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Self-Strengthening, episode 10

The Hermit Kingdom

For centuries Korea has sent tribute to the Qing emperor and run its own affairs, and in 1876 Japan forces it open by treaty. The episode follows Li Hongzhang as he tries to keep Korea in China's orbit by new means, urging it to sign treaties with the West to balance Japan, and Ma Jianzhong, the Western educated aide he sends to Seoul when soldiers riot in 1882 and who carries the king's father off to China, and asks whether this was the old tributary order or a new Qing imperialism. It hears Li in his own letters and memorials, alongside foreign observers and scholars.

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Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

Li Hongzhang
Li Hongzhang. Russell & Sons, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, the Qing quarrelled with Russia over the Ili valley, at the far northwestern corner of the empire, until Russia had more than ninety thousand troops near the disputed ground. The envoy Chonghou signed away most of the valley at Livadiya, was condemned to death for it, and was spared only after foreign protests and a personal appeal from Queen Victoria. Then Zeng Jize, son of the great Zeng Guofan, went to St Petersburg and talked the Russians into handing back most of what Chonghou had given away, for more money. It was a bloodless diplomatic triumph, something new in China's long experience, and he came home to be loaded with honours. But while the court stared west, it had let Japan take the Ryukyu islands, a kingdom that had paid tribute to the Qing for five centuries. This episode is about the next kingdom in line. Picture the map for a moment. Korea hangs down from the mainland of Asia like a thumb, between the Yellow Sea and the Sea of Japan. To its north lies Manchuria, the Qing dynasty's homeland. Across a narrow strait to its south lies Japan. In the 1870s it was ruled, as it had been since 1392, by a single royal house, the Joseon dynasty, from its capital at Seoul. And for as long as anyone could remember, Korea had sent tribute to the emperor in Beijing. Tribute is the key word here, so let me explain it. In the Qing view of the world, the emperor stood at the centre, and the rulers of neighbouring kingdoms acknowledged him by sending regular missions with gifts, and by receiving his recognition when a new king took the throne. In return, they ran their own affairs. The emperor did not tax Korea, did not station officials in Seoul, and did not tell the king how to govern. Korea was the model tributary. Its envoys came to Beijing every year, it used the Qing calendar, and its scholars wrote in classical Chinese and read the same Confucian classics as the officials who received them. Westerners called it the Hermit Kingdom, because it kept nearly everyone else out. Apart from China, the only country Korea dealt with regularly was Japan, through a single trading post on its southern coast. The relationship had not begun gently. Before they conquered China, Manchu armies invaded Korea twice, in 1627 and again in the winter of 1636, and the Korean king was made to kneel before the Manchu ruler and swear to be his vassal. For generations afterwards, Korean scholars privately thought of the Qing as barbarians from the north, and of their own country as the last true keeper of the Confucian civilisation of the fallen Ming dynasty. But the forms were kept faithfully, year after year, for more than two centuries. And over time the forms became the relationship. And there was an older memory too, the one that mattered most for what follows. In the 1590s a Japanese warlord, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, had invaded Korea with enormous armies, meaning to march on to China. A Ming army crossed into Korea to fight him, and after years of war the Japanese withdrew. So for three hundred years, everyone in the region had known what Korea was. It was the road from Japan into China, and the road from China into Japan. For a decade before Japan came knocking, the man who kept the door shut was the king's father. His title was the Daewongun, which means, roughly, the grand prince of the court, the title Korea gave to a king's father who had never been king himself. His son had come to the throne as a boy of eleven, and for ten years the Daewongun ruled in his name. He was fiercely against the foreigners. In 1866 his government killed thousands of Korean Catholics and nine French missionary priests, and when French warships came to punish Korea that year, and American ones in 1871, both times the foreigners sailed away without a treaty. He had stone tablets put up across the country warning that anyone