consular jurisdiction, even though Shufeldt had not asked for this right. Because the Korean-American treaty was a prototype for future treaties between Chosŏn and other countries, China gained this right too, through the commercial regulations examined later in this chapter. This episode calls into question the assumption that the Western powers always obtained extraterritoriality in East Asia by force. It further casts doubt on the notion that extraterritoriality can be uniformly regarded as a hallmark of imperialism, as historical narratives of East Asian countries have typically charged.²⁷
After composing a draft treaty with Li, Kim returned to Tianjin, where a special envoy of the king, Yi Ŭng-jun, was waiting for him with a sovereign letter stating that the dispatch of a plenipotentiary was impossible and that it would be better for the Americans to travel to Chosŏn for further communication. When Kim asked the Chinese chief of the Tianjin Customs, Zhou Fu (1837–1921), to forward the message to Li, Zhou repeated the suggestion that Kim himself act as the plenipotentiary. Kim again refused, believing it would be better for China to negotiate on behalf of his country. Zhou also questioned the phrase independence and half-autonomy (Ch., duli banzhu) that appeared in a Korean note explaining the term zizhu in the Korean-Japanese Treaty of 1876. Zhou warned that the statement, which seemed to claim much greater independence than was foreseen by Kim and Li, was a Japanese plot and could only damage Chosŏn’s interests. In response, Kim confirmed that Chosŏn would not claim to be independent and autonomous (K., chajon t’ŭknip) in its treaty with the United States.²⁸
Soon thereafter, the treaty negotiations between Li Hongzhang and Shufeldt opened. Whether the treaty should include a clause defining Chosŏn as China’s shuguo became the most controversial issue. The first article of Li’s draft, as Li and Kim had discussed, stated that "Chosŏn is China’s shubang and always enjoys the right of zizhu in its domestic and foreign affairs."²⁹ Shufeldt objected to this statement, so the two sides drew up a draft treaty with fifteen articles, leaving the first one blank. According to the Sino-Korean plan, if it proved impossible to include the statement in the final version of the treaty, Chosŏn would send a special
note to the US government to articulate its status as China’s shuguo. Kim did not hold any conversations with Shufeldt, nor did he participate in the negotiations. On April 21, 1882, Li gave Kim and Yi Ŭng-jun a copy of the draft treaty and instructed Yi to return to Chosŏn immediately from Tianjin by a Chinese steamer. At Kim’s request, Li instructed Ma Jianzhong, who was very skilled in international law, to accompany Shufeldt to Inch’ŏn to ensure that everything would go smoothly. In the meantime, two Korean officials, Ŏ Yun-jung (1848–96) and Yi Cho-yŏn, left Hansŏng for Tianjin as officials of examination and selection (K., kosŏn kwan), not as the plenipotentiaries that Li, Kim, and Shufeldt desperately wanted.
On May 8 Ma Jianzhong and the Chinese admiral Ding Ruchang (1836–95) arrived at Inch’ŏn, where Ma met with the Japanese minister, Hanabusa Yoshimoto, who had arrived a day earlier in the hope of influencing the negotiations. Four days later, Shufeldt arrived on the USS Swatara and negotiated with the Korean plenipotentiaries, Kim Hong-jip and Sin Hŏn (1810–84), the latter of whom had signed the Treaty of Kanghwa in 1876. The negotiations ended on May 22 with a treaty of fourteen articles, omitting the first article about Chosŏn’s status that Li had proposed. For Chosŏn’s national flag, Ma suggested Yi Ŭng-jun’s design of the Taiji and eight trigrams as the basic model.³⁰ After Shufeldt left for Shanghai with a copy of the treaty, Ma remained in Inch’ŏn to help Chosŏn negotiate treaties with Britain and other states.³¹ Following the middle course, as determined by Li, Ma, and Kim, the king sent a dispatch that Ma had drafted to the US president Chester Arthur on May 29, claiming that Corea is a tributary of China, but in regard to both internal administration and foreign intercourse it enjoys complete independence.³² The king sent the same announcement to the sovereigns of other treaty countries, including Britain (June 6, 1882), Germany (November 26, 1883), Italy (June 26, 1884), Russia (July 7, 1884), and France (June 4, 1886). As the hermit nation entered the family of nations, its de jure independent status as a sovereign state in terms of international law and its de facto and de jure dependent status as a subordinate of China in accordance with Zongfan principles became one of the most controversial and perplexing issues for Western states in East Asia. The new situation also complicated Sino-Korean relations as Chosŏn moved toward modifying its relations with China.
Protecting Chosŏn as the Patriarch: The Chinese Military Intervention in 1882
Challenges from Within: The King’s Requests for Change
By the time Chosŏn concluded its treaty with the United States, more than one-third of the Korean trainees in Tianjin had returned home. The training program had provided cover for Korean-American treaty negotiations and a new channel of communication outside the Zongfan mechanism, but it was never independently a focus for either the Chinese or the Korean side. Ŏ Yun-jung and Yi Cho-yŏn, the two Korean officials who had nominally been sent to evaluate the trainees in Tianjin, also ignored the training program in order to focus on their true diplomatic mission. In May 1882 Ŏ and Yi submitted four detailed requests from the king to the acting Beiyang superintendent, Zhang Shusheng (1824–84), who had assumed Li Hongzhang’s position when Li returned to his hometown in Anhui for one hundred days of mourning for his mother.
The first request proposed that the two countries negotiate a treaty in keeping with the new international situation. The second recommended that the two sides close the markets on the northeastern border of Manchuria in order to prevent Russian interference. The third request offered to replace Chosŏn’s periodic dispatch of emissaries to Beijing with representatives who would reside in the capital permanently, receiving imperial edicts and calendars and making China’s dispatch of imperial envoys to Chosŏn unnecessary. The fourth request further specified that the Korean emissaries residing in Beijing would be responsible for their own travel expenses and meals, effectively making them no different from the ministers of other countries.³³ These bold requests reflected Huang Zunxian’s blueprint for Korea’s reforms as laid out in his A Strategy for Chosŏn in late 1880, and they were aimed at replacing certain Zongfan conventions with Western
diplomatic principles as practiced between sovereign states.
Concluding a treaty with China was Chosŏn’s primary goal. For that purpose, Ŏ discussed with Zhou Fu key issues such as the posting of permanent emissaries in Beijing, the granting of most-favored-nation status to China, and the definition of Chosŏn’s status as China’s shuguo in the treaty. The two sides agreed that China’s foreign affairs vis-à-vis Chosŏn would be managed by the Zongli Yamen and the Beiyang superintendent, whereas bilateral tributary affairs would remain under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Rites. This discussion set the tone for the treaty. In June 1882 Ŏ arrived in Beijing, where he was lodged at the Foreign Emissaries’ Common Accommodations by the Ministry of Rites. The ministry, following Zongfan conventions, presented Ŏ with silver, sheep, wine, and meals. In the meantime, Yi Ŭng-jun, another special emissary of the king, arrived in Beijing with a note expressing the king’s sincere gratitude to the emperor and the central dynasty for protecting the small country and the fan in the negotiations with the United States. Yi was also lodged at the Common Accommodations and showered with silver, sheep, wine, and meals.
Although granting the king’s requests would weaken the role of the Ministry of Rites, the cases of Ryukyu, Burma, and Vietnam—which by 1882 had been or were being separated from the Sinocentric realm and colonized by other states—had made the ministry realize that many issues lay beyond the capacity of the Zongfan mechanism to address effectively. The ministry passed the king’s requests to the emperor and suggested that he instruct all officials familiar with foreign affairs, especially Li Hongzhang, to participate in a confidential discussion on the matter. Baoting (1840–90), a Manchu minister of the ministry, presented a memorial to the emperor to detail the ministry’s preferences.
According to Baoting, Chosŏn, the first shuguo of foreign barbarians that had subordinated itself to the Great Qing during the Hongtaiji period, was far more important than the countries in the South Sea (Ch., Nanyang zhuguo, Southeast Asia). After Japan’s invasion of Ryukyu, Britain’s of Burma, and France’s of Vietnam, all of which China failed to resist, Chosŏn’s respect for China had diminished, but it had not betrayed China because of Chosŏn’s weakness and still respected China’s virtues.
Baoting argued that refusing to let the shuguo trade at China’s treaty ports and pursue shared commercial interests with other barbarians from afar (Ch., yuanyi) would be unfair to Chosŏn and might push it to the Japanese side. But permitting Chosŏn’s emissaries to reside in Beijing permanently would put Chosŏn on an equal footing with other countries with representatives in China and might make it as aggressive as the British barbarians had become. Baoting urged the Ministry of Rites to retain its right to administer Chosŏn but to continue to forward matters concerning trade to the Zongli Yamen. Even if Korean emissaries were permitted to reside permanently in Beijing, China should not allow Chosŏn to build a legation in the city. Instead, the emissaries should be lodged at the Common Accommodations to emphasize that China and Chosŏn remained members of the same family. Baoting also proposed that Beijing use Chosŏn’s intention of exploiting China’s power to check other countries as an opportunity to dispatch thousands of soldiers to Chosŏn to garrison its military forts in order to protect it and place it under China’s influence (Ch., yu hubi zhi zhong yu kongzhi zhi dao).³⁴
Baoting’s opinions had a strong impact on the Qing court’s decision. The court promptly issued an edict declining Chosŏn’s request to place permanent emissaries in Beijing because of various potential inconveniences and the fact that "Chosŏn has been a fan for a long time, and all rituals have regulations." It also decided that the Zongli Yamen should be in charge of China’s trade affairs with Chosŏn and the Ministry of Rites should continue to manage tributary affairs. Nevertheless, the court agreed to make changes to some conventions and instructed the Beiyang superintendent to negotiate a commercial treaty with Chosŏn.³⁵ This imperial order further augmented the superintendent’s importance as the most powerful agent of Sino-Korean contacts beyond the court-to-court tributary track. Two weeks later, Baoting submitted another memorial to the emperor to argue that China should help Chosŏn strengthen its maritime defenses. To
underline Chosŏn’s critical position, Baoting went as far as to claim that China would rather lose Yunnan and Guizhou than Chosŏn (Ch., jishi Yun Gui, buke shi Chaoxian). The emperor commented that the comparison between Yunnan and Guizhou Provinces and Chosŏn was inappropriate, but he showed serious concern over the security of China’s shuguo.³⁶
Justifying China’s Status as the Patriarch: The Dispatch of Chinese Troops to Chosŏn
While Chosŏn was successfully persuading China to sign a treaty with it, back home it was teetering on the brink of political upheaval. On July 23, 1882, a mutiny, known as the Imo incident, broke out in Hansŏng over the unfair distribution of rations of rice among troops after a severe drought. Hundreds of soldiers of a military unit called Muwiyŏng attacked the Japanese legation, killing several Japanese, including Lieutenant Horimoto Reizō, who had been teaching Chosŏn’s Special Skills Army (K., Pyŏlgi gun) since 1881. After occupying the palace, the rebels held the king captive and killed several high-ranking officials who had been prominent pillars of Queen Min’s clan in the partisan struggles at the court. The king’s father, the Taewŏn’gun, seized the opportunity to restore his regency and retaliated against the queen’s clan by announcing that the queen was dead. In fact, she had escaped the capital and had hidden in Ch’ungju Prefecture.³⁷ The Japanese chargé d’affaires, Hanabusa Yoshimoto, fled to Inch’ŏn, where he boarded a British steamer to Nagasaki and telegraphed news of the uprising to Tokyo.
Tokyo instructed Hanabusa to return to Inch’ŏn with navy forces to seek justice and compensation for the killings of the Japanese. The Chinese minister in Tokyo, Li Shuchang (1837–96), telegraphed Beijing, likewise to request the immediate dispatch of troops to Chosŏn. In Beijing the German minister, Max August von Brandt, and the inspector general of the imperial customs, Robert Hart (1835–1911), informed the Zongli Yamen about the mutiny on August 2 and 3, at the same time that copies of the German-Korean and British-Korean treaties, along with the Korean king’s dispatches to the German and British sovereigns claiming Chosŏn’s status as China’s shuguo, reached the Zongli Yamen.³⁸ Within days, Beijing was in full alarm over the situation in Korea.
When Zhang Shusheng, who commanded the Beiyang Navy in Tianjin, instructed General Wu Changqing (1829–84) to be ready for military action, he was influenced in large part by the Korean officials Kim Yun-sik and Ŏ Yun-jung, who were in Tianjin at the time. As fervent proponents of the king’s policy of opening up, Kim and Ŏ linked the mutiny with the aborted coup of the previous year, which had been linked to the Taewŏn’gun. They asked Zhang to send warships and soldiers to suppress the uprising and to check Japanese intrigue. Accusing the Taewŏn’gun of plotting against the king, Kim even secretly proposed to kill the Taewŏn’gun when the Chinese troops occupied Hansŏng in order to erase the bane of the country.³⁹ Handicapped by the limited channels of communication and intelligence gathering, China was so unfamiliar with Chosŏn’s domestic situation that Zhang and his Chinese colleagues became dependent on Kim’s and Ŏ’s biased information. The Chinese concluded that the Taewŏn’gun would dethrone the king if China failed to take action in time.
Beijing decided to exercise its patriarchal authority immediately. The Guangxu emperor instructed the Zongli Yamen and Zhang to send forces to Chosŏn under the leadership of Ma Jianzhong and Ding Ruchang to cherish the small country, halt the Japanese plot, and protect the Japanese people along the same lines. The military action acquired legitimacy from the rationales of the Zongfan arrangement. Zhang assembled thirteen warships and merchant ships under Admiral Ding’s command and summoned four thousand soldiers, placing them under General Wu’s command. Zhang also ordered Kim and Ŏ to return to Chosŏn together with the Chinese troops to serve as their guides. Meanwhile, Ma conducted a reconnaissance mission in Inch’ŏn that included several long conversations with Ŏ. Ŏ’s personal resentment of the Taewŏn’gun deeply influenced Ma’s judgment on the matter in his report to Zhang, confirming the Chinese side’s earlier evaluation of the Korean situation. General Wu soon left Tianjin for Yantai, from where he would continue to Chosŏn with his fleet and officers, including the twenty-four-year-old Yuan Shikai. During the trip to Chosŏn, Yuan told Kim that he wanted to lead hundreds of warriors to seize Hansŏng, which impressed Kim considerably.⁴⁰ Yuan would later reside in Chosŏn for more than a decade and significantly shape the future of the country.
Japan, too, considered its action of sending troops to Chosŏn legal and legitimate. Inoue Kaoru informed the foreign ministers in Tokyo that Japan’s operation was completely based upon pacifism, and the aim of its warships and troops was to protect the Japanese embassy and citizens. The deputy foreign minister, Yoshida Kyonari (1845–91), declined Li Shuchang’s offer of China’s mediation. Very soon Inoue was giving Hanabusa detailed instructions on military operations and the terms of compensation, all of which were aimed at dealing with the situation unilaterally and by force, rather than through China or other countries.⁴¹ As a result, the ideological conflict between China and Japan regarding Chosŏn’s status evolved into a military rivalry on the peninsula.
For China, sending troops to its shuguo was legitimate and necessary. As the Zongli Yamen put it to Mori in 1876, China had long before assumed responsibility for helping Chosŏn solve its difficulties, resolve its disputes, and secure its safety and security. Reviewing this point in his notes to Yoshida, Li Shuchang stated that China’s actions followed the rule of cherishing the small. China had to "suppress the rebellion for the sake of the shubang and protect the Japanese legation in Hansŏng at the same time. The minister used a metaphor to explain the rationale behind China’s operation, describing China as the patriarch of a family" (Ch., jiazhang) who had the obligation to investigate why the belongings of other people—that is, Japan—left at the houses of his sons or brothers (Ch., zidi jia), namely, Chosŏn, had been stolen.⁴² This metaphor crystallized China’s role vis-à-vis Korea within the Zongfan world. It also clearly demonstrated that China’s understanding of the mutiny and its decision to send troops to Chosŏn were not related to international law.
Japan had difficulty rebuffing China’s statement and worried that the situation in Chosŏn might draw Japan into the abyss of a war with the powerful China. Having consulted with Charles Le Gendre about the Taiwan issue in 1872, the Gaimushō again resorted to its foreign intellectual resources, soliciting advice from the French jurist and legal adviser to the government, Gustave Boissonade (1825–1910). Bois-sonade suggested that Japan could insist that Chosŏn was an independent country and only focus on negotiation with Chosŏn. He mentioned the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and Egypt as an analogy for the Sino-Korean relationship, as Mori had done in 1876. Since Britain and France had directly intervened in the mutiny of Egypt in January 1882, regardless of the Ottomans’ attitude, Japan could directly intervene in the rebellion in Chosŏn without regard to China’s response.⁴³ In Beijing, Inspector General Hart also believed that China and Japan about Corea will just be in much the same position as Turkey and England about Egypt.⁴⁴ In this context, then, the trilateral relationship between China, Chosŏn, and Japan became analogous to the one between the Ottoman Empire, European powers represented by Britain and France, and African countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, reflecting the connection between the transformation of the East Asian community and the rise of new imperialism in world history.⁴⁵ The European colonial experience in Africa thus made a critical intellectual contribution to the development of the Japanese colonial enterprise in East Asia.
The Chinese side was not blind to the emergence of the new colonial model practiced by European states. Li Shuchang, from Tokyo, suggested to the Zongli Yamen that after suppressing the mutiny China should manage and supervise all of Chosŏn’s affairs in order to ensure peace in its domestic situation as well as its foreign relations. He further proposed that China should directly abolish the kingship and convert the country into prefectures and counties [of China] (Ch., zhi fei qiwang er junxian zhi), imitating the approach of Britain in India, in order to resolve once and for all the thorny question of Chosŏn’s status between China and other states.⁴⁶ China’s possible provincialization of Korea was thus to some degree equated to and even justified by the colonialism practiced by European powers. Yet Li himself concluded that China would be unable to take the proposed action because it would violate China’s self-imposed rule of humanity and virtue.⁴⁷ Until the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894, China never initiated any plan to colonize Chosŏn; rather, it tried to protect and supervise the country along Zongfan lines.
Arriving in Chosŏn almost a month after the uprising, General Wu and his assistants were welcomed by the Korean officials.⁴⁸ The Chinese officials used
China’s uniquely favorable position and authority to quickly end the political turmoil by occupying the capital, capturing the Taewŏn’gun and sending him to Tianjin in China, restoring the king and the queen, and supporting Chosŏn in signing two conventions with Japan. Afterward, the king dispatched missions to Beijing and Tokyo along conventional lines to brief the two governments on the incident. At the end of September, the Zongli Yamen distributed a note to seven foreign ministers in Beijing, informing them about the Chinese intervention and reemphasizing that "Chosŏn, being a shuguo of our Great Qing, has maintained its status as fan for generations, and the court regards it as an inner subordinate [Ch., neifu] that shares solidarity with us."⁴⁹ The Yamen also announced that the Chinese troops would remain in Chosŏn to ensure the stability and security of the country.
A thornier issue for Beijing was how to deal with the Taewŏn’gun, who had been sent from Tianjin to Baoding. After reassuming the position of the Beiyang superintendent, Li Hongzhang endorsed Zhang Shusheng’s proposal that Beijing should detain the Taewŏn’gun in China forever and allow the king to regularly send officials to visit him. Li cited a similar historical case from the early fourteenth century, when the Mongol court of the Yuan Dynasty exiled King Ch’unghye (r. 1330–32, 1339–43) of Koryŏ Korea to Guangdong Province in China.⁵⁰ In its contemporary reaction to the political turmoil of its outer fan, the Qing could point to historical precedent to argue that it retained the fully legal power to punish any official of the fan and even to depose the king, if necessary. The Qing’s decision to dethrone the last king of the Lê Dynasty of Annam in 1789 was also a clear demonstration of this power. It was in this context that in 1886 Yuan Shikai enthusiastically proposed to Li Hongzhang that China should replace the king of Chosŏn with an able man from the Korean royal family.⁵¹ In the end, after holding the Taewŏn’gun for three years, Beijing released him back to Chosŏn in October 1885, when Yuan Shikai was promoted to the position of an imperial resident in the country.
China’s military intervention in 1882 was a turning point in Qing-Chosŏn relations, yet in a fundamental sense it was only a public presentation of the underlying nature of the supreme and patriarchal power the Qing had wielded over its subordinate country since 1637. The assertion that China’s superiority was merely titular and its act of detaining the Taewŏn’gun inconceivable is a far cry from the truth.⁵² So is the argument that through this particular intervention the Qing became a colonial power that inflicted Western-style imperialism on Chosŏn.
Defining Chosŏn through Treaties: The Sino-Korean Regulations and Their Consequences
Complicating the Zongfan Order: The First Sino-Korean Treaty
As Chosŏn’s troubles seemed to continue, many Chinese officials advocated establishing stronger relations with the country. On February 28, 1882, Wu Dacheng (1835–1902), an assistant official of border affairs in Jilin in Manchuria, stressed in a memorial to the emperor that China’s self-strengthening enterprise was also aimed at protecting Chosŏn and checking Japan and Russia. Wu argued that Beijing should dispatch imperial commissioners to Chosŏn to push the Koreans to determine whether such harbors as Wŏnsan (known in Russian as Lazarev), a port in northeastern Korea being surveyed by Russia, could become trade ports. Chosŏn, Wu proposed, should allow the China Merchants Steamship Navigation Company (Ch., Lunchuan zhaoshang ju) to survey the coastal conditions with the aim of establishing Chinese trade posts. In return, he suggested allowing Korean merchants to trade in Tianjin, Yantai, Shanghai, and other trade ports of China. Wu justified his proposal by invoking China’s Zongfan relations with Chosŏn, the "outer fan that had been a subordinate to our dynasty for more than two hundred years."⁵³ International law was of no concern to him.
In order to help Chosŏn overcome the financial crisis triggered by the turmoil, China loaned the country 0.5 million taels of silver at the request of leading Korean officials Cho Yŏng-ha (1845–84) and Kim Hong-jip, who negotiated the loan with their Chinese counterparts Ma Jianzhong and Tang Tingshu (1832–92).
Tang was the chief of the Kaiping Mining Administration (Ch., Kaiping kuangwu ju), a modern engineering and mining company founded by Li Hongzhang in Zhili Province in 1878. According to their agreement, 0.3 million of the loan would come from the China Merchants Steamship Navigation Company and 0.2 million from the Kaiping Mining Administration. Chosŏn’s tariffs and taxes on red ginseng would serve as mortgage, and it would pay off the loan in twelve years at 0.8 percent interest. In return, the two Chinese creditors supervised by Li were granted economic privileges in Chosŏn. The Navigation Company gained the right to rent land at Chosŏn’s treaty ports for its factories and offices, while Kaiping Mining could freely prospect for minerals in the hinterland of the country. Chinese commercial power thus quickly expanded into Chosŏn. In addition, China agreed to provide Chosŏn with military supplies for its poorly equipped troops. In October 1882 Li Hongzhang gave Chosŏn ten twelve-pound cannons, three thousand cannonballs, 4,500 pounds of cannon powder, 1,500 pounds of bullet powder, one thousand British rifles, ten thousand pounds of rifle powder, and one million bullets from the Tianjin Arsenals.⁵⁴ A month later Chosŏn’s military and industrial training program in Tianjin ended with the king’s recall of the rest of the apprentices.⁵⁵ From that point on, Chosŏn had to invite foreign advisers to the country to train its forces, leaving the country more vulnerable to outside influences.⁵⁶
After China quelled the mutiny in Chosŏn in the summer of 1882, the two countries resumed their negotiations for a commercial treaty in Tianjin, with Ŏ Yun-jung representing Chosŏn and Zhou Fu and Ma Jianzhong representing China. From the beginning of their meetings in May 1882, before the rebellion, the two sides agreed on clarifying in the treaty that Chosŏn was China’s shuguo with the right of zizhu, not an independent country. After reviewing the Chinese draft, entitled Regulations for Maritime and Overland Trade between Chinese and Chosŏn Subjects (Ch., Zhongguo Chaoxian shangmin shuilu maoyi zhangcheng, hereafter the Sino-Korean Regulations), Ŏ questioned some of its elements, in particular the imbalance in consular jurisdiction enshrined in article 2 and the opening of Hansŏng as a trade city for Chinese merchants and the permission for Chinese merchants to trade in Chosŏn’s hinterlands that were provided by article 4. Quoting Zongfan regulations, Zhou and Ma responded that this treaty was different from those signed between China and friendly nations (Ch., yuguo, such as Britain, France, and the United States); in this case, the two countries should uphold their veritable orthodox legitimacy (Ch., shizai zhi mingfen) in an established context. The Chinese response helps explain why the parties decided to call the document regulations (Ch., zhangcheng) rather than a treaty (Ch., tiaoyue). In the end, Zhou and Ma agreed to alter several terms but successfully added a preamble specifying that the regulations applied only to China’s subordinate countries and were exempt from the most-favored-nation rule. The Korean side endorsed the revised text.⁵⁷
In a memorial to Beijing, Li Hongzhang summarized the regulations and emphasized that the preamble would clarify and define the orthodox legitimacy (Ch., zhengming dingfen) between China and its shuguo.⁵⁸ Li did not mention that article 7 endowed Chinese warships with the right to cruise in Chosŏn’s waters and to cast anchor at any of its ports in the interests of Chosŏn’s security. This article impinged on Chosŏn’s sovereignty, but Ŏ and his Korean colleagues, like Li and his Chinese colleagues, regarded it as part of the favorable protection that the upper country generously offered to the subordinate country. These scholar-officials, including the French-educated Ma Jianzhong, did not interpret the regulations’ terms with reference to international law. In the aftermath of the mutiny, China was the only power that Chosŏn could trust as it wrestled with multiple crises. Yet not all Koreans applauded the treaty dictated by the Chinese. For example, Yun Ch’i-ho (1865–1945), who had served as the assistant to Ŏ Yun-jung in the gentlemen’s sighting group to Japan to observe Japanese politics and society in 1881 and was visiting Tokyo when the Sino-Korean Regulations were signed, reported feeling extremely sad that the treaty placed Chosŏn in such an inferior position vis-à-vis China.⁵⁹ Having been exposed to Western and Japanese modernity and civilization, young Korean scholars such as Yun believed that such unequal arrangements between the two nations should be abandoned, signaling the rise of modern nationalism and national identity among these Korean intellectuals. Yun later became a leading figure in Korean modernization.
By concluding the regulations with Chosŏn, China fulfilled the majority of the requests that the king had made in the spring of 1882 (discussed earlier), changing or permanently abolishing certain conventions that had been in place for 245 years, since 1637. Scholars who embrace theories of power politics prefer to interpret the treaty as a tool by which China, the preponderant side in geopolitical terms, strengthened its control over Chosŏn, consolidating its suzerainty and even becoming another imperialist power pursuing its own commercial interests on the peninsula. From this perspective, China brought multilateral imperialism to Korea in exactly the same way in which China itself had been introduced to the concept by its Western counterparts.⁶⁰ However, the Manchu court of China in the 1880s still primarily followed conventional Zongfan rules and precedents in its policies toward Chosŏn, and these often contradicted international law and local Chinese officials’ practical concerns over Sino-Korean contacts. For instance, on March 14, 1882, several months before the conclusion of the Sino-Korean Regulations, the Qing court learned from the Manchu general of Jilin, Ming’an (1828–1911), and his assistant Wu Dacheng that Chosŏn peasants kept crossing the border to cultivate wilderness areas in Jilin and that this trespassing was causing serious problems. The eleven-year-old Emperor Guangxu, under the tutelage of his mentors, responded, Regarding these poor Chosŏn peasants, in the eyes of the local officials, there is certainly a line between them and us, but in the eyes of the court, there is originally no difference between the inside and the outside. Thus, these peasants should be managed well and not be punished by additional rules, as long as they have no intention of encroaching on our borders.⁶¹
This policy bears a striking similarity to Emperor Yongzheng’s decision of 1727 to demarcate a new borderline with Annam on the basis of the idea that all lands of China’s outer fan were under the emperor’s jurisdiction. From 1727 to 1882, the politico-cultural ideology of all-under-Heaven as embraced by the Chinese court remained unchanged. Although the Kangxi emperor had established himself as a student of both Chinese and Western learning, in particular in the fields of mathematics and astronomy, in his active communications with the Jesuits, almost all emperors after him left such Sino-Western intellectual exchange to the Imperial Astronomical Bureau.⁶² Until the late nineteenth century, the young emperors—Tongzhi and Guangxu—studied only Confucian classics and Chinese history in their daily lessons at court (Ch., rijiang). Even though European and American ministers started to reside in Beijing and China launched a self-strengthening movement in the 1860s, the Manchu court did not train emperors in international knowledge commensurate with China’s needs and changing situation. The imperial civil-service examinations that selected officials for the Qing bureaucracy still tested the candidates only on the Confucian classics and showed no hint of change. The Guangxu emperor, along with his tutors, in particular Weng Tonghe, remained confined to this educational milieu. The first textbook on Western history and international law aimed at introducing Guangxu to European and American history since the Age of Discovery, titled Lectures on Western History (Ch., Xishi jiangyi), did not reach the emperor until November 1907, a year before he died.⁶³
When the young Guangxu emperor approved the Sino-Korean Regulations in 1882, he adopted a typically Confucian tone to emphasize that "Chosŏn is our shuguo and exists as eastern barbarians far away" (Ch., Chaoxian wei wo shuguo, pizai dongyi).⁶⁴ The conventional discourse on the civilized–barbarian distinction was still firmly rooted at the court, at least in the minds of core leaders. For the Manchu ruling house of the Chinese empire, this discourse concerned not so much practical diplomatic negotiations at the provincial level as statecraft from the court’s perspective. Qing China in the 1880s continued to act as the Middle Kingdom, the upper country, and the Heavenly Dynasty in the Sino-Korean Zongfan framework. As long as Chosŏn was a shuguo, China’s centrality would persist and China’s Western-oriented diplomacy would accordingly be circumscribed. In this sense, China’s transformation into a modern state occurred with the involution of the universal politico-cultural Chinese empire, which revealed the discrepancy between provincial diplomatic practices and the court’s ideological norms in the late nineteenth century and highlighted the significance of Chosŏn for the rise of a modern Chinese state.
Complementing the Zongfan Order: The Ritual Crisis and the Sino-Korean Border Treaties
By adopting the form, though not the name, of a Western-style treaty, the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations helped lay out the inner dual network—introduced at the beginning of this chapter—of Sino-Korean contacts. In addition to maintaining the court-to-court system described in chapter 2, the two countries now had to adjust to the newly created state-to-state system, in which both countries were treated by their Japanese and Western treaty counterparts as independent sovereign states that were theoretically equal to each other. This inner dual network introduced the two countries to a more complicated situation in the new setting of international politics, as the ritual crisis that unfolded in China in late 1882 demonstrates.
The crisis started with questions regarding the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations raised by the Manchu general in Mukden, Chongqi (1830–1900). In three palace memorials in December 1882, Chongqi protested article 2, according to which the Chinese commissioners of trade at the treaty ports of Chosŏn will, in their dealings with Chosŏn’s officials, be on a footing of perfect equality, and are to be treated with the consideration due to the observance of etiquette, while the Chosŏn commissioners at Chinese ports "are likewise to be treated on a footing of equality in their dealings with the local authorities, namely, the taotai [daotai, circuit intendant], the prefect, and the magistrates of the place." Recalling that Chosŏn became a fan and subject of the Great Qing in 1637 and that the Korean officials were ministers of ministers and thus ranked below their Chinese counterparts, Chongqi pointed out that equality between Chosŏn commissioners and China’s local authorities meant that the emperor himself would be on a footing of equality with the king. The assumption of equality thus severely undermined the established order, and under no circumstances should such treatment be extended to Chosŏn. The term equality (Ch., pingxing) in the article should, argued Chongqi, be deleted for the sake of moral principles (Ch., lunji) and China’s national polity (Ch., guoti). Mukden would treat the Chosŏn commissioners along conventional lines in order to defend decorum (Ch., titong).
The general also questioned article 5, which canceled the requirement of official supervision of trade at the border and allowed local people to trade freely at Zhamen and Ŭiju on the two sides of the Yalu River and at Hunchun and Hoeryŏng on the two sides of the Tumen River. Chongqi agreed that outdated rules ought to be rescinded, but he insisted that land border security should be strengthened by maintaining the existing patrols along the Chinese side. His concerns about unpredictable threats from Chosŏn itself and from the treaty powers present in Chosŏn were heightened by his perception of the uniqueness and importance of the Mukden area, the Qing’s ancestral territory.⁶⁵
Chongqi’s worries triggered a heated debate among the Ministry of Rites, the Zongli Yamen, and the Beiyang superintendent. Since the overland border trade regulations would soon be renegotiated at Mukden after a joint Sino-Korean investigation, the issue of the performance of equal rituals became the hottest topic in the discussion. Li Hongzhang argued that the imperial code did not regulate ritual performances between local Chinese officials and foreign tributary emissaries, but he noted that local officials treated the emissaries of Vietnam, Siam, and Ryukyu with rituals of equality (Ch., pingli), which should be applicable to Chosŏn too. Li also solicited theoretical support from the classics of the Zhou Dynasty and drew an analogy between the statuses of the authorities of the Qing and those of Chosŏn. According to this analogy, the king, as an outer vassal of the Son of Heaven, was equal to China’s governors-general and governors who were inner vassals; meanwhile, Chosŏn’s officials were equal to Chinese officials below the ranks of governor and governor-general. Accordingly, in China, the Chosŏn commissioners should perform rituals of subordination (Ch., shuli) to the Chinese governors-general, governors, and other officials with higher ranks, and rituals of equality to such local officials as taotai and prefects. They should also perform rituals of equality to Western ministers in Tianjin, where the commissioners would reside. In Chosŏn, on the other hand, the Chinese commissioners should perform rituals of equality to Korean officials whose rank was inferior to that of the cabinet, Ŭijŏngbu.
In his suggestions, Li Hongzhang tried to pursue a mean between Zongfan rituals embodying the ancestral system (Ch., zuzhi) and Western-style etiquette
between foreign ministers and the host country. Agreeing that Chosŏn’s commissioners could get favorable treatment since they were not tributary emissaries, the Ministry of Rites proposed that when Chinese commissioners at or below the rank of taotai visited the king, they should perform guest-host rituals (Ch., binzhu li), a proposal that involved a slight change to certain rules of the imperial code.⁶⁶ In February 1883 the court, via the Zongli Yamen, endorsed Li’s and the ministry’s solutions to the ritual crisis and set up a new framework for ritual performances between various officials of the two countries (see figure 5.1). As the diplomatic corps formed in Hansŏng, the new ritual arrangements would cause increasing conflicts between China, Chosŏn, Japan, and Western states in the following decade, demonstrating the strong influence of the dynamics of the inner dual network over the practices of the outer dual network between China and Chosŏn.
Chongqi found the new ritual code a good resolution to the problems he had noted. He went on to strengthen border security and maintain the proper system as he had wished by signing a convention with the Korean representative Ŏ Yun-jung in March 1883. The convention, Regulations for Trade at the Border between Mukden and Chosŏn (Ch., Fengtian yu Chaoxian bianmin jiaoyi zhangcheng), governed trade at the Zhongjiang (middle river) area of the Yalu River. Several articles were specifically aimed at upholding Zongfan conventions. Echoing the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations, the preamble of the Mukden-Chosŏn Regulations stated that the border trade at Zhongjiang "is not on the same footing as the trade carried on at the treaty ports, inasmuch as it was originally established by the Heavenly Dynasty as a benefit to its shuguo with the distinct understanding that it should be a convenience to the population … and that other nations are not concerned in these rules. According to articles 8 and 19, China would not impose taxes on Chosŏn’s annual tributes and routine goods and would send soldiers to escort Chosŏn’s tributary missions to Beijing from Fenghuang City, precisely as China had done for more than two centuries. Article 23 dictated that bilateral correspondence should be conducted in accordance with the established system, in which Chosŏn should call China the upper country or Heavenly Dynasty" and avoid such abbreviated characters as zhong (for Zhongguo, the Middle Kingdom, in reference to China) or dong (for Dongguo, the eastern country, in reference to Chosŏn). For their part, Chinese officials would address Chosŏn as the country of Chosŏn or your honorable country.⁶⁷
FIGURE 5.1. The rules of ritual performance between China and Chosŏn after 1883. S refers to rituals of subordination, E refers to rituals of equality, and G-H refers to guest-host rituals. Foreign ministers in China sometimes used the rituals of equality in their dealings with Chinese taotai, prefects, magistrates, and other local officials.
FIGURE 5.1. The rules of ritual performance between China and Chosŏn after 1883. S refers to rituals of subordination, E refers to rituals of equality, and G-H refers to guest-host rituals. Foreign ministers in China sometimes used the rituals of equality in their dealings with Chinese taotai, prefects, magistrates, and other local officials.
Several months later, the two countries signed a third treaty, entitled Regulations for Trade at the Border between Jilin and Chosŏn Whenever Necessary (Ch., Jilin Chaoxian shangmin suishi maoyi zhangcheng). This treaty was a short version of the one governing trade between Mukden and Chosŏn and laid down the format of bilateral official correspondence in accordance with Zongfan hierarchy in the same way.
By the end of 1883, then, China and Chosŏn had signed three treaties, or regulations, that were firmly rooted in the Zongfan discourse. The sophisticated norms used in these texts continued to serve as a way of institutionalizing the hierarchical relationship, centering the Middle Kingdom, and articulating the parties’ identities in the Chinese world, just as the Zongfan discourse had done in the 1630s, 1760s, and 1860s. Simultaneously, however, the new rules made adjustments to the traditional mechanism by introducing a new political and commercial network into the borderland between the two countries in Manchuria. This change extended China’s modern diplomacy, which had been practiced primarily in inner China’s coastal areas, into Manchuria, along with the considerable influence of its human agents such as Li Hongzhang. The three treaties therefore laid the legal foundation for state-to-state contacts between the two countries in the following, and final, decade of their longstanding Zongfan relationship. The border areas of Manchuria became a test field where the two countries negotiated the reach of their respective sovereignties between tradition and modernity, as discussed in chapter 6.
Joining Chosŏn’s Foreign Network: The Chinese Commissioners and the Chinese Settlements
Struggling for Authority: The Chinese Commissioner of Trade in Chosŏn
After the mutiny of 1882, Chosŏn asked China to send specialists on diplomacy and trade to assist it in establishing a system of maritime customs. The request was made by the king, endorsed by China’s court, and executed by both countries within the Zongfan framework. Consequently, Chosŏn’s maritime customs system became a sub-branch of China’s imperial customs, and its annual reports were affiliated with those of imperial customs until 1895. In November 1882 Li Hongzhang appointed Ma Jianchang (1840–1939), Ma Jianzhong’s brother, and Paul Georg von Möllendorff (1847–1901), a German national who worked as an assistant in the Chinese Maritime Customs office in Beijing, as foreign advisers to the king.⁶⁸ Ma and Möllendorff took up their posts in early 1883, followed by the first group of representatives from Western treaty nations and China.
The first US envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary, Lucius H. Foote (1826–1913), and the first Chinese commissioner of trade, Chen Shu-tang, were the two most important figures among the diplomats now arriving in Chosŏn, and they took diametrically different approaches to defining Chosŏn’s status. Before he departed for Chosŏn in March 1883, Foote received instructions from Secretary of State Frederick Frelinghuysen (1817–85), emphasizing that the American treaty negotiations with Chosŏn were conducted as between two independent and sovereign nations…. As far as we are concerned Corea is an independent sovereign power, with all the attendant rights, privileges, duties and responsibilities: in her relations to China we have no desire to interfere unless action should be taken prejudicial to the rights of the United States. The instructions reminded Foote that for all purposes of intercourse between the United States and Corea the King is a sovereign, and that with sovereign states only do the United States treat. Further the representatives of the United States in China will treat the Corean representatives there as in the position assigned them by the Chinese government.⁶⁹ Other Western countries imitated this pragmatic policy.
Chen Shutang’s appointment and authority derived from the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations. Article 1 of the treaty endowed the Beiyang superintendent with the
power to appoint commissioners of trade (Ch., shangwu weiyuan) to reside at Chosŏn’s treaty ports and exercise jurisdiction over Chinese merchants, while Chosŏn would send similar commissioners of trade to Tianjin and other Chinese treaty ports for the sake of its own merchants. Chen was a Han Chinese official and had served as consul-general in San Francisco from January 1880 to April 1882. He arrived in Hansŏng in October 1883 and opened his office with ten thousand taels of silver that he had received from Shanghai Maritime Customs. His expenditures would be covered by Beijing’s budget for overseas missions. As a second-rank taotai, Chen held the official title commissioner of commercial affairs in Chosŏn (Ch., Zongban Chaoxian shangwu weiyuan).⁷⁰ He was not an envoy of the imperial court, but his position carried imperial authority. As Beijing clarified to Chosŏn, Chen was slightly different from China’s representatives to other countries, but the rationale [for his dispatch] is generally the same. Invoking again the notion that Chosŏn is a subordinate country of China, Beijing concluded that Chen should be the center of the guests and instructed Chosŏn’s foreign office to give him favorable treatment whenever there was a banquet for foreign ministers.⁷¹
Chen himself was also a believer in China’s superiority. He posted a notification on the wall of Hansŏng’s southern gate, stating that "Chosŏn is a shuguo of China and calling on all merchants intending to trade in Chosŏn to follow the established rituals and to report to him in case of any disputes with others in the country. The text sought to highlight the friendship with the shuguo that uses the same language" (Ch., zhao shuguo tongwen zhi yi) and to cherish the affection within a family that respects a common patriarch (Ch., zhong yijia gongzhu zhi qing).⁷² Chen’s stridency antagonized the American minister and Korean officials, but he refused to change his tone. As in the case of Ma Jianzhong, who had studied in France, Chen’s diplomatic experience in the United States seemed to have no effect on his line of reasoning in Chosŏn.
In practice, Chen acted as a Chinese consul and planned to build his official residence in the style of a Chinese consulate (Ch., Zhongguo gongguan).⁷³ Yet he was not a consul, and his official title did not put him in charge of foreign affairs. Instead of contacting Chen, then, the Japanese and Western ministers brought diplomatic matters concerning China directly to Chosŏn’s Foreign Office, the T’ongni amun (K., T’ongni kyosŏp t’ongsang samu amun). Chosŏn also expressed a desire for independence from Chinese involvement by sending a special mission to the United States in the fall of 1883.⁷⁴ Chen felt so marginalized that in September 1884 he complained to Li Hongzhang that his awkward position was causing him to be snubbed by the Japanese and British ministers. Chen tried to justify his authority by invoking the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations, but other ministers responded that the treaty, as its preamble stated, was effective only between China and Korea. After consulting with Li and Foote, Chen updated his title to general commissioner of foreign and commercial affairs at Chosŏn’s ports (Ch., Zongban Chaoxian gekou jiaoshe tongshang shiwu) in November 1884.
According to Chen, this title perfectly fit the established system, in accordance with which he, as an official of the upper country, could discuss certain affairs of China’s shuguo with his Japanese and Western counterparts. Unsurprisingly, by failing to draw a clear line between Chinese and Korean affairs at the ports, the new title aroused deep concern among Western ministers, including the first British minister to Chosŏn, Harry Parkes, who had been wondering about Chosŏn’s international position for years. The Zongli Yamen clarified to Parkes that "Chosŏn is a shuguo of China, which means that the commissioner should not be understood as a minister to the country, but since Chen has been appointed by the emperor to be in charge of diplomatic affairs and he holds a second-rank taotai, his position is equal to that of the consuls-general of other countries."⁷⁵ This description thus strategically defined Chen as a consul-general.
Questionable Imperialism: Chinese Settlements in Chosŏn
Chen arrived in Hansŏng without a clear mission from Beijing or Tianjin, so he alone had to decide what to do. Beijing’s original plan had been to place Chen in charge of Chinese business in Inch’ŏn too, but Chen realized that it was impossible for him to perform duties in both Hansŏng and Inch’ŏn. A series of
commercial and diplomatic events involving Chinese merchants and citizens in Inch’ŏn and other treaty ports reached Chen’s desk right after he opened his office, so he sent an assistant, Li Nairong, to Inch’ŏn as the first Chinese representative at that port. Due to his lack of an official status, Li Nairong found himself in the same uncomfortable situation as Chen had. Chen called Li a consul (Ch., lingshi) instead of a commissioner (Ch., lishi) in front of the Japanese consul and the commissioner of Inch’ŏn maritime customs, although Li was not, strictly speaking, a consul. Since the Chinese terms for commissioner and consul have very similar pronunciations, Chen may have planned to use the phonological likeness to tacitly confer on Li Nairong a clear status commensurate with international practice. Li Nairong later told Chen that it would be better to clarify his official rank as commissioner rather than consul to the Korean side.⁷⁶
In February 1884 Chen informed Min Yŏng-muk (1826–84), Queen Min’s nephew and the minister of Chosŏn’s Foreign Office, that Li and other Chinese officials residing in Korean treaty ports held the title of commissioner of Chinese merchants’ affairs (Ch., huashang shiwu guan). These commissioners, said Chen, were equal to Chosŏn officials and foreign consuls and were in charge of all affairs concerning Chinese merchants in Chosŏn.⁷⁷ Li Nairong was thus transformed from Chen’s private assistant to a diplomatic representative of the Chinese state. As Kirk W. Larsen points out, Chen was successful … in establishing and promoting an official Qing diplomatic and commercial presence in Korea.⁷⁸
Li Nairong found his understaffed office in Inch’ŏn unable to handle the increase in Chinese business and Sino-Japanese conflicts at the port. Japan had opened more than one hundred stores in the city since 1876, and Japanese residents outnumbered the Koreans, Chinese, and Westerners. But now growing numbers of Chinese merchants, in particular from Shandong, Zhejiang, and Guangdong Provinces, were coming to seek their fortunes in the city, and these businessmen organized companies such as Tongshuntai hao (the Company of Union, Prosperity, and Peace) to challenge Japan’s monopoly in local trade.⁷⁹ Within a single month, from October to November 1883, the number of Chinese stores in Inch’ŏn increased from two to seven and that of Chinese merchants from about ten to more than sixty. According to Chinese statistics, from 1883 to 1884 the number of Chinese in Inch’ŏn rose from 63 to 235 and that of Chinese in Hansŏng from 26 to 352.⁸⁰ Some Chinese merchants in Inch’ŏn had started to extend their businesses to Hansŏng. Chen Shutang and Li Nairong were thus facing a new Chinese presence in Chosŏn. In addition, hundreds of Chinese sailors working on Chinese and Japanese cargo ships frequently passed through Inch’ŏn, giving a major boost to local bars and brothels. These sailors were troublemakers not only in Korean and Japanese eyes but also from the perspective of the Chinese, because Chinese officials at the port did not have a full roster of these Chinese citizens and therefore did not know whom to prosecute if any of them were involved in local conflicts. In an attempt to control the sailors, Li followed international conventions by requesting that all Chinese citizens visiting Inch’ŏn, including civilians and soldiers, register with his office.⁸¹
Given the growing number of Chinese merchants in Inch’ŏn and the expansion of their businesses, Chen Shutang felt it was necessary to set up a Chinese settlement for trade purposes. He found legal support in article 4 of the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations, which stated that the merchants of either country who may proceed to the open ports of the other country for trade will be allowed to rent land or houses and erect buildings. In December 1883 Chen and Möllendorff, the assistant minister of Chosŏn’s Foreign Office, conducted a field investigation in Inch’ŏn and decided to secure a foundation for a Chinese settlement. Many parts of the area lay on hillsides or in marshland, so the project required land reclamation (see map 5.1). Li Nairong and the commissioner of Inch’ŏn maritime customs made a map of the Chinese settlement, and Li asked local Chinese merchants to provide financial support for the land reclamation project.⁸²
MAP 5.1. The Chinese settlement in Inch’oȈn in the early 1890s. 1 meter = 39.37 inches. Plan of Settlements in Chemulpo [Inch’oȈn], handwritten map, preserved at the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University. Copyright Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies.
MAP 5.1. The Chinese settlement in Inch’oȈn in the early 1890s. 1 meter = 39.37 inches. Plan of Settlements in Chemulpo [Inch’oȈn], handwritten map, preserved at the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University. Copyright Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies.
Chen found the name of the settlement a challenge. In his notes to the Korean side, Chen—unlike his Chinese or Korean colleagues—avoided the term settlement (Ch., zujie), instead calling it lands and boundary (Ch., dijie, which generally means land). In a letter to Li Nairong in December 1883, Chen said he had been considering whether the settlement should be called Lands of the Great Qing (Ch., Da Qing dijie) or Lands of the Chinese merchants (Ch., Huashang dijie). Confessing that he thought the former was not perfect, Chen decided on the latter, as it would not take advantage of Chosŏn and would maintain the face of the upper country.⁸³ Chen’s weighing of semantic options, like his maneuverings around the term commissioner, betrayed the problems of the outer dual network between China and Chosŏn—that is, the overlapping operation of the Zongfan framework and the treaty system in the two countries’ foreign
relations.
Chosŏn, however, did not endorse Chen’s plan to distinguish the Sino-Korean relationship in this particular case. When Min Yŏng-muk heard Chen’s argument that the regulations governing the Chinese merchants’ settlement should be different from those used for other countries in accordance with the system, Min retorted that there was no difference between the two.⁸⁴ On April 2, 1884, Min and Chen signed the Regulations for the Chinese Merchants Settlement in Inch’ŏn (Ch., Renchuan kou huashang dijie zhangcheng), which was based on the draft Chen had presented to Min in February. The text was written only in Chinese and officially called the settlement Lands of the Chinese Merchants, as Chen had proposed, but it omitted Chen’s preamble, which imitated the preamble to the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations by emphasizing that Sino-Korean trade was different from that between Chosŏn and other countries and that the regulations would apply only to the former.⁸⁵ Without the preamble, the two countries’ state-to-state relations took center stage.
While Chen was opening the Chinese settlement in Inch’ŏn, an event occurred in Pusan that further legitimized his agenda of expanding this model to other treaty ports. In early November 1883 a Chinese grocery store in Kōbe, Japan, called Dexing hao (Store of Merit and Prosperity) had sent two agents to Pusan to open a branch in the Japanese settlement there, but the branch was suddenly shut down by the Japanese consul. As soon as he returned to Hansŏng, Chen raised the case with Min Yŏng-muk. Min explained that he would prefer to "select a settlement [K., chogye] for the Chinese merchants where they can quickly open their stores," rather than negotiate with the Japanese to allow the Chinese merchants to do business in the Japanese settlement in Pusan. Chen applauded this proposal and volunteered to visit Pusan together with a Korean official for a joint field investigation. Min again appointed Möllendorff to accompany Chen.⁸⁶ In the meantime, the Chinese minister to Japan, Li Shuchang, suggested to the Zongli Yamen that Beijing should instruct Chosŏn’s Foreign Office to establish Chinese settlements in Pusan and other ports.⁸⁷ Li’s proposal fit Chen’s agenda perfectly. As a result, China opened settlements in Pusan and Wŏnsan.
Observing that China became active in Chosŏn after a series of crises beginning in 1882, scholars have generally interpreted the phenomenon as a fundamental change in China’s foreign policy toward Chosŏn and have described China as practicing imperialism under the cloak of suzerainty.⁸⁸ Two issues concerning the sovereignty of Chosŏn are worth discussing here: Chinese and Korean perceptions of the Chinese settlements and the extraterritoriality that Chinese citizens enjoyed in their settlements.
The negotiations between Chen and Min suggest that neither side perceived the settlements as a symbol of imperialist expansion that would damage Chosŏn’s sovereignty or help China gain geopolitical hegemony on the peninsula. Min’s proposal to open another Chinese settlement in Pusan in order to avoid cases like that of Dexing hao shows that he considered such settlements only pieces of rented land for whose use the Chinese, the Japanese, and other foreigners had to pay every year.⁸⁹ The term sovereignty never entered Min’s and Chen’s correspondence, and the term settlement carried a meaning that was very different from that which it would later convey in the strongly nationalist historical context of the twentieth century. The issue of establishing police forces in the Chinese settlement in Inch’ŏn, which involved Chinese, Korean, and British citizens, is another case that demonstrates the difference between China’s understanding of settlement and that of scholars in an international law context.⁹⁰
Furthermore, it is important to note that Chosŏn had the legal option of opening its own settlements at China’s ports in accordance with article 4 of the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations. Once the regulations went into effect, many Korean merchants traveled to Chinese ports, some even going as far as Gansu, Shaanxi, and Sichuan, to sell ginseng. In 1885 Chosŏn dispatched a commercial commissioner (K., sangmu wiwŏn) to Tianjin as a counterpart of Chen Shutang. Had the Korean merchants formed a strong and sizeable community in Tianjin, Shanghai, or other ports, as the Chinese did in Inch’ŏn and Pusan, Chosŏn could have established settlements at those Chinese ports through negotiations with Beijing. It was only Chosŏn’s limited overseas commercial activity that made this
scenario impracticable.
In terms of extraterritoriality, it is true that Chinese citizens held this right within Chinese settlements in Chosŏn, whereas Chosŏn merchants at Chinese treaty ports, according to article 2 of the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations, were under local Chinese jurisdiction, a difference that highlighted the unequal nature of their terms. However, in addition to the connection between article 2 of the Sino-Korean Regulations and the extraterritoriality granted to American citizens in the Korean-American treaty discussed earlier in this chapter, we should keep in mind that Koreans who conducted illegal trade in Qing China outside of the treaty ports always enjoyed extraterritoriality. The case of Korean merchants illegally visiting Gansu and Sichuan Provinces illustrates this point.
After China opened its treaty ports to Koreans as required by the Sino-Korean Regulations, the number of Koreans traveling to Gansu and Sichuan to sell ginseng without passports issued by the Korean commissioners and local Chinese officials increased sharply. In June 1883 the officials of Langzhong County in Sichuan sent three such unauthorized Korean ginseng merchants to Nanbu County, from where they were sent further to Chengdu, the provincial capital.⁹¹ At almost the same time, Gansu also sent a Korean merchant, Mun So-wun, who had sold ginseng illegally in the province, to the Ministry of Rites in Beijing; the ministry transferred him to Tianjin, from where he could board a ship for Chosŏn. The officials in Sichuan did not detain these "people of the fan " (Ch., fanfu renmin) who had traveled thousands of miles to make a profit, and they preferred to follow the Western example (Ch., zhao Taixi yili) by sending them to Beijing. Since article 4 of the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations regarding trade licenses and passports did not address this scenario, the Ministry of Rites, the Zongli Yamen, and the Beiyang superintendent eventually instructed the local officials to send Korean violators to the Korean commercial commissioners at Chinese treaty ports, from where they would be deported to Chosŏn for punishment.
In these cases, the Chinese side regarded the Korean violators as guilty of a crime punishable by the laws of their own country, and therefore the Korean side had to take the necessary steps for extradition based on article 2 of the regulations.⁹² These Korean citizens, or criminals, were thus exempt from Chinese jurisdiction, which in the Zongfan context was seen as a manifestation of China’s favor to the small country. Beijing particularly instructed local officials to treat the Korean violators well as a way of cherishing the subordinate country. For its part, Chosŏn also used Zongfan terminology to describe China’s clemency as a demonstration of China’s extreme solicitude to the small country.⁹³ In their bilateral communications about such cases, no mention was made of Chosŏn’s or China’s sovereignty or international law. If extraterritoriality were to imply imperialism, one would have to conclude that the Qing and Chosŏn practiced imperialism on each other.
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6LOSINGCHOSOŎNThe Rise of a Modern Chinese State, 1885–1911Since the 1860s, China had struggled to provide Western states with an unequivocal definition of Chosŏn’s status. Its difficulties were rooted in the institutionaldiscrepancies between the Zongfan mechanism and international law. The tacit understanding among these states was that China’s authority over Chosŏn wasvalid and real. Yet in the wake of Japan’s challenges in the 1880s and early 1890s, at a time when the world was entering the age of empires as a consequence ofcolonial powers’ quest for territorial acquisition, China took steps to modify its routine contacts with Chosŏn in an effort to save the fundamentals of the Zongfanorder,whichwerearousingconcernamongotherempirespresentintheregion.¹Bytheendofthe1880s,ChinafounditselfsurroundedbyJapaneseandEuro-peancolonialforces.Japan,Britain,andFrancehadcolonizedorannexedChina’souterfaninEastandSoutheastAsia,inparticularRyukyu,Burma,andVietnam,while Russia was encroaching on China’s territory in Central Asia, forcing China to provincialize Xinjiang in 1884. As a result, the frontiers of the politico-culturalChineseempirethathadencompassedChina’souterfanbegantodisappear,replacedbyclearnationalbordersbetweentheChinesestateanditsformerouterfan.The threat posed to China by the presence of rival powers in Chosŏn was not less than that which it faced at its other borders. China had two primary options intermsofitspolicytowardtheouterfan.ItcouldeitherprovincializeChosŏnbyincorporatingthecountryintoitsterritoryintheformofprefecturesandcounties,or it could supervise and protect it by harnessing China’s patriarchal authority. Both approaches won support from China’s leading scholars and officials. Beijingfinally adopted an in-between policy: assisting Chosŏn with managing its diplomatic and commercial affairs and placing an imperial resident in Hansŏng. Fromthe perspective of Western diplomats in East Asia, however, China was moving toward annexing Chosŏn under the guise of conventional Zongfan practices. ThischaptershowsthatalthoughChinabelieveditwasfulfillingitscommitmenttoprotectitsshuguo,itspolicyturnedouttocauseincreasedtensionsbetweenBei-jing and Hansŏng because of the rise of the Korean state in the international community and the impact of Korean nationalism within Chosŏn. After the termi-nation of the Zongfan arrangement in 1895, both Qing China and Chosŏn Korea entered a new era as sovereign states. By withdrawing from its periphery inChosŏn to its core in the Qing, the Chinese empire developed into a modern state and embarked on its own road to modernity.Invoking the Zongfan Conventions: His Imperial Chinese Majesty’s Resident in ChosŏnMaintaining Zongfanism from Within: Yuan Shikai in Chosŏn and the Ritual ConundrumAs the imperial commissioner of commercial affairs in Chosŏn, Chen Shu-tang successfully augmented his power in the fall of 1884, as described in the previouschapter, but he barely had time to exercise his new authority before an attempted coup took place in Hansŏng. On December 4, 1884, a group of pro-Japanesemembers of the Kaehwadang (Enlightenment Party) occupied the palace, killed several pro-Chinese officials, and claimed they were terminating the country’s hi-erarchical relations with China. These fervent nationalists, among them Hong Yŏng-sik (1855–84), Kim Ok-kyun (1851–94), and Pak Yŏng-hyo (1861–1939), wonthe strong support of the Japanese minister Takezoe Shinichirō (1842–1917), an assistant to Mori Arinori in the 1876 Sino-Japanese debate over Chosŏn’s status.Thecoup,knownasKapsinjŏngbyŏn(thecoupoftheyearofKapsin),wasaresultofincreasingconflictbetweenChina,Japan,andWesternstates,alongwithKorean domestic political struggles and strong Korean nationalism cultivated primarily by Japan. The coup’s leaders orchestrated the attack to coincide with
China’s dispatch of more troops to South China to fight the French in Vietnam. The dramatic and bloody nationalist revolution lasted only three days. Chinesetroops led by Gen. Wu Zhaoyou successfully placed the king and members of the royal family under their protection and totally defeated the Kaehwadang and theJapaneseforcesinHansŏng.²Because there had been Chinese and Korean attacks on the Japanese legation and on Japanese citizens, and because the Korean court was in chaos, it was lefttotheChineseandtheJapanesetoresolvetheproblemscausedbythecoup.TheresultingSino-JapanesetalksagainfocusedonChosŏn’sinternationalstatus.³Tokyo sent Inoue Kaoru as the plenipotentiary to Hansŏng to conduct talks with the Chinese envoys Wu Dacheng and Xuchang. But Wu was not a plenipotentiary,so the negotiations were transferred to Tianjin and held between Li Hongzhang and Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909). The two sides signed a convention on April 18,1885. Each agreed to pull its troops out of the peninsula within four months, to allow the king to hire officers from countries beyond China and Japan to train theKoreanforces,andtonotifytheotherofanydecisiontosendtroopstoChosŏnintheeventofaseriousdisturbance.⁴Japanthusobtainedthelegalrighttosendtroops to Chosŏn, which paved the way for its military involvement in the Korean rebellion in 1894.The coup considerably alarmed China. Ma Jianchang, the Chinese adviser to the king, suggested to Li Hongzhang that “China should either allow Chosŏn to beindependent from China and free from the current relationship or positively engage in its affairs by sending an able imperial resident to the country with Chineseforcessotheresidentcansupervisecertainaffairs.”⁵LirespondedthatChinashouldfocusonovercomingitsowncrisesfirst,butheagreedthatChinashouldstrengthen the authority of its representative in Chosŏn in order to check encroachment by Japan and other powers. The result was a considerable expansion inthe powers enjoyed by Chen’s successor, Yuan Shikai.In November 1885, on Li’s recommendation, Beijing appointed Yuan the “imperial resident in Chosŏn in charge of diplomatic and commercial intercourse”(Ch.,QinmingzhuzhaChaoxianzonglijiaoshetongshangshiyi)andbestowedonhimathird-levelrankwiththetitleofbackupcandidateforataotai.AccordingtoLi, this new title endowed Yuan with the right to “engage in diplomatic affairs in one way or another,” which perfectly resolved the legal quagmire concerning theChineserepresentative’sstatus.YuanpromisedbothLiandBeijingthathewoulddohisbesttoprotectthe“easternfencethathasbeenafanofChinaforgenerations.”⁶Overthefollowingdecade,YuanputhiswordsintopracticealongZongfanlines,stirringupseriousconflictsamongdiplomatsinChosŏnintheprocess.The foreign diplomats in Hansŏng needed to establish whether Yuan’s appointment marked the beginning of a Chinese absorption of the country, a colonialpolicy like those pursued by Britain, France, Italy, and Germany in Africa. The English translation of Yuan’s title became a crucial issue in this regard. George C.Foulk (1856–93), the American chargé d’affaires ad interim, offered the translation “charge of diplomatic and commercial intercourse,” but it was rejected by anunidentified young American-educated assistant of Yuan (possibly Tang Shaoyi, 1862–1938, a graduate of Columbia University who reached the country alongwith Ma Jianchang and Paul Georg von Möllendorff in 1883). The assistant then put forward the translation “his imperial Chinese majesty’s resident, Seoul,” per-hapsinspiredbytheAmericanminister’sofficialtitle“ministerresidentandconsulgeneral.”⁷WhentalksbetweenFoulk,theBritishconsulEdwardC.Baber(1843–90), and the Japanese chargé d’affaires Takahira Kogorō (1854–1926) yielded no unanimous agreement on a translation, Yuan decided to use his assistant’ssuggestion,abbreviatedas“H.I.C.M.Resident.”⁸Althoughtheresident’slegitimacyandpowerderivedfromChina’simperialmight,theresidenthimselfwasnotpartoftheManchucourt.NorwastheBeiyangsuperintendent.Figure6.1illustratesthevariouschannelsofcommunicationbetweenChinaandKorea.Yuan may not have realized that the title “resident” possessed strong connotations of an imperialist regime’s indirect rule over a region that would subse-quently become a protectorate or colony of the empire. The British Empire, for instance, had accomplished its expansion into India by appointing a single British
“resident” or “political agent” to each princely state, the resident virtually controlling the state by offering advice to the local prince or chief. This type of indirectruledatedbackto1764andwaspracticeduntilQueenVictoria’sproclamationof1858.⁹Intheearly1880s,thetitle“resident”wasstillsensitivebecauseofitscon-nection to a colonial power’s territorial expansion. For example, in the spring of 1881, after France signed the Treaty of Bardo with the Tunisian bey Muhammad al-Sadiq (1813–82), the French consul general in Tunisia assumed the new title “resident minister,” or officially “the French resident and delegate [to the bey] forexternalaffairs,”whichtriggeredthecountry’sconversionintoaFrenchprotectorate.¹⁰In1883theFrenchalsobegantosetuparesidentatHuếinVietnam;thisresident was the representative of the French protectorate and thus was more powerful than the Vietnamese king. In this context, when Yuan claimed to be a resi-dent of the Chinese empire in Chosŏn, he certainly puzzled his Western counterparts, who had tacitly defined him as China’s “consul-general” or “consul-generalwithdiplomaticfunctions,”ignoringanypotentialrolesbasedonChineseimperialauthority.¹¹
Yuan was not a minister, but his status as an imperial resident endowed him with more power than a minister would have held. Unlike a British resident in Indiaor a French resident in Tunisia, Yuan in Chosŏn could exploit the term “imperial” in his title, as it carried the authority of the Chinese emperor, to whom theChosŏn sovereign was subordinate in Zongfan terms. When Korean officials expressed concern over the breadth of Yuan’s power in the country, Yuan clarifiedthathisaimwassimplyto“justifytheorthodoxlegitimacyofChosŏn’sstatusasChina’ssubordinatecountry”(Ch.,zhengshubangmingfen).¹²Yuan’s handling of his relations with the Korean court demonstrates the authority he claimed for himself. In September 1886, for example, he spent hours in aface-to-face meeting with the king, lecturing him on how to deal with the Port Hamilton incident. The port in southern Chosŏn had been occupied by Britain in1885 amid British-Russian rivalry, triggering an intense dispute between Britain, Russia, Chosŏn, China, and Japan. Following China’s active intervention, theBritishfleetwithdrewin1887ontheagreementthatnoforeignpowerwouldoccupyanypartofChosŏn’sterritoryinthefuture.¹³Yuan’sobservationofKoreancourt politics persuaded him that the king was weak, and Yuan even secretly proposed to Li Hongzhang that China replace the king with an able man from the Ko-reanroyalfamily.¹⁴NotonlydidthekingdisapproveofYuan’sbehavior,butYuan’sfellowdiplomatsalsoregardedhisactivitiesasviolatingdiplomaticprotocolsand damaging Chosŏn’s sovereignty, aggravating relations between Yuan and other diplomats in Hansŏng.Illustrative of these tensions were the new rituals Yuan performed to the king. In a telegram soliciting Li Hongzhang’s advice in 1886, Yuan mentioned that inpast years, when Chinese officials had paid visits to the king, they had entered the palace gate in a sedan chair, bowed to the king three times with their handsfoldedinfront(Ch.,sanyi;yimeanszuoyi,aritualpracticedbetweenofficialsofequalrank),andthensatdownattheking’sside.In1884,however,theChineseenvoys Wu Dacheng and Xuchang, Gen. Ding Ruchang, and Taotai Ma Jianzhong had sat down opposite the king, following guest-host rituals. Yuan also notedthat the ministers of other countries had to dismount their sedan chairs outside the palace gate and pay visits to the king according to the etiquette for officialsoutside the capital. Quoting ritual codes applicable to relations between China and Chosŏn, Li advised Yuan that it would be “truly courteous” for Yuan to followthe rituals for Chinese provincial-level officials visiting first-degree princes. This category of ritual performance dictated that Yuan would dismount his sedan chairat the gate of the palace hall, bow to the king three times with his hands folded in front, and then sit down by the king’s side. At grand ceremonies such as assem-blies,Yuanwouldlikewisebowthreetimeswithhishandsfoldedinfront,insteadofperformingahigher-levelritualofthreebows(Ch.,sanjugong),inordertoshowthatChinawas“neitherhaughtynorhumble”andtoharmonizehisconductwiththatofotherministers.¹⁵ThenewritualseasedYuan’sintegrationintotheKoreancourt,buttheycreatedfrictionwithotherdiplomatsinthecity.¹⁶China’s Two Options: Supervision versus ProvincializationIn the turbulent 1880s, when Beijing dramatically changed its border policy in the northwest by converting Xinjiang into a province, the northeastern frontier, too,posed a major challenge to the Qing. Having lost Burma to Britain, Ryukyu to Japan, and Vietnam to France within three decades, China stood at a historicalcrossroadswithregardtoitsfutureadministrationofChosŏn,asithadtodecidehowbesttoavoidalsolosingitsmostexemplaryouterfan:shouldittakeastepback and adopt an indirect approach of sending high-ranking officials to supervise and protect Chosŏn, or would it be better to incorporate Chosŏn into Chineseterritory as prefectures and counties of China? Both options had precedents in the Han and the Yuan Dynasties and so could be justified. Viewed from a modernperspective, however, both represented a colonial approach not unlike Japan’s later annexation of Korea in 1910. It was on precisely this point that China fell into adilemma that it was unable to overcome.The Qing regarded Chosŏn as a loyal subordinate in its rhetoric, but as seen in the preceding chapters it never tried to incorporate Chosŏn into Chinese terri-tory. The Chinese appraisal of Chosŏn as being “like prefectures and counties” merely acknowledged Korea’s subordination to China’s cultural superiority; it
didn’texpressapracticalpoliticalapproachtoannexingthecountry.Forcenturies,China,Chosŏn,andChina’sotherouterfansharedtheworldviewofall-under-Heav-en, according to which all their lands were subject to the authority of the Son of Heaven. There was also a rule, drawn up by the first emperor of the Ming inthefourteenthcentury,thatChinawouldnotannexthefifteenouterfanwhosecontactswithChinaweresupervisedbytheMinistryofRites.ThefirstoftheseouterfanwasKorea.¹⁷Thisprinciplecameunderchallengeinthe1880s,whentheoptionsofsupervisionandprotection,ontheonehand,andoutrightprovin-cialization, on the other, were put forward by some Chinese officials and scholars.In November 1880 the Chinese minister to Japan, He Ruzhang, argued that it would be the best policy for China to send an imperial commissioner to Chosŏnto manage the country’s domestic and foreign affairs, as China had done in Mongolia and Tibet. However, realizing that such a move was almost impossible atthe time, He Ruzhang suggested that Chosŏn sign treaties with other countries under China’s supervision in order to pursue a balance of power. In August 1882,in the wake of Chosŏn’s mutiny and Japan’s provocative response, another Chinese minister to Japan, Li Shuchang, suggested that China “abolish the king andconvert the country into prefectures and counties of China,” imitating the relationship between Britain and India, in order to resolve all thorny issues related toChosŏn once and for all. Li Shuchang was fully aware that such an action would undermine China’s moral standards, but he nonetheless regarded it as the bestavailablepolicyforChina.¹⁸ThiswasprobablythefirsttimethatChineseofficialsexplicitlyarguedthatChinashouldprovincializeChosŏnduringthisperiod,butthe proposal was confidential and strictly confined to a small group of policymakers.In 1882 Zhang Jian (1853–1926), an assistant to Gen. Wu Changqing in Hansŏng, called for reforms in Chosŏn in his treatise “Six Strategies for Managing theConsequencesofChosŏn’sMutiny”(Ch.,Chaoxianshanhouliuce).¹⁹Thistreatise,whichwaswidelydisseminatedinBeijingthroughinformalchannels,encour-aged officials of the so-called Pure Stream group (Ch., Qingliu)—who had seized the moral high ground in political struggles—to pursue a solution to theChosŏn problem. In October 1882 Zhang Peilun (1848–1903), a pillar of the Pure Stream, urged Beijing to dispatch a commercial commissioner to manageChosŏn’s foreign and domestic affairs. Li Hongzhang did not endorse this plan because he was fearful of a scenario in which China would be drawn into an evenmore difficult situation and could not efficiently manage the country, but he noted that if Beijing decided to accept Zhang’s proposal, he would recommend HeRuzhangforthepositionofimperialcommissioner.²⁰At the same time, Li Hongzhang received a note from the king inviting Chinese specialists on foreign affairs to serve as his assistants. Li believed that Chinacould exploit this opportunity to steer a middle course between supervising and protecting Chosŏn, on the one hand, and provincializing the country, on theother.Theinvitedspecialistswouldbeundertheking’scommand,guaranteeingChosŏntherightofzizhuandunderliningChosŏn’sstatusasChina’sshuguo.Asdescribed in the previous chapter, the specialists, Ma Jianchang and Paul Georg von Möllendorff, arrived in Hansŏng in 1883, followed by the Chinese commercialcommissioner Chen Shutang. It was against this background of China’s increasingly active role in Chosŏn that Yuan Shikai was appointed as an imperial residenta year and a half later.In the wake of the bloody coup of 1884, a growing number of Chinese officials supported strengthening China’s position in Chosŏn. In late 1885 the ManchuofficialShengyu(1850–1900),thenpresidentoftheDirectorateofEducation,declaredthatamongChina’sfanChosŏnwasmoreimportantthanRyukyuandViet-nam had been. He suggested that the court send a competent man to “protect and cherish the country” by leading a powerful contingent of troops, and that itissueadecreetooustQueenMinandherfollowerswiththeaimof“mollifyingtheKoreanpeople’sresentmentandproclaimingChina’spowerandvirtues.”²¹Inthe summer of 1890, hearing rumors that Russia was planning to invade Chosŏn, Kang Youwei (1858–1927), a Cantonese scholar who at the time was preparingforthecivil-serviceexamination,draftedatreatiseentitled“StrategiesforSavingChosŏn”(Ch.,BaoChaoxiance)thatproposed“middle,upper,andlower”
strategies.Accordingtohismiddlestrategy,Chinawould“incorporateChosŏnintotheChineseinnerlandandmanageitsadministration”(Ch.,shouweineidierzhiqizheng).Kangarguedthatin1882ChinashouldhaveappointedofficialsandofficerstomanageChosŏn’spoliticsandthatitshouldhavetakencontrolofChosŏn’s taxes, trained its soldiers, and converted Chosŏn into an integral part of China’s inner territory. Kang’s upper strategy was to make Chosŏn into an in-ternationalprotectorate.Bycontrast,thelowerstrategywastomaintainChosŏn’s“nominaltitleasChina’sfanandshuguo”inwardlyandtoallowitto“conductforeignaffairsfreelyunderzizhu”outwardly,whichamountedto“nopolicyperse.”²²KangcastigatedChinaforitsinabilitytosolvetheKoreanprobleminthein-ternational political arena. Eight years later, Kang served as a mentor to Emperor Guangxu when the latter launched dramatic reforms after China’s humiliating de-feat in its war with Japan, which broke out in Chosŏn.From Huang Zunxian and He Ruzhang in 1880 to Li Shuchang and Zhang Peilun in 1882 and then to Ma Jianchang in 1884, Shengyu in 1885, and Kang Youweiin 1890, Beijing was barraged with proposals to either supervise and protect Chosŏn or provincialize it. The advocates of these proposals frequently traced thepoint of departure for their suggested policies back to the early Qing and even earlier dynasties. They pointed out that Qing China had to take responsibility forsaving Chosŏn from crises, as Ming China had done in the 1590s. In this sense, they saw China’s policy in Chosŏn in the 1880s as a resurgence of the intrinsicpowerexertedbythepatriarchoftheZongfanfamilyoveritsouterfan.ForscholarswhoprefertointerpretChina’spolicythroughthelensofinternationalpoli-tics, this statement seems clichéd, but one should bear in mind that political rules informed by the Westphalian system cannot easily be applied to the Qing’srationaleforitsforeignrelationswithitsouterfanasembodiedinQing-Chosŏnrelations.Otherwise,WesterndiplomatsinHansŏng,Beijing,andTokyowouldnot have suffered such confusion for more than two decades, and the Western consultants hired by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs would not have hadto resort to the Ottoman-Egyptian example for lack of a model for the Qing-Chosŏn relationship in European history.Although China believed it had the theoretical authority to carry out an annexation of Chosŏn and could justify to itself the political legitimacy of such a move,the Manchu imperial court never put this option on its agenda; rather, it continued to adhere firmly to Zongfan principles in its contacts with Chosŏn. Whereasthe Yuan and Ming Dynasties had officially discussed plans to provincialize Korea, no textual evidence suggests that the Qing court entertained any court-leveldiscussion on this subject. The Zongli Yamen and other central institutions and high-ranking officials did forward proposals for provincialization to EmpressDowager Cixi and Emperor Guangxu from the early 1880s to the peak of the war in 1894 and 1895, but the central court always remained silent on these proposals.The pleas for provincialization thus did not change the imperial court’s established perception of Chosŏn. This perception may explain why, even after Chosŏnobtained its independence in 1895, the Qing’s imperial calendars continued to include the country in the list of China’s inner provinces until as late as 1909, a yearbefore Chosŏn was colonized by Japan. In this regard, Zongfanism manifested itself in a fundamentally different way from colonialism.This interpretation does not imply that international politics had no influence on China’s policy and behavior. In fact, China’s provincialization of Chosŏn couldhave led to a domino effect in China’s borderland in Manchuria, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Yunnan, where China was contending with Japan, Russia, Britain, and France.Chosŏn was a politico-cultural frontier of the Chinese empire, but this frontier was invisible and existed only in an intellectual sense within the Chinese world. Norcould this frontier be defined by international law. On the borders of its territorial empire, China did embrace the policy of provincialization at that time. In 1884Beijing accepted the proposals of Zuo Zongtang and Liu Jintang (1844–94) and converted Xinjiang into a province; this multiethnic region in Inner Asia remainspart of the Chinese state’s territory today. The same policy was applied to Taiwan in 1885, turning the island into another province. Although Taiwan was ceded toJapan in 1895 as a result of the Sino-Japanese War, the Qing’s earlier provincialization of Taiwan provided the Chinese state in the twentieth century with legitimateand legal resources to claim sovereignty over the island.
