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Self-Strengthening, episode 14

Korea, 1894

In December 1884 a young Qing officer named Yuan Shikai breaks a coup in Seoul with his own troops, and for the next ten years he runs Korea for Li Hongzhang as China's resident, while Japan watches. The episode follows Yuan and Li from that coup and the 1885 agreement with Japan that each would warn the other before sending troops, to the rebellion in 1894 that brought both armies back, and closes the season with China and Japan at war over Korea, asking whether thirty years of self strengthening were the failure that the next nine months would make them look. It leans on foreign observers and scholars, with Li's side heard once and the court barely at all.

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Transcript

Yuan Shikai
Yuan Shikai. Photo by Rio V. De Sieux, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, we watched Li Hongzhang's northern fleet look promising enough on paper, while the money meant for it was diverted to rebuild the Empress Dowager's Summer Palace. We watched its British instructor, Captain Lang, resign after a quarrel over who commanded, and the fleet's drill slacken without him. And we watched a Japanese warship turn up at the fleet's exercises in 1893, exchange salutes, watch what the Chinese were doing, and sail away without a word. Around the fleet, Li had built a whole web of modern enterprises: a telegraph administration, a steamship company, and the coal mines and cotton mill that the steamship company's money helped pay for. All of it was real. All of it belonged, more or less, to one man and his followers, and lived on the court's favour. This time, we go to the place where the Japanese were looking: Korea. This episode also draws on the work of Peter Zarrow and Putnam Weale, and on the writer known as Vladimir. It is the last episode of this season, and it ends with a war. To understand why Korea mattered so much, you have to see where it sits. Korea is a peninsula hanging down from Manchuria, the homeland of the Qing dynasty's own Manchu rulers, with Japan a short sea crossing away to the southeast. For more than two centuries Korea's kings had sent tribute to the Qing emperor and accepted him as their overlord, while running their own kingdom as they pleased. In the old Chinese view of the world, that made Korea the model tributary: the nearest, the most loyal, and the most like China in its learning and its government. A tributary, in this sense, was a kingdom whose ruler acknowledged the Chinese emperor as his superior, sent regular missions to Beijing with gifts, and received his title and his calendar from the emperor in return. Then Japan forced Korea open by treaty in 1876 and called it independent, and Li Hongzhang, who handled Korea for the court, had to find new ways to hold on to it. In 1882 he had sent troops to put down a soldiers' mutiny in Seoul, the Korean capital, and they had stayed. Japan had come out of that mutiny with something too. Its legation had been attacked, and in the settlement it won the right to keep its own soldiers in Seoul to guard it. So from 1882 there were two foreign garrisons in the Korean capital, a large Chinese one and a small Japanese one, a few streets apart. After that crisis, when an official at court urged preparing for war with Japan, and the throne ordered Li to prepare a plan for invading it, Li told it what he thought of the idea. "I fear that unless all the Ministers of the Cabinet and the Viceroys of all the provinces agree together, and assiduously work for years to come, any such attempt would be a failure." First of all, he said, the navy must be thoroughly organised before anyone could think of an invasion. And if the ministers and the viceroys would not act together, it was "decidedly better not to place the responsibility of this enterprise on my shoulders alone." The official who had proposed the invasion had complained that China's policy failed because the court's decisions kept shifting and nobody's responsibility was clearly defined. Li agreed. He called it perfectly true, an indisputable fact. And he explained why. The navy and coast defence were meant to have four million taels a year, but because of bad estimates and provinces keeping their own revenue, his department had received only a quarter of that sum. Remember that complaint. It is Li's whole problem in one sentence, and it never went away. A fleet that was supposed to belong to the empire was paid for by whatever the provinces chose to send, and the provinces kept what they could. His conclusion was caution. Strengthen the country's defences first, build a powerful navy, and do not rush into aggressive steps against Japan. What Li could do was tie Korea to China in the new ways. He