Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/59

 and Korea only, the former country granting to the latter certain advantages as a tributary kingdom, and treaty nations are not to participate therein. It is in this sense that the following Articles have been agreed upon.

At last we see clearly. Korea was a "boundary state" precisely as Annam, Tonking, Siam, Burmah, Tibet, Nepaul, Eastern Turkestan, and the Principalities of Outer Mongolia were boundary states, i.e. buffer territories ruled over by lesser kings. Surrounding the ancient Middle Kingdom, which was looked upon as centre of all things because in the Confucian cosmogony the emperors, Sons of Heaven, were necessarily the High Priests of all who acknowledged the sway of Chinese culture, they had a definite and special rôle to fulfil. It is easy to see that the difficulties facing China in the nineteenth century were the difficulties facing England in India, where for the same reasons, although they were given another name, the Russian advance in Central Asia, which was leading to the absorption of the independent Khanates, menaced the whole buffer-territory theory. China's predicament in Korea was therefore England's predicament in Afghanistan; intercourse by water had been absolutely and rigidly cut off even between suzerain and