Reading Zongfanism from the Outside: Western Diplomats’ Perceptions of Chosŏn’s Sovereignty and IndependenceChosŏn’s sovereignty became a heated topic in the late 1880s when Chosŏn stepped onto the world stage. In order to meet various diplomatic challenges,Chosŏn established new institutions and developed a pattern of dual diplomacy in the 1880s, just as China had done in the 1860s. Within this dual pattern, theroyal court maintained its Zongfan relations with China’s imperial court, while the new institutions, predominantly the Foreign Office, presented Chosŏn as anindependent state in its contacts with Western countries. The agencies of China’s state diplomacy, in particular the Beiyang superintendent and the H.I.C.M. Resi-dent, sought to use China’s authority to influence Chosŏn’s state diplomacy. In the eyes of Western ministers, including the Western advisers appointed by Chinato Chosŏn, China was impinging on Chosŏn’s independent sovereignty through calculated schemes. China’s image suffered, not only in the estimation of Japanand the Western states that had interests in the peninsula, but also in Chosŏn itself.The Western advisers recommended by Li Hongzhang to the king of Chosŏn serve as good examples in this regard. As the first Western adviser to the king onmaritime customs, Möllendorff also assumed the vice presidency of Chosŏn’s newly founded Foreign Office. But as he became eager to develop Chosŏn’s mili-tary forces to counterbalance the country’s weakness, his activities progressively deviated from Li’s wishes. In 1884 Möllendorff asked Li to send officers to trainthe Korean army. When this request yielded no response, he persuaded the king to negotiate a convention with Russia whereby Russian officers would train thearmy in exchange for the use of Wŏnsan, the ice-free port on the eastern coast of the country. Under pressure from Li, the king dismissed Möllendorff in Novem-ber 1885. At the recommendation of China’s inspector general, Robert Hart, Henry F. Merrill, an American national, replaced Möllendorff as chief commissionerof the Korean Maritime Customs, and Owen N. Denny (1838–1900), a former US consul in Tianjin, assumed the post of vice president of the Foreign Office andadviser to the king. Whereas Merrill rarely commented on Chosŏn’s affairs, Denny was very enthusiastic about assisting Chosŏn in pursuing independence fromChina.In January 1887 a veteran Chinese diplomat, Zeng Jize (known as Marquis Tseng, 1839–90), the eldest son of the distinguished late official Zeng Guofan (1811–72),publishedanEnglish-languagearticleentitled“China:TheSleepandtheAwakening”intheBritishjournalAsiaticQuarterlyReview.Makinganambitiousargu-ment that China would become “a great Asiatic Power” as awakened in the process of modernization, Zeng also commented on China’s foreign policy toward itssubordinate countries, noting that China “has decided on exercising a more effective supervision on the acts of her vassal Princes, and of accepting a larger re-sponsibility for them than heretofore.” The marquis further claimed that “the Warden of the Marches is now abroad, looking to the security of China’s outlyingprovinces––of Corea, Thibet, and Chinese Turkestan. Henceforth, any hostile movements against these countries, or any interference with their affairs, will beviewedatPekingasadeclaration,onthepartofthePowercommittingit,ofadesiretodiscontinueitsfriendlyrelationswiththeChineseGovernment.”²³Thereality, however, unfolded in a way that differed dramatically from what the marquis envisioned. In this regard, Denny was more prescient. A lawyer by profession,DennyfoundhislegaltrainingusefulinChosŏn.InFebruary1888hepublishedabookletentitledChinaandKorea,inwhichheassertedthatChinawasdestroyingKorea—anindependentstatewithindependentsovereignty—“byabsorbingthecountry.”²⁴Denny’s pamphlet was emotional and exposed his limited knowledge of Sino-Korean relations, but it was welcomed by his fellow Western diplomats who des-perately hoped to grasp the nature of China’s presence in Chosŏn. The first two American ministers in Chosŏn, Lucius H. Foote and George C. Foulk, were veryenthusiasticaboutChina’sinfluencesinthecountry,andtheUnitedStateswasdeeplyinvolvedintheissueofChosŏn’sinternationalstatus.²⁵Inthesummerof1887, Yuan, Li, Foulk, the American chargé d’affaires William W. Rockhill, and the new American minister Hugh A. Dinsmore (1850–1930) became embroiled in anintense dispute resulting from a widely circulated rumor that Foulk had encouraged the king to seek independence from China. Dinsmore complained that “China
is slowly but surely tightening her grasp upon this government and its King,” and he blamed Yuan for his “declaration that Korea is a vassal state and altogetherincapableofself-government.”²⁶The United States also became entangled in another fierce dispute between China and Korea in 1887, when the king decided to send Pak Chŏng-yang (1842–1905)asanenvoytotheUnitedStates,followedbyanotherenvoytoBritain,Germany,Russia,Italy,andFrance.²⁷Chinaendorsedtheking’splanbuturgedtheking not to endow the envoys with the title of plenipotentiary, and reminded the monarch that all Korean envoys overseas had to obey three rules outlined by LiHongzhang: first, a Korean envoy arriving in a new posting should first report to the Chinese consulate and be accompanied by the Chinese minister to the hostcountry’s ministry of foreign affairs; second, the Korean envoy should always sit behind the Chinese minister at meetings and banquets in the host country; andthird, the Korean envoy should consult with the Chinese minister about major events before contacting the institutions of the host country. These three rules wereaimedatmaintainingtheestablished“systemofshuguo”byemphasizingthehierarchybetweentheChineseministerandtheKoreanenvoyinthehostcountryaswellasthatbetweenChinaandKoreaingeneral.²⁸The king did not follow Beijing’s instructions: in the letter of credence to the United States he called himself “I, the emperor” and appointed Pak “envoy plenipo-tentiary”(K.,chŏngwŏntaesin),althoughinhismemorialtotheGuangxuemperorhecalledPaka“minister’sminister.”²⁹Accordingly,theAmericansidetreatedPak as minister plenipotentiary when he arrived in Washington in January 1888. Under the strong influence of his American secretary Horace N. Allen(1858–1932),³⁰Pakcontinuedtofloutthethreerules:hedidnotsubordinatehimselftotheChineseministerinWashington,ZhangYinhuan(1837–1900),whichled to an awkward and even hostile relationship between the two representatives. Some American news reports also stated that Korea dispatched its minister totheUnitedStatesindependentlyanddidnotneedtoobtainChina’spermission.³¹InordertoreassertChosŏn’spositionasChina’sshuguo,ZhangdeliveredtoPakaChineseimperialcalendarfor1888thathehadreceivedfromShanghai.³²Finally,underpressurefromChina,thekingofChosŏnrecalledPak,turningthisbrief episode showcasing Chosŏn’s apparent sovereignty and international status into a highly unpleasant footnote in Sino-Korean relations.It was at this time that Denny’s pamphlet was circulating among Westerners in Korea and, soon, further afield. For China, the Korean situation was becomingincreasingly complicated, and in June 1888 Li Hongzhang secretly sent Möllendorff back to Hansŏng to “checkmate Denny who is urging the King to assertindependence.”³³Denny’stakeontheissueofKorea’sindependenceanditsrelationshiptoChinaquicklyreachedtheUnitedStates.OnAugust31,1888,withPakstill in Washington, Senator John H. Mitchell (1835–1905) of Oregon, Denny’s home state, called on the Senate, and particularly the Committee on Foreign Rela-tions, to pay attention to the Sino-Korean relationship. Mitchell, holding in his hand a copy of Denny’s “very able and highly interesting brief,” stated that “forsome time past the Imperial Government of China has, through its chief officers and representatives, and especially and particularly its representative at the city ofSeoul,beencontemplatingthesubjugationandentireabsorptionofCorea.”HeemphasizedthatKorea’srelationshipwithChinawas“thatofameretributarystate,inwhichnoneoftherightsofsovereigntyorindependenceareeliminatedordestroyed,andnotthatofadependentorvassalgovernmentwithoutanyoftheprerogativesofsovereigntyattaching.”³⁴All of these episodes contributed to the deterioration of the Sino-Korean relationship by the end of the 1880s. Many a Western diplomat, sympathetic toward theking and his government, believed that China was controlling Chosŏn in dramatic or even colonialist ways, while Chosŏn was desperately distancing itself fromthe Sinocentric system by adopting Western political and diplomatic terms. As Dinsmore observed in the summer of 1887, “The Koreans do not impress me ashaving any affection or strong attachment for the Chinese. On the contrary there is among the common people a well-defined dislike for them, but they fear themanditisundertheinfluenceofthisfearthattheyaregraduallyyieldingtoChinesesupremacy.”³⁵Inthiscontext,Chosŏnuseditsstate-to-statecontactswith
China and other countries to propel itself out of China’s orbit.Perplexing issues such as Yuan Shikai’s status as resident and Pak’s mission to the United States led Western scholar-diplomats to study the history of Sino-Korean relations with the aim of exploring the origin of China’s authority over Chosŏn. During a journey in the capital district of Chosŏn in 1884, George Foulksaw the Samjŏndo stele that had been erected in 1639, which he described as “a great marble tablet fully twelve feet high and a foot thick, mounted upon the backof a gigantic granite turtle.” He added, “Historically, this monument presents much interest, and a thorough examination may develop information on the statusofCoreawithregardtoChinaofmoredirectlypracticaluse.”³⁶Indeed,RockhillsoontriedtointerpretSino-KoreanrelationsbyusingtheinscriptionsoftheSamjŏndo stele and other Chinese materials; his efforts were published as a long article in 1889 under the title “Korea in Its Relations with China.” In the article,Rockhill attempted to answer the “puzzle for Western nations” of whether Korea was “an integral part of the Chinese empire” or “a sovereign state enjoying abso-luteinternationalrights.”³⁷Rockhill noted that the British government considered the Burmese “tribute” to China within the Sino-Burmese framework to be of a “purely ceremonial na-ture,” so in the Sino-British convention of 1886 the British side guaranteed the continuance of the Burmese decennial tribute mission to Beijing. The Sino-Koreanrelationship was much more complicated. After examining Sino-Korean relations from 1392 and reviewing Qing-Chosŏn contacts since the early seventeenth cen-tury, Rockhill determined that Chosŏn’s conclusion of treaties with Japan and the United States “has not materially altered the nature of the relations existing forthelastfourcenturiesatleastbetweenChinaanditsso-calledvassal.”³⁸Rockhill’sconclusionseriouslychallengedthepopularperceptionamongWesterndiplo-mats in East Asia that Chosŏn was independent from China. The puzzle, therefore, remained unsolved and in fact became even more vexing.The Grand Performance of the Zongfan Order: China’s Last Imperial Mission to ChosŏnRituals and Authority: Yuan’s Efforts to Assert China’s Superiority in ChosŏnAs its awareness of its own independent sovereignty (or the possibility thereof) deepened in the late 1880s, Chosŏn cautiously maintained its court-to-court con-tacts with China and conducted its own state diplomacy beyond China. Because of this dual diplomacy, whereas China wanted to preserve and highlight its su-periority in Chosŏn, Hansŏng tried to compromise the hierarchical arrangement in practice. Along the way, in 1890, the two sides entered into intense negoti-ations over the Zongfan rituals.On June 4, 1890, Korean Queen Dowager Cho died. A series of ritual practices between Hansŏng and Beijing had to be carried out. Aware that ritual matterswere under the management of the Manchu court, Yuan responded to the Korean Foreign Office’s announcement of the dowager’s death with a short note ex-pressinghiscondolences.³⁹Atatimewheninternationalintriguesandrivalriesexertedsuchastronginfluenceonthepeninsula,Sino-Koreancourt-to-courtcon-tacts through the exchange of emissaries seemed dwarfed by the two countries’ state-to-state contacts over political and diplomatic issues. While the Koreancourt continued to send tributary missions to Beijing through the 1880s, Beijing did not dispatch envoys to Hansŏng for tributary affairs after Chosŏn opened itsdoors to the West in 1882. Although court diplomacy still played a key role in regulating and modifying the bilateral relationship, the decade-long absence of impe-rial envoys from Korean soil left Yuan Shikai in Hansŏng without any recent precedents to consult. The absence of such envoys also reinforced the impression ofWestern diplomats that China had little authority over Chosŏn. Yuan believed that the expression of China’s condolences on the death of the dowager providedtheperfectopportunitytocounteracttheWesternperceptionofSino-Koreanrelations.⁴⁰When the American minister Augustine Heard (1827–1905) invited Yuan to join a discussion with other ministers over an appropriate expression of their joint
condolences to the Korean court, Yuan declined on the grounds that “China and Chosŏn have longtime established regulations on ritual exchanges that are dif-ferentfromothercountries’.”⁴¹InareporttoLiHongzhang,inwhichheidentifiedChosŏnas“afriendlynation”(Ch.,youbang)ofothertreatynations,Yuansaidthat the other ministers would follow common diplomatic etiquette in expressing condolences to the Korean government on the occasion of a national funeral,butthosecountrieswouldnotsendspecialrepresentativesforthispurpose.Bycontrast,Yuanargued,becauseChosŏnwasChina’sshuguoandalwaysreceivedChina’sspecialfavors,whenthecountrywasingrandmourning,Chinashouldsendanimperialmissioninaccordancewiththeestablishedsystem(Ch.,tizhi).⁴²Yuan became the first Han Chinese official in Chosŏn’s territory since 1637 to try to maintain China’s superiority through appropriate rituals, including by propos-ing new ones.On learning that other ministers would visit and bow to the king or visit the regent official and shake hands with him to show their sympathy, Yuan refused tofollow their example. Instead he proposed a new ritual procedure endorsed by Li Hongzhang: after the first five days, during which the body of the dowager wouldlie in repose and the Korean people wore mourning clothes, Yuan would make an appointment with the Korean court to express his condolences based on “per-sonalfriendship”(Ch.,siqing),whichwasconsideredequivalenttofriendshipamongcolleagues(Ch.,liaoyinjiaoqing),ratherthanextendingChina’s“nationalpubliccondolences”(Ch.,guojiagongdiao).⁴³InearlyJune,whenothercountriesflewtheirlegations’flagsathalf-mastforthreedaystoexpresstheircondo-lences,YuanandLiinstructedChinesewarshipsandinstitutionsinInch’ŏnandatotherKoreantreatyportstodosoforonlytwodays.⁴⁴TheireffortstoassertChina’s superiority through unique as well as unequal rituals simply magnified China’s isolation from other countries.Despite his efforts, Yuan found himself stuck in a ritual dilemma. When he notified Min Chong-muk (1835–1916), the resident of the Foreign Office, that hewouldliketovisitthefuneralhallintheinnerpalace,Mindeclinedtheofferbecauseonlyroyalfamilymemberscoulddoso.⁴⁵WhentheAmericanminister,forhis part, consulted with Min about how foreign ministers should perform funerary rituals, Min said that it would be inappropriate for the Korean court to inviteforeign ministers to attend the funeral procession, but his office could provide a place near the East Gate of the city for the ministers to perform ceremonies asthe hearse passed through the gate. Heard complied; Yuan did not. Yuan then told the Home Office and the Foreign Office that he would like to accompany thefuneral team from the palace gate outside the city and hold the cord guiding the hearse, a Chinese funeral custom showing deep respect for the deceased. But theHome Office did not endorse this proposal and suggested that Yuan go directly to the East Gate, where other ministers would convene; when the hearse passedthrough the gate, the procession would stop for a moment, during which Yuan could perform a farewell ceremony. Disappointed by this response, Yuan decidedto set himself apart from the other ministers with his own ritual: he would set an incense burner on a table and hold a memorial ceremony for the late dowager bythesideoftheroadontheprocessionday.⁴⁶Soon thereafter, another event made Yuan reconsider his plans yet again. On October 11, 1890, seven American officers led fifty armed marines on a marchfrom Inch’ŏn toward Hansŏng. Heard explained to Yuan that the United States, as a friend of Chosŏn, had sent naval troops to accompany the funeral procession“asamarkofrespectandsympathy.”⁴⁷Yuandoubtedhisexplanation.ItwasthesecondtimeinseveralmonthsthatHeardhadsummonedtroopstothecapital.The first time had been right after the death of the dowager in June, when the king had sent an agent to ask Heard to send forces to the palace at once to provideprotection. Heard hesitated, but after considering the potential for disturbance and the jeopardy in which it might place American citizens, he ordered marinesfromtheUSSSwatarainInch’ŏntoHansŏng.Heardspecifiedtothekingthatthetroopsweretheretoprotectthelegation,buttheking,hesaid,“wouldbenefitbythemoraleffectwhichtheirpresencewouldproduce.”⁴⁸ThepresenceofAmericanforcesinHansŏngsparkedarumorinBeijingthatChosŏnwasplanningtorent Port Hamilton to the United States as a coaling station in exchange for protection. Under these circumstances, to monitor the Americans, Yuan set up his
memorial table at the East Gate, where Heard and the American soldiers stood in line on the side of the road. The hearse did not stop as promised, but Yuan stillbowedthreetimeswithhishandsfoldedinfront.⁴⁹TheAmericansoldiersreturnedtoInch’ŏnonOctober15,defusingthetensionsandallayingYuan’ssuspi-cions.Rituals and Sovereignty: Chosŏn’s Bargaining with China about the Imperial MissionWhileYuanShikaiwastacklingritualdilemmasinHansŏng,theKoreancourtwasnegotiatingritualconventionswithBeijing.⁵⁰OnJune5,1890,thekingin-structed the prefect of Ŭiju to inform the garrison major of the Manchu bannermen at Fenghuang City of the dowager’s death. The monarch also appointed HongChong-yŏng as envoy and Cho Pyŏng-sŏng as attendant secretary of a mission to carry the news to Beijing. According to convention, Beijing in turn needed to dis-patch a mission of condolence to Hansŏng. Two weeks later, through Yuan Shikai and Li Hongzhang, the king asked Beijing not to send envoys to Hansŏng butto allow Chosŏn’s tributary emissaries to bring back the imperial condolence messages. The king explained that if China sent a mission, the United States, Britain,Germany, France, and Japan would send missions too, creating a situation that Chosŏn could not afford. What the king was requesting was known as “handingoverforconvenience”(Ch.,shunfu),butLiwasnotsurewhetherthisconventionhadeverbeenappliedtocondolencemessages.HeinstructedYuantosecretlyconsult precedents and warned him not to be rash, because Li felt that Hansŏng was forcing Beijing to do its bidding, despite the petition’s beseeching tone.After examining imperial missions of condolence to Chosŏn upon queen dowagers’ deaths since the Qianlong period and enumerating six cases in 1757, 1805,1821, 1844, 1858, and 1878, Yuan concluded that in the case of conferring noble rank on deceased royalty, Beijing always dispatched envoys and never used “hand-ing over for convenience.” In view of his findings, Yuan saw the king’s request as a conspiracy. He reported to Li that Queen Min was dominating the kingthroughherfearthattheceremoniesperformedtoChina’senvoysinfrontofWesternerswoulddamageChosŏn’simageasacountryofzizhu.Yuanfurtheras-sertedthatDennywasincitingthekingtourgeBeijingnottosendamissionbecausetheritualswoulddamageChosŏn’s“nationalpolity.”⁵¹Whenthekingdis-cussed this issue with Yuan, Yuan insisted that the imperial mission would travel to Chosŏn and that all procedures to welcome the mission had to be conductedin conformity with precedent. However, the two Korean emissaries were already on their way to Beijing, carrying the king’s special request.Upon their arrival in Beijing, Hong Chong-yŏng and Cho Pyŏng-sŏng presented the king’s memorial to the emperor via the Ministry of Rites. In the memorial,thekingstrictlyfollowedtheprescribedtextualformatbyusingChina’sregnaltitleandreferringtohimselfas“subordinate”andtoChosŏnas“smallcountry.”⁵²In a special note to the Ministry of Rites, Hong explained that as Chosŏn was facing a difficult situation because of political troubles, famine, and financial crisis,he preferred to convey the imperial message of condolence back to his country without the need for Beijing to send envoys for the purpose.Neither the ministry nor the Guangxu emperor granted this request. The Grand Council forwarded a decree to Hong that declared that an imperial mission hadtobesentbecausetheHeavenlyDynastywould“cherishsympathyforitsshuguoandfanonsuchoccasions.”Themissionhad“afundamentalrelationshiptothesystem”(Ch.,tizhiyouguan),andtheritualsthatChosŏnshouldperformtoitbasedontheestablishedcodesshouldnotbecurtailedintheleast.Still,theem-peror compromised by instructing the mission to take the maritime route between Tianjin and Inch’ŏn on warships of the Beiyang Navy. This was the first timesince 1637 that an imperial mission had taken to the seas. Of the thirty-nine Manchu candidates recommended by the Ministry of Rites, the emperor selectedXuchang and Chongli (1834–1907) to serve as envoys. Given the possible international responses to the imperial mission’s presence in Chosŏn, the emperor or-deredallmembersofthemissiontorefusegiftsfromChosŏnforthesakeofChina’suprightimage.⁵³The emperor’s decision to send the mission points to an established regulation of the Zongfan system: had Yuan Shikai, Li Hongzhang, or the Ministry of Ritesbeen able to find any historical precedent for the omission of an imperial mission of condolence, Beijing would likely have consented to the king’s request and
refrained from dispatching the mission. The Zongfan regulations thus served both China and Korea as a double-edged sword. The Chinese side further confirmedthat the mission would land in Inch’ŏn as scheduled, not in Masanpu, as Chosŏn proposed. According to Yuan, the king was hesitant about whether to go out ofHansŏng to welcome the envoys in the suburbs and perform ceremonies in person, for Denny was urging the king to receive the envoys in the palace. The envoysstressedthatallceremonieshadtobeperformedasrecordedintheritualcodes,andduringtheirsojourninHansŏngtheywouldnotmeetwithanyWesterners.⁵⁴Rituals and Dignity: The Imperial Mission to Chosŏn and the Grand CeremonyOn October 28, 1890, the two envoys picked up gifts for the king from the Ministry of Rites, including sandalwood incense, white and blue silk, and three hundredtaelsofsilver.Alloftheseitemswereinaccordancewithimperialcodesdeterminedintheeighteenthcentury.⁵⁵TwodayslatertheyarrivedinTianjin,thehead-quartersoftheBeiyangNavycommandedbyLiHongzhang,whohadsummonedthreewarships—theJiyuan,theLaiyuan,andtheJingyuan—toharborforthemission.LifirstsenttheJiyuantoChosŏnwithanoteinwhichtheenvoysagainexpressedtheirinsistencethatallprescribedceremoniesbecarriedoutinfullontheir arrival in Chosŏn. The envoys also stated that the members of the mission would not accept any money or articles as routine gifts in order to show theemperor’sconcernforhisshuguoandfan.⁵⁶Chosŏn was busy preparing to welcome the envoys according to precedent. To receive the mission, the king appointed several high-ranking officials, includingNam Chŏng-ch’ŏl, president of the Ministry of Punishment, and Sŏng Ki-un (1847–1924), grand chamberlain and superintendent of trade in the Inch’ŏn district.Both Nam and Sŏng had served as commissioners in Tianjin in 1884, where they had possessed a status equal to that of Western ministers, but now they werefully integrated into the Zongfan system as subordinates of both the king and the Chinese emperor. In addition to refurnishing a pavilion between Inch’ŏn andHansŏng as the envoys’ accommodations, the Koreans sent 130 foreign-drilled soldiers to the area for security. In Hansŏng the court had deployed around 590soldierstomaintainlocalorder.⁵⁷The king was still reluctant to leave the city to welcome the envoys, as he was worried that Japanese and Western diplomats and citizens would witness the hi-erarchical rituals, in particular his kowtowing to the envoys, which would undermine his dignity as a sovereign. But he nonetheless eventually decided to receivetheenvoysneartheWestGateaccordingtoprecedent.⁵⁸Afterall,thekinghadbeeninvestedbytheChineseemperor,andatthisparticularmomenttheemper-or’s authority exerted a demand that the monarch could not ignore.Once all the rituals had been blueprinted, the envoys sailed from Tianjin and reached the outer harbor of Inch’ŏn on November 6. After two high-ranking Ko-rean officials boarded the cruisers to welcome the mission, the envoys landed by a small steamship with the imperial decree. The Korean officials, headed by thereceivers of the mission, bowed to the imperial envoys and items. After the envoys had placed the decree in the dragon shrine customarily used for this purpose,the procession headed for the envoys’ lodgings in Inch’ŏn. It was a long and magnificent procession. First came the Korean receivers and officials in columns,one on each side of the road, with the Hansŏng magnate and the metropolitan governor on the east side and the prefects and the magistrates on the west side.Next were the Korean escorts, flags, yellow umbrellas, drums, gongs, and bands. They were followed by the incense shrine and the dragon shrine and then by theChinese attendants, all of whom were mounted. The two envoys followed in their sedan chairs, side by side, and behind them marched the high and low deputieswith the supervisors and their attendants.ThecolorfulprocessionpassedthroughtheGeneralForeignSettlementandtheChineseSettlement(Ch.,HuaYangzujie),whichtheChinesemerchantshaddecorated with lanterns and streamers, undoubtedly feeling superior to their counterparts given the occasion. From the perspective of the envoys, the extraor-dinary procession and the elaborate ceremony that numerous Koreans and foreigners gathered to appreciate perfectly highlighted the Great Qing’s superior
authorityinitssubordinatecountry.⁵⁹J.C.Johnston,theactingcommissionerofcustomsinInch’ŏn,wasindeedimpressedandcommentedthatthearrivalofthemissionwas“themostnoteworthyeventsincetheopeningofChemulpo[Inch’ŏn].”⁶⁰WhentheenvoysreachedtheirresidenceattheOfficeoftheSuperin-tendent of Trade (K., Kamni amun), the Korean officials kowtowed toward the imperial envoys and decree, while the envoys replied by bowing with their handsfolded in front. In the office the envoys reviewed the four ritual programs prepared by the Korean side and confirmed that all procedures would be performed thenext day in Hansŏng. They declined to accept any gifts from the Korean officials.The grand ceremony took place in the palace on November 8, and it included the reading of the imperial message of condolence and the ceremonial wailing bythekingandtheenvoys.⁶¹Whentheceremoniesdrewtoaclose,thekingandtheenvoyshadashortconversationinwhichthekingexpressedhisgratitudeforthe“greathonor”thatChinahadgiventothe“smallcountry.”⁶²Theirconversationcontainednomentionofpoliticalordiplomaticissues.Afterdrinkingtea,thehost and the guests bowed toward each other with hands folded in front. All of the rituals strictly followed the precedents of the eighteenth century. In addition,the king visited the envoys at their residence on November 10 and treated them to a tea ceremony. This would traditionally have been the time when the Koreanside gave gifts to the envoys, but the envoys emphasized again that they could not accept even so much as a piece of paper. The next day the king sent off the en-voys at the West Gate by performing the prescribed rituals. After a rest in Inch’ŏn, the envoys sailed back to Tianjin. Their departure marked the end of China’simperial missions to Chosŏn within the Zongfan framework and thus the conclusion to a tradition that had operated at least since 1401, when Ming China hadofficially invested the king of Chosŏn.Already at the time of the event, and ever since, the dominant interpretation of this imperial mission has regarded it as a Chinese conspiracy conducted underthefoiloftributaryroutines,aimingtostrengthenChina’scontroloverChosŏnatthecostofthelatter’sindependentsovereignty.⁶³Withoutknowingwhatoc-curred inside the palace between the king and the envoys, the Western ministers assumed that the envoys had persuaded the king to act in accordance with Bei-jing’sinterestsinthenameofconventionalrituals.⁶⁴Thesediplomatsviewedtheeventinthecontextofmoderndiplomaticcircumstancesandsawritualcon-tacts as a tool that China used to influence or manipulate Chosŏn. Scholars in the twentieth century tended to juxtapose Chosŏn’s vassalage visà-vis China withits independent sovereignty vis-à-vis its treaty counterparts, interpreting the mission as an application of China’s new policy, which might be called the “Li-Yuanpolicy,”afterLiHongzhangandYuanShikai.⁶⁵ThispolicyissaidtohavecombinedChina’ssupremacyasthesuzerainoverKoreawithintheoldtributaryframe-work with China’s hegemonic position in the new treaty port system in Chosŏn.But Yuan’s role may have been exaggerated by his counterparts in Hansŏng at the time and by scholars afterward. Their narratives have portrayed Yuan as anarrogant,overbearing,andperemptorypersonwhoactedasa“Chinesepro-consul”andaggressivelydominatedtheChosŏngovernmentforadecade.⁶⁶Theevents surrounding the death of the dowager in 1890, however, cast doubt on this description. Yuan’s efforts to negotiate his ritual performance in Hansŏng withthe Korean side yielded nothing, which lays bare his unprivileged position as a foreign minister. Yuan did not go to Inch’ŏn to highlight China’s superior positionor attend the grand ceremony in the palace, nor did he meet or talk with the two imperial envoys. The envoys did not contact Yuan either, aside from sending himseveral routine notes about the ritual performance before they left Hansŏng. What Yuan’s experience reflected was Chosŏn’s independent power to manage itsown affairs.This interpretation does not deny the fact that Beijing did use the mission to demonstrate its superiority. After their return, the two envoys reported to the em-peror, “All foreigners have seen the solemn and majestic rituals and learned that Chosŏn is subordinate to the Heavenly Dynasty. Chosŏn could not deny it either.Ifwecantakeadvantageofthesituationtopacifythecountryinanappropriateway,Chosŏnwillserveasourfenceandenjoyourgreatbenevolenceforever.”⁶⁷
Johnston also observed that the mission “derived special political importance from the revival of the old-time ceremonies which mark the suzerain-tributary rela-tionsbetweenChinaandCorea.”⁶⁸Asaresult,accordingtoM.FrederickNelson,thisevent“imparted,fortheWesternobservers,adejurestatustoChina’sdefactopositioninKorea….TheWesternpowerswerebeginningtoattributemoreforcetothefamilialrelationshipwhichfortwodecadestheyhadrejectedaspurelyceremonial.”⁶⁹Behindtherituals,itwasevident,stoodavibrantpolitico-culturalChineseempire.Rituals,therefore,weredeeplyinvolvedinthetortuoustransfor-mation of both China and Korea from parts of the empire to modern sovereign states.Beijing was not blind to the complex international situation as it considered modifying old conventions. Under the rubric of cherishing the subordinate country,the two envoys made the constructive suggestion that China treat the expenses of the envoys to Chosŏn as it did the outlays of ministers to other countries. Theaim was to prevent Chosŏn from imposing exorbitant taxes and levies on its people in the name of welcoming the envoys. After consulting Emperor Yongzheng’sedict of 1735, in which the emperor reduced by half the amount of silver the king was expected to give the imperial envoys as gifts, the Ministry of Rites endorsedthe abolition of the custom of envoys’ receiving silver from Chosŏn. The ministry and the Zongli Yamen decided that in the future each imperial envoy would re-ceive two thousand taels of silver and each interpreter five hundred taels from the Zongli Yamen to cover expenses during the trip to Chosŏn. This reform blurredthelinebetweenimperialenvoystoChina’souterfanandministerssenttoothercountries.EmperorGuangxuapprovedthechange.TheBeiyangsuperintendent,theManchugeneralandtheMinistryofRitesinMukden,thekingofChosŏn,andtheimperialresidentinHansŏngwereallinformedofthedecision.⁷⁰Noimpe-rial envoys, however, would ever have the chance to claim financial support from the Zongli Yamen before the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1894 in Chosŏn.Saving “Our Chosŏn”: The Chinese Intelligentsia’s Responses to the Sino-Japanese WarAssistingtheLoyalFan:ThePrewarViewIn May 1894 the Chinese general Nie Shicheng (1836–1900) returned to Tianjin from a ten-month trip to northern Manchuria, the Russian Far East, and Chosŏn.In Chosŏn he had met with the king and visited treaty ports in order to get a general picture of the situation in the country. According to Nie, “The king is weak,the officials are addicted to alcohol and women, and no one is considering self-strengthening programs…. There are no talented generals at the top and no ablewarriors at the bottom. Were the country to encounter trouble, it would need China to send troops to protect it. The situation is very dangerous.” The general be-lieved that “compared with Russia, which is powerful but only a superficial threat, Japan is a truly mortal danger.” He argued that China should prepare to resistJapan’spotentialinvasionofChosŏninorderto“consolidatethefanandshuguoandprotectChina’sfrontier”(Ch.,gufanshu,baobianjiang).⁷¹Nie’s predictions were proved true by the deterioration of Chosŏn’s situation in the Tonghak Rebellion, an armed peasant uprising that broke out in January1894 against corrupt aristocrats and against the Japanese and Western invasion of Chosŏn (Tonghak, an intellectual school founded in 1860, refers to “Easternlearning,” indicating its anti-Western approach). Nie himself was dispatched to Chosŏn to assist the country in suppressing the rebellion; there he would witnessChina lose Chosŏn to Japan on the battlefield.Many Chinese officials shared Nie’s concerns. In July, when China was clashing with Japan over sending troops to Chosŏn, a group of officials in Beijing out-lined in their memorials or position papers to the emperor what they believed would be the best policy to strengthen Chinese forces, protect Chosŏn, and defeatJapan. Zeng Guangjun (1866–1929) of the Imperial Academy suggested that China publicize its rationale for an expedition against Japan. Defining Chosŏn as thecountry that “was the first to subordinate itself to our dynasty and has conscientiously paid tributary visits for hundreds of years without interruption,” Zeng pro-claimedthat“Japanhasfabricatedexcusesandtriedtomakethecountrysubordinatetotwocountries.”⁷²PangHongshu(1848–1915)oftheGrandCensorate
(Ch., Ducha yuan) alluded to the case of China’s loss of Ryukyu and argued that China should not abandon Chosŏn because it was critical for China’s overall situ-ation.PangemphasizedthatChosŏnhadbeenafanoftheGreatQingforalongtime,“tothepointthatitisnodifferentfromtheMongolsandthetribesinthewesternareas”(Ch.,Xiyu,referringtoInnerAsianareas).Therefore,ChinashouldstoptheinterventionofothercountriesinChosŏntoprotectthesecurityofitsterritory, including the three provinces in Manchuria, the ancestral home of the current dynasty. Conceiving a Chinese strategy in the context of international poli-tics, Pang exhorted China to protect Chosŏn by defeating Japan, so that China could focus on resolving its disputes with Russia over the borderline in the PamirMountainsandwithBritainovertradenegotiationsinTibet.⁷³Other officials preferred to emphasize the internal connections between the Qing and Chosŏn since the early seventeenth century. After reviewing Hongtaiji’sconquest of Chosŏn in 1637 and the erection of the Samjŏndo stele, Duanfang (1861–1911), a Manchu official who later became governor-general of Sichuan, ar-guedthatChinashouldsupportChosŏnbecausethecountryhadloyallyservedtheGreatQingformorethantwohundredyearswithouttreachery.⁷⁴OnthedayDuanfang submitted his position paper, the Japanese and the Chinese navies engaged in a battle at P’ungdo in Chosŏn. Thus began the war between the twocountries.Defending China Itself: The Link between “Our Chosŏn” and Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, and TaiwanEmperorGuangxuissuedanedicttodeclarewaronJapanonAugust1,1894.TheedictreiteratedthatChosŏnhadbeenafanandshuguooftheGreatQingandhad paid tribute to China every year for more than two hundred years, so it was China’s duty to send troops to Chosŏn to protect the Korean people from greatsuffering.⁷⁵TheedictjustifiedChina’sactionas“cherishingthesmall”withintheZongfansystemanddefendinginternationallawwithinthetreatyportsystem.AgrowingnumberofChineseofficialsidentifiedChina’smoveasatypicalembodimentoftheconventionofcherishingmenfromafar.⁷⁶TheseofficialspointedpassionatelytoallofChina’souterandinnerfanandotherfrontierareas,includingVietnam,Burma,Ryukyu,OuterMongolia,Xinjiang,Tibet,Manchuria,andTaiwan, which were already being eyed covetously by Western powers, and declared that for its own good China should not lose Chosŏn. The growing crisis inChosŏn thus became an issue related to Qing China’s own fate. The Great Qing had to defend its territorial borderland and the politico-cultural frontier of the Chi-nese empire.AccordingtoChanglin,theManchuministerattheMinistryofRevenue,ifJapanannexedChosŏn,“allthefanofourdynastywouldbesubordinatetoforeignbarbarians, so other countries would encroach on China’s inner land, and consequently Xinjiang, Taiwan, Tibet, and Manchuria would be in grave danger.” DingLijun(1854–1903),aHanChineseofficialattheImperialAcademy,furthercriticizedJapanfor“usurpingourChosŏn”(Ch.,duowoChaoxian).Heremarked,“Ifthe fence collapsed, Mukden would be in great danger. Chosŏn, which is different from Vietnam and Burma, which are thousands of miles away from China, ismutually dependent with China, like the lips and the teeth, and like bones and flesh.” Ding argued that Beijing should refuse British and Russian mediation be-tween China and Japan, for if China ceded Chosŏn or Taiwan to Japan, as the Western mediators were suggesting, Britain would encroach on Tibet and RussiawouldseektotakeOuterMongolia.⁷⁷Changlin’s and Ding’s concerns about China’s territorial integrity were widely shared by their fellow scholars and scholar-officials, who saw Chosŏn as thefence that protected Manchuria. As one of these officials, Kuai Guangdian, put it, “After we abandon Chosŏn, Russia will invade Mongolia and Britain will do thesametoTibet,soshallweletthesecountriesaloneorarguewiththem?Ifweopttoarguewiththem,wehadbetterkeepChosŏnsafenow.”⁷⁸Alloftheseofficialsregarded Chosŏn as an indispensable element of China’s strategy to safeguard its territorial integrity. Saving “our Chosŏn” was equal to saving China itself.The officials’ ardent belief that Beijing should exercise its patriarchal authority reflected the revitalization of the potential policy of provincializing Chosŏn.
Assuming that the king had been co-opted by Japan, Ding Lijun proposed that China invest the crown prince as the new king and keep him in the Chinese armyfor his own safety. Hong Liangpin (1826–96) similarly suggested that China select a member of the royal house of Chosŏn to guide the Chinese forces and investhim as the new king once the crisis was resolved. Yu Lianyuan (1844–1901) endorsed this proposal and suggested that the new investiture should be conductedinP’yŏngyang.YanYouzhangfurtherarguedthatChinashouldimmediatelytransformChosŏnintoaprovince(Ch.,gaijianxingsheng)andshouldappointofficialsand officers to govern it, yet treat the king and his officials generously and allow them to maintain their Korean titles. While Ding regarded this policy as a way of“publicizingourgreatjusticetoallpeopleunderHeaven,”YansawitaslegitimateandjustifiablebecauseChosŏnwasChina’sfanandhadconstitutedtwoChi-nesecounties—FuyuandLelang—undertheHanDynasty.⁷⁹The storm of officials’ opinions was triggered by the declaration of war against Japan on August 1, but it was also a result of political struggles between bureau-cratic factions in Beijing. The majority of these officials were low-ranking members of the Pure Stream group, which drew on the thinking of the minister of theGrand Council, Li Hongzao (1820–97), and Emperor Guangxu’s instructor Weng Tonghe. Embracing a hawkish approach, both men saw Li Hongzhang as theirpolitical adversary and accused him and his protégés, such as Ma Jianzhong, Liu Mingchuan (1836–96), and Ding Ruchang, of being afraid to fight the Japanese.With the rise of Weng and Li Hongzao in October, their followers became more active with more dramatic proposals during the second half of the war.The core argument of these officials was that China could not lose Chosŏn, for it would mean the disintegration of the Great Qing itself. In fighting for Chosŏn,the Great Qing would fight not only for its territorial integrity but also for its own dignity and legitimacy as the Middle Kingdom and the Heavenly Dynasty. In thecontext of war, the ideology of all-under-Heaven became central for these scholar-officials, who saw the fate of the Great Qing at stake. Pragmatists dealing withthe Japanese, Russians, and British on China’s frontiers regarded the Pure Stream officials as armchair strategists with unrealistic plans, but the latter were unde-niably accurate in their assessment of China’s frontier security. The nightmare scenario they had sketched out in late 1894, in which China would encounter seri-ous challenges in Manchuria, Outer Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan from colonial powers such as Russia and Britain, became true in the postwar period.China’s loss of territory halted only once the People’s Republic of China clearly claimed its territorial domain and defined China’s borders. In this sense, China didnot become a nation-state until the 1950s, when Korea—represented by two sovereign states because of the Cold War—became completely independent from theChinese empire.Losing the Eastern Fence: The Conclusion of the Treaty of ShimonosekiWhile the war was escalating on China’s eastern frontier, people on the western frontier in Tibet looked on with concern. On February 22, 1895, the imperial com-missioner to Tibet, Kuihuan (1850–?), submitted a memorial to Emperor Guangxu, reporting that the thirteenth Dalai Lama (1876–1933) had led lamas and TibetanBuddhists in reading sutras at primary monasteries after hearing that Japan had broken international law to invade Chosŏn. The Dalai Lama hoped their prayersbeforeBuddhaSakyamuniwouldbringblessingstothe“greatemperor”andhis“greatforces,”bywhichChinawoulddefeattheJapanese“clowns”inChosŏn.⁸⁰On April 17, ten days after the emperor learned about the Dalai Lama’s prayers through Kuihuan’s memorial, the Chinese representative Li Hongzhang, afterpainful negotiations with his Japanese counterparts, Itō Hirobumi and Mutsu Munemitsu (1844–97), signed a peace treaty at Shimonoseki in Japan.The text of the treaty was written in Chinese, Japanese, and English. The first article, which was drafted by Japan, stated that “China recognizes definitively thefullandcompleteindependenceandautonomy[Ch.,wanquanwuquezhidulizizhu]ofCorea,andinconsequence,thepaymentoftributeandtheperformanceofceremoniesandformalitiesbyCoreatoChinainderogationofsuchindependenceandautonomy,shallwhollyceaseforthefuture.”⁸¹UnliketheTreatyofKangh-wa of 1876, which was written only in Chinese and Japanese, the English version of the Treaty of Shimonoseki explicitly defined Chosŏn’s “full and complete
independence and autonomy,” erasing any ambiguity about the status of the country in the Chinese or Japanese versions. In addition, the terminology of the treatyreflected Qing China’s transformation over the previous two centuries. In the treaty, the “Great Qing” was fully equal to “China” and “Zhongguo,” although thepreface and the end of the Japanese and Chinese versions of the treaty addressed the Qing as the “Great Qing Empire” in Chinese characters as a counterpart tothe“GreatJapaneseEmpire.”WhereastheJapanesetextcalledtheQingthe“countryoftheQing”(J.,Shinkoku),theChinesetextreferredtoitas“Zhongguo”andthe English version as “China.” In this sense, what the treaty terminated was not only the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship that had existed since 1637 but alsothe general Sino-Korean Zongfan arrangement that had arguably started with Jizi.When the news that Li Hongzhang had signed the treaty reached Beijing, the thousands of scholars attending the triennial imperial civil-service examinationwere dismayed at the humiliating terms. They began to submit long and passionate petitions to the emperor via the Grand Censorate. The majority of these peti-tions were signed by more than fifty scholars from different provinces, and they called for the annulment of the treaty and a continuation of the war with Japan.The scholars emphasized Chosŏn’s strategic position as China’s “eastern fence” and its historical significance for the rise of the Great Qing. The petitions echoedthe fervent tone of the Pure Stream bureaucrats.On May 1, Wang Rongxian, Hong Jiayu, and Bao Xinzeng, three candidate officials from the Ministry of Personnel, submitted a long petition in which they out-lined the grave dangers that each article of the Treaty of Shimonoseki posed for China. Observing that the treaty made Chosŏn equal to China but subordinate toJapan,thethreeofficialsexpressedtheirfrustrationthat“asimplesentenceofatreaty”couldterminateChina’slong-termrelationshipwithChosŏn,“afanforal-most three hundred years that has embodied the superb achievements of Emperors Taizu [Nurhaci] and Taizong [Hongtaiji] and received kindness from otheremperorsforgenerations.”⁸²Twodayslater,tenlow-rankingofficialsfromtheDirectorateofEducationsubmittedajointpetitionviaWengTonghe.Theybitterlyreviewed China’s recent history of losing “our Burma” to Britain, “our Annam” to France, “our northern Heilong River” (the Amur River) to Russia, and “ourRyukyu”andChosŏntoJapan,concludingthat“weoncehadmanyfaninthefourquartersoftheworld,butwehavelostallofthemwithinthepastdecades.”⁸³They further argued that China’s cession of Taiwan and Liaodong to Japan would be a prologue to further surrenders of China’s territory to foreign states, surren-dersthatwouldbemuchworsethanthelossofouterfanonChina’speriphery.Astheseofficialssawit,theGreatQingwascollapsingalongitsfrontiers.Buteven as petitions such as these were flooding Beijing, the exchange of ratifications of the Sino-Japanese treaty took place at Yantai in Shandong Province on May8, 1895.Redefining Chosŏn and China: The Qing-Korean Treaty of 1899 and Its AftermathA Ritual Dilemma: Chosŏn’s Proposal to Negotiate a Treaty with ChinaThe Treaty of Shimonoseki terminated the Sino-Korean court-to-court hierarchy, but it did not change the countries’ state-to-state relationship. The post-1895political framework between the two countries, therefore, was not a completely new arrangement; rather, it represented the institutionalization of the survivingsection of the dual network. The two sides accomplished this institutionalization by negotiating a new and equal treaty. The original proposal for the treaty camefrom the Korean monarch, who was increasingly losing power to his Japanese advisers after the war. On January 7, 1895, as Japan approached victory in the war,the king of Chosŏn performed ceremonies at Chongmyo, the royal ancestral shrine in Hansŏng. The monarch announced “Great Laws” (K., Hongbŏm), callinghimself“emperor”(K.,chim;Ch.,zhen)andexplainingthathehaddecidedto“cutoffthethoughtofbeingdependentuponthecountryoftheQinginordertolaythe foundation for autonomy and independence.” In addition to ending the Qing’s authority—or suzerainty, as many scholars prefer to call it—over Chosŏn, the
king’sfourteenitemsinitiatedaself-strengtheningreformdesignedbyJapanandcarriedoutunderJapanesesupervision.⁸⁴In the postwar period, Japan’s increasing domination of Chosŏn progressively curtailed the country’s autonomy and independence, leading to serious politicaltensions between the king and his Japanese advisers. In October 1895 a mob of Japanese rioters entered the palace, killing Queen Min, the king’s closest adviserfor decades, and mercilessly burning her body. The Japanese atrocities frightened the king, who could foresee his fate as a puppet under draconian Japanese con-trol. Adhering to the Japanese schedule, on January 1, 1896, Chosŏn adopted the solar calendar and the new regnal title Kŏnyang, the first independent regnal titleof the dynasty since its establishment in 1392. However, realizing that these reforms could not ensure his personal safety, the king and the crown prince escapedto the Russian legation in February and sought asylum, leaving the fate of the Korean court uncertain and intensifying the competition between Russia and Japanon the peninsula.Chosŏn had won its independence with the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Shimonoseki, but at that point it had not yet signed a treaty with China that would haveidentified its independent status. In June 1896 the Korean interpreter Pak T’ae-yŏng visited Tang Shaoyi, the manager of Chinese commercial affairs and de factoChinese representative in Hansŏng, to convey the king’s wish to negotiate a treaty with China. Tang did not refuse the proposal but suggested that the talksshouldbeconductedlater,asChosŏncouldnotberegardedasanautonomousandindependentcountryaslongasthekingwasunderRussianprotection.⁸⁵Theking’soverturesposedachallengetoBeijing,whichbelievedthat“Chosŏn,asourdynasty’slongtimefan,shouldnotberegardedasequaltoWesterncountries.” According to the Zongli Yamen, China would agree to negotiate new “trade regulations” with Chosŏn, which would allow the country to maintain con-sulsinChina,butChinawouldnotpermititsformerfantosigntreatieswithit,sendministerstoBeijing,orpresentlettersofcredencetotheChineseemperor.Instead,Chinawouldsendaconsul-generaltoHansŏngtomanageChineseaffairs.Inthisway,Chinacould“preservethesystemofshuguo”(Ch.,cunshuguozhiti).TheYamentelegraphedLiHongzhangforadvice.Li,whowasonapostwartriptoEuropeandtheUnitedStates,endorsedtheplanbutsuggestedthat,tomaintainChina’sdignity,theChineseconsul-general(apostforwhichLirecommendedTangShaoyi)shouldnotpresenthiscredentialstotheking.⁸⁶Thisat-tempt to preserve the prewar hierarchical system characterized Beijing’s policy toward Chosŏn in the immediate postwar period.Similarly, Korean policymakers generally continued to make use of traditional discourse as they adjusted their country’s relations with China. In a conversationbetweentheseniorofficialChoPyŏng-chik(1833–1901)andTangShaoyiinJuly1896,ChostatedthatChosŏnhadbeena“fanandshuguoofthecentraldynastyfor a long time,” and that it was not the king who had originally sought the autonomous status outlined for Chosŏn in the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Chosŏn, Choemphasized,hadbeencoercedbyitspowerfulneighbor(namely,Japan)intodisclaimingthestatusofChina’sshuguo,buttheking“appreciatedthedeepfavorsof the imperial dynasty and would like to negotiate a new treaty to resume the concord.” Cho expressed concern that by refusing to negotiate a treaty with Chosŏn,China might be signaling its refusal to acknowledge Chosŏn’s autonomy. Tang responded that negotiating a treaty and recognizing Chosŏn’s autonomy were twodifferentmatters,becausetheformer“meansonlynotfollowingtheoldregulations,”butthelatter“meansthatthetwocountriesareequaltoeachother.”⁸⁷Theirconversation yielded nothing.In November 1896 Tang informed the Zongli Yamen that the king—Tang refused to acknowledge the monarch’s claim to emperorship—would send represen-tatives to Beijing for treaty negotiations. This prospect forced China to confront the sensitive question of ritual procedures between Korean representatives andthe imperial court in the postwar transitional context. If the self-declared emperor of Chosŏn dispatched a representative to Beijing for treaty negotiations, the rep-resentative, unlike a prewar tributary emissary, would no longer need to perform the ceremony of kowtow to the emperor, which would compromise China’s dig-nity. Given this ritual conundrum, Tang argued that it would be prudent for Beijing to appoint a consul-general to Hansŏng who could negotiate a treaty with
Chosŏn and protect the Chinese merchants and civilians; the affairs of Chinese subjects in Korea had been temporarily supervised by the British consul-general,John N. Jordan (1852–1925), on China’s commission. Endorsing Tang’s proposal, Beijing appointed Tang himself as “Chinese consul-general in Chosŏn” (Ch.,ZhongguozhuzhaChaoxianzonglingshi).Tang’sprewarviewofSino-Koreanrelationsmadeitenormouslydifficultforhimtoadjusttothepostwararrangement.Asheputit,“Althoughthesystemisnowdifferent,itisinconvenientforustosignanequaltreatywithChosŏngiventhatitwasafanofourdynastyforcenturies.”⁸⁸Inthefollowingyears,Tangdidhisbesttopreserveahierarchybetweenthetwocountries.⁸⁹Reluctance and Nostalgia: China’s First Minister to KoreaIn January 1897 Tang Shaoyi learned that the king had appointed Sŏng Ki-un as Chosŏn’s representative for the treaty negotiations but had canceled the plan tosend Sŏng to Beijing once he heard of Tang’s appointment. Tang visited Sŏng and informed him that Chinese officials would not talk with him if he went directlyto Beijing. In a conversation with Jordan, the British consul-general, Tang declared that he intended to focus solely on preventing the Korean representative fromvisitingBeijing,andtothatendhewantedtocommissionJordantocontinuetomanageChinesecommercialaffairs.⁹⁰The dramatic changes in Chosŏn’s political situation in 1897 prompted the Korean Foreign Office to pursue a more active agenda toward the goal of making atreaty with China. In the two years after the war, Chosŏn had begun to construct an image of itself as an independent country by removing or refashioning theicons of China’s supremacy in the Zongfan era. The Korean government converted the Gate of Receiving Imperial Favors into the Gate of Independence (K., Tong-nim mun), buried the Samjŏndo stele, changed the South Palace Annex into the Temple of Heaven (K., Ch’ŏndan), and replaced the Chinese managers ofChosŏn’scustomswithRussians.Theseeffortsconstitutedaprocessof“decenteringtheMiddleKingdom,”asAndreSchmidhasdescribedit.⁹¹In August 1897, six months after returning to his palace from the refuge of the Russian legation, the Korean emperor adopted the new regnal title Kwangmu. OnOctober 12 the sovereign called his country the “Great Korea” (K., Taehan) after performing ceremonies of sacrifice toward Heaven and Earth. Western diplomatssoonformallyrecognizedthenewnameofthecountry.⁹²FromTangShaoyi’sperspective,theKoreansovereignwasarrogatingtohimselfanillegitimateem-peror-ship, and his attitude toward treaty negotiations with Chosŏn became even more conservative. But the new Korean empire did not pin its hopes entirely onTang.In March 1898 the Russian minister in Beijing forwarded to the Zongli Yamen Korea’s expression of willingness to send a representative to Beijing and to re-ceive a Chinese counterpart in Hansŏng. The Yamen instructed Tang to block the dispatch of a Korean representative and decided to send a representative toHansŏng first. Tang suggested that China send an official with a fourth-level rank, as opposed to the third-level representatives of other countries in Korea, inorder to show the “difference between the owner and the servant in the past days” and to ensure that the “system” would not be violated. In the meantime, theJapanese minister in Beijing, Yano Fumio (1851–1931), contacted the Zongli Yamen as a mediator for Sino-Korean contacts. The Yamen informed Yano thatChosŏncouldnegotiatewithTanginHansŏngfortraderegulationsandthatChinadidnotwanttoreceiverepresentativesofitsformershuguoinBeijing.⁹³Tangquickly contacted the Korean Foreign Office to discuss trade regulations, but the office refused on the grounds that a regulation was not a treaty—a retroactiveprotest against the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations, which fell far short of a treaty and had been dictated by the Chinese side.In July, Beijing realized that the situation was slipping out of its hands, when Tang reported that the Foreign Office of Korea had invited Jordan to ask the Britishminister in Beijing, Claude M. MacDonald (1852–1915), to serve as a broker. The Zongli Yamen told Tang that if Chosŏn insisted on sending a representative toBeijing, the representative should be a fourth-rank minister, and his credentials should be forwarded to the emperor by the Yamen; no audience with the emperorwouldbearranged,astheYamenwouldnegotiatepotentialtraderegulationswiththerepresentative.⁹⁴ThreeyearsaftertheSino-JapaneseWar,thehumiliating
end of China’s patriarchal superiority over Korea was still much on Chinese politicians’ minds, and the Zongli Yamen was still reluctant to treat Korea as a stateequal to China. As Tang saw it, allowing Hansŏng to send a minister to Beijing first would have “a detrimental effect on the relationship” given China’s status as a“big country.” To justify his concern, he pointed out that Britain and Spain, which were likewise “big countries,” had also preemptively dispatched their own rep-resentatives to their former subordinates—the United States and South American countries, respectively—once these subordinates had become autonomous(Ch.,zizhu).⁹⁵In China, the ambitious reform initiated by the Guangxu emperor in June 1898 reached its acme. Stimulated by the fiasco of the war, the reform aimed to mod-ernize China by changing outdated conventions. The young emperor believed that China’s relations with Chosŏn should change too. On August 5, at the emper-or’s instructions, the Grand Council telegraphed Tang that the emperor would allow Korea to send a minister to Beijing and would grant the minister an audience.The Zongli Yamen accordingly instructed Tang to inform Hansŏng that Korea could send its minister to China first, and that China would treat him with the cere-moniesappropriateto“friendlynations”(Ch.,youbang).ChinawoulddispatchitsownministertoKoreaforthesakeofreciprocity.⁹⁶Tang,however,chosenottoinformtheKoreansofBeijing’sdecision.⁹⁷In Beijing the emperor appointed Xu Shoupeng (?–1901) as the minister for Korea with a third-level rank and the title “imperial commissioner in the country ofChosŏn”(Ch.,ZhuzhaChaoxianguoqinchaidachen).ThistitlearousedconcernamongforeignministersinHansŏngbecauseitcarriedstrongZongfanconno-tations and smacked of colonialism. In a conversation with Tang, the British inspector general of Korean customs, John M. Brown (1835–1926), expressed hissuspicionthatChinastillregardedKoreaasitsshuguo,becauseBeijing’simperialcommissionersinTibetandMongoliaheldsimilartitles.TheRussianministerto Korea, Nikolai Matyunin (1849–1907), regarded Xu’s position as that of a second-rank minister, which was the highest rank among his counterparts in thediplomatic corps in Hansŏng. The Japanese, French, and German ministers were also disturbed by Xu’s title and the format of the Chinese credentials, whichusedtheoldterm“Chosŏn”ratherthanthenewlyadopted“Han”forKorea.⁹⁸ThediplomatssawsuchlanguageasasignthatChinamightnotendorsethenewpostwar political arrangement in the peninsula.Indeed, what to call Korea and its monarch presented a challenge to the Chinese side. In the end, it was Zhang Yinhuan, the former minister to the UnitedStates, who drafted Xu’s letter of credence on the basis of the first article of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, as instructed by Emperor Guangxu. Ma Jianzhong, themanwhohadbeenheavilyinvolvedinKoreanaffairsinthe1880s,offeredsomerevisionstothedraft.⁹⁹Theopeningsentenceoftheletterread,“TheGreatEm-perorofthecountryoftheGreatQingrespectfullygiveshisgreetingstotheGreatMonarchofthecountryoftheGreatKorea.”¹⁰⁰Theterm“GreatMonarch”(Ch.,dajunzhu)indicatedtheking’sinferiorpositionvis-à-visthe“GreatEmperor”(Ch.,dahuangdi)ofChina,andthedraftcredentialalsousedamodifiedformatforthe conventional honorific elevation that still elevated the Qing above Korea.EmperorGuangxudislikedZhang’sproposedformatbuthimselfwasatalossastohowtorefertoKoreaanditssovereign.¹⁰¹Whentheemperorexpressedhisconcerns to Zhang, Zhang explained that Chosŏn had renamed itself “Great Korea” without informing China, so the draft credential was simply based on theTreatyofShimonosekiratherthanonthedomesticchangesinKorea.¹⁰²SubsequentlytheemperorinstructedTangShaoyitoinvestigatewhichterm—“GreatMonarch” or “Great Emperor”—Britain, Japan, and Russia used in their letters of credence to Korea, for he wanted the Chinese letter to follow whatever practiceothercountrieshadadopted.¹⁰³Becauseoftheemperor’sopen-mindedness,thefinalversionoftheletteraddressedtheKoreanmonarchasthe“GreatEmperor”and placed “Great Qing” and “Great Korea” on the same line. The Korean letter of credence to China, which the first Korean minister to China presented to Em-peror Guangxu in 1902, adopted the same equal format. This change in honorifics was the first since 1637 and represented a watershed moment in Qing-Chosŏn
relations.As the diplomatic changes were inching forward, Empress Dowager Cixi suddenly staged a coup on September 21, 1898, placing the emperor under house ar-rest and suspending his reforms. Despite the political chaos, Xu Shoupeng was allowed to carry on with his work. His title changed from “imperial commis-sioner”to“envoyplenipotentiary,”andhisexplicitmissionwastonegotiateatreatywiththeKoreanForeignOffice.¹⁰⁴Thischangeentirelyerasedtheambiguityof Xu’s former title and the worries of his Japanese and Western counterparts in Hansŏng. The Manchu ruling house eventually, if reluctantly, accepted the factthat Chosŏn was a country equal to the Great Qing.Before he departed for Korea, Xu drafted a treaty consisting of fourteen articles. He commented that China had suffered from unfair treaties with other coun-tries, in particular regarding extraterritoriality and tariff agreements, and would be rectifying these imbalances in its new treaties, starting with the one with Korea.Xu was determined to pursue an equal treaty with Korea for the sake of China’s interests, but at the same time he revealed his traditional bias: “Korea was China’sfanandshuguointhepastanditwasnotKorea’soriginalwishtobeautonomous.Thecountryissmallandsurroundedbypowerfulneighbors.Weshoulddoourbest to cherish it, rather than gain extra advantages from it.” With this mindset, Xu wanted to make sure that both countries could enjoy the right of most-favored-na-tionstatusintradewitheachother.¹⁰⁵WhileXuwasgettingreadytoembarkonhistriptoKorea,WuBaochu(1869–1913),sonofGen.WuChangqing,composedaprefacetoabookentitledThreeStoriesofKorea(Ch.,AoyiChaoxiansanzhong),writtenbyZhouJialu(1846–1909),whohadservedasanassistanttoGeneralWuwhenthelatterwenttoHansŏngin 1882 to suppress the mutiny. In the preface, Wu Baochu reviewed China’s humiliating defeat in Korea in 1895 and argued that China should have integratedKoreaintoChina’shouseholdsystemin1882andconvertedthecountryintoprefecturesandcountiesofChina(Ch.,jiqitudierjunxianzhi).HewasdismayedthatChinanowhadtodispatcharepresentativetoKoreafortreatynegotiations,whichmadeKorea“looklikeanenemyofChina.”¹⁰⁶WuofferedapictureofChina’spresence in Chosŏn that was full of nostalgia, frustration, and uncertainty.Negotiating with a Friendly Nation: The Sino-Korean Treaty of 1899Xu arrived in Hansŏng on January 25, 1899, with the intention of “extending China’s benevolence of cherishing the small” and was granted an audience with theKorean emperor on February 1. On the day of the audience, Xu was picked up by a sedan chair to be taken to the palace. When he entered the audience hall, hebowed once toward the emperor and bowed again as he approached the emperor. The emperor, wearing Western-style clothes, stood up to shake hands with Xuand to receive the Chinese letter of credence. Xu then read aloud a short tribute to the emperor, who in return showed his gratitude to the Chinese minister. Afterthis,theyshookhandsagain,andXubowedforthethirdtimebeforehewasescortedbacktohislegation.¹⁰⁷Theceremony,conductedalongthelinesof“West-ern common rules” at the state-to-state level, was the first ritual performance between the Korean head of state and a state representative of China in the postwarperiod, and it marked the definitive end of centuries-long Zongfan rituals between the two countries.Following the audience, Xu started treaty negotiations with Pak Che-sun (1858–1916), the minister of the Foreign Office. In September the two sides signed atradetreaty(K.,TaeHan’gukTaeCh’ŏnggukt’ongsangchoyak)containingfifteenarticles.Article2statedthateachcountrywoulddispatchrepresentativestoresidein the capital and treaty ports of the other and would enjoy most-favored-nation treatment. Article 5 endowed both with the right of consular jurisdiction. Article 12allowed them to negotiate new regulations for border demarcation and to trade on the frontier in Manchuria. The agreement served as a replacement for the 1882Sino-Korean Regulations as the first equal treaty between the two countries, but China made notable concessions. For example, China was forbidden to exportopium to Korea, but similar restrictions did not apply to Korean exports to China. Xu explained to Emperor Guangxu that he did not challenge such items because
hefoundthat“theKoreanmonarchandsubordinatesstillworshipChinaintheirminds,whichcontributedtothesuccessofthenegotiations.”¹⁰⁸Aftersigningthetreaty,Xucommentedthat“Korea,China’sfanandshuguointhepast,hasnowbecomeafriendlynationofChina,andnothingcanchangethesituation.Recallingthepast—whatapityitis!”¹⁰⁹ThetwocountriesratifiedthetreatyinHansŏnginDecember,andXuwasappointedbyBeijingasthefirstChi-nese minister to Korea. In stark contrast to Tang Shaoyi, who had struggled with reconciling China’s past glory with the reality of the first years after the Sino-Japanese war, Xu in 1899 merely presented himself as a Western-style minister and quickly busied himself with reestablishing the Chinese diplomatic network inKorea in order to protect Chinese citizens and interests.Korea would eventually send its minister to Beijing in reciprocity, but the dispatch was postponed because of China’s deteriorating situation. The Boxer Upris-ing was sweeping across northwestern Shandong, and it began to spread toward Tianjin and Beijing. The anti-Christian uprising eventually resulted in a diplo-matic and political disaster for China in August 1900, when the Eight-Nation Alliance occupied Beijing right after Emperor Guangxu and Empress Dowager Cixihad fled to Xi’an. In October, Li Hongzhang began to negotiate with Britain, the United States, Japan, Russia, Italy, France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. In viewof the dramatic changes in China, the Korean emperor, who was under close Japanese supervision, wrote a letter to the Meiji emperor asking Japan to protect Ko-reaninterestsinChinaduringthenegotiations.¹¹⁰InJanuary1901BeijingrecalledXuShoupengfromHansŏngtoBeijingtoassistLiinthepeacenegotiations.Before leaving Korea, Xu named one of his counselors, Xu Taishen, as acting minister.In late July the Zongli Yamen changed its Chinese name to Waiwu bu, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, legitimizing itself as China’s sole foreign office. XuShoupeng was appointed as a minister of the ministry. On September 7, 1901, Li signed the final protocol with the foreign states, and the Chinese empire teeteredon the edge of collapse. Li died two months later, leaving his lifelong dream of modernizing China and his many plans to protect Korea unfulfilled. With the returnof Emperor Guangxu and Empress Dowager Cixi to the Forbidden City in January 1902, Korea was finally ready to send its first minister to take his place amid therubble of the city of Beijing.The Korean government appointed Pak Che-sun, Xu Shoupeng’s treaty negotiation counterpart and the former commissioner in Tianjin, as the first Korean min-isterplenipotentiarytoChina.¹¹¹OnSeptember30,1902,PakpresentedhisletterofcredencetoEmperorGuangxuintheForbiddenCityfollowingatailoredWestern-styleprocedure.¹¹²Theceremonyofkowtow,performedbyKoreantributaryemissariestotheemperorofChinaforcenturies,hadcometoanend.Inter-estingly, the Chinese official records on the audience are very brief, exactly like those on the first meeting between Emperor Tongzhi and foreign ministers in 1873.PerhapsthecourtsawinthenewritualsbothareminderoftheChineseempire’spastgloryvis-à-visitsouterfanandacomplexchallengetoChina’sdignity.Afterthe audience, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs instructed Xu Taishen to send two Korean-language interpreters to Beijing to facilitate its further communicationswithPak.¹¹³TheKoreanlanguagethusjoinedthelistoftheofficialforeignlanguagesoftheChineseforeignministry.Anew—iffleeting—bilateralrelationshiphad begun.Chinese Zongfanism and Korean Colonialism in the Borderland: Sino-Korean Contacts in South China and ManchuriaThe transformation of the Sino-Korean relationship was not as clear-cut in China’s provinces as it was in Beijing. In the coastal areas of South China, local offi-cials still followed prewar routines to manage affairs regarding Korea. In December 1895, for instance, Governor Liao Shoufeng (1836–1901) in Zhejiang Provincereported to Emperor Guangxu that officials in Wenzhou had rescued twenty-eight Koreans from a shipwreck in October and provided the victims with clothes andfood, “following conventions,” eventually returning them to Chosŏn via Shanghai. Liao called these Koreans “barbarians of the country of Chosŏn who had suf-feredfromtheshipwreck”(Ch.,Chaoxianguonanfan),usingthesameZongfanwordingasthatusedintheeighteenthcentury.¹¹⁴TheWenzhoucasebecamea
model for similar cases in the following years.In May 1901 Governor Yu Lianyuan in Zhejiang reported that fifteen Korean fishermen had suffered a shipwreck on China’s coast. After consulting the Wenzhouprecedent,hefollowedtheconventionsofsavingandtakingcareofthemandsentthemontoShanghai.¹¹⁵YuhadbeenapillarofthePureStreaminthe1890sand had been among those who called for Beijing to protect Chosŏn for the sake of the integrity of the Great Qing. By this point, China had signed its new treatywithKoreaandYuhadbeenpromotedtogovernor,butinYu’smindChosŏn—thetermheused,ratherthan“GreatKorea”or“Han”—wasstillafanoftheGreatQingandtheKoreanfishermenbelongedtothecategoryof“barbarians.”Yu’ssuccessorsinZhejiangfrom1902to1908embracedthesameapproach.¹¹⁶Inal-most all cases the Korean victims were referred to as “barbarians” who were beneficiaries of China’s policy of “cherishing the small” or “cherishing the men fromafar.” In provincial practice, then, Zongfan norms were no weaker than they had been in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.In contrast to the benign and almost imperceptible postwar transformation of the Sino-Korean relationship in South China, the shift in the border areas inManchuria was manifested in blood, fire, and death. According to the reports of Chinese officials in Manchuria in 1907, Koreans started to attack and loot Chinesevillages along the border of Jilin and Mukden in the late 1890s, and the situation deteriorated dramatically after 1901, when Beijing was occupied by the Eight-NationAllianceandManchuriawasoccupiedbyRussia.¹¹⁷ChinesebanditssimilarlyattackedKoreanvillagesontheborder.ThesharpriseinSino-Koreanborderconflicts signaled the local disorder caused by the collapse of the Zongfan arrangement from the top down. For local and nonofficial forces on both sides of theborder, impoverished peasants in particular, practical concerns and the pressures of daily needs, such as the search for fertile land, food, livestock, and energy re-sources, prevailed over national relationships and state interests. With the sudden absence of Chinese and Korean authority, the borderland in Manchuria becamea perfect location for Chinese and Korean bandits and other illegal armed groups to build up their strength and extract goods from local farmers and settlers.Between early 1901 and early 1905, officials in Mukden and Jilin reported to Beijing at least a dozen cases of serious cross-border crime committed by Koreans,including armed robberies, burglaries, shootings, homicides, rapes, kidnappings, and arson. Chen Zuoyan, a local Chinese official in Yanji in eastern Jilin, re-portedthataKoreanattackagainstaChineseareainMarch1901claimedelevenChineselivesandcausedalossof4,337.81taelsofsilver.¹¹⁸AsmoreKoreanimmigrants poured over the border into Chinese territory, the situation continued to worsen. In July 1903 Chen Zuoyan reported a series of misdeeds by Koreansettlers and called on Beijing to take urgent measures to protect Chinese interests. A local report revealed that a Korean armed attack against four villages in Yan-jininthefallof1903haddamaged211ChineseandKoreanhousesandcostmorethan19,546.46taelsofsilver.¹¹⁹Inthemeantime,Chinesebanditscontinuedtocross the border rivers to pillage Korean villages, and on the Chinese side of the border the Chinese pawns of local officials extracted money from Korean immi-grants.AtleastfourinstancesofillegalloggingorkidnappingontheKoreanside,forexample,werecommittedbyChinesebandits.¹²⁰InAugust1903,empha-sizing that “Korea is different from what it was in the past,” the Chinese minister in Hansŏng, Xu Taishen, suggested to Beijing that China should implementcountermeasures to check Korean expansion into Chinese territory in Yanji, an area the Koreans and Japanese began to refer to as “Kando” (Ch., Jiandao). Britainand Japan, which had formed an alliance in 1902, informed Xu that Russian machinations were behind the attempt to settle Koreans in this area. In the followingtwoyears,theChineseandKoreanforeignministriessoughtinvaintosettleborderdisputesinManchuria.¹²¹Many historical and geopolitical factors contributed to the violent conflicts in the border areas. The absence of any demarcation of the point at which the Yaluand Tumen Rivers converged—marking the traditional boundary between the two countries—had been a problem since the Kangxi period in the eighteenth cen-tury. Although a borderline existed, it was not clearly or legally delineated, as it would be in modern times between two sovereign states. In the first half of thetwentieth century, this issue evolved into a dispute that involved not just China and Korea but Japan as well. Border conflicts were also fueled by China’s opening
of Manchuria in the 1870s, when the Manchu court abolished the two-hundred-year-old policy of segregating Manchuria from inner China and encouraged peopleto immigrate to the area for cultivation. The new policy and the rich resources in the area also attracted thousands of poor Korean peasants, who crossed theTumenRivertocultivatethewildernessintheconvergencezone,forcingChinatodealwiththeseforeigncitizens.¹²²EmperorGuangxuhadinstructedlocaloffi-cials in 1882 to tolerate the illegal Korean immigrants as long as they had no intention of encroaching on China’s borders. Later, in order to solve the mountingproblems, China started to assimilate Korean immigrants into the Chinese populace by ordering them to cut their hair in the Chinese style and to wear Chineseclothes.ThispolicyprovokedstrongprotestfromKorea.¹²³The accumulating conflicts led to a skirmish in the spring of 1904, when Chinese forces under the command of the officer Hu Dianjia defeated a group of Ko-rean soldiers who had crossed the Tumen River with the purpose of occupying more land and mobilizing the Korean immigrants to break away from Chinesegovernance. This was the first time that China used force to resolve a dispute with Korea in the post-1895 period. The skirmish resulted in China’s resumption ofterritorial and administrative control over the area and forced Korea to return to peace talks. On June 15, 1904, Hu Dianjia, Chen Zuoyan, and three Korean offi-cials signed an agreement with the title “Regulation on Sino-Korean Border Affairs with the Purpose of Solving Problems Arising from the Conflict” (Ch., Zhong-Han bianjie shanhou zhangcheng). Its name notwithstanding, the agreement primarily served to tie up remaining unresolved issues from the spring skirmish; itwasnotastate-to-statetreatyforthelong-termstrategicgoalofsettlingborderdisputes.¹²⁴At the time the Sino-Korean agreement was signed, Japan was fighting with Russia for control of Manchuria. After it finally prevailed over Russia, Japan publiclymade Korea into its protectorate in November 1905. The Korean minister to Beijing was recalled, and all affairs regarding Korean contacts with China were trans-ferred to the management of the Japanese legation in Beijing. In February 1906, with the closing of the American, British, and French legations in Hansŏng andthe arrival of the first Japanese residential general, Itō Hirobumi, China also recalled its third minister to Korea, Zeng Guangquan.In Manchuria Sino-Korean border conflicts continued to increase, and the local Chinese officials believed that Korea was aggressively expanding to the Chineseside, where Korean immigrants significantly outnumbered the Chinese population. In 1907 Wu Luzhen (1880–1911), the Chinese investigator in charge of Sino-Korean border affairs, reported that there were more than fifty thousand Koreans on the Chinese side of the Tumen River, compared to fewer than ten thousandChinese residents. According to Wu’s investigation of thirty-nine villages in the Helongyu area, the Korean settlers had established a total of 5,990 households inthesevillages,dwarfingthe264Chinesehouseholds.WucommentedthatthisancestralterritoryoftheQinghadalmostbecome“Chosŏn’scolony”(Ch.,Chaox-ianzhiminzhidi).¹²⁵AlthoughKoreawasfallingvictimtoJapanesecolonialism,KoreanimmigrantshadservedasthevanguardintheKoreancolonizationofChi-nese territory in Manchuria. This type of Korean colonization subsequently served as a vehicle of Japan’s colonial expansion into the vast inner land of Manchuriaover the following three decades.In order to protect the interests of Chinese merchants in Korea, Beijing appointed Ma Tingliang as the consul-general to Korea in 1909, a year after EmperorGuangxu and Empress Dowager Cixi died and the new emperor was inaugurated with the regnal title of Xuantong. China was in the throes of violent domestic up-heaval through a series of reforms and rebellions, so the relationship with Korea was not a priority for the Beijing government. On August 22, 1910, Korea was an-nexed by Japan. Beijing made no official comment on the annexation. In Hansŏng, Ma instructed Chinese citizens to follow the new orders issued by the Japaneseauthorities, and he dismissed the police forces in Chinese settlements.Beijing’s silence notwithstanding, the Japanese annexation was alarming to many Chinese, who felt the same colonial threat hanging over China. Dai Jitao(1891–1949), who had been educated in Japan and would later become an assistant to Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), published an editorial in a Shanghai newspaper in
August 1910 criticizing Beijing’s indifferent attitude to this tragic chapter in Korea’s history. Invoking the time-honored Sino-Korean relationship since the Jizi pe-riod,Daideclaredthat“KoreahasbeenChina’sshuguoformorethanthreethousandyears,itslandsliewithinChina’sborders[Ch.,jiangyu],itspeoplebelongtothe same ethnic group as the Chinese, its characters are Chinese, and its political customs are Chinese legacies.” Lamenting Korea’s tragic fate, Dai warned thatunlessChinarouseditself,ittoowouldsoonsufferaJapaneseinvasioninthepolitical,military,andindustrialarenas.¹²⁶InManchuria,thegovernor-generaloftheThreeNortheasternProvinces,Xiliang(1853–1917),wasalarmedbyJapan’s“colonialpolicy”(Ch.,zhiminzhengce)to-ward China, enacted through the Koreans who continued to cross the border to occupy Chinese land. In September and October 1910, Xiliang reported, morethan thirty thousand Korean immigrants were living among the Chinese residents on China’s side of the border. The governor-general emphasized that sincethese Korean immigrants had become Japanese citizens upon the Japanese annexation of Korea in August, they were no longer subject to Chinese jurisdiction butratheransweredtotheJapaneseconsul.Xiliangarguedthatthischangewould“harmoursovereignty”(Ch.,sunwozhuquan),andthat“thethousandsofKoreanimmigrantswouldplaytheleadinJapan’sannexationofManchuria.”HesuggestedthatChinausethenewlyissuedNationalityRegulationsoftheGreatQing(Ch.,DaQingguojitiaoli)toconverttheKoreanimmigrantsintoChinesecitizensinordertomaketheterritorialborderlinedistinctandsecure.¹²⁷In August 1911 Zhao Erxun (1844–1927), Xiliang’s successor, urged Beijing to heed Xiliang’s proposal and to naturalize the Korean immigrants on Chinese soil.Stressingthat“allthecountiesalongtheYaluRiver,whicharemorethanteninnumber,belongtoChina’sinnerland[Ch.,neidi],”ZhaoproposedthatChinatelltheKoreanimmigrantsto“becomecivilized”(Ch.,guihua)byapplyingforandobtainingChinesecitizenship.¹²⁸LikeXiliang,Zhaowasawarethattheissueofthenationality of the considerable Korean immigrant population was inextricably linked to China’s sovereignty. Zhao’s observation reveals that in the early 1910s, Chi-nese officials—at least those in Manchuria—perceived Sino-Korean relations purely on the state-to-state level. However, before Beijing could respond to Zhao’sproposal, the nationalist revolution broke out in Wuhan in October 1911, quickly leading to the collapse of the dynasty.
6
LOSING CHOSOŎN
The Rise of a Modern Chinese State, 1885–1911
Since the 1860s, China had struggled to provide Western states with an unequivocal definition of Chosŏn’s status. Its difficulties were rooted in the institutional discrepancies between the Zongfan mechanism and international law. The tacit understanding among these states was that China’s authority over Chosŏn was valid and real. Yet in the wake of Japan’s challenges in the 1880s and early 1890s, at a time when the world was entering the age of empires as a consequence of colonial powers’ quest for territorial acquisition, China took steps to modify its routine contacts with Chosŏn in an effort to save the fundamentals of the Zongfan order, which were arousing concern among other empires present in the region.¹ By the end of the 1880s, China found itself surrounded by Japanese and European colonial forces. Japan, Britain, and France had colonized or annexed China’s outer fan in East and Southeast Asia, in particular Ryukyu, Burma, and Vietnam, while Russia was encroaching on China’s territory in Central Asia, forcing China to provincialize Xinjiang in 1884. As a result, the frontiers of the politico-cultural Chinese empire that had encompassed China’s outer fan began to disappear, replaced by clear national borders between the Chinese state and its former outer fan .
The threat posed to China by the presence of rival powers in Chosŏn was not less than that which it faced at its other borders. China had two primary options in terms of its policy toward the outer fan. It could either provincialize Chosŏn by incorporating the country into its territory in the form of prefectures and counties, or it could supervise and protect it by harnessing China’s patriarchal authority. Both approaches won support from China’s leading scholars and officials. Beijing finally adopted an in-between policy: assisting Chosŏn with managing its diplomatic and commercial affairs and placing an imperial resident in Hansŏng. From the perspective of Western diplomats in East Asia, however, China was moving toward annexing Chosŏn under the guise of conventional Zongfan practices. This chapter shows that although China believed it was fulfilling its commitment to protect its shuguo, its policy turned out to cause increased tensions between Beijing and Hansŏng because of the rise of the Korean state in the international community and the impact of Korean nationalism within Chosŏn. After the termination of the Zongfan arrangement in 1895, both Qing China and Chosŏn Korea entered a new era as sovereign states. By withdrawing from its periphery in Chosŏn to its core in the Qing, the Chinese empire developed into a modern state and embarked on its own road to modernity.
Invoking the Zongfan Conventions: His Imperial Chinese Majesty’s Resident in Chosŏn
Maintaining Zongfanism from Within: Yuan Shikai in Chosŏn and the Ritual Conundrum
As the imperial commissioner of commercial affairs in Chosŏn, Chen Shu-tang successfully augmented his power in the fall of 1884, as described in the previous chapter, but he barely had time to exercise his new authority before an attempted coup took place in Hansŏng. On December 4, 1884, a group of pro-Japanese members of the Kaehwadang (Enlightenment Party) occupied the palace, killed several pro-Chinese officials, and claimed they were terminating the country’s hierarchical relations with China. These fervent nationalists, among them Hong Yŏng-sik (1855–84), Kim Ok-kyun (1851–94), and Pak Yŏng-hyo (1861–1939), won the strong support of the Japanese minister Takezoe Shinichirō (1842–1917), an assistant to Mori Arinori in the 1876 Sino-Japanese debate over Chosŏn’s status.
The coup, known as Kapsin jŏngbyŏn (the coup of the year of Kapsin), was a result of increasing conflict between China, Japan, and Western states, along with Korean domestic political struggles and strong Korean nationalism cultivated primarily by Japan. The coup’s leaders orchestrated the attack to coincide with
China’s dispatch of more troops to South China to fight the French in Vietnam. The dramatic and bloody nationalist revolution lasted only three days. Chinese troops led by Gen. Wu Zhaoyou successfully placed the king and members of the royal family under their protection and totally defeated the Kaehwadang and the Japanese forces in Hansŏng.²
Because there had been Chinese and Korean attacks on the Japanese legation and on Japanese citizens, and because the Korean court was in chaos, it was left to the Chinese and the Japanese to resolve the problems caused by the coup. The resulting Sino-Japanese talks again focused on Chosŏn’s international status.³ Tokyo sent Inoue Kaoru as the plenipotentiary to Hansŏng to conduct talks with the Chinese envoys Wu Dacheng and Xuchang. But Wu was not a plenipotentiary, so the negotiations were transferred to Tianjin and held between Li Hongzhang and Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909). The two sides signed a convention on April 18, 1885. Each agreed to pull its troops out of the peninsula within four months, to allow the king to hire officers from countries beyond China and Japan to train the Korean forces, and to notify the other of any decision to send troops to Chosŏn in the event of a serious disturbance.⁴ Japan thus obtained the legal right to send troops to Chosŏn, which paved the way for its military involvement in the Korean rebellion in 1894.
The coup considerably alarmed China. Ma Jianchang, the Chinese adviser to the king, suggested to Li Hongzhang that China should either allow Chosŏn to be independent from China and free from the current relationship or positively engage in its affairs by sending an able imperial resident to the country with Chinese forces so the resident can supervise certain affairs.⁵ Li responded that China should focus on overcoming its own crises first, but he agreed that China should strengthen the authority of its representative in Chosŏn in order to check encroachment by Japan and other powers. The result was a considerable expansion in the powers enjoyed by Chen’s successor, Yuan Shikai.
In November 1885, on Li’s recommendation, Beijing appointed Yuan the imperial resident in Chosŏn in charge of diplomatic and commercial intercourse (Ch., Qinming zhuzha Chaoxian zongli jiaoshe tongshang shiyi) and bestowed on him a third-level rank with the title of backup candidate for a taotai. According to Li, this new title endowed Yuan with the right to engage in diplomatic affairs in one way or another, which perfectly resolved the legal quagmire concerning the Chinese representative’s status. Yuan promised both Li and Beijing that he would do his best to protect the "eastern fence that has been a fan of China for generations."⁶ Over the following decade, Yuan put his words into practice along Zongfan lines, stirring up serious conflicts among diplomats in Chosŏn in the process.
The foreign diplomats in Hansŏng needed to establish whether Yuan’s appointment marked the beginning of a Chinese absorption of the country, a colonial policy like those pursued by Britain, France, Italy, and Germany in Africa. The English translation of Yuan’s title became a crucial issue in this regard. George C. Foulk (1856–93), the American chargé d’affaires ad interim, offered the translation charge of diplomatic and commercial intercourse, but it was rejected by an unidentified young American-educated assistant of Yuan (possibly Tang Shaoyi, 1862–1938, a graduate of Columbia University who reached the country along with Ma Jianchang and Paul Georg von Möllendorff in 1883). The assistant then put forward the translation his imperial Chinese majesty’s resident, Seoul, perhaps inspired by the American minister’s official title minister resident and consul general.⁷ When talks between Foulk, the British consul Edward C. Baber (1843–90), and the Japanese chargé d’affaires Takahira Kogorō (1854–1926) yielded no unanimous agreement on a translation, Yuan decided to use his assistant’s suggestion, abbreviated as H.I.C.M. Resident.⁸ Although the resident’s legitimacy and power derived from China’s imperial might, the resident himself was not part of the Manchu court. Nor was the Beiyang superintendent. Figure 6.1 illustrates the various channels of communication between China and Korea.
Yuan may not have realized that the title resident possessed strong connotations of an imperialist regime’s indirect rule over a region that would subsequently become a protectorate or colony of the empire. The British Empire, for instance, had accomplished its expansion into India by appointing a single British
resident or political agent to each princely state, the resident virtually controlling the state by offering advice to the local prince or chief. This type of indirect rule dated back to 1764 and was practiced until Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858.⁹ In the early 1880s, the title resident was still sensitive because of its connection to a colonial power’s territorial expansion. For example, in the spring of 1881, after France signed the Treaty of Bardo with the Tunisian bey Muhammad al-Sadiq (1813–82), the French consul general in Tunisia assumed the new title resident minister, or officially the French resident and delegate [to the bey] for external affairs, which triggered the country’s conversion into a French protectorate.¹⁰ In 1883 the French also began to set up a resident at Huế in Vietnam; this resident was the representative of the French protectorate and thus was more powerful than the Vietnamese king. In this context, when Yuan claimed to be a resident of the Chinese empire in Chosŏn, he certainly puzzled his Western counterparts, who had tacitly defined him as China’s consul-general or consul-general with diplomatic functions, ignoring any potential roles based on Chinese imperial authority.¹¹
FIGURE 6.1. Channels of official Sino-Korean communications after 1883
Yuan was not a minister, but his status as an imperial resident endowed him with more power than a minister would have held. Unlike a British resident in India or a French resident in Tunisia, Yuan in Chosŏn could exploit the term imperial in his title, as it carried the authority of the Chinese emperor, to whom the Chosŏn sovereign was subordinate in Zongfan terms. When Korean officials expressed concern over the breadth of Yuan’s power in the country, Yuan clarified that his aim was simply to justify the orthodox legitimacy of Chosŏn’s status as China’s subordinate country (Ch., zheng shubang mingfen).¹²
Yuan’s handling of his relations with the Korean court demonstrates the authority he claimed for himself. In September 1886, for example, he spent hours in a face-to-face meeting with the king, lecturing him on how to deal with the Port Hamilton incident. The port in southern Chosŏn had been occupied by Britain in 1885 amid British-Russian rivalry, triggering an intense dispute between Britain, Russia, Chosŏn, China, and Japan. Following China’s active intervention, the British fleet withdrew in 1887 on the agreement that no foreign power would occupy any part of Chosŏn’s territory in the future.¹³ Yuan’s observation of Korean court politics persuaded him that the king was weak, and Yuan even secretly proposed to Li Hongzhang that China replace the king with an able man from the Korean royal family.¹⁴ Not only did the king disapprove of Yuan’s behavior, but Yuan’s fellow diplomats also regarded his activities as violating diplomatic protocols and damaging Chosŏn’s sovereignty, aggravating relations between Yuan and other diplomats in Hansŏng.
Illustrative of these tensions were the new rituals Yuan performed to the king. In a telegram soliciting Li Hongzhang’s advice in 1886, Yuan mentioned that in past years, when Chinese officials had paid visits to the king, they had entered the palace gate in a sedan chair, bowed to the king three times with their hands folded in front (Ch., sanyi; yi means zuoyi, a ritual practiced between officials of equal rank), and then sat down at the king’s side. In 1884, however, the Chinese envoys Wu Dacheng and Xuchang, Gen. Ding Ruchang, and Taotai Ma Jianzhong had sat down opposite the king, following guest-host rituals. Yuan also noted that the ministers of other countries had to dismount their sedan chairs outside the palace gate and pay visits to the king according to the etiquette for officials outside the capital. Quoting ritual codes applicable to relations between China and Chosŏn, Li advised Yuan that it would be truly courteous for Yuan to follow the rituals for Chinese provincial-level officials visiting first-degree princes. This category of ritual performance dictated that Yuan would dismount his sedan chair at the gate of the palace hall, bow to the king three times with his hands folded in front, and then sit down by the king’s side. At grand ceremonies such as assemblies, Yuan would likewise bow three times with his hands folded in front, instead of performing a higher-level ritual of three bows (Ch., san jugong), in order to show that China was neither haughty nor humble and to harmonize his conduct with that of other ministers.¹⁵ The new rituals eased Yuan’s integration into the Korean court, but they created friction with other diplomats in the city.¹⁶
China’s Two Options: Supervision versus Provincialization
In the turbulent 1880s, when Beijing dramatically changed its border policy in the northwest by converting Xinjiang into a province, the northeastern frontier, too, posed a major challenge to the Qing. Having lost Burma to Britain, Ryukyu to Japan, and Vietnam to France within three decades, China stood at a historical crossroads with regard to its future administration of Chosŏn, as it had to decide how best to avoid also losing its most exemplary outer fan : should it take a step back and adopt an indirect approach of sending high-ranking officials to supervise and protect Chosŏn, or would it be better to incorporate Chosŏn into Chinese territory as prefectures and counties of China? Both options had precedents in the Han and the Yuan Dynasties and so could be justified. Viewed from a modern perspective, however, both represented a colonial approach not unlike Japan’s later annexation of Korea in 1910. It was on precisely this point that China fell into a dilemma that it was unable to overcome.
The Qing regarded Chosŏn as a loyal subordinate in its rhetoric, but as seen in the preceding chapters it never tried to incorporate Chosŏn into Chinese territory. The Chinese appraisal of Chosŏn as being like prefectures and counties merely acknowledged Korea’s subordination to China’s cultural superiority; it
didn’t express a practical political approach to annexing the country. For centuries, China, Chosŏn, and China’s other outer fan shared the worldview of all-under-Heaven, according to which all their lands were subject to the authority of the Son of Heaven. There was also a rule, drawn up by the first emperor of the Ming in the fourteenth century, that China would not annex the fifteen outer fan whose contacts with China were supervised by the Ministry of Rites. The first of these outer fan was Korea.¹⁷ This principle came under challenge in the 1880s, when the options of supervision and protection, on the one hand, and outright provincialization, on the other, were put forward by some Chinese officials and scholars.
