Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/48

 when the first Japanese treaty of 1871 was signed with China, missionaries of all denominations had been commonplaces for two generations.

Adequately to treat this critical period of history—the renewal of direct and formal intercourse between China and Japan late in the nineteenth century, as a result of the opening of the two countries by the military action of the West—requires what is entirely missing, namely, a critical and authentic monograph on the statesman Li Hung Chang, who, until the outbreak of the war over Korea in 1894, so largely controlled the foreign relations of Peking. We do not yet know the things we require to know; we are still in the dark. The handling of evidence, the assignment of proportion, the testing of policy—all these things, difficult enough in the case of Western statesmen, become doubly so when Oriental statecraft is mixed with European issues, and the whole hidden in the twilight of an old-fashioned Yamen. Brought in 1870 to the gateway of the capital (for Tientsin is the gateway to Peking) as metropolitan viceroy and High Commissioner for Trade in the Northern Seas, Li Hung Chang