who talked of peace with the Western barbarians was a traitor. In 1873 the young king, now grown, took power into his own hands, and the Daewongun was pushed aside. The family of the king's wife, Queen Min, rose in his place. Keep the Daewongun in mind. He is not finished. Meanwhile, across the strait, Japan had changed out of all recognition. In 1868 a group of young samurai had overthrown the shogun, the military ruler who had run Japan for centuries, and restored the emperor as the centre of a new government. That is the Meiji Restoration. The new government set out to build a modern state, with a conscript army, a navy, railways and a Western style bureaucracy, as fast as it could. When it wrote to Korea announcing the change, the Koreans refused to accept the letters. They used words for Japan's emperor that, to Korean eyes, only the emperor in Beijing could use. In Tokyo there were samurai urging a war of conquest, and Korea was the target they preferred. The Taiwan expedition of 1874 was, in part, a way to give them something else to do. In 1873 the new government had a furious argument over whether to send an expedition to Korea. One of the great heroes of the Restoration wanted to go to Seoul himself as envoy, and expected to be killed there, giving Japan its cause for war. The men who had just come back from a long tour of the West overruled him. Japan, they said, had to build its strength at home first. He left the government in disgust. Four years later he led a rebellion of disaffected samurai in the south of Japan, and died when the new conscript army crushed it. But the argument in Tokyo had never been about whether Japan should have its way in Korea. Only about when. In 1875 a Japanese gunboat surveying the Korean coast near the island of Kanghwa, at the mouth of the river that leads to Seoul, exchanged fire with the Korean forts there. Japan used the clash the way the Western powers had so often used incidents against China. Early in 1876 it sent warships and troops to Kanghwa and demanded a treaty. If that sounds familiar, it should have sounded familiar in Tokyo too. Little more than twenty years earlier, an American commodore, Matthew Perry, had sailed his black ships into Tokyo Bay and forced Japan to open its ports by treaty. Now Japan arrived off Korea with its own warships and did the same thing, almost step by step. The pupil had learned the lesson well. The Korean court argued over whether to fight. The Daewongun, from retirement, wanted to. But the king's government decided it could not, and it signed. And Japan imposed on the reluctant king of Korea a treaty of amity and commerce. The treaty opened three Korean ports to Japanese trade: Busan in the south, Chemulpo near Seoul, and Wonsan on the east coast. But the clause that mattered most to China was the very first one. Korea, it said, "being an independent state, enjoys the same sovereign rights as Japan". It sounds harmless enough, and at the time little notice was taken of it. Korea went on as China's vassal, as before. But the claim was Japan's, and now it was on paper. The language of the treaty declared Korea an independent and sovereign state, and in effect denied its tributary status to the Qing. There was more in it, and it would look very familiar to anyone in China. Japanese living in the open ports would be tried by their own consuls under Japanese law, just as Westerners in the treaty ports of China were tried by theirs. Japan had spent years trying to free itself from exactly that kind of clause in its own treaties with the West. Now it had written one into a treaty of its own. The Qing had been given a chance to object, and they had not really taken it. Before the warships sailed, Japan's envoy in China, Mori Arinori, called on Li Hongzhang to ask where the Qing stood. Li Hongzhang was the governor general of Zhili, the province around Beijing, and the court's leading statesman, with his headquarters at Tianjin. He was then in his early fifties, an Anhui scholar who had raised his own army, the Huai Army, to fight the Taiping in the 1860s, and who since 1870 had made Tianjin the centre of everything modern the Qing were trying to build: arsenals, steamships, schools, and soon a navy. Li urged Japan not to use force. But the Qing position was that Korea, though a tributary, ran its own government and its own foreign relations. That had always been true in the old world. In the new world of treaties and international law, it amounted to saying that Korea was on its own. The Qing had just learned, in Taiwan, what Japan was willing to do. Now they had to decide how much Korea mattered. Within a few years, the man who had to answer that question was Li Hongzhang. And his answer was not the old one.