In November 1880 the Chinese minister to Japan, He Ruzhang, argued that it would be the best policy for China to send an imperial commissioner to Chosŏn to manage the country’s domestic and foreign affairs, as China had done in Mongolia and Tibet. However, realizing that such a move was almost impossible at the time, He Ruzhang suggested that Chosŏn sign treaties with other countries under China’s supervision in order to pursue a balance of power. In August 1882, in the wake of Chosŏn’s mutiny and Japan’s provocative response, another Chinese minister to Japan, Li Shuchang, suggested that China abolish the king and convert the country into prefectures and counties of China, imitating the relationship between Britain and India, in order to resolve all thorny issues related to Chosŏn once and for all. Li Shuchang was fully aware that such an action would undermine China’s moral standards, but he nonetheless regarded it as the best available policy for China.¹⁸ This was probably the first time that Chinese officials explicitly argued that China should provincialize Chosŏn during this period, but the proposal was confidential and strictly confined to a small group of policymakers.
In 1882 Zhang Jian (1853–1926), an assistant to Gen. Wu Changqing in Hansŏng, called for reforms in Chosŏn in his treatise Six Strategies for Managing the Consequences of Chosŏn’s Mutiny (Ch., Chaoxian shanhou liuce).¹⁹ This treatise, which was widely disseminated in Beijing through informal channels, encouraged officials of the so-called Pure Stream group (Ch., Qingliu)—who had seized the moral high ground in political struggles—to pursue a solution to the Chosŏn problem. In October 1882 Zhang Peilun (1848–1903), a pillar of the Pure Stream, urged Beijing to dispatch a commercial commissioner to manage Chosŏn’s foreign and domestic affairs. Li Hongzhang did not endorse this plan because he was fearful of a scenario in which China would be drawn into an even more difficult situation and could not efficiently manage the country, but he noted that if Beijing decided to accept Zhang’s proposal, he would recommend He Ruzhang for the position of imperial commissioner.²⁰
At the same time, Li Hongzhang received a note from the king inviting Chinese specialists on foreign affairs to serve as his assistants. Li believed that China could exploit this opportunity to steer a middle course between supervising and protecting Chosŏn, on the one hand, and provincializing the country, on the other. The invited specialists would be under the king’s command, guaranteeing Chosŏn the right of zizhu and underlining Chosŏn’s status as China’s shuguo. As described in the previous chapter, the specialists, Ma Jianchang and Paul Georg von Möllendorff, arrived in Hansŏng in 1883, followed by the Chinese commercial commissioner Chen Shutang. It was against this background of China’s increasingly active role in Chosŏn that Yuan Shikai was appointed as an imperial resident a year and a half later.
In the wake of the bloody coup of 1884, a growing number of Chinese officials supported strengthening China’s position in Chosŏn. In late 1885 the Manchu official Shengyu (1850–1900), then president of the Directorate of Education, declared that among China’s fan Chosŏn was more important than Ryukyu and Vietnam had been. He suggested that the court send a competent man to protect and cherish the country by leading a powerful contingent of troops, and that it issue a decree to oust Queen Min and her followers with the aim of mollifying the Korean people’s resentment and proclaiming China’s power and virtues.²¹ In the summer of 1890, hearing rumors that Russia was planning to invade Chosŏn, Kang Youwei (1858–1927), a Cantonese scholar who at the time was preparing for the civil-service examination, drafted a treatise entitled Strategies for Saving Chosŏn (Ch., Bao Chaoxian ce) that proposed middle, upper, and lower
strategies. According to his middle strategy, China would incorporate Chosŏn into the Chinese inner land and manage its administration (Ch., shouwei neidi er zhi qizheng). Kang argued that in 1882 China should have appointed officials and officers to manage Chosŏn’s politics and that it should have taken control of Chosŏn’s taxes, trained its soldiers, and converted Chosŏn into an integral part of China’s inner territory. Kang’s upper strategy was to make Chosŏn into an international protectorate. By contrast, the lower strategy was to maintain Chosŏn’s "nominal title as China’s fan and shuguo inwardly and to allow it to conduct foreign affairs freely under zizhu outwardly, which amounted to no policy per se."²² Kang castigated China for its inability to solve the Korean problem in the international political arena. Eight years later, Kang served as a mentor to Emperor Guangxu when the latter launched dramatic reforms after China’s humiliating defeat in its war with Japan, which broke out in Chosŏn.
From Huang Zunxian and He Ruzhang in 1880 to Li Shuchang and Zhang Peilun in 1882 and then to Ma Jianchang in 1884, Shengyu in 1885, and Kang Youwei in 1890, Beijing was barraged with proposals to either supervise and protect Chosŏn or provincialize it. The advocates of these proposals frequently traced the point of departure for their suggested policies back to the early Qing and even earlier dynasties. They pointed out that Qing China had to take responsibility for saving Chosŏn from crises, as Ming China had done in the 1590s. In this sense, they saw China’s policy in Chosŏn in the 1880s as a resurgence of the intrinsic power exerted by the patriarch of the Zongfan family over its outer fan. For scholars who prefer to interpret China’s policy through the lens of international politics, this statement seems clichéd, but one should bear in mind that political rules informed by the Westphalian system cannot easily be applied to the Qing’s rationale for its foreign relations with its outer fan as embodied in Qing-Chosŏn relations. Otherwise, Western diplomats in Hansŏng, Beijing, and Tokyo would not have suffered such confusion for more than two decades, and the Western consultants hired by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs would not have had to resort to the Ottoman-Egyptian example for lack of a model for the Qing-Chosŏn relationship in European history.
Although China believed it had the theoretical authority to carry out an annexation of Chosŏn and could justify to itself the political legitimacy of such a move, the Manchu imperial court never put this option on its agenda; rather, it continued to adhere firmly to Zongfan principles in its contacts with Chosŏn. Whereas the Yuan and Ming Dynasties had officially discussed plans to provincialize Korea, no textual evidence suggests that the Qing court entertained any court-level discussion on this subject. The Zongli Yamen and other central institutions and high-ranking officials did forward proposals for provincialization to Empress Dowager Cixi and Emperor Guangxu from the early 1880s to the peak of the war in 1894 and 1895, but the central court always remained silent on these proposals. The pleas for provincialization thus did not change the imperial court’s established perception of Chosŏn. This perception may explain why, even after Chosŏn obtained its independence in 1895, the Qing’s imperial calendars continued to include the country in the list of China’s inner provinces until as late as 1909, a year before Chosŏn was colonized by Japan. In this regard, Zongfanism manifested itself in a fundamentally different way from colonialism.
This interpretation does not imply that international politics had no influence on China’s policy and behavior. In fact, China’s provincialization of Chosŏn could have led to a domino effect in China’s borderland in Manchuria, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Yunnan, where China was contending with Japan, Russia, Britain, and France. Chosŏn was a politico-cultural frontier of the Chinese empire, but this frontier was invisible and existed only in an intellectual sense within the Chinese world. Nor could this frontier be defined by international law. On the borders of its territorial empire, China did embrace the policy of provincialization at that time. In 1884 Beijing accepted the proposals of Zuo Zongtang and Liu Jintang (1844–94) and converted Xinjiang into a province; this multiethnic region in Inner Asia remains part of the Chinese state’s territory today. The same policy was applied to Taiwan in 1885, turning the island into another province. Although Taiwan was ceded to Japan in 1895 as a result of the Sino-Japanese War, the Qing’s earlier provincialization of Taiwan provided the Chinese state in the twentieth century with legitimate and legal resources to claim sovereignty over the island.
Reading Zongfanism from the Outside: Western Diplomats’ Perceptions of Chosŏn’s Sovereignty and Independence
Chosŏn’s sovereignty became a heated topic in the late 1880s when Chosŏn stepped onto the world stage. In order to meet various diplomatic challenges, Chosŏn established new institutions and developed a pattern of dual diplomacy in the 1880s, just as China had done in the 1860s. Within this dual pattern, the royal court maintained its Zongfan relations with China’s imperial court, while the new institutions, predominantly the Foreign Office, presented Chosŏn as an independent state in its contacts with Western countries. The agencies of China’s state diplomacy, in particular the Beiyang superintendent and the H.I.C.M. Resident, sought to use China’s authority to influence Chosŏn’s state diplomacy. In the eyes of Western ministers, including the Western advisers appointed by China to Chosŏn, China was impinging on Chosŏn’s independent sovereignty through calculated schemes. China’s image suffered, not only in the estimation of Japan and the Western states that had interests in the peninsula, but also in Chosŏn itself.
The Western advisers recommended by Li Hongzhang to the king of Chosŏn serve as good examples in this regard. As the first Western adviser to the king on maritime customs, Möllendorff also assumed the vice presidency of Chosŏn’s newly founded Foreign Office. But as he became eager to develop Chosŏn’s military forces to counterbalance the country’s weakness, his activities progressively deviated from Li’s wishes. In 1884 Möllendorff asked Li to send officers to train the Korean army. When this request yielded no response, he persuaded the king to negotiate a convention with Russia whereby Russian officers would train the army in exchange for the use of Wŏnsan, the ice-free port on the eastern coast of the country. Under pressure from Li, the king dismissed Möllendorff in November 1885. At the recommendation of China’s inspector general, Robert Hart, Henry F. Merrill, an American national, replaced Möllendorff as chief commissioner of the Korean Maritime Customs, and Owen N. Denny (1838–1900), a former US consul in Tianjin, assumed the post of vice president of the Foreign Office and adviser to the king. Whereas Merrill rarely commented on Chosŏn’s affairs, Denny was very enthusiastic about assisting Chosŏn in pursuing independence from China.
In January 1887 a veteran Chinese diplomat, Zeng Jize (known as Marquis Tseng, 1839–90), the eldest son of the distinguished late official Zeng Guofan (1811–72), published an English-language article entitled China: The Sleep and the Awakening in the British journal Asiatic Quarterly Review. Making an ambitious argument that China would become a great Asiatic Power as awakened in the process of modernization, Zeng also commented on China’s foreign policy toward its subordinate countries, noting that China has decided on exercising a more effective supervision on the acts of her vassal Princes, and of accepting a larger responsibility for them than heretofore. The marquis further claimed that the Warden of the Marches is now abroad, looking to the security of China’s outlying provinces––of Corea, Thibet, and Chinese Turkestan. Henceforth, any hostile movements against these countries, or any interference with their affairs, will be viewed at Peking as a declaration, on the part of the Power committing it, of a desire to discontinue its friendly relations with the Chinese Government.²³ The reality, however, unfolded in a way that differed dramatically from what the marquis envisioned. In this regard, Denny was more prescient. A lawyer by profession, Denny found his legal training useful in Chosŏn. In February 1888 he published a booklet entitled China and Korea, in which he asserted that China was destroying Korea—an independent state with independent sovereignty—by absorbing the country.²⁴
Denny’s pamphlet was emotional and exposed his limited knowledge of Sino-Korean relations, but it was welcomed by his fellow Western diplomats who desperately hoped to grasp the nature of China’s presence in Chosŏn. The first two American ministers in Chosŏn, Lucius H. Foote and George C. Foulk, were very enthusiastic about China’s influences in the country, and the United States was deeply involved in the issue of Chosŏn’s international status.²⁵ In the summer of 1887, Yuan, Li, Foulk, the American chargé d’affaires William W. Rockhill, and the new American minister Hugh A. Dinsmore (1850–1930) became embroiled in an intense dispute resulting from a widely circulated rumor that Foulk had encouraged the king to seek independence from China. Dinsmore complained that "China
is slowly but surely tightening her grasp upon this government and its King, and he blamed Yuan for his declaration that Korea is a vassal state and altogether incapable of self-government."²⁶
The United States also became entangled in another fierce dispute between China and Korea in 1887, when the king decided to send Pak Chŏng-yang (1842–1905) as an envoy to the United States, followed by another envoy to Britain, Germany, Russia, Italy, and France.²⁷ China endorsed the king’s plan but urged the king not to endow the envoys with the title of plenipotentiary, and reminded the monarch that all Korean envoys overseas had to obey three rules outlined by Li Hongzhang: first, a Korean envoy arriving in a new posting should first report to the Chinese consulate and be accompanied by the Chinese minister to the host country’s ministry of foreign affairs; second, the Korean envoy should always sit behind the Chinese minister at meetings and banquets in the host country; and third, the Korean envoy should consult with the Chinese minister about major events before contacting the institutions of the host country. These three rules were aimed at maintaining the established "system of shuguo " by emphasizing the hierarchy between the Chinese minister and the Korean envoy in the host country as well as that between China and Korea in general.²⁸
The king did not follow Beijing’s instructions: in the letter of credence to the United States he called himself I, the emperor and appointed Pak envoy plenipotentiary (K., chŏngwŏn taesin), although in his memorial to the Guangxu emperor he called Pak a minister’s minister.²⁹ Accordingly, the American side treated Pak as minister plenipotentiary when he arrived in Washington in January 1888. Under the strong influence of his American secretary Horace N. Allen (1858–1932),³⁰ Pak continued to flout the three rules: he did not subordinate himself to the Chinese minister in Washington, Zhang Yinhuan (1837–1900), which led to an awkward and even hostile relationship between the two representatives. Some American news reports also stated that Korea dispatched its minister to the United States independently and did not need to obtain China’s permission.³¹ In order to reassert Chosŏn’s position as China’s shuguo, Zhang delivered to Pak a Chinese imperial calendar for 1888 that he had received from Shanghai.³² Finally, under pressure from China, the king of Chosŏn recalled Pak, turning this brief episode showcasing Chosŏn’s apparent sovereignty and international status into a highly unpleasant footnote in Sino-Korean relations.
It was at this time that Denny’s pamphlet was circulating among Westerners in Korea and, soon, further afield. For China, the Korean situation was becoming increasingly complicated, and in June 1888 Li Hongzhang secretly sent Möllendorff back to Hansŏng to checkmate Denny who is urging the King to assert independence.³³ Denny’s take on the issue of Korea’s independence and its relationship to China quickly reached the United States. On August 31, 1888, with Pak still in Washington, Senator John H. Mitchell (1835–1905) of Oregon, Denny’s home state, called on the Senate, and particularly the Committee on Foreign Relations, to pay attention to the Sino-Korean relationship. Mitchell, holding in his hand a copy of Denny’s very able and highly interesting brief, stated that for some time past the Imperial Government of China has, through its chief officers and representatives, and especially and particularly its representative at the city of Seoul, been contemplating the subjugation and entire absorption of Corea. He emphasized that Korea’s relationship with China was "that of a mere tributary state, in which none of the rights of sovereignty or independence are eliminated or destroyed, and not that of a dependent or vassal government without any of the prerogatives of sovereignty attaching."³⁴
All of these episodes contributed to the deterioration of the Sino-Korean relationship by the end of the 1880s. Many a Western diplomat, sympathetic toward the king and his government, believed that China was controlling Chosŏn in dramatic or even colonialist ways, while Chosŏn was desperately distancing itself from the Sinocentric system by adopting Western political and diplomatic terms. As Dinsmore observed in the summer of 1887, The Koreans do not impress me as having any affection or strong attachment for the Chinese. On the contrary there is among the common people a well-defined dislike for them, but they fear them and it is under the influence of this fear that they are gradually yielding to Chinese supremacy.³⁵ In this context, Chosŏn used its state-to-state contacts with
China and other countries to propel itself out of China’s orbit.
Perplexing issues such as Yuan Shikai’s status as resident and Pak’s mission to the United States led Western scholar-diplomats to study the history of Sino-Korean relations with the aim of exploring the origin of China’s authority over Chosŏn. During a journey in the capital district of Chosŏn in 1884, George Foulk saw the Samjŏndo stele that had been erected in 1639, which he described as a great marble tablet fully twelve feet high and a foot thick, mounted upon the back of a gigantic granite turtle. He added, Historically, this monument presents much interest, and a thorough examination may develop information on the status of Corea with regard to China of more directly practical use.³⁶ Indeed, Rockhill soon tried to interpret Sino-Korean relations by using the inscriptions of the Samjŏndo stele and other Chinese materials; his efforts were published as a long article in 1889 under the title Korea in Its Relations with China. In the article, Rockhill attempted to answer the puzzle for Western nations of whether Korea was an integral part of the Chinese empire or a sovereign state enjoying absolute international rights.³⁷
Rockhill noted that the British government considered the Burmese tribute to China within the Sino-Burmese framework to be of a purely ceremonial nature, so in the Sino-British convention of 1886 the British side guaranteed the continuance of the Burmese decennial tribute mission to Beijing. The Sino-Korean relationship was much more complicated. After examining Sino-Korean relations from 1392 and reviewing Qing-Chosŏn contacts since the early seventeenth century, Rockhill determined that Chosŏn’s conclusion of treaties with Japan and the United States has not materially altered the nature of the relations existing for the last four centuries at least between China and its so-called vassal.³⁸ Rockhill’s conclusion seriously challenged the popular perception among Western diplomats in East Asia that Chosŏn was independent from China. The puzzle, therefore, remained unsolved and in fact became even more vexing.
The Grand Performance of the Zongfan Order: China’s Last Imperial Mission to Chosŏn
Rituals and Authority: Yuan’s Efforts to Assert China’s Superiority in Chosŏn
As its awareness of its own independent sovereignty (or the possibility thereof) deepened in the late 1880s, Chosŏn cautiously maintained its court-to-court contacts with China and conducted its own state diplomacy beyond China. Because of this dual diplomacy, whereas China wanted to preserve and highlight its superiority in Chosŏn, Hansŏng tried to compromise the hierarchical arrangement in practice. Along the way, in 1890, the two sides entered into intense negotiations over the Zongfan rituals.
On June 4, 1890, Korean Queen Dowager Cho died. A series of ritual practices between Hansŏng and Beijing had to be carried out. Aware that ritual matters were under the management of the Manchu court, Yuan responded to the Korean Foreign Office’s announcement of the dowager’s death with a short note expressing his condolences.³⁹ At a time when international intrigues and rivalries exerted such a strong influence on the peninsula, Sino-Korean court-to-court contacts through the exchange of emissaries seemed dwarfed by the two countries’ state-to-state contacts over political and diplomatic issues. While the Korean court continued to send tributary missions to Beijing through the 1880s, Beijing did not dispatch envoys to Hansŏng for tributary affairs after Chosŏn opened its doors to the West in 1882. Although court diplomacy still played a key role in regulating and modifying the bilateral relationship, the decade-long absence of imperial envoys from Korean soil left Yuan Shikai in Hansŏng without any recent precedents to consult. The absence of such envoys also reinforced the impression of Western diplomats that China had little authority over Chosŏn. Yuan believed that the expression of China’s condolences on the death of the dowager provided the perfect opportunity to counteract the Western perception of Sino-Korean relations.⁴⁰
When the American minister Augustine Heard (1827–1905) invited Yuan to join a discussion with other ministers over an appropriate expression of their joint
condolences to the Korean court, Yuan declined on the grounds that China and Chosŏn have longtime established regulations on ritual exchanges that are different from other countries’.⁴¹ In a report to Li Hongzhang, in which he identified Chosŏn as a friendly nation (Ch., youbang) of other treaty nations, Yuan said that the other ministers would follow common diplomatic etiquette in expressing condolences to the Korean government on the occasion of a national funeral, but those countries would not send special representatives for this purpose. By contrast, Yuan argued, because Chosŏn was China’s shuguo and always received China’s special favors, when the country was in grand mourning, China should send an imperial mission in accordance with the established system (Ch., tizhi).⁴² Yuan became the first Han Chinese official in Chosŏn’s territory since 1637 to try to maintain China’s superiority through appropriate rituals, including by proposing new ones.
On learning that other ministers would visit and bow to the king or visit the regent official and shake hands with him to show their sympathy, Yuan refused to follow their example. Instead he proposed a new ritual procedure endorsed by Li Hongzhang: after the first five days, during which the body of the dowager would lie in repose and the Korean people wore mourning clothes, Yuan would make an appointment with the Korean court to express his condolences based on personal friendship (Ch., siqing), which was considered equivalent to friendship among colleagues (Ch., liaoyin jiaoqing), rather than extending China’s national public condolences (Ch., guojia gongdiao).⁴³ In early June, when other countries flew their legations’ flags at half-mast for three days to express their condolences, Yuan and Li instructed Chinese warships and institutions in Inch’ŏn and at other Korean treaty ports to do so for only two days.⁴⁴ Their efforts to assert China’s superiority through unique as well as unequal rituals simply magnified China’s isolation from other countries.
Despite his efforts, Yuan found himself stuck in a ritual dilemma. When he notified Min Chong-muk (1835–1916), the resident of the Foreign Office, that he would like to visit the funeral hall in the inner palace, Min declined the offer because only royal family members could do so.⁴⁵ When the American minister, for his part, consulted with Min about how foreign ministers should perform funerary rituals, Min said that it would be inappropriate for the Korean court to invite foreign ministers to attend the funeral procession, but his office could provide a place near the East Gate of the city for the ministers to perform ceremonies as the hearse passed through the gate. Heard complied; Yuan did not. Yuan then told the Home Office and the Foreign Office that he would like to accompany the funeral team from the palace gate outside the city and hold the cord guiding the hearse, a Chinese funeral custom showing deep respect for the deceased. But the Home Office did not endorse this proposal and suggested that Yuan go directly to the East Gate, where other ministers would convene; when the hearse passed through the gate, the procession would stop for a moment, during which Yuan could perform a farewell ceremony. Disappointed by this response, Yuan decided to set himself apart from the other ministers with his own ritual: he would set an incense burner on a table and hold a memorial ceremony for the late dowager by the side of the road on the procession day.⁴⁶
Soon thereafter, another event made Yuan reconsider his plans yet again. On October 11, 1890, seven American officers led fifty armed marines on a march from Inch’ŏn toward Hansŏng. Heard explained to Yuan that the United States, as a friend of Chosŏn, had sent naval troops to accompany the funeral procession as a mark of respect and sympathy.⁴⁷ Yuan doubted his explanation. It was the second time in several months that Heard had summoned troops to the capital. The first time had been right after the death of the dowager in June, when the king had sent an agent to ask Heard to send forces to the palace at once to provide protection. Heard hesitated, but after considering the potential for disturbance and the jeopardy in which it might place American citizens, he ordered marines from the USS Swatara in Inch’ŏn to Hansŏng. Heard specified to the king that the troops were there to protect the legation, but the king, he said, would benefit by the moral effect which their presence would produce.⁴⁸ The presence of American forces in Hansŏng sparked a rumor in Beijing that Chosŏn was planning to rent Port Hamilton to the United States as a coaling station in exchange for protection. Under these circumstances, to monitor the Americans, Yuan set up his
memorial table at the East Gate, where Heard and the American soldiers stood in line on the side of the road. The hearse did not stop as promised, but Yuan still bowed three times with his hands folded in front.⁴⁹ The American soldiers returned to Inch’ŏn on October 15, defusing the tensions and allaying Yuan’s suspicions.
Rituals and Sovereignty: Chosŏn’s Bargaining with China about the Imperial Mission
While Yuan Shikai was tackling ritual dilemmas in Hansŏng, the Korean court was negotiating ritual conventions with Beijing.⁵⁰ On June 5, 1890, the king instructed the prefect of Ŭiju to inform the garrison major of the Manchu bannermen at Fenghuang City of the dowager’s death. The monarch also appointed Hong Chong-yŏng as envoy and Cho Pyŏng-sŏng as attendant secretary of a mission to carry the news to Beijing. According to convention, Beijing in turn needed to dispatch a mission of condolence to Hansŏng. Two weeks later, through Yuan Shikai and Li Hongzhang, the king asked Beijing not to send envoys to Hansŏng but to allow Chosŏn’s tributary emissaries to bring back the imperial condolence messages. The king explained that if China sent a mission, the United States, Britain, Germany, France, and Japan would send missions too, creating a situation that Chosŏn could not afford. What the king was requesting was known as handing over for convenience (Ch., shunfu), but Li was not sure whether this convention had ever been applied to condolence messages. He instructed Yuan to secretly consult precedents and warned him not to be rash, because Li felt that Hansŏng was forcing Beijing to do its bidding, despite the petition’s beseeching tone.
After examining imperial missions of condolence to Chosŏn upon queen dowagers’ deaths since the Qianlong period and enumerating six cases in 1757, 1805, 1821, 1844, 1858, and 1878, Yuan concluded that in the case of conferring noble rank on deceased royalty, Beijing always dispatched envoys and never used handing over for convenience. In view of his findings, Yuan saw the king’s request as a conspiracy. He reported to Li that Queen Min was dominating the king through her fear that the ceremonies performed to China’s envoys in front of Westerners would damage Chosŏn’s image as a country of zizhu. Yuan further asserted that Denny was inciting the king to urge Beijing not to send a mission because the rituals would damage Chosŏn’s national polity.⁵¹ When the king discussed this issue with Yuan, Yuan insisted that the imperial mission would travel to Chosŏn and that all procedures to welcome the mission had to be conducted in conformity with precedent. However, the two Korean emissaries were already on their way to Beijing, carrying the king’s special request.
Upon their arrival in Beijing, Hong Chong-yŏng and Cho Pyŏng-sŏng presented the king’s memorial to the emperor via the Ministry of Rites. In the memorial, the king strictly followed the prescribed textual format by using China’s regnal title and referring to himself as subordinate and to Chosŏn as small country.⁵² In a special note to the Ministry of Rites, Hong explained that as Chosŏn was facing a difficult situation because of political troubles, famine, and financial crisis, he preferred to convey the imperial message of condolence back to his country without the need for Beijing to send envoys for the purpose.
Neither the ministry nor the Guangxu emperor granted this request. The Grand Council forwarded a decree to Hong that declared that an imperial mission had to be sent because the Heavenly Dynasty would "cherish sympathy for its shuguo and fan on such occasions. The mission had a fundamental relationship to the system" (Ch., tizhi youguan), and the rituals that Chosŏn should perform to it based on the established codes should not be curtailed in the least. Still, the emperor compromised by instructing the mission to take the maritime route between Tianjin and Inch’ŏn on warships of the Beiyang Navy. This was the first time since 1637 that an imperial mission had taken to the seas. Of the thirty-nine Manchu candidates recommended by the Ministry of Rites, the emperor selected Xuchang and Chongli (1834–1907) to serve as envoys. Given the possible international responses to the imperial mission’s presence in Chosŏn, the emperor ordered all members of the mission to refuse gifts from Chosŏn for the sake of China’s upright image.⁵³
The emperor’s decision to send the mission points to an established regulation of the Zongfan system: had Yuan Shikai, Li Hongzhang, or the Ministry of Rites been able to find any historical precedent for the omission of an imperial mission of condolence, Beijing would likely have consented to the king’s request and
refrained from dispatching the mission. The Zongfan regulations thus served both China and Korea as a double-edged sword. The Chinese side further confirmed that the mission would land in Inch’ŏn as scheduled, not in Masanpu, as Chosŏn proposed. According to Yuan, the king was hesitant about whether to go out of Hansŏng to welcome the envoys in the suburbs and perform ceremonies in person, for Denny was urging the king to receive the envoys in the palace. The envoys stressed that all ceremonies had to be performed as recorded in the ritual codes, and during their sojourn in Hansŏng they would not meet with any Westerners.⁵⁴
Rituals and Dignity: The Imperial Mission to Chosŏn and the Grand Ceremony
On October 28, 1890, the two envoys picked up gifts for the king from the Ministry of Rites, including sandalwood incense, white and blue silk, and three hundred taels of silver. All of these items were in accordance with imperial codes determined in the eighteenth century.⁵⁵ Two days later they arrived in Tianjin, the headquarters of the Beiyang Navy commanded by Li Hongzhang, who had summoned three warships—the Jiyuan, the Laiyuan, and the Jingyuan—to harbor for the mission. Li first sent the Jiyuan to Chosŏn with a note in which the envoys again expressed their insistence that all prescribed ceremonies be carried out in full on their arrival in Chosŏn. The envoys also stated that the members of the mission would not accept any money or articles as routine gifts in order to show the emperor’s concern for his shuguo and fan.⁵⁶
Chosŏn was busy preparing to welcome the envoys according to precedent. To receive the mission, the king appointed several high-ranking officials, including Nam Chŏng-ch’ŏl, president of the Ministry of Punishment, and Sŏng Ki-un (1847–1924), grand chamberlain and superintendent of trade in the Inch’ŏn district. Both Nam and Sŏng had served as commissioners in Tianjin in 1884, where they had possessed a status equal to that of Western ministers, but now they were fully integrated into the Zongfan system as subordinates of both the king and the Chinese emperor. In addition to refurnishing a pavilion between Inch’ŏn and Hansŏng as the envoys’ accommodations, the Koreans sent 130 foreign-drilled soldiers to the area for security. In Hansŏng the court had deployed around 590 soldiers to maintain local order.⁵⁷
The king was still reluctant to leave the city to welcome the envoys, as he was worried that Japanese and Western diplomats and citizens would witness the hierarchical rituals, in particular his kowtowing to the envoys, which would undermine his dignity as a sovereign. But he nonetheless eventually decided to receive the envoys near the West Gate according to precedent.⁵⁸ After all, the king had been invested by the Chinese emperor, and at this particular moment the emperor’s authority exerted a demand that the monarch could not ignore.
Once all the rituals had been blueprinted, the envoys sailed from Tianjin and reached the outer harbor of Inch’ŏn on November 6. After two high-ranking Korean officials boarded the cruisers to welcome the mission, the envoys landed by a small steamship with the imperial decree. The Korean officials, headed by the receivers of the mission, bowed to the imperial envoys and items. After the envoys had placed the decree in the dragon shrine customarily used for this purpose, the procession headed for the envoys’ lodgings in Inch’ŏn. It was a long and magnificent procession. First came the Korean receivers and officials in columns, one on each side of the road, with the Hansŏng magnate and the metropolitan governor on the east side and the prefects and the magistrates on the west side. Next were the Korean escorts, flags, yellow umbrellas, drums, gongs, and bands. They were followed by the incense shrine and the dragon shrine and then by the Chinese attendants, all of whom were mounted. The two envoys followed in their sedan chairs, side by side, and behind them marched the high and low deputies with the supervisors and their attendants.
The colorful procession passed through the General Foreign Settlement and the Chinese Settlement (Ch., Hua Yang zujie), which the Chinese merchants had decorated with lanterns and streamers, undoubtedly feeling superior to their counterparts given the occasion. From the perspective of the envoys, the extraordinary procession and the elaborate ceremony that numerous Koreans and foreigners gathered to appreciate perfectly highlighted the Great Qing’s superior
authority in its subordinate country.⁵⁹ J. C. Johnston, the acting commissioner of customs in Inch’ŏn, was indeed impressed and commented that the arrival of the mission was the most noteworthy event since the opening of Chemulpo [Inch’ŏn].⁶⁰ When the envoys reached their residence at the Office of the Superintendent of Trade (K., Kamni amun), the Korean officials kowtowed toward the imperial envoys and decree, while the envoys replied by bowing with their hands folded in front. In the office the envoys reviewed the four ritual programs prepared by the Korean side and confirmed that all procedures would be performed the next day in Hansŏng. They declined to accept any gifts from the Korean officials.
The grand ceremony took place in the palace on November 8, and it included the reading of the imperial message of condolence and the ceremonial wailing by the king and the envoys.⁶¹ When the ceremonies drew to a close, the king and the envoys had a short conversation in which the king expressed his gratitude for the great honor that China had given to the small country.⁶² Their conversation contained no mention of political or diplomatic issues. After drinking tea, the host and the guests bowed toward each other with hands folded in front. All of the rituals strictly followed the precedents of the eighteenth century. In addition, the king visited the envoys at their residence on November 10 and treated them to a tea ceremony. This would traditionally have been the time when the Korean side gave gifts to the envoys, but the envoys emphasized again that they could not accept even so much as a piece of paper. The next day the king sent off the envoys at the West Gate by performing the prescribed rituals. After a rest in Inch’ŏn, the envoys sailed back to Tianjin. Their departure marked the end of China’s imperial missions to Chosŏn within the Zongfan framework and thus the conclusion to a tradition that had operated at least since 1401, when Ming China had officially invested the king of Chosŏn.
Already at the time of the event, and ever since, the dominant interpretation of this imperial mission has regarded it as a Chinese conspiracy conducted under the foil of tributary routines, aiming to strengthen China’s control over Chosŏn at the cost of the latter’s independent sovereignty.⁶³ Without knowing what occurred inside the palace between the king and the envoys, the Western ministers assumed that the envoys had persuaded the king to act in accordance with Beijing’s interests in the name of conventional rituals.⁶⁴ These diplomats viewed the event in the context of modern diplomatic circumstances and saw ritual contacts as a tool that China used to influence or manipulate Chosŏn. Scholars in the twentieth century tended to juxtapose Chosŏn’s vassalage visà-vis China with its independent sovereignty vis-à-vis its treaty counterparts, interpreting the mission as an application of China’s new policy, which might be called the Li-Yuan policy, after Li Hongzhang and Yuan Shikai.⁶⁵ This policy is said to have combined China’s supremacy as the suzerain over Korea within the old tributary framework with China’s hegemonic position in the new treaty port system in Chosŏn.
But Yuan’s role may have been exaggerated by his counterparts in Hansŏng at the time and by scholars afterward. Their narratives have portrayed Yuan as an arrogant, overbearing, and peremptory person who acted as a Chinese pro-consul and aggressively dominated the Chosŏn government for a decade.⁶⁶ The events surrounding the death of the dowager in 1890, however, cast doubt on this description. Yuan’s efforts to negotiate his ritual performance in Hansŏng with the Korean side yielded nothing, which lays bare his unprivileged position as a foreign minister. Yuan did not go to Inch’ŏn to highlight China’s superior position or attend the grand ceremony in the palace, nor did he meet or talk with the two imperial envoys. The envoys did not contact Yuan either, aside from sending him several routine notes about the ritual performance before they left Hansŏng. What Yuan’s experience reflected was Chosŏn’s independent power to manage its own affairs.
This interpretation does not deny the fact that Beijing did use the mission to demonstrate its superiority. After their return, the two envoys reported to the emperor, All foreigners have seen the solemn and majestic rituals and learned that Chosŏn is subordinate to the Heavenly Dynasty. Chosŏn could not deny it either. If we can take advantage of the situation to pacify the country in an appropriate way, Chosŏn will serve as our fence and enjoy our great benevolence forever.⁶⁷
Johnston also observed that the mission derived special political importance from the revival of the old-time ceremonies which mark the suzerain-tributary relations between China and Corea.⁶⁸ As a result, according to M. Frederick Nelson, this event "imparted, for the Western observers, a de jure status to China’s de facto position in Korea…. The Western powers were beginning to attribute more force to the familial relationship which for two decades they had rejected as purely ceremonial."⁶⁹ Behind the rituals, it was evident, stood a vibrant politico-cultural Chinese empire. Rituals, therefore, were deeply involved in the tortuous transformation of both China and Korea from parts of the empire to modern sovereign states.
Beijing was not blind to the complex international situation as it considered modifying old conventions. Under the rubric of cherishing the subordinate country, the two envoys made the constructive suggestion that China treat the expenses of the envoys to Chosŏn as it did the outlays of ministers to other countries. The aim was to prevent Chosŏn from imposing exorbitant taxes and levies on its people in the name of welcoming the envoys. After consulting Emperor Yongzheng’s edict of 1735, in which the emperor reduced by half the amount of silver the king was expected to give the imperial envoys as gifts, the Ministry of Rites endorsed the abolition of the custom of envoys’ receiving silver from Chosŏn. The ministry and the Zongli Yamen decided that in the future each imperial envoy would receive two thousand taels of silver and each interpreter five hundred taels from the Zongli Yamen to cover expenses during the trip to Chosŏn. This reform blurred the line between imperial envoys to China’s outer fan and ministers sent to other countries. Emperor Guangxu approved the change. The Beiyang superintendent, the Manchu general and the Ministry of Rites in Mukden, the king of Chosŏn, and the imperial resident in Hansŏng were all informed of the decision.⁷⁰ No imperial envoys, however, would ever have the chance to claim financial support from the Zongli Yamen before the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1894 in Chosŏn.
Saving Our Chosŏn: The Chinese Intelligentsia’s Responses to the Sino-Japanese War
Assisting the Loyal Fan : The Prewar View
In May 1894 the Chinese general Nie Shicheng (1836–1900) returned to Tianjin from a ten-month trip to northern Manchuria, the Russian Far East, and Chosŏn. In Chosŏn he had met with the king and visited treaty ports in order to get a general picture of the situation in the country. According to Nie, The king is weak, the officials are addicted to alcohol and women, and no one is considering self-strengthening programs…. There are no talented generals at the top and no able warriors at the bottom. Were the country to encounter trouble, it would need China to send troops to protect it. The situation is very dangerous. The general believed that compared with Russia, which is powerful but only a superficial threat, Japan is a truly mortal danger. He argued that China should prepare to resist Japan’s potential invasion of Chosŏn in order to "consolidate the fan and shuguo and protect China’s frontier" (Ch., gu fanshu, bao bianjiang).⁷¹
Nie’s predictions were proved true by the deterioration of Chosŏn’s situation in the Tonghak Rebellion, an armed peasant uprising that broke out in January 1894 against corrupt aristocrats and against the Japanese and Western invasion of Chosŏn (Tonghak, an intellectual school founded in 1860, refers to Eastern learning, indicating its anti-Western approach). Nie himself was dispatched to Chosŏn to assist the country in suppressing the rebellion; there he would witness China lose Chosŏn to Japan on the battlefield.
Many Chinese officials shared Nie’s concerns. In July, when China was clashing with Japan over sending troops to Chosŏn, a group of officials in Beijing outlined in their memorials or position papers to the emperor what they believed would be the best policy to strengthen Chinese forces, protect Chosŏn, and defeat Japan. Zeng Guangjun (1866–1929) of the Imperial Academy suggested that China publicize its rationale for an expedition against Japan. Defining Chosŏn as the country that was the first to subordinate itself to our dynasty and has conscientiously paid tributary visits for hundreds of years without interruption, Zeng proclaimed that Japan has fabricated excuses and tried to make the country subordinate to two countries.⁷² Pang Hongshu (1848–1915) of the Grand Censorate
(Ch., Ducha yuan) alluded to the case of China’s loss of Ryukyu and argued that China should not abandon Chosŏn because it was critical for China’s overall situation. Pang emphasized that Chosŏn had been a fan of the Great Qing for a long time, to the point that it is no different from the Mongols and the tribes in the western areas (Ch., Xiyu, referring to Inner Asian areas). Therefore, China should stop the intervention of other countries in Chosŏn to protect the security of its territory, including the three provinces in Manchuria, the ancestral home of the current dynasty. Conceiving a Chinese strategy in the context of international politics, Pang exhorted China to protect Chosŏn by defeating Japan, so that China could focus on resolving its disputes with Russia over the borderline in the Pamir Mountains and with Britain over trade negotiations in Tibet.⁷³
Other officials preferred to emphasize the internal connections between the Qing and Chosŏn since the early seventeenth century. After reviewing Hongtaiji’s conquest of Chosŏn in 1637 and the erection of the Samjŏndo stele, Duanfang (1861–1911), a Manchu official who later became governor-general of Sichuan, argued that China should support Chosŏn because the country had loyally served the Great Qing for more than two hundred years without treachery.⁷⁴ On the day Duanfang submitted his position paper, the Japanese and the Chinese navies engaged in a battle at P’ungdo in Chosŏn. Thus began the war between the two countries.
Defending China Itself: The Link between Our Chosŏn and Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan
Emperor Guangxu issued an edict to declare war on Japan on August 1, 1894. The edict reiterated that Chosŏn had been a fan and shuguo of the Great Qing and had paid tribute to China every year for more than two hundred years, so it was China’s duty to send troops to Chosŏn to protect the Korean people from great suffering.⁷⁵ The edict justified China’s action as cherishing the small within the Zongfan system and defending international law within the treaty port system. A growing number of Chinese officials identified China’s move as a typical embodiment of the convention of cherishing men from afar.⁷⁶ These officials pointed passionately to all of China’s outer and inner fan and other frontier areas, including Vietnam, Burma, Ryukyu, Outer Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, Manchuria, and Taiwan, which were already being eyed covetously by Western powers, and declared that for its own good China should not lose Chosŏn. The growing crisis in Chosŏn thus became an issue related to Qing China’s own fate. The Great Qing had to defend its territorial borderland and the politico-cultural frontier of the Chinese empire.
According to Changlin, the Manchu minister at the Ministry of Revenue, if Japan annexed Chosŏn, "all the fan of our dynasty would be subordinate to foreign barbarians, so other countries would encroach on China’s inner land, and consequently Xinjiang, Taiwan, Tibet, and Manchuria would be in grave danger. Ding Lijun (1854–1903), a Han Chinese official at the Imperial Academy, further criticized Japan for usurping our Chosŏn" (Ch., duo wo Chaoxian). He remarked, If the fence collapsed, Mukden would be in great danger. Chosŏn, which is different from Vietnam and Burma, which are thousands of miles away from China, is mutually dependent with China, like the lips and the teeth, and like bones and flesh. Ding argued that Beijing should refuse British and Russian mediation between China and Japan, for if China ceded Chosŏn or Taiwan to Japan, as the Western mediators were suggesting, Britain would encroach on Tibet and Russia would seek to take Outer Mongolia.⁷⁷
Changlin’s and Ding’s concerns about China’s territorial integrity were widely shared by their fellow scholars and scholar-officials, who saw Chosŏn as the fence that protected Manchuria. As one of these officials, Kuai Guangdian, put it, After we abandon Chosŏn, Russia will invade Mongolia and Britain will do the same to Tibet, so shall we let these countries alone or argue with them? If we opt to argue with them, we had better keep Chosŏn safe now.⁷⁸ All of these officials regarded Chosŏn as an indispensable element of China’s strategy to safeguard its territorial integrity. Saving our Chosŏn was equal to saving China itself.
The officials’ ardent belief that Beijing should exercise its patriarchal authority reflected the revitalization of the potential policy of provincializing Chosŏn.
Assuming that the king had been co-opted by Japan, Ding Lijun proposed that China invest the crown prince as the new king and keep him in the Chinese army for his own safety. Hong Liangpin (1826–96) similarly suggested that China select a member of the royal house of Chosŏn to guide the Chinese forces and invest him as the new king once the crisis was resolved. Yu Lianyuan (1844–1901) endorsed this proposal and suggested that the new investiture should be conducted in P’yŏngyang. Yan Youzhang further argued that China should immediately transform Chosŏn into a province (Ch., gaijian xingsheng) and should appoint officials and officers to govern it, yet treat the king and his officials generously and allow them to maintain their Korean titles. While Ding regarded this policy as a way of publicizing our great justice to all people under Heaven, Yan saw it as legitimate and justifiable because Chosŏn was China’s fan and had constituted two Chinese counties—Fuyu and Lelang—under the Han Dynasty.⁷⁹
The storm of officials’ opinions was triggered by the declaration of war against Japan on August 1, but it was also a result of political struggles between bureaucratic factions in Beijing. The majority of these officials were low-ranking members of the Pure Stream group, which drew on the thinking of the minister of the Grand Council, Li Hongzao (1820–97), and Emperor Guangxu’s instructor Weng Tonghe. Embracing a hawkish approach, both men saw Li Hongzhang as their political adversary and accused him and his protégés, such as Ma Jianzhong, Liu Mingchuan (1836–96), and Ding Ruchang, of being afraid to fight the Japanese. With the rise of Weng and Li Hongzao in October, their followers became more active with more dramatic proposals during the second half of the war.
The core argument of these officials was that China could not lose Chosŏn, for it would mean the disintegration of the Great Qing itself. In fighting for Chosŏn, the Great Qing would fight not only for its territorial integrity but also for its own dignity and legitimacy as the Middle Kingdom and the Heavenly Dynasty. In the context of war, the ideology of all-under-Heaven became central for these scholar-officials, who saw the fate of the Great Qing at stake. Pragmatists dealing with the Japanese, Russians, and British on China’s frontiers regarded the Pure Stream officials as armchair strategists with unrealistic plans, but the latter were undeniably accurate in their assessment of China’s frontier security. The nightmare scenario they had sketched out in late 1894, in which China would encounter serious challenges in Manchuria, Outer Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan from colonial powers such as Russia and Britain, became true in the postwar period. China’s loss of territory halted only once the People’s Republic of China clearly claimed its territorial domain and defined China’s borders. In this sense, China did not become a nation-state until the 1950s, when Korea—represented by two sovereign states because of the Cold War—became completely independent from the Chinese empire.
Losing the Eastern Fence: The Conclusion of the Treaty of Shimonoseki
While the war was escalating on China’s eastern frontier, people on the western frontier in Tibet looked on with concern. On February 22, 1895, the imperial commissioner to Tibet, Kuihuan (1850–?), submitted a memorial to Emperor Guangxu, reporting that the thirteenth Dalai Lama (1876–1933) had led lamas and Tibetan Buddhists in reading sutras at primary monasteries after hearing that Japan had broken international law to invade Chosŏn. The Dalai Lama hoped their prayers before Buddha Sakyamuni would bring blessings to the great emperor and his great forces, by which China would defeat the Japanese clowns in Chosŏn.⁸⁰ On April 17, ten days after the emperor learned about the Dalai Lama’s prayers through Kuihuan’s memorial, the Chinese representative Li Hongzhang, after painful negotiations with his Japanese counterparts, Itō Hirobumi and Mutsu Munemitsu (1844–97), signed a peace treaty at Shimonoseki in Japan.
The text of the treaty was written in Chinese, Japanese, and English. The first article, which was drafted by Japan, stated that "China recognizes definitively the full and complete independence and autonomy [Ch., wanquan wuque zhi duli zizhu] of Corea, and in consequence, the payment of tribute and the performance of ceremonies and formalities by Corea to China in derogation of such independence and autonomy, shall wholly cease for the future."⁸¹ Unlike the Treaty of Kanghwa of 1876, which was written only in Chinese and Japanese, the English version of the Treaty of Shimonoseki explicitly defined Chosŏn’s "full and complete
independence and autonomy, erasing any ambiguity about the status of the country in the Chinese or Japanese versions. In addition, the terminology of the treaty reflected Qing China’s transformation over the previous two centuries. In the treaty, the Great Qing was fully equal to China and Zhongguo, although the preface and the end of the Japanese and Chinese versions of the treaty addressed the Qing as the Great Qing Empire in Chinese characters as a counterpart to the Great Japanese Empire. Whereas the Japanese text called the Qing the country of the Qing" (J., Shinkoku), the Chinese text referred to it as Zhongguo and the English version as China. In this sense, what the treaty terminated was not only the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship that had existed since 1637 but also the general Sino-Korean Zongfan arrangement that had arguably started with Jizi.
When the news that Li Hongzhang had signed the treaty reached Beijing, the thousands of scholars attending the triennial imperial civil-service examination were dismayed at the humiliating terms. They began to submit long and passionate petitions to the emperor via the Grand Censorate. The majority of these petitions were signed by more than fifty scholars from different provinces, and they called for the annulment of the treaty and a continuation of the war with Japan. The scholars emphasized Chosŏn’s strategic position as China’s eastern fence and its historical significance for the rise of the Great Qing. The petitions echoed the fervent tone of the Pure Stream bureaucrats.
On May 1, Wang Rongxian, Hong Jiayu, and Bao Xinzeng, three candidate officials from the Ministry of Personnel, submitted a long petition in which they outlined the grave dangers that each article of the Treaty of Shimonoseki posed for China. Observing that the treaty made Chosŏn equal to China but subordinate to Japan, the three officials expressed their frustration that a simple sentence of a treaty could terminate China’s long-term relationship with Chosŏn, "a fan for almost three hundred years that has embodied the superb achievements of Emperors Taizu [Nurhaci] and Taizong [Hongtaiji] and received kindness from other emperors for generations."⁸² Two days later, ten low-ranking officials from the Directorate of Education submitted a joint petition via Weng Tonghe. They bitterly reviewed China’s recent history of losing our Burma to Britain, our Annam to France, our northern Heilong River (the Amur River) to Russia, and our Ryukyu and Chosŏn to Japan, concluding that "we once had many fan in the four quarters of the world, but we have lost all of them within the past decades."⁸³ They further argued that China’s cession of Taiwan and Liaodong to Japan would be a prologue to further surrenders of China’s territory to foreign states, surrenders that would be much worse than the loss of outer fan on China’s periphery. As these officials saw it, the Great Qing was collapsing along its frontiers. But even as petitions such as these were flooding Beijing, the exchange of ratifications of the Sino-Japanese treaty took place at Yantai in Shandong Province on May 8, 1895.
Redefining Chosŏn and China: The Qing-Korean Treaty of 1899 and Its Aftermath
A Ritual Dilemma: Chosŏn’s Proposal to Negotiate a Treaty with China
The Treaty of Shimonoseki terminated the Sino-Korean court-to-court hierarchy, but it did not change the countries’ state-to-state relationship. The post-1895 political framework between the two countries, therefore, was not a completely new arrangement; rather, it represented the institutionalization of the surviving section of the dual network. The two sides accomplished this institutionalization by negotiating a new and equal treaty. The original proposal for the treaty came from the Korean monarch, who was increasingly losing power to his Japanese advisers after the war. On January 7, 1895, as Japan approached victory in the war, the king of Chosŏn performed ceremonies at Chongmyo, the royal ancestral shrine in Hansŏng. The monarch announced Great Laws (K., Hongbŏm), calling himself emperor (K., chim; Ch., zhen) and explaining that he had decided to cut off the thought of being dependent upon the country of the Qing in order to lay the foundation for autonomy and independence. In addition to ending the Qing’s authority—or suzerainty, as many scholars prefer to call it—over Chosŏn, the
king’s fourteen items initiated a self-strengthening reform designed by Japan and carried out under Japanese supervision.⁸⁴
In the postwar period, Japan’s increasing domination of Chosŏn progressively curtailed the country’s autonomy and independence, leading to serious political tensions between the king and his Japanese advisers. In October 1895 a mob of Japanese rioters entered the palace, killing Queen Min, the king’s closest adviser for decades, and mercilessly burning her body. The Japanese atrocities frightened the king, who could foresee his fate as a puppet under draconian Japanese control. Adhering to the Japanese schedule, on January 1, 1896, Chosŏn adopted the solar calendar and the new regnal title Kŏnyang, the first independent regnal title of the dynasty since its establishment in 1392. However, realizing that these reforms could not ensure his personal safety, the king and the crown prince escaped to the Russian legation in February and sought asylum, leaving the fate of the Korean court uncertain and intensifying the competition between Russia and Japan on the peninsula.
Chosŏn had won its independence with the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Shimonoseki, but at that point it had not yet signed a treaty with China that would have identified its independent status. In June 1896 the Korean interpreter Pak T’ae-yŏng visited Tang Shaoyi, the manager of Chinese commercial affairs and de facto Chinese representative in Hansŏng, to convey the king’s wish to negotiate a treaty with China. Tang did not refuse the proposal but suggested that the talks should be conducted later, as Chosŏn could not be regarded as an autonomous and independent country as long as the king was under Russian protection.⁸⁵
The king’s overtures posed a challenge to Beijing, which believed that "Chosŏn, as our dynasty’s longtime fan, should not be regarded as equal to Western countries. According to the Zongli Yamen, China would agree to negotiate new trade regulations" with Chosŏn, which would allow the country to maintain consuls in China, but China would not permit its former fan to sign treaties with it, send ministers to Beijing, or present letters of credence to the Chinese emperor. Instead, China would send a consul-general to Hansŏng to manage Chinese affairs. In this way, China could "preserve the system of shuguo " (Ch., cun shuguo zhi ti). The Yamen telegraphed Li Hongzhang for advice. Li, who was on a postwar trip to Europe and the United States, endorsed the plan but suggested that, to maintain China’s dignity, the Chinese consul-general (a post for which Li recommended Tang Shaoyi) should not present his credentials to the king.⁸⁶ This attempt to preserve the prewar hierarchical system characterized Beijing’s policy toward Chosŏn in the immediate postwar period.
Similarly, Korean policymakers generally continued to make use of traditional discourse as they adjusted their country’s relations with China. In a conversation between the senior official Cho Pyŏng-chik (1833–1901) and Tang Shaoyi in July 1896, Cho stated that Chosŏn had been a " fan and shuguo of the central dynasty for a long time," and that it was not the king who had originally sought the autonomous status outlined for Chosŏn in the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Chosŏn, Cho emphasized, had been coerced by its powerful neighbor (namely, Japan) into disclaiming the status of China’s shuguo, but the king appreciated the deep favors of the imperial dynasty and would like to negotiate a new treaty to resume the concord. Cho expressed concern that by refusing to negotiate a treaty with Chosŏn, China might be signaling its refusal to acknowledge Chosŏn’s autonomy. Tang responded that negotiating a treaty and recognizing Chosŏn’s autonomy were two different matters, because the former means only not following the old regulations, but the latter means that the two countries are equal to each other.⁸⁷ Their conversation yielded nothing.
In November 1896 Tang informed the Zongli Yamen that the king—Tang refused to acknowledge the monarch’s claim to emperorship—would send representatives to Beijing for treaty negotiations. This prospect forced China to confront the sensitive question of ritual procedures between Korean representatives and the imperial court in the postwar transitional context. If the self-declared emperor of Chosŏn dispatched a representative to Beijing for treaty negotiations, the representative, unlike a prewar tributary emissary, would no longer need to perform the ceremony of kowtow to the emperor, which would compromise China’s dignity. Given this ritual conundrum, Tang argued that it would be prudent for Beijing to appoint a consul-general to Hansŏng who could negotiate a treaty with
Chosŏn and protect the Chinese merchants and civilians; the affairs of Chinese subjects in Korea had been temporarily supervised by the British consul-general, John N. Jordan (1852–1925), on China’s commission. Endorsing Tang’s proposal, Beijing appointed Tang himself as Chinese consul-general in Chosŏn (Ch., Zhongguo zhuzha Chaoxian zonglingshi). Tang’s prewar view of Sino-Korean relations made it enormously difficult for him to adjust to the postwar arrangement. As he put it, "Although the system is now different, it is inconvenient for us to sign an equal treaty with Chosŏn given that it was a fan of our dynasty for centuries."⁸⁸ In the following years, Tang did his best to preserve a hierarchy between the two countries.⁸⁹
Reluctance and Nostalgia: China’s First Minister to Korea
In January 1897 Tang Shaoyi learned that the king had appointed Sŏng Ki-un as Chosŏn’s representative for the treaty negotiations but had canceled the plan to send Sŏng to Beijing once he heard of Tang’s appointment. Tang visited Sŏng and informed him that Chinese officials would not talk with him if he went directly to Beijing. In a conversation with Jordan, the British consul-general, Tang declared that he intended to focus solely on preventing the Korean representative from visiting Beijing, and to that end he wanted to commission Jordan to continue to manage Chinese commercial affairs.⁹⁰
The dramatic changes in Chosŏn’s political situation in 1897 prompted the Korean Foreign Office to pursue a more active agenda toward the goal of making a treaty with China. In the two years after the war, Chosŏn had begun to construct an image of itself as an independent country by removing or refashioning the icons of China’s supremacy in the Zongfan era. The Korean government converted the Gate of Receiving Imperial Favors into the Gate of Independence (K., Tongnim mun), buried the Samjŏndo stele, changed the South Palace Annex into the Temple of Heaven (K., Ch’ŏndan), and replaced the Chinese managers of Chosŏn’s customs with Russians. These efforts constituted a process of decentering the Middle Kingdom, as Andre Schmid has described it.⁹¹
In August 1897, six months after returning to his palace from the refuge of the Russian legation, the Korean emperor adopted the new regnal title Kwangmu. On October 12 the sovereign called his country the Great Korea (K., Taehan) after performing ceremonies of sacrifice toward Heaven and Earth. Western diplomats soon formally recognized the new name of the country.⁹² From Tang Shaoyi’s perspective, the Korean sovereign was arrogating to himself an illegitimate emperor-ship, and his attitude toward treaty negotiations with Chosŏn became even more conservative. But the new Korean empire did not pin its hopes entirely on Tang.
In March 1898 the Russian minister in Beijing forwarded to the Zongli Yamen Korea’s expression of willingness to send a representative to Beijing and to receive a Chinese counterpart in Hansŏng. The Yamen instructed Tang to block the dispatch of a Korean representative and decided to send a representative to Hansŏng first. Tang suggested that China send an official with a fourth-level rank, as opposed to the third-level representatives of other countries in Korea, in order to show the difference between the owner and the servant in the past days and to ensure that the system would not be violated. In the meantime, the Japanese minister in Beijing, Yano Fumio (1851–1931), contacted the Zongli Yamen as a mediator for Sino-Korean contacts. The Yamen informed Yano that Chosŏn could negotiate with Tang in Hansŏng for trade regulations and that China did not want to receive representatives of its former shuguo in Beijing.⁹³ Tang quickly contacted the Korean Foreign Office to discuss trade regulations, but the office refused on the grounds that a regulation was not a treaty—a retroactive protest against the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations, which fell far short of a treaty and had been dictated by the Chinese side.
In July, Beijing realized that the situation was slipping out of its hands, when Tang reported that the Foreign Office of Korea had invited Jordan to ask the British minister in Beijing, Claude M. MacDonald (1852–1915), to serve as a broker. The Zongli Yamen told Tang that if Chosŏn insisted on sending a representative to Beijing, the representative should be a fourth-rank minister, and his credentials should be forwarded to the emperor by the Yamen; no audience with the emperor would be arranged, as the Yamen would negotiate potential trade regulations with the representative.⁹⁴ Three years after the Sino-Japanese War, the humiliating
end of China’s patriarchal superiority over Korea was still much on Chinese politicians’ minds, and the Zongli Yamen was still reluctant to treat Korea as a state equal to China. As Tang saw it, allowing Hansŏng to send a minister to Beijing first would have a detrimental effect on the relationship given China’s status as a big country. To justify his concern, he pointed out that Britain and Spain, which were likewise big countries, had also preemptively dispatched their own representatives to their former subordinates—the United States and South American countries, respectively—once these subordinates had become autonomous (Ch., zizhu).⁹⁵
In China, the ambitious reform initiated by the Guangxu emperor in June 1898 reached its acme. Stimulated by the fiasco of the war, the reform aimed to modernize China by changing outdated conventions. The young emperor believed that China’s relations with Chosŏn should change too. On August 5, at the emperor’s instructions, the Grand Council telegraphed Tang that the emperor would allow Korea to send a minister to Beijing and would grant the minister an audience. The Zongli Yamen accordingly instructed Tang to inform Hansŏng that Korea could send its minister to China first, and that China would treat him with the ceremonies appropriate to friendly nations (Ch., youbang). China would dispatch its own minister to Korea for the sake of reciprocity.⁹⁶ Tang, however, chose not to inform the Koreans of Beijing’s decision.⁹⁷
In Beijing the emperor appointed Xu Shoupeng (?–1901) as the minister for Korea with a third-level rank and the title imperial commissioner in the country of Chosŏn (Ch., Zhuzha Chaoxian guo qinchai dachen). This title aroused concern among foreign ministers in Hansŏng because it carried strong Zongfan connotations and smacked of colonialism. In a conversation with Tang, the British inspector general of Korean customs, John M. Brown (1835–1926), expressed his suspicion that China still regarded Korea as its shuguo, because Beijing’s imperial commissioners in Tibet and Mongolia held similar titles. The Russian minister to Korea, Nikolai Matyunin (1849–1907), regarded Xu’s position as that of a second-rank minister, which was the highest rank among his counterparts in the diplomatic corps in Hansŏng. The Japanese, French, and German ministers were also disturbed by Xu’s title and the format of the Chinese credentials, which used the old term Chosŏn rather than the newly adopted Han for Korea.⁹⁸ The diplomats saw such language as a sign that China might not endorse the new postwar political arrangement in the peninsula.
Indeed, what to call Korea and its monarch presented a challenge to the Chinese side. In the end, it was Zhang Yinhuan, the former minister to the United States, who drafted Xu’s letter of credence on the basis of the first article of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, as instructed by Emperor Guangxu. Ma Jianzhong, the man who had been heavily involved in Korean affairs in the 1880s, offered some revisions to the draft.⁹⁹ The opening sentence of the letter read, The Great Emperor of the country of the Great Qing respectfully gives his greetings to the Great Monarch of the country of the Great Korea.¹⁰⁰ The term Great Monarch (Ch., da junzhu) indicated the king’s inferior position vis-à-vis the Great Emperor (Ch., da huangdi) of China, and the draft credential also used a modified format for the conventional honorific elevation that still elevated the Qing above Korea.
Emperor Guangxu disliked Zhang’s proposed format but himself was at a loss as to how to refer to Korea and its sovereign.¹⁰¹ When the emperor expressed his concerns to Zhang, Zhang explained that Chosŏn had renamed itself Great Korea without informing China, so the draft credential was simply based on the Treaty of Shimonoseki rather than on the domestic changes in Korea.¹⁰² Subse quently the emperor instructed Tang Shaoyi to investigate which term—Great Monarch or Great Emperor—Britain, Japan, and Russia used in their letters of credence to Korea, for he wanted the Chinese letter to follow whatever practice other countries had adopted.¹⁰³ Because of the emperor’s open-mindedness, the final version of the letter addressed the Korean monarch as the Great Emperor and placed Great Qing and Great Korea on the same line. The Korean letter of credence to China, which the first Korean minister to China presented to Emperor Guangxu in 1902, adopted the same equal format. This change in honorifics was the first since 1637 and represented a watershed moment in Qing-Chosŏn
relations.
As the diplomatic changes were inching forward, Empress Dowager Cixi suddenly staged a coup on September 21, 1898, placing the emperor under house arrest and suspending his reforms. Despite the political chaos, Xu Shoupeng was allowed to carry on with his work. His title changed from imperial commissioner to envoy plenipotentiary, and his explicit mission was to negotiate a treaty with the Korean Foreign Office.¹⁰⁴ This change entirely erased the ambiguity of Xu’s former title and the worries of his Japanese and Western counterparts in Hansŏng. The Manchu ruling house eventually, if reluctantly, accepted the fact that Chosŏn was a country equal to the Great Qing.
Before he departed for Korea, Xu drafted a treaty consisting of fourteen articles. He commented that China had suffered from unfair treaties with other countries, in particular regarding extraterritoriality and tariff agreements, and would be rectifying these imbalances in its new treaties, starting with the one with Korea. Xu was determined to pursue an equal treaty with Korea for the sake of China’s interests, but at the same time he revealed his traditional bias: "Korea was China’s fan and shuguo in the past and it was not Korea’s original wish to be autonomous. The country is small and surrounded by powerful neighbors. We should do our best to cherish it, rather than gain extra advantages from it." With this mindset, Xu wanted to make sure that both countries could enjoy the right of most-favored-nation status in trade with each other.¹⁰⁵
While Xu was getting ready to embark on his trip to Korea, Wu Baochu (1869– 1913), son of Gen. Wu Changqing, composed a preface to a book entitled Three Stories of Korea (Ch., Aoyi Chaoxian sanzhong), written by Zhou Jialu (1846– 1909), who had served as an assistant to General Wu when the latter went to Hansŏng in 1882 to suppress the mutiny. In the preface, Wu Baochu reviewed China’s humiliating defeat in Korea in 1895 and argued that China should have integrated Korea into China’s household system in 1882 and converted the country into prefectures and counties of China (Ch., jiqi tudi er junxian zhi). He was dismayed that China now had to dispatch a representative to Korea for treaty negotiations, which made Korea look like an enemy of China.¹⁰⁶ Wu offered a picture of China’s presence in Chosŏn that was full of nostalgia, frustration, and uncertainty.
Negotiating with a Friendly Nation: The Sino-Korean Treaty of 1899
Xu arrived in Hansŏng on January 25, 1899, with the intention of extending China’s benevolence of cherishing the small and was granted an audience with the Korean emperor on February 1. On the day of the audience, Xu was picked up by a sedan chair to be taken to the palace. When he entered the audience hall, he bowed once toward the emperor and bowed again as he approached the emperor. The emperor, wearing Western-style clothes, stood up to shake hands with Xu and to receive the Chinese letter of credence. Xu then read aloud a short tribute to the emperor, who in return showed his gratitude to the Chinese minister. After this, they shook hands again, and Xu bowed for the third time before he was escorted back to his legation.¹⁰⁷ The ceremony, conducted along the lines of Western common rules at the state-to-state level, was the first ritual performance between the Korean head of state and a state representative of China in the postwar period, and it marked the definitive end of centuries-long Zongfan rituals between the two countries.
Following the audience, Xu started treaty negotiations with Pak Che-sun (1858–1916), the minister of the Foreign Office. In September the two sides signed a trade treaty (K., Tae Han’guk Tae Ch’ŏngguk t’ongsang choyak) containing fifteen articles. Article 2 stated that each country would dispatch representatives to reside in the capital and treaty ports of the other and would enjoy most-favored-nation treatment. Article 5 endowed both with the right of consular jurisdiction. Article 12 allowed them to negotiate new regulations for border demarcation and to trade on the frontier in Manchuria. The agreement served as a replacement for the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations as the first equal treaty between the two countries, but China made notable concessions. For example, China was forbidden to export opium to Korea, but similar restrictions did not apply to Korean exports to China. Xu explained to Emperor Guangxu that he did not challenge such items because
he found that the Korean monarch and subordinates still worship China in their minds, which contributed to the success of the negotiations.¹⁰⁸
After signing the treaty, Xu commented that "Korea, China’s fan and shuguo in the past, has now become a friendly nation of China, and nothing can change the situation. Recalling the past—what a pity it is!"¹⁰⁹ The two countries ratified the treaty in Hansŏng in December, and Xu was appointed by Beijing as the first Chinese minister to Korea. In stark contrast to Tang Shaoyi, who had struggled with reconciling China’s past glory with the reality of the first years after the Sino-Japanese war, Xu in 1899 merely presented himself as a Western-style minister and quickly busied himself with reestablishing the Chinese diplomatic network in Korea in order to protect Chinese citizens and interests.
Korea would eventually send its minister to Beijing in reciprocity, but the dispatch was postponed because of China’s deteriorating situation. The Boxer Uprising was sweeping across northwestern Shandong, and it began to spread toward Tianjin and Beijing. The anti-Christian uprising eventually resulted in a diplomatic and political disaster for China in August 1900, when the Eight-Nation Alliance occupied Beijing right after Emperor Guangxu and Empress Dowager Cixi had fled to Xi’an. In October, Li Hongzhang began to negotiate with Britain, the United States, Japan, Russia, Italy, France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. In view of the dramatic changes in China, the Korean emperor, who was under close Japanese supervision, wrote a letter to the Meiji emperor asking Japan to protect Korean interests in China during the negotiations.¹¹⁰ In January 1901 Beijing recalled Xu Shoupeng from Hansŏng to Beijing to assist Li in the peace negotiations. Before leaving Korea, Xu named one of his counselors, Xu Taishen, as acting minister.
In late July the Zongli Yamen changed its Chinese name to Waiwu bu, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, legitimizing itself as China’s sole foreign office. Xu Shoupeng was appointed as a minister of the ministry. On September 7, 1901, Li signed the final protocol with the foreign states, and the Chinese empire teetered on the edge of collapse. Li died two months later, leaving his lifelong dream of modernizing China and his many plans to protect Korea unfulfilled. With the return of Emperor Guangxu and Empress Dowager Cixi to the Forbidden City in January 1902, Korea was finally ready to send its first minister to take his place amid the rubble of the city of Beijing.
The Korean government appointed Pak Che-sun, Xu Shoupeng’s treaty negotiation counterpart and the former commissioner in Tianjin, as the first Korean minister plenipotentiary to China.¹¹¹ On September 30, 1902, Pak presented his letter of credence to Emperor Guangxu in the Forbidden City following a tailored Western-style procedure.¹¹² The ceremony of kowtow, performed by Korean tributary emissaries to the emperor of China for centuries, had come to an end. Interestingly, the Chinese official records on the audience are very brief, exactly like those on the first meeting between Emperor Tongzhi and foreign ministers in 1873. Perhaps the court saw in the new rituals both a reminder of the Chinese empire’s past glory vis-à-vis its outer fan and a complex challenge to China’s dignity. After the audience, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs instructed Xu Taishen to send two Korean-language interpreters to Beijing to facilitate its further communications with Pak.¹¹³ The Korean language thus joined the list of the official foreign languages of the Chinese foreign ministry. A new—if fleeting—bilateral relationship had begun.
Chinese Zongfanism and Korean Colonialism in the Borderland: Sino-Korean Contacts in South China and Manchuria
The transformation of the Sino-Korean relationship was not as clear-cut in China’s provinces as it was in Beijing. In the coastal areas of South China, local officials still followed prewar routines to manage affairs regarding Korea. In December 1895, for instance, Governor Liao Shoufeng (1836–1901) in Zhejiang Province reported to Emperor Guangxu that officials in Wenzhou had rescued twenty-eight Koreans from a shipwreck in October and provided the victims with clothes and food, following conventions, eventually returning them to Chosŏn via Shanghai. Liao called these Koreans barbarians of the country of Chosŏn who had suffered from the shipwreck (Ch., Chaoxian guo nanfan), using the same Zongfan wording as that used in the eighteenth century.¹¹⁴ The Wenzhou case became a
model for similar cases in the following years.
In May 1901 Governor Yu Lianyuan in Zhejiang reported that fifteen Korean fishermen had suffered a shipwreck on China’s coast. After consulting the Wenzhou precedent, he followed the conventions of saving and taking care of them and sent them on to Shanghai.¹¹⁵ Yu had been a pillar of the Pure Stream in the 1890s and had been among those who called for Beijing to protect Chosŏn for the sake of the integrity of the Great Qing. By this point, China had signed its new treaty with Korea and Yu had been promoted to governor, but in Yu’s mind Chosŏn—the term he used, rather than Great Korea or Han—was still a fan of the Great Qing and the Korean fishermen belonged to the category of barbarians. Yu’s successors in Zhejiang from 1902 to 1908 embraced the same approach.¹¹⁶ In almost all cases the Korean victims were referred to as barbarians who were beneficiaries of China’s policy of cherishing the small or cherishing the men from afar. In provincial practice, then, Zongfan norms were no weaker than they had been in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
In contrast to the benign and almost imperceptible postwar transformation of the Sino-Korean relationship in South China, the shift in the border areas in Manchuria was manifested in blood, fire, and death. According to the reports of Chinese officials in Manchuria in 1907, Koreans started to attack and loot Chinese villages along the border of Jilin and Mukden in the late 1890s, and the situation deteriorated dramatically after 1901, when Beijing was occupied by the Eight-Nation Alliance and Manchuria was occupied by Russia.¹¹⁷ Chinese bandits similarly attacked Korean villages on the border. The sharp rise in Sino-Korean border conflicts signaled the local disorder caused by the collapse of the Zongfan arrangement from the top down. For local and nonofficial forces on both sides of the border, impoverished peasants in particular, practical concerns and the pressures of daily needs, such as the search for fertile land, food, livestock, and energy resources, prevailed over national relationships and state interests. With the sudden absence of Chinese and Korean authority, the borderland in Manchuria became a perfect location for Chinese and Korean bandits and other illegal armed groups to build up their strength and extract goods from local farmers and settlers.
Between early 1901 and early 1905, officials in Mukden and Jilin reported to Beijing at least a dozen cases of serious cross-border crime committed by Koreans, including armed robberies, burglaries, shootings, homicides, rapes, kidnappings, and arson. Chen Zuoyan, a local Chinese official in Yanji in eastern Jilin, reported that a Korean attack against a Chinese area in March 1901 claimed eleven Chinese lives and caused a loss of 4,337.81 taels of silver.¹¹⁸ As more Korean immigrants poured over the border into Chinese territory, the situation continued to worsen. In July 1903 Chen Zuoyan reported a series of misdeeds by Korean settlers and called on Beijing to take urgent measures to protect Chinese interests. A local report revealed that a Korean armed attack against four villages in Yanjin in the fall of 1903 had damaged 211 Chinese and Korean houses and cost more than 19,546.46 taels of silver.¹¹⁹ In the meantime, Chinese bandits continued to cross the border rivers to pillage Korean villages, and on the Chinese side of the border the Chinese pawns of local officials extracted money from Korean immigrants. At least four instances of illegal logging or kidnapping on the Korean side, for example, were committed by Chinese bandits.¹²⁰ In August 1903, emphasizing that Korea is different from what it was in the past, the Chinese minister in Hansŏng, Xu Taishen, suggested to Beijing that China should implement countermeasures to check Korean expansion into Chinese territory in Yanji, an area the Koreans and Japanese began to refer to as Kando (Ch., Jiandao). Britain and Japan, which had formed an alliance in 1902, informed Xu that Russian machinations were behind the attempt to settle Koreans in this area. In the following two years, the Chinese and Korean foreign ministries sought in vain to settle border disputes in Manchuria.¹²¹
Many historical and geopolitical factors contributed to the violent conflicts in the border areas. The absence of any demarcation of the point at which the Yalu and Tumen Rivers converged—marking the traditional boundary between the two countries—had been a problem since the Kangxi period in the eighteenth century. Although a borderline existed, it was not clearly or legally delineated, as it would be in modern times between two sovereign states. In the first half of the twentieth century, this issue evolved into a dispute that involved not just China and Korea but Japan as well. Border conflicts were also fueled by China’s opening
of Manchuria in the 1870s, when the Manchu court abolished the two-hundred-year-old policy of segregating Manchuria from inner China and encouraged people to immigrate to the area for cultivation. The new policy and the rich resources in the area also attracted thousands of poor Korean peasants, who crossed the Tumen River to cultivate the wilderness in the convergence zone, forcing China to deal with these foreign citizens.¹²² Emperor Guangxu had instructed local officials in 1882 to tolerate the illegal Korean immigrants as long as they had no intention of encroaching on China’s borders. Later, in order to solve the mounting problems, China started to assimilate Korean immigrants into the Chinese populace by ordering them to cut their hair in the Chinese style and to wear Chinese clothes. This policy provoked strong protest from Korea.¹²³
The accumulating conflicts led to a skirmish in the spring of 1904, when Chinese forces under the command of the officer Hu Dianjia defeated a group of Korean soldiers who had crossed the Tumen River with the purpose of occupying more land and mobilizing the Korean immigrants to break away from Chinese governance. This was the first time that China used force to resolve a dispute with Korea in the post-1895 period. The skirmish resulted in China’s resumption of territorial and administrative control over the area and forced Korea to return to peace talks. On June 15, 1904, Hu Dianjia, Chen Zuoyan, and three Korean officials signed an agreement with the title Regulation on Sino-Korean Border Affairs with the Purpose of Solving Problems Arising from the Conflict (Ch., Zhong-Han bianjie shanhou zhangcheng). Its name notwithstanding, the agreement primarily served to tie up remaining unresolved issues from the spring skirmish; it was not a state-to-state treaty for the long-term strategic goal of settling border disputes.¹²⁴
At the time the Sino-Korean agreement was signed, Japan was fighting with Russia for control of Manchuria. After it finally prevailed over Russia, Japan publicly made Korea into its protectorate in November 1905. The Korean minister to Beijing was recalled, and all affairs regarding Korean contacts with China were transferred to the management of the Japanese legation in Beijing. In February 1906, with the closing of the American, British, and French legations in Hansŏng and the arrival of the first Japanese residential general, Itō Hirobumi, China also recalled its third minister to Korea, Zeng Guangquan.
In Manchuria Sino-Korean border conflicts continued to increase, and the local Chinese officials believed that Korea was aggressively expanding to the Chinese side, where Korean immigrants significantly outnumbered the Chinese population. In 1907 Wu Luzhen (1880–1911), the Chinese investigator in charge of Sino-Korean border affairs, reported that there were more than fifty thousand Koreans on the Chinese side of the Tumen River, compared to fewer than ten thousand Chinese residents. According to Wu’s investigation of thirty-nine villages in the Helongyu area, the Korean settlers had established a total of 5,990 households in these villages, dwarfing the 264 Chinese households. Wu commented that this ancestral territory of the Qing had almost become Chosŏn’s colony (Ch., Chaoxian zhimin zhi di).¹²⁵ Although Korea was falling victim to Japanese colonialism, Korean immigrants had served as the vanguard in the Korean colonization of Chinese territory in Manchuria. This type of Korean colonization subsequently served as a vehicle of Japan’s colonial expansion into the vast inner land of Manchuria over the following three decades.
In order to protect the interests of Chinese merchants in Korea, Beijing appointed Ma Tingliang as the consul-general to Korea in 1909, a year after Emperor Guangxu and Empress Dowager Cixi died and the new emperor was inaugurated with the regnal title of Xuantong. China was in the throes of violent domestic upheaval through a series of reforms and rebellions, so the relationship with Korea was not a priority for the Beijing government. On August 22, 1910, Korea was annexed by Japan. Beijing made no official comment on the annexation. In Hansŏng, Ma instructed Chinese citizens to follow the new orders issued by the Japanese authorities, and he dismissed the police forces in Chinese settlements.
Beijing’s silence notwithstanding, the Japanese annexation was alarming to many Chinese, who felt the same colonial threat hanging over China. Dai Jitao (1891–1949), who had been educated in Japan and would later become an assistant to Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), published an editorial in a Shanghai newspaper in
August 1910 criticizing Beijing’s indifferent attitude to this tragic chapter in Korea’s history. Invoking the time-honored Sino-Korean relationship since the Jizi period, Dai declared that "Korea has been China’s shuguo for more than three thousand years, its lands lie within China’s borders [Ch., jiangyu], its people belong to the same ethnic group as the Chinese, its characters are Chinese, and its political customs are Chinese legacies." Lamenting Korea’s tragic fate, Dai warned that unless China roused itself, it too would soon suffer a Japanese invasion in the political, military, and industrial arenas.¹²⁶
In Manchuria, the governor-general of the Three Northeastern Provinces, Xiliang (1853–1917), was alarmed by Japan’s colonial policy (Ch., zhimin zhengce) toward China, enacted through the Koreans who continued to cross the border to occupy Chinese land. In September and October 1910, Xiliang reported, more than thirty thousand Korean immigrants were living among the Chinese residents on China’s side of the border. The governor-general emphasized that since these Korean immigrants had become Japanese citizens upon the Japanese annexation of Korea in August, they were no longer subject to Chinese jurisdiction but rather answered to the Japanese consul. Xiliang argued that this change would harm our sovereignty (Ch., sun wo zhuquan), and that the thousands of Korean immigrants would play the lead in Japan’s annexation of Manchuria. He suggested that China use the newly issued Nationality Regulations of the Great Qing (Ch., Da Qing guoji tiaoli) to convert the Korean immigrants into Chinese citizens in order to make the territorial borderline distinct and secure.¹²⁷
In August 1911 Zhao Erxun (1844–1927), Xiliang’s successor, urged Beijing to heed Xiliang’s proposal and to naturalize the Korean immigrants on Chinese soil. Stressing that "all the counties along the Yalu River, which are more than ten in number, belong to China’s inner land [Ch., neidi], Zhao proposed that China tell the Korean immigrants to become civilized" (Ch., guihua) by applying for and obtaining Chinese citizenship.¹²⁸ Like Xiliang, Zhao was aware that the issue of the nationality of the considerable Korean immigrant population was inextricably linked to China’s sovereignty. Zhao’s observation reveals that in the early 1910s, Chinese officials—at least those in Manchuria—perceived Sino-Korean relations purely on the state-to-state level. However, before Beijing could respond to Zhao’s proposal, the nationalist revolution broke out in Wuhan in October 1911, quickly leading to the collapse of the dynasty.
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6
LOSING CHOSOŎN
The Rise of a Modern Chinese State, 1885–1911
Since the 1860s, China had struggled to provide Western states with an unequivocal definition of Chosŏn’s status. Its difficulties were rooted in the institutional
discrepancies between the Zongfan mechanism and international law. The tacit understanding among these states was that China’s authority over Chosŏn was
valid and real. Yet in the wake of Japan’s challenges in the 1880s and early 1890s, at a time when the world was entering the age of empires as a consequence of
colonial powers’ quest for territorial acquisition, China took steps to modify its routine contacts with Chosŏn in an effort to save the fundamentals of the Zongfan
order, which were arousing concern among other empires present in the region.¹ By the end of the 1880s, China found itself surrounded by Japanese and Euro-
pean colonial forces. Japan, Britain, and France had colonized or annexed China’s outer fan in East and Southeast Asia, in particular Ryukyu, Burma, and Vietnam,
while Russia was encroaching on China’s territory in Central Asia, forcing China to provincialize Xinjiang in 1884. As a result, the frontiers of the politico-cultural
Chinese empire that had encompassed China’s outer fan began to disappear, replaced by clear national borders between the Chinese state and its former outer
fan .
The threat posed to China by the presence of rival powers in Chosŏn was not less than that which it faced at its other borders. China had two primary options in
terms of its policy toward the outer fan. It could either provincialize Chosŏn by incorporating the country into its territory in the form of prefectures and counties,
or it could supervise and protect it by harnessing China’s patriarchal authority. Both approaches won support from China’s leading scholars and officials. Beijing
finally adopted an in-between policy: assisting Chosŏn with managing its diplomatic and commercial affairs and placing an imperial resident in Hansŏng. From
the perspective of Western diplomats in East Asia, however, China was moving toward annexing Chosŏn under the guise of conventional Zongfan practices. This
chapter shows that although China believed it was fulfilling its commitment to protect its shuguo, its policy turned out to cause increased tensions between Bei-
jing and Hansŏng because of the rise of the Korean state in the international community and the impact of Korean nationalism within Chosŏn. After the termi-
nation of the Zongfan arrangement in 1895, both Qing China and Chosŏn Korea entered a new era as sovereign states. By withdrawing from its periphery in
Chosŏn to its core in the Qing, the Chinese empire developed into a modern state and embarked on its own road to modernity.
Invoking the Zongfan Conventions: His Imperial Chinese Majesty’s Resident in Chosŏn
Maintaining Zongfanism from Within: Yuan Shikai in Chosŏn and the Ritual Conundrum
As the imperial commissioner of commercial affairs in Chosŏn, Chen Shu-tang successfully augmented his power in the fall of 1884, as described in the previous
chapter, but he barely had time to exercise his new authority before an attempted coup took place in Hansŏng. On December 4, 1884, a group of pro-Japanese
members of the Kaehwadang (Enlightenment Party) occupied the palace, killed several pro-Chinese officials, and claimed they were terminating the country’s hi-
erarchical relations with China. These fervent nationalists, among them Hong Yŏng-sik (1855–84), Kim Ok-kyun (1851–94), and Pak Yŏng-hyo (1861–1939), won
the strong support of the Japanese minister Takezoe Shinichirō (1842–1917), an assistant to Mori Arinori in the 1876 Sino-Japanese debate over Chosŏn’s status.
The coup, known as Kapsin jŏngbyŏn (the coup of the year of Kapsin), was a result of increasing conflict between China, Japan, and Western states, along with
Korean domestic political struggles and strong Korean nationalism cultivated primarily by Japan. The coup’s leaders orchestrated the attack to coincide with
China’s dispatch of more troops to South China to fight the French in Vietnam. The dramatic and bloody nationalist revolution lasted only three days. Chinese
troops led by Gen. Wu Zhaoyou successfully placed the king and members of the royal family under their protection and totally defeated the Kaehwadang and the
Japanese forces in Hansŏng.²
Because there had been Chinese and Korean attacks on the Japanese legation and on Japanese citizens, and because the Korean court was in chaos, it was left
to the Chinese and the Japanese to resolve the problems caused by the coup. The resulting Sino-Japanese talks again focused on Chosŏn’s international status.³
Tokyo sent Inoue Kaoru as the plenipotentiary to Hansŏng to conduct talks with the Chinese envoys Wu Dacheng and Xuchang. But Wu was not a plenipotentiary,
so the negotiations were transferred to Tianjin and held between Li Hongzhang and Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909). The two sides signed a convention on April 18,
1885. Each agreed to pull its troops out of the peninsula within four months, to allow the king to hire officers from countries beyond China and Japan to train the
Korean forces, and to notify the other of any decision to send troops to Chosŏn in the event of a serious disturbance.⁴ Japan thus obtained the legal right to send
troops to Chosŏn, which paved the way for its military involvement in the Korean rebellion in 1894.