secured control of Korea's telegraphs, and he set up a Korean branch of the Customs service under Sir Robert Hart. But the intrigues in Seoul went on, between Koreans, Japanese and Chinese, until in 1884 they broke out in another round of assassination and rioting. The man at the centre of what happened next was a Chinese officer of twenty five named Yuan Shikai. Yuan was born in 1859 into a landed family of officials and soldiers in Henan, in central China. A great uncle of his had been a high official who fought the Taiping and the Nian. The proper road for a young man of his class ran through the civil service examinations, the great tests of the Confucian classics that chose the empire's officials. Yuan sat them twice and failed both times, and he decided that a career would have to come some other way. In 1881 he joined a brigade of Li's Huai Army whose commander had been a friend of his family, and in 1882 he came with it to Korea, to put down the mutiny in Seoul. The Huai Army was the force Li had raised in his home province of Anhui to fight the Taiping, twenty years before, and kept under arms ever since. Its officers owed their careers to Li, and they knew it. He did well in Korea, and he stayed on with the troops left behind in the capital, helping to train a new Korean army unit. The Korean court came to know him, and so did the Japanese. Hold on to that name. Of all the people in this season, Yuan is the one with the longest road ahead of him. Now look at the other side of the Korean court. The king, Gojong, was in his early thirties, and had been on the throne since he was a boy. His father, the Daewongun, had ruled for him for ten years, and his queen's family, the Min clan, now held most of the great offices. The Daewongun was the old man whom Li's agents had carried off to China after the mutiny of 1882. The queen, from the Min clan, was the sharpest politician in the palace. She had escaped the mutineers in 1882 disguised as a servant, and after the Chinese put her enemies down, her family looked to China to keep them in power. So the Korean court of 1884 was split. On one side stood the queen's family, the old officials and China. On the other, a handful of young men in a hurry. A group of young Korean nobles had watched Japan's reforms with something like envy. They wanted Korea to do the same, quickly, and they wanted it out from under China. Their leader was Kim Ok-gyun, a brilliant young official in his early thirties who had travelled in Japan, admired what he saw, and made friends there among Japanese who wanted Korea reformed on Japan's model. To him and his friends, Japan was proof that an old Confucian kingdom could remake itself in a generation. China's hold on Korea looked like the thing standing in the way. They were known as the party of enlightenment. Late in the year, they saw their chance. With the French war going on in the south, half of the Chinese garrison in Seoul had been pulled out to face France. And the Japanese minister in Seoul let the plotters believe that his legation guard would stand behind them. On the fourth of December 1884, a banquet was given in Seoul to celebrate the opening of Korea's new postal service. During the banquet a fire was started nearby, and in the confusion one of the queen's kinsmen was badly wounded with a sword. He survived, because an American missionary doctor who had arrived in Seoul only a few months before worked over him for weeks. The grateful king let the doctor open the first Western hospital in Korea the following year. A riot broke out in the street. The plotters went to the king and told him that the Chinese were attacking. They moved him to a smaller palace, and Japanese soldiers from the legation came to guard the gates. By the next morning seven members of the government had been killed, and the opposition had formed an administration of its own. They began issuing a spate of reform decrees. For a day, it looked as though Korea had been taken over by its reformers, with Japan behind them. In the Chinese camp, Yuan Shikai had to decide what to do. Korean officials who had escaped the killings came to the Chinese and begged them to rescue the king. The Chinese garrison in Seoul was far larger than the Japanese legation guard. But the guard was Japanese, and an attack on it could mean war with Japan. There was no time to ask anyone. No telegraph line yet ran from Seoul to China, and a message to Li in Tianjin had to go by ship. Yuan resolved to take the Chinese troops to the palace and protect the king. It is worth pausing on what that meant. A young officer on the spot was about to decide whether China would fight Japan's soldiers in a foreign capital. That is how the Qing ran Korea: through a few men on the spot, trusted by Li, acting first and reporting after.

