Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/60

 tributary because the only method of enforcing a veto in the East is to make it absolute. Westernism, of which Japan had become a pretended exponent, was destructive of the old sanction. Water was the element which could not be controlled. It is water to-day which still remains the master-force in the Far East. ..

In 1883 further regulations to control Korean frontier traffic throw further light on an obscure and difficult subject. Chinese and Korean officials, talking to one another in the Liaotung, reveal some of the curiosities of the old relationship. One clause states that "it being one of the prerogatives of the Court of China to draw its supply of fish for sacrificial purposes from the embouchures of rivers situated on the Chinese side of the Yalu and in the Korean district of Pingyang, the people are strictly forbidden to fish there clandestinely". What visions of a long departed past does this not conjure up, the Altar of Heaven and the Temple of Imperial Ancestors in Peking, so many hundreds of miles away, drawing supplies by prescriptive right from this tributary region! Another clause declares just as unemotionally: "Whereas all the territory under the jurisdiction of the Liaotung is Crown land attached to His Majesty's Second Capital and subject to