The coup considerably alarmed China. Ma Jianchang, the Chinese adviser to the king, suggested to Li Hongzhang that “China should either allow Chosŏn to be
independent from China and free from the current relationship or positively engage in its affairs by sending an able imperial resident to the country with Chinese
forces so the resident can supervise certain affairs.”⁵ Li responded that China should focus on overcoming its own crises first, but he agreed that China should
strengthen the authority of its representative in Chosŏn in order to check encroachment by Japan and other powers. The result was a considerable expansion in
the powers enjoyed by Chen’s successor, Yuan Shikai.
In November 1885, on Li’s recommendation, Beijing appointed Yuan the “imperial resident in Chosŏn in charge of diplomatic and commercial intercourse”
(Ch., Qinming zhuzha Chaoxian zongli jiaoshe tongshang shiyi) and bestowed on him a third-level rank with the title of backup candidate for a taotai. According to
Li, this new title endowed Yuan with the right to “engage in diplomatic affairs in one way or another,” which perfectly resolved the legal quagmire concerning the
Chinese representative’s status. Yuan promised both Li and Beijing that he would do his best to protect the “eastern fence that has been a fan of China for
generations.”⁶ Over the following decade, Yuan put his words into practice along Zongfan lines, stirring up serious conflicts among diplomats in Chosŏn in the
process.
The foreign diplomats in Hansŏng needed to establish whether Yuan’s appointment marked the beginning of a Chinese absorption of the country, a colonial
policy like those pursued by Britain, France, Italy, and Germany in Africa. The English translation of Yuan’s title became a crucial issue in this regard. George C.
Foulk (1856–93), the American chargé d’affaires ad interim, offered the translation “charge of diplomatic and commercial intercourse,” but it was rejected by an
unidentified young American-educated assistant of Yuan (possibly Tang Shaoyi, 1862–1938, a graduate of Columbia University who reached the country along
with Ma Jianchang and Paul Georg von Möllendorff in 1883). The assistant then put forward the translation “his imperial Chinese majesty’s resident, Seoul,” per-
haps inspired by the American minister’s official title “minister resident and consul general.”⁷ When talks between Foulk, the British consul Edward C. Baber
(1843–90), and the Japanese chargé d’affaires Takahira Kogorō (1854–1926) yielded no unanimous agreement on a translation, Yuan decided to use his assistant’s
suggestion, abbreviated as “H.I.C.M. Resident.”⁸ Although the resident’s legitimacy and power derived from China’s imperial might, the resident himself was not
part of the Manchu court. Nor was the Beiyang superintendent. Figure 6.1 illustrates the various channels of communication between China and Korea.
Yuan may not have realized that the title “resident” possessed strong connotations of an imperialist regime’s indirect rule over a region that would subse-
quently become a protectorate or colony of the empire. The British Empire, for instance, had accomplished its expansion into India by appointing a single British
“resident” or “political agent” to each princely state, the resident virtually controlling the state by offering advice to the local prince or chief. This type of indirect
rule dated back to 1764 and was practiced until Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858.⁹ In the early 1880s, the title “resident” was still sensitive because of its con-
nection to a colonial power’s territorial expansion. For example, in the spring of 1881, after France signed the Treaty of Bardo with the Tunisian bey Muhammad al-
Sadiq (1813–82), the French consul general in Tunisia assumed the new title “resident minister,” or officially “the French resident and delegate [to the bey] for
external affairs,” which triggered the country’s conversion into a French protectorate.¹⁰ In 1883 the French also began to set up a resident at Huế in Vietnam; this
resident was the representative of the French protectorate and thus was more powerful than the Vietnamese king. In this context, when Yuan claimed to be a resi-
dent of the Chinese empire in Chosŏn, he certainly puzzled his Western counterparts, who had tacitly defined him as China’s “consul-general” or “consul-general
with diplomatic functions,” ignoring any potential roles based on Chinese imperial authority.¹¹
FIGURE 6.1. Channels of official Sino-Korean communications after 1883
Yuan was not a minister, but his status as an imperial resident endowed him with more power than a minister would have held. Unlike a British resident in India
or a French resident in Tunisia, Yuan in Chosŏn could exploit the term “imperial” in his title, as it carried the authority of the Chinese emperor, to whom the
Chosŏn sovereign was subordinate in Zongfan terms. When Korean officials expressed concern over the breadth of Yuan’s power in the country, Yuan clarified
that his aim was simply to “justify the orthodox legitimacy of Chosŏn’s status as China’s subordinate country” (Ch., zheng shubang mingfen).¹²
Yuan’s handling of his relations with the Korean court demonstrates the authority he claimed for himself. In September 1886, for example, he spent hours in a
face-to-face meeting with the king, lecturing him on how to deal with the Port Hamilton incident. The port in southern Chosŏn had been occupied by Britain in
1885 amid British-Russian rivalry, triggering an intense dispute between Britain, Russia, Chosŏn, China, and Japan. Following China’s active intervention, the
British fleet withdrew in 1887 on the agreement that no foreign power would occupy any part of Chosŏn’s territory in the future.¹³ Yuan’s observation of Korean
court politics persuaded him that the king was weak, and Yuan even secretly proposed to Li Hongzhang that China replace the king with an able man from the Ko-
rean royal family.¹⁴ Not only did the king disapprove of Yuan’s behavior, but Yuan’s fellow diplomats also regarded his activities as violating diplomatic protocols
and damaging Chosŏn’s sovereignty, aggravating relations between Yuan and other diplomats in Hansŏng.
Illustrative of these tensions were the new rituals Yuan performed to the king. In a telegram soliciting Li Hongzhang’s advice in 1886, Yuan mentioned that in
past years, when Chinese officials had paid visits to the king, they had entered the palace gate in a sedan chair, bowed to the king three times with their hands
folded in front (Ch., sanyi; yi means zuoyi, a ritual practiced between officials of equal rank), and then sat down at the king’s side. In 1884, however, the Chinese
envoys Wu Dacheng and Xuchang, Gen. Ding Ruchang, and Taotai Ma Jianzhong had sat down opposite the king, following guest-host rituals. Yuan also noted
that the ministers of other countries had to dismount their sedan chairs outside the palace gate and pay visits to the king according to the etiquette for officials
outside the capital. Quoting ritual codes applicable to relations between China and Chosŏn, Li advised Yuan that it would be “truly courteous” for Yuan to follow
the rituals for Chinese provincial-level officials visiting first-degree princes. This category of ritual performance dictated that Yuan would dismount his sedan chair
at the gate of the palace hall, bow to the king three times with his hands folded in front, and then sit down by the king’s side. At grand ceremonies such as assem-
blies, Yuan would likewise bow three times with his hands folded in front, instead of performing a higher-level ritual of three bows (Ch., san jugong), in order to
show that China was “neither haughty nor humble” and to harmonize his conduct with that of other ministers.¹⁵ The new rituals eased Yuan’s integration into the
Korean court, but they created friction with other diplomats in the city.¹⁶
China’s Two Options: Supervision versus Provincialization
In the turbulent 1880s, when Beijing dramatically changed its border policy in the northwest by converting Xinjiang into a province, the northeastern frontier, too,
posed a major challenge to the Qing. Having lost Burma to Britain, Ryukyu to Japan, and Vietnam to France within three decades, China stood at a historical
crossroads with regard to its future administration of Chosŏn, as it had to decide how best to avoid also losing its most exemplary outer fan : should it take a step
back and adopt an indirect approach of sending high-ranking officials to supervise and protect Chosŏn, or would it be better to incorporate Chosŏn into Chinese
territory as prefectures and counties of China? Both options had precedents in the Han and the Yuan Dynasties and so could be justified. Viewed from a modern
perspective, however, both represented a colonial approach not unlike Japan’s later annexation of Korea in 1910. It was on precisely this point that China fell into a
dilemma that it was unable to overcome.
The Qing regarded Chosŏn as a loyal subordinate in its rhetoric, but as seen in the preceding chapters it never tried to incorporate Chosŏn into Chinese terri-
tory. The Chinese appraisal of Chosŏn as being “like prefectures and counties” merely acknowledged Korea’s subordination to China’s cultural superiority; it
didn’t express a practical political approach to annexing the country. For centuries, China, Chosŏn, and China’s other outer fan shared the worldview of all-under-
Heav-en, according to which all their lands were subject to the authority of the Son of Heaven. There was also a rule, drawn up by the first emperor of the Ming in
the fourteenth century, that China would not annex the fifteen outer fan whose contacts with China were supervised by the Ministry of Rites. The first of these
outer fan was Korea.¹⁷ This principle came under challenge in the 1880s, when the options of supervision and protection, on the one hand, and outright provin-
cialization, on the other, were put forward by some Chinese officials and scholars.
In November 1880 the Chinese minister to Japan, He Ruzhang, argued that it would be the best policy for China to send an imperial commissioner to Chosŏn
to manage the country’s domestic and foreign affairs, as China had done in Mongolia and Tibet. However, realizing that such a move was almost impossible at
the time, He Ruzhang suggested that Chosŏn sign treaties with other countries under China’s supervision in order to pursue a balance of power. In August 1882,
in the wake of Chosŏn’s mutiny and Japan’s provocative response, another Chinese minister to Japan, Li Shuchang, suggested that China “abolish the king and
convert the country into prefectures and counties of China,” imitating the relationship between Britain and India, in order to resolve all thorny issues related to
Chosŏn once and for all. Li Shuchang was fully aware that such an action would undermine China’s moral standards, but he nonetheless regarded it as the best
available policy for China.¹⁸ This was probably the first time that Chinese officials explicitly argued that China should provincialize Chosŏn during this period, but
the proposal was confidential and strictly confined to a small group of policymakers.
In 1882 Zhang Jian (1853–1926), an assistant to Gen. Wu Changqing in Hansŏng, called for reforms in Chosŏn in his treatise “Six Strategies for Managing the
Consequences of Chosŏn’s Mutiny” (Ch., Chaoxian shanhou liuce).¹⁹ This treatise, which was widely disseminated in Beijing through informal channels, encour-
aged officials of the so-called Pure Stream group (Ch., Qingliu)—who had seized the moral high ground in political struggles—to pursue a solution to the
Chosŏn problem. In October 1882 Zhang Peilun (1848–1903), a pillar of the Pure Stream, urged Beijing to dispatch a commercial commissioner to manage
Chosŏn’s foreign and domestic affairs. Li Hongzhang did not endorse this plan because he was fearful of a scenario in which China would be drawn into an even
more difficult situation and could not efficiently manage the country, but he noted that if Beijing decided to accept Zhang’s proposal, he would recommend He
Ruzhang for the position of imperial commissioner.²⁰
At the same time, Li Hongzhang received a note from the king inviting Chinese specialists on foreign affairs to serve as his assistants. Li believed that China
could exploit this opportunity to steer a middle course between supervising and protecting Chosŏn, on the one hand, and provincializing the country, on the
other. The invited specialists would be under the king’s command, guaranteeing Chosŏn the right of zizhu and underlining Chosŏn’s status as China’s shuguo. As
described in the previous chapter, the specialists, Ma Jianchang and Paul Georg von Möllendorff, arrived in Hansŏng in 1883, followed by the Chinese commercial
commissioner Chen Shutang. It was against this background of China’s increasingly active role in Chosŏn that Yuan Shikai was appointed as an imperial resident
a year and a half later.
In the wake of the bloody coup of 1884, a growing number of Chinese officials supported strengthening China’s position in Chosŏn. In late 1885 the Manchu
official Shengyu (1850–1900), then president of the Directorate of Education, declared that among China’s fan Chosŏn was more important than Ryukyu and Viet-
nam had been. He suggested that the court send a competent man to “protect and cherish the country” by leading a powerful contingent of troops, and that it
issue a decree to oust Queen Min and her followers with the aim of “mollifying the Korean people’s resentment and proclaiming China’s power and virtues.”²¹ In
the summer of 1890, hearing rumors that Russia was planning to invade Chosŏn, Kang Youwei (1858–1927), a Cantonese scholar who at the time was preparing
for the civil-service examination, drafted a treatise entitled “Strategies for Saving Chosŏn” (Ch., Bao Chaoxian ce) that proposed “middle, upper, and lower”
strategies. According to his middle strategy, China would “incorporate Chosŏn into the Chinese inner land and manage its administration” (Ch., shouwei neidi er
zhi qizheng). Kang argued that in 1882 China should have appointed officials and officers to manage Chosŏn’s politics and that it should have taken control of
Chosŏn’s taxes, trained its soldiers, and converted Chosŏn into an integral part of China’s inner territory. Kang’s upper strategy was to make Chosŏn into an in-
ternational protectorate. By contrast, the lower strategy was to maintain Chosŏn’s “nominal title as China’s fan and shuguo ” inwardly and to allow it to “conduct
foreign affairs freely under zizhu ” outwardly, which amounted to “no policy per se.”²² Kang castigated China for its inability to solve the Korean problem in the in-
ternational political arena. Eight years later, Kang served as a mentor to Emperor Guangxu when the latter launched dramatic reforms after China’s humiliating de-
feat in its war with Japan, which broke out in Chosŏn.
From Huang Zunxian and He Ruzhang in 1880 to Li Shuchang and Zhang Peilun in 1882 and then to Ma Jianchang in 1884, Shengyu in 1885, and Kang Youwei
in 1890, Beijing was barraged with proposals to either supervise and protect Chosŏn or provincialize it. The advocates of these proposals frequently traced the
point of departure for their suggested policies back to the early Qing and even earlier dynasties. They pointed out that Qing China had to take responsibility for
saving Chosŏn from crises, as Ming China had done in the 1590s. In this sense, they saw China’s policy in Chosŏn in the 1880s as a resurgence of the intrinsic
power exerted by the patriarch of the Zongfan family over its outer fan. For scholars who prefer to interpret China’s policy through the lens of international poli-
tics, this statement seems clichéd, but one should bear in mind that political rules informed by the Westphalian system cannot easily be applied to the Qing’s
rationale for its foreign relations with its outer fan as embodied in Qing-Chosŏn relations. Otherwise, Western diplomats in Hansŏng, Beijing, and Tokyo would
not have suffered such confusion for more than two decades, and the Western consultants hired by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs would not have had
to resort to the Ottoman-Egyptian example for lack of a model for the Qing-Chosŏn relationship in European history.
Although China believed it had the theoretical authority to carry out an annexation of Chosŏn and could justify to itself the political legitimacy of such a move,
the Manchu imperial court never put this option on its agenda; rather, it continued to adhere firmly to Zongfan principles in its contacts with Chosŏn. Whereas
the Yuan and Ming Dynasties had officially discussed plans to provincialize Korea, no textual evidence suggests that the Qing court entertained any court-level
discussion on this subject. The Zongli Yamen and other central institutions and high-ranking officials did forward proposals for provincialization to Empress
Dowager Cixi and Emperor Guangxu from the early 1880s to the peak of the war in 1894 and 1895, but the central court always remained silent on these proposals.
The pleas for provincialization thus did not change the imperial court’s established perception of Chosŏn. This perception may explain why, even after Chosŏn
obtained its independence in 1895, the Qing’s imperial calendars continued to include the country in the list of China’s inner provinces until as late as 1909, a year
before Chosŏn was colonized by Japan. In this regard, Zongfanism manifested itself in a fundamentally different way from colonialism.
This interpretation does not imply that international politics had no influence on China’s policy and behavior. In fact, China’s provincialization of Chosŏn could
have led to a domino effect in China’s borderland in Manchuria, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Yunnan, where China was contending with Japan, Russia, Britain, and France.
Chosŏn was a politico-cultural frontier of the Chinese empire, but this frontier was invisible and existed only in an intellectual sense within the Chinese world. Nor
could this frontier be defined by international law. On the borders of its territorial empire, China did embrace the policy of provincialization at that time. In 1884
Beijing accepted the proposals of Zuo Zongtang and Liu Jintang (1844–94) and converted Xinjiang into a province; this multiethnic region in Inner Asia remains
part of the Chinese state’s territory today. The same policy was applied to Taiwan in 1885, turning the island into another province. Although Taiwan was ceded to
Japan in 1895 as a result of the Sino-Japanese War, the Qing’s earlier provincialization of Taiwan provided the Chinese state in the twentieth century with legitimate
and legal resources to claim sovereignty over the island.
Reading Zongfanism from the Outside: Western Diplomats’ Perceptions of Chosŏn’s Sovereignty and Independence
Chosŏn’s sovereignty became a heated topic in the late 1880s when Chosŏn stepped onto the world stage. In order to meet various diplomatic challenges,
Chosŏn established new institutions and developed a pattern of dual diplomacy in the 1880s, just as China had done in the 1860s. Within this dual pattern, the
royal court maintained its Zongfan relations with China’s imperial court, while the new institutions, predominantly the Foreign Office, presented Chosŏn as an
independent state in its contacts with Western countries. The agencies of China’s state diplomacy, in particular the Beiyang superintendent and the H.I.C.M. Resi-
dent, sought to use China’s authority to influence Chosŏn’s state diplomacy. In the eyes of Western ministers, including the Western advisers appointed by China
to Chosŏn, China was impinging on Chosŏn’s independent sovereignty through calculated schemes. China’s image suffered, not only in the estimation of Japan
and the Western states that had interests in the peninsula, but also in Chosŏn itself.
The Western advisers recommended by Li Hongzhang to the king of Chosŏn serve as good examples in this regard. As the first Western adviser to the king on
maritime customs, Möllendorff also assumed the vice presidency of Chosŏn’s newly founded Foreign Office. But as he became eager to develop Chosŏn’s mili-
tary forces to counterbalance the country’s weakness, his activities progressively deviated from Li’s wishes. In 1884 Möllendorff asked Li to send officers to train
the Korean army. When this request yielded no response, he persuaded the king to negotiate a convention with Russia whereby Russian officers would train the
army in exchange for the use of Wŏnsan, the ice-free port on the eastern coast of the country. Under pressure from Li, the king dismissed Möllendorff in Novem-
ber 1885. At the recommendation of China’s inspector general, Robert Hart, Henry F. Merrill, an American national, replaced Möllendorff as chief commissioner
of the Korean Maritime Customs, and Owen N. Denny (1838–1900), a former US consul in Tianjin, assumed the post of vice president of the Foreign Office and
adviser to the king. Whereas Merrill rarely commented on Chosŏn’s affairs, Denny was very enthusiastic about assisting Chosŏn in pursuing independence from
China.
In January 1887 a veteran Chinese diplomat, Zeng Jize (known as Marquis Tseng, 1839–90), the eldest son of the distinguished late official Zeng Guofan (1811–
72), published an English-language article entitled “China: The Sleep and the Awakening” in the British journal Asiatic Quarterly Review. Making an ambitious argu-
ment that China would become “a great Asiatic Power” as awakened in the process of modernization, Zeng also commented on China’s foreign policy toward its
subordinate countries, noting that China “has decided on exercising a more effective supervision on the acts of her vassal Princes, and of accepting a larger re-
sponsibility for them than heretofore.” The marquis further claimed that “the Warden of the Marches is now abroad, looking to the security of China’s outlying
provinces––of Corea, Thibet, and Chinese Turkestan. Henceforth, any hostile movements against these countries, or any interference with their affairs, will be
viewed at Peking as a declaration, on the part of the Power committing it, of a desire to discontinue its friendly relations with the Chinese Government.”²³ The
reality, however, unfolded in a way that differed dramatically from what the marquis envisioned. In this regard, Denny was more prescient. A lawyer by profession,
Denny found his legal training useful in Chosŏn. In February 1888 he published a booklet entitled China and Korea, in which he asserted that China was destroying
Korea—an independent state with independent sovereignty—“by absorbing the country.”²⁴
Denny’s pamphlet was emotional and exposed his limited knowledge of Sino-Korean relations, but it was welcomed by his fellow Western diplomats who des-
perately hoped to grasp the nature of China’s presence in Chosŏn. The first two American ministers in Chosŏn, Lucius H. Foote and George C. Foulk, were very
enthusiastic about China’s influences in the country, and the United States was deeply involved in the issue of Chosŏn’s international status.²⁵ In the summer of
1887, Yuan, Li, Foulk, the American chargé d’affaires William W. Rockhill, and the new American minister Hugh A. Dinsmore (1850–1930) became embroiled in an
intense dispute resulting from a widely circulated rumor that Foulk had encouraged the king to seek independence from China. Dinsmore complained that “China
is slowly but surely tightening her grasp upon this government and its King,” and he blamed Yuan for his “declaration that Korea is a vassal state and altogether
incapable of self-government.”²⁶
The United States also became entangled in another fierce dispute between China and Korea in 1887, when the king decided to send Pak Chŏng-yang (1842–
1905) as an envoy to the United States, followed by another envoy to Britain, Germany, Russia, Italy, and France.²⁷ China endorsed the king’s plan but urged the
king not to endow the envoys with the title of plenipotentiary, and reminded the monarch that all Korean envoys overseas had to obey three rules outlined by Li
Hongzhang: first, a Korean envoy arriving in a new posting should first report to the Chinese consulate and be accompanied by the Chinese minister to the host
country’s ministry of foreign affairs; second, the Korean envoy should always sit behind the Chinese minister at meetings and banquets in the host country; and
third, the Korean envoy should consult with the Chinese minister about major events before contacting the institutions of the host country. These three rules were
aimed at maintaining the established “system of shuguo ” by emphasizing the hierarchy between the Chinese minister and the Korean envoy in the host country as
well as that between China and Korea in general.²⁸
The king did not follow Beijing’s instructions: in the letter of credence to the United States he called himself “I, the emperor” and appointed Pak “envoy plenipo-
tentiary” (K., chŏngwŏn taesin), although in his memorial to the Guangxu emperor he called Pak a “minister’s minister.”²⁹ Accordingly, the American side treated
Pak as minister plenipotentiary when he arrived in Washington in January 1888. Under the strong influence of his American secretary Horace N. Allen
(1858–1932),³⁰ Pak continued to flout the three rules: he did not subordinate himself to the Chinese minister in Washington, Zhang Yinhuan (1837–1900), which
led to an awkward and even hostile relationship between the two representatives. Some American news reports also stated that Korea dispatched its minister to
the United States independently and did not need to obtain China’s permission.³¹ In order to reassert Chosŏn’s position as China’s shuguo, Zhang delivered to
Pak a Chinese imperial calendar for 1888 that he had received from Shanghai.³² Finally, under pressure from China, the king of Chosŏn recalled Pak, turning this
brief episode showcasing Chosŏn’s apparent sovereignty and international status into a highly unpleasant footnote in Sino-Korean relations.
It was at this time that Denny’s pamphlet was circulating among Westerners in Korea and, soon, further afield. For China, the Korean situation was becoming
increasingly complicated, and in June 1888 Li Hongzhang secretly sent Möllendorff back to Hansŏng to “checkmate Denny who is urging the King to assert
independence.”³³ Denny’s take on the issue of Korea’s independence and its relationship to China quickly reached the United States. On August 31, 1888, with Pak
still in Washington, Senator John H. Mitchell (1835–1905) of Oregon, Denny’s home state, called on the Senate, and particularly the Committee on Foreign Rela-
tions, to pay attention to the Sino-Korean relationship. Mitchell, holding in his hand a copy of Denny’s “very able and highly interesting brief,” stated that “for
some time past the Imperial Government of China has, through its chief officers and representatives, and especially and particularly its representative at the city of
Seoul, been contemplating the subjugation and entire absorption of Corea.” He emphasized that Korea’s relationship with China was “that of a mere tributary
state, in which none of the rights of sovereignty or independence are eliminated or destroyed, and not that of a dependent or vassal government without any of the
prerogatives of sovereignty attaching.”³⁴
All of these episodes contributed to the deterioration of the Sino-Korean relationship by the end of the 1880s. Many a Western diplomat, sympathetic toward the
king and his government, believed that China was controlling Chosŏn in dramatic or even colonialist ways, while Chosŏn was desperately distancing itself from
the Sinocentric system by adopting Western political and diplomatic terms. As Dinsmore observed in the summer of 1887, “The Koreans do not impress me as
having any affection or strong attachment for the Chinese. On the contrary there is among the common people a well-defined dislike for them, but they fear them
and it is under the influence of this fear that they are gradually yielding to Chinese supremacy.”³⁵ In this context, Chosŏn used its state-to-state contacts with
China and other countries to propel itself out of China’s orbit.
Perplexing issues such as Yuan Shikai’s status as resident and Pak’s mission to the United States led Western scholar-diplomats to study the history of Sino-
Korean relations with the aim of exploring the origin of China’s authority over Chosŏn. During a journey in the capital district of Chosŏn in 1884, George Foulk
saw the Samjŏndo stele that had been erected in 1639, which he described as “a great marble tablet fully twelve feet high and a foot thick, mounted upon the back
of a gigantic granite turtle.” He added, “Historically, this monument presents much interest, and a thorough examination may develop information on the status
of Corea with regard to China of more directly practical use.”³⁶ Indeed, Rockhill soon tried to interpret Sino-Korean relations by using the inscriptions of the
Samjŏndo stele and other Chinese materials; his efforts were published as a long article in 1889 under the title “Korea in Its Relations with China.” In the article,
Rockhill attempted to answer the “puzzle for Western nations” of whether Korea was “an integral part of the Chinese empire” or “a sovereign state enjoying abso-
lute international rights.”³⁷
Rockhill noted that the British government considered the Burmese “tribute” to China within the Sino-Burmese framework to be of a “purely ceremonial na-
ture,” so in the Sino-British convention of 1886 the British side guaranteed the continuance of the Burmese decennial tribute mission to Beijing. The Sino-Korean
relationship was much more complicated. After examining Sino-Korean relations from 1392 and reviewing Qing-Chosŏn contacts since the early seventeenth cen-
tury, Rockhill determined that Chosŏn’s conclusion of treaties with Japan and the United States “has not materially altered the nature of the relations existing for
the last four centuries at least between China and its so-called vassal.”³⁸ Rockhill’s conclusion seriously challenged the popular perception among Western diplo-
mats in East Asia that Chosŏn was independent from China. The puzzle, therefore, remained unsolved and in fact became even more vexing.
The Grand Performance of the Zongfan Order: China’s Last Imperial Mission to Chosŏn
Rituals and Authority: Yuan’s Efforts to Assert China’s Superiority in Chosŏn
As its awareness of its own independent sovereignty (or the possibility thereof) deepened in the late 1880s, Chosŏn cautiously maintained its court-to-court con-
tacts with China and conducted its own state diplomacy beyond China. Because of this dual diplomacy, whereas China wanted to preserve and highlight its su-
periority in Chosŏn, Hansŏng tried to compromise the hierarchical arrangement in practice. Along the way, in 1890, the two sides entered into intense negoti-
ations over the Zongfan rituals.
On June 4, 1890, Korean Queen Dowager Cho died. A series of ritual practices between Hansŏng and Beijing had to be carried out. Aware that ritual matters
were under the management of the Manchu court, Yuan responded to the Korean Foreign Office’s announcement of the dowager’s death with a short note ex-
pressing his condolences.³⁹ At a time when international intrigues and rivalries exerted such a strong influence on the peninsula, Sino-Korean court-to-court con-
tacts through the exchange of emissaries seemed dwarfed by the two countries’ state-to-state contacts over political and diplomatic issues. While the Korean
court continued to send tributary missions to Beijing through the 1880s, Beijing did not dispatch envoys to Hansŏng for tributary affairs after Chosŏn opened its
doors to the West in 1882. Although court diplomacy still played a key role in regulating and modifying the bilateral relationship, the decade-long absence of impe-
rial envoys from Korean soil left Yuan Shikai in Hansŏng without any recent precedents to consult. The absence of such envoys also reinforced the impression of
Western diplomats that China had little authority over Chosŏn. Yuan believed that the expression of China’s condolences on the death of the dowager provided
the perfect opportunity to counteract the Western perception of Sino-Korean relations.⁴⁰
When the American minister Augustine Heard (1827–1905) invited Yuan to join a discussion with other ministers over an appropriate expression of their joint
condolences to the Korean court, Yuan declined on the grounds that “China and Chosŏn have longtime established regulations on ritual exchanges that are dif-
ferent from other countries’.”⁴¹ In a report to Li Hongzhang, in which he identified Chosŏn as “a friendly nation” (Ch., youbang) of other treaty nations, Yuan said
that the other ministers would follow common diplomatic etiquette in expressing condolences to the Korean government on the occasion of a national funeral,
but those countries would not send special representatives for this purpose. By contrast, Yuan argued, because Chosŏn was China’s shuguo and always received
China’s special favors, when the country was in grand mourning, China should send an imperial mission in accordance with the established system (Ch., tizhi).⁴²
Yuan became the first Han Chinese official in Chosŏn’s territory since 1637 to try to maintain China’s superiority through appropriate rituals, including by propos-
ing new ones.
On learning that other ministers would visit and bow to the king or visit the regent official and shake hands with him to show their sympathy, Yuan refused to
follow their example. Instead he proposed a new ritual procedure endorsed by Li Hongzhang: after the first five days, during which the body of the dowager would
lie in repose and the Korean people wore mourning clothes, Yuan would make an appointment with the Korean court to express his condolences based on “per-
sonal friendship” (Ch., siqing), which was considered equivalent to friendship among colleagues (Ch., liaoyin jiaoqing), rather than extending China’s “national
public condolences” (Ch., guojia gongdiao).⁴³ In early June, when other countries flew their legations’ flags at half-mast for three days to express their condo-
lences, Yuan and Li instructed Chinese warships and institutions in Inch’ŏn and at other Korean treaty ports to do so for only two days.⁴⁴ Their efforts to assert
China’s superiority through unique as well as unequal rituals simply magnified China’s isolation from other countries.
Despite his efforts, Yuan found himself stuck in a ritual dilemma. When he notified Min Chong-muk (1835–1916), the resident of the Foreign Office, that he
would like to visit the funeral hall in the inner palace, Min declined the offer because only royal family members could do so.⁴⁵ When the American minister, for
his part, consulted with Min about how foreign ministers should perform funerary rituals, Min said that it would be inappropriate for the Korean court to invite
foreign ministers to attend the funeral procession, but his office could provide a place near the East Gate of the city for the ministers to perform ceremonies as
the hearse passed through the gate. Heard complied; Yuan did not. Yuan then told the Home Office and the Foreign Office that he would like to accompany the
funeral team from the palace gate outside the city and hold the cord guiding the hearse, a Chinese funeral custom showing deep respect for the deceased. But the
Home Office did not endorse this proposal and suggested that Yuan go directly to the East Gate, where other ministers would convene; when the hearse passed
through the gate, the procession would stop for a moment, during which Yuan could perform a farewell ceremony. Disappointed by this response, Yuan decided
to set himself apart from the other ministers with his own ritual: he would set an incense burner on a table and hold a memorial ceremony for the late dowager by
the side of the road on the procession day.⁴⁶
Soon thereafter, another event made Yuan reconsider his plans yet again. On October 11, 1890, seven American officers led fifty armed marines on a march
from Inch’ŏn toward Hansŏng. Heard explained to Yuan that the United States, as a friend of Chosŏn, had sent naval troops to accompany the funeral procession
“as a mark of respect and sympathy.”⁴⁷ Yuan doubted his explanation. It was the second time in several months that Heard had summoned troops to the capital.
The first time had been right after the death of the dowager in June, when the king had sent an agent to ask Heard to send forces to the palace at once to provide
protection. Heard hesitated, but after considering the potential for disturbance and the jeopardy in which it might place American citizens, he ordered marines
from the USS Swatara in Inch’ŏn to Hansŏng. Heard specified to the king that the troops were there to protect the legation, but the king, he said, “would benefit
by the moral effect which their presence would produce.”⁴⁸ The presence of American forces in Hansŏng sparked a rumor in Beijing that Chosŏn was planning to
rent Port Hamilton to the United States as a coaling station in exchange for protection. Under these circumstances, to monitor the Americans, Yuan set up his
memorial table at the East Gate, where Heard and the American soldiers stood in line on the side of the road. The hearse did not stop as promised, but Yuan still
bowed three times with his hands folded in front.⁴⁹ The American soldiers returned to Inch’ŏn on October 15, defusing the tensions and allaying Yuan’s suspi-
cions.
Rituals and Sovereignty: Chosŏn’s Bargaining with China about the Imperial Mission
While Yuan Shikai was tackling ritual dilemmas in Hansŏng, the Korean court was negotiating ritual conventions with Beijing.⁵⁰ On June 5, 1890, the king in-
structed the prefect of Ŭiju to inform the garrison major of the Manchu bannermen at Fenghuang City of the dowager’s death. The monarch also appointed Hong
Chong-yŏng as envoy and Cho Pyŏng-sŏng as attendant secretary of a mission to carry the news to Beijing. According to convention, Beijing in turn needed to dis-
patch a mission of condolence to Hansŏng. Two weeks later, through Yuan Shikai and Li Hongzhang, the king asked Beijing not to send envoys to Hansŏng but
to allow Chosŏn’s tributary emissaries to bring back the imperial condolence messages. The king explained that if China sent a mission, the United States, Britain,
Germany, France, and Japan would send missions too, creating a situation that Chosŏn could not afford. What the king was requesting was known as “handing
over for convenience” (Ch., shunfu), but Li was not sure whether this convention had ever been applied to condolence messages. He instructed Yuan to secretly
consult precedents and warned him not to be rash, because Li felt that Hansŏng was forcing Beijing to do its bidding, despite the petition’s beseeching tone.
After examining imperial missions of condolence to Chosŏn upon queen dowagers’ deaths since the Qianlong period and enumerating six cases in 1757, 1805,
1821, 1844, 1858, and 1878, Yuan concluded that in the case of conferring noble rank on deceased royalty, Beijing always dispatched envoys and never used “hand-
ing over for convenience.” In view of his findings, Yuan saw the king’s request as a conspiracy. He reported to Li that Queen Min was dominating the king
through her fear that the ceremonies performed to China’s envoys in front of Westerners would damage Chosŏn’s image as a country of zizhu. Yuan further as-
serted that Denny was inciting the king to urge Beijing not to send a mission because the rituals would damage Chosŏn’s “national polity.”⁵¹ When the king dis-
cussed this issue with Yuan, Yuan insisted that the imperial mission would travel to Chosŏn and that all procedures to welcome the mission had to be conducted
in conformity with precedent. However, the two Korean emissaries were already on their way to Beijing, carrying the king’s special request.
Upon their arrival in Beijing, Hong Chong-yŏng and Cho Pyŏng-sŏng presented the king’s memorial to the emperor via the Ministry of Rites. In the memorial,
the king strictly followed the prescribed textual format by using China’s regnal title and referring to himself as “subordinate” and to Chosŏn as “small country.”⁵²
In a special note to the Ministry of Rites, Hong explained that as Chosŏn was facing a difficult situation because of political troubles, famine, and financial crisis,
he preferred to convey the imperial message of condolence back to his country without the need for Beijing to send envoys for the purpose.
Neither the ministry nor the Guangxu emperor granted this request. The Grand Council forwarded a decree to Hong that declared that an imperial mission had
to be sent because the Heavenly Dynasty would “cherish sympathy for its shuguo and fan on such occasions.” The mission had “a fundamental relationship to the
system” (Ch., tizhi youguan), and the rituals that Chosŏn should perform to it based on the established codes should not be curtailed in the least. Still, the em-
peror compromised by instructing the mission to take the maritime route between Tianjin and Inch’ŏn on warships of the Beiyang Navy. This was the first time
since 1637 that an imperial mission had taken to the seas. Of the thirty-nine Manchu candidates recommended by the Ministry of Rites, the emperor selected
Xuchang and Chongli (1834–1907) to serve as envoys. Given the possible international responses to the imperial mission’s presence in Chosŏn, the emperor or-
dered all members of the mission to refuse gifts from Chosŏn for the sake of China’s upright image.⁵³
The emperor’s decision to send the mission points to an established regulation of the Zongfan system: had Yuan Shikai, Li Hongzhang, or the Ministry of Rites
been able to find any historical precedent for the omission of an imperial mission of condolence, Beijing would likely have consented to the king’s request and
refrained from dispatching the mission. The Zongfan regulations thus served both China and Korea as a double-edged sword. The Chinese side further confirmed
that the mission would land in Inch’ŏn as scheduled, not in Masanpu, as Chosŏn proposed. According to Yuan, the king was hesitant about whether to go out of
Hansŏng to welcome the envoys in the suburbs and perform ceremonies in person, for Denny was urging the king to receive the envoys in the palace. The envoys
stressed that all ceremonies had to be performed as recorded in the ritual codes, and during their sojourn in Hansŏng they would not meet with any Westerners.⁵⁴
Rituals and Dignity: The Imperial Mission to Chosŏn and the Grand Ceremony
On October 28, 1890, the two envoys picked up gifts for the king from the Ministry of Rites, including sandalwood incense, white and blue silk, and three hundred
taels of silver. All of these items were in accordance with imperial codes determined in the eighteenth century.⁵⁵ Two days later they arrived in Tianjin, the head-
quarters of the Beiyang Navy commanded by Li Hongzhang, who had summoned three warships—the Jiyuan, the Laiyuan, and the Jingyuan—to harbor for the
mission. Li first sent the Jiyuan to Chosŏn with a note in which the envoys again expressed their insistence that all prescribed ceremonies be carried out in full on
their arrival in Chosŏn. The envoys also stated that the members of the mission would not accept any money or articles as routine gifts in order to show the
emperor’s concern for his shuguo and fan.⁵⁶
Chosŏn was busy preparing to welcome the envoys according to precedent. To receive the mission, the king appointed several high-ranking officials, including
Nam Chŏng-ch’ŏl, president of the Ministry of Punishment, and Sŏng Ki-un (1847–1924), grand chamberlain and superintendent of trade in the Inch’ŏn district.
Both Nam and Sŏng had served as commissioners in Tianjin in 1884, where they had possessed a status equal to that of Western ministers, but now they were
fully integrated into the Zongfan system as subordinates of both the king and the Chinese emperor. In addition to refurnishing a pavilion between Inch’ŏn and
Hansŏng as the envoys’ accommodations, the Koreans sent 130 foreign-drilled soldiers to the area for security. In Hansŏng the court had deployed around 590
soldiers to maintain local order.⁵⁷
The king was still reluctant to leave the city to welcome the envoys, as he was worried that Japanese and Western diplomats and citizens would witness the hi-
erarchical rituals, in particular his kowtowing to the envoys, which would undermine his dignity as a sovereign. But he nonetheless eventually decided to receive
the envoys near the West Gate according to precedent.⁵⁸ After all, the king had been invested by the Chinese emperor, and at this particular moment the emper-
or’s authority exerted a demand that the monarch could not ignore.
Once all the rituals had been blueprinted, the envoys sailed from Tianjin and reached the outer harbor of Inch’ŏn on November 6. After two high-ranking Ko-
rean officials boarded the cruisers to welcome the mission, the envoys landed by a small steamship with the imperial decree. The Korean officials, headed by the
receivers of the mission, bowed to the imperial envoys and items. After the envoys had placed the decree in the dragon shrine customarily used for this purpose,
the procession headed for the envoys’ lodgings in Inch’ŏn. It was a long and magnificent procession. First came the Korean receivers and officials in columns,
one on each side of the road, with the Hansŏng magnate and the metropolitan governor on the east side and the prefects and the magistrates on the west side.
Next were the Korean escorts, flags, yellow umbrellas, drums, gongs, and bands. They were followed by the incense shrine and the dragon shrine and then by the
Chinese attendants, all of whom were mounted. The two envoys followed in their sedan chairs, side by side, and behind them marched the high and low deputies
with the supervisors and their attendants.
The colorful procession passed through the General Foreign Settlement and the Chinese Settlement (Ch., Hua Yang zujie), which the Chinese merchants had
decorated with lanterns and streamers, undoubtedly feeling superior to their counterparts given the occasion. From the perspective of the envoys, the extraor-
dinary procession and the elaborate ceremony that numerous Koreans and foreigners gathered to appreciate perfectly highlighted the Great Qing’s superior
authority in its subordinate country.⁵⁹ J. C. Johnston, the acting commissioner of customs in Inch’ŏn, was indeed impressed and commented that the arrival of
the mission was “the most noteworthy event since the opening of Chemulpo [Inch’ŏn].”⁶⁰ When the envoys reached their residence at the Office of the Superin-
tendent of Trade (K., Kamni amun), the Korean officials kowtowed toward the imperial envoys and decree, while the envoys replied by bowing with their hands
folded in front. In the office the envoys reviewed the four ritual programs prepared by the Korean side and confirmed that all procedures would be performed the
next day in Hansŏng. They declined to accept any gifts from the Korean officials.
The grand ceremony took place in the palace on November 8, and it included the reading of the imperial message of condolence and the ceremonial wailing by
the king and the envoys.⁶¹ When the ceremonies drew to a close, the king and the envoys had a short conversation in which the king expressed his gratitude for
the “great honor” that China had given to the “small country.”⁶² Their conversation contained no mention of political or diplomatic issues. After drinking tea, the
host and the guests bowed toward each other with hands folded in front. All of the rituals strictly followed the precedents of the eighteenth century. In addition,
the king visited the envoys at their residence on November 10 and treated them to a tea ceremony. This would traditionally have been the time when the Korean
side gave gifts to the envoys, but the envoys emphasized again that they could not accept even so much as a piece of paper. The next day the king sent off the en-
voys at the West Gate by performing the prescribed rituals. After a rest in Inch’ŏn, the envoys sailed back to Tianjin. Their departure marked the end of China’s
imperial missions to Chosŏn within the Zongfan framework and thus the conclusion to a tradition that had operated at least since 1401, when Ming China had
officially invested the king of Chosŏn.
Already at the time of the event, and ever since, the dominant interpretation of this imperial mission has regarded it as a Chinese conspiracy conducted under
the foil of tributary routines, aiming to strengthen China’s control over Chosŏn at the cost of the latter’s independent sovereignty.⁶³ Without knowing what oc-
curred inside the palace between the king and the envoys, the Western ministers assumed that the envoys had persuaded the king to act in accordance with Bei-
jing’s interests in the name of conventional rituals.⁶⁴ These diplomats viewed the event in the context of modern diplomatic circumstances and saw ritual con-
tacts as a tool that China used to influence or manipulate Chosŏn. Scholars in the twentieth century tended to juxtapose Chosŏn’s vassalage visà-vis China with
its independent sovereignty vis-à-vis its treaty counterparts, interpreting the mission as an application of China’s new policy, which might be called the “Li-Yuan
policy,” after Li Hongzhang and Yuan Shikai.⁶⁵ This policy is said to have combined China’s supremacy as the suzerain over Korea within the old tributary frame-
work with China’s hegemonic position in the new treaty port system in Chosŏn.
But Yuan’s role may have been exaggerated by his counterparts in Hansŏng at the time and by scholars afterward. Their narratives have portrayed Yuan as an
arrogant, overbearing, and peremptory person who acted as a “Chinese pro-consul” and aggressively dominated the Chosŏn government for a decade.⁶⁶ The
events surrounding the death of the dowager in 1890, however, cast doubt on this description. Yuan’s efforts to negotiate his ritual performance in Hansŏng with
the Korean side yielded nothing, which lays bare his unprivileged position as a foreign minister. Yuan did not go to Inch’ŏn to highlight China’s superior position
or attend the grand ceremony in the palace, nor did he meet or talk with the two imperial envoys. The envoys did not contact Yuan either, aside from sending him
several routine notes about the ritual performance before they left Hansŏng. What Yuan’s experience reflected was Chosŏn’s independent power to manage its
own affairs.
This interpretation does not deny the fact that Beijing did use the mission to demonstrate its superiority. After their return, the two envoys reported to the em-
peror, “All foreigners have seen the solemn and majestic rituals and learned that Chosŏn is subordinate to the Heavenly Dynasty. Chosŏn could not deny it either.
If we can take advantage of the situation to pacify the country in an appropriate way, Chosŏn will serve as our fence and enjoy our great benevolence forever.”⁶⁷
Johnston also observed that the mission “derived special political importance from the revival of the old-time ceremonies which mark the suzerain-tributary rela-
tions between China and Corea.”⁶⁸ As a result, according to M. Frederick Nelson, this event “imparted, for the Western observers, a de jure status to China’s de
facto position in Korea…. The Western powers were beginning to attribute more force to the familial relationship which for two decades they had rejected as purely
ceremonial.”⁶⁹ Behind the rituals, it was evident, stood a vibrant politico-cultural Chinese empire. Rituals, therefore, were deeply involved in the tortuous transfor-
mation of both China and Korea from parts of the empire to modern sovereign states.
Beijing was not blind to the complex international situation as it considered modifying old conventions. Under the rubric of cherishing the subordinate country,
the two envoys made the constructive suggestion that China treat the expenses of the envoys to Chosŏn as it did the outlays of ministers to other countries. The
aim was to prevent Chosŏn from imposing exorbitant taxes and levies on its people in the name of welcoming the envoys. After consulting Emperor Yongzheng’s
edict of 1735, in which the emperor reduced by half the amount of silver the king was expected to give the imperial envoys as gifts, the Ministry of Rites endorsed
the abolition of the custom of envoys’ receiving silver from Chosŏn. The ministry and the Zongli Yamen decided that in the future each imperial envoy would re-
ceive two thousand taels of silver and each interpreter five hundred taels from the Zongli Yamen to cover expenses during the trip to Chosŏn. This reform blurred
the line between imperial envoys to China’s outer fan and ministers sent to other countries. Emperor Guangxu approved the change. The Beiyang superintendent,
the Manchu general and the Ministry of Rites in Mukden, the king of Chosŏn, and the imperial resident in Hansŏng were all informed of the decision.⁷⁰ No impe-
rial envoys, however, would ever have the chance to claim financial support from the Zongli Yamen before the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1894 in Chosŏn.
Saving “Our Chosŏn”: The Chinese Intelligentsia’s Responses to the Sino-Japanese War
Assisting the Loyal Fan : The Prewar View
In May 1894 the Chinese general Nie Shicheng (1836–1900) returned to Tianjin from a ten-month trip to northern Manchuria, the Russian Far East, and Chosŏn.
In Chosŏn he had met with the king and visited treaty ports in order to get a general picture of the situation in the country. According to Nie, “The king is weak,
the officials are addicted to alcohol and women, and no one is considering self-strengthening programs…. There are no talented generals at the top and no able
warriors at the bottom. Were the country to encounter trouble, it would need China to send troops to protect it. The situation is very dangerous.” The general be-
lieved that “compared with Russia, which is powerful but only a superficial threat, Japan is a truly mortal danger.” He argued that China should prepare to resist
Japan’s potential invasion of Chosŏn in order to “consolidate the fan and shuguo and protect China’s frontier” (Ch., gu fanshu, bao bianjiang).⁷¹
Nie’s predictions were proved true by the deterioration of Chosŏn’s situation in the Tonghak Rebellion, an armed peasant uprising that broke out in January
1894 against corrupt aristocrats and against the Japanese and Western invasion of Chosŏn (Tonghak, an intellectual school founded in 1860, refers to “Eastern
learning,” indicating its anti-Western approach). Nie himself was dispatched to Chosŏn to assist the country in suppressing the rebellion; there he would witness
China lose Chosŏn to Japan on the battlefield.
Many Chinese officials shared Nie’s concerns. In July, when China was clashing with Japan over sending troops to Chosŏn, a group of officials in Beijing out-
lined in their memorials or position papers to the emperor what they believed would be the best policy to strengthen Chinese forces, protect Chosŏn, and defeat
Japan. Zeng Guangjun (1866–1929) of the Imperial Academy suggested that China publicize its rationale for an expedition against Japan. Defining Chosŏn as the
country that “was the first to subordinate itself to our dynasty and has conscientiously paid tributary visits for hundreds of years without interruption,” Zeng pro-
claimed that “Japan has fabricated excuses and tried to make the country subordinate to two countries.”⁷² Pang Hongshu (1848–1915) of the Grand Censorate
(Ch., Ducha yuan) alluded to the case of China’s loss of Ryukyu and argued that China should not abandon Chosŏn because it was critical for China’s overall situ-
ation. Pang emphasized that Chosŏn had been a fan of the Great Qing for a long time, “to the point that it is no different from the Mongols and the tribes in the
western areas” (Ch., Xiyu, referring to Inner Asian areas). Therefore, China should stop the intervention of other countries in Chosŏn to protect the security of its
territory, including the three provinces in Manchuria, the ancestral home of the current dynasty. Conceiving a Chinese strategy in the context of international poli-
tics, Pang exhorted China to protect Chosŏn by defeating Japan, so that China could focus on resolving its disputes with Russia over the borderline in the Pamir
Mountains and with Britain over trade negotiations in Tibet.⁷³
Other officials preferred to emphasize the internal connections between the Qing and Chosŏn since the early seventeenth century. After reviewing Hongtaiji’s
conquest of Chosŏn in 1637 and the erection of the Samjŏndo stele, Duanfang (1861–1911), a Manchu official who later became governor-general of Sichuan, ar-
gued that China should support Chosŏn because the country had loyally served the Great Qing for more than two hundred years without treachery.⁷⁴ On the day
Duanfang submitted his position paper, the Japanese and the Chinese navies engaged in a battle at P’ungdo in Chosŏn. Thus began the war between the two
countries.
Defending China Itself: The Link between “Our Chosŏn” and Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan
Emperor Guangxu issued an edict to declare war on Japan on August 1, 1894. The edict reiterated that Chosŏn had been a fan and shuguo of the Great Qing and
had paid tribute to China every year for more than two hundred years, so it was China’s duty to send troops to Chosŏn to protect the Korean people from great
suffering.⁷⁵ The edict justified China’s action as “cherishing the small” within the Zongfan system and defending international law within the treaty port system. A
growing number of Chinese officials identified China’s move as a typical embodiment of the convention of cherishing men from afar.⁷⁶ These officials pointed
passionately to all of China’s outer and inner fan and other frontier areas, including Vietnam, Burma, Ryukyu, Outer Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, Manchuria, and
Taiwan, which were already being eyed covetously by Western powers, and declared that for its own good China should not lose Chosŏn. The growing crisis in
Chosŏn thus became an issue related to Qing China’s own fate. The Great Qing had to defend its territorial borderland and the politico-cultural frontier of the Chi-
nese empire.
According to Changlin, the Manchu minister at the Ministry of Revenue, if Japan annexed Chosŏn, “all the fan of our dynasty would be subordinate to foreign
barbarians, so other countries would encroach on China’s inner land, and consequently Xinjiang, Taiwan, Tibet, and Manchuria would be in grave danger.” Ding
Lijun (1854–1903), a Han Chinese official at the Imperial Academy, further criticized Japan for “usurping our Chosŏn” (Ch., duo wo Chaoxian). He remarked, “If
the fence collapsed, Mukden would be in great danger. Chosŏn, which is different from Vietnam and Burma, which are thousands of miles away from China, is
mutually dependent with China, like the lips and the teeth, and like bones and flesh.” Ding argued that Beijing should refuse British and Russian mediation be-
tween China and Japan, for if China ceded Chosŏn or Taiwan to Japan, as the Western mediators were suggesting, Britain would encroach on Tibet and Russia
would seek to take Outer Mongolia.⁷⁷
Changlin’s and Ding’s concerns about China’s territorial integrity were widely shared by their fellow scholars and scholar-officials, who saw Chosŏn as the
fence that protected Manchuria. As one of these officials, Kuai Guangdian, put it, “After we abandon Chosŏn, Russia will invade Mongolia and Britain will do the
same to Tibet, so shall we let these countries alone or argue with them? If we opt to argue with them, we had better keep Chosŏn safe now.”⁷⁸ All of these officials
regarded Chosŏn as an indispensable element of China’s strategy to safeguard its territorial integrity. Saving “our Chosŏn” was equal to saving China itself.
The officials’ ardent belief that Beijing should exercise its patriarchal authority reflected the revitalization of the potential policy of provincializing Chosŏn.
Assuming that the king had been co-opted by Japan, Ding Lijun proposed that China invest the crown prince as the new king and keep him in the Chinese army
for his own safety. Hong Liangpin (1826–96) similarly suggested that China select a member of the royal house of Chosŏn to guide the Chinese forces and invest
him as the new king once the crisis was resolved. Yu Lianyuan (1844–1901) endorsed this proposal and suggested that the new investiture should be conducted
in P’yŏngyang. Yan Youzhang further argued that China should immediately transform Chosŏn into a province (Ch., gaijian xingsheng) and should appoint officials
and officers to govern it, yet treat the king and his officials generously and allow them to maintain their Korean titles. While Ding regarded this policy as a way of
“publicizing our great justice to all people under Heaven,” Yan saw it as legitimate and justifiable because Chosŏn was China’s fan and had constituted two Chi-
nese counties—Fuyu and Lelang—under the Han Dynasty.⁷⁹
The storm of officials’ opinions was triggered by the declaration of war against Japan on August 1, but it was also a result of political struggles between bureau-
cratic factions in Beijing. The majority of these officials were low-ranking members of the Pure Stream group, which drew on the thinking of the minister of the
Grand Council, Li Hongzao (1820–97), and Emperor Guangxu’s instructor Weng Tonghe. Embracing a hawkish approach, both men saw Li Hongzhang as their
political adversary and accused him and his protégés, such as Ma Jianzhong, Liu Mingchuan (1836–96), and Ding Ruchang, of being afraid to fight the Japanese.
With the rise of Weng and Li Hongzao in October, their followers became more active with more dramatic proposals during the second half of the war.
The core argument of these officials was that China could not lose Chosŏn, for it would mean the disintegration of the Great Qing itself. In fighting for Chosŏn,
the Great Qing would fight not only for its territorial integrity but also for its own dignity and legitimacy as the Middle Kingdom and the Heavenly Dynasty. In the
context of war, the ideology of all-under-Heaven became central for these scholar-officials, who saw the fate of the Great Qing at stake. Pragmatists dealing with
the Japanese, Russians, and British on China’s frontiers regarded the Pure Stream officials as armchair strategists with unrealistic plans, but the latter were unde-
niably accurate in their assessment of China’s frontier security. The nightmare scenario they had sketched out in late 1894, in which China would encounter seri-
ous challenges in Manchuria, Outer Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan from colonial powers such as Russia and Britain, became true in the postwar period.
China’s loss of territory halted only once the People’s Republic of China clearly claimed its territorial domain and defined China’s borders. In this sense, China did
not become a nation-state until the 1950s, when Korea—represented by two sovereign states because of the Cold War—became completely independent from the
Chinese empire.
Losing the Eastern Fence: The Conclusion of the Treaty of Shimonoseki
While the war was escalating on China’s eastern frontier, people on the western frontier in Tibet looked on with concern. On February 22, 1895, the imperial com-
missioner to Tibet, Kuihuan (1850–?), submitted a memorial to Emperor Guangxu, reporting that the thirteenth Dalai Lama (1876–1933) had led lamas and Tibetan
Buddhists in reading sutras at primary monasteries after hearing that Japan had broken international law to invade Chosŏn. The Dalai Lama hoped their prayers
before Buddha Sakyamuni would bring blessings to the “great emperor” and his “great forces,” by which China would defeat the Japanese “clowns” in Chosŏn.⁸⁰
On April 17, ten days after the emperor learned about the Dalai Lama’s prayers through Kuihuan’s memorial, the Chinese representative Li Hongzhang, after
painful negotiations with his Japanese counterparts, Itō Hirobumi and Mutsu Munemitsu (1844–97), signed a peace treaty at Shimonoseki in Japan.
The text of the treaty was written in Chinese, Japanese, and English. The first article, which was drafted by Japan, stated that “China recognizes definitively the
full and complete independence and autonomy [Ch., wanquan wuque zhi duli zizhu] of Corea, and in consequence, the payment of tribute and the performance of
ceremonies and formalities by Corea to China in derogation of such independence and autonomy, shall wholly cease for the future.”⁸¹ Unlike the Treaty of Kangh-
wa of 1876, which was written only in Chinese and Japanese, the English version of the Treaty of Shimonoseki explicitly defined Chosŏn’s “full and complete
independence and autonomy,” erasing any ambiguity about the status of the country in the Chinese or Japanese versions. In addition, the terminology of the treaty
reflected Qing China’s transformation over the previous two centuries. In the treaty, the “Great Qing” was fully equal to “China” and “Zhongguo,” although the
preface and the end of the Japanese and Chinese versions of the treaty addressed the Qing as the “Great Qing Empire” in Chinese characters as a counterpart to
the “Great Japanese Empire.” Whereas the Japanese text called the Qing the “country of the Qing” (J., Shinkoku), the Chinese text referred to it as “Zhongguo” and
the English version as “China.” In this sense, what the treaty terminated was not only the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship that had existed since 1637 but also
the general Sino-Korean Zongfan arrangement that had arguably started with Jizi.
When the news that Li Hongzhang had signed the treaty reached Beijing, the thousands of scholars attending the triennial imperial civil-service examination
were dismayed at the humiliating terms. They began to submit long and passionate petitions to the emperor via the Grand Censorate. The majority of these peti-
tions were signed by more than fifty scholars from different provinces, and they called for the annulment of the treaty and a continuation of the war with Japan.
The scholars emphasized Chosŏn’s strategic position as China’s “eastern fence” and its historical significance for the rise of the Great Qing. The petitions echoed
the fervent tone of the Pure Stream bureaucrats.
On May 1, Wang Rongxian, Hong Jiayu, and Bao Xinzeng, three candidate officials from the Ministry of Personnel, submitted a long petition in which they out-
lined the grave dangers that each article of the Treaty of Shimonoseki posed for China. Observing that the treaty made Chosŏn equal to China but subordinate to
Japan, the three officials expressed their frustration that “a simple sentence of a treaty” could terminate China’s long-term relationship with Chosŏn, “a fan for al-
most three hundred years that has embodied the superb achievements of Emperors Taizu [Nurhaci] and Taizong [Hongtaiji] and received kindness from other
emperors for generations.”⁸² Two days later, ten low-ranking officials from the Directorate of Education submitted a joint petition via Weng Tonghe. They bitterly
reviewed China’s recent history of losing “our Burma” to Britain, “our Annam” to France, “our northern Heilong River” (the Amur River) to Russia, and “our
Ryukyu” and Chosŏn to Japan, concluding that “we once had many fan in the four quarters of the world, but we have lost all of them within the past decades.”⁸³
They further argued that China’s cession of Taiwan and Liaodong to Japan would be a prologue to further surrenders of China’s territory to foreign states, surren-
ders that would be much worse than the loss of outer fan on China’s periphery. As these officials saw it, the Great Qing was collapsing along its frontiers. But
even as petitions such as these were flooding Beijing, the exchange of ratifications of the Sino-Japanese treaty took place at Yantai in Shandong Province on May
8, 1895.
Redefining Chosŏn and China: The Qing-Korean Treaty of 1899 and Its Aftermath
A Ritual Dilemma: Chosŏn’s Proposal to Negotiate a Treaty with China
The Treaty of Shimonoseki terminated the Sino-Korean court-to-court hierarchy, but it did not change the countries’ state-to-state relationship. The post-1895
political framework between the two countries, therefore, was not a completely new arrangement; rather, it represented the institutionalization of the surviving
section of the dual network. The two sides accomplished this institutionalization by negotiating a new and equal treaty. The original proposal for the treaty came
from the Korean monarch, who was increasingly losing power to his Japanese advisers after the war. On January 7, 1895, as Japan approached victory in the war,
the king of Chosŏn performed ceremonies at Chongmyo, the royal ancestral shrine in Hansŏng. The monarch announced “Great Laws” (K., Hongbŏm), calling
himself “emperor” (K., chim; Ch., zhen) and explaining that he had decided to “cut off the thought of being dependent upon the country of the Qing in order to lay
the foundation for autonomy and independence.” In addition to ending the Qing’s authority—or suzerainty, as many scholars prefer to call it—over Chosŏn, the
king’s fourteen items initiated a self-strengthening reform designed by Japan and carried out under Japanese supervision.⁸⁴
In the postwar period, Japan’s increasing domination of Chosŏn progressively curtailed the country’s autonomy and independence, leading to serious political
tensions between the king and his Japanese advisers. In October 1895 a mob of Japanese rioters entered the palace, killing Queen Min, the king’s closest adviser
for decades, and mercilessly burning her body. The Japanese atrocities frightened the king, who could foresee his fate as a puppet under draconian Japanese con-
trol. Adhering to the Japanese schedule, on January 1, 1896, Chosŏn adopted the solar calendar and the new regnal title Kŏnyang, the first independent regnal title
of the dynasty since its establishment in 1392. However, realizing that these reforms could not ensure his personal safety, the king and the crown prince escaped
to the Russian legation in February and sought asylum, leaving the fate of the Korean court uncertain and intensifying the competition between Russia and Japan
on the peninsula.
Chosŏn had won its independence with the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Shimonoseki, but at that point it had not yet signed a treaty with China that would have
identified its independent status. In June 1896 the Korean interpreter Pak T’ae-yŏng visited Tang Shaoyi, the manager of Chinese commercial affairs and de facto
Chinese representative in Hansŏng, to convey the king’s wish to negotiate a treaty with China. Tang did not refuse the proposal but suggested that the talks
should be conducted later, as Chosŏn could not be regarded as an autonomous and independent country as long as the king was under Russian protection.⁸⁵
The king’s overtures posed a challenge to Beijing, which believed that “Chosŏn, as our dynasty’s longtime fan, should not be regarded as equal to Western
countries.” According to the Zongli Yamen, China would agree to negotiate new “trade regulations” with Chosŏn, which would allow the country to maintain con-
suls in China, but China would not permit its former fan to sign treaties with it, send ministers to Beijing, or present letters of credence to the Chinese emperor.
Instead, China would send a consul-general to Hansŏng to manage Chinese affairs. In this way, China could “preserve the system of shuguo ” (Ch., cun shuguo zhi
ti). The Yamen telegraphed Li Hongzhang for advice. Li, who was on a postwar trip to Europe and the United States, endorsed the plan but suggested that, to
maintain China’s dignity, the Chinese consul-general (a post for which Li recommended Tang Shaoyi) should not present his credentials to the king.⁸⁶ This at-
tempt to preserve the prewar hierarchical system characterized Beijing’s policy toward Chosŏn in the immediate postwar period.
Similarly, Korean policymakers generally continued to make use of traditional discourse as they adjusted their country’s relations with China. In a conversation
between the senior official Cho Pyŏng-chik (1833–1901) and Tang Shaoyi in July 1896, Cho stated that Chosŏn had been a “ fan and shuguo of the central dynasty
for a long time,” and that it was not the king who had originally sought the autonomous status outlined for Chosŏn in the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Chosŏn, Cho
emphasized, had been coerced by its powerful neighbor (namely, Japan) into disclaiming the status of China’s shuguo, but the king “appreciated the deep favors
of the imperial dynasty and would like to negotiate a new treaty to resume the concord.” Cho expressed concern that by refusing to negotiate a treaty with Chosŏn,
China might be signaling its refusal to acknowledge Chosŏn’s autonomy. Tang responded that negotiating a treaty and recognizing Chosŏn’s autonomy were two
different matters, because the former “means only not following the old regulations,” but the latter “means that the two countries are equal to each other.”⁸⁷ Their
conversation yielded nothing.
In November 1896 Tang informed the Zongli Yamen that the king—Tang refused to acknowledge the monarch’s claim to emperorship—would send represen-
tatives to Beijing for treaty negotiations. This prospect forced China to confront the sensitive question of ritual procedures between Korean representatives and
the imperial court in the postwar transitional context. If the self-declared emperor of Chosŏn dispatched a representative to Beijing for treaty negotiations, the rep-
resentative, unlike a prewar tributary emissary, would no longer need to perform the ceremony of kowtow to the emperor, which would compromise China’s dig-
nity. Given this ritual conundrum, Tang argued that it would be prudent for Beijing to appoint a consul-general to Hansŏng who could negotiate a treaty with
Chosŏn and protect the Chinese merchants and civilians; the affairs of Chinese subjects in Korea had been temporarily supervised by the British consul-general,
John N. Jordan (1852–1925), on China’s commission. Endorsing Tang’s proposal, Beijing appointed Tang himself as “Chinese consul-general in Chosŏn” (Ch.,
Zhongguo zhuzha Chaoxian zonglingshi). Tang’s prewar view of Sino-Korean relations made it enormously difficult for him to adjust to the postwar arrangement. As
he put it, “Although the system is now different, it is inconvenient for us to sign an equal treaty with Chosŏn given that it was a fan of our dynasty for centuries.”⁸⁸
In the following years, Tang did his best to preserve a hierarchy between the two countries.⁸⁹
Reluctance and Nostalgia: China’s First Minister to Korea
In January 1897 Tang Shaoyi learned that the king had appointed Sŏng Ki-un as Chosŏn’s representative for the treaty negotiations but had canceled the plan to
send Sŏng to Beijing once he heard of Tang’s appointment. Tang visited Sŏng and informed him that Chinese officials would not talk with him if he went directly
to Beijing. In a conversation with Jordan, the British consul-general, Tang declared that he intended to focus solely on preventing the Korean representative from
visiting Beijing, and to that end he wanted to commission Jordan to continue to manage Chinese commercial affairs.⁹⁰
The dramatic changes in Chosŏn’s political situation in 1897 prompted the Korean Foreign Office to pursue a more active agenda toward the goal of making a
treaty with China. In the two years after the war, Chosŏn had begun to construct an image of itself as an independent country by removing or refashioning the
icons of China’s supremacy in the Zongfan era. The Korean government converted the Gate of Receiving Imperial Favors into the Gate of Independence (K., Tong-
nim mun), buried the Samjŏndo stele, changed the South Palace Annex into the Temple of Heaven (K., Ch’ŏndan), and replaced the Chinese managers of
Chosŏn’s customs with Russians. These efforts constituted a process of “decentering the Middle Kingdom,” as Andre Schmid has described it.⁹¹
In August 1897, six months after returning to his palace from the refuge of the Russian legation, the Korean emperor adopted the new regnal title Kwangmu. On
October 12 the sovereign called his country the “Great Korea” (K., Taehan) after performing ceremonies of sacrifice toward Heaven and Earth. Western diplomats
soon formally recognized the new name of the country.⁹² From Tang Shaoyi’s perspective, the Korean sovereign was arrogating to himself an illegitimate em-
peror-ship, and his attitude toward treaty negotiations with Chosŏn became even more conservative. But the new Korean empire did not pin its hopes entirely on
Tang.
In March 1898 the Russian minister in Beijing forwarded to the Zongli Yamen Korea’s expression of willingness to send a representative to Beijing and to re-
ceive a Chinese counterpart in Hansŏng. The Yamen instructed Tang to block the dispatch of a Korean representative and decided to send a representative to
Hansŏng first. Tang suggested that China send an official with a fourth-level rank, as opposed to the third-level representatives of other countries in Korea, in
order to show the “difference between the owner and the servant in the past days” and to ensure that the “system” would not be violated. In the meantime, the
Japanese minister in Beijing, Yano Fumio (1851–1931), contacted the Zongli Yamen as a mediator for Sino-Korean contacts. The Yamen informed Yano that
Chosŏn could negotiate with Tang in Hansŏng for trade regulations and that China did not want to receive representatives of its former shuguo in Beijing.⁹³ Tang
quickly contacted the Korean Foreign Office to discuss trade regulations, but the office refused on the grounds that a regulation was not a treaty—a retroactive
protest against the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations, which fell far short of a treaty and had been dictated by the Chinese side.
In July, Beijing realized that the situation was slipping out of its hands, when Tang reported that the Foreign Office of Korea had invited Jordan to ask the British
minister in Beijing, Claude M. MacDonald (1852–1915), to serve as a broker. The Zongli Yamen told Tang that if Chosŏn insisted on sending a representative to
Beijing, the representative should be a fourth-rank minister, and his credentials should be forwarded to the emperor by the Yamen; no audience with the emperor
would be arranged, as the Yamen would negotiate potential trade regulations with the representative.⁹⁴ Three years after the Sino-Japanese War, the humiliating
end of China’s patriarchal superiority over Korea was still much on Chinese politicians’ minds, and the Zongli Yamen was still reluctant to treat Korea as a state
equal to China. As Tang saw it, allowing Hansŏng to send a minister to Beijing first would have “a detrimental effect on the relationship” given China’s status as a
“big country.” To justify his concern, he pointed out that Britain and Spain, which were likewise “big countries,” had also preemptively dispatched their own rep-
resentatives to their former subordinates—the United States and South American countries, respectively—once these subordinates had become autonomous
(Ch., zizhu).⁹⁵
In China, the ambitious reform initiated by the Guangxu emperor in June 1898 reached its acme. Stimulated by the fiasco of the war, the reform aimed to mod-
ernize China by changing outdated conventions. The young emperor believed that China’s relations with Chosŏn should change too. On August 5, at the emper-
or’s instructions, the Grand Council telegraphed Tang that the emperor would allow Korea to send a minister to Beijing and would grant the minister an audience.
The Zongli Yamen accordingly instructed Tang to inform Hansŏng that Korea could send its minister to China first, and that China would treat him with the cere-
monies appropriate to “friendly nations” (Ch., youbang). China would dispatch its own minister to Korea for the sake of reciprocity.⁹⁶ Tang, however, chose not to
inform the Koreans of Beijing’s decision.⁹⁷
In Beijing the emperor appointed Xu Shoupeng (?–1901) as the minister for Korea with a third-level rank and the title “imperial commissioner in the country of
Chosŏn” (Ch., Zhuzha Chaoxian guo qinchai dachen). This title aroused concern among foreign ministers in Hansŏng because it carried strong Zongfan conno-
tations and smacked of colonialism. In a conversation with Tang, the British inspector general of Korean customs, John M. Brown (1835–1926), expressed his
suspicion that China still regarded Korea as its shuguo, because Beijing’s imperial commissioners in Tibet and Mongolia held similar titles. The Russian minister
to Korea, Nikolai Matyunin (1849–1907), regarded Xu’s position as that of a second-rank minister, which was the highest rank among his counterparts in the
diplomatic corps in Hansŏng. The Japanese, French, and German ministers were also disturbed by Xu’s title and the format of the Chinese credentials, which
used the old term “Chosŏn” rather than the newly adopted “Han” for Korea.⁹⁸ The diplomats saw such language as a sign that China might not endorse the new
postwar political arrangement in the peninsula.
Indeed, what to call Korea and its monarch presented a challenge to the Chinese side. In the end, it was Zhang Yinhuan, the former minister to the United
States, who drafted Xu’s letter of credence on the basis of the first article of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, as instructed by Emperor Guangxu. Ma Jianzhong, the
man who had been heavily involved in Korean affairs in the 1880s, offered some revisions to the draft.⁹⁹ The opening sentence of the letter read, “The Great Em-
peror of the country of the Great Qing respectfully gives his greetings to the Great Monarch of the country of the Great Korea.”¹⁰⁰ The term “Great Monarch” (Ch.,
da junzhu) indicated the king’s inferior position vis-à-vis the “Great Emperor” (Ch., da huangdi) of China, and the draft credential also used a modified format for
the conventional honorific elevation that still elevated the Qing above Korea.
Emperor Guangxu disliked Zhang’s proposed format but himself was at a loss as to how to refer to Korea and its sovereign.¹⁰¹ When the emperor expressed his
concerns to Zhang, Zhang explained that Chosŏn had renamed itself “Great Korea” without informing China, so the draft credential was simply based on the
Treaty of Shimonoseki rather than on the domestic changes in Korea.¹⁰² Subse quently the emperor instructed Tang Shaoyi to investigate which term—“Great
Monarch” or “Great Emperor”—Britain, Japan, and Russia used in their letters of credence to Korea, for he wanted the Chinese letter to follow whatever practice
other countries had adopted.¹⁰³ Because of the emperor’s open-mindedness, the final version of the letter addressed the Korean monarch as the “Great Emperor”
and placed “Great Qing” and “Great Korea” on the same line. The Korean letter of credence to China, which the first Korean minister to China presented to Em-
peror Guangxu in 1902, adopted the same equal format. This change in honorifics was the first since 1637 and represented a watershed moment in Qing-Chosŏn
relations.
As the diplomatic changes were inching forward, Empress Dowager Cixi suddenly staged a coup on September 21, 1898, placing the emperor under house ar-
rest and suspending his reforms. Despite the political chaos, Xu Shoupeng was allowed to carry on with his work. His title changed from “imperial commis-
sioner” to “envoy plenipotentiary,” and his explicit mission was to negotiate a treaty with the Korean Foreign Office.¹⁰⁴ This change entirely erased the ambiguity
of Xu’s former title and the worries of his Japanese and Western counterparts in Hansŏng. The Manchu ruling house eventually, if reluctantly, accepted the fact
that Chosŏn was a country equal to the Great Qing.
Before he departed for Korea, Xu drafted a treaty consisting of fourteen articles. He commented that China had suffered from unfair treaties with other coun-
tries, in particular regarding extraterritoriality and tariff agreements, and would be rectifying these imbalances in its new treaties, starting with the one with Korea.
Xu was determined to pursue an equal treaty with Korea for the sake of China’s interests, but at the same time he revealed his traditional bias: “Korea was China’s
fan and shuguo in the past and it was not Korea’s original wish to be autonomous. The country is small and surrounded by powerful neighbors. We should do our
best to cherish it, rather than gain extra advantages from it.” With this mindset, Xu wanted to make sure that both countries could enjoy the right of most-favored-
na-tion status in trade with each other.¹⁰⁵
While Xu was getting ready to embark on his trip to Korea, Wu Baochu (1869– 1913), son of Gen. Wu Changqing, composed a preface to a book entitled Three
Stories of Korea (Ch., Aoyi Chaoxian sanzhong), written by Zhou Jialu (1846– 1909), who had served as an assistant to General Wu when the latter went to Hansŏng
in 1882 to suppress the mutiny. In the preface, Wu Baochu reviewed China’s humiliating defeat in Korea in 1895 and argued that China should have integrated
Korea into China’s household system in 1882 and converted the country into prefectures and counties of China (Ch., jiqi tudi er junxian zhi). He was dismayed that
China now had to dispatch a representative to Korea for treaty negotiations, which made Korea “look like an enemy of China.”¹⁰⁶ Wu offered a picture of China’s
presence in Chosŏn that was full of nostalgia, frustration, and uncertainty.
Negotiating with a Friendly Nation: The Sino-Korean Treaty of 1899
Xu arrived in Hansŏng on January 25, 1899, with the intention of “extending China’s benevolence of cherishing the small” and was granted an audience with the
Korean emperor on February 1. On the day of the audience, Xu was picked up by a sedan chair to be taken to the palace. When he entered the audience hall, he
bowed once toward the emperor and bowed again as he approached the emperor. The emperor, wearing Western-style clothes, stood up to shake hands with Xu
and to receive the Chinese letter of credence. Xu then read aloud a short tribute to the emperor, who in return showed his gratitude to the Chinese minister. After
this, they shook hands again, and Xu bowed for the third time before he was escorted back to his legation.¹⁰⁷ The ceremony, conducted along the lines of “West-
ern common rules” at the state-to-state level, was the first ritual performance between the Korean head of state and a state representative of China in the postwar
period, and it marked the definitive end of centuries-long Zongfan rituals between the two countries.
Following the audience, Xu started treaty negotiations with Pak Che-sun (1858–1916), the minister of the Foreign Office. In September the two sides signed a
trade treaty (K., Tae Han’guk Tae Ch’ŏngguk t’ongsang choyak) containing fifteen articles. Article 2 stated that each country would dispatch representatives to reside
in the capital and treaty ports of the other and would enjoy most-favored-nation treatment. Article 5 endowed both with the right of consular jurisdiction. Article 12
allowed them to negotiate new regulations for border demarcation and to trade on the frontier in Manchuria. The agreement served as a replacement for the 1882
Sino-Korean Regulations as the first equal treaty between the two countries, but China made notable concessions. For example, China was forbidden to export
opium to Korea, but similar restrictions did not apply to Korean exports to China. Xu explained to Emperor Guangxu that he did not challenge such items because
he found that “the Korean monarch and subordinates still worship China in their minds, which contributed to the success of the negotiations.”¹⁰⁸
After signing the treaty, Xu commented that “Korea, China’s fan and shuguo in the past, has now become a friendly nation of China, and nothing can change the
situation. Recalling the past—what a pity it is!”¹⁰⁹ The two countries ratified the treaty in Hansŏng in December, and Xu was appointed by Beijing as the first Chi-
nese minister to Korea. In stark contrast to Tang Shaoyi, who had struggled with reconciling China’s past glory with the reality of the first years after the Sino-
Japanese war, Xu in 1899 merely presented himself as a Western-style minister and quickly busied himself with reestablishing the Chinese diplomatic network in
Korea in order to protect Chinese citizens and interests.
Korea would eventually send its minister to Beijing in reciprocity, but the dispatch was postponed because of China’s deteriorating situation. The Boxer Upris-
ing was sweeping across northwestern Shandong, and it began to spread toward Tianjin and Beijing. The anti-Christian uprising eventually resulted in a diplo-
matic and political disaster for China in August 1900, when the Eight-Nation Alliance occupied Beijing right after Emperor Guangxu and Empress Dowager Cixi
had fled to Xi’an. In October, Li Hongzhang began to negotiate with Britain, the United States, Japan, Russia, Italy, France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. In view
of the dramatic changes in China, the Korean emperor, who was under close Japanese supervision, wrote a letter to the Meiji emperor asking Japan to protect Ko-
rean interests in China during the negotiations.¹¹⁰ In January 1901 Beijing recalled Xu Shoupeng from Hansŏng to Beijing to assist Li in the peace negotiations.
Before leaving Korea, Xu named one of his counselors, Xu Taishen, as acting minister.
In late July the Zongli Yamen changed its Chinese name to Waiwu bu, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, legitimizing itself as China’s sole foreign office. Xu
Shoupeng was appointed as a minister of the ministry. On September 7, 1901, Li signed the final protocol with the foreign states, and the Chinese empire teetered
on the edge of collapse. Li died two months later, leaving his lifelong dream of modernizing China and his many plans to protect Korea unfulfilled. With the return
of Emperor Guangxu and Empress Dowager Cixi to the Forbidden City in January 1902, Korea was finally ready to send its first minister to take his place amid the
rubble of the city of Beijing.
The Korean government appointed Pak Che-sun, Xu Shoupeng’s treaty negotiation counterpart and the former commissioner in Tianjin, as the first Korean min-
ister plenipotentiary to China.¹¹¹ On September 30, 1902, Pak presented his letter of credence to Emperor Guangxu in the Forbidden City following a tailored
Western-style procedure.¹¹² The ceremony of kowtow, performed by Korean tributary emissaries to the emperor of China for centuries, had come to an end. Inter-
estingly, the Chinese official records on the audience are very brief, exactly like those on the first meeting between Emperor Tongzhi and foreign ministers in 1873.
Perhaps the court saw in the new rituals both a reminder of the Chinese empire’s past glory vis-à-vis its outer fan and a complex challenge to China’s dignity. After
the audience, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs instructed Xu Taishen to send two Korean-language interpreters to Beijing to facilitate its further communications
with Pak.¹¹³ The Korean language thus joined the list of the official foreign languages of the Chinese foreign ministry. A new—if fleeting—bilateral relationship
had begun.
Chinese Zongfanism and Korean Colonialism in the Borderland: Sino-Korean Contacts in South China and Manchuria
The transformation of the Sino-Korean relationship was not as clear-cut in China’s provinces as it was in Beijing. In the coastal areas of South China, local offi-
cials still followed prewar routines to manage affairs regarding Korea. In December 1895, for instance, Governor Liao Shoufeng (1836–1901) in Zhejiang Province
reported to Emperor Guangxu that officials in Wenzhou had rescued twenty-eight Koreans from a shipwreck in October and provided the victims with clothes and
food, “following conventions,” eventually returning them to Chosŏn via Shanghai. Liao called these Koreans “barbarians of the country of Chosŏn who had suf-
fered from the shipwreck” (Ch., Chaoxian guo nanfan), using the same Zongfan wording as that used in the eighteenth century.¹¹⁴ The Wenzhou case became a
model for similar cases in the following years.
In May 1901 Governor Yu Lianyuan in Zhejiang reported that fifteen Korean fishermen had suffered a shipwreck on China’s coast. After consulting the Wenzhou
precedent, he followed the conventions of saving and taking care of them and sent them on to Shanghai.¹¹⁵ Yu had been a pillar of the Pure Stream in the 1890s
and had been among those who called for Beijing to protect Chosŏn for the sake of the integrity of the Great Qing. By this point, China had signed its new treaty
with Korea and Yu had been promoted to governor, but in Yu’s mind Chosŏn—the term he used, rather than “Great Korea” or “Han”—was still a fan of the Great
Qing and the Korean fishermen belonged to the category of “barbarians.” Yu’s successors in Zhejiang from 1902 to 1908 embraced the same approach.¹¹⁶ In al-
most all cases the Korean victims were referred to as “barbarians” who were beneficiaries of China’s policy of “cherishing the small” or “cherishing the men from
afar.” In provincial practice, then, Zongfan norms were no weaker than they had been in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
In contrast to the benign and almost imperceptible postwar transformation of the Sino-Korean relationship in South China, the shift in the border areas in
Manchuria was manifested in blood, fire, and death. According to the reports of Chinese officials in Manchuria in 1907, Koreans started to attack and loot Chinese
villages along the border of Jilin and Mukden in the late 1890s, and the situation deteriorated dramatically after 1901, when Beijing was occupied by the Eight-
Nation Alliance and Manchuria was occupied by Russia.¹¹⁷ Chinese bandits similarly attacked Korean villages on the border. The sharp rise in Sino-Korean border
conflicts signaled the local disorder caused by the collapse of the Zongfan arrangement from the top down. For local and nonofficial forces on both sides of the
border, impoverished peasants in particular, practical concerns and the pressures of daily needs, such as the search for fertile land, food, livestock, and energy re-
sources, prevailed over national relationships and state interests. With the sudden absence of Chinese and Korean authority, the borderland in Manchuria became
a perfect location for Chinese and Korean bandits and other illegal armed groups to build up their strength and extract goods from local farmers and settlers.