By 1879 the court had given Li charge of its dealings with Korea, which meant that letters between Seoul and the Qing now passed through his office at Tianjin. That year, Japan's new strength had just been shown again. It had annexed the Ryukyu islands outright and made them a Japanese prefecture. Korea was next door, and Li knew it. The Qing had protested over the Ryukyus, and they had even found an unexpected go between. In 1879 the former American president, Ulysses Grant, was travelling around the world, and when he came through China, Li and Prince Gong asked him to help settle the quarrel with Japan. Grant urged both sides to compromise, and in 1880 the two governments discussed dividing the islands between them. But the Qing never signed, and Japan simply kept them all. The lesson was plain enough. Protest was not going to save a tributary. Something else would have to. Li's view of Japan was not complicated. The Japanese, he wrote, were "of a proud and overbearing nature" and "extremely ambitious and wily, they advance step by step". On the twenty third of October 1879, he sat down and wrote a long letter to a senior Korean statesman. The man had once been the Korean king's chief minister, and he was close to the court in Seoul. It is one of the clearest statements Li ever made of how he saw the world. And it is worth hearing at some length, because almost everything that happens in Korea for the next fifteen years flows from it. Li began with the Japanese, and their professions of friendship. The Korean had passed on Japan's assurances that it wanted nothing but good relations, and that the Japanese were perfectly frank and sincere. Li was not impressed. Relations between neighbouring states, he wrote, were easy to explain. Two countries that had been enemies could come together when they shared a common interest. "Where no such ground of mutual advantage exists, they soon cease to agree and become enemies." Korea, he advised, should hide what it knew about Japan's lack of sincerity, stay on its guard, and avoid every subject of dispute, so as not to give Japan a pretext. He went on to the money troubles driving Japan to look for land abroad, and he urged Korea to build up its defences quietly, while keeping carefully to every treaty it had signed. Then he came to the heart of it. "All the political leaders of China are convinced that, in these matters, prevention is better than cure." "You may say that the simplest way to avoid trouble would be to shut oneself in and be at peace. Alas, as far as the East is concerned, this is not possible." In his words, "There is no human agency capable of putting a stop to the expansionist movement of Japan". So what was Korea to do? Li's answer is the line that sums up his whole strategy: "is not our best course to neutralise one poison by another, to set one energy against another". And he spelled out what he meant. "You should seize every opportunity to establish treaty relations with Western nations, of which you would make use to check Japan." Think about how strange that advice was, coming from where it came. For forty years, the treaties the West had forced on China had been the great humiliation of the Qing. Here was the Qing's leading statesman telling Korea to go out and sign some. Li gave his reasons, and they came from the newspapers of Europe. The year before, he wrote, Turkey had been the victim of Russia's aggression. But at the moment she was about to give way, England had called the other nations together to consult, and Russia had promptly called off her forces. If Turkey had stayed in isolation like Korea's, he warned, she would have become Russia's prey. He was talking about the war between Russia and the Ottoman empire in 1877 and 1878, and the Congress of Berlin, where the other powers forced Russia to give back much of what it had won. He did not pretend the West was virtuous. There was a rule in the West, he wrote, that a nation may not seize another's territory without good cause. But in his words, "international law acts only as a protective force in the case of the Powers with common commercial interests". In other words, the law of nations protects you only if you have friends with something to lose. So go and make some friends. And he gave the Koreans two more examples. "Belgium and Denmark, two small States in Europe, have made treaties with all the Powers". Because of that, he said, no one dared oppress them. So Li advised treaties of commerce with England, France, Germany and the United States, which he called "far-distant countries, whose only object would be to trade with your kingdom". He also advised a customs tariff, and Korean ministers sent abroad. And he made one more point, which shows how much he had learned from his own country's experience. The Western nations, he wrote, had imposed their treaties on China by force, and so carrying them out had been a source of endless trouble. But "if your Government were to take the initiative of its own free will and before they resort to violence, the Western Powers would be so surprised that they could hardly be exacting." Sign before they come with gunboats, in other words, and you can name better terms. Above all, he told the Koreans, they should use every possible means to divide their adversaries: "go warily, use cunning". It was exactly the game Li himself played, year in and year out, at the court in Beijing. And he had a reason to hurry that he did not need to spell out. Against the menace of Japan, his letter kept an eye on Russia as well. That same autumn, Chonghou was signing away most of Ili at Livadiya. Russia's long border with Manchuria ran right down to the Korean frontier. Li even suggested how a Korea that opened of its own accord might keep what it valued. By signing first, on its own terms, it could keep its bans on the sale of opium and on preaching the Christian religion, without giving the powers a pretext to complain. Think about that. Opium and missionaries were the two things the treaties had forced on China. Li was trying to spare Korea both.

