Page:American Diplomacy in the Orient - Foster (1903).djvu/332

 territory has been invaded by four of the nations of the West, France, the United States, Great Britain, and Russia. To-day it is a threatening cause of conflict between Japan and Russia.

European commercial activity, which followed the maritime discoveries of the Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, found nothing to attract it in poverty-stricken Korea, exhausted by war and taxation. The first recorded formal attempt to open trade with Korea took place in 1832, when the British East India Company fitted out a ship at Canton and sent her on a voyage of commercial exploration to that country. Dr. Gutzlaff, the German missionary, then in the service of the American Board of Missions, went as a passenger in the hope of finding an opening for mission work. The vessel spent a month on the southern coast, and presents were sent to the king of Korea, but they were refused by him. Dr. Gutzlaff, through his knowledge of the Chinese language, was able to communicate with the natives, and occupied himself with medical attention to the people, planting potatoes and teaching their cultivation, and with futile efforts at the distribution of Bibles and works on geography and mathematics in Chinese translations. The expedition was both a commercial and religious failure.