Between early 1901 and early 1905, officials in Mukden and Jilin reported to Beijing at least a dozen cases of serious cross-border crime committed by Koreans,
including armed robberies, burglaries, shootings, homicides, rapes, kidnappings, and arson. Chen Zuoyan, a local Chinese official in Yanji in eastern Jilin, re-
ported that a Korean attack against a Chinese area in March 1901 claimed eleven Chinese lives and caused a loss of 4,337.81 taels of silver.¹¹⁸ As more Korean
immigrants poured over the border into Chinese territory, the situation continued to worsen. In July 1903 Chen Zuoyan reported a series of misdeeds by Korean
settlers and called on Beijing to take urgent measures to protect Chinese interests. A local report revealed that a Korean armed attack against four villages in Yan-
jin in the fall of 1903 had damaged 211 Chinese and Korean houses and cost more than 19,546.46 taels of silver.¹¹⁹ In the meantime, Chinese bandits continued to
cross the border rivers to pillage Korean villages, and on the Chinese side of the border the Chinese pawns of local officials extracted money from Korean immi-
grants. At least four instances of illegal logging or kidnapping on the Korean side, for example, were committed by Chinese bandits.¹²⁰ In August 1903, empha-
sizing that “Korea is different from what it was in the past,” the Chinese minister in Hansŏng, Xu Taishen, suggested to Beijing that China should implement
countermeasures to check Korean expansion into Chinese territory in Yanji, an area the Koreans and Japanese began to refer to as “Kando” (Ch., Jiandao). Britain
and Japan, which had formed an alliance in 1902, informed Xu that Russian machinations were behind the attempt to settle Koreans in this area. In the following
two years, the Chinese and Korean foreign ministries sought in vain to settle border disputes in Manchuria.¹²¹
Many historical and geopolitical factors contributed to the violent conflicts in the border areas. The absence of any demarcation of the point at which the Yalu
and Tumen Rivers converged—marking the traditional boundary between the two countries—had been a problem since the Kangxi period in the eighteenth cen-
tury. Although a borderline existed, it was not clearly or legally delineated, as it would be in modern times between two sovereign states. In the first half of the
twentieth century, this issue evolved into a dispute that involved not just China and Korea but Japan as well. Border conflicts were also fueled by China’s opening
of Manchuria in the 1870s, when the Manchu court abolished the two-hundred-year-old policy of segregating Manchuria from inner China and encouraged people
to immigrate to the area for cultivation. The new policy and the rich resources in the area also attracted thousands of poor Korean peasants, who crossed the
Tumen River to cultivate the wilderness in the convergence zone, forcing China to deal with these foreign citizens.¹²² Emperor Guangxu had instructed local offi-
cials in 1882 to tolerate the illegal Korean immigrants as long as they had no intention of encroaching on China’s borders. Later, in order to solve the mounting
problems, China started to assimilate Korean immigrants into the Chinese populace by ordering them to cut their hair in the Chinese style and to wear Chinese
clothes. This policy provoked strong protest from Korea.¹²³
The accumulating conflicts led to a skirmish in the spring of 1904, when Chinese forces under the command of the officer Hu Dianjia defeated a group of Ko-
rean soldiers who had crossed the Tumen River with the purpose of occupying more land and mobilizing the Korean immigrants to break away from Chinese
governance. This was the first time that China used force to resolve a dispute with Korea in the post-1895 period. The skirmish resulted in China’s resumption of
territorial and administrative control over the area and forced Korea to return to peace talks. On June 15, 1904, Hu Dianjia, Chen Zuoyan, and three Korean offi-
cials signed an agreement with the title “Regulation on Sino-Korean Border Affairs with the Purpose of Solving Problems Arising from the Conflict” (Ch., Zhong-
Han bianjie shanhou zhangcheng). Its name notwithstanding, the agreement primarily served to tie up remaining unresolved issues from the spring skirmish; it
was not a state-to-state treaty for the long-term strategic goal of settling border disputes.¹²⁴
At the time the Sino-Korean agreement was signed, Japan was fighting with Russia for control of Manchuria. After it finally prevailed over Russia, Japan publicly
made Korea into its protectorate in November 1905. The Korean minister to Beijing was recalled, and all affairs regarding Korean contacts with China were trans-
ferred to the management of the Japanese legation in Beijing. In February 1906, with the closing of the American, British, and French legations in Hansŏng and
the arrival of the first Japanese residential general, Itō Hirobumi, China also recalled its third minister to Korea, Zeng Guangquan.
In Manchuria Sino-Korean border conflicts continued to increase, and the local Chinese officials believed that Korea was aggressively expanding to the Chinese
side, where Korean immigrants significantly outnumbered the Chinese population. In 1907 Wu Luzhen (1880–1911), the Chinese investigator in charge of Sino-
Korean border affairs, reported that there were more than fifty thousand Koreans on the Chinese side of the Tumen River, compared to fewer than ten thousand
Chinese residents. According to Wu’s investigation of thirty-nine villages in the Helongyu area, the Korean settlers had established a total of 5,990 households in
these villages, dwarfing the 264 Chinese households. Wu commented that this ancestral territory of the Qing had almost become “Chosŏn’s colony” (Ch., Chaox-
ian zhimin zhi di).¹²⁵ Although Korea was falling victim to Japanese colonialism, Korean immigrants had served as the vanguard in the Korean colonization of Chi-
nese territory in Manchuria. This type of Korean colonization subsequently served as a vehicle of Japan’s colonial expansion into the vast inner land of Manchuria
over the following three decades.
In order to protect the interests of Chinese merchants in Korea, Beijing appointed Ma Tingliang as the consul-general to Korea in 1909, a year after Emperor
Guangxu and Empress Dowager Cixi died and the new emperor was inaugurated with the regnal title of Xuantong. China was in the throes of violent domestic up-
heaval through a series of reforms and rebellions, so the relationship with Korea was not a priority for the Beijing government. On August 22, 1910, Korea was an-
nexed by Japan. Beijing made no official comment on the annexation. In Hansŏng, Ma instructed Chinese citizens to follow the new orders issued by the Japanese
authorities, and he dismissed the police forces in Chinese settlements.
Beijing’s silence notwithstanding, the Japanese annexation was alarming to many Chinese, who felt the same colonial threat hanging over China. Dai Jitao
(1891–1949), who had been educated in Japan and would later become an assistant to Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), published an editorial in a Shanghai newspaper in
August 1910 criticizing Beijing’s indifferent attitude to this tragic chapter in Korea’s history. Invoking the time-honored Sino-Korean relationship since the Jizi pe-
riod, Dai declared that “Korea has been China’s shuguo for more than three thousand years, its lands lie within China’s borders [Ch., jiangyu], its people belong to
the same ethnic group as the Chinese, its characters are Chinese, and its political customs are Chinese legacies.” Lamenting Korea’s tragic fate, Dai warned that
unless China roused itself, it too would soon suffer a Japanese invasion in the political, military, and industrial arenas.¹²⁶
In Manchuria, the governor-general of the Three Northeastern Provinces, Xiliang (1853–1917), was alarmed by Japan’s “colonial policy” (Ch., zhimin zhengce) to-
ward China, enacted through the Koreans who continued to cross the border to occupy Chinese land. In September and October 1910, Xiliang reported, more
than thirty thousand Korean immigrants were living among the Chinese residents on China’s side of the border. The governor-general emphasized that since
these Korean immigrants had become Japanese citizens upon the Japanese annexation of Korea in August, they were no longer subject to Chinese jurisdiction but
rather answered to the Japanese consul. Xiliang argued that this change would “harm our sovereignty” (Ch., sun wo zhuquan), and that “the thousands of Korean
immigrants would play the lead in Japan’s annexation of Manchuria.” He suggested that China use the newly issued Nationality Regulations of the Great Qing (Ch.,
Da Qing guoji tiaoli) to convert the Korean immigrants into Chinese citizens in order to make the territorial borderline distinct and secure.¹²⁷
In August 1911 Zhao Erxun (1844–1927), Xiliang’s successor, urged Beijing to heed Xiliang’s proposal and to naturalize the Korean immigrants on Chinese soil.
Stressing that “all the counties along the Yalu River, which are more than ten in number, belong to China’s inner land [Ch., neidi],” Zhao proposed that China tell
the Korean immigrants to “become civilized” (Ch., guihua) by applying for and obtaining Chinese citizenship.¹²⁸ Like Xiliang, Zhao was aware that the issue of the
nationality of the considerable Korean immigrant population was inextricably linked to China’s sovereignty. Zhao’s observation reveals that in the early 1910s, Chi-
nese officials—at least those in Manchuria—perceived Sino-Korean relations purely on the state-to-state level. However, before Beijing could respond to Zhao’s
proposal, the nationalist revolution broke out in Wuhan in October 1911, quickly leading to the collapse of the dynasty.
6
LOSING CHOSOŎN
The Rise of a Modern Chinese State, 1885–1911
Since the 1860s, China had struggled to provide Western states with an unequivocal definition of Chosŏn’s status. Its difficulties were rooted in the institutional discrepancies between the Zongfan mechanism and international law. The tacit understanding among these states was that China’s authority over Chosŏn was valid and real. Yet in the wake of Japan’s challenges in the 1880s and early 1890s, at a time when the world was entering the age of empires as a consequence of colonial powers’ quest for territorial acquisition, China took steps to modify its routine contacts with Chosŏn in an effort to save the fundamentals of the Zongfan order, which were arousing concern among other empires present in the region.¹ By the end of the 1880s, China found itself surrounded by Japanese and European colonial forces. Japan, Britain, and France had colonized or annexed China’s outer fan in East and Southeast Asia, in particular Ryukyu, Burma, and Vietnam, while Russia was encroaching on China’s territory in Central Asia, forcing China to provincialize Xinjiang in 1884. As a result, the frontiers of the politico-cultural Chinese empire that had encompassed China’s outer fan began to disappear, replaced by clear national borders between the Chinese state and its former outer fan .
The threat posed to China by the presence of rival powers in Chosŏn was not less than that which it faced at its other borders. China had two primary options in terms of its policy toward the outer fan. It could either provincialize Chosŏn by incorporating the country into its territory in the form of prefectures and counties, or it could supervise and protect it by harnessing China’s patriarchal authority. Both approaches won support from China’s leading scholars and officials. Beijing finally adopted an in-between policy: assisting Chosŏn with managing its diplomatic and commercial affairs and placing an imperial resident in Hansŏng. From the perspective of Western diplomats in East Asia, however, China was moving toward annexing Chosŏn under the guise of conventional Zongfan practices. This chapter shows that although China believed it was fulfilling its commitment to protect its shuguo, its policy turned out to cause increased tensions between Beijing and Hansŏng because of the rise of the Korean state in the international community and the impact of Korean nationalism within Chosŏn. After the termination of the Zongfan arrangement in 1895, both Qing China and Chosŏn Korea entered a new era as sovereign states. By withdrawing from its periphery in Chosŏn to its core in the Qing, the Chinese empire developed into a modern state and embarked on its own road to modernity.
Invoking the Zongfan Conventions: His Imperial Chinese Majesty’s Resident in Chosŏn
Maintaining Zongfanism from Within: Yuan Shikai in Chosŏn and the Ritual Conundrum
As the imperial commissioner of commercial affairs in Chosŏn, Chen Shu-tang successfully augmented his power in the fall of 1884, as described in the previous chapter, but he barely had time to exercise his new authority before an attempted coup took place in Hansŏng. On December 4, 1884, a group of pro-Japanese members of the Kaehwadang (Enlightenment Party) occupied the palace, killed several pro-Chinese officials, and claimed they were terminating the country’s hierarchical relations with China. These fervent nationalists, among them Hong Yŏng-sik (1855–84), Kim Ok-kyun (1851–94), and Pak Yŏng-hyo (1861–1939), won the strong support of the Japanese minister Takezoe Shinichirō (1842–1917), an assistant to Mori Arinori in the 1876 Sino-Japanese debate over Chosŏn’s status.
The coup, known as Kapsin jŏngbyŏn (the coup of the year of Kapsin), was a result of increasing conflict between China, Japan, and Western states, along with Korean domestic political struggles and strong Korean nationalism cultivated primarily by Japan. The coup’s leaders orchestrated the attack to coincide with
China’s dispatch of more troops to South China to fight the French in Vietnam. The dramatic and bloody nationalist revolution lasted only three days. Chinese troops led by Gen. Wu Zhaoyou successfully placed the king and members of the royal family under their protection and totally defeated the Kaehwadang and the Japanese forces in Hansŏng.²
Because there had been Chinese and Korean attacks on the Japanese legation and on Japanese citizens, and because the Korean court was in chaos, it was left to the Chinese and the Japanese to resolve the problems caused by the coup. The resulting Sino-Japanese talks again focused on Chosŏn’s international status.³ Tokyo sent Inoue Kaoru as the plenipotentiary to Hansŏng to conduct talks with the Chinese envoys Wu Dacheng and Xuchang. But Wu was not a plenipotentiary, so the negotiations were transferred to Tianjin and held between Li Hongzhang and Itō Hirobumi (1841–1909). The two sides signed a convention on April 18, 1885. Each agreed to pull its troops out of the peninsula within four months, to allow the king to hire officers from countries beyond China and Japan to train the Korean forces, and to notify the other of any decision to send troops to Chosŏn in the event of a serious disturbance.⁴ Japan thus obtained the legal right to send troops to Chosŏn, which paved the way for its military involvement in the Korean rebellion in 1894.
The coup considerably alarmed China. Ma Jianchang, the Chinese adviser to the king, suggested to Li Hongzhang that China should either allow Chosŏn to be independent from China and free from the current relationship or positively engage in its affairs by sending an able imperial resident to the country with Chinese forces so the resident can supervise certain affairs.⁵ Li responded that China should focus on overcoming its own crises first, but he agreed that China should strengthen the authority of its representative in Chosŏn in order to check encroachment by Japan and other powers. The result was a considerable expansion in the powers enjoyed by Chen’s successor, Yuan Shikai.
In November 1885, on Li’s recommendation, Beijing appointed Yuan the imperial resident in Chosŏn in charge of diplomatic and commercial intercourse (Ch., Qinming zhuzha Chaoxian zongli jiaoshe tongshang shiyi) and bestowed on him a third-level rank with the title of backup candidate for a taotai. According to Li, this new title endowed Yuan with the right to engage in diplomatic affairs in one way or another, which perfectly resolved the legal quagmire concerning the Chinese representative’s status. Yuan promised both Li and Beijing that he would do his best to protect the "eastern fence that has been a fan of China for generations."⁶ Over the following decade, Yuan put his words into practice along Zongfan lines, stirring up serious conflicts among diplomats in Chosŏn in the process.
The foreign diplomats in Hansŏng needed to establish whether Yuan’s appointment marked the beginning of a Chinese absorption of the country, a colonial policy like those pursued by Britain, France, Italy, and Germany in Africa. The English translation of Yuan’s title became a crucial issue in this regard. George C. Foulk (1856–93), the American chargé d’affaires ad interim, offered the translation charge of diplomatic and commercial intercourse, but it was rejected by an unidentified young American-educated assistant of Yuan (possibly Tang Shaoyi, 1862–1938, a graduate of Columbia University who reached the country along with Ma Jianchang and Paul Georg von Möllendorff in 1883). The assistant then put forward the translation his imperial Chinese majesty’s resident, Seoul, perhaps inspired by the American minister’s official title minister resident and consul general.⁷ When talks between Foulk, the British consul Edward C. Baber (1843–90), and the Japanese chargé d’affaires Takahira Kogorō (1854–1926) yielded no unanimous agreement on a translation, Yuan decided to use his assistant’s suggestion, abbreviated as H.I.C.M. Resident.⁸ Although the resident’s legitimacy and power derived from China’s imperial might, the resident himself was not part of the Manchu court. Nor was the Beiyang superintendent. Figure 6.1 illustrates the various channels of communication between China and Korea.
Yuan may not have realized that the title resident possessed strong connotations of an imperialist regime’s indirect rule over a region that would subsequently become a protectorate or colony of the empire. The British Empire, for instance, had accomplished its expansion into India by appointing a single British
resident or political agent to each princely state, the resident virtually controlling the state by offering advice to the local prince or chief. This type of indirect rule dated back to 1764 and was practiced until Queen Victoria’s proclamation of 1858.⁹ In the early 1880s, the title resident was still sensitive because of its connection to a colonial power’s territorial expansion. For example, in the spring of 1881, after France signed the Treaty of Bardo with the Tunisian bey Muhammad al-Sadiq (1813–82), the French consul general in Tunisia assumed the new title resident minister, or officially the French resident and delegate [to the bey] for external affairs, which triggered the country’s conversion into a French protectorate.¹⁰ In 1883 the French also began to set up a resident at Huế in Vietnam; this resident was the representative of the French protectorate and thus was more powerful than the Vietnamese king. In this context, when Yuan claimed to be a resident of the Chinese empire in Chosŏn, he certainly puzzled his Western counterparts, who had tacitly defined him as China’s consul-general or consul-general with diplomatic functions, ignoring any potential roles based on Chinese imperial authority.¹¹
FIGURE 6.1. Channels of official Sino-Korean communications after 1883
FIGURE 6.1. Channels of official Sino-Korean communications after 1883
Yuan was not a minister, but his status as an imperial resident endowed him with more power than a minister would have held. Unlike a British resident in India or a French resident in Tunisia, Yuan in Chosŏn could exploit the term imperial in his title, as it carried the authority of the Chinese emperor, to whom the Chosŏn sovereign was subordinate in Zongfan terms. When Korean officials expressed concern over the breadth of Yuan’s power in the country, Yuan clarified that his aim was simply to justify the orthodox legitimacy of Chosŏn’s status as China’s subordinate country (Ch., zheng shubang mingfen).¹²
Yuan’s handling of his relations with the Korean court demonstrates the authority he claimed for himself. In September 1886, for example, he spent hours in a face-to-face meeting with the king, lecturing him on how to deal with the Port Hamilton incident. The port in southern Chosŏn had been occupied by Britain in 1885 amid British-Russian rivalry, triggering an intense dispute between Britain, Russia, Chosŏn, China, and Japan. Following China’s active intervention, the British fleet withdrew in 1887 on the agreement that no foreign power would occupy any part of Chosŏn’s territory in the future.¹³ Yuan’s observation of Korean court politics persuaded him that the king was weak, and Yuan even secretly proposed to Li Hongzhang that China replace the king with an able man from the Korean royal family.¹⁴ Not only did the king disapprove of Yuan’s behavior, but Yuan’s fellow diplomats also regarded his activities as violating diplomatic protocols and damaging Chosŏn’s sovereignty, aggravating relations between Yuan and other diplomats in Hansŏng.
Illustrative of these tensions were the new rituals Yuan performed to the king. In a telegram soliciting Li Hongzhang’s advice in 1886, Yuan mentioned that in past years, when Chinese officials had paid visits to the king, they had entered the palace gate in a sedan chair, bowed to the king three times with their hands folded in front (Ch., sanyi; yi means zuoyi, a ritual practiced between officials of equal rank), and then sat down at the king’s side. In 1884, however, the Chinese envoys Wu Dacheng and Xuchang, Gen. Ding Ruchang, and Taotai Ma Jianzhong had sat down opposite the king, following guest-host rituals. Yuan also noted that the ministers of other countries had to dismount their sedan chairs outside the palace gate and pay visits to the king according to the etiquette for officials outside the capital. Quoting ritual codes applicable to relations between China and Chosŏn, Li advised Yuan that it would be truly courteous for Yuan to follow the rituals for Chinese provincial-level officials visiting first-degree princes. This category of ritual performance dictated that Yuan would dismount his sedan chair at the gate of the palace hall, bow to the king three times with his hands folded in front, and then sit down by the king’s side. At grand ceremonies such as assemblies, Yuan would likewise bow three times with his hands folded in front, instead of performing a higher-level ritual of three bows (Ch., san jugong), in order to show that China was neither haughty nor humble and to harmonize his conduct with that of other ministers.¹⁵ The new rituals eased Yuan’s integration into the Korean court, but they created friction with other diplomats in the city.¹⁶
China’s Two Options: Supervision versus Provincialization
In the turbulent 1880s, when Beijing dramatically changed its border policy in the northwest by converting Xinjiang into a province, the northeastern frontier, too, posed a major challenge to the Qing. Having lost Burma to Britain, Ryukyu to Japan, and Vietnam to France within three decades, China stood at a historical crossroads with regard to its future administration of Chosŏn, as it had to decide how best to avoid also losing its most exemplary outer fan : should it take a step back and adopt an indirect approach of sending high-ranking officials to supervise and protect Chosŏn, or would it be better to incorporate Chosŏn into Chinese territory as prefectures and counties of China? Both options had precedents in the Han and the Yuan Dynasties and so could be justified. Viewed from a modern perspective, however, both represented a colonial approach not unlike Japan’s later annexation of Korea in 1910. It was on precisely this point that China fell into a dilemma that it was unable to overcome.
The Qing regarded Chosŏn as a loyal subordinate in its rhetoric, but as seen in the preceding chapters it never tried to incorporate Chosŏn into Chinese territory. The Chinese appraisal of Chosŏn as being like prefectures and counties merely acknowledged Korea’s subordination to China’s cultural superiority; it
didn’t express a practical political approach to annexing the country. For centuries, China, Chosŏn, and China’s other outer fan shared the worldview of all-under-Heaven, according to which all their lands were subject to the authority of the Son of Heaven. There was also a rule, drawn up by the first emperor of the Ming in the fourteenth century, that China would not annex the fifteen outer fan whose contacts with China were supervised by the Ministry of Rites. The first of these outer fan was Korea.¹⁷ This principle came under challenge in the 1880s, when the options of supervision and protection, on the one hand, and outright provincialization, on the other, were put forward by some Chinese officials and scholars.
In November 1880 the Chinese minister to Japan, He Ruzhang, argued that it would be the best policy for China to send an imperial commissioner to Chosŏn to manage the country’s domestic and foreign affairs, as China had done in Mongolia and Tibet. However, realizing that such a move was almost impossible at the time, He Ruzhang suggested that Chosŏn sign treaties with other countries under China’s supervision in order to pursue a balance of power. In August 1882, in the wake of Chosŏn’s mutiny and Japan’s provocative response, another Chinese minister to Japan, Li Shuchang, suggested that China abolish the king and convert the country into prefectures and counties of China, imitating the relationship between Britain and India, in order to resolve all thorny issues related to Chosŏn once and for all. Li Shuchang was fully aware that such an action would undermine China’s moral standards, but he nonetheless regarded it as the best available policy for China.¹⁸ This was probably the first time that Chinese officials explicitly argued that China should provincialize Chosŏn during this period, but the proposal was confidential and strictly confined to a small group of policymakers.
In 1882 Zhang Jian (1853–1926), an assistant to Gen. Wu Changqing in Hansŏng, called for reforms in Chosŏn in his treatise Six Strategies for Managing the Consequences of Chosŏn’s Mutiny (Ch., Chaoxian shanhou liuce).¹⁹ This treatise, which was widely disseminated in Beijing through informal channels, encouraged officials of the so-called Pure Stream group (Ch., Qingliu)—who had seized the moral high ground in political struggles—to pursue a solution to the Chosŏn problem. In October 1882 Zhang Peilun (1848–1903), a pillar of the Pure Stream, urged Beijing to dispatch a commercial commissioner to manage Chosŏn’s foreign and domestic affairs. Li Hongzhang did not endorse this plan because he was fearful of a scenario in which China would be drawn into an even more difficult situation and could not efficiently manage the country, but he noted that if Beijing decided to accept Zhang’s proposal, he would recommend He Ruzhang for the position of imperial commissioner.²⁰
At the same time, Li Hongzhang received a note from the king inviting Chinese specialists on foreign affairs to serve as his assistants. Li believed that China could exploit this opportunity to steer a middle course between supervising and protecting Chosŏn, on the one hand, and provincializing the country, on the other. The invited specialists would be under the king’s command, guaranteeing Chosŏn the right of zizhu and underlining Chosŏn’s status as China’s shuguo. As described in the previous chapter, the specialists, Ma Jianchang and Paul Georg von Möllendorff, arrived in Hansŏng in 1883, followed by the Chinese commercial commissioner Chen Shutang. It was against this background of China’s increasingly active role in Chosŏn that Yuan Shikai was appointed as an imperial resident a year and a half later.
In the wake of the bloody coup of 1884, a growing number of Chinese officials supported strengthening China’s position in Chosŏn. In late 1885 the Manchu official Shengyu (1850–1900), then president of the Directorate of Education, declared that among China’s fan Chosŏn was more important than Ryukyu and Vietnam had been. He suggested that the court send a competent man to protect and cherish the country by leading a powerful contingent of troops, and that it issue a decree to oust Queen Min and her followers with the aim of mollifying the Korean people’s resentment and proclaiming China’s power and virtues.²¹ In the summer of 1890, hearing rumors that Russia was planning to invade Chosŏn, Kang Youwei (1858–1927), a Cantonese scholar who at the time was preparing for the civil-service examination, drafted a treatise entitled Strategies for Saving Chosŏn (Ch., Bao Chaoxian ce) that proposed middle, upper, and lower
strategies. According to his middle strategy, China would incorporate Chosŏn into the Chinese inner land and manage its administration (Ch., shouwei neidi er zhi qizheng). Kang argued that in 1882 China should have appointed officials and officers to manage Chosŏn’s politics and that it should have taken control of Chosŏn’s taxes, trained its soldiers, and converted Chosŏn into an integral part of China’s inner territory. Kang’s upper strategy was to make Chosŏn into an international protectorate. By contrast, the lower strategy was to maintain Chosŏn’s "nominal title as China’s fan and shuguo inwardly and to allow it to conduct foreign affairs freely under zizhu outwardly, which amounted to no policy per se."²² Kang castigated China for its inability to solve the Korean problem in the international political arena. Eight years later, Kang served as a mentor to Emperor Guangxu when the latter launched dramatic reforms after China’s humiliating defeat in its war with Japan, which broke out in Chosŏn.
From Huang Zunxian and He Ruzhang in 1880 to Li Shuchang and Zhang Peilun in 1882 and then to Ma Jianchang in 1884, Shengyu in 1885, and Kang Youwei in 1890, Beijing was barraged with proposals to either supervise and protect Chosŏn or provincialize it. The advocates of these proposals frequently traced the point of departure for their suggested policies back to the early Qing and even earlier dynasties. They pointed out that Qing China had to take responsibility for saving Chosŏn from crises, as Ming China had done in the 1590s. In this sense, they saw China’s policy in Chosŏn in the 1880s as a resurgence of the intrinsic power exerted by the patriarch of the Zongfan family over its outer fan. For scholars who prefer to interpret China’s policy through the lens of international politics, this statement seems clichéd, but one should bear in mind that political rules informed by the Westphalian system cannot easily be applied to the Qing’s rationale for its foreign relations with its outer fan as embodied in Qing-Chosŏn relations. Otherwise, Western diplomats in Hansŏng, Beijing, and Tokyo would not have suffered such confusion for more than two decades, and the Western consultants hired by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs would not have had to resort to the Ottoman-Egyptian example for lack of a model for the Qing-Chosŏn relationship in European history.
Although China believed it had the theoretical authority to carry out an annexation of Chosŏn and could justify to itself the political legitimacy of such a move, the Manchu imperial court never put this option on its agenda; rather, it continued to adhere firmly to Zongfan principles in its contacts with Chosŏn. Whereas the Yuan and Ming Dynasties had officially discussed plans to provincialize Korea, no textual evidence suggests that the Qing court entertained any court-level discussion on this subject. The Zongli Yamen and other central institutions and high-ranking officials did forward proposals for provincialization to Empress Dowager Cixi and Emperor Guangxu from the early 1880s to the peak of the war in 1894 and 1895, but the central court always remained silent on these proposals. The pleas for provincialization thus did not change the imperial court’s established perception of Chosŏn. This perception may explain why, even after Chosŏn obtained its independence in 1895, the Qing’s imperial calendars continued to include the country in the list of China’s inner provinces until as late as 1909, a year before Chosŏn was colonized by Japan. In this regard, Zongfanism manifested itself in a fundamentally different way from colonialism.
This interpretation does not imply that international politics had no influence on China’s policy and behavior. In fact, China’s provincialization of Chosŏn could have led to a domino effect in China’s borderland in Manchuria, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Yunnan, where China was contending with Japan, Russia, Britain, and France. Chosŏn was a politico-cultural frontier of the Chinese empire, but this frontier was invisible and existed only in an intellectual sense within the Chinese world. Nor could this frontier be defined by international law. On the borders of its territorial empire, China did embrace the policy of provincialization at that time. In 1884 Beijing accepted the proposals of Zuo Zongtang and Liu Jintang (1844–94) and converted Xinjiang into a province; this multiethnic region in Inner Asia remains part of the Chinese state’s territory today. The same policy was applied to Taiwan in 1885, turning the island into another province. Although Taiwan was ceded to Japan in 1895 as a result of the Sino-Japanese War, the Qing’s earlier provincialization of Taiwan provided the Chinese state in the twentieth century with legitimate and legal resources to claim sovereignty over the island.
Reading Zongfanism from the Outside: Western Diplomats’ Perceptions of Chosŏn’s Sovereignty and Independence
Chosŏn’s sovereignty became a heated topic in the late 1880s when Chosŏn stepped onto the world stage. In order to meet various diplomatic challenges, Chosŏn established new institutions and developed a pattern of dual diplomacy in the 1880s, just as China had done in the 1860s. Within this dual pattern, the royal court maintained its Zongfan relations with China’s imperial court, while the new institutions, predominantly the Foreign Office, presented Chosŏn as an independent state in its contacts with Western countries. The agencies of China’s state diplomacy, in particular the Beiyang superintendent and the H.I.C.M. Resident, sought to use China’s authority to influence Chosŏn’s state diplomacy. In the eyes of Western ministers, including the Western advisers appointed by China to Chosŏn, China was impinging on Chosŏn’s independent sovereignty through calculated schemes. China’s image suffered, not only in the estimation of Japan and the Western states that had interests in the peninsula, but also in Chosŏn itself.
The Western advisers recommended by Li Hongzhang to the king of Chosŏn serve as good examples in this regard. As the first Western adviser to the king on maritime customs, Möllendorff also assumed the vice presidency of Chosŏn’s newly founded Foreign Office. But as he became eager to develop Chosŏn’s military forces to counterbalance the country’s weakness, his activities progressively deviated from Li’s wishes. In 1884 Möllendorff asked Li to send officers to train the Korean army. When this request yielded no response, he persuaded the king to negotiate a convention with Russia whereby Russian officers would train the army in exchange for the use of Wŏnsan, the ice-free port on the eastern coast of the country. Under pressure from Li, the king dismissed Möllendorff in November 1885. At the recommendation of China’s inspector general, Robert Hart, Henry F. Merrill, an American national, replaced Möllendorff as chief commissioner of the Korean Maritime Customs, and Owen N. Denny (1838–1900), a former US consul in Tianjin, assumed the post of vice president of the Foreign Office and adviser to the king. Whereas Merrill rarely commented on Chosŏn’s affairs, Denny was very enthusiastic about assisting Chosŏn in pursuing independence from China.
In January 1887 a veteran Chinese diplomat, Zeng Jize (known as Marquis Tseng, 1839–90), the eldest son of the distinguished late official Zeng Guofan (1811–72), published an English-language article entitled China: The Sleep and the Awakening in the British journal Asiatic Quarterly Review. Making an ambitious argument that China would become a great Asiatic Power as awakened in the process of modernization, Zeng also commented on China’s foreign policy toward its subordinate countries, noting that China has decided on exercising a more effective supervision on the acts of her vassal Princes, and of accepting a larger responsibility for them than heretofore. The marquis further claimed that the Warden of the Marches is now abroad, looking to the security of China’s outlying provinces––of Corea, Thibet, and Chinese Turkestan. Henceforth, any hostile movements against these countries, or any interference with their affairs, will be viewed at Peking as a declaration, on the part of the Power committing it, of a desire to discontinue its friendly relations with the Chinese Government.²³ The reality, however, unfolded in a way that differed dramatically from what the marquis envisioned. In this regard, Denny was more prescient. A lawyer by profession, Denny found his legal training useful in Chosŏn. In February 1888 he published a booklet entitled China and Korea, in which he asserted that China was destroying Korea—an independent state with independent sovereignty—by absorbing the country.²⁴
Denny’s pamphlet was emotional and exposed his limited knowledge of Sino-Korean relations, but it was welcomed by his fellow Western diplomats who desperately hoped to grasp the nature of China’s presence in Chosŏn. The first two American ministers in Chosŏn, Lucius H. Foote and George C. Foulk, were very enthusiastic about China’s influences in the country, and the United States was deeply involved in the issue of Chosŏn’s international status.²⁵ In the summer of 1887, Yuan, Li, Foulk, the American chargé d’affaires William W. Rockhill, and the new American minister Hugh A. Dinsmore (1850–1930) became embroiled in an intense dispute resulting from a widely circulated rumor that Foulk had encouraged the king to seek independence from China. Dinsmore complained that "China
is slowly but surely tightening her grasp upon this government and its King, and he blamed Yuan for his declaration that Korea is a vassal state and altogether incapable of self-government."²⁶
The United States also became entangled in another fierce dispute between China and Korea in 1887, when the king decided to send Pak Chŏng-yang (1842–1905) as an envoy to the United States, followed by another envoy to Britain, Germany, Russia, Italy, and France.²⁷ China endorsed the king’s plan but urged the king not to endow the envoys with the title of plenipotentiary, and reminded the monarch that all Korean envoys overseas had to obey three rules outlined by Li Hongzhang: first, a Korean envoy arriving in a new posting should first report to the Chinese consulate and be accompanied by the Chinese minister to the host country’s ministry of foreign affairs; second, the Korean envoy should always sit behind the Chinese minister at meetings and banquets in the host country; and third, the Korean envoy should consult with the Chinese minister about major events before contacting the institutions of the host country. These three rules were aimed at maintaining the established "system of shuguo " by emphasizing the hierarchy between the Chinese minister and the Korean envoy in the host country as well as that between China and Korea in general.²⁸
The king did not follow Beijing’s instructions: in the letter of credence to the United States he called himself I, the emperor and appointed Pak envoy plenipotentiary (K., chŏngwŏn taesin), although in his memorial to the Guangxu emperor he called Pak a minister’s minister.²⁹ Accordingly, the American side treated Pak as minister plenipotentiary when he arrived in Washington in January 1888. Under the strong influence of his American secretary Horace N. Allen (1858–1932),³⁰ Pak continued to flout the three rules: he did not subordinate himself to the Chinese minister in Washington, Zhang Yinhuan (1837–1900), which led to an awkward and even hostile relationship between the two representatives. Some American news reports also stated that Korea dispatched its minister to the United States independently and did not need to obtain China’s permission.³¹ In order to reassert Chosŏn’s position as China’s shuguo, Zhang delivered to Pak a Chinese imperial calendar for 1888 that he had received from Shanghai.³² Finally, under pressure from China, the king of Chosŏn recalled Pak, turning this brief episode showcasing Chosŏn’s apparent sovereignty and international status into a highly unpleasant footnote in Sino-Korean relations.
It was at this time that Denny’s pamphlet was circulating among Westerners in Korea and, soon, further afield. For China, the Korean situation was becoming increasingly complicated, and in June 1888 Li Hongzhang secretly sent Möllendorff back to Hansŏng to checkmate Denny who is urging the King to assert independence.³³ Denny’s take on the issue of Korea’s independence and its relationship to China quickly reached the United States. On August 31, 1888, with Pak still in Washington, Senator John H. Mitchell (1835–1905) of Oregon, Denny’s home state, called on the Senate, and particularly the Committee on Foreign Relations, to pay attention to the Sino-Korean relationship. Mitchell, holding in his hand a copy of Denny’s very able and highly interesting brief, stated that for some time past the Imperial Government of China has, through its chief officers and representatives, and especially and particularly its representative at the city of Seoul, been contemplating the subjugation and entire absorption of Corea. He emphasized that Korea’s relationship with China was "that of a mere tributary state, in which none of the rights of sovereignty or independence are eliminated or destroyed, and not that of a dependent or vassal government without any of the prerogatives of sovereignty attaching."³⁴
All of these episodes contributed to the deterioration of the Sino-Korean relationship by the end of the 1880s. Many a Western diplomat, sympathetic toward the king and his government, believed that China was controlling Chosŏn in dramatic or even colonialist ways, while Chosŏn was desperately distancing itself from the Sinocentric system by adopting Western political and diplomatic terms. As Dinsmore observed in the summer of 1887, The Koreans do not impress me as having any affection or strong attachment for the Chinese. On the contrary there is among the common people a well-defined dislike for them, but they fear them and it is under the influence of this fear that they are gradually yielding to Chinese supremacy.³⁵ In this context, Chosŏn used its state-to-state contacts with
China and other countries to propel itself out of China’s orbit.
Perplexing issues such as Yuan Shikai’s status as resident and Pak’s mission to the United States led Western scholar-diplomats to study the history of Sino-Korean relations with the aim of exploring the origin of China’s authority over Chosŏn. During a journey in the capital district of Chosŏn in 1884, George Foulk saw the Samjŏndo stele that had been erected in 1639, which he described as a great marble tablet fully twelve feet high and a foot thick, mounted upon the back of a gigantic granite turtle. He added, Historically, this monument presents much interest, and a thorough examination may develop information on the status of Corea with regard to China of more directly practical use.³⁶ Indeed, Rockhill soon tried to interpret Sino-Korean relations by using the inscriptions of the Samjŏndo stele and other Chinese materials; his efforts were published as a long article in 1889 under the title Korea in Its Relations with China. In the article, Rockhill attempted to answer the puzzle for Western nations of whether Korea was an integral part of the Chinese empire or a sovereign state enjoying absolute international rights.³⁷
Rockhill noted that the British government considered the Burmese tribute to China within the Sino-Burmese framework to be of a purely ceremonial nature, so in the Sino-British convention of 1886 the British side guaranteed the continuance of the Burmese decennial tribute mission to Beijing. The Sino-Korean relationship was much more complicated. After examining Sino-Korean relations from 1392 and reviewing Qing-Chosŏn contacts since the early seventeenth century, Rockhill determined that Chosŏn’s conclusion of treaties with Japan and the United States has not materially altered the nature of the relations existing for the last four centuries at least between China and its so-called vassal.³⁸ Rockhill’s conclusion seriously challenged the popular perception among Western diplomats in East Asia that Chosŏn was independent from China. The puzzle, therefore, remained unsolved and in fact became even more vexing.
The Grand Performance of the Zongfan Order: China’s Last Imperial Mission to Chosŏn
Rituals and Authority: Yuan’s Efforts to Assert China’s Superiority in Chosŏn
As its awareness of its own independent sovereignty (or the possibility thereof) deepened in the late 1880s, Chosŏn cautiously maintained its court-to-court contacts with China and conducted its own state diplomacy beyond China. Because of this dual diplomacy, whereas China wanted to preserve and highlight its superiority in Chosŏn, Hansŏng tried to compromise the hierarchical arrangement in practice. Along the way, in 1890, the two sides entered into intense negotiations over the Zongfan rituals.
On June 4, 1890, Korean Queen Dowager Cho died. A series of ritual practices between Hansŏng and Beijing had to be carried out. Aware that ritual matters were under the management of the Manchu court, Yuan responded to the Korean Foreign Office’s announcement of the dowager’s death with a short note expressing his condolences.³⁹ At a time when international intrigues and rivalries exerted such a strong influence on the peninsula, Sino-Korean court-to-court contacts through the exchange of emissaries seemed dwarfed by the two countries’ state-to-state contacts over political and diplomatic issues. While the Korean court continued to send tributary missions to Beijing through the 1880s, Beijing did not dispatch envoys to Hansŏng for tributary affairs after Chosŏn opened its doors to the West in 1882. Although court diplomacy still played a key role in regulating and modifying the bilateral relationship, the decade-long absence of imperial envoys from Korean soil left Yuan Shikai in Hansŏng without any recent precedents to consult. The absence of such envoys also reinforced the impression of Western diplomats that China had little authority over Chosŏn. Yuan believed that the expression of China’s condolences on the death of the dowager provided the perfect opportunity to counteract the Western perception of Sino-Korean relations.⁴⁰
When the American minister Augustine Heard (1827–1905) invited Yuan to join a discussion with other ministers over an appropriate expression of their joint
condolences to the Korean court, Yuan declined on the grounds that China and Chosŏn have longtime established regulations on ritual exchanges that are different from other countries’.⁴¹ In a report to Li Hongzhang, in which he identified Chosŏn as a friendly nation (Ch., youbang) of other treaty nations, Yuan said that the other ministers would follow common diplomatic etiquette in expressing condolences to the Korean government on the occasion of a national funeral, but those countries would not send special representatives for this purpose. By contrast, Yuan argued, because Chosŏn was China’s shuguo and always received China’s special favors, when the country was in grand mourning, China should send an imperial mission in accordance with the established system (Ch., tizhi).⁴² Yuan became the first Han Chinese official in Chosŏn’s territory since 1637 to try to maintain China’s superiority through appropriate rituals, including by proposing new ones.
On learning that other ministers would visit and bow to the king or visit the regent official and shake hands with him to show their sympathy, Yuan refused to follow their example. Instead he proposed a new ritual procedure endorsed by Li Hongzhang: after the first five days, during which the body of the dowager would lie in repose and the Korean people wore mourning clothes, Yuan would make an appointment with the Korean court to express his condolences based on personal friendship (Ch., siqing), which was considered equivalent to friendship among colleagues (Ch., liaoyin jiaoqing), rather than extending China’s national public condolences (Ch., guojia gongdiao).⁴³ In early June, when other countries flew their legations’ flags at half-mast for three days to express their condolences, Yuan and Li instructed Chinese warships and institutions in Inch’ŏn and at other Korean treaty ports to do so for only two days.⁴⁴ Their efforts to assert China’s superiority through unique as well as unequal rituals simply magnified China’s isolation from other countries.
Despite his efforts, Yuan found himself stuck in a ritual dilemma. When he notified Min Chong-muk (1835–1916), the resident of the Foreign Office, that he would like to visit the funeral hall in the inner palace, Min declined the offer because only royal family members could do so.⁴⁵ When the American minister, for his part, consulted with Min about how foreign ministers should perform funerary rituals, Min said that it would be inappropriate for the Korean court to invite foreign ministers to attend the funeral procession, but his office could provide a place near the East Gate of the city for the ministers to perform ceremonies as the hearse passed through the gate. Heard complied; Yuan did not. Yuan then told the Home Office and the Foreign Office that he would like to accompany the funeral team from the palace gate outside the city and hold the cord guiding the hearse, a Chinese funeral custom showing deep respect for the deceased. But the Home Office did not endorse this proposal and suggested that Yuan go directly to the East Gate, where other ministers would convene; when the hearse passed through the gate, the procession would stop for a moment, during which Yuan could perform a farewell ceremony. Disappointed by this response, Yuan decided to set himself apart from the other ministers with his own ritual: he would set an incense burner on a table and hold a memorial ceremony for the late dowager by the side of the road on the procession day.⁴⁶
Soon thereafter, another event made Yuan reconsider his plans yet again. On October 11, 1890, seven American officers led fifty armed marines on a march from Inch’ŏn toward Hansŏng. Heard explained to Yuan that the United States, as a friend of Chosŏn, had sent naval troops to accompany the funeral procession as a mark of respect and sympathy.⁴⁷ Yuan doubted his explanation. It was the second time in several months that Heard had summoned troops to the capital. The first time had been right after the death of the dowager in June, when the king had sent an agent to ask Heard to send forces to the palace at once to provide protection. Heard hesitated, but after considering the potential for disturbance and the jeopardy in which it might place American citizens, he ordered marines from the USS Swatara in Inch’ŏn to Hansŏng. Heard specified to the king that the troops were there to protect the legation, but the king, he said, would benefit by the moral effect which their presence would produce.⁴⁸ The presence of American forces in Hansŏng sparked a rumor in Beijing that Chosŏn was planning to rent Port Hamilton to the United States as a coaling station in exchange for protection. Under these circumstances, to monitor the Americans, Yuan set up his
memorial table at the East Gate, where Heard and the American soldiers stood in line on the side of the road. The hearse did not stop as promised, but Yuan still bowed three times with his hands folded in front.⁴⁹ The American soldiers returned to Inch’ŏn on October 15, defusing the tensions and allaying Yuan’s suspicions.
Rituals and Sovereignty: Chosŏn’s Bargaining with China about the Imperial Mission
While Yuan Shikai was tackling ritual dilemmas in Hansŏng, the Korean court was negotiating ritual conventions with Beijing.⁵⁰ On June 5, 1890, the king instructed the prefect of Ŭiju to inform the garrison major of the Manchu bannermen at Fenghuang City of the dowager’s death. The monarch also appointed Hong Chong-yŏng as envoy and Cho Pyŏng-sŏng as attendant secretary of a mission to carry the news to Beijing. According to convention, Beijing in turn needed to dispatch a mission of condolence to Hansŏng. Two weeks later, through Yuan Shikai and Li Hongzhang, the king asked Beijing not to send envoys to Hansŏng but to allow Chosŏn’s tributary emissaries to bring back the imperial condolence messages. The king explained that if China sent a mission, the United States, Britain, Germany, France, and Japan would send missions too, creating a situation that Chosŏn could not afford. What the king was requesting was known as handing over for convenience (Ch., shunfu), but Li was not sure whether this convention had ever been applied to condolence messages. He instructed Yuan to secretly consult precedents and warned him not to be rash, because Li felt that Hansŏng was forcing Beijing to do its bidding, despite the petition’s beseeching tone.
After examining imperial missions of condolence to Chosŏn upon queen dowagers’ deaths since the Qianlong period and enumerating six cases in 1757, 1805, 1821, 1844, 1858, and 1878, Yuan concluded that in the case of conferring noble rank on deceased royalty, Beijing always dispatched envoys and never used handing over for convenience. In view of his findings, Yuan saw the king’s request as a conspiracy. He reported to Li that Queen Min was dominating the king through her fear that the ceremonies performed to China’s envoys in front of Westerners would damage Chosŏn’s image as a country of zizhu. Yuan further asserted that Denny was inciting the king to urge Beijing not to send a mission because the rituals would damage Chosŏn’s national polity.⁵¹ When the king discussed this issue with Yuan, Yuan insisted that the imperial mission would travel to Chosŏn and that all procedures to welcome the mission had to be conducted in conformity with precedent. However, the two Korean emissaries were already on their way to Beijing, carrying the king’s special request.
Upon their arrival in Beijing, Hong Chong-yŏng and Cho Pyŏng-sŏng presented the king’s memorial to the emperor via the Ministry of Rites. In the memorial, the king strictly followed the prescribed textual format by using China’s regnal title and referring to himself as subordinate and to Chosŏn as small country.⁵² In a special note to the Ministry of Rites, Hong explained that as Chosŏn was facing a difficult situation because of political troubles, famine, and financial crisis, he preferred to convey the imperial message of condolence back to his country without the need for Beijing to send envoys for the purpose.
Neither the ministry nor the Guangxu emperor granted this request. The Grand Council forwarded a decree to Hong that declared that an imperial mission had to be sent because the Heavenly Dynasty would "cherish sympathy for its shuguo and fan on such occasions. The mission had a fundamental relationship to the system" (Ch., tizhi youguan), and the rituals that Chosŏn should perform to it based on the established codes should not be curtailed in the least. Still, the emperor compromised by instructing the mission to take the maritime route between Tianjin and Inch’ŏn on warships of the Beiyang Navy. This was the first time since 1637 that an imperial mission had taken to the seas. Of the thirty-nine Manchu candidates recommended by the Ministry of Rites, the emperor selected Xuchang and Chongli (1834–1907) to serve as envoys. Given the possible international responses to the imperial mission’s presence in Chosŏn, the emperor ordered all members of the mission to refuse gifts from Chosŏn for the sake of China’s upright image.⁵³
The emperor’s decision to send the mission points to an established regulation of the Zongfan system: had Yuan Shikai, Li Hongzhang, or the Ministry of Rites been able to find any historical precedent for the omission of an imperial mission of condolence, Beijing would likely have consented to the king’s request and
refrained from dispatching the mission. The Zongfan regulations thus served both China and Korea as a double-edged sword. The Chinese side further confirmed that the mission would land in Inch’ŏn as scheduled, not in Masanpu, as Chosŏn proposed. According to Yuan, the king was hesitant about whether to go out of Hansŏng to welcome the envoys in the suburbs and perform ceremonies in person, for Denny was urging the king to receive the envoys in the palace. The envoys stressed that all ceremonies had to be performed as recorded in the ritual codes, and during their sojourn in Hansŏng they would not meet with any Westerners.⁵⁴
Rituals and Dignity: The Imperial Mission to Chosŏn and the Grand Ceremony
On October 28, 1890, the two envoys picked up gifts for the king from the Ministry of Rites, including sandalwood incense, white and blue silk, and three hundred taels of silver. All of these items were in accordance with imperial codes determined in the eighteenth century.⁵⁵ Two days later they arrived in Tianjin, the headquarters of the Beiyang Navy commanded by Li Hongzhang, who had summoned three warships—the Jiyuan, the Laiyuan, and the Jingyuan—to harbor for the mission. Li first sent the Jiyuan to Chosŏn with a note in which the envoys again expressed their insistence that all prescribed ceremonies be carried out in full on their arrival in Chosŏn. The envoys also stated that the members of the mission would not accept any money or articles as routine gifts in order to show the emperor’s concern for his shuguo and fan.⁵⁶
Chosŏn was busy preparing to welcome the envoys according to precedent. To receive the mission, the king appointed several high-ranking officials, including Nam Chŏng-ch’ŏl, president of the Ministry of Punishment, and Sŏng Ki-un (1847–1924), grand chamberlain and superintendent of trade in the Inch’ŏn district. Both Nam and Sŏng had served as commissioners in Tianjin in 1884, where they had possessed a status equal to that of Western ministers, but now they were fully integrated into the Zongfan system as subordinates of both the king and the Chinese emperor. In addition to refurnishing a pavilion between Inch’ŏn and Hansŏng as the envoys’ accommodations, the Koreans sent 130 foreign-drilled soldiers to the area for security. In Hansŏng the court had deployed around 590 soldiers to maintain local order.⁵⁷
The king was still reluctant to leave the city to welcome the envoys, as he was worried that Japanese and Western diplomats and citizens would witness the hierarchical rituals, in particular his kowtowing to the envoys, which would undermine his dignity as a sovereign. But he nonetheless eventually decided to receive the envoys near the West Gate according to precedent.⁵⁸ After all, the king had been invested by the Chinese emperor, and at this particular moment the emperor’s authority exerted a demand that the monarch could not ignore.
Once all the rituals had been blueprinted, the envoys sailed from Tianjin and reached the outer harbor of Inch’ŏn on November 6. After two high-ranking Korean officials boarded the cruisers to welcome the mission, the envoys landed by a small steamship with the imperial decree. The Korean officials, headed by the receivers of the mission, bowed to the imperial envoys and items. After the envoys had placed the decree in the dragon shrine customarily used for this purpose, the procession headed for the envoys’ lodgings in Inch’ŏn. It was a long and magnificent procession. First came the Korean receivers and officials in columns, one on each side of the road, with the Hansŏng magnate and the metropolitan governor on the east side and the prefects and the magistrates on the west side. Next were the Korean escorts, flags, yellow umbrellas, drums, gongs, and bands. They were followed by the incense shrine and the dragon shrine and then by the Chinese attendants, all of whom were mounted. The two envoys followed in their sedan chairs, side by side, and behind them marched the high and low deputies with the supervisors and their attendants.
The colorful procession passed through the General Foreign Settlement and the Chinese Settlement (Ch., Hua Yang zujie), which the Chinese merchants had decorated with lanterns and streamers, undoubtedly feeling superior to their counterparts given the occasion. From the perspective of the envoys, the extraordinary procession and the elaborate ceremony that numerous Koreans and foreigners gathered to appreciate perfectly highlighted the Great Qing’s superior
authority in its subordinate country.⁵⁹ J. C. Johnston, the acting commissioner of customs in Inch’ŏn, was indeed impressed and commented that the arrival of the mission was the most noteworthy event since the opening of Chemulpo [Inch’ŏn].⁶⁰ When the envoys reached their residence at the Office of the Superintendent of Trade (K., Kamni amun), the Korean officials kowtowed toward the imperial envoys and decree, while the envoys replied by bowing with their hands folded in front. In the office the envoys reviewed the four ritual programs prepared by the Korean side and confirmed that all procedures would be performed the next day in Hansŏng. They declined to accept any gifts from the Korean officials.
The grand ceremony took place in the palace on November 8, and it included the reading of the imperial message of condolence and the ceremonial wailing by the king and the envoys.⁶¹ When the ceremonies drew to a close, the king and the envoys had a short conversation in which the king expressed his gratitude for the great honor that China had given to the small country.⁶² Their conversation contained no mention of political or diplomatic issues. After drinking tea, the host and the guests bowed toward each other with hands folded in front. All of the rituals strictly followed the precedents of the eighteenth century. In addition, the king visited the envoys at their residence on November 10 and treated them to a tea ceremony. This would traditionally have been the time when the Korean side gave gifts to the envoys, but the envoys emphasized again that they could not accept even so much as a piece of paper. The next day the king sent off the envoys at the West Gate by performing the prescribed rituals. After a rest in Inch’ŏn, the envoys sailed back to Tianjin. Their departure marked the end of China’s imperial missions to Chosŏn within the Zongfan framework and thus the conclusion to a tradition that had operated at least since 1401, when Ming China had officially invested the king of Chosŏn.
Already at the time of the event, and ever since, the dominant interpretation of this imperial mission has regarded it as a Chinese conspiracy conducted under the foil of tributary routines, aiming to strengthen China’s control over Chosŏn at the cost of the latter’s independent sovereignty.⁶³ Without knowing what occurred inside the palace between the king and the envoys, the Western ministers assumed that the envoys had persuaded the king to act in accordance with Beijing’s interests in the name of conventional rituals.⁶⁴ These diplomats viewed the event in the context of modern diplomatic circumstances and saw ritual contacts as a tool that China used to influence or manipulate Chosŏn. Scholars in the twentieth century tended to juxtapose Chosŏn’s vassalage visà-vis China with its independent sovereignty vis-à-vis its treaty counterparts, interpreting the mission as an application of China’s new policy, which might be called the Li-Yuan policy, after Li Hongzhang and Yuan Shikai.⁶⁵ This policy is said to have combined China’s supremacy as the suzerain over Korea within the old tributary framework with China’s hegemonic position in the new treaty port system in Chosŏn.
But Yuan’s role may have been exaggerated by his counterparts in Hansŏng at the time and by scholars afterward. Their narratives have portrayed Yuan as an arrogant, overbearing, and peremptory person who acted as a Chinese pro-consul and aggressively dominated the Chosŏn government for a decade.⁶⁶ The events surrounding the death of the dowager in 1890, however, cast doubt on this description. Yuan’s efforts to negotiate his ritual performance in Hansŏng with the Korean side yielded nothing, which lays bare his unprivileged position as a foreign minister. Yuan did not go to Inch’ŏn to highlight China’s superior position or attend the grand ceremony in the palace, nor did he meet or talk with the two imperial envoys. The envoys did not contact Yuan either, aside from sending him several routine notes about the ritual performance before they left Hansŏng. What Yuan’s experience reflected was Chosŏn’s independent power to manage its own affairs.
This interpretation does not deny the fact that Beijing did use the mission to demonstrate its superiority. After their return, the two envoys reported to the emperor, All foreigners have seen the solemn and majestic rituals and learned that Chosŏn is subordinate to the Heavenly Dynasty. Chosŏn could not deny it either. If we can take advantage of the situation to pacify the country in an appropriate way, Chosŏn will serve as our fence and enjoy our great benevolence forever.⁶⁷
Johnston also observed that the mission derived special political importance from the revival of the old-time ceremonies which mark the suzerain-tributary relations between China and Corea.⁶⁸ As a result, according to M. Frederick Nelson, this event "imparted, for the Western observers, a de jure status to China’s de facto position in Korea…. The Western powers were beginning to attribute more force to the familial relationship which for two decades they had rejected as purely ceremonial."⁶⁹ Behind the rituals, it was evident, stood a vibrant politico-cultural Chinese empire. Rituals, therefore, were deeply involved in the tortuous transformation of both China and Korea from parts of the empire to modern sovereign states.
Beijing was not blind to the complex international situation as it considered modifying old conventions. Under the rubric of cherishing the subordinate country, the two envoys made the constructive suggestion that China treat the expenses of the envoys to Chosŏn as it did the outlays of ministers to other countries. The aim was to prevent Chosŏn from imposing exorbitant taxes and levies on its people in the name of welcoming the envoys. After consulting Emperor Yongzheng’s edict of 1735, in which the emperor reduced by half the amount of silver the king was expected to give the imperial envoys as gifts, the Ministry of Rites endorsed the abolition of the custom of envoys’ receiving silver from Chosŏn. The ministry and the Zongli Yamen decided that in the future each imperial envoy would receive two thousand taels of silver and each interpreter five hundred taels from the Zongli Yamen to cover expenses during the trip to Chosŏn. This reform blurred the line between imperial envoys to China’s outer fan and ministers sent to other countries. Emperor Guangxu approved the change. The Beiyang superintendent, the Manchu general and the Ministry of Rites in Mukden, the king of Chosŏn, and the imperial resident in Hansŏng were all informed of the decision.⁷⁰ No imperial envoys, however, would ever have the chance to claim financial support from the Zongli Yamen before the Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1894 in Chosŏn.
Saving Our Chosŏn: The Chinese Intelligentsia’s Responses to the Sino-Japanese War
Assisting the Loyal Fan : The Prewar View
In May 1894 the Chinese general Nie Shicheng (1836–1900) returned to Tianjin from a ten-month trip to northern Manchuria, the Russian Far East, and Chosŏn. In Chosŏn he had met with the king and visited treaty ports in order to get a general picture of the situation in the country. According to Nie, The king is weak, the officials are addicted to alcohol and women, and no one is considering self-strengthening programs…. There are no talented generals at the top and no able warriors at the bottom. Were the country to encounter trouble, it would need China to send troops to protect it. The situation is very dangerous. The general believed that compared with Russia, which is powerful but only a superficial threat, Japan is a truly mortal danger. He argued that China should prepare to resist Japan’s potential invasion of Chosŏn in order to "consolidate the fan and shuguo and protect China’s frontier" (Ch., gu fanshu, bao bianjiang).⁷¹
Nie’s predictions were proved true by the deterioration of Chosŏn’s situation in the Tonghak Rebellion, an armed peasant uprising that broke out in January 1894 against corrupt aristocrats and against the Japanese and Western invasion of Chosŏn (Tonghak, an intellectual school founded in 1860, refers to Eastern learning, indicating its anti-Western approach). Nie himself was dispatched to Chosŏn to assist the country in suppressing the rebellion; there he would witness China lose Chosŏn to Japan on the battlefield.
Many Chinese officials shared Nie’s concerns. In July, when China was clashing with Japan over sending troops to Chosŏn, a group of officials in Beijing outlined in their memorials or position papers to the emperor what they believed would be the best policy to strengthen Chinese forces, protect Chosŏn, and defeat Japan. Zeng Guangjun (1866–1929) of the Imperial Academy suggested that China publicize its rationale for an expedition against Japan. Defining Chosŏn as the country that was the first to subordinate itself to our dynasty and has conscientiously paid tributary visits for hundreds of years without interruption, Zeng proclaimed that Japan has fabricated excuses and tried to make the country subordinate to two countries.⁷² Pang Hongshu (1848–1915) of the Grand Censorate
(Ch., Ducha yuan) alluded to the case of China’s loss of Ryukyu and argued that China should not abandon Chosŏn because it was critical for China’s overall situation. Pang emphasized that Chosŏn had been a fan of the Great Qing for a long time, to the point that it is no different from the Mongols and the tribes in the western areas (Ch., Xiyu, referring to Inner Asian areas). Therefore, China should stop the intervention of other countries in Chosŏn to protect the security of its territory, including the three provinces in Manchuria, the ancestral home of the current dynasty. Conceiving a Chinese strategy in the context of international politics, Pang exhorted China to protect Chosŏn by defeating Japan, so that China could focus on resolving its disputes with Russia over the borderline in the Pamir Mountains and with Britain over trade negotiations in Tibet.⁷³
Other officials preferred to emphasize the internal connections between the Qing and Chosŏn since the early seventeenth century. After reviewing Hongtaiji’s conquest of Chosŏn in 1637 and the erection of the Samjŏndo stele, Duanfang (1861–1911), a Manchu official who later became governor-general of Sichuan, argued that China should support Chosŏn because the country had loyally served the Great Qing for more than two hundred years without treachery.⁷⁴ On the day Duanfang submitted his position paper, the Japanese and the Chinese navies engaged in a battle at P’ungdo in Chosŏn. Thus began the war between the two countries.
Defending China Itself: The Link between Our Chosŏn and Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan
Emperor Guangxu issued an edict to declare war on Japan on August 1, 1894. The edict reiterated that Chosŏn had been a fan and shuguo of the Great Qing and had paid tribute to China every year for more than two hundred years, so it was China’s duty to send troops to Chosŏn to protect the Korean people from great suffering.⁷⁵ The edict justified China’s action as cherishing the small within the Zongfan system and defending international law within the treaty port system. A growing number of Chinese officials identified China’s move as a typical embodiment of the convention of cherishing men from afar.⁷⁶ These officials pointed passionately to all of China’s outer and inner fan and other frontier areas, including Vietnam, Burma, Ryukyu, Outer Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, Manchuria, and Taiwan, which were already being eyed covetously by Western powers, and declared that for its own good China should not lose Chosŏn. The growing crisis in Chosŏn thus became an issue related to Qing China’s own fate. The Great Qing had to defend its territorial borderland and the politico-cultural frontier of the Chinese empire.
According to Changlin, the Manchu minister at the Ministry of Revenue, if Japan annexed Chosŏn, "all the fan of our dynasty would be subordinate to foreign barbarians, so other countries would encroach on China’s inner land, and consequently Xinjiang, Taiwan, Tibet, and Manchuria would be in grave danger. Ding Lijun (1854–1903), a Han Chinese official at the Imperial Academy, further criticized Japan for usurping our Chosŏn" (Ch., duo wo Chaoxian). He remarked, If the fence collapsed, Mukden would be in great danger. Chosŏn, which is different from Vietnam and Burma, which are thousands of miles away from China, is mutually dependent with China, like the lips and the teeth, and like bones and flesh. Ding argued that Beijing should refuse British and Russian mediation between China and Japan, for if China ceded Chosŏn or Taiwan to Japan, as the Western mediators were suggesting, Britain would encroach on Tibet and Russia would seek to take Outer Mongolia.⁷⁷
Changlin’s and Ding’s concerns about China’s territorial integrity were widely shared by their fellow scholars and scholar-officials, who saw Chosŏn as the fence that protected Manchuria. As one of these officials, Kuai Guangdian, put it, After we abandon Chosŏn, Russia will invade Mongolia and Britain will do the same to Tibet, so shall we let these countries alone or argue with them? If we opt to argue with them, we had better keep Chosŏn safe now.⁷⁸ All of these officials regarded Chosŏn as an indispensable element of China’s strategy to safeguard its territorial integrity. Saving our Chosŏn was equal to saving China itself.
The officials’ ardent belief that Beijing should exercise its patriarchal authority reflected the revitalization of the potential policy of provincializing Chosŏn.
Assuming that the king had been co-opted by Japan, Ding Lijun proposed that China invest the crown prince as the new king and keep him in the Chinese army for his own safety. Hong Liangpin (1826–96) similarly suggested that China select a member of the royal house of Chosŏn to guide the Chinese forces and invest him as the new king once the crisis was resolved. Yu Lianyuan (1844–1901) endorsed this proposal and suggested that the new investiture should be conducted in P’yŏngyang. Yan Youzhang further argued that China should immediately transform Chosŏn into a province (Ch., gaijian xingsheng) and should appoint officials and officers to govern it, yet treat the king and his officials generously and allow them to maintain their Korean titles. While Ding regarded this policy as a way of publicizing our great justice to all people under Heaven, Yan saw it as legitimate and justifiable because Chosŏn was China’s fan and had constituted two Chinese counties—Fuyu and Lelang—under the Han Dynasty.⁷⁹
The storm of officials’ opinions was triggered by the declaration of war against Japan on August 1, but it was also a result of political struggles between bureaucratic factions in Beijing. The majority of these officials were low-ranking members of the Pure Stream group, which drew on the thinking of the minister of the Grand Council, Li Hongzao (1820–97), and Emperor Guangxu’s instructor Weng Tonghe. Embracing a hawkish approach, both men saw Li Hongzhang as their political adversary and accused him and his protégés, such as Ma Jianzhong, Liu Mingchuan (1836–96), and Ding Ruchang, of being afraid to fight the Japanese. With the rise of Weng and Li Hongzao in October, their followers became more active with more dramatic proposals during the second half of the war.
The core argument of these officials was that China could not lose Chosŏn, for it would mean the disintegration of the Great Qing itself. In fighting for Chosŏn, the Great Qing would fight not only for its territorial integrity but also for its own dignity and legitimacy as the Middle Kingdom and the Heavenly Dynasty. In the context of war, the ideology of all-under-Heaven became central for these scholar-officials, who saw the fate of the Great Qing at stake. Pragmatists dealing with the Japanese, Russians, and British on China’s frontiers regarded the Pure Stream officials as armchair strategists with unrealistic plans, but the latter were undeniably accurate in their assessment of China’s frontier security. The nightmare scenario they had sketched out in late 1894, in which China would encounter serious challenges in Manchuria, Outer Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan from colonial powers such as Russia and Britain, became true in the postwar period. China’s loss of territory halted only once the People’s Republic of China clearly claimed its territorial domain and defined China’s borders. In this sense, China did not become a nation-state until the 1950s, when Korea—represented by two sovereign states because of the Cold War—became completely independent from the Chinese empire.
Losing the Eastern Fence: The Conclusion of the Treaty of Shimonoseki
While the war was escalating on China’s eastern frontier, people on the western frontier in Tibet looked on with concern. On February 22, 1895, the imperial commissioner to Tibet, Kuihuan (1850–?), submitted a memorial to Emperor Guangxu, reporting that the thirteenth Dalai Lama (1876–1933) had led lamas and Tibetan Buddhists in reading sutras at primary monasteries after hearing that Japan had broken international law to invade Chosŏn. The Dalai Lama hoped their prayers before Buddha Sakyamuni would bring blessings to the great emperor and his great forces, by which China would defeat the Japanese clowns in Chosŏn.⁸⁰ On April 17, ten days after the emperor learned about the Dalai Lama’s prayers through Kuihuan’s memorial, the Chinese representative Li Hongzhang, after painful negotiations with his Japanese counterparts, Itō Hirobumi and Mutsu Munemitsu (1844–97), signed a peace treaty at Shimonoseki in Japan.
The text of the treaty was written in Chinese, Japanese, and English. The first article, which was drafted by Japan, stated that "China recognizes definitively the full and complete independence and autonomy [Ch., wanquan wuque zhi duli zizhu] of Corea, and in consequence, the payment of tribute and the performance of ceremonies and formalities by Corea to China in derogation of such independence and autonomy, shall wholly cease for the future."⁸¹ Unlike the Treaty of Kanghwa of 1876, which was written only in Chinese and Japanese, the English version of the Treaty of Shimonoseki explicitly defined Chosŏn’s "full and complete
independence and autonomy, erasing any ambiguity about the status of the country in the Chinese or Japanese versions. In addition, the terminology of the treaty reflected Qing China’s transformation over the previous two centuries. In the treaty, the Great Qing was fully equal to China and Zhongguo, although the preface and the end of the Japanese and Chinese versions of the treaty addressed the Qing as the Great Qing Empire in Chinese characters as a counterpart to the Great Japanese Empire. Whereas the Japanese text called the Qing the country of the Qing" (J., Shinkoku), the Chinese text referred to it as Zhongguo and the English version as China. In this sense, what the treaty terminated was not only the Qing-Chosŏn Zongfan relationship that had existed since 1637 but also the general Sino-Korean Zongfan arrangement that had arguably started with Jizi.
When the news that Li Hongzhang had signed the treaty reached Beijing, the thousands of scholars attending the triennial imperial civil-service examination were dismayed at the humiliating terms. They began to submit long and passionate petitions to the emperor via the Grand Censorate. The majority of these petitions were signed by more than fifty scholars from different provinces, and they called for the annulment of the treaty and a continuation of the war with Japan. The scholars emphasized Chosŏn’s strategic position as China’s eastern fence and its historical significance for the rise of the Great Qing. The petitions echoed the fervent tone of the Pure Stream bureaucrats.
On May 1, Wang Rongxian, Hong Jiayu, and Bao Xinzeng, three candidate officials from the Ministry of Personnel, submitted a long petition in which they outlined the grave dangers that each article of the Treaty of Shimonoseki posed for China. Observing that the treaty made Chosŏn equal to China but subordinate to Japan, the three officials expressed their frustration that a simple sentence of a treaty could terminate China’s long-term relationship with Chosŏn, "a fan for almost three hundred years that has embodied the superb achievements of Emperors Taizu [Nurhaci] and Taizong [Hongtaiji] and received kindness from other emperors for generations."⁸² Two days later, ten low-ranking officials from the Directorate of Education submitted a joint petition via Weng Tonghe. They bitterly reviewed China’s recent history of losing our Burma to Britain, our Annam to France, our northern Heilong River (the Amur River) to Russia, and our Ryukyu and Chosŏn to Japan, concluding that "we once had many fan in the four quarters of the world, but we have lost all of them within the past decades."⁸³ They further argued that China’s cession of Taiwan and Liaodong to Japan would be a prologue to further surrenders of China’s territory to foreign states, surrenders that would be much worse than the loss of outer fan on China’s periphery. As these officials saw it, the Great Qing was collapsing along its frontiers. But even as petitions such as these were flooding Beijing, the exchange of ratifications of the Sino-Japanese treaty took place at Yantai in Shandong Province on May 8, 1895.
Redefining Chosŏn and China: The Qing-Korean Treaty of 1899 and Its Aftermath
A Ritual Dilemma: Chosŏn’s Proposal to Negotiate a Treaty with China
The Treaty of Shimonoseki terminated the Sino-Korean court-to-court hierarchy, but it did not change the countries’ state-to-state relationship. The post-1895 political framework between the two countries, therefore, was not a completely new arrangement; rather, it represented the institutionalization of the surviving section of the dual network. The two sides accomplished this institutionalization by negotiating a new and equal treaty. The original proposal for the treaty came from the Korean monarch, who was increasingly losing power to his Japanese advisers after the war. On January 7, 1895, as Japan approached victory in the war, the king of Chosŏn performed ceremonies at Chongmyo, the royal ancestral shrine in Hansŏng. The monarch announced Great Laws (K., Hongbŏm), calling himself emperor (K., chim; Ch., zhen) and explaining that he had decided to cut off the thought of being dependent upon the country of the Qing in order to lay the foundation for autonomy and independence. In addition to ending the Qing’s authority—or suzerainty, as many scholars prefer to call it—over Chosŏn, the
king’s fourteen items initiated a self-strengthening reform designed by Japan and carried out under Japanese supervision.⁸⁴
In the postwar period, Japan’s increasing domination of Chosŏn progressively curtailed the country’s autonomy and independence, leading to serious political tensions between the king and his Japanese advisers. In October 1895 a mob of Japanese rioters entered the palace, killing Queen Min, the king’s closest adviser for decades, and mercilessly burning her body. The Japanese atrocities frightened the king, who could foresee his fate as a puppet under draconian Japanese control. Adhering to the Japanese schedule, on January 1, 1896, Chosŏn adopted the solar calendar and the new regnal title Kŏnyang, the first independent regnal title of the dynasty since its establishment in 1392. However, realizing that these reforms could not ensure his personal safety, the king and the crown prince escaped to the Russian legation in February and sought asylum, leaving the fate of the Korean court uncertain and intensifying the competition between Russia and Japan on the peninsula.
Chosŏn had won its independence with the Sino-Japanese Treaty of Shimonoseki, but at that point it had not yet signed a treaty with China that would have identified its independent status. In June 1896 the Korean interpreter Pak T’ae-yŏng visited Tang Shaoyi, the manager of Chinese commercial affairs and de facto Chinese representative in Hansŏng, to convey the king’s wish to negotiate a treaty with China. Tang did not refuse the proposal but suggested that the talks should be conducted later, as Chosŏn could not be regarded as an autonomous and independent country as long as the king was under Russian protection.⁸⁵
The king’s overtures posed a challenge to Beijing, which believed that "Chosŏn, as our dynasty’s longtime fan, should not be regarded as equal to Western countries. According to the Zongli Yamen, China would agree to negotiate new trade regulations" with Chosŏn, which would allow the country to maintain consuls in China, but China would not permit its former fan to sign treaties with it, send ministers to Beijing, or present letters of credence to the Chinese emperor. Instead, China would send a consul-general to Hansŏng to manage Chinese affairs. In this way, China could "preserve the system of shuguo " (Ch., cun shuguo zhi ti). The Yamen telegraphed Li Hongzhang for advice. Li, who was on a postwar trip to Europe and the United States, endorsed the plan but suggested that, to maintain China’s dignity, the Chinese consul-general (a post for which Li recommended Tang Shaoyi) should not present his credentials to the king.⁸⁶ This attempt to preserve the prewar hierarchical system characterized Beijing’s policy toward Chosŏn in the immediate postwar period.
Similarly, Korean policymakers generally continued to make use of traditional discourse as they adjusted their country’s relations with China. In a conversation between the senior official Cho Pyŏng-chik (1833–1901) and Tang Shaoyi in July 1896, Cho stated that Chosŏn had been a " fan and shuguo of the central dynasty for a long time," and that it was not the king who had originally sought the autonomous status outlined for Chosŏn in the Treaty of Shimonoseki. Chosŏn, Cho emphasized, had been coerced by its powerful neighbor (namely, Japan) into disclaiming the status of China’s shuguo, but the king appreciated the deep favors of the imperial dynasty and would like to negotiate a new treaty to resume the concord. Cho expressed concern that by refusing to negotiate a treaty with Chosŏn, China might be signaling its refusal to acknowledge Chosŏn’s autonomy. Tang responded that negotiating a treaty and recognizing Chosŏn’s autonomy were two different matters, because the former means only not following the old regulations, but the latter means that the two countries are equal to each other.⁸⁷ Their conversation yielded nothing.
In November 1896 Tang informed the Zongli Yamen that the king—Tang refused to acknowledge the monarch’s claim to emperorship—would send representatives to Beijing for treaty negotiations. This prospect forced China to confront the sensitive question of ritual procedures between Korean representatives and the imperial court in the postwar transitional context. If the self-declared emperor of Chosŏn dispatched a representative to Beijing for treaty negotiations, the representative, unlike a prewar tributary emissary, would no longer need to perform the ceremony of kowtow to the emperor, which would compromise China’s dignity. Given this ritual conundrum, Tang argued that it would be prudent for Beijing to appoint a consul-general to Hansŏng who could negotiate a treaty with
Chosŏn and protect the Chinese merchants and civilians; the affairs of Chinese subjects in Korea had been temporarily supervised by the British consul-general, John N. Jordan (1852–1925), on China’s commission. Endorsing Tang’s proposal, Beijing appointed Tang himself as Chinese consul-general in Chosŏn (Ch., Zhongguo zhuzha Chaoxian zonglingshi). Tang’s prewar view of Sino-Korean relations made it enormously difficult for him to adjust to the postwar arrangement. As he put it, "Although the system is now different, it is inconvenient for us to sign an equal treaty with Chosŏn given that it was a fan of our dynasty for centuries."⁸⁸ In the following years, Tang did his best to preserve a hierarchy between the two countries.⁸⁹
Reluctance and Nostalgia: China’s First Minister to Korea
In January 1897 Tang Shaoyi learned that the king had appointed Sŏng Ki-un as Chosŏn’s representative for the treaty negotiations but had canceled the plan to send Sŏng to Beijing once he heard of Tang’s appointment. Tang visited Sŏng and informed him that Chinese officials would not talk with him if he went directly to Beijing. In a conversation with Jordan, the British consul-general, Tang declared that he intended to focus solely on preventing the Korean representative from visiting Beijing, and to that end he wanted to commission Jordan to continue to manage Chinese commercial affairs.⁹⁰
The dramatic changes in Chosŏn’s political situation in 1897 prompted the Korean Foreign Office to pursue a more active agenda toward the goal of making a treaty with China. In the two years after the war, Chosŏn had begun to construct an image of itself as an independent country by removing or refashioning the icons of China’s supremacy in the Zongfan era. The Korean government converted the Gate of Receiving Imperial Favors into the Gate of Independence (K., Tongnim mun), buried the Samjŏndo stele, changed the South Palace Annex into the Temple of Heaven (K., Ch’ŏndan), and replaced the Chinese managers of Chosŏn’s customs with Russians. These efforts constituted a process of decentering the Middle Kingdom, as Andre Schmid has described it.⁹¹
In August 1897, six months after returning to his palace from the refuge of the Russian legation, the Korean emperor adopted the new regnal title Kwangmu. On October 12 the sovereign called his country the Great Korea (K., Taehan) after performing ceremonies of sacrifice toward Heaven and Earth. Western diplomats soon formally recognized the new name of the country.⁹² From Tang Shaoyi’s perspective, the Korean sovereign was arrogating to himself an illegitimate emperor-ship, and his attitude toward treaty negotiations with Chosŏn became even more conservative. But the new Korean empire did not pin its hopes entirely on Tang.
In March 1898 the Russian minister in Beijing forwarded to the Zongli Yamen Korea’s expression of willingness to send a representative to Beijing and to receive a Chinese counterpart in Hansŏng. The Yamen instructed Tang to block the dispatch of a Korean representative and decided to send a representative to Hansŏng first. Tang suggested that China send an official with a fourth-level rank, as opposed to the third-level representatives of other countries in Korea, in order to show the difference between the owner and the servant in the past days and to ensure that the system would not be violated. In the meantime, the Japanese minister in Beijing, Yano Fumio (1851–1931), contacted the Zongli Yamen as a mediator for Sino-Korean contacts. The Yamen informed Yano that Chosŏn could negotiate with Tang in Hansŏng for trade regulations and that China did not want to receive representatives of its former shuguo in Beijing.⁹³ Tang quickly contacted the Korean Foreign Office to discuss trade regulations, but the office refused on the grounds that a regulation was not a treaty—a retroactive protest against the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations, which fell far short of a treaty and had been dictated by the Chinese side.
In July, Beijing realized that the situation was slipping out of its hands, when Tang reported that the Foreign Office of Korea had invited Jordan to ask the British minister in Beijing, Claude M. MacDonald (1852–1915), to serve as a broker. The Zongli Yamen told Tang that if Chosŏn insisted on sending a representative to Beijing, the representative should be a fourth-rank minister, and his credentials should be forwarded to the emperor by the Yamen; no audience with the emperor would be arranged, as the Yamen would negotiate potential trade regulations with the representative.⁹⁴ Three years after the Sino-Japanese War, the humiliating
end of China’s patriarchal superiority over Korea was still much on Chinese politicians’ minds, and the Zongli Yamen was still reluctant to treat Korea as a state equal to China. As Tang saw it, allowing Hansŏng to send a minister to Beijing first would have a detrimental effect on the relationship given China’s status as a big country. To justify his concern, he pointed out that Britain and Spain, which were likewise big countries, had also preemptively dispatched their own representatives to their former subordinates—the United States and South American countries, respectively—once these subordinates had become autonomous (Ch., zizhu).⁹⁵
In China, the ambitious reform initiated by the Guangxu emperor in June 1898 reached its acme. Stimulated by the fiasco of the war, the reform aimed to modernize China by changing outdated conventions. The young emperor believed that China’s relations with Chosŏn should change too. On August 5, at the emperor’s instructions, the Grand Council telegraphed Tang that the emperor would allow Korea to send a minister to Beijing and would grant the minister an audience. The Zongli Yamen accordingly instructed Tang to inform Hansŏng that Korea could send its minister to China first, and that China would treat him with the ceremonies appropriate to friendly nations (Ch., youbang). China would dispatch its own minister to Korea for the sake of reciprocity.⁹⁶ Tang, however, chose not to inform the Koreans of Beijing’s decision.⁹⁷
In Beijing the emperor appointed Xu Shoupeng (?–1901) as the minister for Korea with a third-level rank and the title imperial commissioner in the country of Chosŏn (Ch., Zhuzha Chaoxian guo qinchai dachen). This title aroused concern among foreign ministers in Hansŏng because it carried strong Zongfan connotations and smacked of colonialism. In a conversation with Tang, the British inspector general of Korean customs, John M. Brown (1835–1926), expressed his suspicion that China still regarded Korea as its shuguo, because Beijing’s imperial commissioners in Tibet and Mongolia held similar titles. The Russian minister to Korea, Nikolai Matyunin (1849–1907), regarded Xu’s position as that of a second-rank minister, which was the highest rank among his counterparts in the diplomatic corps in Hansŏng. The Japanese, French, and German ministers were also disturbed by Xu’s title and the format of the Chinese credentials, which used the old term Chosŏn rather than the newly adopted Han for Korea.⁹⁸ The diplomats saw such language as a sign that China might not endorse the new postwar political arrangement in the peninsula.
Indeed, what to call Korea and its monarch presented a challenge to the Chinese side. In the end, it was Zhang Yinhuan, the former minister to the United States, who drafted Xu’s letter of credence on the basis of the first article of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, as instructed by Emperor Guangxu. Ma Jianzhong, the man who had been heavily involved in Korean affairs in the 1880s, offered some revisions to the draft.⁹⁹ The opening sentence of the letter read, The Great Emperor of the country of the Great Qing respectfully gives his greetings to the Great Monarch of the country of the Great Korea.¹⁰⁰ The term Great Monarch (Ch., da junzhu) indicated the king’s inferior position vis-à-vis the Great Emperor (Ch., da huangdi) of China, and the draft credential also used a modified format for the conventional honorific elevation that still elevated the Qing above Korea.
Emperor Guangxu disliked Zhang’s proposed format but himself was at a loss as to how to refer to Korea and its sovereign.¹⁰¹ When the emperor expressed his concerns to Zhang, Zhang explained that Chosŏn had renamed itself Great Korea without informing China, so the draft credential was simply based on the Treaty of Shimonoseki rather than on the domestic changes in Korea.¹⁰² Subse quently the emperor instructed Tang Shaoyi to investigate which term—Great Monarch or Great Emperor—Britain, Japan, and Russia used in their letters of credence to Korea, for he wanted the Chinese letter to follow whatever practice other countries had adopted.¹⁰³ Because of the emperor’s open-mindedness, the final version of the letter addressed the Korean monarch as the Great Emperor and placed Great Qing and Great Korea on the same line. The Korean letter of credence to China, which the first Korean minister to China presented to Emperor Guangxu in 1902, adopted the same equal format. This change in honorifics was the first since 1637 and represented a watershed moment in Qing-Chosŏn
relations.
As the diplomatic changes were inching forward, Empress Dowager Cixi suddenly staged a coup on September 21, 1898, placing the emperor under house arrest and suspending his reforms. Despite the political chaos, Xu Shoupeng was allowed to carry on with his work. His title changed from imperial commissioner to envoy plenipotentiary, and his explicit mission was to negotiate a treaty with the Korean Foreign Office.¹⁰⁴ This change entirely erased the ambiguity of Xu’s former title and the worries of his Japanese and Western counterparts in Hansŏng. The Manchu ruling house eventually, if reluctantly, accepted the fact that Chosŏn was a country equal to the Great Qing.
Before he departed for Korea, Xu drafted a treaty consisting of fourteen articles. He commented that China had suffered from unfair treaties with other countries, in particular regarding extraterritoriality and tariff agreements, and would be rectifying these imbalances in its new treaties, starting with the one with Korea. Xu was determined to pursue an equal treaty with Korea for the sake of China’s interests, but at the same time he revealed his traditional bias: "Korea was China’s fan and shuguo in the past and it was not Korea’s original wish to be autonomous. The country is small and surrounded by powerful neighbors. We should do our best to cherish it, rather than gain extra advantages from it." With this mindset, Xu wanted to make sure that both countries could enjoy the right of most-favored-nation status in trade with each other.¹⁰⁵
While Xu was getting ready to embark on his trip to Korea, Wu Baochu (1869– 1913), son of Gen. Wu Changqing, composed a preface to a book entitled Three Stories of Korea (Ch., Aoyi Chaoxian sanzhong), written by Zhou Jialu (1846– 1909), who had served as an assistant to General Wu when the latter went to Hansŏng in 1882 to suppress the mutiny. In the preface, Wu Baochu reviewed China’s humiliating defeat in Korea in 1895 and argued that China should have integrated Korea into China’s household system in 1882 and converted the country into prefectures and counties of China (Ch., jiqi tudi er junxian zhi). He was dismayed that China now had to dispatch a representative to Korea for treaty negotiations, which made Korea look like an enemy of China.¹⁰⁶ Wu offered a picture of China’s presence in Chosŏn that was full of nostalgia, frustration, and uncertainty.
Negotiating with a Friendly Nation: The Sino-Korean Treaty of 1899
Xu arrived in Hansŏng on January 25, 1899, with the intention of extending China’s benevolence of cherishing the small and was granted an audience with the Korean emperor on February 1. On the day of the audience, Xu was picked up by a sedan chair to be taken to the palace. When he entered the audience hall, he bowed once toward the emperor and bowed again as he approached the emperor. The emperor, wearing Western-style clothes, stood up to shake hands with Xu and to receive the Chinese letter of credence. Xu then read aloud a short tribute to the emperor, who in return showed his gratitude to the Chinese minister. After this, they shook hands again, and Xu bowed for the third time before he was escorted back to his legation.¹⁰⁷ The ceremony, conducted along the lines of Western common rules at the state-to-state level, was the first ritual performance between the Korean head of state and a state representative of China in the postwar period, and it marked the definitive end of centuries-long Zongfan rituals between the two countries.