On the sixth of December 1884, Yuan led two thousand Chinese troops, together with three thousand Korean soldiers, against the palace where the Japanese minister and his guard had taken refuge with the king. The Chinese troops opened fire on the Japanese, and a general commotion followed. The Japanese exploded a mine, which killed a number of Koreans and Chinese and threw the attack into confusion for a while. But there were far more Chinese than Japanese, and by evening the Japanese guard had pulled out of the palace. The king was in Chinese hands. The Japanese then fought their way out of the city and down to Chemulpo, the port on the coast. The Japanese minister himself led the retreat, with his legation staff, his guard and the Japanese civilians who could reach them. Chemulpo was Seoul's harbour, a day's march to the west, where Japanese ships could take them off. Behind them, crowds in Seoul burned the Japanese legation and killed Japanese residents they found in the streets. The coup was over in three days. Kim Ok-gyun and the other leaders who survived fled with the Japanese and made their way to Japan, where they lived for years in exile. Many of the families and followers they left behind were put to death. In January 1885 the Korean government signed an agreement with Japan, apologizing and paying compensation for the burned legation and the Japanese dead. But that settled things between Japan and Korea. It did not settle them between Japan and China. In Japan the failure of the coup left a bitter taste. A few months later a Tokyo newspaper ran an unsigned essay, usually credited to Fukuzawa Yukichi, Japan's best known champion of Western learning, which argued that Japan should leave Asia behind. Japan, it said, should stop waiting for China and Korea to reform, and deal with them as the Western powers did. It was one essay among many, and few people noticed it at the time. But it caught a mood that would grow over the next ten years. Li Hongzhang, for his part, moved aggressively, sending in troops to crush the movement. For Yuan, it was the making of his career. A man of twenty five had faced down Japan in Korea's capital, and won. Yuan Shikai, whose later career some of you have already followed all the way to a throne of his own. But notice what it cost. Japanese soldiers had been shot by Chinese soldiers, in a palace, in a country both empires claimed an interest in. In Tokyo there was talk of war. And China was already fighting France. A second war, with Japan, in the north, was the last thing Li wanted. So, early in 1885, Japan sent a statesman to China at the head of an embassy, to put an end to China's overlordship in Korea by diplomacy.

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

His name was Ito Hirobumi. Ito was then in his early forties, one of the young samurai who had made the revolution that put Japan's emperor back at the centre of government in 1868. He had studied in Britain as a young man, and had lately been in Europe studying constitutions for Japan. Before the year was out he would become Japan's first prime minister. An embassy under Ito went to Beijing in March 1885, and he sat down with Li Hongzhang at Tianjin. The two men who would shape the next ten years in East Asia were across a table from each other for the first time. Li was sixty two, the old viceroy who had been dealing with foreigners for more than twenty years. Ito was a generation younger, one of the leaders of a country that had been remaking itself at astonishing speed. Japan wanted the Chinese officers who had fired on its soldiers punished, and compensation for its dead. Above all, it wanted the Chinese army out of Seoul. Li wanted the matter closed, without a war in the north while the French war was still going on in the south. They signed their agreement on the eighteenth of April 1885. Both countries would pull their troops out of Korea within four months. Neither would send officers to train Korea's army. And if either one ever needed to send troops back into Korea, it would tell the other in writing first, and pull them out again when the trouble was over. It looked like a sensible bargain. Both armies out, nobody humiliated, no war. Remember the pair of them. They will meet again across a table, and next time it will not be on good terms at all. But look at what China had agreed to. For centuries Korea had been China's tributary, and China alone had sent soldiers to defend its king. Now Japan had the same right, on the same terms. In substance, China had surrendered its suzerainty, and kept only the shadow of an empty title. A suzerain is an overlord, a state with authority over another state's foreign affairs, while that state rules itself at home. By letting Japan into a kind of joint control of Korea, Li had given up the stronghold, and put Japan in a position to dominate China's foreign policy from then on. Even a staunch admirer of Li's called it one more concession made to avoid a war, a war that very likely would never have come. And sharing a country between a strong partner and a weaker one has a way of ending badly for the weaker. So that is the trap. Whoever sent troops first would bring the other's army in after it. For the next nine years, nobody sprang it. Li did something else instead. He sent Yuan Shikai back to Seoul. After the old regent had been carried off, Li had secured the post of Chinese Resident at the Korean court for one of his ablest lieutenants. That lieutenant was Yuan. In the autumn of 1885 he came back to Seoul, escorting the Daewongun, the king's father, home from his exile in China, with a new title as China's commissioner in Korea. Bringing back the king's father, the queen's great enemy, was a message in itself. China could return him, and China could take him away again. For the next nine years, Yuan Shikai ran Korea for Li Hongzhang. He did not behave like an ordinary diplomat. He insisted on being treated as the representative of Korea's overlord, above the ministers of every other country in Seoul. When the king tried to send his own envoys abroad as if Korea were an independent state, Yuan made sure they were hemmed in by rules that showed whose tributary Korea was. And when, in 1886, there were rumours that the king was seeking the protection of Russia, Yuan proposed to Li that the king should simply be removed. Li did not go that far. But he let Yuan run things very much his own way. The king's American adviser grew so angry at Yuan's conduct that in 1888 he published a pamphlet denouncing it, and arguing that Korea was an independent kingdom, not China's to run. It made no difference. Before long the adviser was gone from his post. Yuan stayed. Other powers were watching Korea too. In 1885 a British squadron occupied a group of small islands off Korea's southern coast, to keep the Russians from taking them, and held them for two years. Korea had become a place where empires