In 1881 A Draft Commercial Treaty Was Drawn Up, Approved By The Chinese Authorities And The Representatives Of The Principal Powers At Pekin, And Carried To The Court Of Seoul For Acceptance And Signature By The American Naval Officer, Commodore Schufeldt.

The Corean king made no objection to the arrangement, and it was signed with the express stipulation that the ratifications of the treaty were to be exchanged in the following year.

Thus was it harmoniously arranged at Pekin that Corea was to issue from her hermit's call, and open her ports to trading countries under the guidance and encouragement of China. There can be no doubt that if this arrangement had been carried out, the influence and the position of China in Corea would have been very greatly increased and strengthened. But, unfortunately, the policy of Li Hung Chang - for if he did not originate, he took the most important part in directing it - aroused the jealousy of Japan, which has long asserted the right to have an equal voice with China in the control of Corean affairs; and the government of Tokio, on hearing of the Schufeldt treaty, at once took steps not merely to obtain all the rights to be conferred by that document, to which no one would have objected, but also to assert its claim to control equally with China the policy of the Corean court. With that object, a Japanese fleet and army were sent to the Seoul River, and when the diplomatists returned for the ratification of the treaty, they found the Japanese in a strong position close to the Corean capital. The Chinese were not to be set on one side in so open a manner, and a powerful fleet of gunboats, with 5,000 troops, were sent to the Seoul River to uphold their rights. Under other circumstances, more especially as the Chinese expedition was believed to be the superior, a hostile collision must have ensued, and the war which has so often seemed near between the Chinese and Japanese would have become an accomplished fact; but fortunately the presence of the foreign diplomatists moderated the ardor of both sides, and a rupture was averted. By a stroke of judgment the Chinese seized Tai Wang Kun, the father of the young king, and the leader of the anti-foreign party, and carried him off to Pekin, where he was kept in imprisonment for some time, until matters had settled down in his own country. The opening of Corea to the Treaty Powers did not put an end to the old rivalry of China and Japan in that country, of which history contains so many examples; and, before the Corean question was definitely settled, it again became obtrusive. Such evidence as is obtainable points to the conclusion that Chinese influence was gradually getting the better of Japanese in the country, and the attack on the Japanese legation in 1884 was a striking revelation of popular antipathy or of an elaborate anti-Japanese plot headed by the released Chinese prisoner, Tai Wang Kun.

At the opposite point of the frontier China was brought face to face with a danger which threatened to develop into a peril of the first magnitude, and in meeting which she was undoubtedly hampered by her treaties with the general body of foreign powers and her own peculiar place in the family of nations. It is the special misfortune of China that she cannot engage in any, even a defensive, war with a maritime power without incurring the grave risk, or indeed the practical certainty, that if such a war be continued for any length of time she must find herself involved with every other foreign country through the impossibility of confining the hostility of her own subjects to one race of foreigners in particular. In considering the last war with a European country in which China was engaged, due allowance must be made for these facts, and also for the anomalous character of that contest, when active hostilities were carried on without any formal declaration of war - a state of things which gave the French many advantages. Toward the end of the year 1882, the French government came to the decision to establish a "definite protectorate" over Tonquin. Events had for some time been shaping themselves in this direction, and the colonial ambition of France had long fixed on Indo- China as a field in which it might aggrandize itself with comparatively little risk and a wide margin of advantage. The weakness of the kingdom of Annam was a strong enough temptation in itself to assert the protectorate over it which France had, more or less, claimed for forty years; but when the reports of several French explorers came to promote the conviction that France might acquire the control of a convenient and perhaps the best route into some of the richest provinces of interior China without much difficulty, the temptation became irresistible. French activity in Indo- China was heightened by the declaration of Garnier, Rocher, and others, that the Songcoi, or Red River, furnished the best means of communicating with Yunnan, and tapping the wealth of the richest mineral province in China. The apathy of England in her relations with Burmah, which presented, under its arrogant and obstructive rulers, what may have seemed an insuperable obstacle to trade intercourse between India and China, afforded additional inducement to the French to act quickly; and, as they felt confident of their ability and power to coerce the court of Hue, the initial difficulties of their undertaking did not seem very formidable. That undertaking was, in the first place, defined to be a protectorate of Annam, and, as the first step in the enterprise, the town of Hanoi, in the delta of the Red River, and the nominal capital of Tonquin, was captured before the end of the year 1882.

Tonquin stood in very much the same relationship to China as Corea; and, although the enforcement of the suzerain tie was lax, there was no doubt that at Pekin the opinion was held very strongly that the action of France was an encroachment on the rights of China.

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