Following the audience, Xu started treaty negotiations with Pak Che-sun (1858–1916), the minister of the Foreign Office. In September the two sides signed a trade treaty (K., Tae Han’guk Tae Ch’ŏngguk t’ongsang choyak) containing fifteen articles. Article 2 stated that each country would dispatch representatives to reside in the capital and treaty ports of the other and would enjoy most-favored-nation treatment. Article 5 endowed both with the right of consular jurisdiction. Article 12 allowed them to negotiate new regulations for border demarcation and to trade on the frontier in Manchuria. The agreement served as a replacement for the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations as the first equal treaty between the two countries, but China made notable concessions. For example, China was forbidden to export opium to Korea, but similar restrictions did not apply to Korean exports to China. Xu explained to Emperor Guangxu that he did not challenge such items because
he found that the Korean monarch and subordinates still worship China in their minds, which contributed to the success of the negotiations.¹⁰⁸
After signing the treaty, Xu commented that "Korea, China’s fan and shuguo in the past, has now become a friendly nation of China, and nothing can change the situation. Recalling the past—what a pity it is!"¹⁰⁹ The two countries ratified the treaty in Hansŏng in December, and Xu was appointed by Beijing as the first Chinese minister to Korea. In stark contrast to Tang Shaoyi, who had struggled with reconciling China’s past glory with the reality of the first years after the Sino-Japanese war, Xu in 1899 merely presented himself as a Western-style minister and quickly busied himself with reestablishing the Chinese diplomatic network in Korea in order to protect Chinese citizens and interests.
Korea would eventually send its minister to Beijing in reciprocity, but the dispatch was postponed because of China’s deteriorating situation. The Boxer Uprising was sweeping across northwestern Shandong, and it began to spread toward Tianjin and Beijing. The anti-Christian uprising eventually resulted in a diplomatic and political disaster for China in August 1900, when the Eight-Nation Alliance occupied Beijing right after Emperor Guangxu and Empress Dowager Cixi had fled to Xi’an. In October, Li Hongzhang began to negotiate with Britain, the United States, Japan, Russia, Italy, France, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. In view of the dramatic changes in China, the Korean emperor, who was under close Japanese supervision, wrote a letter to the Meiji emperor asking Japan to protect Korean interests in China during the negotiations.¹¹⁰ In January 1901 Beijing recalled Xu Shoupeng from Hansŏng to Beijing to assist Li in the peace negotiations. Before leaving Korea, Xu named one of his counselors, Xu Taishen, as acting minister.
In late July the Zongli Yamen changed its Chinese name to Waiwu bu, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, legitimizing itself as China’s sole foreign office. Xu Shoupeng was appointed as a minister of the ministry. On September 7, 1901, Li signed the final protocol with the foreign states, and the Chinese empire teetered on the edge of collapse. Li died two months later, leaving his lifelong dream of modernizing China and his many plans to protect Korea unfulfilled. With the return of Emperor Guangxu and Empress Dowager Cixi to the Forbidden City in January 1902, Korea was finally ready to send its first minister to take his place amid the rubble of the city of Beijing.
The Korean government appointed Pak Che-sun, Xu Shoupeng’s treaty negotiation counterpart and the former commissioner in Tianjin, as the first Korean minister plenipotentiary to China.¹¹¹ On September 30, 1902, Pak presented his letter of credence to Emperor Guangxu in the Forbidden City following a tailored Western-style procedure.¹¹² The ceremony of kowtow, performed by Korean tributary emissaries to the emperor of China for centuries, had come to an end. Interestingly, the Chinese official records on the audience are very brief, exactly like those on the first meeting between Emperor Tongzhi and foreign ministers in 1873. Perhaps the court saw in the new rituals both a reminder of the Chinese empire’s past glory vis-à-vis its outer fan and a complex challenge to China’s dignity. After the audience, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs instructed Xu Taishen to send two Korean-language interpreters to Beijing to facilitate its further communications with Pak.¹¹³ The Korean language thus joined the list of the official foreign languages of the Chinese foreign ministry. A new—if fleeting—bilateral relationship had begun.
Chinese Zongfanism and Korean Colonialism in the Borderland: Sino-Korean Contacts in South China and Manchuria
The transformation of the Sino-Korean relationship was not as clear-cut in China’s provinces as it was in Beijing. In the coastal areas of South China, local officials still followed prewar routines to manage affairs regarding Korea. In December 1895, for instance, Governor Liao Shoufeng (1836–1901) in Zhejiang Province reported to Emperor Guangxu that officials in Wenzhou had rescued twenty-eight Koreans from a shipwreck in October and provided the victims with clothes and food, following conventions, eventually returning them to Chosŏn via Shanghai. Liao called these Koreans barbarians of the country of Chosŏn who had suffered from the shipwreck (Ch., Chaoxian guo nanfan), using the same Zongfan wording as that used in the eighteenth century.¹¹⁴ The Wenzhou case became a
model for similar cases in the following years.
In May 1901 Governor Yu Lianyuan in Zhejiang reported that fifteen Korean fishermen had suffered a shipwreck on China’s coast. After consulting the Wenzhou precedent, he followed the conventions of saving and taking care of them and sent them on to Shanghai.¹¹⁵ Yu had been a pillar of the Pure Stream in the 1890s and had been among those who called for Beijing to protect Chosŏn for the sake of the integrity of the Great Qing. By this point, China had signed its new treaty with Korea and Yu had been promoted to governor, but in Yu’s mind Chosŏn—the term he used, rather than Great Korea or Han—was still a fan of the Great Qing and the Korean fishermen belonged to the category of barbarians. Yu’s successors in Zhejiang from 1902 to 1908 embraced the same approach.¹¹⁶ In almost all cases the Korean victims were referred to as barbarians who were beneficiaries of China’s policy of cherishing the small or cherishing the men from afar. In provincial practice, then, Zongfan norms were no weaker than they had been in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
In contrast to the benign and almost imperceptible postwar transformation of the Sino-Korean relationship in South China, the shift in the border areas in Manchuria was manifested in blood, fire, and death. According to the reports of Chinese officials in Manchuria in 1907, Koreans started to attack and loot Chinese villages along the border of Jilin and Mukden in the late 1890s, and the situation deteriorated dramatically after 1901, when Beijing was occupied by the Eight-Nation Alliance and Manchuria was occupied by Russia.¹¹⁷ Chinese bandits similarly attacked Korean villages on the border. The sharp rise in Sino-Korean border conflicts signaled the local disorder caused by the collapse of the Zongfan arrangement from the top down. For local and nonofficial forces on both sides of the border, impoverished peasants in particular, practical concerns and the pressures of daily needs, such as the search for fertile land, food, livestock, and energy resources, prevailed over national relationships and state interests. With the sudden absence of Chinese and Korean authority, the borderland in Manchuria became a perfect location for Chinese and Korean bandits and other illegal armed groups to build up their strength and extract goods from local farmers and settlers.
Between early 1901 and early 1905, officials in Mukden and Jilin reported to Beijing at least a dozen cases of serious cross-border crime committed by Koreans, including armed robberies, burglaries, shootings, homicides, rapes, kidnappings, and arson. Chen Zuoyan, a local Chinese official in Yanji in eastern Jilin, reported that a Korean attack against a Chinese area in March 1901 claimed eleven Chinese lives and caused a loss of 4,337.81 taels of silver.¹¹⁸ As more Korean immigrants poured over the border into Chinese territory, the situation continued to worsen. In July 1903 Chen Zuoyan reported a series of misdeeds by Korean settlers and called on Beijing to take urgent measures to protect Chinese interests. A local report revealed that a Korean armed attack against four villages in Yanjin in the fall of 1903 had damaged 211 Chinese and Korean houses and cost more than 19,546.46 taels of silver.¹¹⁹ In the meantime, Chinese bandits continued to cross the border rivers to pillage Korean villages, and on the Chinese side of the border the Chinese pawns of local officials extracted money from Korean immigrants. At least four instances of illegal logging or kidnapping on the Korean side, for example, were committed by Chinese bandits.¹²⁰ In August 1903, emphasizing that Korea is different from what it was in the past, the Chinese minister in Hansŏng, Xu Taishen, suggested to Beijing that China should implement countermeasures to check Korean expansion into Chinese territory in Yanji, an area the Koreans and Japanese began to refer to as Kando (Ch., Jiandao). Britain and Japan, which had formed an alliance in 1902, informed Xu that Russian machinations were behind the attempt to settle Koreans in this area. In the following two years, the Chinese and Korean foreign ministries sought in vain to settle border disputes in Manchuria.¹²¹
Many historical and geopolitical factors contributed to the violent conflicts in the border areas. The absence of any demarcation of the point at which the Yalu and Tumen Rivers converged—marking the traditional boundary between the two countries—had been a problem since the Kangxi period in the eighteenth century. Although a borderline existed, it was not clearly or legally delineated, as it would be in modern times between two sovereign states. In the first half of the twentieth century, this issue evolved into a dispute that involved not just China and Korea but Japan as well. Border conflicts were also fueled by China’s opening
of Manchuria in the 1870s, when the Manchu court abolished the two-hundred-year-old policy of segregating Manchuria from inner China and encouraged people to immigrate to the area for cultivation. The new policy and the rich resources in the area also attracted thousands of poor Korean peasants, who crossed the Tumen River to cultivate the wilderness in the convergence zone, forcing China to deal with these foreign citizens.¹²² Emperor Guangxu had instructed local officials in 1882 to tolerate the illegal Korean immigrants as long as they had no intention of encroaching on China’s borders. Later, in order to solve the mounting problems, China started to assimilate Korean immigrants into the Chinese populace by ordering them to cut their hair in the Chinese style and to wear Chinese clothes. This policy provoked strong protest from Korea.¹²³
The accumulating conflicts led to a skirmish in the spring of 1904, when Chinese forces under the command of the officer Hu Dianjia defeated a group of Korean soldiers who had crossed the Tumen River with the purpose of occupying more land and mobilizing the Korean immigrants to break away from Chinese governance. This was the first time that China used force to resolve a dispute with Korea in the post-1895 period. The skirmish resulted in China’s resumption of territorial and administrative control over the area and forced Korea to return to peace talks. On June 15, 1904, Hu Dianjia, Chen Zuoyan, and three Korean officials signed an agreement with the title Regulation on Sino-Korean Border Affairs with the Purpose of Solving Problems Arising from the Conflict (Ch., Zhong-Han bianjie shanhou zhangcheng). Its name notwithstanding, the agreement primarily served to tie up remaining unresolved issues from the spring skirmish; it was not a state-to-state treaty for the long-term strategic goal of settling border disputes.¹²⁴
At the time the Sino-Korean agreement was signed, Japan was fighting with Russia for control of Manchuria. After it finally prevailed over Russia, Japan publicly made Korea into its protectorate in November 1905. The Korean minister to Beijing was recalled, and all affairs regarding Korean contacts with China were transferred to the management of the Japanese legation in Beijing. In February 1906, with the closing of the American, British, and French legations in Hansŏng and the arrival of the first Japanese residential general, Itō Hirobumi, China also recalled its third minister to Korea, Zeng Guangquan.
In Manchuria Sino-Korean border conflicts continued to increase, and the local Chinese officials believed that Korea was aggressively expanding to the Chinese side, where Korean immigrants significantly outnumbered the Chinese population. In 1907 Wu Luzhen (1880–1911), the Chinese investigator in charge of Sino-Korean border affairs, reported that there were more than fifty thousand Koreans on the Chinese side of the Tumen River, compared to fewer than ten thousand Chinese residents. According to Wu’s investigation of thirty-nine villages in the Helongyu area, the Korean settlers had established a total of 5,990 households in these villages, dwarfing the 264 Chinese households. Wu commented that this ancestral territory of the Qing had almost become Chosŏn’s colony (Ch., Chaoxian zhimin zhi di).¹²⁵ Although Korea was falling victim to Japanese colonialism, Korean immigrants had served as the vanguard in the Korean colonization of Chinese territory in Manchuria. This type of Korean colonization subsequently served as a vehicle of Japan’s colonial expansion into the vast inner land of Manchuria over the following three decades.
In order to protect the interests of Chinese merchants in Korea, Beijing appointed Ma Tingliang as the consul-general to Korea in 1909, a year after Emperor Guangxu and Empress Dowager Cixi died and the new emperor was inaugurated with the regnal title of Xuantong. China was in the throes of violent domestic upheaval through a series of reforms and rebellions, so the relationship with Korea was not a priority for the Beijing government. On August 22, 1910, Korea was annexed by Japan. Beijing made no official comment on the annexation. In Hansŏng, Ma instructed Chinese citizens to follow the new orders issued by the Japanese authorities, and he dismissed the police forces in Chinese settlements.
Beijing’s silence notwithstanding, the Japanese annexation was alarming to many Chinese, who felt the same colonial threat hanging over China. Dai Jitao (1891–1949), who had been educated in Japan and would later become an assistant to Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), published an editorial in a Shanghai newspaper in
August 1910 criticizing Beijing’s indifferent attitude to this tragic chapter in Korea’s history. Invoking the time-honored Sino-Korean relationship since the Jizi period, Dai declared that "Korea has been China’s shuguo for more than three thousand years, its lands lie within China’s borders [Ch., jiangyu], its people belong to the same ethnic group as the Chinese, its characters are Chinese, and its political customs are Chinese legacies." Lamenting Korea’s tragic fate, Dai warned that unless China roused itself, it too would soon suffer a Japanese invasion in the political, military, and industrial arenas.¹²⁶
In Manchuria, the governor-general of the Three Northeastern Provinces, Xiliang (1853–1917), was alarmed by Japan’s colonial policy (Ch., zhimin zhengce) toward China, enacted through the Koreans who continued to cross the border to occupy Chinese land. In September and October 1910, Xiliang reported, more than thirty thousand Korean immigrants were living among the Chinese residents on China’s side of the border. The governor-general emphasized that since these Korean immigrants had become Japanese citizens upon the Japanese annexation of Korea in August, they were no longer subject to Chinese jurisdiction but rather answered to the Japanese consul. Xiliang argued that this change would harm our sovereignty (Ch., sun wo zhuquan), and that the thousands of Korean immigrants would play the lead in Japan’s annexation of Manchuria. He suggested that China use the newly issued Nationality Regulations of the Great Qing (Ch., Da Qing guoji tiaoli) to convert the Korean immigrants into Chinese citizens in order to make the territorial borderline distinct and secure.¹²⁷
In August 1911 Zhao Erxun (1844–1927), Xiliang’s successor, urged Beijing to heed Xiliang’s proposal and to naturalize the Korean immigrants on Chinese soil. Stressing that "all the counties along the Yalu River, which are more than ten in number, belong to China’s inner land [Ch., neidi], Zhao proposed that China tell the Korean immigrants to become civilized" (Ch., guihua) by applying for and obtaining Chinese citizenship.¹²⁸ Like Xiliang, Zhao was aware that the issue of the nationality of the considerable Korean immigrant population was inextricably linked to China’s sovereignty. Zhao’s observation reveals that in the early 1910s, Chinese officials—at least those in Manchuria—perceived Sino-Korean relations purely on the state-to-state level. However, before Beijing could respond to Zhao’s proposal, the nationalist revolution broke out in Wuhan in October 1911, quickly leading to the collapse of the dynasty.
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CONCLUSIONOn February 12, 1912, the Manchu court issued an edict of abdication that announced the end of the Great Qing and acknowledged the Qing’s loss of the Man-date of Heaven. The Qing declared that it was handing over China’s “sovereignty” to “the entire people.” The imperial court and a group of Han Chinese andManchu ministers who had drafted the edict stressed that the post-Qing political system should guarantee that “the complete integrity of the territories of the fiveraces,Chinese,Manchus,Mongols,Muhammadans,andTibetans”bemaintainedfor“agreatstateunderthetitle‘theRepublicofChina.’”¹Accordingtotheirblueprint,thenewChinawouldintegrateintoitsterritorytheoutersubordinates,orouterfan,thathadbeenadministeredbytheMongolianSuperintendency,butitwouldnotencompassthoseouterfanwhosecontactswithChinahadbeenunderthejurisdictionoftheMinistryofRites.Mostofthelatterwerealreadyunderforeign colonial rule. From then on, China, or Zhongguo, was principally defined by its state sovereignty and territorial borders, the connotations of the Chineseempire having shrunk sharply.Yuan Shikai, the prime minister of the Imperial Cabinet of the Qing since November 1911 and the leader of the New Army in North China, was entrusted by theimperial court with organizing a provisional Republican government. Having started his political career in Chosŏn, Yuan was now the most powerful man inChina and would soon become the first president of the republic. But Yuan’s new China showed little concern for Korea’s fate. In 1912 Japan entered the Taishōperiod and China underwent its transformation into a republic, but Korea remained under the yoke of Japanese colonialism. Having witnessed the dramaticchanges in East Asia and the rapid proliferation of ideas of national independence across the world, the Chinese in the 1910s held mixed views of colonial Korea.AlthoughsomeChinesevisitorssawKoreaasapositivemodelofmodernization,²agreaternumberregardedthecountryasanegativeexampleofcolonialismand a vivid warning to China about the perils of falling under colonial rule. An anonymous Chinese visitor en route to Japan in 1918, for instance, commented thatit was the blood of the Korean people that nourished the remarkable achievements in Korea. The visitor predicted that within a few decades the whole country ofKoreaandtheethnicKoreanpeoplewouldbecomeextinct.³Byunderscoringthedangersofcolonialism,hesoughttomobilizehiscountrymentosaveChinafrom being subjugated by foreign powers such as Japan.Passionate and patriotic Chinese nationalists such as the anonymous traveler may have been more or less relieved when the May Fourth Movement erupted inBeijing in 1919, the same year in which the March First Independence Movement swept Hansŏng in colonial Korea. Each of the two movements opened a newchapter in the modern history of its respective country. More importantly, the Korean nationalists who survived the Japanese suppression of the movement es-caped to China and established a government in exile in Shanghai, calling it the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea. Not only did China thus be-come a safe harbor for the overseas Korean nationalist movement, but the Sino-Korean relationship was transformed yet again in the twentieth century. The pre-1895 inner dual network between the two countries was resuscitated in 1919, this time linking the Korean Nationalist Party with the Chinese Nationalist Party, onthe one hand, and the Korean state—which for now existed only in imagined form because of Japanese colonialism—with the Chinese state, on the other. In-formed by the age-old politico-cultural homogenization, this dual network remained the basic political arrangement between the two sides in mainland Chinathroughout the Republican era, from 1912 to 1949, as well as after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.By the end of the 1950s, the People’s Republic of China had recovered the majority of the Qing’s territory and begun to govern its vast expanse through a newkind of regime and a new set of political, cultural, and social norms imported from the West. By mining historical sources from late imperial and modern Chinafor precedents, the new state sought to integrate into its territory certain areas that had been governed by the Qing with various degrees of control, ranging fromManchuria to Mongolia, from eastern Turkestan to the Himalayas, and from the southwestern mountainous areas to Taiwan and the small islands of the South
China Sea. The policy of absorbing these areas into Chinese territory completely removed any ambiguity that might otherwise have been caused by patriarchalrelationships or kinship ties between central political actors and their local agents or subordinates—connections reminiscent of those that had characterized theZongfan era. For instance, Tibet, where the Qing court had maintained an imperial resident since 1727, was incorporated into the People’s Republic in the 1950sdespitethefactthatithadenjoyedindependencesince1913.⁴Inthissense,thePeople’sRepublicsucceededinredrawingChina’sbordersandrealizingthethwarted ambitions of the Republic of China during the latter’s continental period from 1912 to 1949. It was also during this frenzied time before the triumph ofthe Communist revolution that China ultimately failed to reclaim Outer Mongolia, although in 1916 the Republican government under Yuan Shikai successfully re-storedtheZongfanrelationshipwithOuterMongoliabyrevivingtheconventionofimperialinvestiturefromtheQing.⁵The Chinese state narrative since 1949 has oversimplified late imperial history, treating the Qing as a single dynasty in Chinese history rather than as the nodeof a Qing-centric cosmopolitan world. However, the historical record of events on Qing China’s frontiers, especially events with implications concerning theautonomous positions of certain political units, has challenged the official Chinese narrative by revealing the existence and operation of a cross-border ChineseempireundertheQing.⁶OutsideChina,almostallofQingChina’sformersubordinatecountriesunderthemanagementoftheMinistryofRitesseparatedthem-selves from China’s orbit in the post–World War II movement for national independence and decolonization. Since then, these countries have played only a minorrole in Chinese nationalist histories of China, including Qing China, even though they were regarded in late imperial times as part of the Chinese empire. In thissense, what the authoritarian regime of the People’s Republic of China has encountered on its borders since 1949 is a series of post-Qing problems unleashed byChina’slateimperialtransformations.⁷Korea is a typical case. This book has demonstrated that Korea formed part of the Chinese empire in the politico-cultural sense in the late imperial period, theirconnection weakening precipitously after 1895 and finally giving way to Japanese domination. But the Chinese perception of Korea’s position within the Chineseworld crossed the 1911 divide. From the time of the March First Independence Movement in 1919, the nationalist government of China was enthusiastic in its sup-port of Korea, in part because of Chinese nostalgia for the familistic Sino-Korean relationship. Many Chinese regarded Korea as a lost land of China. In 1929, forexample, the Administration for Industry and Commerce of Hebei Province published a “Map of the National Humiliation of the Central Civilized Country” (Ch.,Zhonghua guochi ditu). The map shows the territory of the Republic of China, including Outer Mongolia and Tibet, which at the time presented themselves asindependent countries, as well as the lands that China lost between the Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689 and Japan’s Twenty-One Demands of 1915. Among the lostlandswereChina’spreviousfanandsubordinatecountries(Ch.,fanshu)Korea,Ryukyu,Annam,Siam,Myanmar,Bhutan,andNepal.Alloftheseterritoriesto-getherconstituted“thecentralcivilizedcountry”(Ch.,Zhonghua),reflectingthereachofthepolitico-culturalChineseempireintheQingperiod.CitingSunYat-sen’s 1924 comment that China was a “second-level colony,” a status that was even worse than that of a “semi-colony,” the map’s authors rallied the Chinese toerasethenationalhumiliationofChina’slossoftheseterritoriesandtofightforChina’sfuture.⁸In March 1930 the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Guomindang, issued a proclamation supporting the Korean independence movement against Japan. The na-tionalists claimed thatKorea used to be China’s vassal and dependent country, and according to historical records the Koreans are descendants of the Shang and Zhou Dynas-ties and a branch of our Chinese people. Their political and cultural production primarily follows the ways of the Han and Tang Dynasties, so they are obvi-ously a school of our Chinese culture, and they practice our Chinese rituals of worship. Thus, they should ally with us to survive and become prosperoustogether. In this way, they can make their ancestors proud and present their unusual achievements as part of the everlasting lineage of the Yan and Huang
emperors[Ch.,YanHuangzisun].⁹The Chinese Communist Party shared the Nationalist Party’s perception of Korea. In April 1937, three months before the Marco Polo Bridge Incident betweenJapan and China in Beijing, Mao Zedong (1893–1976) composed an address on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party at Yan’an for the sacrificial ceremony fortheHuangemperor,thelegendary“ancestoroftheChinesepeoples”(Ch.,Zhonghuaminzushizu).MaorecalledthatQingChina“lostRyukyuandTaiwan,andKoreawasruined”(Ch.,LiuTaibushou,Sanhanweixu),andhemournedthedemiseoftheChineseempire’sglory,whichhadhistoricallyunder-girdedtheSino-Koreanrelationship.¹⁰Thirteenyearslater,MaosenthistroopstoNorthKoreato,ashesawit,rescueacountrythathadbecomepartofthenewlyconstructedandtransnationalCommunistworld.¹¹In the 1960s, when the Great Cultural Revolution swept China and triggered various conflicts between China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea in the globalColdWar,NorthKorealaunchedamovementtoconsolidateKimIl-sung(1912–1994)’sChuch’eideology(K.,Chuch’esasang,“thoughtofautonomy”),aspartofwhichtheregimesharplycriticizedKorea’sSadaeism(K.,Sadaejuŭi,“the-ismofservingthegreat”)andChina’sTaegukism(K.,Taegukjuŭi,“the-ismofservingasthegreat”)inhistory.¹²China’sbookofall-under-Heavenwasfinallyandbitterlyclosedonthepeninsula.ThismomentalsomarkedtheendofChina’sprospects of again treating Korea as an outlying province or even incorporating it into China as a province. In the same period, the Chinese state abandoned thehope of retrieving Outer Mongolia, yet it had fully integrated Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet into Chinese territory and laid claim to Taiwan.Here, at the very end of this book, let us go back to Ch’oe Hyo-il, the Korean warrior who, as described in the introduction, sacrificed himself in front of Em-peror Chongzhen’s tomb in 1644. Ch’oe died for the Chinese empire, but his martyrdom has not been celebrated in either Chinese or Korean historical narrativessince at least 1895. In the remade East Asia of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, both China and Korea have chosen to forget, purposely and perhaps perma-nently, that Chosŏn was long enfolded within the Chinese empire.
CONCLUSION
On February 12, 1912, the Manchu court issued an edict of abdication that announced the end of the Great Qing and acknowledged the Qing’s loss of the Mandate of Heaven. The Qing declared that it was handing over China’s sovereignty to the entire people. The imperial court and a group of Han Chinese and Manchu ministers who had drafted the edict stressed that the post-Qing political system should guarantee that the complete integrity of the territories of the five races, Chinese, Manchus, Mongols, Muhammadans, and Tibetans be maintained for a great state under the title ‘the Republic of China.’¹ According to their blueprint, the new China would integrate into its territory the outer subordinates, or outer fan, that had been administered by the Mongolian Superintendency, but it would not encompass those outer fan whose contacts with China had been under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Rites. Most of the latter were already under foreign colonial rule. From then on, China, or Zhongguo, was principally defined by its state sovereignty and territorial borders, the connotations of the Chinese empire having shrunk sharply.
Yuan Shikai, the prime minister of the Imperial Cabinet of the Qing since November 1911 and the leader of the New Army in North China, was entrusted by the imperial court with organizing a provisional Republican government. Having started his political career in Chosŏn, Yuan was now the most powerful man in China and would soon become the first president of the republic. But Yuan’s new China showed little concern for Korea’s fate. In 1912 Japan entered the Taishō period and China underwent its transformation into a republic, but Korea remained under the yoke of Japanese colonialism. Having witnessed the dramatic changes in East Asia and the rapid proliferation of ideas of national independence across the world, the Chinese in the 1910s held mixed views of colonial Korea. Although some Chinese visitors saw Korea as a positive model of modernization,² a greater number regarded the country as a negative example of colonialism and a vivid warning to China about the perils of falling under colonial rule. An anonymous Chinese visitor en route to Japan in 1918, for instance, commented that it was the blood of the Korean people that nourished the remarkable achievements in Korea. The visitor predicted that within a few decades the whole country of Korea and the ethnic Korean people would become extinct.³ By underscoring the dangers of colonialism, he sought to mobilize his countrymen to save China from being subjugated by foreign powers such as Japan.
Passionate and patriotic Chinese nationalists such as the anonymous traveler may have been more or less relieved when the May Fourth Movement erupted in Beijing in 1919, the same year in which the March First Independence Movement swept Hansŏng in colonial Korea. Each of the two movements opened a new chapter in the modern history of its respective country. More importantly, the Korean nationalists who survived the Japanese suppression of the movement escaped to China and established a government in exile in Shanghai, calling it the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea. Not only did China thus become a safe harbor for the overseas Korean nationalist movement, but the Sino-Korean relationship was transformed yet again in the twentieth century. The pre-1895 inner dual network between the two countries was resuscitated in 1919, this time linking the Korean Nationalist Party with the Chinese Nationalist Party, on the one hand, and the Korean state—which for now existed only in imagined form because of Japanese colonialism—with the Chinese state, on the other. Informed by the age-old politico-cultural homogenization, this dual network remained the basic political arrangement between the two sides in mainland China throughout the Republican era, from 1912 to 1949, as well as after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
By the end of the 1950s, the People’s Republic of China had recovered the majority of the Qing’s territory and begun to govern its vast expanse through a new kind of regime and a new set of political, cultural, and social norms imported from the West. By mining historical sources from late imperial and modern China for precedents, the new state sought to integrate into its territory certain areas that had been governed by the Qing with various degrees of control, ranging from Manchuria to Mongolia, from eastern Turkestan to the Himalayas, and from the southwestern mountainous areas to Taiwan and the small islands of the South
China Sea. The policy of absorbing these areas into Chinese territory completely removed any ambiguity that might otherwise have been caused by patriarchal relationships or kinship ties between central political actors and their local agents or subordinates—connections reminiscent of those that had characterized the Zongfan era. For instance, Tibet, where the Qing court had maintained an imperial resident since 1727, was incorporated into the People’s Republic in the 1950s despite the fact that it had enjoyed independence since 1913.⁴ In this sense, the People’s Republic succeeded in redrawing China’s borders and realizing the thwarted ambitions of the Republic of China during the latter’s continental period from 1912 to 1949. It was also during this frenzied time before the triumph of the Communist revolution that China ultimately failed to reclaim Outer Mongolia, although in 1916 the Republican government under Yuan Shikai successfully restored the Zongfan relationship with Outer Mongolia by reviving the convention of imperial investiture from the Qing.⁵
The Chinese state narrative since 1949 has oversimplified late imperial history, treating the Qing as a single dynasty in Chinese history rather than as the node of a Qing-centric cosmopolitan world. However, the historical record of events on Qing China’s frontiers, especially events with implications concerning the autonomous positions of certain political units, has challenged the official Chinese narrative by revealing the existence and operation of a cross-border Chinese empire under the Qing.⁶ Outside China, almost all of Qing China’s former subordinate countries under the management of the Ministry of Rites separated themselves from China’s orbit in the post–World War II movement for national independence and decolonization. Since then, these countries have played only a minor role in Chinese nationalist histories of China, including Qing China, even though they were regarded in late imperial times as part of the Chinese empire. In this sense, what the authoritarian regime of the People’s Republic of China has encountered on its borders since 1949 is a series of post-Qing problems unleashed by China’s late imperial transformations.⁷
Korea is a typical case. This book has demonstrated that Korea formed part of the Chinese empire in the politico-cultural sense in the late imperial period, their connection weakening precipitously after 1895 and finally giving way to Japanese domination. But the Chinese perception of Korea’s position within the Chinese world crossed the 1911 divide. From the time of the March First Independence Movement in 1919, the nationalist government of China was enthusiastic in its support of Korea, in part because of Chinese nostalgia for the familistic Sino-Korean relationship. Many Chinese regarded Korea as a lost land of China. In 1929, for example, the Administration for Industry and Commerce of Hebei Province published a Map of the National Humiliation of the Central Civilized Country (Ch., Zhonghua guochi ditu). The map shows the territory of the Republic of China, including Outer Mongolia and Tibet, which at the time presented themselves as independent countries, as well as the lands that China lost between the Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689 and Japan’s Twenty-One Demands of 1915. Among the lost lands were China’s previous fan and subordinate countries (Ch., fanshu) Korea, Ryukyu, Annam, Siam, Myanmar, Bhutan, and Nepal. All of these territories together constituted the central civilized country (Ch., Zhonghua), reflecting the reach of the politico-cultural Chinese empire in the Qing period. Citing Sun Yat-sen’s 1924 comment that China was a second-level colony, a status that was even worse than that of a semi-colony, the map’s authors rallied the Chinese to erase the national humiliation of China’s loss of these territories and to fight for China’s future.⁸
In March 1930 the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Guomindang, issued a proclamation supporting the Korean independence movement against Japan. The nationalists claimed that
Korea used to be China’s vassal and dependent country, and according to historical records the Koreans are descendants of the Shang and Zhou Dynasties and a branch of our Chinese people. Their political and cultural production primarily follows the ways of the Han and Tang Dynasties, so they are obviously a school of our Chinese culture, and they practice our Chinese rituals of worship. Thus, they should ally with us to survive and become prosperous together. In this way, they can make their ancestors proud and present their unusual achievements as part of the everlasting lineage of the Yan and Huang
The Chinese Communist Party shared the Nationalist Party’s perception of Korea. In April 1937, three months before the Marco Polo Bridge Incident between Japan and China in Beijing, Mao Zedong (1893–1976) composed an address on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party at Yan’an for the sacrificial ceremony for the Huang emperor, the legendary ancestor of the Chinese peoples (Ch., Zhonghua minzu shizu). Mao recalled that Qing China lost Ryukyu and Taiwan, and Korea was ruined (Ch., Liu Tai bushou, Sanhan wei xu), and he mourned the demise of the Chinese empire’s glory, which had historically under-girded the Sino-Korean relationship.¹⁰ Thirteen years later, Mao sent his troops to North Korea to, as he saw it, rescue a country that had become part of the newly constructed and transnational Communist world.¹¹
In the 1960s, when the Great Cultural Revolution swept China and triggered various conflicts between China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea in the global Cold War, North Korea launched a movement to consolidate Kim Il-sung (1912– 1994)’s Chuch’e ideology (K., Chuch’e sasang, thought of autonomy), as part of which the regime sharply criticized Korea’s Sadaeism (K., Sadae juŭi, the -ism of serving the great) and China’s Taegukism (K., Taeguk juŭi, the -ism of serving as the great) in history.¹² China’s book of all-under-Heaven was finally and bitterly closed on the peninsula. This moment also marked the end of China’s prospects of again treating Korea as an outlying province or even incorporating it into China as a province. In the same period, the Chinese state abandoned the hope of retrieving Outer Mongolia, yet it had fully integrated Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet into Chinese territory and laid claim to Taiwan.
Here, at the very end of this book, let us go back to Ch’oe Hyo-il, the Korean warrior who, as described in the introduction, sacrificed himself in front of Emperor Chongzhen’s tomb in 1644. Ch’oe died for the Chinese empire, but his martyrdom has not been celebrated in either Chinese or Korean historical narratives since at least 1895. In the remade East Asia of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, both China and Korea have chosen to forget, purposely and perhaps permanently, that Chosŏn was long enfolded within the Chinese empire.
==
CONCLUSION
On February 12, 1912, the Manchu court issued an edict of abdication that announced the end of the Great Qing and acknowledged the Qing’s loss of the Man-
date of Heaven. The Qing declared that it was handing over China’s “sovereignty” to “the entire people.” The imperial court and a group of Han Chinese and
Manchu ministers who had drafted the edict stressed that the post-Qing political system should guarantee that “the complete integrity of the territories of the five
races, Chinese, Manchus, Mongols, Muhammadans, and Tibetans” be maintained for “a great state under the title ‘the Republic of China.’”¹ According to their
blueprint, the new China would integrate into its territory the outer subordinates, or outer fan, that had been administered by the Mongolian Superintendency, but
it would not encompass those outer fan whose contacts with China had been under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Rites. Most of the latter were already under
foreign colonial rule. From then on, China, or Zhongguo, was principally defined by its state sovereignty and territorial borders, the connotations of the Chinese
empire having shrunk sharply.
Yuan Shikai, the prime minister of the Imperial Cabinet of the Qing since November 1911 and the leader of the New Army in North China, was entrusted by the
imperial court with organizing a provisional Republican government. Having started his political career in Chosŏn, Yuan was now the most powerful man in
China and would soon become the first president of the republic. But Yuan’s new China showed little concern for Korea’s fate. In 1912 Japan entered the Taishō
period and China underwent its transformation into a republic, but Korea remained under the yoke of Japanese colonialism. Having witnessed the dramatic
changes in East Asia and the rapid proliferation of ideas of national independence across the world, the Chinese in the 1910s held mixed views of colonial Korea.
Although some Chinese visitors saw Korea as a positive model of modernization,² a greater number regarded the country as a negative example of colonialism
and a vivid warning to China about the perils of falling under colonial rule. An anonymous Chinese visitor en route to Japan in 1918, for instance, commented that
it was the blood of the Korean people that nourished the remarkable achievements in Korea. The visitor predicted that within a few decades the whole country of
Korea and the ethnic Korean people would become extinct.³ By underscoring the dangers of colonialism, he sought to mobilize his countrymen to save China
from being subjugated by foreign powers such as Japan.
Passionate and patriotic Chinese nationalists such as the anonymous traveler may have been more or less relieved when the May Fourth Movement erupted in
Beijing in 1919, the same year in which the March First Independence Movement swept Hansŏng in colonial Korea. Each of the two movements opened a new
chapter in the modern history of its respective country. More importantly, the Korean nationalists who survived the Japanese suppression of the movement es-
caped to China and established a government in exile in Shanghai, calling it the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea. Not only did China thus be-
come a safe harbor for the overseas Korean nationalist movement, but the Sino-Korean relationship was transformed yet again in the twentieth century. The pre-
1895 inner dual network between the two countries was resuscitated in 1919, this time linking the Korean Nationalist Party with the Chinese Nationalist Party, on
the one hand, and the Korean state—which for now existed only in imagined form because of Japanese colonialism—with the Chinese state, on the other. In-
formed by the age-old politico-cultural homogenization, this dual network remained the basic political arrangement between the two sides in mainland China
throughout the Republican era, from 1912 to 1949, as well as after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
By the end of the 1950s, the People’s Republic of China had recovered the majority of the Qing’s territory and begun to govern its vast expanse through a new
kind of regime and a new set of political, cultural, and social norms imported from the West. By mining historical sources from late imperial and modern China
for precedents, the new state sought to integrate into its territory certain areas that had been governed by the Qing with various degrees of control, ranging from
Manchuria to Mongolia, from eastern Turkestan to the Himalayas, and from the southwestern mountainous areas to Taiwan and the small islands of the South
China Sea. The policy of absorbing these areas into Chinese territory completely removed any ambiguity that might otherwise have been caused by patriarchal
relationships or kinship ties between central political actors and their local agents or subordinates—connections reminiscent of those that had characterized the
Zongfan era. For instance, Tibet, where the Qing court had maintained an imperial resident since 1727, was incorporated into the People’s Republic in the 1950s
despite the fact that it had enjoyed independence since 1913.⁴ In this sense, the People’s Republic succeeded in redrawing China’s borders and realizing the
thwarted ambitions of the Republic of China during the latter’s continental period from 1912 to 1949. It was also during this frenzied time before the triumph of
the Communist revolution that China ultimately failed to reclaim Outer Mongolia, although in 1916 the Republican government under Yuan Shikai successfully re-
stored the Zongfan relationship with Outer Mongolia by reviving the convention of imperial investiture from the Qing.⁵
The Chinese state narrative since 1949 has oversimplified late imperial history, treating the Qing as a single dynasty in Chinese history rather than as the node
of a Qing-centric cosmopolitan world. However, the historical record of events on Qing China’s frontiers, especially events with implications concerning the
autonomous positions of certain political units, has challenged the official Chinese narrative by revealing the existence and operation of a cross-border Chinese
empire under the Qing.⁶ Outside China, almost all of Qing China’s former subordinate countries under the management of the Ministry of Rites separated them-
selves from China’s orbit in the post–World War II movement for national independence and decolonization. Since then, these countries have played only a minor
role in Chinese nationalist histories of China, including Qing China, even though they were regarded in late imperial times as part of the Chinese empire. In this
sense, what the authoritarian regime of the People’s Republic of China has encountered on its borders since 1949 is a series of post-Qing problems unleashed by
China’s late imperial transformations.⁷
Korea is a typical case. This book has demonstrated that Korea formed part of the Chinese empire in the politico-cultural sense in the late imperial period, their
connection weakening precipitously after 1895 and finally giving way to Japanese domination. But the Chinese perception of Korea’s position within the Chinese
world crossed the 1911 divide. From the time of the March First Independence Movement in 1919, the nationalist government of China was enthusiastic in its sup-
port of Korea, in part because of Chinese nostalgia for the familistic Sino-Korean relationship. Many Chinese regarded Korea as a lost land of China. In 1929, for
example, the Administration for Industry and Commerce of Hebei Province published a “Map of the National Humiliation of the Central Civilized Country” (Ch.,
Zhonghua guochi ditu). The map shows the territory of the Republic of China, including Outer Mongolia and Tibet, which at the time presented themselves as
independent countries, as well as the lands that China lost between the Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689 and Japan’s Twenty-One Demands of 1915. Among the lost
lands were China’s previous fan and subordinate countries (Ch., fanshu) Korea, Ryukyu, Annam, Siam, Myanmar, Bhutan, and Nepal. All of these territories to-
gether constituted “the central civilized country” (Ch., Zhonghua), reflecting the reach of the politico-cultural Chinese empire in the Qing period. Citing Sun Yat-
sen’s 1924 comment that China was a “second-level colony,” a status that was even worse than that of a “semi-colony,” the map’s authors rallied the Chinese to
erase the national humiliation of China’s loss of these territories and to fight for China’s future.⁸
In March 1930 the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Guomindang, issued a proclamation supporting the Korean independence movement against Japan. The na-
tionalists claimed that
Korea used to be China’s vassal and dependent country, and according to historical records the Koreans are descendants of the Shang and Zhou Dynas-
ties and a branch of our Chinese people. Their political and cultural production primarily follows the ways of the Han and Tang Dynasties, so they are obvi-
ously a school of our Chinese culture, and they practice our Chinese rituals of worship. Thus, they should ally with us to survive and become prosperous
together. In this way, they can make their ancestors proud and present their unusual achievements as part of the everlasting lineage of the Yan and Huang
emperors [Ch., Yan Huang zisun].⁹
The Chinese Communist Party shared the Nationalist Party’s perception of Korea. In April 1937, three months before the Marco Polo Bridge Incident between
Japan and China in Beijing, Mao Zedong (1893–1976) composed an address on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party at Yan’an for the sacrificial ceremony for
the Huang emperor, the legendary “ancestor of the Chinese peoples” (Ch., Zhonghua minzu shizu). Mao recalled that Qing China “lost Ryukyu and Taiwan, and
Korea was ruined” (Ch., Liu Tai bushou, Sanhan wei xu), and he mourned the demise of the Chinese empire’s glory, which had historically under-girded the Sino-
Korean relationship.¹⁰ Thirteen years later, Mao sent his troops to North Korea to, as he saw it, rescue a country that had become part of the newly constructed
and transnational Communist world.¹¹
In the 1960s, when the Great Cultural Revolution swept China and triggered various conflicts between China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea in the global
Cold War, North Korea launched a movement to consolidate Kim Il-sung (1912– 1994)’s Chuch’e ideology (K., Chuch’e sasang, “thought of autonomy”), as part of
which the regime sharply criticized Korea’s Sadaeism (K., Sadae juŭi, “the -ism of serving the great”) and China’s Taegukism (K., Taeguk juŭi, “the -ism of serving
as the great”) in history.¹² China’s book of all-under-Heaven was finally and bitterly closed on the peninsula. This moment also marked the end of China’s
prospects of again treating Korea as an outlying province or even incorporating it into China as a province. In the same period, the Chinese state abandoned the
hope of retrieving Outer Mongolia, yet it had fully integrated Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet into Chinese territory and laid claim to Taiwan.
Here, at the very end of this book, let us go back to Ch’oe Hyo-il, the Korean warrior who, as described in the introduction, sacrificed himself in front of Em-
peror Chongzhen’s tomb in 1644. Ch’oe died for the Chinese empire, but his martyrdom has not been celebrated in either Chinese or Korean historical narratives
since at least 1895. In the remade East Asia of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, both China and Korea have chosen to forget, purposely and perhaps perma-
nently, that Chosŏn was long enfolded within the Chinese empire.
CONCLUSION
On February 12, 1912, the Manchu court issued an edict of abdication that announced the end of the Great Qing and acknowledged the Qing’s loss of the Mandate of Heaven. The Qing declared that it was handing over China’s sovereignty to the entire people. The imperial court and a group of Han Chinese and Manchu ministers who had drafted the edict stressed that the post-Qing political system should guarantee that the complete integrity of the territories of the five races, Chinese, Manchus, Mongols, Muhammadans, and Tibetans be maintained for a great state under the title ‘the Republic of China.’¹ According to their blueprint, the new China would integrate into its territory the outer subordinates, or outer fan, that had been administered by the Mongolian Superintendency, but it would not encompass those outer fan whose contacts with China had been under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Rites. Most of the latter were already under foreign colonial rule. From then on, China, or Zhongguo, was principally defined by its state sovereignty and territorial borders, the connotations of the Chinese empire having shrunk sharply.
Yuan Shikai, the prime minister of the Imperial Cabinet of the Qing since November 1911 and the leader of the New Army in North China, was entrusted by the imperial court with organizing a provisional Republican government. Having started his political career in Chosŏn, Yuan was now the most powerful man in China and would soon become the first president of the republic. But Yuan’s new China showed little concern for Korea’s fate. In 1912 Japan entered the Taishō period and China underwent its transformation into a republic, but Korea remained under the yoke of Japanese colonialism. Having witnessed the dramatic changes in East Asia and the rapid proliferation of ideas of national independence across the world, the Chinese in the 1910s held mixed views of colonial Korea. Although some Chinese visitors saw Korea as a positive model of modernization,² a greater number regarded the country as a negative example of colonialism and a vivid warning to China about the perils of falling under colonial rule. An anonymous Chinese visitor en route to Japan in 1918, for instance, commented that it was the blood of the Korean people that nourished the remarkable achievements in Korea. The visitor predicted that within a few decades the whole country of Korea and the ethnic Korean people would become extinct.³ By underscoring the dangers of colonialism, he sought to mobilize his countrymen to save China from being subjugated by foreign powers such as Japan.
Passionate and patriotic Chinese nationalists such as the anonymous traveler may have been more or less relieved when the May Fourth Movement erupted in Beijing in 1919, the same year in which the March First Independence Movement swept Hansŏng in colonial Korea. Each of the two movements opened a new chapter in the modern history of its respective country. More importantly, the Korean nationalists who survived the Japanese suppression of the movement escaped to China and established a government in exile in Shanghai, calling it the Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea. Not only did China thus become a safe harbor for the overseas Korean nationalist movement, but the Sino-Korean relationship was transformed yet again in the twentieth century. The pre-1895 inner dual network between the two countries was resuscitated in 1919, this time linking the Korean Nationalist Party with the Chinese Nationalist Party, on the one hand, and the Korean state—which for now existed only in imagined form because of Japanese colonialism—with the Chinese state, on the other. Informed by the age-old politico-cultural homogenization, this dual network remained the basic political arrangement between the two sides in mainland China throughout the Republican era, from 1912 to 1949, as well as after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
By the end of the 1950s, the People’s Republic of China had recovered the majority of the Qing’s territory and begun to govern its vast expanse through a new kind of regime and a new set of political, cultural, and social norms imported from the West. By mining historical sources from late imperial and modern China for precedents, the new state sought to integrate into its territory certain areas that had been governed by the Qing with various degrees of control, ranging from Manchuria to Mongolia, from eastern Turkestan to the Himalayas, and from the southwestern mountainous areas to Taiwan and the small islands of the South
China Sea. The policy of absorbing these areas into Chinese territory completely removed any ambiguity that might otherwise have been caused by patriarchal relationships or kinship ties between central political actors and their local agents or subordinates—connections reminiscent of those that had characterized the Zongfan era. For instance, Tibet, where the Qing court had maintained an imperial resident since 1727, was incorporated into the People’s Republic in the 1950s despite the fact that it had enjoyed independence since 1913.⁴ In this sense, the People’s Republic succeeded in redrawing China’s borders and realizing the thwarted ambitions of the Republic of China during the latter’s continental period from 1912 to 1949. It was also during this frenzied time before the triumph of the Communist revolution that China ultimately failed to reclaim Outer Mongolia, although in 1916 the Republican government under Yuan Shikai successfully restored the Zongfan relationship with Outer Mongolia by reviving the convention of imperial investiture from the Qing.⁵
The Chinese state narrative since 1949 has oversimplified late imperial history, treating the Qing as a single dynasty in Chinese history rather than as the node of a Qing-centric cosmopolitan world. However, the historical record of events on Qing China’s frontiers, especially events with implications concerning the autonomous positions of certain political units, has challenged the official Chinese narrative by revealing the existence and operation of a cross-border Chinese empire under the Qing.⁶ Outside China, almost all of Qing China’s former subordinate countries under the management of the Ministry of Rites separated themselves from China’s orbit in the post–World War II movement for national independence and decolonization. Since then, these countries have played only a minor role in Chinese nationalist histories of China, including Qing China, even though they were regarded in late imperial times as part of the Chinese empire. In this sense, what the authoritarian regime of the People’s Republic of China has encountered on its borders since 1949 is a series of post-Qing problems unleashed by China’s late imperial transformations.⁷
Korea is a typical case. This book has demonstrated that Korea formed part of the Chinese empire in the politico-cultural sense in the late imperial period, their connection weakening precipitously after 1895 and finally giving way to Japanese domination. But the Chinese perception of Korea’s position within the Chinese world crossed the 1911 divide. From the time of the March First Independence Movement in 1919, the nationalist government of China was enthusiastic in its support of Korea, in part because of Chinese nostalgia for the familistic Sino-Korean relationship. Many Chinese regarded Korea as a lost land of China. In 1929, for example, the Administration for Industry and Commerce of Hebei Province published a Map of the National Humiliation of the Central Civilized Country (Ch., Zhonghua guochi ditu). The map shows the territory of the Republic of China, including Outer Mongolia and Tibet, which at the time presented themselves as independent countries, as well as the lands that China lost between the Treaty of Nerchinsk of 1689 and Japan’s Twenty-One Demands of 1915. Among the lost lands were China’s previous fan and subordinate countries (Ch., fanshu) Korea, Ryukyu, Annam, Siam, Myanmar, Bhutan, and Nepal. All of these territories together constituted the central civilized country (Ch., Zhonghua), reflecting the reach of the politico-cultural Chinese empire in the Qing period. Citing Sun Yat-sen’s 1924 comment that China was a second-level colony, a status that was even worse than that of a semi-colony, the map’s authors rallied the Chinese to erase the national humiliation of China’s loss of these territories and to fight for China’s future.⁸
In March 1930 the Chinese Nationalist Party, the Guomindang, issued a proclamation supporting the Korean independence movement against Japan. The nationalists claimed that
Korea used to be China’s vassal and dependent country, and according to historical records the Koreans are descendants of the Shang and Zhou Dynasties and a branch of our Chinese people. Their political and cultural production primarily follows the ways of the Han and Tang Dynasties, so they are obviously a school of our Chinese culture, and they practice our Chinese rituals of worship. Thus, they should ally with us to survive and become prosperous together. In this way, they can make their ancestors proud and present their unusual achievements as part of the everlasting lineage of the Yan and Huang
emperors [Ch., Yan Huang zisun].⁹
The Chinese Communist Party shared the Nationalist Party’s perception of Korea. In April 1937, three months before the Marco Polo Bridge Incident between Japan and China in Beijing, Mao Zedong (1893–1976) composed an address on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party at Yan’an for the sacrificial ceremony for the Huang emperor, the legendary ancestor of the Chinese peoples (Ch., Zhonghua minzu shizu). Mao recalled that Qing China lost Ryukyu and Taiwan, and Korea was ruined (Ch., Liu Tai bushou, Sanhan wei xu), and he mourned the demise of the Chinese empire’s glory, which had historically under-girded the Sino-Korean relationship.¹⁰ Thirteen years later, Mao sent his troops to North Korea to, as he saw it, rescue a country that had become part of the newly constructed and transnational Communist world.¹¹
In the 1960s, when the Great Cultural Revolution swept China and triggered various conflicts between China, the Soviet Union, and North Korea in the global Cold War, North Korea launched a movement to consolidate Kim Il-sung (1912– 1994)’s Chuch’e ideology (K., Chuch’e sasang, thought of autonomy), as part of which the regime sharply criticized Korea’s Sadaeism (K., Sadae juŭi, the -ism of serving the great) and China’s Taegukism (K., Taeguk juŭi, the -ism of serving as the great) in history.¹² China’s book of all-under-Heaven was finally and bitterly closed on the peninsula. This moment also marked the end of China’s prospects of again treating Korea as an outlying province or even incorporating it into China as a province. In the same period, the Chinese state abandoned the hope of retrieving Outer Mongolia, yet it had fully integrated Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet into Chinese territory and laid claim to Taiwan.
Here, at the very end of this book, let us go back to Ch’oe Hyo-il, the Korean warrior who, as described in the introduction, sacrificed himself in front of Emperor Chongzhen’s tomb in 1644. Ch’oe died for the Chinese empire, but his martyrdom has not been celebrated in either Chinese or Korean historical narratives since at least 1895. In the remade East Asia of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, both China and Korea have chosen to forget, purposely and perhaps permanently, that Chosŏn was long enfolded within the Chinese empire.
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Notes The following abbreviations are used in the notes: ADPP American Diplomatic and Public Papers FO 17 Foreign Office Record Group 17, China Correspondence FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States GXZP Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, Guangxu chao zhupi zouzhe HKMS Ku Han’guk oegyo munsŏ JACAR Japan Center for Asian Historical Records JJCZ Qingdai gongzhongdang zouzhe ji Junjichu dang zhejian KARD Korean - American Relations: Documents Pertaining to the Far Eastern Diplomacy of the United States LBZL Libu zeli LFZZ Junjichu hanwen lufu zouzhe LHZQJ Gu and Dai, Li Hongzhang quanji LKSS Neige Like shishu MBRT Manbun rōtō MWLD Manwen laodang NHGB Nihon Gaimushō, Nihon gaikō bunsho QSCJ Qinshi fengming qianlai ciji Chaoxian guowang mufei juan QSL Qing shilu RCGK Renchuan gangkou juan TMHG Tongmun hwigo WJSL Chosŏn wangjo sillok WJZA Neige waijiao zhuan’an, Chaoxian WLGS Chang and Yeh, Qing ruguan qian yu Chaoxian wanglai guoshu huibian, 1619–1643 ZCSLHB Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, Qingdai Zhong-Chao guanxi dang’an shiliao huibian ZCSLXB Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, Qingdai Zhong-Chao guanxi dang’an shiliao xubian ZRHGX Qingji Zhong-Ri-Han guanxi shiliao
ZRJSSL Qing Guangxu chao Zhong-Ri jiaoshe shiliao ZRZZ Qi, Zhong-Ri zhanzheng INTRODUCTION 1. Sohyŏn Simyang ilgi, 354. Please see the bibliography for translations of non-English titles. 2. Ŭpchi P’yŏngan do p’yŏn, 531–32; Chosŏn wangjo sillok (hereafter cited as WJSL) (Sukchong), 40:552. 3. There is no scholarly consensus on a generic term to describe the Sinocentric political arrangements of late imperial times. I adopt the term Zongfan, as ex- plained in the following sections of this chapter and in the next chapter. Among modern sources, my use of Zongfan primarily follows Shao Xunzheng in his Zhong-Fa-Yuenan guanxi and Chang Tsun-wu in his Qing-Han Zongfan maoyi. Some scholars have also used Zongfan as an interpretive lens in their studies of the relationship between the Qing and Inner Asia; see, for example, Zha, Qingdai Xizang yu Bulukeba. For some recent works on the Sinocentric foreign-relations sys- tem from an East Asian perspective, see, for example, Chen, Zhongguo chuantong duiwai guanxi; Huang, Songdai chaogong tixi; Kim, Han-Chung kwan’gye sa; Lee, China’s Hegemony; Li, Chaogong zhidu shilun; and Sun, Qingdai Zhong-Yue Zongfan guanxi. For the discrepancy between this Sinocentric system and the Western understanding of it, see Chang, “Dongxi guoji zhixu yuanli,” 54–57; Chang, Qing-Han Zongfan maoyi, 2–15; Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, 9–15; Larsen, “Com- forting Fictions”; Nelson, Korea and the Old Orders, 288–97; Okamoto, Sō shuken no sekaishi, 90–118; Shao, Zhong-Fa-Yuenan guanxi, 37–38; Song, “‘Tributary’ from a Multilateral and Multi-layered Perspective”; Wills, “Tribute, Defensiveness, and Dependency”; Zhang, “Rethinking the ‘Tribute System,’” Zhou, “Equilibrium Analysis.” For a review of the literature on the “tributary system” and Korea, see Wang, “Co-constructing Empire,” 28–43. 4. In Chinese history, Zhengtong has two major intellectual sources: the circulation of the “Five Virtues” (Ch., Wude, namely, earth, wood, metal, fire, and water), a theory put forward by Zou Yan (ca. 305–240 BC), and the great unification raised by scholars of the Tang and Song Dynasties based on their interpre- tations of the classic Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals (Ch., Chunqiu Gongyang zhuan). The former was used in a temporal sense and the latter in spatial and politico-cultural senses. Since the Mongolian conquest of the Song in the thirteenth century, Zhengtong was principally bound with the great unification; see Rao, Zhongguo shixue, 12–26, 81–86. Both the Mongols of the Yuan and the Manchus of the Qing based the orthodox legitimacy of their dynasties on the ideology of the great unification. For the influence of Zhengtong on the historiographical tradition and politics in late imperial China, see Liu, Zhengtong yu Hua–Yi; for a similar influence in Tokugawa Japan, see Koschmann, Mito Ideology. For more details on the Qing and Chosŏn Korea in this regard, see the fol- lowing chapters of this book. 5. Wang, “Yinzhou zhidu lun.” 6. Wang, “Early Ming Relations,” 37–41. 7. For discussions on the story of Jizi/Kija, see, for example, Kim, Han-Chung kwan’gye sa, 1:87–103; Wang, “Co-constructing Empire,” 342–96; Miao, “Jishi Chaoxian wenti.” For the unified Chinese dynasties’ perception of Korea, see Haboush, “Contesting Chinese Time,” 118. 8. Yuanshi, 15:4621; Chŏng, Koryŏ sa, 1:564. 9. WJSL (T’aejong), 1:205. 10. WJSL (Sejong), 2:483, 4:699. For Ming-Chosŏn relations, see Clark, “Sino-Korean Tributary Relations”; Wang, “Co-constructing Empire.” 11. Mingshi, 27:8279; Hong, Tamhŏn yŏn’gi, 42:18; Kye, “Huddling under the Imperial Umbrella.” 12. For the introduction of Neo-Confucianism to Chosŏn, see Duncan, Origins of the Chosŏn Dynasty, 237–65; Palais, Confucian Statecraft, 25–47.
13. WJSL (Sŏnjo), 21:497, 531; 22:189, 294, 439, 617. 14. See, for example, Yun, “Rethinking the Tribute System,” 6–17. 15. For more discussion on the complexity of outer fan under the Qing, see chapter 2. On the Qing-Siamese case, see Chuang, “Xianluo guowang ”; Mancall, “Ch’ing Tribute System”; Masuda, “Fall of Ayutthaya.” 16. Shao, Zhong-Fa-Yuenan guanxi, 38; Koo, Ch’ŏng nara, 211–16. 17. Qing shilu (hereafter QSL) (Qianlong), 17:680, 732–40; 18:12; Da Qing huidian shili, 502:8a–9b. 18. Chun, “Sino-Korean Tributary Relations.” 19. For the former, see Huang, Chaoxian de ruhua; for the latter, see Em, Great Enterprise, 23–24; Larsen, “Comforting Fictions”; Lee, China’s Hegemony; Lim, “Tributary Relations.” 20. For recent research on the relationship between the civilized–barbarian discourse and identity in early modern East Asia, see Chang, “Han’guk esŏ tae- jungguk kwannyŏm”; Fuma, Chōsen enkōshi, 38–43, 328–90; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 35–42; Rawski, Early Modern China, 188–224; Sun, Da Ming qihao; Wang, Xiao Zhonghua; Yamauchi, Chōsen kara mita Ka–I . 21. Gaimushō, Nihon gaikō bunsho (hereafter NHGB), 2(28): 363–72. 22. Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, 8; Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 27. For the rise of empire in Chinese history, see Puett, Ambivalence of Creation, 141–76. 23. Wong, “China’s Agrarian Empire,” 190. 24. Treaties, Conventions, etc ., 1:1–13. 25. Choi, “Nerchinsk choyak”; Zhao, “Reinventing China.” 26. Chuang, Man Han Yiyu Lu, 11–12, 168. 27. Huang, Riben guozhi, 4:1; Liang, Yinbingshi heji, 5:15. 28. Grosier, General Description of China, 244; Curzon, Problems of the Far East, 158. 29. Guo and Zhang, Yuenan tongshi, 413–61; Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model, 9–10, 18–22. For the independent status of Vietnam in the Ming period, see Baldanza, Ming China and Vietnam, 77–110. 30. Haboush, Confucian Kingship in Korea, 11–26. 31. Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, Ming Qing shiliao, ser. 7, 5:491b. For China’s modern diplomacy, see Kawashima, Chū goku kindai gaikō no keisei; Li, Zhongguo jindai waijiaoguan; Okamoto and Kawashima, Chū goku kindai gaikō no taidō ; Rudolph, Negotiated Power. For Korea’s modern diplomacy, see Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade; Mori, Chōsen gaikō no kindai . 32. Sun, Qingdai Zhong-Yue Zongfan guanxi, 92–93. 33. For the politics of time inscription in Korea during the Qing, see Haboush, “Contesting Chinese Time,” 128–33. 34. For the Qing’s cartographic survey and its significance, see Kicengge, “Nibcu tiaoyue jiebei tu”; Li, “Ji Kangxi ‘Huangyu quanlan tu’”; Perdue, “Boundaries, Maps, and Movement.” For the Qing-Annam and Qing-Chosŏn juridical negotiations, see Kim, “The Rule of Ritual.” For a study of Chosŏn’s perception of bor- ders and Qing power from 1636 to 1912, see Kim, Ginseng and Borderland .
35. For the Sino-Korean demarcation negotiations, see Chang, “Qingdai Zhong-Han bianwu”; Kim, Han-Chung kwan’gye sa, 2:885–95; Ledyard, “Cartography in Korea”; Li, Cho-Ch’ŏng kukgyŏng munje yŏn’gu; Song, Making Borders . 36. WJSL (Sŏnjo), 22:57. 37. Mingshi, 27:8307. 38. QSL (Qianlong), 24:297, 25:715. 39. Da Qing tongli, 28:4–5. 40. Da Qing Shixian li/shu, 1646, 1679, 1731, 1795, 1821, 1842, 1865, 1894, 1898, 1909; Neige Like shishu (hereafter LKSS), no. 2–8; Qintian jian tiben zhuanti shiliao, R4–R7. 41. Elverskog, “Mongol Time,” 143. 42. See, for example, Haedong chido, 1:2–3; Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise, 47–49; Smith, Mapping China, 48–88. 43. Simyang janggye, 574. 44. Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, Guangxu chao zhupi zouzhe (hereafter GXZP), 112:243. 45. Kim, Ŭmch’ŏng sa, 40–41. 46. QSL (Guangxu), 55:128. 47. Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 156. 48. For the term “outlying province,” see Zeng (the Marquis Tseng), “China,” 9. 49. Schmid, Korea between Empires, 11, 55–100, 257–60. 50. See, for example, Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 56–83; Cohen, Discovering History in China, 97–147; Hevia, English Lessons, 4–26; Iriye, “Imperialism in East Asia”; Rowe, China’s Last Empire, 231–43; Westad, Restless Empire, 53–86. 51. Pomeranz, Great Divergence . 52. Hu, Diguo zhuyi; Scott, China and the International System . 53. For the paradigm of “New Qing history,” see Millward et al., New Qing Imperial History; Waley-Cohen, “New Qing History.” For interpretations of the Qing empire from an Inner Asian and ethnic perspective, see, for example, Crossley, Manchus; Crossley, Translucent Mirror; Crossley, Siu, and Sutton, Empire at the Margins; Elliott, Manchu Way . 54. See, for example, Di Cosmo, “Qing Colonial Administration”; Herman, “Empires in the Southwest”; Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar; Hevia, English Lessons, 18, 166–174; Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Kim, Borderland Capitalism; Millward, Beyond the Pass; Perdue, China Marches West . 55. Kim Kwangmin has pointed out that the “dual expansions” of European maritime commerce in the Indian Ocean and Chinese power in Xinjiang in the eigh- teenth century “changed the economic and political landscapes of Central Asia significantly.” See Kim, Borderland Capitalism, 45. 56. Champion and Echstein, “Introduction,” 3. 57. See, for example, Lee, Diplomatic Relations, 136–42; Kim, “Chinese Imperialism in Korea”; Deuchler, Confucian Gentlemen, 220; Kim, Last Phase, 348; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 11–19. For the term “informal empire,” see Gallagher and Robinson, “Imperialism of Free Trade.” 58. Nelson, Korea and the Old Orders, 294.
59. As R. Bin Wong points out, “The absence of apparent change suggests the reproduction of a set of relationships or conditions.” See Wong, China Transformed, 3. 60. As Peter I. Yun has argued, “In reality, each state was guided in its foreign policy formulation by the principles of realism and pragmatism. It is necessary to examine actual political motives and imperatives such as trade, cultural imports, and especially the issue of border security.” See Yun, “Rethinking the Tribute System,” 6. In his examination of the Qing’s frontier policy, Matthew W. Mosca emphasizes that “there were no absolute policy differences distinguishing the em- pire’s borderlands. Rather, it was the nature of the threat perceived that guided the empire’s foreign policy choices.” See Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy, 8. 1. CONQUERING CHOSOŎN 1. Ming Shenzong shilu, 541:10283. 2. Huang, 1587 . 3. Manbun rōtō (hereafter MBRT), 1:67; Kuang and Li, Qing Taizu chao manwen, 1:63; QSL (Nurhaci), 1:63–64. 4. Michael, Origin of Manchu Rule, 44; WJSL (Kwanghaegun), 29:501; Crossley, “ Manzhou Yuanliu Kao .” 5. Da Ming huidian, 107:7a, 113:6a; Meng, Qingdai shi, 105. 6. WJSL (Kwanghaegun), 29:433, 508–22; Yi, Ja’am jip, 5:5. 7. For the Jurchen-Korean hierarchy, see Kawachi, Mindai Joshin shi no kenkyū, 424–50. 8. MBRT, 1:143. 9. Chang and Yeh, Qing ruguan qian yu Chaoxian wanglai guoshu (hereafter WLGS), 3. 10. WJSL (Kwanghaegun), 30:126–28. 11. Yi, Ja’am jip, 5:18–19. 12. WJSL (Kwanghaegun), 30:169. 13. Wang, Xu Guangqi ji, 1:106–17; Ming Shenzong shilu, 584:11172–73. 14. WJSL (Kwanghaegun), 31:129, 165–67. 15. WJSL (Injo), 33:503, 34:244. 16. WJSL (Injo), 34:163, 168, 208. 17. MBRT, 4:51. 18. Liu, Qingchao chuqi, 15–16. 19. WJSL (Injo), 34:208. 20. WJSL (Injo), 34:251, 260, 262; Liu, Qingchao chuqi, 54–57. 21. Choi, Myŏng Ch’ŏng sidae, 107–8. 22. WJSL (Injo), 34:414. 23. Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, Ming Qing shiliao, ser. 3, 1:45. 24. WLGS, 100.
25. Suzuki, “‘Manbun gentō’ ni mieru Chōsen.” 26. MBRT, 5:619–21. 27. MBRT, 5:803, 853. 28. Luo, Tiancong chao chengong zouyi, 2:1a–3b, 20b; Qingshi gao, 12:3282; MBRT, 5:825–26. 29. MBRT, 4:92–95; Manwen laodang (hereafter MWLD), 861–62. 30. QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:171. For laichao, see Chun, “Tongyang kodaesa”; Fairbank, “Tributary Trade.” 31. For the issue of the tributes and Ming China’s and the Central Asian states’ different understandings of their relationship, see Fletcher, “China and Central Asia.” 32. MBRT, 4:99–100; QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:190–91. 33. Luo, Tiancong chao chengong zouyi, 3(1):10a–11b, 35a–35b; 3(2):15b. 34. Luo, Tiancong chao chengong zouyi, 3(1):11b, 21b; 3(2):18a. 35. For Nurhaci’s and Hongtaiji’s construction of Manchu imperial authority and their integration of multiethnic subjects for a new identity under the Manchu regime, see Crossley, Translucent Mirror, 177–85. 36. Farquhar, “Origins,” 199–200; Perdue, China Marches West, 122–27. 37. See Ho, “In Defense of Sinicization”; Rawski, “Reenvisioning the Qing”; Huang, Reorienting the Manchus . 38. Ch’en, Manzhou congkao, 1–9; Zhao, “Jiu Qing Yu” yanjiu, 69–70. 39. MBRT, 1:76–78, 159–60, 191–92. For the relationship between gurun and the Manchu perception of “nation,” see Elliott, “Manchu (Re)Definitions.” 40. Imanishi, Man - Wa Mō - Wa taiyaku Manshū jitsuroku . 41. MBRT, 1:159–60, 191–92. 42. MBRT, 4:125; QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:190–91. 43. QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:71. 44. MBRT, 5:792; QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:165. 45. Luo, Tiancong chao chengong zouyi, 3(1):35. 46. MBRT, 4:29–30, 7:1439–41; QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:404. 47. WJSL (Injo), 34:625; MBRT, 6:981. 48. Tong, Chunqiu shi, 277–79; Zhang, Qinzhi yanjiu, 39–51. 49. For discussion, see Ge, Zhaizi Zhongguo, 41–44. 50. MBRT, 4:92–95, 332. 51. MBRT, 4:28. 52. MBRT, 6:893–98; WLGS, 168–69. 53. QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:341–43. 54. MBRT, 6:904–11; QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:347–49; WJSL (Injo), 34:624–25.
55. WJSL (Injo), 34:625. 56. MBRT, 6:982, 993–94; Qing Taizong shilu gaoben, 17; WJSL (Injo), 34:631. 57. QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:369–72; MBRT, 6:1005–6. 58. WJSL (Injo), 34:649. 59. Chosŏnguk raesŏ bu, 2:21–22; WLGS, 199–200. 60. Chosŏnguk raesŏ bu, 2:26–29; WLGS, 207–9. 61. Yi Kŭng-ik, Yŏllyŏsil gisul, 3:491–98. 62. Chosŏnguk raesŏ bu, 2:29–32; WLGS, 210–12. 63. WJSL (Injo), 34:671; Tongmun hwigo (hereafter TMHG), 2:1488. 64. QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:432–33, 511. 65. WJSL (Injo), 34:674, 677. 66. QSL (Shunzhi), 3:363. 67. QSL (Shunzhi), 3:995. The practice of “dividing cogongrass,” which was recorded in The Classic of History as “dividing soil and cogongrass,” refers to a part of the Zhou Zongfan investiture ritual in which the Son of Heaven endowed the vassals with some soil from his ancestral shrine and the soil was wrapped in white cogongrass. The vassals would then use the soil for their own ancestral shrines on their own lands. 68. See Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming, March 6, 1725; the King’s memorial dated August 28, 1735, in Neige waijiao zhuan’an, Chaoxian (hereafter WJZA), no. 564–2–190–4. 69. T’ongmun’gwan ji, 1:112. 70. See, for example, Guanming’s memorial on November 20, 1811, in Junjichu hanwen lufu zouzhe (hereafter LFZZ), no. 3–163–7728–16. 71. QSL (Qianlong), 17:680, 732–40; Da Qing huidian shili, 502:8a–9b. 72. Qingji Zhong-Ri-Han guanxi shiliao (hereafter ZRHGX), 3:1072–75. 73. Li to Yuan, February 1, 1886, in Gu and Dai, Li Hongzhang quanji (hereafter LHZQJ), 21:655. 74. Rockhill, “Korea in Its Relations with China,” 32. 75. For the critiques of reinterpretation, see Lin, “Tributary System,” 507; for “Pax Sinica,” see Huang, Dongya de liyi shijie . 76. For a study of China’s tribute system from an international-relations perspective, see Lee, China’s Hegemony . 77. Perdue, “Tea, Cloth, Gold, and Religion,” 2. 78. See Wills, Embassies and Illusions, 173; Smith, “Mapping China.” Iwai Shigeki argues that the practice of foreigners paying homage to China (J., chōkō; Ch., chaogong) began to be incorporated into the Sino-foreign trade system (J., goshi; Ch., hushi) after 1380, when the Ming abolished the Maritime Trade Superin- tendency (Ch., Shibo si), a longstanding institution for managing maritime trade, and that this policy endured until 1684, when Emperor Kangxi resumed maritime trade. See Iwai, “Chōkō to goshi.” Danjo Hiroshi emphasizes the same change in the Ming period; see Danjo, Mindai kaikin, 181–82, 336–37. 79. QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:633–34, 777, 820–21, 876, 890; QSL (Shunzhi), 3:898. 80. TMHG, 2:1533.
81. Yi, Pusim ilgi, 445. 82. QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:459; Chosŏnguk raesŏ bu, 2:36–41. 83. WJSL (Injo), 34:709. 84. QSL (Shunzhi), 2:511, 3:586–87. 85. Wang, “Santiandu,” 290–96. For recent discussions about the Samjŏndo stele, see Koo, Ch’ŏng nara, 44–47; Bae, Chosŏn kwa Chunghwa, 33–65. In 2007, the 370th anniversary of Chosŏn’s surrender to the Manchus in 1637, a Korean nationalist painted “ch’ŏlgŏ Pyŏngja 370” in large characters on the stele (ch’ŏlgŏ means “remove”), demonstrating the event’s strong psychological impact on modern Korean nationalism. 86. WJSL (Injo), 34:709. 87. QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:649. 88. TMHG, 1485:1497–98, 1503–11. 89. TMHG, 2:1700–1702, 1747–48. 90. See Han, Chŏngmyo, Pyŏngja horan, 383–87. 91. For Manchu-Mongol relations during this period, see Elverskog, Our Great Qing, 27–39. 2. BARBARIANIZING CHOSOŎN 1. For the post-Ming process of decentering China among China’s neighbors, see Haboush, “Constructing the Center”; Rawski, Early Modern China, 1–10, 225–34. 2. QSL (Shunzhi), 3:91–92. 3. QSL (Qianlong), 18:643. 4. Langkio’s palace memorial, April 17, 1653, in LKSS, no. 2–3. 5. Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, Ming Qing shiliao, ser. 7, 5:404b. 6. QSL (Shunzhi), 3:363. 7. Millward, Beyond the Pass, 36–38. 8. MBRT, 5:790–92; MWLD, 1297–99; QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:165. 9. Zhaofu Zheng Jing chiyu . 10. Chuang, Man Han Yiyu Lu, 11–12, 168. 11. Da Ming jili, 32:7a–8b. 12. For example, the MBRT, the most important historical record of pre-1644 Manchu history, did not refer to the Manchu regime as abkai gurun. For this sub- tle philological explanation, I am also grateful to two prestigious archivists and scholars, Wu Yuanfeng at the First Historical Archives of China and Zhao Zhiqiang at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, whose mother tongue is Xibo, which is almost identical to Manchu. 13. QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:455. 14. QSL (Shunzhi), 3:530–54; Guo, “Wushi Dalai Lama rujin shulun.” 15. QSL (Shunzhi), 3:376–77.
16. Libu zeli (hereafter LBZL), 173:6b–10a, 174:8a–13b, 175:5b–6a, 176:6b–8a. 17. See, for example, Huang, Chaoxian de ruhua . 18. Chang, Qing-Han Zongfan maoyi, 25–27. 19. QSL (Shunzhi), 3:251, 272; Lidai baoan, 1:107. 20. For the case of Siam, see LKSS, no. 2–3; for Ryukyu, see Wu, “Qingchu cefeng Liuqiu.” 21. Jiang, Taiwan waiji, 175–207. 22. Zhaofu Zheng Jing chiyu . 23. QSL (Shunzhi), 3:363, 586–87. 24. Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, Qinggong zhencang lishi Dalai Lama dang’an, 10–19. 25. See Xizang zizhiqu dang’an guan, Xizang lishi dang’an, files 34–74. 26. See, for example, Da Qing huidian (1764), vols. 79–80; LBZL, vols. 171–87; Lifan yuan zeli, vol. 16. John King Fairbank and S. Y. Têng have also argued that the way in which the Qing controlled and managed these Mongol tribes was “all in the traditional forms of the tributary relationship”; see Fairbank and Têng, “On the Ch’ing Tributary System,” 158–63. Recent scholarship has complicated this picture by examining how the Manchu and Mongol sides perceived each other’s positions in the Qing-led empire; see Elverskog, Our Great Qing, 23–39. 27. Da Qing huidian shili, 975:9b–10a. 28. See, for example, QSL (Yongzheng), 8:388; Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, Qingdai Junjichu manwen aocha dang, 1:1123, 2:1476; Xizang dang’an, files 34–74; Da Qing huidian (1764), 80:26a. 29. Mark Mancall also points out that after 1644 the Mongolian Superintendency “used rites and forms of the traditional Confucian Chinese system to conduct relations with the ‘barbarians’”; see Mancall, “Ch’ing Tribute System,” 72–73. 30. LBZL, 171:1–14, 172:1–22, 181:1–7, 184:1–6, 185:1–3, 186:1–5. For the classic discussion on the regulations, see Fairbank, “Preliminary Framework,” 10–11; Fairbank and Têng, “On the Ch’ing Tributary System,” 163–73. 31. Da Ming huidian, vols. 105–8. 32. Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise, 118–21. 33. For the Qing’s expansion to the southwest, see Herman, “Empires in the Southwest”; Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Gong, Ming Qing Yunnan tusi; Li, Qingdai tusi zhidu . 34. Zhupi yuzhi, 45:1a–81a. 35. Da Ming huidian, 105:1b; Da Qing huidian (1899), 39:2a–3a. 36. Da Qing huidian (1764), 56:1a–2b; LBZL, vols. 171–80; Da Qing huidian (1899), 39:2a–3a. The successive changes to the list over the course of the Qing pe- riod are highlighted by the five editions of Da Qing huidian (issued in 1690, 1732, 1764, 1818, and 1899, respectively). See Fairbank and Têng, “On the Ch’ing Trib- utary System,” 174; Banno, Kindai Chū goku seiji gaikō shi, 87. 37. Da Qing huidian (1764), 80:1a, 10b. Peter C. Perdue argues that this claim “was as much mythical as real”; see Perdue, China Marches West, 527. 38. LBZL, vols. 172–77. Siam sent emissaries once every three years until 1839 and once every four years thereafter.
39. LBZL, 172:1b–5b. 40. TMHG, 2:1700–1744; Ch’ŏng sŏn go, 2:404–502; Chang, Qing-Han Zongfan maoyi, 18–19; Liu, Qingdai Zhong-Chao shizhe, 154–251. In practice, the Korean tributary emissaries simultaneously gathered intelligence on the Qing and reported their findings to the king after they returned home in attachments to their palace memorials (K., p’iltam). Their intelligence-gathering activities helped the Korean court understand the dynamics of the Qing’s domestic and international situation. For p’iltam from 1639 to 1862, see Tongmun koryak, 3:405–530. For a specific case of intelligence gathering, see Ding, “18 segi ch’o Chosŏn yŏn- haengsa.” 41. QSL (Qianlong), 24:297, 25:715. 42. LBZL, 172–80:1a. The number of attendants in Sulu’s missions was also open, but theoretically Sulu sent a mission only once every five years. 43. Langkio’s memorial, February 9, 1653, in LKSS, no. 2–1; LFZZ, nos. 3–163–7728–8, 3–163–7730–25. 44. T’ongmun’gwan ji, 1:94–98; Yi, Pugwon rok, 707–9. 45. Langkio’s memorial, May 28, 1653, in LKSS, no. 2–4. 46. TMHG, 1:903–1044, 2:1045–1245, 1747–71; Chun, “Sino-Korean Tributary Relations,” 92–94, 101; Liu, Qingdai Zhong-Chao shizhe, 35–41, 154–251. 47. QSL (Shunzhi), 3:940; T’ongmun’gwan ji, 1:215–18. 48. Qingdai gongzhongdang zouzhe ji Junjichu dang zhejian (hereafter JJCZ), no. 072667; LBZL, 181:1b–2a. For the mission in 1845, see JJCZ, no. 076837; Huashana, Dongshi jicheng . 49. Ch’iksa ilgi, 17:14b; Chongli, Fengshi Chaoxian riji, 22b–23a. 50. Hong, Tamhŏn yŏn’gi, 42:29. 51. Akŭkton si, 5; Huang and Qian, Fengshi tu, nos. 9 and 11. 52. See Yi, Y ŏnhaeng kisa, 58:256–388, 59:12–15; Kim, Ŭmch’ŏng sa, 21; Baijun, Fengshi Chaoxian . 53. For the palisade, see Da Qing huidian shili, 233:20a; Shengjing tongzhi, 11:5a–6a; Yang, Liubian jilue, 1:1; Yang, Qingdai liutiao bian, 27–53; Edmonds, “Willow Palisade.” 54. Kim, Tongyŏ do, no. 16. 55. Boming xizhe, Fengcheng suolu, 2a. 56. Kang, Y ŏnhaeng noch’ong gi, 447–50. 57. WJSL (Sukchong), 40:117. 58. See Yi, Y ŏnhaeng kisa, 58:314–15; Kwon, “Chosŏn Korea’s Trade,” 163–70; Yi, Chosŏn huki taechŏng muyŏk, 63–79. 59. TMHG, 1:672; T’ongmun’gwan ji, 1:112–30; WJZA, no. 564–2–190–4. 60. T’ongmun’gwan ji, 1:112–13. 61. WJZA, no. 564–2–190–4. 62. LFZZ, no. 3–163–7729–42; Chaoxian shiliao huibian, 20:513–73. 63. WJSL (Injo), 34:709. 64. QSL (Shunzhi), 3:363; QSL (Kangxi), 4:678–79.
65. Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming . 66. Jangsŏgak sojang gomunsŏ, 3:20–21. 67. Jangsŏgak sojang gomunsŏ, 3:30–33. 68. LKSS, no. 2–3. 69. See Crossley, Translucent Mirror, 11–12. 70. See Chuang, “Xianluo guowang”; Mancall, “Ch’ing Tribute System”; Masuda, “Fall of Ayutthaya.” 71. Rockhill, “Korea in Its Relations with China,” 2. 72. See, for example, LFZZ, nos. 3–163–7729–16/17/26/27/29/31/33/45/46; for more on the Korean tributes, see Qingdai Zhong-Chao guanxi dang’an shiliao huibian (hereafter ZCSLHB); Qingdai Zhong-Chao guanxi dang’an shiliao xubian (hereafter ZCSLXB). 73. LBZL, 172:6a–7b; Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, Ming Qing shiliao, ser. 7, 5:469b. 74. Yi, Y ŏnhaeng ilgi, 100–101. 75. Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, Ming Qing shiliao, ser. 7, 5:449b. 76. LBZL, 171:3b–4a, 11b–15a; Da Qing tongli, 43:1–6. 77. Da Tang Kaiyuan li, 386–92. 78. Sadae mungwe, 42:14b–15b. 79. As JaHyun Kim Haboush points out in the context of seventeenth-century Korea, “In the cultural matrix of the time, ritual was seen as the manifestation of order as well as a means through which order was preserved and restored.” See Haboush, “Constructing the Center,” 70–71. 80. QSL (Kangxi), 4:678. 81. See, for example, QSL (Qianlong), 26:9. 82. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 108. 83. Guanglu si zeli, 23:4b–6a; LBZL, 299:7a–7b. 84. LBZL, vol. 1, illustration no. 5. 85. Wang, Xiao Zhonghua, 137–38. 86. Dong, Xianqiao shanfang riji, 18–27. 87. Pak, Hwanjae sŏnsaengjip, 6–7. 88. Kim, Last Phase, 12. 89. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 72, 322. 90. Li and Ch’oi, Hanke shicun, 261–66; Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 392, 396. 91. Manbu jich’ik sarye, 12–37. 92. Kwansŏ jich’ik jŏngnye, 63–101. 93. Li, Shi Liuqiu ji, 4:14b–23a, 5:6b–17b. 94. Ch’iksa ilgi, 1:25b; 3:28a, 30b; 4:18; 5:10a; 7:18a; 8:17a; 9:19b; 10:24b; 11:26b; Tumangang kamgye mundap ki, 34.
