Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/57

 off Korea prepared for peace or war—and a treaty resulted, characteristically signed by the divisional general, in which the independence of Korea was acknowledged.

What did this signify? How was it possible to reconcile such a declaration with the tribute missions which still regularly proceeded to Peking and which were a matter of common knowledge? Did it mean that the new-type relationship which Western arms had forced on Eastern empires—with written Roman Law agreements—must inevitably destroy old cultural claims and the old hegemony? No one knows, but it is not mere coincidence that in the year following this treaty Li Hung Chang should have annexed to China the forty-mile neutral strip on the west, or Chinese, bank of the Yalu River, which for centuries had been a No-man's-land, because it lay beyond the old boundary palisade. Plainly the move showed fear—a dim realization that a "strategic frontier" was being menaced.

Yet in spite of these things there seems to have been no definite policy regarding the main factor—foreign pressure. In 1881, however, Li Hung Chang wrote a dispatch to the Korean Court advising "limited treaties" with the Western Powers. In 1882 the United States,