watched each other. Under Yuan, China's grip on Korea was in some ways tighter than it had ever been. Chinese merchants moved into the Korean ports, Chinese steamers ran to them, and Chinese loans kept the Korean court from borrowing elsewhere. A Chinese built telegraph line, run by Chinese operators, now linked Seoul to China, so that Li in Tianjin could hear from Yuan in hours. China, in other words, was doing in Korea much what the Western powers did in China. And Japan, meanwhile, was getting ready. Japan by now was not the Japan of the Taiwan expedition. Since the revolution of 1868 it had abolished the old samurai class, brought in conscription for a national army, built railways and telegraphs and modern schools, and sent its brightest young men to study in Europe and America. In 1888 its army was reorganized into divisions on the German model, with German officers to advise it, an army built not for keeping order at home but for fighting abroad. In 1889 Japan's emperor granted a constitution, and in 1890 an elected parliament met for the first time, with the right to argue over the budget. At its first session, the prime minister, a general named Yamagata Aritomo, told the members that Japan must defend not only its own borders, which he called its line of sovereignty, but a wider line of advantage beyond them. Everyone who heard him knew where that line ran. It ran through Korea. And the year after that, Russia began building the Trans Siberian Railway, a line that would one day carry Russian armies from Europe to the Pacific, right on Korea's northern border. To Japan's leaders, Korea in the hands of a weak China was a door left open, and Russia was the power they feared would walk through it. Here is the difference between the two countries, and it is worth saying plainly. In China, self strengthening was the work of a few governors, each with his own arsenal, his own fleet and his own money. In Japan, the same kind of work was being done by a central government, for the whole country, with the emperor's name behind it. That does not mean Japan was bound to win. But it does mean that when Japan moved, all of Japan would move together.

The trouble, when it came, did not come from the palace. It came from the villages. For years, Japanese merchants had been buying up Korean rice and selling Japanese and foreign goods in its markets. Japan's growing cities needed food, and Korean rice and beans went across the strait in Japanese ships. When the harvest was poor, Korean prices rose and Korean villages went hungry. In 1889 a Korean provincial governor tried to stop grain from leaving his province, and Japan demanded compensation for its merchants' losses, and in the end got it. Chinese merchants were in Korea too, in growing numbers under Yuan's protection, and Korean traders and peasants felt squeezed between them. After a few years of that Japanese penetration, the position of ordinary Koreans was desperate enough to account for the rising that broke out in 1894. On top of that, the peasants were taxed hard by their own government, and much of what they paid stuck to the hands of the officials who collected it. Out of that misery came the Donghak. Donghak means Eastern Learning. It was a religion founded in the eighteen sixties by a Korean scholar who blended Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist ideas and folk belief, and set it against Western Learning, which was what Koreans called Christianity. Its founder was executed by the Korean government, and the movement spread underground among the peasants of the south. A delegation of its followers came to the palace gates in Seoul with a petition, and waited there patiently for two days until a hearing was refused. The petition asked, among other things, that the founder's name be cleared. It got them nothing, so they gathered again. That spring, tens of thousands of Donghak believers camped together in the hills of the south, under banners calling for the Japanese and the Westerners to be driven out. The government sent officials to talk them into going home, and promised to look into their grievances. For a while, they went. In the spring of 1894, the sect's followers came out in open rebellion. They were protesting against heavy and corrupt taxation. It began in one county in the southwest, where a magistrate had squeezed the farmers to pay for an irrigation dam, and it spread fast. The man who led it was Jeon Bong-jun, a village schoolteacher, a small man, whose followers called him the Green Bean General. His men swore to rules that tell you what they were fighting for. Do not kill people or harm their property. Drive out the Japanese and the Westerners. March on the capital and purge the powerful. It was a peasant war against corrupt officials, a religious movement, and an uprising against foreigners, all at once. And here is the irony that runs through the rest of this story. A rising that wanted the foreigners out of Korea was about to bring in two foreign armies. By May, large bodies of Donghak men were reported to be up in arms in the southern provinces. The foreign legations in Seoul heard that the Donghak were coming, many tens of thousands strong, and that one article of their creed was the expulsion of foreigners. That was enough to frighten every legation in the city, the Chinese and the Japanese included. The government sent troops against the rebels, and the troops were defeated. The revolt looked as though it would become a serious rebellion. At the end of May the rebels took Jeonju, the capital of their province and the ancestral seat of Korea's royal family. For the Korean court, that was a terrible blow. The royal house had come from Jeonju, its ancestral shrine was there, and now it was in the hands of a peasant army. And the court had no reliable army of its own left to send. Meanwhile, something else had happened that set Japan on edge. In March 1894 Kim Ok-gyun, the leader of the failed coup of ten years before, was lured from Japan to Shanghai and shot dead in a hotel there by a Korean assassin, a man who had won his trust. Kim had spent ten years in Japan, sometimes welcome, sometimes shunted off to remote islands when he became an embarrassment to the Japanese government, and always hunted by agents of the Korean court. His body was carried back to Korea on a Chinese warship, and there it was cut into pieces and displayed as a traitor's. In Japan, where Kim had lived in exile and had friends, people were furious. To many Japanese it looked like China and the Korean court acting together. Newspapers in Tokyo demanded that something be done, and the government of Ito Hirobumi, prime minister again, was already in trouble with its own parliament. So by the late spring, a rebellion was moving north toward Seoul, and Japanese opinion was already looking for a fight. And in the Chinese legation, Yuan Shikai was watching the Korean court panic.