Ukiyo-e by Utagawa Kunimatsu showing the Japanese legation fleeing Korea, 1882
Ukiyo-e by Utagawa Kunimatsu showing the Japanese legation fleeing Korea, 1882. Utagawa Kunimatsu, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The Koreans did not leap at Li's advice. Their first answer was polite and noncommittal. Korea had no wish to deal with the Western powers at all. But the king was beginning to think differently. In 1880 a Korean envoy came back from Tokyo carrying a short essay written by a Qing diplomat there, Huang Zunxian, that said much the same as Li's letter. Its advice was that Korea should hold close to China, keep on terms with Japan, and ally with America, all against the real danger, which it saw in Russia. When the king had the essay circulated, conservative scholars across the country sent in furious memorials against it. One of them carried the names of thousands of scholars from a single province. The king, by then in his late twenties, wanted to know how the modern world worked. In 1881 he sent a party of officials to Japan to study its new institutions, and another group of young Koreans to Tianjin to learn how to make guns and machines at Li's arsenal there. The man who led the students to Tianjin was an official named Kim Yun-sik. He will turn up again in a moment. Behind the king stood his queen, Queen Min. She was clever and politically skilled, and her relatives now held many of the great offices of the kingdom. Her enemies, and there were many, blamed her family for the corruption of the government. The greatest of those enemies was her father in law, the Daewongun. The king pressed on anyway. And Li set about arranging the first treaty himself. The power he chose was the United States. An American naval officer, Commodore Robert Shufeldt, had been trying for years to open Korea. In 1881 and 1882 he negotiated the terms with Li Hongzhang at Tianjin, with the Koreans kept informed but hardly at the table. Li wanted the treaty to say plainly that Korea was a dependency of China. Shufeldt refused. So they found a way around it. The treaty would treat Korea as a sovereign state, and the king would send a separate letter to the American president, saying that Korea was a dependent of China but ran its own affairs. The Qing sent two men to Korea with Shufeldt to see the treaty signed. One was the admiral Ding Ruchang. The other was a young aide of Li's named Ma Jianzhong. Ma Jianzhong is one of the most interesting men in this whole story, so let me take a moment with him. He was born in 1845 into a Catholic family near the Yangtze, and was taught by French Jesuits in Shanghai, where he learned French, Latin and Greek alongside the Chinese classics. He joined Li's staff, and in 1877 he went to France with the young officers of the Fuzhou navy yard who were being sent to study in Europe. In Paris he studied law and politics, and he came home in 1880 with a French degree in law, one of the first Chinese ever to earn one. So the man Li sent to Korea knew international law the way the Europeans taught it, and he knew how the Europeans used it. He was also full of ideas. He wrote to Li from Europe that the West's strength did not come only from guns and ships, but from its laws, its parliaments and its schools. That was a long way ahead of most of the men around him. In Korea he would have the chance to see how far his master was willing to go. He was there when the Korean American treaty was signed at Chemulpo in May 1882. Within weeks Korea had signed treaties with Britain and Germany too, with Ma helping to arrange them. Li's plan was working. Korea was being tied to the Western powers, on terms the Qing had written, with a Qing aide standing at the table. Not everyone in Korea saw it that way. The signing of the American treaty alarmed the party of reaction in Korea. And the anger did not stay with the scholars. It found its way into the barracks. Korea's old army had been left to rot. Its soldiers had not been paid their rice ration for more than a year, while a small new unit, trained by a Japanese officer, was well fed and well armed. In July 1882 the government finally handed out a month's rice to the old soldiers. When they opened the sacks, they found it short in weight and mixed with sand. They rioted. They attacked the official in charge, and then the houses of the queen's family. And the riot found a leader in the king's father, the Daewongun. Under his hand, it ended in the burning of the Japanese legation at Seoul. On the twenty third of July 1882, a mob attacked the Japanese legation and killed several of the people inside. The mob burnt the legation, and the Japanese minister and his guard fought their way out of Seoul to the coast. They reached the harbour at Chemulpo and got away on a British survey ship that happened to be there. The Japanese officer who had trained the new Korean unit was killed. Many other Japanese in Seoul died in the rising. The next day the mob broke into the royal palace and demanded the queen's life. She escaped, by most accounts disguised as a palace servant, and hid in the countryside. The Daewongun announced that she was dead and ordered mourning for her. And for a few weeks, the old conservative prince was back in power. Everything Li had built in Korea was suddenly in danger. The king's government had been overthrown, a Japanese legation had been burned, and Japan now had every reason to send an army. The race was on, and the Qing moved first. Li himself was not at Tianjin that summer. His mother had died that spring, and he had gone home to mourn her, as custom demanded of every official. His deputy at Tianjin, Zhang Shusheng, held his place. Two Korean officials who happened to be in Tianjin, Kim Yun-sik among them, urged the Qing to send troops at once, before the Japanese could. Li later boasted that the Qing had moved with real speed over the Korean trouble, "truly relying on the power of the telegraph". The telegraph line from Tianjin to Shanghai had opened only the year before. News, orders and replies that once took weeks now took hours. Li's office sent Ma Jianzhong to Korea, with a considerable naval and military force.