95. Langkio’s memorial, May 18, 1653, in LKSS, no. 2–4. 96. Chang, Qing-Han Zongfan maoyi, 36–37. 97. Iwai, “Chōkō to goshi,” 137. 98. LBZL, 172:11a–12b. 99. Huang, Chaoxian de ruhua, 479–91. 100. QSL (Qianlong), 9:477. 101. Yi, Yŏnhaeng ilgi, 193–94. 102. QSL (Qianlong), 9:330–31, 477–79. 103. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 176. 104. QSL (Qianlong), 9:633–34, 711. 105. QSL (Qianlong), 17:721–22, 857; Ch’iksa ilgi, 12:8a. 106. QSL (Yongzheng), 8:399–400, 458. 107. QSL (Qianlong), 12:527–74; TMHG, 1:913–18. For a study of the case of Mangniushao, see Kim, Ginseng and Borderland, 92–103. 108. For more on the case of Zeng, see Spence, Treason by the Book . 109. QSL (Yongzheng), 8:696–97. 110. See Hirano, Shin teikoku to Chibetto mondai, 71–112. 111. Lidai diwang miao yanjiu, 14–31. 112. See Crossley, Translucent Mirror, 261–62. 113. Kishimoto, “‘Zhongguo’ he ‘Waiguo,’” 365–66. 114. The imperial envoys in 1729, 1731, 1736, 1748, and 1750 did so. See Ch’iksa ilgi, vols. 4–9. 115. QSL (Qianlong), 14:120–21. 116. Jiu Tangshu, 16:5274. 117. Millward, Beyond the Pass, 25. 118. Guben Yuan Ming zaju, 4:1–12. 119. Siku quanshu zongmu tiyao, 15:12. 120. Huang Qing zhigong tu, 40–41, 54–55, 58–59, 66–67. 121. Chuang, Xie Sui Zhigong tu, 60–61, 78–79; Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise, 47; Smith, Mapping China, 75–76. 122. Zhu, Qingshi tudian, 6:197–98. 123. Crossley, “ Manzhou Yuanliu Kao,” 761. 124. QSL (Qianlong), 17:259–60. 125. Pritchard, Anglo - Chinese Relations, 133–43. 126. These reports can be found in ZCSLXB and ZCSLHB. As chapter 6 shows, in the 1900s Chinese provincial governors were still submitting similar reports
to Beijing. 127. For tianchao tizhi, see Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, Qingdai Zhong-Liu guanxi dang’an xubian, 723. 128. QSL (Qianlong), 21:578; Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, Qianlong chao manwen jixin dang yibian, 12:117. 129. For further cases, see Kim, “Kŏllyung nyŏnkan Chosŏn sahaeng.” 3. JUSTIFYING THE CIVILIZED 1. WJSL (Sukchong), 40:118; Wang, Xiao Zhonghua, 43–51. 2. Cefeng Chaoxian wangshidi Li Qin fengtian gaoming, May 24, 1722. 3. Songja taejŏn, 96; WJSL (Sukchong), 38:243–44, 265, 288; 39:92; 41:94. 4. Haboush, “Constructing the Center,” 62–90. 5. Sin, Ch’ŏngsaem jip, 4:1a–2b, 8b–13a. 6. WJSL (Sukchong), 40:76, 108, 122, 124. 7. For the most comprehensive collection of these journals, see Lim, Yŏnhaengnok jŏnjip . 8. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 11; Ch’ŏng sŏn go, 2:458. 9. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 93. 10. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 106–8. 11. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 117. 12. Fuma, Chōsen enkōshi, 365–69. 13. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 172–76. 14. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 72, 322. 15. Pak, Chŏngyu chip, 109–15, 383–438. 16. Pak, Chŏngyu chip, 437–38. 17. Ch’ae, Ham’in nok, 335–81. 18. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 1:10b. 19. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 1:59b–65b. 20. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 2:1a–2a. 21. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 2:57b. 22. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 3:20b; Min, Chungguk gŭndaesa yŏn’gu, 4. 23. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 3:26a–32b, 85a–87b, 92a–92b. 24. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 3:75a. 25. The rules of Qing bureaucracy contributed to this paradox. The Ministry of Rites, describing the Koreans’ meeting with the Panchen Erdeni in a memorial to the emperor, simply fabricated its account, saying that after receiving the gifts from the Panchen, the Koreans immediately performed kowtow to show their grat- itude. See Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 3:91b.
26. QSL (Qianlong), 22:872. 27. Pak, Chŏngyu chip, 380–81. 28. Sŏ, Yŏlha kiyu, 335. 29. Sŏ, Yŏlha kiyu, 342, 421–22. 30. Sŏ, Yŏlha kiyu, 442. 31. QSL (Qianlong), 25:817, 873–74, 973. 32. QSL (Qianlong), 25:874, 966–74. 33. Qinding Annan jilue, 21:14a. 34. Qinding Annan jilue, 23:24a, 26:18a. 35. QSL (Qianlong), 25:1049–50, 1198, 1201–28. 36. Some modern scholars have argued that the man who presented himself at the border was not Nguyễn Huệ himself but rather a double; see Lam, “Inter- vention versus Tribute in Sino-Vietnamese Relations.” In any case, what mattered to Beijing was that Annam’s sovereign demonstrated subordination to Qing au- thority. 37. Qinding Annan jilue, 28:21. 38. QSL (Qianlong), 26:174–75. By rendering the phrase fengjian shizhong as “centering,” James Hevia, in his study of the Macartney mission, may have given the phrase a more extended meaning; see Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, 123. 39. QSL (Qianlong), 26:196–200. 40. For a review of this case, see Harrison, “Qianlong Emperor’s Letter.” 41. Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy, 69–160. 42. Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, Yingshi Majiaerni fanghua dang’an, 32–38. 43. Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, Yingshi Majiaerni fanghua dang’an, 51, 148–49. 44. Peyrefitte, Immobile Empire, 223–24; Durand, “Jianting zeming.” 45. Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, Yingshi Majiaerni fanghua dang’an, 57–60, 162–75. 46. Chen, Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes, 8. 47. QSL (Qianlong), 27:257–64; Yi, Yŏnhaeng ilgi, 105–27. 48. Qing Jiaqing chao waijiao shiliao, 5:11a–12a, 37a–40b, 57a. 49. Staunton, Narrative of the Chinese Embassy, v–vi. 50. Peyrefitte, Immobile Empire, 524–25. 51. Baijun, Fengshi Chaoxian, 571–661. 52. LFZZ, no. 3–163–7729–44. 53. Huashana, Dongshi jicheng, 131–99. 54. Wang, Xiao Zhonghua, 140. For the story of Ye, see Wong, Yeh Ming-Ch’en .
55. Chouban yiwu shimo (Xianfeng), 2:610–19. 56. Chouban yiwu shimo (Xianfeng), 3:748–94. 57. Chouban yiwu shimo (Xianfeng), 3:938. 58. Treaties, Conventions, etc ., 1:715. 59. Chouban yiwu shimo (Xianfeng), 3:952–61. 60. Treaties, Conventions, etc ., 1:405. 61. Treaties, Conventions, etc ., 1:419. 62. Loch, Personal Narrative of Occurrences, 258, 274. 63. Loch, Personal Narrative of Occurrences, 286–89. 64. For the latest research on the Zongli Yamen, see Rudolph, Negotiated Power; Li, Zhongguo jindai waijiaoguan . 65. Chouban yiwu shimo (Xianfeng), 8:2708–15. 66. Frederick Low to Hamilton Fish, no. 77, January 13, 1872, in Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), 1872–’73, 127–28. 67. Ch’ŏng sŏn go, 2:490–91; ZCSLXB, 315–17; QSL (Xianfeng), 44:1093. 68. See Mao, Jindai de chidu, 166–254. 4. DEFINING CHOSOŎN 1. For the term “everyday familiarity,” see Heidegger, Being and Time, 176. 2. For the translation of Wanguo gongfa, see Liu, Clash of Empires, 108–39; Okamoto, Sōshuken no sekaishi, 90–118. 3. Wheaton, Wanguo gongfa, vol. 1. 4. Fairbank, “Early Treaty System,” 257. 5. Kojong Sunjong sillok, 1:121. 6. Ilsŏngnok, 66:199–201. 7. ZRHGX, 2:29; FRUS, 1867–’68, 1:420. 8. FRUS, 1867–’68, 1:420. 9. See, for example, Grosier, General Description of China, 244. 10. Nelson, Korea and the Old Orders, 292. 11. See, for example, Curzon, Problems of the Far East, 144–45. 12. Tamura, “Ejiputo kenkyu”; Em, Great Enterprise, 30. 13. Wheaton, Wanguo gongfa, 1:25a–28b; 2:2b–3a; Wheaton, Elements of International Law, 44–50, 79. 14. Nelson, Korea and the Old Orders, 289; Westad, Restless Empire, 81–82. 15. Aihanzhe, ed., Dong Xi-yang kao meiyue tongji zhuan, 91–92. Aihanzhe, literally “people loving China,” might refer to a group of missionaries who were active in South China near Guangdong. For Gützlaff’s contribution to the Chinese norms discussed here, see Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy, 218–19. 16. See Edward Hertslet, “Memorandum respecting Corea,” December 19, 1882, in Korea, the Ryukyu Islands, and North-East Asia, 2–3; Frederick Low to
Hamilton Fish, November 23, 1871, in Davids, American Diplomatic and Public Papers (hereafter ADPP), 9:184; Mori Arinori to the Zongli Yamen, January 15, 1876, in ZRHGX, 2:270. 17. Rockhill, “Korea in Its Relations with China.” 18. Curzon, Problems of the Far East, 209–22. 19. ZRHGX, 2:33–34. 20. Ilsŏngnok, 66:614. 21. Kojong Sunjong sillok, 1:227–28. 22. Ilsŏngnok, 66:309, 582. 23. Kojong sidae sa, 1:263. 24. FRUS, 1867–’68, 1:416. 25. Kojong Sunjong sillok, 1:235. 26. Kuiling, Dongshi jishi shilue, 737. 27. Ilsŏngnok, 66:643–48. 28. FRUS, 1867–’68, 1:4224. 29. ZCSLXB, 344–60. 30. FRUS, 1867–’68, 1:426–28. 31. ADPP, 9:49. 32. Dennett, Americans in Eastern Asia, 418–19. 33. See Griffis, Corea: The Hermit Nation . 34. See Le Gendre’s letter on June 21, 1867, in “Rishi shokan,” Japan Center for Asian Historical Records (hereafter JACAR), ref. no. A03030060500. For Admi- ral Bell’s expedition against the aborigines, see Carrington, Foreigners in Formosa, 156–57. 35. Davidson, Island of Formosa, 117–22. 36. Low to Fish, no. 225, July 16, 1870, in FRUS, 1870–’71, 362. 37. ZRHGX, 2:165–66. 38. Low to Fish, no. 29, April 3, 1871; no. 31, May 13, 1871, in FRUS, 1871–’72, 111–15. 39. ZRHGX, 2:175. 40. Low to Fish, dispatch 102, November 23, 1871, in ADPP, 9:184. 41. Treaties, Conventions, etc ., 2:508; Gaimushō jōyakukyoku, Kyūjōyaku isan, 1:394–95. 42. JACAR, ref. nos. A03023011000, A03023011700. 43. See Yen, Taiwan, 159–74; Mayo, “Korean Crisis of 1873,” 802–5. 44. Li’s palace memorial, May 3, 1873, in LHZQJ, 5:346–47. 45. Wade to Earl Granville, no. 118, confidential, May 15, 1873; no. 131, May 25, 1873; no. 143, June 4, 1873, in Foreign Office Record Group 17, China
Correspondence (hereafter FO 17), 654. 46. FRUS, 1873–’74, 1:188. 47. Shima, Soejima Taneomi zenshū, 2:165–66, 456. 48. JACAR, ref. no. A03023011900. 49. Soejima to Sanjō, June 29, 1873, in NHGB, 6:160. 50. Tada, Iwakurakō jikki, 3:46–90; Mayo, “Korean Crisis of 1873.” 51. In Tokyo, the British minister, Harry Parkes, clearly told the Japanese foreign minister, Terashima Munenori, “I really am not aware whether the territory in question is or is not beyond the jurisdiction of the Chinese Government. During a residence of upwards of twenty years in China, I always heard that the whole of Formosa was claimed by China.” See Parkes to Terashima, April 16, 1874, in NHGB, 7:37. 52. Chouban yiwu shimo (Tongzhi), 10:3835–949. 53. Parkes to Earl of Derby, July 20, 1875, in Korea, the Ryukyu Islands, and North-East Asia, 39. 54. Tabohashi, Kindai Nissen kankei, 1:515. 55. Ōkubo, Mori Arinori zenshū, 1:779–80; Mori Arinori bunsho, R. 2–68. 56. Terashima to Tei, November 15, 1875, in NHGB, 8:138. 57. Wade to Earl of Derby, no. 5, January 12, 1876, in FO 17, 719. 58. Marquis of Zetland, Letters of Disraeli, 373. 59. Earl of Derby to Wade, no. 77, January 1, 1876, in British Parliamentary Papers, China, 107. 60. Wade to Earl of Derby, no. 6, confidential, January 12, 1876, in FO 17, 719. 61. Mori Arinori bunsho, R. 2–67. 62. Mori Arinori bunsho, R. 1–55–1. 63. Mori’s letter to his father, January 13, 1876, Mori Arinori bunsho, R. 1–55–1. 64. Chen, Weng Tonghe riji, 3:1176. 65. Mori to the Zongli Yamen, January 15, 1876, in ZRHGX, 2:270. 66. Qing Guangxu chao Zhong-Ri jiaoshe shiliao (hereafter ZRJSSL), 1:1b–2a. 67. Ch’ŏng sŏn go, 2:495. 68. Mori to Terashima, February 3, 1876, in NHGB, 9:170–76; Li to the Zongli Yamen, January 23–24, 1876, in LHZQJ, 31:334–42. 69. Mori’s original English report of the meeting on January 24 is missing, but the Japanese translation by the Gaimushō is still available in Tokyo; see JACAR, ref. no. B03030144000; Mori to Terashima, February 3, 1876, in NHGB, 9:170–76. 70. Li to the Zongli Yamen, January 23, 1876, in LHZQJ, 31:340; NHGB, 9:172. 71. Mori, “The Second Interview,” JACAR, ref. no. B03030144000. 72. ZRHGX, 2:295. 73. Mori Arinori bunsho, R. 1–55–1.
74. Ch’iksa ilgi, 17:28b. 75. Quan, “Jianghua tiaoyue.” 76. ZRHGX, 2:300. 77. Guo, Guo Songtao riji, 3:14–15. 78. ZRHGX, 2:316–18. 79. Bruce Cumings has also questioned whether this treaty can be seen as a modern one; see Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 102. 80. Gaimushō jōyakukyoku, Kyūjōyaku isan, 3:2. 81. For affirmations of this view, see, for example, ADPP, 10:66–77; British Parliamentary Papers, Japan, 9–10; Deuchler, Confucian Gentlemen, 47; Hua, Zhong- guo bianjiang, 121; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 63; Morse, International Relations, 3:8. For challenges to it, see Hsü, China and Her Political Entity, 109–10; Kim, Last Phase, 252. 82. NHGB, 9:115. 83. Bingham to Fish, dispatch 364, March 22, 1876, in ADPP, 10:66–77; Parkes to Earl of Derby, no. 13, March 25 and 27, 1876, in British Parliamentary Papers, Japan, 9–11, 17. 84. For a review of Korea’s modern sovereignty, see Em, Great Enterprise, 21–84. 85. Mori Arinori bunsho, R. 2–68. 5. SUPERVISING CHOSOŎN 1. Yi to Li, December 24, 1879, in ZRHGX, 2:398–401. 2. NHGB, 13:435. 3. See Deuchler, Confucian Gentlemen, 110–13. 4. Shufeldt to R. W. Thompson, dispatch 21, August 30, 1880, in ADPP, 10:102–5; Li to Yu, August 28, 1880, in LHZQJ, 32:585; Paullin, “Opening of Korea,” 483. 5. Yi, Kawo koryak, 11:436. 6. Kojong Sunjong sillok, 1:617; QSL (Guangxu), 53:726–27. 7. ZRJSSL, 2:31a–32a. 8. Li to the Zongli Yamen, March 2, 1881, in ZRHGX, 2:467–68. 9. Wu, Xu, and Wang, Huang Zunxian ji, 2:394, 400. 10. He to the Zongli Yamen, November 18, 1880, in ZRHGX, 2:441. 11. Kojong Sunjong sillok, 1:629; Chun, “T’ongni kimu amun.” 12. For these secret reports and memorandums, see Hŏ, Chosa sich’al dan . 13. Sŭngjŏngwŏn ilgi, 7:262. 14. Ilsŏngnok, 73:450–53, 478–81, 534–35. 15. Kojong Sunjong sillok, 2:14–16; Yi, Kawo koryak, 7:271–72.
16. Ilsŏngnok, 73:578–82. 17. Kim, Ŭmch’ŏng sa, 1–2; Sim, Mangi yoran chaeyong p’yŏn, 701. 18. Kim, Ŭmch’ŏng sa, 3, 12–21. 19. Li’s memorial, January 21, 1882, in LHZQJ, 9:539–44. 20. Kim, Ch’ŏnjin tamch’o, 2. 21. QSL (Guangxu), 53:1002–3. 22. Paullin, “Opening of Korea,” 485–87. 23. Holcombe to Frederick Frelinghuysen, February 4, 1882, in ADPP, 10:163–71. 24. Kim, Ch’ŏnjin tamch’o, 12–13. 25. Kim, Ch’ŏnjin tamch’o, 20–21. 26. Kim, Ch’ŏnjin tamch’o, 17. 27. For China’s struggle to abolish extraterritoriality as “the most important imperialist practice in China,” see Kayaoğlu, Legal Imperialism, 149–90. 28. Kim, Ch’ŏnjin tamch’o, 23–26. 29. ZRHGX, 2:552–55. 30. Ku Han’guk oegyo munsŏ (hereafter HKMS), 10:12–14. 31. HKMS, 10:14–15. 32. T’ongsang Miguk silgi, 6a–9b; HKMS, 10:1–2; Okamoto, Zokkoku to jishu no aida, 35–69. 33. Ŏ, Chongjŏng nyŏnp’yo, 131. 34. Baoting’s memorial, June 14, 1882, in ZRJSSL, 3:17b–18a. 35. Imperial edict, June 14, 1882, in ZRJSSL, 3:18b. 36. Baoting’s memorial, June 28, 1882, in Gongzhong dang zouzhe, 4–1–30–0278–025. 37. Kojong sidae sa, 2:331–37. 38. Inoue Kaoru to Hanabusa, July 31, 1882, in NHGB, 15:221–23; Li Shuchang to Zhang Shusheng, July 31, 1882, in ZRHGX, 2:735–47. 39. Kim, Ŭmch’ŏng sa, 179–85; Kim’s conversation with Zhou Fu, August 5, 1882, in ZRHGX, 2:769–72. 40. ZRHGX, 3:765, 789–805; Kim, Ŭmch’ŏng sa, 189–90. 41. NHGB, 15:226–30. 42. Li Shuchang to Yoshida, August 9 and 12, 1882, in NHGB, 15:164–65. 43. Inoue’s conversations with Boissonade, August 9 and 13, 1882, in NHGB, 15:169– 73; Boissonade tōgi, 140–62. For the Anglo-French joint action against the Egyptian revolt and the British conquest of Egypt in 1882, see Reid, “Urabi Revolution.” 44. Hart to James Duncan Campbell, no. 370, Z/83, August 10, 1882, in Fairbank, Bruner, and Matheson, I. G. in Peking, 417. 45. For the African case, see Lewis, Divided Rule, 14–16. 46. Zhang Shusheng to the Zongli Yamen, August 9, 1882, in ZRHGX, 2:773; Li Shuchang to the Zongli Yamen, August 31, 1882, in ZRHGX, 3:836.
47. For the influence of virtue on China’s statecraft, see Wang, “Early Ming Relations,” 42–45. 48. Kim, Tongmyo yŏngjŏp nok . 49. ZRHGX, 3:863–79. 50. ZRHGX, 3:843, 867. 51. Yuan to Li, August 6, 1886, in LHZQJ, 22:77. 52. Kim, Last Phase, 1, 348. 53. ZRJSSL, 2:33a–34b. 54. ZRHGX, 3:967–76. 55. Kim, Ŭmch’ŏngsa, 212. 56. See Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 101–3. 57. Treaties, Conventions, etc ., 2:847–53; ZRHGX, 3:983–86. 58. GXZP, 112:243. 59. Yun, Yun Ch’i-ho ilgi, 1:4. 60. See Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 72–94. According to Larsen, the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations “constitute the first time that the Qing Empire proactively sought to promote Chinese commercial interests beyond its borders through the use of treaties and international law” (90). 61. GXZP, 112:243. 62. For the Kangxi emperor’s role in introducing his empire to Western knowledge, see Jami, Emperor’s New Mathematics . 63. Mao, “Qingmo diwang jiaokeshu,” 127–29. 64. Mao, “Qingmo diwang jiaokeshu,” 147. 65. Chongqi’s memorial, in ZRHGX, 3:1063–69. 66. Li to the Zongli Yamen, January 3, 1883, and the Ministry of Rites to the Zongli Yamen, January 18, 1883, in ZRHGX, 3:1072–75, 1085–88. 67. Chunggang t’ongsang changjŏng chogwan; Yŏ Chungguk wiwŏn hoesang sangse changjŏng . 68. ZRHGX, 3:1020–30; Hart to Campbell, no. 390, Z/100, December 10, 1882, in Fairbank, Bruner, and Matheson, I. G. in Peking, 436; Lensen, Balance of Intrigue, 1:31–53. 69. Frelinghuysen to Foote, no. 3, Washington, DC, March 17, 1883, in Korean-American Relations (hereafter KARD), 1:25–26. 70. Renchuan gangkou juan (hereafter RCGK), vol. 1, n.p. 71. Chen to Min Yŏng-muk, October 20, 1883, in HKMS, 8:5. 72. Yun, Yun Ch’i-ho ilgi, 1:14–16. 73. Li Hongzhang to the Zongli Yamen, January 2, 1884, in ZRHGX, 3:1314–15. 74. For the Korean mission of 1883 to the United States, see, for example, Walter, “Korean Special Mission.” 75. Hart to Campbell, no. 518, Z/212, March 23, 1885, in Fairbank, Bruner, and Matheson, I. G. in Peking, 590; the Zongli Yamen to Parkes, November 22, 1884, in ZRHGX, 3:1494.
76. Li Nairong to Chen Shutang, December 12, 1883, and Chen Shutang to Chen Weikun, December 20, 1883, in RCGK, vol. 1, n.p. 77. Chen to Min, February 7, 1884, in RCGK, vol. 2, n.p. 78. Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 109. 79. For Chinese immigrants and their activities in Korea after the 1870s, see Yang and Sun, Chaoxian huaqiao shi, 107–63. For a study of the Chinese merchants in Inch’ŏn and their influence on modern Korean and East Asian financial markets through the case of Tongshuntai, see Kang, Tongsunt’ae ho. Tongshuntai was founded by Cantonese merchants, and by the mid-1880s it had developed into a leading Chinese firm in Korea. It later served as a financial agency for the Chinese government. The firm finally ended its operations in Korea in September 1937 after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. See Kang, Tongsunt’ae ho, 59– 112, 280–81; Larsen , Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 263–66; Yang and Sun, Chaoxian huaqiao shi, 142–45. 80. The number of Chinese immigrants in Korea was 2,182 in 1893, 3,661 in 1906, and 11,818 in 1910. Chinese immigrants were far outnumbered by their Japa- nese counterparts. In 1892, for example, 1,805 Chinese and 9,340 Japanese were living in Hansŏng, Inch’ŏn, Pusan, and Wŏnsan. See Yang and Sun, Chaoxian huaqiao shi, 125–31. 81. Li Hongzhang to the Zongli Yamen, March 29, 1884, in ZRHGX, 3:1355–57. 82. Chen to Min, January 15, 1884, in HKMS, 8:21–22; Li to Chen, December 12, 1883, in RCGK, vol. 1, n.p. 83. Chen to Li, December 12, 1883, in RCGK, vol. 1, n.p. 84. Chen to Min, January 15, 1884, and Min to Chen, January 19, 1884, in HKMS, 8:21–23. 85. Chen to Min, March 7, 1884, in HKMS, 8:35–38. 86. Min to Chen and Chen to Min, December 14, 16, and 17, 1883, in HKMS, 8:14–15. 87. Li Shuchang to the Zongli Yamen, December 29, 1883, in ZRHGX, 3:1259. 88. See, for example, Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 2–17, 107–17. 89. Min to Chen, January 19, 1884, in HKMS, 8:23. 90. For the establishment of police forces in Inch’ŏn, see He, “Chaoxian bandao de Zhongguo zujie,” 31–34. 91. Note of Langzhong County to Nanbu County, June 4, 1883, in Sichuan sheng Nanchong shi dang’anguan, Qingdai Sichuan Nanbu xian yamen dang’an, 58:402. 92. Sichuan sheng Nanchong shi dang’anguan, Qingdai Sichuan Nanbu xian yamen dang’an, 58:403–23; Chen to Min, March 11, 1884, in HKMS, 8:40–42. 93. Min to Chen, March 15, 1884, in HKMS, 8:45. 6. LOSING CHOSOŎN 1. For the rise of the age of empires, see Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 56–83. 2. Luo and Liu, Yuan Shikai quanji, 1:34–46. 3. Ōkubo, Mori Arinori zenshū, 1:195. 4. Treaties, Conventions, etc ., 2:588–89. 5. Ma, Ma Xiangbo ji, 1091–96. 6. ZCSLHB, 259; ZRHGX, 4:1957.
7. This title was a downgrade, imposed by Congress in July 1884, from the original “envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary.” See Frederick Frel- inghuysen to Lucius Foote, no. 58, July 14, 1884, in KARD, 1:36. 8. Foulk to Thomas Bayard, no. 255, confidential, November 25, 1885, in KARD, 1:137–39. 9. Fisher, “Indirect Rule,” 393–401. 10. Lewis, Divided Rule, 24–26. 11. Hugh Dinsmore to Thomas Bayard, no. 20, May 27, 1887, and Augustine Heard to James Blaine, no. 29, confidential, July 10, 1890, in KARD, 2:11, 21. 12. Li Hongzhang to the Zongli Yamen, January 30, 1886, in ZRHGX, 4:2002–4. 13. For the Port Hamilton incident, see Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 173–76; Zhang, Zai chuantong yu xiandaixing, 201–27. 14. Yuan to Li, August 6, 1886, in LHZQJ, 22:77. 15. Li to Yuan, February 1, 1886, in LHZQJ, 21:655. 16. Hugh Dinsmore to Thomas Bayard, no. 20, May 27, 1887, in KARD, 2:12; Horace Allen to Walter Gresham, no. 469, October 6, 1893, and no. 479, confi- dential, November 4, 1893, in KARD, 2:93–98; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 192; Lensen, Balance of Intrigue, 1:92–93. 17. Da Ming huidian, 105:1b. The Ming conquered Annam in 1407 and divided it into fifteen prefectures, thirty-six subprefectures, and 181 counties, but it ended its colonial policy in 1428. See Guo and Zhang, Yuenan tongshi, 395–421. 18. He Ruzhang to the Zongli Yamen, November 18, 1880, in ZRHGX, 2:437–47; Li Shuchang to the Zongli Yamen, August 31, 1882, in ZRHGX, 3:836. 19. Zhang Jian quanji, 6:206–7. 20. Li to the Zongli Yamen, November 23, 1882, in ZRHGX, 3:1030–33. 21. Shengyu’s memorial, December 6, 1885, in ZRJSSL, 9:16b–18b. 22. Kang Youwei quanji, 1:394–96. 23. Zeng, “China,” 9. Zeng is referring here to the office of the Warden of the Marches of England against Scotland, which was created in 1309 in order to mon- itor and defend the marches (i.e., the border) of England and Scotland; see Reid, “Office of Warden.” 24. Swartout, American Adviser, 142. 25. See, for example, Lee, Diplomatic Relations, 52–124. 26. Dinsmore to Thomas Bayard, no. 20, May 27, 1887, in KARD, 2:11–13. 27. See Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 176–89; Zhang, Zai chuantong yu xiandaixing, 227–74. 28. Yuan to Cho Pyŏng-sik, October 21 and November 8, 1887, in HKMS, 8:382, 384. 29. HKMS, 10:317; ZRJSSL, 10:37a. 30. Allen, Things Korean, 163–64. 31. Zhang, Zhang Yinhuan riji, 244–50, 279. 32. Zhang Yinhuan’s palace memorial, March 6, 1888, in LFZZ, no. 3–5700–043. 33. Hart to Campbell, no. 651, Z/342, June 3, 1888, in Fairbank, Bruner, and Matheson, I. G. in Peking, 705. 34. 50 Cong. Rec. 8136 (August 31, 1888); italics in the original.
35. Dinsmore to Thomas Bayard, no. 20, May 27, 1887, in KARD, 2:12. 36. Foulk to Frederick Frelinghuysen, no. 229, October 10, 1884, in FRUS 1885–’86, 326. Foulk described the stele: “The front of the stone is closely filled en- tirely with an inscription deeply cut in what I took to be Manchu Tartar script characters; these closely resemble Sanscrit or Pali characters, but they are written in vertical lines, beginning on the left. Over the body of the inscription is a title line written horizontally from left to right. On the back of the stone is another inscrip- tion only partly covering it, in Chinese square characters” (326). 37. Rockhill, “Korea in Its Relations with China,” 1. 38. Rockhill, “Korea in Its Relations with China,” 1–2. 39. Min Chong-muk to Yuan, June 4, 1890, and Yuan to Min and Li Hongzhang, June 5, 1890, in Qinshi fengming qianlai ciji Chaoxian guowang mufei juan (hereafter QSCJ), n.p. 40. Yuan to Li Hongzhang, May 16, 1890, in ZRJSSL, 11:31a. 41. Yuan to Heard, June 5, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p. 42. Yuan to Li, June 6, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p. 43. Yuan to Li, June 6, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p; Li to the Zongli Yamen, June 13, 1890, in ZRHGX, 5:2785. 44. Li to Yuan, and Yuan to Chinese commercial commissioners in Chosŏn, June 6, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p. 45. Min Chong-muk to Yuan, June 10, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p. 46. Yuan to Heard, September 30, 1890, and Kim Yŏngsu to Yuan, October 11, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p. 47. Heard to Yuan, October 11, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p. 48. Heard to James Blaine, no. 13, June 7, 1890, in KARD, 2:124–26. 49. LHZQJ, 23:102–5. 50. For the 1890 imperial mission to Korea, see Okamoto, “ Fengshi Chaoxian riji zhi yanjiu”; Van Lieu, “Politics of Condolence.” Van Lieu’s study also reveals the significant influence of the Chinese propaganda movement following the 1890 mission on Western historiography of Chosŏn-Qing relations; see Van Lieu, “Politics of Condolence,” 103–10. 51. LHZQJ, 23:69–75. 52. Chongli, Fengshi Chaoxian riji, 2b–3a. 53. Shihan jilue, 3–7. 54. Li to Yuan, October 12, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p. 55. Chongli, Fengshi Chaoxian riji, 12b–13b. 56. Notes on the Imperial Chinese Mission, 8. 57. Ch’iksa ilgi, 19:1a–6a. 58. Chongli, Fengshi Chaoxian riji, 17b–18a. 59. Chongli, Fengshi Chaoxian riji, 26b–27a. 60. China Imperial Maritime Customs Decennial Reports, app. 2, 42.
61. Shihan jilue, 22–26. 62. Ch’iksa ilgi, 19:11a–12a. 63. For defenses of this argument, see Okamoto, Sekai no naka no Nitsu-Shin-Kan, 15–28; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 190–91; Van Lieu, “Politics of Condolence.” 64. Augustine Heard to James Blaine, no. 89, confidential, November 19, 1890, in KARD, 2:35. 65. Treat, “China and Korea,” 506–43. 66. See, for example, Nelson, Korea and the Old Orders, 175–80; Lin, Yuan Shikai yu Chaoxian, 137–321; Kim, Last Phase, 350; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 128–73; Zhang, Zai chuantong yu xiandaixing, 192–201. But Larsen has critically pointed out that “Yuan represented only one strand of Qing imperial strategy in Chosŏn Korea, and often not the most influential one at that”; see Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 173. 67. Chongli, Fengshi Chaoxian riji, 54b–55a. 68. China Imperial Maritime Customs Decennial Reports, app. 2, 42. 69. Nelson, Korea and the Old Orders, 202. 70. Chongli, Fengshi Chaoxian riji, 55b–60b. 71. Nie, Dongyou jicheng, 547–53. 72. Qi, Zhong-Ri zhanzheng (hereafter ZRZZ), 1:16. 73. ZRZZ, 1:23–24. 74. ZRZZ, 1:33–35. 75. QSL (Guangxu), 56:396. 76. ZRZZ, 1:61. 77. ZRZZ, 1:45–48. 78. ZRZZ, 1:155. 79. ZRZZ, 1:146–52, 199; Hong Liangpin’s memorial, August 10, 1894, in LFZZ, no. 3–167–9115–5. 80. Qinggong zhencang lishi Dalai Lama dang’an, 387–88. 81. NHGB, 28(2):373. 82. ZRZZ, 3:188. 83. ZRZZ, 3:290. 84. Ilsŏngnok, 79:209; Koketsu, “Ni-Shin kaisen”; Em, Great Enterprise, 21–52. 85. Wang Wenshao to the Zongli Yamen, July 12, 1896, in ZRHGX, 8:4856–57. 86. The Zongli Yamen’s memorial, July 27, 1896, in ZRHGX, 8:4871–74. 87. Wang Wenshao to the Zongli Yamen, August 7, 1896, in ZRHGX, 8:4899–900. 88. The Zongli Yamen’s memorial, November 20, 1896, in ZRHGX, 8:4968. 89. In 1905 Tang Shaoyi brought his Korean experience to the treaty negotiations with Britain over Tibet; see Lu, Xizang jiaoshe jiyao, 17–20; Tang’s telegrams to
Beijing, July 2, July 14, and August 21, 1905, in Waiwu bu Xizang dang, 02–16–001–06–061/066, 02–16–003–01–007. 90. Tang Shaoyi to the Zongli Yamen, March 13, 1897, in ZRHGX, 8:4989. 91. Schmid, Korea between Empires, 11, 55–100. 92. Ilsŏngnok, 80:161–63; Lensen, Balance of Intrigue, 2:644–46. 93. ZRJSSL, 51:21a, 35b, 36b. 94. ZRJSSL, 51:40. 95. ZRJSSL, 52:1a–2b. 96. ZRJSSL, 52:2b. 97. Mao, “Wuxu bianfa,” 45. 98. Tang Shaoyi to the Zongli Yamen, August 28, 1898, in ZRHGX, 8:5146–48. 99. Zhang, Zhang Yinhuan riji, 549. 100. Mao, “Wuxu bianfa,” 48. 101. Zhongguo shixue hui, Zhongguo jindaishi ziliao congkan, Wuxu bianfa, 4:325–26. 102. Zhang, Zhang Yinhuan riji, 554. 103. ZRJSSL, 52:7a. 104. Imperial decree, October 11, 1898, in ZRHGX, 8:5160. 105. Xu Shoupeng to the Zongli Yamen, December 4, 1898, in ZRHGX, 8:5179. 106. Wu, “Chaoxian sanzhong xu,” 1. 107. Xu’s memorial, March 5, 1899, in ZRHGX, 8:5200; Han Ch’ŏng ŭiyak kongdok, 11–12. 108. Xu’s memorial, July 19, 1899, in ZRJSSL, 52:38a–38b. 109. ZRHGX, 8:5246–47. 110. Giwadan jihen ni kanshi Kankoku kōtei. 111. HKMS, 9:534. 112. GXZP, 112:342–43. 113. ZRHGX, 8:5556. 114. GXZP, 112:332–33. 115. GXZP, 112:339. 116. GXZP, 112:241–42, 344–57. 117. Zhao Erxun quanzong dang’an, no. 125–2. 118. Chen Zuoyan’s report, March 1901, in ZRHGX, 9:5839–44. 119. The Manchu general of Jilin to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, July 29, 1903, in ZRHGX, 9:5680–82; Zhang Zhaolin’s report, fall 1903, in ZRHGX, 9:5849–81. 120. Zhao Erxun quanzong dang’an, no. 125.
121. For the issue of Kando/Jiandao, see Song, Making Borders . 122. Kim, “Pugyŏ yosŏn,” 253; Wu, Yanji bianwu baogao, chap. 4, 1–2. 123. Yuan Shikai to Li Hongzhang, August 30, 1890, in ZRHGX, 9:5703–5. 124. For the regulation, see ZRHGX, 9:5952–53. 125. Wu, Yanji bianwu baogao, chap. 4, 11. 126. Tang and Sang, Dai Jitao ji, 29. 127. Xiliang to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, September 8 and 17, 1910, in ZRHGX, 10:7119, 7127. For the full text of the Da Qing guoji tiaoli issued on March 28, 1909, see Ding, “Qingmo yixing guoji guanli tiaoli.” 128. Zhao to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, August 15, 1911, in ZRHGX, 10:7202. CONCLUSION 1. China Mission Year Book, 1912, app. C, 17. 2. Wang and Wan, Chaoxian diaocha ji; Chen, Diaocha Chaoxian shiye baogao . 3. Chaoxian wenjian lu, 2–3. 4. See Goldstein, History of Modern Tibet, 638–813; van Schaik, Tibet, 207–69. 5. Chang, Waimeng zhuquan, 269–303. 6. See, for example, Fiskesjö, “Rescuing the Empire”; Carlson, “Reimagining the Frontier”; Liu, Recast All under Heaven, 3–18, 171–241. 7. For an example, see Rawski, Early Modern China, 235–63. 8. Zhonghua guochi ditu . 9. Zhongyang ribao, Nanjing, March 15, 1930, in Hu, Hanguo duli yundong, 303. 10. Ji, Mao Zedong shici, 546. 11. For the relationship between Mao’s “Central Kingdom” mentality and China’s decision to enter the Korean War, see Chen, China’s Road, 213–20. For the ef- fect of this mentality on the Sino-Korean demarcation in Manchuria, see Shen, Saigo no tenchō, 2:144–47. 12. Shen, Saigo no tenchō, 2:181–82.
Notes The following abbreviations are used in the notes: INTRODUCTION
1. Sohyŏn Simyang ilgi, 354. Please see the bibliography for translations of non-English titles.
2. Ŭpchi P’yŏngan do p’yŏn, 531–32; Chosŏn wangjo sillok (hereafter cited as WJSL) (Sukchong), 40:552.
3. There is no scholarly consensus on a generic term to describe the Sinocentric political arrangements of late imperial times. I adopt the term Zongfan, as explained in the following sections of this chapter and in the next chapter. Among modern sources, my use of Zongfan primarily follows Shao Xunzheng in his Zhong-Fa-Yuenan guanxi and Chang Tsun-wu in his Qing-Han Zongfan maoyi. Some scholars have also used Zongfan as an interpretive lens in their studies of the relationship between the Qing and Inner Asia; see, for example, Zha, Qingdai Xizang yu Bulukeba. For some recent works on the Sinocentric foreign-relations system from an East Asian perspective, see, for example, Chen, Zhongguo chuantong duiwai guanxi; Huang, Songdai chaogong tixi; Kim, Han-Chung kwan’gye sa; Lee, China’s Hegemony; Li, Chaogong zhidu shilun; and Sun, Qingdai Zhong-Yue Zongfan guanxi. For the discrepancy between this Sinocentric system and the Western understanding of it, see Chang, Dongxi guoji zhixu yuanli, 54–57; Chang, Qing-Han Zongfan maoyi, 2–15; Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, 9–15; Larsen, Comforting Fictions; Nelson, Korea and the Old Orders, 288–97; Okamoto, Sō shuken no sekaishi, 90–118; Shao, Zhong-Fa-Yuenan guanxi, 37–38; Song, ‘Tributary’ from a Multilateral and Multi-layered Perspective; Wills, Tribute, Defensiveness, and Dependency; Zhang, Rethinking the ‘Tribute System,’ Zhou, Equilibrium Analysis. For a review of the literature on the tributary system and Korea, see Wang, Co-constructing Empire, 28–43.
4. In Chinese history, Zhengtong has two major intellectual sources: the circulation of the Five Virtues (Ch., Wude, namely, earth, wood, metal, fire, and water), a theory put forward by Zou Yan (ca. 305–240 BC), and the great unification raised by scholars of the Tang and Song Dynasties based on their interpretations of the classic Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals (Ch., Chunqiu Gongyang zhuan). The former was used in a temporal sense and the latter in spatial and politico-cultural senses. Since the Mongolian conquest of the Song in the thirteenth century, Zhengtong was principally bound with the great unification; see Rao, Zhongguo shixue, 12–26, 81–86. Both the Mongols of the Yuan and the Manchus of the Qing based the orthodox legitimacy of their dynasties on the ideology of the great unification. For the influence of Zhengtong on the historiographical tradition and politics in late imperial China, see Liu, Zhengtong yu Hua–Yi; for a similar influence in Tokugawa Japan, see Koschmann, Mito Ideology. For more details on the Qing and Chosŏn Korea in this regard, see the following chapters of this book.
7. For discussions on the story of Jizi/Kija, see, for example, Kim, Han-Chung kwan’gye sa, 1:87–103; Wang, Co-constructing Empire, 342–96; Miao, Jishi Chaoxian wenti. For the unified Chinese dynasties’ perception of Korea, see Haboush, Contesting Chinese Time, 118.
14. See, for example, Yun, Rethinking the Tribute System, 6–17.
15. For more discussion on the complexity of outer fan under the Qing, see chapter 2. On the Qing-Siamese case, see Chuang, Xianluo guowang ; Mancall, Ch’ing Tribute System; Masuda, Fall of Ayutthaya.
19. For the former, see Huang, Chaoxian de ruhua; for the latter, see Em, Great Enterprise, 23–24; Larsen, Comforting Fictions; Lee, China’s Hegemony; Lim, Tributary Relations.
20. For recent research on the relationship between the civilized–barbarian discourse and identity in early modern East Asia, see Chang, Han’guk esŏ taejungguk kwannyŏm; Fuma, Chōsen enkōshi, 38–43, 328–90; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 35–42; Rawski, Early Modern China, 188–224; Sun, Da Ming qihao; Wang, Xiao Zhonghua; Yamauchi, Chōsen kara mita Ka–I .
22. Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, 8; Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 27. For the rise of empire in Chinese history, see Puett, Ambivalence of Creation, 141–76.
28. Grosier, General Description of China, 244; Curzon, Problems of the Far East, 158.
29. Guo and Zhang, Yuenan tongshi, 413–61; Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model, 9–10, 18–22. For the independent status of Vietnam in the Ming period, see Baldanza, Ming China and Vietnam, 77–110.
31. Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, Ming Qing shiliao, ser. 7, 5:491b. For China’s modern diplomacy, see Kawashima, Chū goku kindai gaikō no keisei; Li, Zhongguo jindai waijiaoguan; Okamoto and Kawashima, Chū goku kindai gaikō no taidō ; Rudolph, Negotiated Power. For Korea’s modern diplomacy, see Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade; Mori, Chōsen gaikō no kindai .
33. For the politics of time inscription in Korea during the Qing, see Haboush, Contesting Chinese Time, 128–33.
34. For the Qing’s cartographic survey and its significance, see Kicengge, Nibcu tiaoyue jiebei tu; Li, Ji Kangxi ‘Huangyu quanlan tu’; Perdue, Boundaries, Maps, and Movement. For the Qing-Annam and Qing-Chosŏn juridical negotiations, see Kim, The Rule of Ritual. For a study of Chosŏn’s perception of borders and Qing power from 1636 to 1912, see Kim, Ginseng and Borderland .
35. For the Sino-Korean demarcation negotiations, see Chang, Qingdai Zhong-Han bianwu; Kim, Han-Chung kwan’gye sa, 2:885–95; Ledyard, Cartography in Korea; Li, Cho-Ch’ŏng kukgyŏng munje yŏn’gu; Song, Making Borders .
48. For the term outlying province, see Zeng (the Marquis Tseng), China, 9.
49. Schmid, Korea between Empires, 11, 55–100, 257–60.
50. See, for example, Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 56–83; Cohen, Discovering History in China, 97–147; Hevia, English Lessons, 4–26; Iriye, Imperialism in East Asia; Rowe, China’s Last Empire, 231–43; Westad, Restless Empire, 53–86.
52. Hu, Diguo zhuyi; Scott, China and the International System .
53. For the paradigm of New Qing history, see Millward et al., New Qing Imperial History; Waley-Cohen, New Qing History. For interpretations of the Qing empire from an Inner Asian and ethnic perspective, see, for example, Crossley, Manchus; Crossley, Translucent Mirror; Crossley, Siu, and Sutton, Empire at the Margins; Elliott, Manchu Way .
54. See, for example, Di Cosmo, Qing Colonial Administration; Herman, Empires in the Southwest; Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar; Hevia, English Lessons, 18, 166–174; Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Kim, Borderland Capitalism; Millward, Beyond the Pass; Perdue, China Marches West .
55. Kim Kwangmin has pointed out that the dual expansions of European maritime commerce in the Indian Ocean and Chinese power in Xinjiang in the eighteenth century changed the economic and political landscapes of Central Asia significantly. See Kim, Borderland Capitalism, 45.
57. See, for example, Lee, Diplomatic Relations, 136–42; Kim, Chinese Imperialism in Korea; Deuchler, Confucian Gentlemen, 220; Kim, Last Phase, 348; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 11–19. For the term informal empire, see Gallagher and Robinson, Imperialism of Free Trade.
59. As R. Bin Wong points out, The absence of apparent change suggests the reproduction of a set of relationships or conditions. See Wong, China Transformed, 3.
60. As Peter I. Yun has argued, In reality, each state was guided in its foreign policy formulation by the principles of realism and pragmatism. It is necessary to examine actual political motives and imperatives such as trade, cultural imports, and especially the issue of border security. See Yun, Rethinking the Tribute System, 6. In his examination of the Qing’s frontier policy, Matthew W. Mosca emphasizes that there were no absolute policy differences distinguishing the empire’s borderlands. Rather, it was the nature of the threat perceived that guided the empire’s foreign policy choices. See Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy, 8. 1. CONQUERING CHOSOŎN
30. QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:171. For laichao, see Chun, Tongyang kodaesa; Fairbank, Tributary Trade.
31. For the issue of the tributes and Ming China’s and the Central Asian states’ different understandings of their relationship, see Fletcher, China and Central Asia.
35. For Nurhaci’s and Hongtaiji’s construction of Manchu imperial authority and their integration of multiethnic subjects for a new identity under the Manchu regime, see Crossley, Translucent Mirror, 177–85.
36. Farquhar, Origins, 199–200; Perdue, China Marches West, 122–27.
37. See Ho, In Defense of Sinicization; Rawski, Reenvisioning the Qing; Huang, Reorienting the Manchus .
67. QSL (Shunzhi), 3:995. The practice of dividing cogongrass, which was recorded in The Classic of History as dividing soil and cogongrass, refers to a part of the Zhou Zongfan investiture ritual in which the Son of Heaven endowed the vassals with some soil from his ancestral shrine and the soil was wrapped in white cogongrass. The vassals would then use the soil for their own ancestral shrines on their own lands.
68. See Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming, March 6, 1725; the King’s memorial dated August 28, 1735, in Neige waijiao zhuan’an, Chaoxian (hereafter WJZA), no. 564–2–190–4.
78. See Wills, Embassies and Illusions, 173; Smith, Mapping China. Iwai Shigeki argues that the practice of foreigners paying homage to China (J., chōkō; Ch., chaogong) began to be incorporated into the Sino-foreign trade system (J., goshi; Ch., hushi) after 1380, when the Ming abolished the Maritime Trade Superintendency (Ch., Shibo si), a longstanding institution for managing maritime trade, and that this policy endured until 1684, when Emperor Kangxi resumed maritime trade. See Iwai, Chōkō to goshi. Danjo Hiroshi emphasizes the same change in the Ming period; see Danjo, Mindai kaikin, 181–82, 336–37.
85. Wang, Santiandu, 290–96. For recent discussions about the Samjŏndo stele, see Koo, Ch’ŏng nara, 44–47; Bae, Chosŏn kwa Chunghwa, 33–65. In 2007, the 370th anniversary of Chosŏn’s surrender to the Manchus in 1637, a Korean nationalist painted ch’ŏlgŏ Pyŏngja 370 in large characters on the stele (ch’ŏlgŏ means remove), demonstrating the event’s strong psychological impact on modern Korean nationalism.
91. For Manchu-Mongol relations during this period, see Elverskog, Our Great Qing, 27–39. 2. BARBARIANIZING CHOSOŎN
1. For the post-Ming process of decentering China among China’s neighbors, see Haboush, Constructing the Center; Rawski, Early Modern China, 1–10, 225–34.
12. For example, the MBRT, the most important historical record of pre-1644 Manchu history, did not refer to the Manchu regime as abkai gurun. For this subtle philological explanation, I am also grateful to two prestigious archivists and scholars, Wu Yuanfeng at the First Historical Archives of China and Zhao Zhiqiang at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, whose mother tongue is Xibo, which is almost identical to Manchu.
26. See, for example, Da Qing huidian (1764), vols. 79–80; LBZL, vols. 171–87; Lifan yuan zeli, vol. 16. John King Fairbank and S. Y. Têng have also argued that the way in which the Qing controlled and managed these Mongol tribes was all in the traditional forms of the tributary relationship; see Fairbank and Têng, On the Ch’ing Tributary System, 158–63. Recent scholarship has complicated this picture by examining how the Manchu and Mongol sides perceived each other’s positions in the Qing-led empire; see Elverskog, Our Great Qing, 23–39.
28. See, for example, QSL (Yongzheng), 8:388; Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, Qingdai Junjichu manwen aocha dang, 1:1123, 2:1476; Xizang dang’an, files 34–74; Da Qing huidian (1764), 80:26a.
29. Mark Mancall also points out that after 1644 the Mongolian Superintendency used rites and forms of the traditional Confucian Chinese system to conduct relations with the ‘barbarians’; see Mancall, Ch’ing Tribute System, 72–73.
30. LBZL, 171:1–14, 172:1–22, 181:1–7, 184:1–6, 185:1–3, 186:1–5. For the classic discussion on the regulations, see Fairbank, Preliminary Framework, 10–11; Fairbank and Têng, On the Ch’ing Tributary System, 163–73.
33. For the Qing’s expansion to the southwest, see Herman, Empires in the Southwest; Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Gong, Ming Qing Yunnan tusi; Li, Qingdai tusi zhidu .
35. Da Ming huidian, 105:1b; Da Qing huidian (1899), 39:2a–3a.
36. Da Qing huidian (1764), 56:1a–2b; LBZL, vols. 171–80; Da Qing huidian (1899), 39:2a–3a. The successive changes to the list over the course of the Qing period are highlighted by the five editions of Da Qing huidian (issued in 1690, 1732, 1764, 1818, and 1899, respectively). See Fairbank and Têng, On the Ch’ing Tributary System, 174; Banno, Kindai Chū goku seiji gaikō shi, 87.
37. Da Qing huidian (1764), 80:1a, 10b. Peter C. Perdue argues that this claim was as much mythical as real; see Perdue, China Marches West, 527.
38. LBZL, vols. 172–77. Siam sent emissaries once every three years until 1839 and once every four years thereafter.
40. TMHG, 2:1700–1744; Ch’ŏng sŏn go, 2:404–502; Chang, Qing-Han Zongfan maoyi, 18–19; Liu, Qingdai Zhong-Chao shizhe, 154–251. In practice, the Korean tributary emissaries simultaneously gathered intelligence on the Qing and reported their findings to the king after they returned home in attachments to their palace memorials (K., p’iltam). Their intelligence-gathering activities helped the Korean court understand the dynamics of the Qing’s domestic and international situation. For p’iltam from 1639 to 1862, see Tongmun koryak, 3:405–530. For a specific case of intelligence gathering, see Ding, 18 segi ch’o Chosŏn yŏnhaengsa.
70. See Chuang, Xianluo guowang; Mancall, Ch’ing Tribute System; Masuda, Fall of Ayutthaya.
71. Rockhill, Korea in Its Relations with China, 2.
72. See, for example, LFZZ, nos. 3–163–7729–16/17/26/27/29/31/33/45/46; for more on the Korean tributes, see Qingdai Zhong-Chao guanxi dang’an shiliao huibian (hereafter ZCSLHB); Qingdai Zhong-Chao guanxi dang’an shiliao xubian (hereafter ZCSLXB).
79. As JaHyun Kim Haboush points out in the context of seventeenth-century Korea, In the cultural matrix of the time, ritual was seen as the manifestation of order as well as a means through which order was preserved and restored. See Haboush, Constructing the Center, 70–71.
125. Pritchard, Anglo - Chinese Relations, 133–43.
126. These reports can be found in ZCSLXB and ZCSLHB. As chapter 6 shows, in the 1900s Chinese provincial governors were still submitting similar reports
to Beijing.
127. For tianchao tizhi, see Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, Qingdai Zhong-Liu guanxi dang’an xubian, 723.
25. The rules of Qing bureaucracy contributed to this paradox. The Ministry of Rites, describing the Koreans’ meeting with the Panchen Erdeni in a memorial to the emperor, simply fabricated its account, saying that after receiving the gifts from the Panchen, the Koreans immediately performed kowtow to show their gratitude. See Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 3:91b.
36. Some modern scholars have argued that the man who presented himself at the border was not Nguyễn Huệ himself but rather a double; see Lam, Intervention versus Tribute in Sino-Vietnamese Relations. In any case, what mattered to Beijing was that Annam’s sovereign demonstrated subordination to Qing authority.
38. QSL (Qianlong), 26:174–75. By rendering the phrase fengjian shizhong as centering, James Hevia, in his study of the Macartney mission, may have given the phrase a more extended meaning; see Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, 123.
11. See, for example, Curzon, Problems of the Far East, 144–45.
12. Tamura, Ejiputo kenkyu; Em, Great Enterprise, 30.
13. Wheaton, Wanguo gongfa, 1:25a–28b; 2:2b–3a; Wheaton, Elements of International Law, 44–50, 79.
14. Nelson, Korea and the Old Orders, 289; Westad, Restless Empire, 81–82.
15. Aihanzhe, ed., Dong Xi-yang kao meiyue tongji zhuan, 91–92. Aihanzhe, literally people loving China, might refer to a group of missionaries who were active in South China near Guangdong. For Gützlaff’s contribution to the Chinese norms discussed here, see Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy, 218–19.
16. See Edward Hertslet, Memorandum respecting Corea, December 19, 1882, in Korea, the Ryukyu Islands, and North-East Asia, 2–3; Frederick Low to
Hamilton Fish, November 23, 1871, in Davids, American Diplomatic and Public Papers (hereafter ADPP), 9:184; Mori Arinori to the Zongli Yamen, January 15, 1876, in ZRHGX, 2:270.
34. See Le Gendre’s letter on June 21, 1867, in Rishi shokan, Japan Center for Asian Historical Records (hereafter JACAR), ref. no. A03030060500. For Admiral Bell’s expedition against the aborigines, see Carrington, Foreigners in Formosa, 156–57.
43. See Yen, Taiwan, 159–74; Mayo, Korean Crisis of 1873, 802–5.
44. Li’s palace memorial, May 3, 1873, in LHZQJ, 5:346–47.
45. Wade to Earl Granville, no. 118, confidential, May 15, 1873; no. 131, May 25, 1873; no. 143, June 4, 1873, in Foreign Office Record Group 17, China
49. Soejima to Sanjō, June 29, 1873, in NHGB, 6:160.
50. Tada, Iwakurakō jikki, 3:46–90; Mayo, Korean Crisis of 1873.
51. In Tokyo, the British minister, Harry Parkes, clearly told the Japanese foreign minister, Terashima Munenori, I really am not aware whether the territory in question is or is not beyond the jurisdiction of the Chinese Government. During a residence of upwards of twenty years in China, I always heard that the whole of Formosa was claimed by China. See Parkes to Terashima, April 16, 1874, in NHGB, 7:37.
68. Mori to Terashima, February 3, 1876, in NHGB, 9:170–76; Li to the Zongli Yamen, January 23–24, 1876, in LHZQJ, 31:334–42.
69. Mori’s original English report of the meeting on January 24 is missing, but the Japanese translation by the Gaimushō is still available in Tokyo; see JACAR, ref. no. B03030144000; Mori to Terashima, February 3, 1876, in NHGB, 9:170–76.
70. Li to the Zongli Yamen, January 23, 1876, in LHZQJ, 31:340; NHGB, 9:172.
71. Mori, The Second Interview, JACAR, ref. no. B03030144000.
81. For affirmations of this view, see, for example, ADPP, 10:66–77; British Parliamentary Papers, Japan, 9–10; Deuchler, Confucian Gentlemen, 47; Hua, Zhongguo bianjiang, 121; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 63; Morse, International Relations, 3:8. For challenges to it, see Hsü, China and Her Political Entity, 109–10; Kim, Last Phase, 252.
83. Bingham to Fish, dispatch 364, March 22, 1876, in ADPP, 10:66–77; Parkes to Earl of Derby, no. 13, March 25 and 27, 1876, in British Parliamentary Papers, Japan, 9–11, 17.
84. For a review of Korea’s modern sovereignty, see Em, Great Enterprise, 21–84.
85. Mori Arinori bunsho, R. 2–68. 5. SUPERVISING CHOSOŎN
1. Yi to Li, December 24, 1879, in ZRHGX, 2:398–401.
4. Shufeldt to R. W. Thompson, dispatch 21, August 30, 1880, in ADPP, 10:102–5; Li to Yu, August 28, 1880, in LHZQJ, 32:585; Paullin, Opening of Korea, 483.
42. Li Shuchang to Yoshida, August 9 and 12, 1882, in NHGB, 15:164–65.
43. Inoue’s conversations with Boissonade, August 9 and 13, 1882, in NHGB, 15:169– 73; Boissonade tōgi, 140–62. For the Anglo-French joint action against the Egyptian revolt and the British conquest of Egypt in 1882, see Reid, Urabi Revolution.
44. Hart to James Duncan Campbell, no. 370, Z/83, August 10, 1882, in Fairbank, Bruner, and Matheson, I. G. in Peking, 417.
45. For the African case, see Lewis, Divided Rule, 14–16.
46. Zhang Shusheng to the Zongli Yamen, August 9, 1882, in ZRHGX, 2:773; Li Shuchang to the Zongli Yamen, August 31, 1882, in ZRHGX, 3:836.
47. For the influence of virtue on China’s statecraft, see Wang, Early Ming Relations, 42–45.
60. See Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 72–94. According to Larsen, the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations constitute the first time that the Qing Empire proactively sought to promote Chinese commercial interests beyond its borders through the use of treaties and international law (90).
68. ZRHGX, 3:1020–30; Hart to Campbell, no. 390, Z/100, December 10, 1882, in Fairbank, Bruner, and Matheson, I. G. in Peking, 436; Lensen, Balance of Intrigue, 1:31–53.
69. Frelinghuysen to Foote, no. 3, Washington, DC, March 17, 1883, in Korean-American Relations (hereafter KARD), 1:25–26.
70. Renchuan gangkou juan (hereafter RCGK), vol. 1, n.p.
71. Chen to Min Yŏng-muk, October 20, 1883, in HKMS, 8:5.
73. Li Hongzhang to the Zongli Yamen, January 2, 1884, in ZRHGX, 3:1314–15.
74. For the Korean mission of 1883 to the United States, see, for example, Walter, Korean Special Mission.
75. Hart to Campbell, no. 518, Z/212, March 23, 1885, in Fairbank, Bruner, and Matheson, I. G. in Peking, 590; the Zongli Yamen to Parkes, November 22, 1884, in ZRHGX, 3:1494.
76. Li Nairong to Chen Shutang, December 12, 1883, and Chen Shutang to Chen Weikun, December 20, 1883, in RCGK, vol. 1, n.p.
77. Chen to Min, February 7, 1884, in RCGK, vol. 2, n.p.
79. For Chinese immigrants and their activities in Korea after the 1870s, see Yang and Sun, Chaoxian huaqiao shi, 107–63. For a study of the Chinese merchants in Inch’ŏn and their influence on modern Korean and East Asian financial markets through the case of Tongshuntai, see Kang, Tongsunt’ae ho. Tongshuntai was founded by Cantonese merchants, and by the mid-1880s it had developed into a leading Chinese firm in Korea. It later served as a financial agency for the Chinese government. The firm finally ended its operations in Korea in September 1937 after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. See Kang, Tongsunt’ae ho, 59–112, 280–81; Larsen , Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 263–66; Yang and Sun, Chaoxian huaqiao shi, 142–45.
80. The number of Chinese immigrants in Korea was 2,182 in 1893, 3,661 in 1906, and 11,818 in 1910. Chinese immigrants were far outnumbered by their Japanese counterparts. In 1892, for example, 1,805 Chinese and 9,340 Japanese were living in Hansŏng, Inch’ŏn, Pusan, and Wŏnsan. See Yang and Sun, Chaoxian huaqiao shi, 125–31.
81. Li Hongzhang to the Zongli Yamen, March 29, 1884, in ZRHGX, 3:1355–57.
82. Chen to Min, January 15, 1884, in HKMS, 8:21–22; Li to Chen, December 12, 1883, in RCGK, vol. 1, n.p.
83. Chen to Li, December 12, 1883, in RCGK, vol. 1, n.p.
84. Chen to Min, January 15, 1884, and Min to Chen, January 19, 1884, in HKMS, 8:21–23.
90. For the establishment of police forces in Inch’ŏn, see He, Chaoxian bandao de Zhongguo zujie, 31–34.
91. Note of Langzhong County to Nanbu County, June 4, 1883, in Sichuan sheng Nanchong shi dang’anguan, Qingdai Sichuan Nanbu xian yamen dang’an, 58:402.
92. Sichuan sheng Nanchong shi dang’anguan, Qingdai Sichuan Nanbu xian yamen dang’an, 58:403–23; Chen to Min, March 11, 1884, in HKMS, 8:40–42.
93. Min to Chen, March 15, 1884, in HKMS, 8:45. 6. LOSING CHOSOŎN
1. For the rise of the age of empires, see Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 56–83.
7. This title was a downgrade, imposed by Congress in July 1884, from the original envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary. See Frederick Frelinghuysen to Lucius Foote, no. 58, July 14, 1884, in KARD, 1:36.
8. Foulk to Thomas Bayard, no. 255, confidential, November 25, 1885, in KARD, 1:137–39.
15. Li to Yuan, February 1, 1886, in LHZQJ, 21:655.
16. Hugh Dinsmore to Thomas Bayard, no. 20, May 27, 1887, in KARD, 2:12; Horace Allen to Walter Gresham, no. 469, October 6, 1893, and no. 479, confidential, November 4, 1893, in KARD, 2:93–98; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 192; Lensen, Balance of Intrigue, 1:92–93.
17. Da Ming huidian, 105:1b. The Ming conquered Annam in 1407 and divided it into fifteen prefectures, thirty-six subprefectures, and 181 counties, but it ended its colonial policy in 1428. See Guo and Zhang, Yuenan tongshi, 395–421.
18. He Ruzhang to the Zongli Yamen, November 18, 1880, in ZRHGX, 2:437–47; Li Shuchang to the Zongli Yamen, August 31, 1882, in ZRHGX, 3:836.
23. Zeng, China, 9. Zeng is referring here to the office of the Warden of the Marches of England against Scotland, which was created in 1309 in order to monitor and defend the marches (i.e., the border) of England and Scotland; see Reid, Office of Warden.
32. Zhang Yinhuan’s palace memorial, March 6, 1888, in LFZZ, no. 3–5700–043.
33. Hart to Campbell, no. 651, Z/342, June 3, 1888, in Fairbank, Bruner, and Matheson, I. G. in Peking, 705.
34. 50 Cong. Rec. 8136 (August 31, 1888); italics in the original.
35. Dinsmore to Thomas Bayard, no. 20, May 27, 1887, in KARD, 2:12.
36. Foulk to Frederick Frelinghuysen, no. 229, October 10, 1884, in FRUS 1885–’86, 326. Foulk described the stele: The front of the stone is closely filled entirely with an inscription deeply cut in what I took to be Manchu Tartar script characters; these closely resemble Sanscrit or Pali characters, but they are written in vertical lines, beginning on the left. Over the body of the inscription is a title line written horizontally from left to right. On the back of the stone is another inscription only partly covering it, in Chinese square characters (326).
37. Rockhill, Korea in Its Relations with China, 1.
38. Rockhill, Korea in Its Relations with China, 1–2.
39. Min Chong-muk to Yuan, June 4, 1890, and Yuan to Min and Li Hongzhang, June 5, 1890, in Qinshi fengming qianlai ciji Chaoxian guowang mufei juan (hereafter QSCJ), n.p.
40. Yuan to Li Hongzhang, May 16, 1890, in ZRJSSL, 11:31a.
50. For the 1890 imperial mission to Korea, see Okamoto, " Fengshi Chaoxian riji zhi yanjiu; Van Lieu, Politics of Condolence. Van Lieu’s study also reveals the significant influence of the Chinese propaganda movement following the 1890 mission on Western historiography of Chosŏn-Qing relations; see Van Lieu, Politics of Condolence," 103–10.
63. For defenses of this argument, see Okamoto, Sekai no naka no Nitsu-Shin-Kan, 15–28; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 190–91; Van Lieu, Politics of Condolence.
64. Augustine Heard to James Blaine, no. 89, confidential, November 19, 1890, in KARD, 2:35.
66. See, for example, Nelson, Korea and the Old Orders, 175–80; Lin, Yuan Shikai yu Chaoxian, 137–321; Kim, Last Phase, 350; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 128–73; Zhang, Zai chuantong yu xiandaixing, 192–201. But Larsen has critically pointed out that Yuan represented only one strand of Qing imperial strategy in Chosŏn Korea, and often not the most influential one at that; see Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 173.
84. Ilsŏngnok, 79:209; Koketsu, Ni-Shin kaisen; Em, Great Enterprise, 21–52.
85. Wang Wenshao to the Zongli Yamen, July 12, 1896, in ZRHGX, 8:4856–57.
86. The Zongli Yamen’s memorial, July 27, 1896, in ZRHGX, 8:4871–74.
87. Wang Wenshao to the Zongli Yamen, August 7, 1896, in ZRHGX, 8:4899–900.
88. The Zongli Yamen’s memorial, November 20, 1896, in ZRHGX, 8:4968.
89. In 1905 Tang Shaoyi brought his Korean experience to the treaty negotiations with Britain over Tibet; see Lu, Xizang jiaoshe jiyao, 17–20; Tang’s telegrams to
Beijing, July 2, July 14, and August 21, 1905, in Waiwu bu Xizang dang, 02–16–001–06–061/066, 02–16–003–01–007.
90. Tang Shaoyi to the Zongli Yamen, March 13, 1897, in ZRHGX, 8:4989.
118. Chen Zuoyan’s report, March 1901, in ZRHGX, 9:5839–44.
119. The Manchu general of Jilin to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, July 29, 1903, in ZRHGX, 9:5680–82; Zhang Zhaolin’s report, fall 1903, in ZRHGX, 9:5849–81.
127. Xiliang to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, September 8 and 17, 1910, in ZRHGX, 10:7119, 7127. For the full text of the Da Qing guoji tiaoli issued on March 28, 1909, see Ding, Qingmo yixing guoji guanli tiaoli.
128. Zhao to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, August 15, 1911, in ZRHGX, 10:7202. CONCLUSION
11. For the relationship between Mao’s Central Kingdom mentality and China’s decision to enter the Korean War, see Chen, China’s Road, 213–20. For the effect of this mentality on the Sino-Korean demarcation in Manchuria, see Shen, Saigo no tenchō, 2:144–47.
12. Shen, Saigo no tenchō, 2:181–82. Previous ChapterNext Chapter
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Notes
The following abbreviations are used in the notes:
ADPP
American Diplomatic and Public Papers
FO
17 Foreign Office Record Group 17, China Correspondence
1. Sohyŏn Simyang ilgi, 354. Please see the bibliography for translations of non-English titles.
2. Ŭpchi P’yŏngan do p’yŏn, 531–32; Chosŏn wangjo sillok (hereafter cited as WJSL) (Sukchong), 40:552.
3. There is no scholarly consensus on a generic term to describe the Sinocentric political arrangements of late imperial times. I adopt the term Zongfan, as ex-
plained in the following sections of this chapter and in the next chapter. Among modern sources, my use of Zongfan primarily follows Shao Xunzheng in his
Zhong-Fa-Yuenan guanxi and Chang Tsun-wu in his Qing-Han Zongfan maoyi. Some scholars have also used Zongfan as an interpretive lens in their studies of the
relationship between the Qing and Inner Asia; see, for example, Zha, Qingdai Xizang yu Bulukeba. For some recent works on the Sinocentric foreign-relations sys-
tem from an East Asian perspective, see, for example, Chen, Zhongguo chuantong duiwai guanxi; Huang, Songdai chaogong tixi; Kim, Han-Chung kwan’gye sa; Lee,
China’s Hegemony; Li, Chaogong zhidu shilun; and Sun, Qingdai Zhong-Yue Zongfan guanxi. For the discrepancy between this Sinocentric system and the Western
understanding of it, see Chang, “Dongxi guoji zhixu yuanli,” 54–57; Chang, Qing-Han Zongfan maoyi, 2–15; Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, 9–15; Larsen, “Com-
forting Fictions”; Nelson, Korea and the Old Orders, 288–97; Okamoto, Sō shuken no sekaishi, 90–118; Shao, Zhong-Fa-Yuenan guanxi, 37–38; Song, “‘Tributary’ from
a Multilateral and Multi-layered Perspective”; Wills, “Tribute, Defensiveness, and Dependency”; Zhang, “Rethinking the ‘Tribute System,’” Zhou, “Equilibrium
Analysis.” For a review of the literature on the “tributary system” and Korea, see Wang, “Co-constructing Empire,” 28–43.
4. In Chinese history, Zhengtong has two major intellectual sources: the circulation of the “Five Virtues” (Ch., Wude, namely, earth, wood, metal, fire, and
water), a theory put forward by Zou Yan (ca. 305–240 BC), and the great unification raised by scholars of the Tang and Song Dynasties based on their interpre-
tations of the classic Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals (Ch., Chunqiu Gongyang zhuan). The former was used in a temporal sense and the
latter in spatial and politico-cultural senses. Since the Mongolian conquest of the Song in the thirteenth century, Zhengtong was principally bound with the great
unification; see Rao, Zhongguo shixue, 12–26, 81–86. Both the Mongols of the Yuan and the Manchus of the Qing based the orthodox legitimacy of their dynasties
on the ideology of the great unification. For the influence of Zhengtong on the historiographical tradition and politics in late imperial China, see Liu, Zhengtong yu
Hua–Yi; for a similar influence in Tokugawa Japan, see Koschmann, Mito Ideology. For more details on the Qing and Chosŏn Korea in this regard, see the fol-
lowing chapters of this book.
5. Wang, “Yinzhou zhidu lun.”
6. Wang, “Early Ming Relations,” 37–41.
7. For discussions on the story of Jizi/Kija, see, for example, Kim, Han-Chung kwan’gye sa, 1:87–103; Wang, “Co-constructing Empire,” 342–96; Miao, “Jishi
Chaoxian wenti.” For the unified Chinese dynasties’ perception of Korea, see Haboush, “Contesting Chinese Time,” 118.
8. Yuanshi, 15:4621; Chŏng, Koryŏ sa, 1:564.
9. WJSL (T’aejong), 1:205.
10. WJSL (Sejong), 2:483, 4:699. For Ming-Chosŏn relations, see Clark, “Sino-Korean Tributary Relations”; Wang, “Co-constructing Empire.”
11. Mingshi, 27:8279; Hong, Tamhŏn yŏn’gi, 42:18; Kye, “Huddling under the Imperial Umbrella.”
12. For the introduction of Neo-Confucianism to Chosŏn, see Duncan, Origins of the Chosŏn Dynasty, 237–65; Palais, Confucian Statecraft, 25–47.
14. See, for example, Yun, “Rethinking the Tribute System,” 6–17.
15. For more discussion on the complexity of outer fan under the Qing, see chapter 2. On the Qing-Siamese case, see Chuang, “Xianluo guowang ”; Mancall,
“Ch’ing Tribute System”; Masuda, “Fall of Ayutthaya.”
19. For the former, see Huang, Chaoxian de ruhua; for the latter, see Em, Great Enterprise, 23–24; Larsen, “Comforting Fictions”; Lee, China’s Hegemony; Lim,
“Tributary Relations.”
20. For recent research on the relationship between the civilized–barbarian discourse and identity in early modern East Asia, see Chang, “Han’guk esŏ tae-
jungguk kwannyŏm”; Fuma, Chōsen enkōshi, 38–43, 328–90; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 35–42; Rawski, Early Modern China, 188–224; Sun, Da Ming
qihao; Wang, Xiao Zhonghua; Yamauchi, Chōsen kara mita Ka–I .
22. Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, 8; Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 27. For the rise of empire in Chinese history, see Puett, Ambivalence of
28. Grosier, General Description of China, 244; Curzon, Problems of the Far East, 158.
29. Guo and Zhang, Yuenan tongshi, 413–61; Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model, 9–10, 18–22. For the independent status of Vietnam in the Ming period,
see Baldanza, Ming China and Vietnam, 77–110.
30. Haboush, Confucian Kingship in Korea, 11–26.
31. Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, Ming Qing shiliao, ser. 7, 5:491b. For China’s modern diplomacy, see Kawashima, Chū goku kindai gaikō no
keisei; Li, Zhongguo jindai waijiaoguan; Okamoto and Kawashima, Chū goku kindai gaikō no taidō ; Rudolph, Negotiated Power. For Korea’s modern diplomacy, see
Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade; Mori, Chōsen gaikō no kindai .
32. Sun, Qingdai Zhong-Yue Zongfan guanxi, 92–93.
33. For the politics of time inscription in Korea during the Qing, see Haboush, “Contesting Chinese Time,” 128–33.
34. For the Qing’s cartographic survey and its significance, see Kicengge, “Nibcu tiaoyue jiebei tu”; Li, “Ji Kangxi ‘Huangyu quanlan tu’”; Perdue, “Boundaries,
Maps, and Movement.” For the Qing-Annam and Qing-Chosŏn juridical negotiations, see Kim, “The Rule of Ritual.” For a study of Chosŏn’s perception of bor-
ders and Qing power from 1636 to 1912, see Kim, Ginseng and Borderland .
35. For the Sino-Korean demarcation negotiations, see Chang, “Qingdai Zhong-Han bianwu”; Kim, Han-Chung kwan’gye sa, 2:885–95; Ledyard, “Cartography in
Korea”; Li, Cho-Ch’ŏng kukgyŏng munje yŏn’gu; Song, Making Borders .
48. For the term “outlying province,” see Zeng (the Marquis Tseng), “China,” 9.
49. Schmid, Korea between Empires, 11, 55–100, 257–60.
50. See, for example, Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 56–83; Cohen, Discovering History in China, 97–147; Hevia, English Lessons, 4–26; Iriye, “Imperialism in East
Asia”; Rowe, China’s Last Empire, 231–43; Westad, Restless Empire, 53–86.
51. Pomeranz, Great Divergence .
52. Hu, Diguo zhuyi; Scott, China and the International System .
53. For the paradigm of “New Qing history,” see Millward et al., New Qing Imperial History; Waley-Cohen, “New Qing History.” For interpretations of the Qing
empire from an Inner Asian and ethnic perspective, see, for example, Crossley, Manchus; Crossley, Translucent Mirror; Crossley, Siu, and Sutton, Empire at the
Margins; Elliott, Manchu Way .
54. See, for example, Di Cosmo, “Qing Colonial Administration”; Herman, “Empires in the Southwest”; Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar; Hevia, English Lessons,
18, 166–174; Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Kim, Borderland Capitalism; Millward, Beyond the Pass; Perdue, China Marches West .
55. Kim Kwangmin has pointed out that the “dual expansions” of European maritime commerce in the Indian Ocean and Chinese power in Xinjiang in the eigh-
teenth century “changed the economic and political landscapes of Central Asia significantly.” See Kim, Borderland Capitalism, 45.
56. Champion and Echstein, “Introduction,” 3.
57. See, for example, Lee, Diplomatic Relations, 136–42; Kim, “Chinese Imperialism in Korea”; Deuchler, Confucian Gentlemen, 220; Kim, Last Phase, 348;
Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 11–19. For the term “informal empire,” see Gallagher and Robinson, “Imperialism of Free Trade.”
58. Nelson, Korea and the Old Orders, 294.
59. As R. Bin Wong points out, “The absence of apparent change suggests the reproduction of a set of relationships or conditions.” See Wong, China
Transformed, 3.
60. As Peter I. Yun has argued, “In reality, each state was guided in its foreign policy formulation by the principles of realism and pragmatism. It is necessary to
examine actual political motives and imperatives such as trade, cultural imports, and especially the issue of border security.” See Yun, “Rethinking the Tribute
System,” 6. In his examination of the Qing’s frontier policy, Matthew W. Mosca emphasizes that “there were no absolute policy differences distinguishing the em-
pire’s borderlands. Rather, it was the nature of the threat perceived that guided the empire’s foreign policy choices.” See Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign
30. QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:171. For laichao, see Chun, “Tongyang kodaesa”; Fairbank, “Tributary Trade.”
31. For the issue of the tributes and Ming China’s and the Central Asian states’ different understandings of their relationship, see Fletcher, “China and Central
35. For Nurhaci’s and Hongtaiji’s construction of Manchu imperial authority and their integration of multiethnic subjects for a new identity under the Manchu
regime, see Crossley, Translucent Mirror, 177–85.
36. Farquhar, “Origins,” 199–200; Perdue, China Marches West, 122–27.
37. See Ho, “In Defense of Sinicization”; Rawski, “Reenvisioning the Qing”; Huang, Reorienting the Manchus .
67. QSL (Shunzhi), 3:995. The practice of “dividing cogongrass,” which was recorded in The Classic of History as “dividing soil and cogongrass,” refers to a part
of the Zhou Zongfan investiture ritual in which the Son of Heaven endowed the vassals with some soil from his ancestral shrine and the soil was wrapped in
white cogongrass. The vassals would then use the soil for their own ancestral shrines on their own lands.
68. See Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming, March 6, 1725; the King’s memorial dated August 28, 1735, in Neige waijiao zhuan’an, Chaoxian
(hereafter WJZA), no. 564–2–190–4.
69. T’ongmun’gwan ji, 1:112.
70. See, for example, Guanming’s memorial on November 20, 1811, in Junjichu hanwen lufu zouzhe (hereafter LFZZ), no. 3–163–7728–16.
71. QSL (Qianlong), 17:680, 732–40; Da Qing huidian shili, 502:8a–9b.
73. Li to Yuan, February 1, 1886, in Gu and Dai, Li Hongzhang quanji (hereafter LHZQJ), 21:655.
74. Rockhill, “Korea in Its Relations with China,” 32.
75. For the critiques of reinterpretation, see Lin, “Tributary System,” 507; for “Pax Sinica,” see Huang, Dongya de liyi shijie .
76. For a study of China’s tribute system from an international-relations perspective, see Lee, China’s Hegemony .
77. Perdue, “Tea, Cloth, Gold, and Religion,” 2.
78. See Wills, Embassies and Illusions, 173; Smith, “Mapping China.” Iwai Shigeki argues that the practice of foreigners paying homage to China (J., chōkō; Ch.,
chaogong) began to be incorporated into the Sino-foreign trade system (J., goshi; Ch., hushi) after 1380, when the Ming abolished the Maritime Trade Superin-
tendency (Ch., Shibo si), a longstanding institution for managing maritime trade, and that this policy endured until 1684, when Emperor Kangxi resumed maritime
trade. See Iwai, “Chōkō to goshi.” Danjo Hiroshi emphasizes the same change in the Ming period; see Danjo, Mindai kaikin, 181–82, 336–37.
82. QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:459; Chosŏnguk raesŏ bu, 2:36–41.
83. WJSL (Injo), 34:709.
84. QSL (Shunzhi), 2:511, 3:586–87.
85. Wang, “Santiandu,” 290–96. For recent discussions about the Samjŏndo stele, see Koo, Ch’ŏng nara, 44–47; Bae, Chosŏn kwa Chunghwa, 33–65. In 2007,
the 370th anniversary of Chosŏn’s surrender to the Manchus in 1637, a Korean nationalist painted “ch’ŏlgŏ Pyŏngja 370” in large characters on the stele (ch’ŏlgŏ
means “remove”), demonstrating the event’s strong psychological impact on modern Korean nationalism.
86. WJSL (Injo), 34:709.
87. QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:649.
88. TMHG, 1485:1497–98, 1503–11.
89. TMHG, 2:1700–1702, 1747–48.
90. See Han, Chŏngmyo, Pyŏngja horan, 383–87.
91. For Manchu-Mongol relations during this period, see Elverskog, Our Great Qing, 27–39.
2. BARBARIANIZING CHOSOŎN
1. For the post-Ming process of decentering China among China’s neighbors, see Haboush, “Constructing the Center”; Rawski, Early Modern China, 1–10,
225–34.
2. QSL (Shunzhi), 3:91–92.
3. QSL (Qianlong), 18:643.
4. Langkio’s palace memorial, April 17, 1653, in LKSS, no. 2–3.
12. For example, the MBRT, the most important historical record of pre-1644 Manchu history, did not refer to the Manchu regime as abkai gurun. For this sub-
tle philological explanation, I am also grateful to two prestigious archivists and scholars, Wu Yuanfeng at the First Historical Archives of China and Zhao Zhiqiang
at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, whose mother tongue is Xibo, which is almost identical to Manchu.
13. QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:455.
14. QSL (Shunzhi), 3:530–54; Guo, “Wushi Dalai Lama rujin shulun.”
26. See, for example, Da Qing huidian (1764), vols. 79–80; LBZL, vols. 171–87; Lifan yuan zeli, vol. 16. John King Fairbank and S. Y. Têng have also argued that
the way in which the Qing controlled and managed these Mongol tribes was “all in the traditional forms of the tributary relationship”; see Fairbank and Têng, “On
the Ch’ing Tributary System,” 158–63. Recent scholarship has complicated this picture by examining how the Manchu and Mongol sides perceived each other’s
positions in the Qing-led empire; see Elverskog, Our Great Qing, 23–39.
27. Da Qing huidian shili, 975:9b–10a.
28. See, for example, QSL (Yongzheng), 8:388; Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, Qingdai Junjichu manwen aocha dang, 1:1123, 2:1476; Xizang dang’an, files
34–74; Da Qing huidian (1764), 80:26a.
29. Mark Mancall also points out that after 1644 the Mongolian Superintendency “used rites and forms of the traditional Confucian Chinese system to conduct
relations with the ‘barbarians’”; see Mancall, “Ch’ing Tribute System,” 72–73.
30. LBZL, 171:1–14, 172:1–22, 181:1–7, 184:1–6, 185:1–3, 186:1–5. For the classic discussion on the regulations, see Fairbank, “Preliminary Framework,” 10–11;
Fairbank and Têng, “On the Ch’ing Tributary System,” 163–73.
31. Da Ming huidian, vols. 105–8.
32. Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise, 118–21.
33. For the Qing’s expansion to the southwest, see Herman, “Empires in the Southwest”; Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Gong, Ming Qing Yunnan tusi; Li,
Qingdai tusi zhidu .
34. Zhupi yuzhi, 45:1a–81a.
35. Da Ming huidian, 105:1b; Da Qing huidian (1899), 39:2a–3a.
36. Da Qing huidian (1764), 56:1a–2b; LBZL, vols. 171–80; Da Qing huidian (1899), 39:2a–3a. The successive changes to the list over the course of the Qing pe-
riod are highlighted by the five editions of Da Qing huidian (issued in 1690, 1732, 1764, 1818, and 1899, respectively). See Fairbank and Têng, “On the Ch’ing Trib-
37. Da Qing huidian (1764), 80:1a, 10b. Peter C. Perdue argues that this claim “was as much mythical as real”; see Perdue, China Marches West, 527.