The Donghak kept winning through May, and their successes made the Korean government turn to its overlord. It asked China for help. The Korean request recalled that when Korea had suffered uprisings in 1882 and 1884, the troops of China had put them down, and on those precedents it presented "an earnest application" for troops to quell the trouble quickly. It promised that as soon as the revolt was over, Korea would ask for the troops to be withdrawn, so that they would not suffer the hardships of being abroad for long. Yuan Shikai was at the king's elbow as the request was made, and he encouraged it. It was the worst misjudgement of his career so far. In Tokyo, the government had already made up its mind. On the second of June, as soon as it heard that Korea might ask China for troops, the cabinet decided that if China sent soldiers, Japan would send more. On the same day, Ito's government dissolved Japan's quarrelsome parliament. The request was laid before the emperor, and troops were ordered out. In China's own words to Japan, sending them was "in harmony with our constant practice to protect our tributary states". Notice that phrase, tributary states. Every word of it mattered to the people reading it in Tokyo. A general commanding troops in Zhili was ordered to go at once to Korea with picked men, and to put down the disturbance. And he was ordered to come home with his troops as soon as that was done. So the first Chinese troops were sent to Korea. Around two and a half thousand of them landed at Asan, a small port on the west coast south of Seoul, in early June. Asan was a long way from the capital and close to the rebels. The landing place itself said that China's troops had come to fight the Donghak, not to occupy Seoul. Then China did exactly what the agreement of 1885 required. Its minister in Tokyo was told to inform the Japanese Foreign Office that China had sent troops. The note went in on the seventh of June 1894. The answer came the same day, from Japan's foreign minister, Mutsu Munemitsu. He acknowledged the note, and then added one sentence. Although the word tributary appeared in the Chinese note, he wrote, "the Imperial Government have never recognised Korea as a tributary state of China." That single sentence tells you everything about where this was going. China was saying that it sent troops as Korea's overlord, as it always had. Japan was saying that China was no such thing, and that the two of them stood in Korea as equals, under the agreement Li himself had signed. Neither side was going to give way on that, because whoever gave way on it gave up Korea. On the same day, Japan's legation in Beijing informed the Zongli Yamen that, because of a disturbance of a grave nature in Korea, Japan intended to send a body of its own troops there. The first Japanese troops landed in Korea. And they kept coming. Within days the Japanese minister was back in Seoul with a guard of marines, and by the end of June a Japanese brigade of some eight thousand men was in and around the capital, far more than China had sent. The Japanese did not land near the rebels. They landed at Chemulpo, the port of Seoul, and marched on the capital. Look at the map in your head. The Chinese were in the south, near the rebellion. The Japanese were in Seoul, around the king. Here is the bitter part. By the time the foreign troops were ashore in strength, the rebellion was already winding down. The rebels had made a truce with the government in the middle of June and gone home to their villages. So the reason for sending troops was gone, and both armies were still there. For a moment, the obvious thing was for both of them to go home. This is the trap Li and Ito built, springing exactly as it was made to. Both sides had followed the agreement to the letter. China had told Japan, and Japan had told China. And now neither could leave first without seeming to give Korea to the other. China proposed that both sides withdraw. Japan refused, unless Korea was reformed first. Japan proposed that China and Japan reform Korea's government together. China refused, because a joint reform would mean admitting that Japan had an equal say in Korea. So Japan announced that it would see to Korea's reform on its own. And it made sure of its friends. On the sixteenth of July 1894, Japan signed a new treaty with Britain, under which Britain agreed to give up the special legal privileges its subjects enjoyed in Japan. It was the first time one of the great powers had agreed to treat Japan as an equal, the thing Japan had wanted since the eighteen fifties. It came one week before Japan's troops moved in Seoul. The reform of Korea was, however, only a pretext. What Japan wanted was to replace China as the power that counted in Korea. In Seoul, the Japanese minister pressed the Korean court with demands for sweeping changes, and then, in July, with an ultimatum: Korea must cancel its agreements with China and get the Chinese troops out of the country. Yuan Shikai's position became impossible. He was the representative