Both China and Japan sent forces to restore order. The Qing force came in Ding Ruchang's warships: some three thousand men of the Huai Army, Li's own army, under a general named Wu Changqing. Among the officers on Wu's staff was a young man of twenty two who had failed the civil service examinations and joined the army through his family's connections instead. His name was Yuan Shikai. Remember that name, too. The Qing troops landed south of Chemulpo in August 1882 and marched on Seoul. The Japanese came in force as well. So now there were two foreign armies in Korea, each saying it had come to restore order, each watching the other. And as long as the Daewongun held Seoul, Japan had every excuse it needed to fight. What Ma did next was quick, and it was not gentle. Ma and the Qing generals paid a courteous call on the Daewongun, and the Daewongun returned the call at the Qing camp, as etiquette required. When he arrived, Ma kept him talking, and then had him put into a sedan chair, carried to the coast under guard, and put aboard a Qing warship. The old prince was taken to China. Li Hongzhang had decided to appease the Japanese by having the grand prince abducted and held under house arrest in Tianjin. He was questioned there, and then kept at Baoding, south of Beijing, for three years. A decree from the throne charged him with seizing power from his own son, the king whom the emperor had invested. In other words, the Qing claimed the right to punish a Korean prince for a crime against the Korean king. That was the emperor acting not as a distant overlord, but as a judge. Within days, Qing troops had hunted down the mutineers in the soldiers' quarters of Seoul, and before long the queen came back to the palace. Think about what had just happened. The Qing had taken the father of a reigning king, a prince of a tributary kingdom, and carried him off to China like a prisoner. There was nothing in the old tributary relationship that allowed for anything like that. The emperor recognised Korea's kings. He did not kidnap their fathers. And yet it worked. Japan, though anxious to assert its rights, was not yet ready for a conclusive test of strength. Japan settled with the restored king's government instead. It obtained an undertaking that Korea would pay an indemnity of five hundred thousand dollars. Japan also won the right to keep soldiers in Seoul to guard its legation. In Tokyo, the speed of the Qing move was a shock. That same year Japan's leaders committed the country to a long program of building up its army and navy, and China was the power they had in mind. Korea also sent a mission to Japan that autumn to apologise for the attack on the legation. Among its members was a young reformer named Kim Ok-gyun, who already looked to Japan, not China, as the model for his country's future. Kim and his friends watched the Qing take the king's father away, and station their troops in Seoul, and they drew their own conclusions. We will meet them again. The Qing kept soldiers there too. Wu Changqing's three thousand men stayed in Seoul. And young Yuan Shikai stayed with them, training a new Korean army unit on the Qing model, and learning how Korean politics worked. That autumn the Qing signed trade regulations with Korea which said in writing, for the first time, that Korea was a dependency of China, and which gave Chinese merchants special rights there. Li also sent a German who had worked in the Qing customs, Paul Georg von Moellendorff, to Seoul to run Korea's customs and advise its government on foreign affairs. The trade regulations were written so that Chinese merchants could live and trade in Seoul itself, and be tried by Chinese officials. Koreans in China got no such rights. And because Korea was called a dependency, the Qing argued that the Western powers could not claim the same privileges for themselves. Troops in the capital, a Qing man running the customs, a Qing officer training the army, the king's father held in China, and treaties drawn up at Tianjin. So what was this? On paper, it was the old relationship, defended. Korea was still a tributary, its king still sent envoys to Beijing, and the Qing had saved his throne. But in practice it looked a great deal like the things the Western powers had done to China: soldiers stationed in the capital, special rights for traders, foreigners at the customs house, and a government told who could and could not rule. My own answer is that it was both. Li was using the new tools to defend the old claim. He had learned from the West how a strong power holds on to a weaker neighbour, and he was holding on. And Japan was learning exactly the same lessons, at exactly the same time. For the moment the Qing had won. Their troops had reached Seoul first, their aide had removed the man who threatened the king, and Japan had been made to settle for money. But a young officer was now living in Seoul with Qing troops behind him, and a group of young Korean reformers was looking to Tokyo. And Japan had soldiers in Seoul too. Two foreign garrisons in one small capital. It is not hard to see where that could lead.