38. LBZL, vols. 172–77. Siam sent emissaries once every three years until 1839 and once every four years thereafter.
39. LBZL, 172:1b–5b.
40. TMHG, 2:1700–1744; Ch’ŏng sŏn go, 2:404–502; Chang, Qing-Han Zongfan maoyi, 18–19; Liu, Qingdai Zhong-Chao shizhe, 154–251. In practice, the Korean
tributary emissaries simultaneously gathered intelligence on the Qing and reported their findings to the king after they returned home in attachments to their
palace memorials (K., p’iltam). Their intelligence-gathering activities helped the Korean court understand the dynamics of the Qing’s domestic and international
situation. For p’iltam from 1639 to 1862, see Tongmun koryak, 3:405–530. For a specific case of intelligence gathering, see Ding, “18 segi ch’o Chosŏn yŏn-
haengsa.”
41. QSL (Qianlong), 24:297, 25:715.
42. LBZL, 172–80:1a. The number of attendants in Sulu’s missions was also open, but theoretically Sulu sent a mission only once every five years.
43. Langkio’s memorial, February 9, 1653, in LKSS, no. 2–1; LFZZ, nos. 3–163–7728–8, 3–163–7730–25.
44. T’ongmun’gwan ji, 1:94–98; Yi, Pugwon rok, 707–9.
45. Langkio’s memorial, May 28, 1653, in LKSS, no. 2–4.
47. QSL (Shunzhi), 3:940; T’ongmun’gwan ji, 1:215–18.
48. Qingdai gongzhongdang zouzhe ji Junjichu dang zhejian (hereafter JJCZ), no. 072667; LBZL, 181:1b–2a. For the mission in 1845, see JJCZ, no. 076837;
76. LBZL, 171:3b–4a, 11b–15a; Da Qing tongli, 43:1–6.
77. Da Tang Kaiyuan li, 386–92.
78. Sadae mungwe, 42:14b–15b.
79. As JaHyun Kim Haboush points out in the context of seventeenth-century Korea, “In the cultural matrix of the time, ritual was seen as the manifestation of
order as well as a means through which order was preserved and restored.” See Haboush, “Constructing the Center,” 70–71.
80. QSL (Kangxi), 4:678.
81. See, for example, QSL (Qianlong), 26:9.
82. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 108.
83. Guanglu si zeli, 23:4b–6a; LBZL, 299:7a–7b.
84. LBZL, vol. 1, illustration no. 5.
85. Wang, Xiao Zhonghua, 137–38.
86. Dong, Xianqiao shanfang riji, 18–27.
87. Pak, Hwanjae sŏnsaengjip, 6–7.
88. Kim, Last Phase, 12.
89. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 72, 322.
90. Li and Ch’oi, Hanke shicun, 261–66; Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 392, 396.
125. Pritchard, Anglo - Chinese Relations, 133–43.
126. These reports can be found in ZCSLXB and ZCSLHB. As chapter 6 shows, in the 1900s Chinese provincial governors were still submitting similar reports
to Beijing.
127. For tianchao tizhi, see Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, Qingdai Zhong-Liu guanxi dang’an xubian, 723.
7. For the most comprehensive collection of these journals, see Lim, Yŏnhaengnok jŏnjip .
8. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 11; Ch’ŏng sŏn go, 2:458.
9. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 93.
10. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 106–8.
11. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 117.
12. Fuma, Chōsen enkōshi, 365–69.
13. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 172–76.
14. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 72, 322.
15. Pak, Chŏngyu chip, 109–15, 383–438.
16. Pak, Chŏngyu chip, 437–38.
17. Ch’ae, Ham’in nok, 335–81.
18. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 1:10b.
19. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 1:59b–65b.
20. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 2:1a–2a.
21. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 2:57b.
22. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 3:20b; Min, Chungguk gŭndaesa yŏn’gu, 4.
23. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 3:26a–32b, 85a–87b, 92a–92b.
24. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 3:75a.
25. The rules of Qing bureaucracy contributed to this paradox. The Ministry of Rites, describing the Koreans’ meeting with the Panchen Erdeni in a memorial to
the emperor, simply fabricated its account, saying that after receiving the gifts from the Panchen, the Koreans immediately performed kowtow to show their grat-
itude. See Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 3:91b.
26. QSL (Qianlong), 22:872.
27. Pak, Chŏngyu chip, 380–81.
28. Sŏ, Yŏlha kiyu, 335.
29. Sŏ, Yŏlha kiyu, 342, 421–22.
30. Sŏ, Yŏlha kiyu, 442.
31. QSL (Qianlong), 25:817, 873–74, 973.
32. QSL (Qianlong), 25:874, 966–74.
33. Qinding Annan jilue, 21:14a.
34. Qinding Annan jilue, 23:24a, 26:18a.
35. QSL (Qianlong), 25:1049–50, 1198, 1201–28.
36. Some modern scholars have argued that the man who presented himself at the border was not Nguyễn Huệ himself but rather a double; see Lam, “Inter-
vention versus Tribute in Sino-Vietnamese Relations.” In any case, what mattered to Beijing was that Annam’s sovereign demonstrated subordination to Qing au-
thority.
37. Qinding Annan jilue, 28:21.
38. QSL (Qianlong), 26:174–75. By rendering the phrase fengjian shizhong as “centering,” James Hevia, in his study of the Macartney mission, may have given
the phrase a more extended meaning; see Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, 123.
39. QSL (Qianlong), 26:196–200.
40. For a review of this case, see Harrison, “Qianlong Emperor’s Letter.”
41. Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy, 69–160.
1. For the term “everyday familiarity,” see Heidegger, Being and Time, 176.
2. For the translation of Wanguo gongfa, see Liu, Clash of Empires, 108–39; Okamoto, Sōshuken no sekaishi, 90–118.
3. Wheaton, Wanguo gongfa, vol. 1.
4. Fairbank, “Early Treaty System,” 257.
5. Kojong Sunjong sillok, 1:121.
6. Ilsŏngnok, 66:199–201.
7. ZRHGX, 2:29; FRUS, 1867–’68, 1:420.
8. FRUS, 1867–’68, 1:420.
9. See, for example, Grosier, General Description of China, 244.
10. Nelson, Korea and the Old Orders, 292.
11. See, for example, Curzon, Problems of the Far East, 144–45.
12. Tamura, “Ejiputo kenkyu”; Em, Great Enterprise, 30.
13. Wheaton, Wanguo gongfa, 1:25a–28b; 2:2b–3a; Wheaton, Elements of International Law, 44–50, 79.
14. Nelson, Korea and the Old Orders, 289; Westad, Restless Empire, 81–82.
15. Aihanzhe, ed., Dong Xi-yang kao meiyue tongji zhuan, 91–92. Aihanzhe, literally “people loving China,” might refer to a group of missionaries who were active
in South China near Guangdong. For Gützlaff’s contribution to the Chinese norms discussed here, see Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy, 218–19.
16. See Edward Hertslet, “Memorandum respecting Corea,” December 19, 1882, in Korea, the Ryukyu Islands, and North-East Asia, 2–3; Frederick Low to
Hamilton Fish, November 23, 1871, in Davids, American Diplomatic and Public Papers (hereafter ADPP), 9:184; Mori Arinori to the Zongli Yamen, January 15, 1876,
in ZRHGX, 2:270.
17. Rockhill, “Korea in Its Relations with China.”
18. Curzon, Problems of the Far East, 209–22.
19. ZRHGX, 2:33–34.
20. Ilsŏngnok, 66:614.
21. Kojong Sunjong sillok, 1:227–28.
22. Ilsŏngnok, 66:309, 582.
23. Kojong sidae sa, 1:263.
24. FRUS, 1867–’68, 1:416.
25. Kojong Sunjong sillok, 1:235.
26. Kuiling, Dongshi jishi shilue, 737.
27. Ilsŏngnok, 66:643–48.
28. FRUS, 1867–’68, 1:4224.
29. ZCSLXB, 344–60.
30. FRUS, 1867–’68, 1:426–28.
31. ADPP, 9:49.
32. Dennett, Americans in Eastern Asia, 418–19.
33. See Griffis, Corea: The Hermit Nation .
34. See Le Gendre’s letter on June 21, 1867, in “Rishi shokan,” Japan Center for Asian Historical Records (hereafter JACAR), ref. no. A03030060500. For Admi-
ral Bell’s expedition against the aborigines, see Carrington, Foreigners in Formosa, 156–57.
35. Davidson, Island of Formosa, 117–22.
36. Low to Fish, no. 225, July 16, 1870, in FRUS, 1870–’71, 362.
37. ZRHGX, 2:165–66.
38. Low to Fish, no. 29, April 3, 1871; no. 31, May 13, 1871, in FRUS, 1871–’72, 111–15.
39. ZRHGX, 2:175.
40. Low to Fish, dispatch 102, November 23, 1871, in ADPP, 9:184.
43. See Yen, Taiwan, 159–74; Mayo, “Korean Crisis of 1873,” 802–5.
44. Li’s palace memorial, May 3, 1873, in LHZQJ, 5:346–47.
45. Wade to Earl Granville, no. 118, confidential, May 15, 1873; no. 131, May 25, 1873; no. 143, June 4, 1873, in Foreign Office Record Group 17, China
Correspondence (hereafter FO 17), 654.
46. FRUS, 1873–’74, 1:188.
47. Shima, Soejima Taneomi zenshū, 2:165–66, 456.
48. JACAR, ref. no. A03023011900.
49. Soejima to Sanjō, June 29, 1873, in NHGB, 6:160.
50. Tada, Iwakurakō jikki, 3:46–90; Mayo, “Korean Crisis of 1873.”
51. In Tokyo, the British minister, Harry Parkes, clearly told the Japanese foreign minister, Terashima Munenori, “I really am not aware whether the territory in
question is or is not beyond the jurisdiction of the Chinese Government. During a residence of upwards of twenty years in China, I always heard that the whole of
Formosa was claimed by China.” See Parkes to Terashima, April 16, 1874, in NHGB, 7:37.
52. Chouban yiwu shimo (Tongzhi), 10:3835–949.
53. Parkes to Earl of Derby, July 20, 1875, in Korea, the Ryukyu Islands, and North-East Asia, 39.
54. Tabohashi, Kindai Nissen kankei, 1:515.
55. Ōkubo, Mori Arinori zenshū, 1:779–80; Mori Arinori bunsho, R. 2–68.
56. Terashima to Tei, November 15, 1875, in NHGB, 8:138.
57. Wade to Earl of Derby, no. 5, January 12, 1876, in FO 17, 719.
58. Marquis of Zetland, Letters of Disraeli, 373.
59. Earl of Derby to Wade, no. 77, January 1, 1876, in British Parliamentary Papers, China, 107.
60. Wade to Earl of Derby, no. 6, confidential, January 12, 1876, in FO 17, 719.
61. Mori Arinori bunsho, R. 2–67.
62. Mori Arinori bunsho, R. 1–55–1.
63. Mori’s letter to his father, January 13, 1876, Mori Arinori bunsho, R. 1–55–1.
64. Chen, Weng Tonghe riji, 3:1176.
65. Mori to the Zongli Yamen, January 15, 1876, in ZRHGX, 2:270.
68. Mori to Terashima, February 3, 1876, in NHGB, 9:170–76; Li to the Zongli Yamen, January 23–24, 1876, in LHZQJ, 31:334–42.
69. Mori’s original English report of the meeting on January 24 is missing, but the Japanese translation by the Gaimushō is still available in Tokyo; see JACAR,
ref. no. B03030144000; Mori to Terashima, February 3, 1876, in NHGB, 9:170–76.
70. Li to the Zongli Yamen, January 23, 1876, in LHZQJ, 31:340; NHGB, 9:172.
71. Mori, “The Second Interview,” JACAR, ref. no. B03030144000.
72. ZRHGX, 2:295.
73. Mori Arinori bunsho, R. 1–55–1.
74. Ch’iksa ilgi, 17:28b.
75. Quan, “Jianghua tiaoyue.”
76. ZRHGX, 2:300.
77. Guo, Guo Songtao riji, 3:14–15.
78. ZRHGX, 2:316–18.
79. Bruce Cumings has also questioned whether this treaty can be seen as a modern one; see Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 102.
80. Gaimushō jōyakukyoku, Kyūjōyaku isan, 3:2.
81. For affirmations of this view, see, for example, ADPP, 10:66–77; British Parliamentary Papers, Japan, 9–10; Deuchler, Confucian Gentlemen, 47; Hua, Zhong-
guo bianjiang, 121; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 63; Morse, International Relations, 3:8. For challenges to it, see Hsü, China and Her Political Entity, 109–10;
Kim, Last Phase, 252.
82. NHGB, 9:115.
83. Bingham to Fish, dispatch 364, March 22, 1876, in ADPP, 10:66–77; Parkes to Earl of Derby, no. 13, March 25 and 27, 1876, in British Parliamentary Papers,
Japan, 9–11, 17.
84. For a review of Korea’s modern sovereignty, see Em, Great Enterprise, 21–84.
85. Mori Arinori bunsho, R. 2–68.
5. SUPERVISING CHOSOŎN
1. Yi to Li, December 24, 1879, in ZRHGX, 2:398–401.
2. NHGB, 13:435.
3. See Deuchler, Confucian Gentlemen, 110–13.
4. Shufeldt to R. W. Thompson, dispatch 21, August 30, 1880, in ADPP, 10:102–5; Li to Yu, August 28, 1880, in LHZQJ, 32:585; Paullin, “Opening of Korea,”
17. Kim, Ŭmch’ŏng sa, 1–2; Sim, Mangi yoran chaeyong p’yŏn, 701.
18. Kim, Ŭmch’ŏng sa, 3, 12–21.
19. Li’s memorial, January 21, 1882, in LHZQJ, 9:539–44.
20. Kim, Ch’ŏnjin tamch’o, 2.
21. QSL (Guangxu), 53:1002–3.
22. Paullin, “Opening of Korea,” 485–87.
23. Holcombe to Frederick Frelinghuysen, February 4, 1882, in ADPP, 10:163–71.
24. Kim, Ch’ŏnjin tamch’o, 12–13.
25. Kim, Ch’ŏnjin tamch’o, 20–21.
26. Kim, Ch’ŏnjin tamch’o, 17.
27. For China’s struggle to abolish extraterritoriality as “the most important imperialist practice in China,” see Kayaoğlu, Legal Imperialism, 149–90.
28. Kim, Ch’ŏnjin tamch’o, 23–26.
29. ZRHGX, 2:552–55.
30. Ku Han’guk oegyo munsŏ (hereafter HKMS), 10:12–14.
31. HKMS, 10:14–15.
32. T’ongsang Miguk silgi, 6a–9b; HKMS, 10:1–2; Okamoto, Zokkoku to jishu no aida, 35–69.
33. Ŏ, Chongjŏng nyŏnp’yo, 131.
34. Baoting’s memorial, June 14, 1882, in ZRJSSL, 3:17b–18a.
35. Imperial edict, June 14, 1882, in ZRJSSL, 3:18b.
36. Baoting’s memorial, June 28, 1882, in Gongzhong dang zouzhe, 4–1–30–0278–025.
37. Kojong sidae sa, 2:331–37.
38. Inoue Kaoru to Hanabusa, July 31, 1882, in NHGB, 15:221–23; Li Shuchang to Zhang Shusheng, July 31, 1882, in ZRHGX, 2:735–47.
39. Kim, Ŭmch’ŏng sa, 179–85; Kim’s conversation with Zhou Fu, August 5, 1882, in ZRHGX, 2:769–72.
40. ZRHGX, 3:765, 789–805; Kim, Ŭmch’ŏng sa, 189–90.
41. NHGB, 15:226–30.
42. Li Shuchang to Yoshida, August 9 and 12, 1882, in NHGB, 15:164–65.
43. Inoue’s conversations with Boissonade, August 9 and 13, 1882, in NHGB, 15:169– 73; Boissonade tōgi, 140–62. For the Anglo-French joint action against the
Egyptian revolt and the British conquest of Egypt in 1882, see Reid, “Urabi Revolution.”
44. Hart to James Duncan Campbell, no. 370, Z/83, August 10, 1882, in Fairbank, Bruner, and Matheson, I. G. in Peking, 417.
45. For the African case, see Lewis, Divided Rule, 14–16.
46. Zhang Shusheng to the Zongli Yamen, August 9, 1882, in ZRHGX, 2:773; Li Shuchang to the Zongli Yamen, August 31, 1882, in ZRHGX, 3:836.
47. For the influence of virtue on China’s statecraft, see Wang, “Early Ming Relations,” 42–45.
48. Kim, Tongmyo yŏngjŏp nok .
49. ZRHGX, 3:863–79.
50. ZRHGX, 3:843, 867.
51. Yuan to Li, August 6, 1886, in LHZQJ, 22:77.
52. Kim, Last Phase, 1, 348.
53. ZRJSSL, 2:33a–34b.
54. ZRHGX, 3:967–76.
55. Kim, Ŭmch’ŏngsa, 212.
56. See Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 101–3.
60. See Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 72–94. According to Larsen, the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations “constitute the first time that the Qing Empire
proactively sought to promote Chinese commercial interests beyond its borders through the use of treaties and international law” (90).
61. GXZP, 112:243.
62. For the Kangxi emperor’s role in introducing his empire to Western knowledge, see Jami, Emperor’s New Mathematics .
63. Mao, “Qingmo diwang jiaokeshu,” 127–29.
64. Mao, “Qingmo diwang jiaokeshu,” 147.
65. Chongqi’s memorial, in ZRHGX, 3:1063–69.
66. Li to the Zongli Yamen, January 3, 1883, and the Ministry of Rites to the Zongli Yamen, January 18, 1883, in ZRHGX, 3:1072–75, 1085–88.
68. ZRHGX, 3:1020–30; Hart to Campbell, no. 390, Z/100, December 10, 1882, in Fairbank, Bruner, and Matheson, I. G. in Peking, 436; Lensen, Balance of
Intrigue, 1:31–53.
69. Frelinghuysen to Foote, no. 3, Washington, DC, March 17, 1883, in Korean-American Relations (hereafter KARD), 1:25–26.
70. Renchuan gangkou juan (hereafter RCGK), vol. 1, n.p.
71. Chen to Min Yŏng-muk, October 20, 1883, in HKMS, 8:5.
72. Yun, Yun Ch’i-ho ilgi, 1:14–16.
73. Li Hongzhang to the Zongli Yamen, January 2, 1884, in ZRHGX, 3:1314–15.
74. For the Korean mission of 1883 to the United States, see, for example, Walter, “Korean Special Mission.”
75. Hart to Campbell, no. 518, Z/212, March 23, 1885, in Fairbank, Bruner, and Matheson, I. G. in Peking, 590; the Zongli Yamen to Parkes, November 22, 1884,
in ZRHGX, 3:1494.
76. Li Nairong to Chen Shutang, December 12, 1883, and Chen Shutang to Chen Weikun, December 20, 1883, in RCGK, vol. 1, n.p.
77. Chen to Min, February 7, 1884, in RCGK, vol. 2, n.p.
78. Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 109.
79. For Chinese immigrants and their activities in Korea after the 1870s, see Yang and Sun, Chaoxian huaqiao shi, 107–63. For a study of the Chinese merchants
in Inch’ŏn and their influence on modern Korean and East Asian financial markets through the case of Tongshuntai, see Kang, Tongsunt’ae ho. Tongshuntai was
founded by Cantonese merchants, and by the mid-1880s it had developed into a leading Chinese firm in Korea. It later served as a financial agency for the Chinese
government. The firm finally ended its operations in Korea in September 1937 after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. See Kang, Tongsunt’ae ho, 59–
112, 280–81; Larsen , Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 263–66; Yang and Sun, Chaoxian huaqiao shi, 142–45.
80. The number of Chinese immigrants in Korea was 2,182 in 1893, 3,661 in 1906, and 11,818 in 1910. Chinese immigrants were far outnumbered by their Japa-
nese counterparts. In 1892, for example, 1,805 Chinese and 9,340 Japanese were living in Hansŏng, Inch’ŏn, Pusan, and Wŏnsan. See Yang and Sun, Chaoxian
huaqiao shi, 125–31.
81. Li Hongzhang to the Zongli Yamen, March 29, 1884, in ZRHGX, 3:1355–57.
82. Chen to Min, January 15, 1884, in HKMS, 8:21–22; Li to Chen, December 12, 1883, in RCGK, vol. 1, n.p.
83. Chen to Li, December 12, 1883, in RCGK, vol. 1, n.p.
84. Chen to Min, January 15, 1884, and Min to Chen, January 19, 1884, in HKMS, 8:21–23.
85. Chen to Min, March 7, 1884, in HKMS, 8:35–38.
86. Min to Chen and Chen to Min, December 14, 16, and 17, 1883, in HKMS, 8:14–15.
87. Li Shuchang to the Zongli Yamen, December 29, 1883, in ZRHGX, 3:1259.
88. See, for example, Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 2–17, 107–17.
89. Min to Chen, January 19, 1884, in HKMS, 8:23.
90. For the establishment of police forces in Inch’ŏn, see He, “Chaoxian bandao de Zhongguo zujie,” 31–34.
91. Note of Langzhong County to Nanbu County, June 4, 1883, in Sichuan sheng Nanchong shi dang’anguan, Qingdai Sichuan Nanbu xian yamen dang’an,
58:402.
92. Sichuan sheng Nanchong shi dang’anguan, Qingdai Sichuan Nanbu xian yamen dang’an, 58:403–23; Chen to Min, March 11, 1884, in HKMS, 8:40–42.
93. Min to Chen, March 15, 1884, in HKMS, 8:45.
6. LOSING CHOSOŎN
1. For the rise of the age of empires, see Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 56–83.
2. Luo and Liu, Yuan Shikai quanji, 1:34–46.
3. Ōkubo, Mori Arinori zenshū, 1:195.
4. Treaties, Conventions, etc ., 2:588–89.
5. Ma, Ma Xiangbo ji, 1091–96.
6. ZCSLHB, 259; ZRHGX, 4:1957.
7. This title was a downgrade, imposed by Congress in July 1884, from the original “envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary.” See Frederick Frel-
inghuysen to Lucius Foote, no. 58, July 14, 1884, in KARD, 1:36.
8. Foulk to Thomas Bayard, no. 255, confidential, November 25, 1885, in KARD, 1:137–39.
9. Fisher, “Indirect Rule,” 393–401.
10. Lewis, Divided Rule, 24–26.
11. Hugh Dinsmore to Thomas Bayard, no. 20, May 27, 1887, and Augustine Heard to James Blaine, no. 29, confidential, July 10, 1890, in KARD, 2:11, 21.
12. Li Hongzhang to the Zongli Yamen, January 30, 1886, in ZRHGX, 4:2002–4.
13. For the Port Hamilton incident, see Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 173–76; Zhang, Zai chuantong yu xiandaixing, 201–27.
14. Yuan to Li, August 6, 1886, in LHZQJ, 22:77.
15. Li to Yuan, February 1, 1886, in LHZQJ, 21:655.
16. Hugh Dinsmore to Thomas Bayard, no. 20, May 27, 1887, in KARD, 2:12; Horace Allen to Walter Gresham, no. 469, October 6, 1893, and no. 479, confi-
dential, November 4, 1893, in KARD, 2:93–98; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 192; Lensen, Balance of Intrigue, 1:92–93.
17. Da Ming huidian, 105:1b. The Ming conquered Annam in 1407 and divided it into fifteen prefectures, thirty-six subprefectures, and 181 counties, but it ended
its colonial policy in 1428. See Guo and Zhang, Yuenan tongshi, 395–421.
18. He Ruzhang to the Zongli Yamen, November 18, 1880, in ZRHGX, 2:437–47; Li Shuchang to the Zongli Yamen, August 31, 1882, in ZRHGX, 3:836.
19. Zhang Jian quanji, 6:206–7.
20. Li to the Zongli Yamen, November 23, 1882, in ZRHGX, 3:1030–33.
21. Shengyu’s memorial, December 6, 1885, in ZRJSSL, 9:16b–18b.
22. Kang Youwei quanji, 1:394–96.
23. Zeng, “China,” 9. Zeng is referring here to the office of the Warden of the Marches of England against Scotland, which was created in 1309 in order to mon-
itor and defend the marches (i.e., the border) of England and Scotland; see Reid, “Office of Warden.”
24. Swartout, American Adviser, 142.
25. See, for example, Lee, Diplomatic Relations, 52–124.
26. Dinsmore to Thomas Bayard, no. 20, May 27, 1887, in KARD, 2:11–13.
27. See Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 176–89; Zhang, Zai chuantong yu xiandaixing, 227–74.
28. Yuan to Cho Pyŏng-sik, October 21 and November 8, 1887, in HKMS, 8:382, 384.
29. HKMS, 10:317; ZRJSSL, 10:37a.
30. Allen, Things Korean, 163–64.
31. Zhang, Zhang Yinhuan riji, 244–50, 279.
32. Zhang Yinhuan’s palace memorial, March 6, 1888, in LFZZ, no. 3–5700–043.
33. Hart to Campbell, no. 651, Z/342, June 3, 1888, in Fairbank, Bruner, and Matheson, I. G. in Peking, 705.
34. 50 Cong. Rec. 8136 (August 31, 1888); italics in the original.
35. Dinsmore to Thomas Bayard, no. 20, May 27, 1887, in KARD, 2:12.
36. Foulk to Frederick Frelinghuysen, no. 229, October 10, 1884, in FRUS 1885–’86, 326. Foulk described the stele: “The front of the stone is closely filled en-
tirely with an inscription deeply cut in what I took to be Manchu Tartar script characters; these closely resemble Sanscrit or Pali characters, but they are written in
vertical lines, beginning on the left. Over the body of the inscription is a title line written horizontally from left to right. On the back of the stone is another inscrip-
tion only partly covering it, in Chinese square characters” (326).
37. Rockhill, “Korea in Its Relations with China,” 1.
38. Rockhill, “Korea in Its Relations with China,” 1–2.
39. Min Chong-muk to Yuan, June 4, 1890, and Yuan to Min and Li Hongzhang, June 5, 1890, in Qinshi fengming qianlai ciji Chaoxian guowang mufei juan
(hereafter QSCJ), n.p.
40. Yuan to Li Hongzhang, May 16, 1890, in ZRJSSL, 11:31a.
41. Yuan to Heard, June 5, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p.
42. Yuan to Li, June 6, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p.
43. Yuan to Li, June 6, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p; Li to the Zongli Yamen, June 13, 1890, in ZRHGX, 5:2785.
44. Li to Yuan, and Yuan to Chinese commercial commissioners in Chosŏn, June 6, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p.
45. Min Chong-muk to Yuan, June 10, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p.
46. Yuan to Heard, September 30, 1890, and Kim Yŏngsu to Yuan, October 11, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p.
47. Heard to Yuan, October 11, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p.
48. Heard to James Blaine, no. 13, June 7, 1890, in KARD, 2:124–26.
49. LHZQJ, 23:102–5.
50. For the 1890 imperial mission to Korea, see Okamoto, “ Fengshi Chaoxian riji zhi yanjiu”; Van Lieu, “Politics of Condolence.” Van Lieu’s study also reveals
the significant influence of the Chinese propaganda movement following the 1890 mission on Western historiography of Chosŏn-Qing relations; see Van Lieu,
“Politics of Condolence,” 103–10.
51. LHZQJ, 23:69–75.
52. Chongli, Fengshi Chaoxian riji, 2b–3a.
53. Shihan jilue, 3–7.
54. Li to Yuan, October 12, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p.
55. Chongli, Fengshi Chaoxian riji, 12b–13b.
56. Notes on the Imperial Chinese Mission, 8.
57. Ch’iksa ilgi, 19:1a–6a.
58. Chongli, Fengshi Chaoxian riji, 17b–18a.
59. Chongli, Fengshi Chaoxian riji, 26b–27a.
60. China Imperial Maritime Customs Decennial Reports, app. 2, 42.
61. Shihan jilue, 22–26.
62. Ch’iksa ilgi, 19:11a–12a.
63. For defenses of this argument, see Okamoto, Sekai no naka no Nitsu-Shin-Kan, 15–28; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 190–91; Van Lieu, “Politics of
Condolence.”
64. Augustine Heard to James Blaine, no. 89, confidential, November 19, 1890, in KARD, 2:35.
65. Treat, “China and Korea,” 506–43.
66. See, for example, Nelson, Korea and the Old Orders, 175–80; Lin, Yuan Shikai yu Chaoxian, 137–321; Kim, Last Phase, 350; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and
Trade, 128–73; Zhang, Zai chuantong yu xiandaixing, 192–201. But Larsen has critically pointed out that “Yuan represented only one strand of Qing imperial strategy
in Chosŏn Korea, and often not the most influential one at that”; see Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 173.
67. Chongli, Fengshi Chaoxian riji, 54b–55a.
68. China Imperial Maritime Customs Decennial Reports, app. 2, 42.
79. ZRZZ, 1:146–52, 199; Hong Liangpin’s memorial, August 10, 1894, in LFZZ, no. 3–167–9115–5.
80. Qinggong zhencang lishi Dalai Lama dang’an, 387–88.
81. NHGB, 28(2):373.
82. ZRZZ, 3:188.
83. ZRZZ, 3:290.
84. Ilsŏngnok, 79:209; Koketsu, “Ni-Shin kaisen”; Em, Great Enterprise, 21–52.
85. Wang Wenshao to the Zongli Yamen, July 12, 1896, in ZRHGX, 8:4856–57.
86. The Zongli Yamen’s memorial, July 27, 1896, in ZRHGX, 8:4871–74.
87. Wang Wenshao to the Zongli Yamen, August 7, 1896, in ZRHGX, 8:4899–900.
88. The Zongli Yamen’s memorial, November 20, 1896, in ZRHGX, 8:4968.
89. In 1905 Tang Shaoyi brought his Korean experience to the treaty negotiations with Britain over Tibet; see Lu, Xizang jiaoshe jiyao, 17–20; Tang’s telegrams to
Beijing, July 2, July 14, and August 21, 1905, in Waiwu bu Xizang dang, 02–16–001–06–061/066, 02–16–003–01–007.
90. Tang Shaoyi to the Zongli Yamen, March 13, 1897, in ZRHGX, 8:4989.
91. Schmid, Korea between Empires, 11, 55–100.
92. Ilsŏngnok, 80:161–63; Lensen, Balance of Intrigue, 2:644–46.
93. ZRJSSL, 51:21a, 35b, 36b.
94. ZRJSSL, 51:40.
95. ZRJSSL, 52:1a–2b.
96. ZRJSSL, 52:2b.
97. Mao, “Wuxu bianfa,” 45.
98. Tang Shaoyi to the Zongli Yamen, August 28, 1898, in ZRHGX, 8:5146–48.
104. Imperial decree, October 11, 1898, in ZRHGX, 8:5160.
105. Xu Shoupeng to the Zongli Yamen, December 4, 1898, in ZRHGX, 8:5179.
106. Wu, “Chaoxian sanzhong xu,” 1.
107. Xu’s memorial, March 5, 1899, in ZRHGX, 8:5200; Han Ch’ŏng ŭiyak kongdok, 11–12.
108. Xu’s memorial, July 19, 1899, in ZRJSSL, 52:38a–38b.
109. ZRHGX, 8:5246–47.
110. Giwadan jihen ni kanshi Kankoku kōtei.
111. HKMS, 9:534.
112. GXZP, 112:342–43.
113. ZRHGX, 8:5556.
114. GXZP, 112:332–33.
115. GXZP, 112:339.
116. GXZP, 112:241–42, 344–57.
117. Zhao Erxun quanzong dang’an, no. 125–2.
118. Chen Zuoyan’s report, March 1901, in ZRHGX, 9:5839–44.
119. The Manchu general of Jilin to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, July 29, 1903, in ZRHGX, 9:5680–82; Zhang Zhaolin’s report, fall 1903, in ZRHGX, 9:5849–81.
120. Zhao Erxun quanzong dang’an, no. 125.
121. For the issue of Kando/Jiandao, see Song, Making Borders .
123. Yuan Shikai to Li Hongzhang, August 30, 1890, in ZRHGX, 9:5703–5.
124. For the regulation, see ZRHGX, 9:5952–53.
125. Wu, Yanji bianwu baogao, chap. 4, 11.
126. Tang and Sang, Dai Jitao ji, 29.
127. Xiliang to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, September 8 and 17, 1910, in ZRHGX, 10:7119, 7127. For the full text of the Da Qing guoji tiaoli issued on March 28,
1909, see Ding, “Qingmo yixing guoji guanli tiaoli.”
128. Zhao to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, August 15, 1911, in ZRHGX, 10:7202.
CONCLUSION
1. China Mission Year Book, 1912, app. C, 17.
2. Wang and Wan, Chaoxian diaocha ji; Chen, Diaocha Chaoxian shiye baogao .
3. Chaoxian wenjian lu, 2–3.
4. See Goldstein, History of Modern Tibet, 638–813; van Schaik, Tibet, 207–69.
5. Chang, Waimeng zhuquan, 269–303.
6. See, for example, Fiskesjö, “Rescuing the Empire”; Carlson, “Reimagining the Frontier”; Liu, Recast All under Heaven, 3–18, 171–241.
7. For an example, see Rawski, Early Modern China, 235–63.
8. Zhonghua guochi ditu .
9. Zhongyang ribao, Nanjing, March 15, 1930, in Hu, Hanguo duli yundong, 303.
10. Ji, Mao Zedong shici, 546.
11. For the relationship between Mao’s “Central Kingdom” mentality and China’s decision to enter the Korean War, see Chen, China’s Road, 213–20. For the ef-
fect of this mentality on the Sino-Korean demarcation in Manchuria, see Shen, Saigo no tenchō, 2:144–47.
12. Shen, Saigo no tenchō, 2:181–82.
Notes
The following abbreviations are used in the notes:
INTRODUCTION
1. Sohyŏn Simyang ilgi, 354. Please see the bibliography for translations of non-English titles.
2. Ŭpchi P’yŏngan do p’yŏn, 531–32; Chosŏn wangjo sillok (hereafter cited as WJSL) (Sukchong), 40:552.
3. There is no scholarly consensus on a generic term to describe the Sinocentric political arrangements of late imperial times. I adopt the term Zongfan, as explained in the following sections of this chapter and in the next chapter. Among modern sources, my use of Zongfan primarily follows Shao Xunzheng in his Zhong-Fa-Yuenan guanxi and Chang Tsun-wu in his Qing-Han Zongfan maoyi. Some scholars have also used Zongfan as an interpretive lens in their studies of the relationship between the Qing and Inner Asia; see, for example, Zha, Qingdai Xizang yu Bulukeba. For some recent works on the Sinocentric foreign-relations system from an East Asian perspective, see, for example, Chen, Zhongguo chuantong duiwai guanxi; Huang, Songdai chaogong tixi; Kim, Han-Chung kwan’gye sa; Lee, China’s Hegemony; Li, Chaogong zhidu shilun; and Sun, Qingdai Zhong-Yue Zongfan guanxi. For the discrepancy between this Sinocentric system and the Western understanding of it, see Chang, Dongxi guoji zhixu yuanli, 54–57; Chang, Qing-Han Zongfan maoyi, 2–15; Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, 9–15; Larsen, Comforting Fictions; Nelson, Korea and the Old Orders, 288–97; Okamoto, Sō shuken no sekaishi, 90–118; Shao, Zhong-Fa-Yuenan guanxi, 37–38; Song, ‘Tributary’ from a Multilateral and Multi-layered Perspective; Wills, Tribute, Defensiveness, and Dependency; Zhang, Rethinking the ‘Tribute System,’ Zhou, Equilibrium Analysis. For a review of the literature on the tributary system and Korea, see Wang, Co-constructing Empire, 28–43.
4. In Chinese history, Zhengtong has two major intellectual sources: the circulation of the Five Virtues (Ch., Wude, namely, earth, wood, metal, fire, and water), a theory put forward by Zou Yan (ca. 305–240 BC), and the great unification raised by scholars of the Tang and Song Dynasties based on their interpretations of the classic Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals (Ch., Chunqiu Gongyang zhuan). The former was used in a temporal sense and the latter in spatial and politico-cultural senses. Since the Mongolian conquest of the Song in the thirteenth century, Zhengtong was principally bound with the great unification; see Rao, Zhongguo shixue, 12–26, 81–86. Both the Mongols of the Yuan and the Manchus of the Qing based the orthodox legitimacy of their dynasties on the ideology of the great unification. For the influence of Zhengtong on the historiographical tradition and politics in late imperial China, see Liu, Zhengtong yu Hua–Yi; for a similar influence in Tokugawa Japan, see Koschmann, Mito Ideology. For more details on the Qing and Chosŏn Korea in this regard, see the following chapters of this book.
5. Wang, Yinzhou zhidu lun.
6. Wang, Early Ming Relations, 37–41.
7. For discussions on the story of Jizi/Kija, see, for example, Kim, Han-Chung kwan’gye sa, 1:87–103; Wang, Co-constructing Empire, 342–96; Miao, Jishi Chaoxian wenti. For the unified Chinese dynasties’ perception of Korea, see Haboush, Contesting Chinese Time, 118.
8. Yuanshi, 15:4621; Chŏng, Koryŏ sa, 1:564.
9. WJSL (T’aejong), 1:205.
10. WJSL (Sejong), 2:483, 4:699. For Ming-Chosŏn relations, see Clark, Sino-Korean Tributary Relations; Wang, Co-constructing Empire.
11. Mingshi, 27:8279; Hong, Tamhŏn yŏn’gi, 42:18; Kye, Huddling under the Imperial Umbrella.
12. For the introduction of Neo-Confucianism to Chosŏn, see Duncan, Origins of the Chosŏn Dynasty, 237–65; Palais, Confucian Statecraft, 25–47.
14. See, for example, Yun, Rethinking the Tribute System, 6–17.
15. For more discussion on the complexity of outer fan under the Qing, see chapter 2. On the Qing-Siamese case, see Chuang, Xianluo guowang ; Mancall, Ch’ing Tribute System; Masuda, Fall of Ayutthaya.
19. For the former, see Huang, Chaoxian de ruhua; for the latter, see Em, Great Enterprise, 23–24; Larsen, Comforting Fictions; Lee, China’s Hegemony; Lim, Tributary Relations.
20. For recent research on the relationship between the civilized–barbarian discourse and identity in early modern East Asia, see Chang, Han’guk esŏ taejungguk kwannyŏm; Fuma, Chōsen enkōshi, 38–43, 328–90; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 35–42; Rawski, Early Modern China, 188–224; Sun, Da Ming qihao; Wang, Xiao Zhonghua; Yamauchi, Chōsen kara mita Ka–I .
22. Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, 8; Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 27. For the rise of empire in Chinese history, see Puett, Ambivalence of Creation, 141–76.
28. Grosier, General Description of China, 244; Curzon, Problems of the Far East, 158.
29. Guo and Zhang, Yuenan tongshi, 413–61; Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model, 9–10, 18–22. For the independent status of Vietnam in the Ming period, see Baldanza, Ming China and Vietnam, 77–110.
30. Haboush, Confucian Kingship in Korea, 11–26.
31. Zhongyang yanjiuyuan lishi yuyan yanjiusuo, Ming Qing shiliao, ser. 7, 5:491b. For China’s modern diplomacy, see Kawashima, Chū goku kindai gaikō no keisei; Li, Zhongguo jindai waijiaoguan; Okamoto and Kawashima, Chū goku kindai gaikō no taidō ; Rudolph, Negotiated Power. For Korea’s modern diplomacy, see Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade; Mori, Chōsen gaikō no kindai .
32. Sun, Qingdai Zhong-Yue Zongfan guanxi, 92–93.
33. For the politics of time inscription in Korea during the Qing, see Haboush, Contesting Chinese Time, 128–33.
34. For the Qing’s cartographic survey and its significance, see Kicengge, Nibcu tiaoyue jiebei tu; Li, Ji Kangxi ‘Huangyu quanlan tu’; Perdue, Boundaries, Maps, and Movement. For the Qing-Annam and Qing-Chosŏn juridical negotiations, see Kim, The Rule of Ritual. For a study of Chosŏn’s perception of borders and Qing power from 1636 to 1912, see Kim, Ginseng and Borderland .
35. For the Sino-Korean demarcation negotiations, see Chang, Qingdai Zhong-Han bianwu; Kim, Han-Chung kwan’gye sa, 2:885–95; Ledyard, Cartography in Korea; Li, Cho-Ch’ŏng kukgyŏng munje yŏn’gu; Song, Making Borders .
48. For the term outlying province, see Zeng (the Marquis Tseng), China, 9.
49. Schmid, Korea between Empires, 11, 55–100, 257–60.
50. See, for example, Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 56–83; Cohen, Discovering History in China, 97–147; Hevia, English Lessons, 4–26; Iriye, Imperialism in East Asia; Rowe, China’s Last Empire, 231–43; Westad, Restless Empire, 53–86.
51. Pomeranz, Great Divergence .
52. Hu, Diguo zhuyi; Scott, China and the International System .
53. For the paradigm of New Qing history, see Millward et al., New Qing Imperial History; Waley-Cohen, New Qing History. For interpretations of the Qing empire from an Inner Asian and ethnic perspective, see, for example, Crossley, Manchus; Crossley, Translucent Mirror; Crossley, Siu, and Sutton, Empire at the Margins; Elliott, Manchu Way .
54. See, for example, Di Cosmo, Qing Colonial Administration; Herman, Empires in the Southwest; Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar; Hevia, English Lessons, 18, 166–174; Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Kim, Borderland Capitalism; Millward, Beyond the Pass; Perdue, China Marches West .
55. Kim Kwangmin has pointed out that the dual expansions of European maritime commerce in the Indian Ocean and Chinese power in Xinjiang in the eighteenth century changed the economic and political landscapes of Central Asia significantly. See Kim, Borderland Capitalism, 45.
56. Champion and Echstein, Introduction, 3.
57. See, for example, Lee, Diplomatic Relations, 136–42; Kim, Chinese Imperialism in Korea; Deuchler, Confucian Gentlemen, 220; Kim, Last Phase, 348; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 11–19. For the term informal empire, see Gallagher and Robinson, Imperialism of Free Trade.
58. Nelson, Korea and the Old Orders, 294.
59. As R. Bin Wong points out, The absence of apparent change suggests the reproduction of a set of relationships or conditions. See Wong, China Transformed, 3.
60. As Peter I. Yun has argued, In reality, each state was guided in its foreign policy formulation by the principles of realism and pragmatism. It is necessary to examine actual political motives and imperatives such as trade, cultural imports, and especially the issue of border security. See Yun, Rethinking the Tribute System, 6. In his examination of the Qing’s frontier policy, Matthew W. Mosca emphasizes that there were no absolute policy differences distinguishing the empire’s borderlands. Rather, it was the nature of the threat perceived that guided the empire’s foreign policy choices. See Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy, 8.
30. QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:171. For laichao, see Chun, Tongyang kodaesa; Fairbank, Tributary Trade.
31. For the issue of the tributes and Ming China’s and the Central Asian states’ different understandings of their relationship, see Fletcher, China and Central Asia.
35. For Nurhaci’s and Hongtaiji’s construction of Manchu imperial authority and their integration of multiethnic subjects for a new identity under the Manchu regime, see Crossley, Translucent Mirror, 177–85.
36. Farquhar, Origins, 199–200; Perdue, China Marches West, 122–27.
37. See Ho, In Defense of Sinicization; Rawski, Reenvisioning the Qing; Huang, Reorienting the Manchus .
67. QSL (Shunzhi), 3:995. The practice of dividing cogongrass, which was recorded in The Classic of History as dividing soil and cogongrass, refers to a part of the Zhou Zongfan investiture ritual in which the Son of Heaven endowed the vassals with some soil from his ancestral shrine and the soil was wrapped in white cogongrass. The vassals would then use the soil for their own ancestral shrines on their own lands.
68. See Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming, March 6, 1725; the King’s memorial dated August 28, 1735, in Neige waijiao zhuan’an, Chaoxian (hereafter WJZA), no. 564–2–190–4.
69. T’ongmun’gwan ji, 1:112.
70. See, for example, Guanming’s memorial on November 20, 1811, in Junjichu hanwen lufu zouzhe (hereafter LFZZ), no. 3–163–7728–16.
71. QSL (Qianlong), 17:680, 732–40; Da Qing huidian shili, 502:8a–9b.
73. Li to Yuan, February 1, 1886, in Gu and Dai, Li Hongzhang quanji (hereafter LHZQJ), 21:655.
74. Rockhill, Korea in Its Relations with China, 32.
75. For the critiques of reinterpretation, see Lin, Tributary System, 507; for Pax Sinica, see Huang, Dongya de liyi shijie .
76. For a study of China’s tribute system from an international-relations perspective, see Lee, China’s Hegemony .
77. Perdue, Tea, Cloth, Gold, and Religion, 2.
78. See Wills, Embassies and Illusions, 173; Smith, Mapping China. Iwai Shigeki argues that the practice of foreigners paying homage to China (J., chōkō; Ch., chaogong) began to be incorporated into the Sino-foreign trade system (J., goshi; Ch., hushi) after 1380, when the Ming abolished the Maritime Trade Superintendency (Ch., Shibo si), a longstanding institution for managing maritime trade, and that this policy endured until 1684, when Emperor Kangxi resumed maritime trade. See Iwai, Chōkō to goshi. Danjo Hiroshi emphasizes the same change in the Ming period; see Danjo, Mindai kaikin, 181–82, 336–37.
82. QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:459; Chosŏnguk raesŏ bu, 2:36–41.
83. WJSL (Injo), 34:709.
84. QSL (Shunzhi), 2:511, 3:586–87.
85. Wang, Santiandu, 290–96. For recent discussions about the Samjŏndo stele, see Koo, Ch’ŏng nara, 44–47; Bae, Chosŏn kwa Chunghwa, 33–65. In 2007, the 370th anniversary of Chosŏn’s surrender to the Manchus in 1637, a Korean nationalist painted ch’ŏlgŏ Pyŏngja 370 in large characters on the stele (ch’ŏlgŏ means remove), demonstrating the event’s strong psychological impact on modern Korean nationalism.
86. WJSL (Injo), 34:709.
87. QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:649.
88. TMHG, 1485:1497–98, 1503–11.
89. TMHG, 2:1700–1702, 1747–48.
90. See Han, Chŏngmyo, Pyŏngja horan, 383–87.
91. For Manchu-Mongol relations during this period, see Elverskog, Our Great Qing, 27–39.
2. BARBARIANIZING CHOSOŎN
1. For the post-Ming process of decentering China among China’s neighbors, see Haboush, Constructing the Center; Rawski, Early Modern China, 1–10, 225–34.
2. QSL (Shunzhi), 3:91–92.
3. QSL (Qianlong), 18:643.
4. Langkio’s palace memorial, April 17, 1653, in LKSS, no. 2–3.
12. For example, the MBRT, the most important historical record of pre-1644 Manchu history, did not refer to the Manchu regime as abkai gurun. For this subtle philological explanation, I am also grateful to two prestigious archivists and scholars, Wu Yuanfeng at the First Historical Archives of China and Zhao Zhiqiang at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, whose mother tongue is Xibo, which is almost identical to Manchu.
13. QSL (Hongtaiji), 2:455.
14. QSL (Shunzhi), 3:530–54; Guo, Wushi Dalai Lama rujin shulun.
26. See, for example, Da Qing huidian (1764), vols. 79–80; LBZL, vols. 171–87; Lifan yuan zeli, vol. 16. John King Fairbank and S. Y. Têng have also argued that the way in which the Qing controlled and managed these Mongol tribes was all in the traditional forms of the tributary relationship; see Fairbank and Têng, On the Ch’ing Tributary System, 158–63. Recent scholarship has complicated this picture by examining how the Manchu and Mongol sides perceived each other’s positions in the Qing-led empire; see Elverskog, Our Great Qing, 23–39.
27. Da Qing huidian shili, 975:9b–10a.
28. See, for example, QSL (Yongzheng), 8:388; Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, Qingdai Junjichu manwen aocha dang, 1:1123, 2:1476; Xizang dang’an, files 34–74; Da Qing huidian (1764), 80:26a.
29. Mark Mancall also points out that after 1644 the Mongolian Superintendency used rites and forms of the traditional Confucian Chinese system to conduct relations with the ‘barbarians’; see Mancall, Ch’ing Tribute System, 72–73.
30. LBZL, 171:1–14, 172:1–22, 181:1–7, 184:1–6, 185:1–3, 186:1–5. For the classic discussion on the regulations, see Fairbank, Preliminary Framework, 10–11; Fairbank and Têng, On the Ch’ing Tributary System, 163–73.
31. Da Ming huidian, vols. 105–8.
32. Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise, 118–21.
33. For the Qing’s expansion to the southwest, see Herman, Empires in the Southwest; Hostetler, Qing Colonial Enterprise; Gong, Ming Qing Yunnan tusi; Li, Qingdai tusi zhidu .
34. Zhupi yuzhi, 45:1a–81a.
35. Da Ming huidian, 105:1b; Da Qing huidian (1899), 39:2a–3a.
36. Da Qing huidian (1764), 56:1a–2b; LBZL, vols. 171–80; Da Qing huidian (1899), 39:2a–3a. The successive changes to the list over the course of the Qing period are highlighted by the five editions of Da Qing huidian (issued in 1690, 1732, 1764, 1818, and 1899, respectively). See Fairbank and Têng, On the Ch’ing Tributary System, 174; Banno, Kindai Chū goku seiji gaikō shi, 87.
37. Da Qing huidian (1764), 80:1a, 10b. Peter C. Perdue argues that this claim was as much mythical as real; see Perdue, China Marches West, 527.
38. LBZL, vols. 172–77. Siam sent emissaries once every three years until 1839 and once every four years thereafter.
39. LBZL, 172:1b–5b.
40. TMHG, 2:1700–1744; Ch’ŏng sŏn go, 2:404–502; Chang, Qing-Han Zongfan maoyi, 18–19; Liu, Qingdai Zhong-Chao shizhe, 154–251. In practice, the Korean tributary emissaries simultaneously gathered intelligence on the Qing and reported their findings to the king after they returned home in attachments to their palace memorials (K., p’iltam). Their intelligence-gathering activities helped the Korean court understand the dynamics of the Qing’s domestic and international situation. For p’iltam from 1639 to 1862, see Tongmun koryak, 3:405–530. For a specific case of intelligence gathering, see Ding, 18 segi ch’o Chosŏn yŏnhaengsa.
41. QSL (Qianlong), 24:297, 25:715.
42. LBZL, 172–80:1a. The number of attendants in Sulu’s missions was also open, but theoretically Sulu sent a mission only once every five years.
43. Langkio’s memorial, February 9, 1653, in LKSS, no. 2–1; LFZZ, nos. 3–163–7728–8, 3–163–7730–25.
44. T’ongmun’gwan ji, 1:94–98; Yi, Pugwon rok, 707–9.
45. Langkio’s memorial, May 28, 1653, in LKSS, no. 2–4.
65. Cefeng Chaoxian guowang Li Qin fengtian gaoming .
66. Jangsŏgak sojang gomunsŏ, 3:20–21.
67. Jangsŏgak sojang gomunsŏ, 3:30–33.
68. LKSS, no. 2–3.
69. See Crossley, Translucent Mirror, 11–12.
70. See Chuang, Xianluo guowang; Mancall, Ch’ing Tribute System; Masuda, Fall of Ayutthaya.
71. Rockhill, Korea in Its Relations with China, 2.
72. See, for example, LFZZ, nos. 3–163–7729–16/17/26/27/29/31/33/45/46; for more on the Korean tributes, see Qingdai Zhong-Chao guanxi dang’an shiliao huibian (hereafter ZCSLHB); Qingdai Zhong-Chao guanxi dang’an shiliao xubian (hereafter ZCSLXB).
76. LBZL, 171:3b–4a, 11b–15a; Da Qing tongli, 43:1–6.
77. Da Tang Kaiyuan li, 386–92.
78. Sadae mungwe, 42:14b–15b.
79. As JaHyun Kim Haboush points out in the context of seventeenth-century Korea, In the cultural matrix of the time, ritual was seen as the manifestation of order as well as a means through which order was preserved and restored. See Haboush, Constructing the Center, 70–71.
80. QSL (Kangxi), 4:678.
81. See, for example, QSL (Qianlong), 26:9.
82. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 108.
83. Guanglu si zeli, 23:4b–6a; LBZL, 299:7a–7b.
84. LBZL, vol. 1, illustration no. 5.
85. Wang, Xiao Zhonghua, 137–38.
86. Dong, Xianqiao shanfang riji, 18–27.
87. Pak, Hwanjae sŏnsaengjip, 6–7.
88. Kim, Last Phase, 12.
89. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 72, 322.
90. Li and Ch’oi, Hanke shicun, 261–66; Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 392, 396.
125. Pritchard, Anglo - Chinese Relations, 133–43.
126. These reports can be found in ZCSLXB and ZCSLHB. As chapter 6 shows, in the 1900s Chinese provincial governors were still submitting similar reports
to Beijing.
127. For tianchao tizhi, see Zhongguo diyi lishi dang’an guan, Qingdai Zhong-Liu guanxi dang’an xubian, 723.
7. For the most comprehensive collection of these journals, see Lim, Yŏnhaengnok jŏnjip .
8. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 11; Ch’ŏng sŏn go, 2:458.
9. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 93.
10. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 106–8.
11. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 117.
12. Fuma, Chōsen enkōshi, 365–69.
13. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 172–76.
14. Hong, Tamhŏn sŏ, 72, 322.
15. Pak, Chŏngyu chip, 109–15, 383–438.
16. Pak, Chŏngyu chip, 437–38.
17. Ch’ae, Ham’in nok, 335–81.
18. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 1:10b.
19. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 1:59b–65b.
20. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 2:1a–2a.
21. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 2:57b.
22. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 3:20b; Min, Chungguk gŭndaesa yŏn’gu, 4.
23. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 3:26a–32b, 85a–87b, 92a–92b.
24. Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 3:75a.
25. The rules of Qing bureaucracy contributed to this paradox. The Ministry of Rites, describing the Koreans’ meeting with the Panchen Erdeni in a memorial to the emperor, simply fabricated its account, saying that after receiving the gifts from the Panchen, the Koreans immediately performed kowtow to show their gratitude. See Pak, Yŏlha ilgi, 3:91b.
26. QSL (Qianlong), 22:872.
27. Pak, Chŏngyu chip, 380–81.
28. Sŏ, Yŏlha kiyu, 335.
29. Sŏ, Yŏlha kiyu, 342, 421–22.
30. Sŏ, Yŏlha kiyu, 442.
31. QSL (Qianlong), 25:817, 873–74, 973.
32. QSL (Qianlong), 25:874, 966–74.
33. Qinding Annan jilue, 21:14a.
34. Qinding Annan jilue, 23:24a, 26:18a.
35. QSL (Qianlong), 25:1049–50, 1198, 1201–28.
36. Some modern scholars have argued that the man who presented himself at the border was not Nguyễn Huệ himself but rather a double; see Lam, Intervention versus Tribute in Sino-Vietnamese Relations. In any case, what mattered to Beijing was that Annam’s sovereign demonstrated subordination to Qing authority.
37. Qinding Annan jilue, 28:21.
38. QSL (Qianlong), 26:174–75. By rendering the phrase fengjian shizhong as centering, James Hevia, in his study of the Macartney mission, may have given the phrase a more extended meaning; see Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, 123.
39. QSL (Qianlong), 26:196–200.
40. For a review of this case, see Harrison, Qianlong Emperor’s Letter.
41. Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy, 69–160.
1. For the term everyday familiarity, see Heidegger, Being and Time, 176.
2. For the translation of Wanguo gongfa, see Liu, Clash of Empires, 108–39; Okamoto, Sōshuken no sekaishi, 90–118.
3. Wheaton, Wanguo gongfa, vol. 1.
4. Fairbank, Early Treaty System, 257.
5. Kojong Sunjong sillok, 1:121.
6. Ilsŏngnok, 66:199–201.
7. ZRHGX, 2:29; FRUS, 1867–’68, 1:420.
8. FRUS, 1867–’68, 1:420.
9. See, for example, Grosier, General Description of China, 244.
10. Nelson, Korea and the Old Orders, 292.
11. See, for example, Curzon, Problems of the Far East, 144–45.
12. Tamura, Ejiputo kenkyu; Em, Great Enterprise, 30.
13. Wheaton, Wanguo gongfa, 1:25a–28b; 2:2b–3a; Wheaton, Elements of International Law, 44–50, 79.
14. Nelson, Korea and the Old Orders, 289; Westad, Restless Empire, 81–82.
15. Aihanzhe, ed., Dong Xi-yang kao meiyue tongji zhuan, 91–92. Aihanzhe, literally people loving China, might refer to a group of missionaries who were active in South China near Guangdong. For Gützlaff’s contribution to the Chinese norms discussed here, see Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy, 218–19.
16. See Edward Hertslet, Memorandum respecting Corea, December 19, 1882, in Korea, the Ryukyu Islands, and North-East Asia, 2–3; Frederick Low to
Hamilton Fish, November 23, 1871, in Davids, American Diplomatic and Public Papers (hereafter ADPP), 9:184; Mori Arinori to the Zongli Yamen, January 15, 1876, in ZRHGX, 2:270.
17. Rockhill, Korea in Its Relations with China.
18. Curzon, Problems of the Far East, 209–22.
19. ZRHGX, 2:33–34.
20. Ilsŏngnok, 66:614.
21. Kojong Sunjong sillok, 1:227–28.
22. Ilsŏngnok, 66:309, 582.
23. Kojong sidae sa, 1:263.
24. FRUS, 1867–’68, 1:416.
25. Kojong Sunjong sillok, 1:235.
26. Kuiling, Dongshi jishi shilue, 737.
27. Ilsŏngnok, 66:643–48.
28. FRUS, 1867–’68, 1:4224.
29. ZCSLXB, 344–60.
30. FRUS, 1867–’68, 1:426–28.
31. ADPP, 9:49.
32. Dennett, Americans in Eastern Asia, 418–19.
33. See Griffis, Corea: The Hermit Nation .
34. See Le Gendre’s letter on June 21, 1867, in Rishi shokan, Japan Center for Asian Historical Records (hereafter JACAR), ref. no. A03030060500. For Admiral Bell’s expedition against the aborigines, see Carrington, Foreigners in Formosa, 156–57.
35. Davidson, Island of Formosa, 117–22.
36. Low to Fish, no. 225, July 16, 1870, in FRUS, 1870–’71, 362.
37. ZRHGX, 2:165–66.
38. Low to Fish, no. 29, April 3, 1871; no. 31, May 13, 1871, in FRUS, 1871–’72, 111–15.
39. ZRHGX, 2:175.
40. Low to Fish, dispatch 102, November 23, 1871, in ADPP, 9:184.
43. See Yen, Taiwan, 159–74; Mayo, Korean Crisis of 1873, 802–5.
44. Li’s palace memorial, May 3, 1873, in LHZQJ, 5:346–47.
45. Wade to Earl Granville, no. 118, confidential, May 15, 1873; no. 131, May 25, 1873; no. 143, June 4, 1873, in Foreign Office Record Group 17, China
Correspondence (hereafter FO 17), 654.
46. FRUS, 1873–’74, 1:188.
47. Shima, Soejima Taneomi zenshū, 2:165–66, 456.
48. JACAR, ref. no. A03023011900.
49. Soejima to Sanjō, June 29, 1873, in NHGB, 6:160.
50. Tada, Iwakurakō jikki, 3:46–90; Mayo, Korean Crisis of 1873.
51. In Tokyo, the British minister, Harry Parkes, clearly told the Japanese foreign minister, Terashima Munenori, I really am not aware whether the territory in question is or is not beyond the jurisdiction of the Chinese Government. During a residence of upwards of twenty years in China, I always heard that the whole of Formosa was claimed by China. See Parkes to Terashima, April 16, 1874, in NHGB, 7:37.
52. Chouban yiwu shimo (Tongzhi), 10:3835–949.
53. Parkes to Earl of Derby, July 20, 1875, in Korea, the Ryukyu Islands, and North-East Asia, 39.
54. Tabohashi, Kindai Nissen kankei, 1:515.
55. Ōkubo, Mori Arinori zenshū, 1:779–80; Mori Arinori bunsho, R. 2–68.
56. Terashima to Tei, November 15, 1875, in NHGB, 8:138.
57. Wade to Earl of Derby, no. 5, January 12, 1876, in FO 17, 719.
58. Marquis of Zetland, Letters of Disraeli, 373.
59. Earl of Derby to Wade, no. 77, January 1, 1876, in British Parliamentary Papers, China, 107.
60. Wade to Earl of Derby, no. 6, confidential, January 12, 1876, in FO 17, 719.
61. Mori Arinori bunsho, R. 2–67.
62. Mori Arinori bunsho, R. 1–55–1.
63. Mori’s letter to his father, January 13, 1876, Mori Arinori bunsho, R. 1–55–1.
64. Chen, Weng Tonghe riji, 3:1176.
65. Mori to the Zongli Yamen, January 15, 1876, in ZRHGX, 2:270.
68. Mori to Terashima, February 3, 1876, in NHGB, 9:170–76; Li to the Zongli Yamen, January 23–24, 1876, in LHZQJ, 31:334–42.
69. Mori’s original English report of the meeting on January 24 is missing, but the Japanese translation by the Gaimushō is still available in Tokyo; see JACAR, ref. no. B03030144000; Mori to Terashima, February 3, 1876, in NHGB, 9:170–76.
70. Li to the Zongli Yamen, January 23, 1876, in LHZQJ, 31:340; NHGB, 9:172.
71. Mori, The Second Interview, JACAR, ref. no. B03030144000.
72. ZRHGX, 2:295.
73. Mori Arinori bunsho, R. 1–55–1.
74. Ch’iksa ilgi, 17:28b.
75. Quan, Jianghua tiaoyue.
76. ZRHGX, 2:300.
77. Guo, Guo Songtao riji, 3:14–15.
78. ZRHGX, 2:316–18.
79. Bruce Cumings has also questioned whether this treaty can be seen as a modern one; see Cumings, Korea’s Place in the Sun, 102.
80. Gaimushō jōyakukyoku, Kyūjōyaku isan, 3:2.
81. For affirmations of this view, see, for example, ADPP, 10:66–77; British Parliamentary Papers, Japan, 9–10; Deuchler, Confucian Gentlemen, 47; Hua, Zhongguo bianjiang, 121; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 63; Morse, International Relations, 3:8. For challenges to it, see Hsü, China and Her Political Entity, 109–10; Kim, Last Phase, 252.
82. NHGB, 9:115.
83. Bingham to Fish, dispatch 364, March 22, 1876, in ADPP, 10:66–77; Parkes to Earl of Derby, no. 13, March 25 and 27, 1876, in British Parliamentary Papers, Japan, 9–11, 17.
84. For a review of Korea’s modern sovereignty, see Em, Great Enterprise, 21–84.
85. Mori Arinori bunsho, R. 2–68.
5. SUPERVISING CHOSOŎN
1. Yi to Li, December 24, 1879, in ZRHGX, 2:398–401.
2. NHGB, 13:435.
3. See Deuchler, Confucian Gentlemen, 110–13.
4. Shufeldt to R. W. Thompson, dispatch 21, August 30, 1880, in ADPP, 10:102–5; Li to Yu, August 28, 1880, in LHZQJ, 32:585; Paullin, Opening of Korea, 483.
17. Kim, Ŭmch’ŏng sa, 1–2; Sim, Mangi yoran chaeyong p’yŏn, 701.
18. Kim, Ŭmch’ŏng sa, 3, 12–21.
19. Li’s memorial, January 21, 1882, in LHZQJ, 9:539–44.
20. Kim, Ch’ŏnjin tamch’o, 2.
21. QSL (Guangxu), 53:1002–3.
22. Paullin, Opening of Korea, 485–87.
23. Holcombe to Frederick Frelinghuysen, February 4, 1882, in ADPP, 10:163–71.
24. Kim, Ch’ŏnjin tamch’o, 12–13.
25. Kim, Ch’ŏnjin tamch’o, 20–21.
26. Kim, Ch’ŏnjin tamch’o, 17.
27. For China’s struggle to abolish extraterritoriality as the most important imperialist practice in China, see Kayaoğlu, Legal Imperialism, 149–90.
28. Kim, Ch’ŏnjin tamch’o, 23–26.
29. ZRHGX, 2:552–55.
30. Ku Han’guk oegyo munsŏ (hereafter HKMS), 10:12–14.
31. HKMS, 10:14–15.
32. T’ongsang Miguk silgi, 6a–9b; HKMS, 10:1–2; Okamoto, Zokkoku to jishu no aida, 35–69.
33. Ŏ, Chongjŏng nyŏnp’yo, 131.
34. Baoting’s memorial, June 14, 1882, in ZRJSSL, 3:17b–18a.
35. Imperial edict, June 14, 1882, in ZRJSSL, 3:18b.
36. Baoting’s memorial, June 28, 1882, in Gongzhong dang zouzhe, 4–1–30–0278–025.
37. Kojong sidae sa, 2:331–37.
38. Inoue Kaoru to Hanabusa, July 31, 1882, in NHGB, 15:221–23; Li Shuchang to Zhang Shusheng, July 31, 1882, in ZRHGX, 2:735–47.
39. Kim, Ŭmch’ŏng sa, 179–85; Kim’s conversation with Zhou Fu, August 5, 1882, in ZRHGX, 2:769–72.
40. ZRHGX, 3:765, 789–805; Kim, Ŭmch’ŏng sa, 189–90.
41. NHGB, 15:226–30.
42. Li Shuchang to Yoshida, August 9 and 12, 1882, in NHGB, 15:164–65.
43. Inoue’s conversations with Boissonade, August 9 and 13, 1882, in NHGB, 15:169– 73; Boissonade tōgi, 140–62. For the Anglo-French joint action against the Egyptian revolt and the British conquest of Egypt in 1882, see Reid, Urabi Revolution.
44. Hart to James Duncan Campbell, no. 370, Z/83, August 10, 1882, in Fairbank, Bruner, and Matheson, I. G. in Peking, 417.
45. For the African case, see Lewis, Divided Rule, 14–16.
46. Zhang Shusheng to the Zongli Yamen, August 9, 1882, in ZRHGX, 2:773; Li Shuchang to the Zongli Yamen, August 31, 1882, in ZRHGX, 3:836.
47. For the influence of virtue on China’s statecraft, see Wang, Early Ming Relations, 42–45.
48. Kim, Tongmyo yŏngjŏp nok .
49. ZRHGX, 3:863–79.
50. ZRHGX, 3:843, 867.
51. Yuan to Li, August 6, 1886, in LHZQJ, 22:77.
52. Kim, Last Phase, 1, 348.
53. ZRJSSL, 2:33a–34b.
54. ZRHGX, 3:967–76.
55. Kim, Ŭmch’ŏngsa, 212.
56. See Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 101–3.
60. See Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 72–94. According to Larsen, the 1882 Sino-Korean Regulations constitute the first time that the Qing Empire proactively sought to promote Chinese commercial interests beyond its borders through the use of treaties and international law (90).
61. GXZP, 112:243.
62. For the Kangxi emperor’s role in introducing his empire to Western knowledge, see Jami, Emperor’s New Mathematics .
63. Mao, Qingmo diwang jiaokeshu, 127–29.
64. Mao, Qingmo diwang jiaokeshu, 147.
65. Chongqi’s memorial, in ZRHGX, 3:1063–69.
66. Li to the Zongli Yamen, January 3, 1883, and the Ministry of Rites to the Zongli Yamen, January 18, 1883, in ZRHGX, 3:1072–75, 1085–88.
68. ZRHGX, 3:1020–30; Hart to Campbell, no. 390, Z/100, December 10, 1882, in Fairbank, Bruner, and Matheson, I. G. in Peking, 436; Lensen, Balance of Intrigue, 1:31–53.
69. Frelinghuysen to Foote, no. 3, Washington, DC, March 17, 1883, in Korean-American Relations (hereafter KARD), 1:25–26.
70. Renchuan gangkou juan (hereafter RCGK), vol. 1, n.p.
71. Chen to Min Yŏng-muk, October 20, 1883, in HKMS, 8:5.
72. Yun, Yun Ch’i-ho ilgi, 1:14–16.
73. Li Hongzhang to the Zongli Yamen, January 2, 1884, in ZRHGX, 3:1314–15.
74. For the Korean mission of 1883 to the United States, see, for example, Walter, Korean Special Mission.
75. Hart to Campbell, no. 518, Z/212, March 23, 1885, in Fairbank, Bruner, and Matheson, I. G. in Peking, 590; the Zongli Yamen to Parkes, November 22, 1884, in ZRHGX, 3:1494.
76. Li Nairong to Chen Shutang, December 12, 1883, and Chen Shutang to Chen Weikun, December 20, 1883, in RCGK, vol. 1, n.p.
77. Chen to Min, February 7, 1884, in RCGK, vol. 2, n.p.
78. Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 109.
79. For Chinese immigrants and their activities in Korea after the 1870s, see Yang and Sun, Chaoxian huaqiao shi, 107–63. For a study of the Chinese merchants in Inch’ŏn and their influence on modern Korean and East Asian financial markets through the case of Tongshuntai, see Kang, Tongsunt’ae ho. Tongshuntai was founded by Cantonese merchants, and by the mid-1880s it had developed into a leading Chinese firm in Korea. It later served as a financial agency for the Chinese government. The firm finally ended its operations in Korea in September 1937 after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War. See Kang, Tongsunt’ae ho, 59–112, 280–81; Larsen , Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 263–66; Yang and Sun, Chaoxian huaqiao shi, 142–45.
80. The number of Chinese immigrants in Korea was 2,182 in 1893, 3,661 in 1906, and 11,818 in 1910. Chinese immigrants were far outnumbered by their Japanese counterparts. In 1892, for example, 1,805 Chinese and 9,340 Japanese were living in Hansŏng, Inch’ŏn, Pusan, and Wŏnsan. See Yang and Sun, Chaoxian huaqiao shi, 125–31.
81. Li Hongzhang to the Zongli Yamen, March 29, 1884, in ZRHGX, 3:1355–57.
82. Chen to Min, January 15, 1884, in HKMS, 8:21–22; Li to Chen, December 12, 1883, in RCGK, vol. 1, n.p.
83. Chen to Li, December 12, 1883, in RCGK, vol. 1, n.p.
84. Chen to Min, January 15, 1884, and Min to Chen, January 19, 1884, in HKMS, 8:21–23.
85. Chen to Min, March 7, 1884, in HKMS, 8:35–38.
86. Min to Chen and Chen to Min, December 14, 16, and 17, 1883, in HKMS, 8:14–15.
87. Li Shuchang to the Zongli Yamen, December 29, 1883, in ZRHGX, 3:1259.
88. See, for example, Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 2–17, 107–17.
89. Min to Chen, January 19, 1884, in HKMS, 8:23.
90. For the establishment of police forces in Inch’ŏn, see He, Chaoxian bandao de Zhongguo zujie, 31–34.
91. Note of Langzhong County to Nanbu County, June 4, 1883, in Sichuan sheng Nanchong shi dang’anguan, Qingdai Sichuan Nanbu xian yamen dang’an, 58:402.
92. Sichuan sheng Nanchong shi dang’anguan, Qingdai Sichuan Nanbu xian yamen dang’an, 58:403–23; Chen to Min, March 11, 1884, in HKMS, 8:40–42.
93. Min to Chen, March 15, 1884, in HKMS, 8:45.
6. LOSING CHOSOŎN
1. For the rise of the age of empires, see Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 56–83.
2. Luo and Liu, Yuan Shikai quanji, 1:34–46.
3. Ōkubo, Mori Arinori zenshū, 1:195.
4. Treaties, Conventions, etc ., 2:588–89.
5. Ma, Ma Xiangbo ji, 1091–96.
6. ZCSLHB, 259; ZRHGX, 4:1957.
7. This title was a downgrade, imposed by Congress in July 1884, from the original envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary. See Frederick Frelinghuysen to Lucius Foote, no. 58, July 14, 1884, in KARD, 1:36.
8. Foulk to Thomas Bayard, no. 255, confidential, November 25, 1885, in KARD, 1:137–39.
9. Fisher, Indirect Rule, 393–401.
10. Lewis, Divided Rule, 24–26.
11. Hugh Dinsmore to Thomas Bayard, no. 20, May 27, 1887, and Augustine Heard to James Blaine, no. 29, confidential, July 10, 1890, in KARD, 2:11, 21.
12. Li Hongzhang to the Zongli Yamen, January 30, 1886, in ZRHGX, 4:2002–4.
13. For the Port Hamilton incident, see Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 173–76; Zhang, Zai chuantong yu xiandaixing, 201–27.
14. Yuan to Li, August 6, 1886, in LHZQJ, 22:77.
15. Li to Yuan, February 1, 1886, in LHZQJ, 21:655.
16. Hugh Dinsmore to Thomas Bayard, no. 20, May 27, 1887, in KARD, 2:12; Horace Allen to Walter Gresham, no. 469, October 6, 1893, and no. 479, confidential, November 4, 1893, in KARD, 2:93–98; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 192; Lensen, Balance of Intrigue, 1:92–93.
17. Da Ming huidian, 105:1b. The Ming conquered Annam in 1407 and divided it into fifteen prefectures, thirty-six subprefectures, and 181 counties, but it ended its colonial policy in 1428. See Guo and Zhang, Yuenan tongshi, 395–421.
18. He Ruzhang to the Zongli Yamen, November 18, 1880, in ZRHGX, 2:437–47; Li Shuchang to the Zongli Yamen, August 31, 1882, in ZRHGX, 3:836.
19. Zhang Jian quanji, 6:206–7.
20. Li to the Zongli Yamen, November 23, 1882, in ZRHGX, 3:1030–33.
21. Shengyu’s memorial, December 6, 1885, in ZRJSSL, 9:16b–18b.
22. Kang Youwei quanji, 1:394–96.
23. Zeng, China, 9. Zeng is referring here to the office of the Warden of the Marches of England against Scotland, which was created in 1309 in order to monitor and defend the marches (i.e., the border) of England and Scotland; see Reid, Office of Warden.
24. Swartout, American Adviser, 142.
25. See, for example, Lee, Diplomatic Relations, 52–124.
26. Dinsmore to Thomas Bayard, no. 20, May 27, 1887, in KARD, 2:11–13.
27. See Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 176–89; Zhang, Zai chuantong yu xiandaixing, 227–74.
28. Yuan to Cho Pyŏng-sik, October 21 and November 8, 1887, in HKMS, 8:382, 384.
29. HKMS, 10:317; ZRJSSL, 10:37a.
30. Allen, Things Korean, 163–64.
31. Zhang, Zhang Yinhuan riji, 244–50, 279.
32. Zhang Yinhuan’s palace memorial, March 6, 1888, in LFZZ, no. 3–5700–043.
33. Hart to Campbell, no. 651, Z/342, June 3, 1888, in Fairbank, Bruner, and Matheson, I. G. in Peking, 705.
34. 50 Cong. Rec. 8136 (August 31, 1888); italics in the original.
35. Dinsmore to Thomas Bayard, no. 20, May 27, 1887, in KARD, 2:12.
36. Foulk to Frederick Frelinghuysen, no. 229, October 10, 1884, in FRUS 1885–’86, 326. Foulk described the stele: The front of the stone is closely filled entirely with an inscription deeply cut in what I took to be Manchu Tartar script characters; these closely resemble Sanscrit or Pali characters, but they are written in vertical lines, beginning on the left. Over the body of the inscription is a title line written horizontally from left to right. On the back of the stone is another inscription only partly covering it, in Chinese square characters (326).
37. Rockhill, Korea in Its Relations with China, 1.
38. Rockhill, Korea in Its Relations with China, 1–2.
39. Min Chong-muk to Yuan, June 4, 1890, and Yuan to Min and Li Hongzhang, June 5, 1890, in Qinshi fengming qianlai ciji Chaoxian guowang mufei juan (hereafter QSCJ), n.p.
40. Yuan to Li Hongzhang, May 16, 1890, in ZRJSSL, 11:31a.
41. Yuan to Heard, June 5, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p.
42. Yuan to Li, June 6, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p.
43. Yuan to Li, June 6, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p; Li to the Zongli Yamen, June 13, 1890, in ZRHGX, 5:2785.
44. Li to Yuan, and Yuan to Chinese commercial commissioners in Chosŏn, June 6, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p.
45. Min Chong-muk to Yuan, June 10, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p.
46. Yuan to Heard, September 30, 1890, and Kim Yŏngsu to Yuan, October 11, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p.
47. Heard to Yuan, October 11, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p.
48. Heard to James Blaine, no. 13, June 7, 1890, in KARD, 2:124–26.
49. LHZQJ, 23:102–5.
50. For the 1890 imperial mission to Korea, see Okamoto, " Fengshi Chaoxian riji zhi yanjiu; Van Lieu, Politics of Condolence. Van Lieu’s study also reveals the significant influence of the Chinese propaganda movement following the 1890 mission on Western historiography of Chosŏn-Qing relations; see Van Lieu, Politics of Condolence," 103–10.
51. LHZQJ, 23:69–75.
52. Chongli, Fengshi Chaoxian riji, 2b–3a.
53. Shihan jilue, 3–7.
54. Li to Yuan, October 12, 1890, in QSCJ, n.p.
55. Chongli, Fengshi Chaoxian riji, 12b–13b.
56. Notes on the Imperial Chinese Mission, 8.
57. Ch’iksa ilgi, 19:1a–6a.
58. Chongli, Fengshi Chaoxian riji, 17b–18a.
59. Chongli, Fengshi Chaoxian riji, 26b–27a.
60. China Imperial Maritime Customs Decennial Reports, app. 2, 42.
61. Shihan jilue, 22–26.
62. Ch’iksa ilgi, 19:11a–12a.
63. For defenses of this argument, see Okamoto, Sekai no naka no Nitsu-Shin-Kan, 15–28; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 190–91; Van Lieu, Politics of Condolence.
64. Augustine Heard to James Blaine, no. 89, confidential, November 19, 1890, in KARD, 2:35.
65. Treat, China and Korea, 506–43.
66. See, for example, Nelson, Korea and the Old Orders, 175–80; Lin, Yuan Shikai yu Chaoxian, 137–321; Kim, Last Phase, 350; Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 128–73; Zhang, Zai chuantong yu xiandaixing, 192–201. But Larsen has critically pointed out that Yuan represented only one strand of Qing imperial strategy in Chosŏn Korea, and often not the most influential one at that; see Larsen, Tradition, Treaties, and Trade, 173.
67. Chongli, Fengshi Chaoxian riji, 54b–55a.
68. China Imperial Maritime Customs Decennial Reports, app. 2, 42.
79. ZRZZ, 1:146–52, 199; Hong Liangpin’s memorial, August 10, 1894, in LFZZ, no. 3–167–9115–5.
80. Qinggong zhencang lishi Dalai Lama dang’an, 387–88.
81. NHGB, 28(2):373.
82. ZRZZ, 3:188.
83. ZRZZ, 3:290.
84. Ilsŏngnok, 79:209; Koketsu, Ni-Shin kaisen; Em, Great Enterprise, 21–52.
85. Wang Wenshao to the Zongli Yamen, July 12, 1896, in ZRHGX, 8:4856–57.
86. The Zongli Yamen’s memorial, July 27, 1896, in ZRHGX, 8:4871–74.
87. Wang Wenshao to the Zongli Yamen, August 7, 1896, in ZRHGX, 8:4899–900.
88. The Zongli Yamen’s memorial, November 20, 1896, in ZRHGX, 8:4968.
89. In 1905 Tang Shaoyi brought his Korean experience to the treaty negotiations with Britain over Tibet; see Lu, Xizang jiaoshe jiyao, 17–20; Tang’s telegrams to
Beijing, July 2, July 14, and August 21, 1905, in Waiwu bu Xizang dang, 02–16–001–06–061/066, 02–16–003–01–007.
90. Tang Shaoyi to the Zongli Yamen, March 13, 1897, in ZRHGX, 8:4989.
91. Schmid, Korea between Empires, 11, 55–100.
92. Ilsŏngnok, 80:161–63; Lensen, Balance of Intrigue, 2:644–46.
93. ZRJSSL, 51:21a, 35b, 36b.
94. ZRJSSL, 51:40.
95. ZRJSSL, 52:1a–2b.
96. ZRJSSL, 52:2b.
97. Mao, Wuxu bianfa, 45.
98. Tang Shaoyi to the Zongli Yamen, August 28, 1898, in ZRHGX, 8:5146–48.
104. Imperial decree, October 11, 1898, in ZRHGX, 8:5160.
105. Xu Shoupeng to the Zongli Yamen, December 4, 1898, in ZRHGX, 8:5179.
106. Wu, Chaoxian sanzhong xu, 1.
107. Xu’s memorial, March 5, 1899, in ZRHGX, 8:5200; Han Ch’ŏng ŭiyak kongdok, 11–12.
108. Xu’s memorial, July 19, 1899, in ZRJSSL, 52:38a–38b.
109. ZRHGX, 8:5246–47.
110. Giwadan jihen ni kanshi Kankoku kōtei.
111. HKMS, 9:534.
112. GXZP, 112:342–43.
113. ZRHGX, 8:5556.
114. GXZP, 112:332–33.
115. GXZP, 112:339.
116. GXZP, 112:241–42, 344–57.
117. Zhao Erxun quanzong dang’an, no. 125–2.
118. Chen Zuoyan’s report, March 1901, in ZRHGX, 9:5839–44.
119. The Manchu general of Jilin to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, July 29, 1903, in ZRHGX, 9:5680–82; Zhang Zhaolin’s report, fall 1903, in ZRHGX, 9:5849–81.
120. Zhao Erxun quanzong dang’an, no. 125.
121. For the issue of Kando/Jiandao, see Song, Making Borders .
123. Yuan Shikai to Li Hongzhang, August 30, 1890, in ZRHGX, 9:5703–5.
124. For the regulation, see ZRHGX, 9:5952–53.
125. Wu, Yanji bianwu baogao, chap. 4, 11.
126. Tang and Sang, Dai Jitao ji, 29.
127. Xiliang to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, September 8 and 17, 1910, in ZRHGX, 10:7119, 7127. For the full text of the Da Qing guoji tiaoli issued on March 28, 1909, see Ding, Qingmo yixing guoji guanli tiaoli.
128. Zhao to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, August 15, 1911, in ZRHGX, 10:7202.
CONCLUSION
1. China Mission Year Book, 1912, app. C, 17.
2. Wang and Wan, Chaoxian diaocha ji; Chen, Diaocha Chaoxian shiye baogao .
3. Chaoxian wenjian lu, 2–3.
4. See Goldstein, History of Modern Tibet, 638–813; van Schaik, Tibet, 207–69.
5. Chang, Waimeng zhuquan, 269–303.
6. See, for example, Fiskesjö, Rescuing the Empire; Carlson, Reimagining the Frontier; Liu, Recast All under Heaven, 3–18, 171–241.
7. For an example, see Rawski, Early Modern China, 235–63.
8. Zhonghua guochi ditu .
9. Zhongyang ribao, Nanjing, March 15, 1930, in Hu, Hanguo duli yundong, 303.
10. Ji, Mao Zedong shici, 546.
11. For the relationship between Mao’s Central Kingdom mentality and China’s decision to enter the Korean War, see Chen, China’s Road, 213–20. For the effect of this mentality on the Sino-Korean demarcation in Manchuria, see Shen, Saigo no tenchō, 2:144–47.
![MAP 5.1. The Chinese settlement in Inch’oȈn in the early 1890s. 1 meter = 39.37 inches. Plan of Settlements in Chemulpo [Inch’oȈn], handwritten map, preserved at the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University. Copyright Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies.](https://www.everand.com/scepub/490567747/chapters/13/images/image-1KYPE1KJ.jpg?token=1723168153_3I3UW7HCBHC76FIXQHC6IQSPIDNABCVFMRAA4I72HMZK3ELC5FUU33YSSV2Q6===_04165377aa0798540ebe5ccbe80e983798639a3b)
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