of Korea's overlord, in a capital full of Japanese soldiers, with the Chinese troops a long way south at Asan. Ten years earlier he had won in Seoul because he had more soldiers on the spot than Japan. Now it was the other way round. Back in Tianjin, Li looked for a way out. He asked the Russians, and then the British, to step in and broker a settlement, and got little from either. Li's position was impossible in its own way. If he sent a large army, he would bring on the war he dreaded. If he pulled his troops out, Korea would fall to Japan without a shot, and the court would never forgive him. And in Beijing, the voices calling for war were getting louder. Many officials at court had long thought of Japan as a small island country on the edge of the civilized world, and they saw no reason for China to back down before it. Li did not want this war. All through the crisis he had been trying to avoid it. But he could not leave his troops at Asan alone in a country filling up with Japanese soldiers. In late July he hired foreign steamers to carry reinforcements across the sea to them, and sent other troops overland toward Pyongyang in the north of Korea.

Japanese troops celebrating their victory over Qing forces at Seonghwan, 5 August 1894
Japanese troops celebrating their victory over Qing forces at Seonghwan, 5 August 1894. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On the twenty third of July 1894, Japanese troops seized the Korean royal family. They brought back the king's father, the Daewongun, to head a new government, and that government asked Japan to drive the Chinese troops out of Korea. The Daewongun was in his seventies now. Twelve years earlier, Li's men had carried him off to China for being too dangerous. Now Japanese soldiers brought him back into the palace. Korea's government, in other words, had changed hands at bayonet point, and the new one belonged to Japan. The king stayed on his throne, but from now on he was a prisoner in his own palace, guarded by Japanese soldiers. Two days later, at sea, Japanese warships sank the Kowshing, with Chinese troops on board. She was a British steamer that China had hired to carry soldiers to Korea. Four days after that, Japanese troops attacked the Chinese garrison near Asan and drove it out. The survivors made a long march north, around the Japanese in Seoul, to join the Chinese army gathering at Pyongyang, the old city in the north of Korea on the road to China. On the first of August, Japan declared war on the Qing, and the court of the Guangxu emperor responded in kind. The Guangxu emperor was twenty two, and ruled in his own name now. But the Empress Dowager Cixi was still the power behind the throne, out at her palace by the lake, with her sixtieth birthday only a few months away and the celebrations already planned. At court, the war was popular. The young emperor and his party, led by his old tutor Weng Tonghe, wanted to fight and expected to win. Li was above all things the Empress Dowager's man, and so the emperor's party at court made a policy of mocking his advice and accusing him of unpatriotic cowardice. The war was none of his seeking. It was thrust upon him. He was forced into a war he would gladly have avoided. And the court's suspicion of him did not wait for the results. Once the war was under way, a censor sent the emperor a memorial attacking Li in the most brutal terms. A censor was an official whose job was to criticize other officials to the throne, and who was supposed to be protected when he did it. Li, the censor wrote, had always advanced himself through his dealings with foreigners. He was afraid that the great sums he had saved from countless frauds, and banked in Japan, might be lost, and that was why he had objected to the war. And "when the decree declaring war reached him, his disappointment was great". The censor did not even call the enemy Japanese. He called them the dwarf bandits. It was an old name from the days of Japanese pirates on the China coast, as if Japan were still a pirate band and not a modern state with a modern army. Whatever the truth of it, that memorial tells you what Li was up against in Beijing. The man who had spent twenty years building China's modern army and navy went into the war as its commander, and as the court's chief suspect. And Yuan Shikai's nine years of running Korea for him were over. Whether Yuan actually helped bring on the war is still a matter of opinion. He had held Korea for China with a heavy hand. But in the end it was Japan that sent the bigger army, seized the palace and struck first. So the test had come. Think about what was going into Korea on each side. On the Japanese side, a national army, conscripted and trained on one model and commanded from Tokyo, carried by its own ships and backed by the whole of its government. On the Chinese side, units of the Huai Army and other provincial forces, each under its own general, armed with a jumble of rifles, sent by Li from Tianjin, while the court in Beijing argued about whether