Back in Beijing, the Korean crisis set off a wave of alarm. After the crisis of 1882, the danger from Japan began to be understood in many quarters. One result was a memorial presented to the throne by a man named Zhang Peilun. He was a thorn in Li's side, and yet six years later he would marry Li's daughter. He urged the throne to make preparations against Japan, for defence and for attack. The throne sent the memorial to Li Hongzhang, and ordered him to report on it. His reply is one of the most revealing things he ever wrote. Because it talks of a campaign against Japan, it is easy to hear it as a plan to attack. Read as a whole, it says something closer to the opposite. He began by agreeing. He was, he said, in entire agreement that "it is necessary for us to prepare for a war with Japan, and that consequently we must develop our naval armaments in order to be able to carry out this object." Then he began to explain, very carefully, why that war could not come yet. That year Japan's leading statesman, Ito Hirobumi, had gone to Europe to study how its governments were built. As a result of that mission, Li warned, "there is always a probability that, in the event of a conflict between China and Japan, foreign Powers might side with Japan against us." He reminded the throne that there were two forces in the world: the moral power of reason, which tells right from wrong, and the material power of strength, which becomes might against weakness. On the Ryukyu islands, he said, China was morally in the right, and materially it was a larger and stronger empire than Japan. If China only organised its resources and built up its army and navy, the great powers would rank it among themselves, and Japan would not dare to move against it. But secrecy mattered, he said. If Japan found out too early that China was preparing a campaign against it, the Japanese government and people would pull together at once. That was a sharp reading of Japan, a country that only a few years earlier had been torn by samurai rebellion. Nothing would unite it faster than a threat from China. They would make alliances with the foreign powers, borrow money, buy and build ships, and China would be left in a dangerous position. And then the sentence that matters most. "Japan has now for years earnestly studied Western systems, and, though her success is so far only an outward one, still her fleet must be admitted to be equal to ours." "Therefore, I should consider it hazardous to send our fleet to Japan to fight in the enemy's own waters." His advice was to keep the plan of a campaign against Japan in view, but not to rush into it. First of all, he wrote, the navy must be thoroughly organised before anyone could think of an invasion. Li's own new fleet was then mostly a collection of small gunboats bought from Britain. Two great ironclads he had ordered were being built in a shipyard at Stettin, in Germany, and would not reach China for another three years. The Korean crisis had been handled with transports and a few small warships, against a mutiny of unpaid soldiers. It was not a test of anything a real navy would face. And he told the throne why the navy was not ready. The government's finance office had fixed an annual grant of four million taels for the navy and the defence of the coast. And Li's department, he wrote, had received "not the amount of four millions, which had been decided upon, but only one-fourth of that sum". A quarter of the money, for a fleet that was supposed to face Japan. Li was back at Tianjin by then. The court had called him back from mourning early, because of the Korean crisis. He came back to a Korea held for the Qing by his own troops, his own aide and his own advisers, and to a fleet that could not yet do what the court's war party wanted. And he faced the same problem he had faced since the war against the Taiping. The court wanted results from his arsenals and ships, and the censors attacked him whenever he counselled caution. But the money that would let him build a navy strong enough to make caution unnecessary kept failing to arrive. So there it is, laid out in Li's own words. Japan was rising, and it had studied the West for years. Its fleet was already a match for China's. And the money promised for China's navy was not arriving. The men at court who shouted loudest for war were, once again, the men who would not have to fight it. Li's answer was the same as it had been over Ili. Build first. Fight later, if at all. It was sensible advice. Whether the empire would give him the time, and the money, to follow it, is the question the rest of this season will answer. And Korea was not the only tributary in trouble that year. In the spring of 1882, while Korea was signing with America, a French naval officer had seized the citadel of Hanoi, in the north of Vietnam, another kingdom that sent tribute to the emperor in Beijing. Next time: France in Vietnam, Li Hongzhang looking for a bargain that avoids war, and a court about to turn on the man who had run its foreign affairs for twenty years, Prince Gong.

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