to trust him. And at sea, the Beiyang Fleet, which had bought no new warship since 1888, against a Japanese navy with new fast cruisers. Everything we have watched for thirty years was about to be weighed. The Huai Army, the arsenals, the telegraph, the steamship company, the two great battleships at Weihaiwei and the cruisers around them. China expected to win. After several decades of self strengthening modelled on Western technology, that is what made the defeat that followed so shocking. Because it was a defeat. The war with Japan would be a disaster of inconceivable proportions for the Qing empire. And when it was over, nearly everyone agreed on what it meant. The debacle produced a general consensus that the first three decades of China's early industrialization had been an abject failure. That is the question this season has been asking all along. Was it? Here the sources disagree. One side says yes, and that the verdict after the war was simply right. On this view, self strengthening tried to add Western guns and ships to the Confucian state without changing the state, and that could never have worked. The other side says that judgement was made through the smoke of 1894. The Qing warships that went into the war were not technically inferior to Japan's, and the result shows little beyond the fact that Japan, in the mid eighteen nineties, was the stronger military power. On that view, what failed was not the arsenals or the ships, but the money, the command, and a court that never treated them as the empire's own. Notice how much the two sides share. Nobody doubts the money was short, or that the command was divided, or that the court fought itself while Japan acted as one. What they argue about is whether those were the faults of a few bad years and bad men, or of the whole idea that guns and ships could be bolted onto the old order and save it. I will leave you to weigh those two answers. You have heard the evidence. What I can tell you is what thirty years had done. When this season began, in 1864, China had no great modern arsenal, no steamship company of its own, no telegraph line, no ironclad fleet and no minister abroad. Thirty years later it had all of those things. And none of them had been built by an empire acting as one. Each had been built by a governor, with a governor's money, on the court's sufferance. Li Hongzhang was seventy one years old. He had kept his army in 1864 when his teacher, Zeng Guofan, sent his own army home, and it had made him the most powerful official in China. Now that army, and the fleet that came after it, were going to war with Japan. Years before, when the court talked of invading Japan, he had warned the throne that the attempt would fail unless all the ministers and the viceroys of the provinces agreed together and worked for years to come. Before we go, let me look back at the people who carried this season. Zeng Guofan, who took Nanjing from the Taiping in 1864 and chose to send his army home rather than frighten the throne, had died in 1872. Zuo Zongtang, who crossed the desert and won back Xinjiang, had died at Fuzhou in 1885, soon after the war with France ended. Prince Gong, who opened the court's first office for foreign affairs and its school for interpreters, had been out of power for ten years. Robert Hart was still at the Customs in Beijing, still sending its revenue to the throne, and still writing his long letters to his agent in London. Cixi had ruled for thirty three years, from behind a screen, then from a retirement that nobody mistook for leaving. And Li Hongzhang was still at Tianjin, still the man the court turned to, and blamed. He had been viceroy of Zhili since 1870, apart from a short break to mourn his mother. But this season was never only about them. It was about merchants in the treaty ports who learned to run steamship lines and mines, and about the boys who went to New England to study and came home to be telegraph clerks, engineers and naval officers. Some of those boys were officers in Li's fleet now, and would be on its decks in the war. It was about writers in Shanghai and Hong Kong, who ran Chinese newspapers and argued in print that China needed more than guns: schools, commerce, and even a parliament. One of them published a book of such proposals in 1894, the year of the war. And it was about the crowds who tore down telegraph poles and burned missions, the converts who were caught between their neighbours and their faith, and the soldiers in the ranks who carried the Remingtons. What they make of self strengthening, and of the war that tested it, is the story still to come. [handoff] That is where this season ends: with China and Japan at war, and everything self strengthening built about to be put to the test. The war itself, and what it did to China, is the story of our next season. And it begins at sea, a week before anyone had declared anything, on the deck of the Kowshing, the British steamer carrying Chinese reinforcements to Korea.

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