David C. Kang - Stephan Haggard - East Asia in The World - Twelve Events That Shaped The Modern International Order-Cambridge University Press (2020)

East Asia in the World
This innovative volume provides an introduction to twelve seminal events in

the international relations of East Asia prior to 1900: twelve events that
everyone interested in the history of world politics should know. The East
Asian historical experience provides a wealth of new and different cases,
patterns, and findings that will expand horizons from the Western, Eurocentric
experience. Written by an international team of historians and political scien-
tists, this volume draws attention to the China-centered East Asian order –
with its long history of dominance – and what this order might tell us about the
current epoch.
stephan haggard is Lawrence and Sallye Krause Professor of Korea–

Pacific Studies at the University of California San Diego. He has written
widely on the political economy of East Asia, including Pathways from the
Periphery (1990), The Political Economy of the Asian Financial Crisis
(2000), Hard Target: Sanctions, Inducements, and the Case of North Korea
(2017), and Developmental States (2018). He is editor of the Journal of East
Asian Studies.
david c. kang is Maria Crutcher Professor of International Relations at the
University of Southern California and Director of the USC Korean Studies
Institute. His publications include American Grand Strategy and East Asian
Security in the Twenty-First Century (2017) and East Asia before the West:
Five Centuries of Trade and Tribute (2010).
East Asia in the World
Twelve Events That Shaped the Modern
International Order
Edited by
Stephan Haggard
University of California San Diego
David C. Kang
University of Southern California
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Contents
List of Figures and Tables page vii

List of Contributors viii
Acknowledgments x
Part I Historicizing East Asian International Relations

1 Introduction 3
stephan haggard and david c. kang
2 East Asian International Relations over the Longue Duree 22
david c. kang and kenneth m. swope
3 The Political Economy of the East Asian Maritime World
in the Sixteenth Century 44
richard von glahn
Part II The East Asian System over Time

4 East Asia’s First World War, 643–668 67
nadia kanagawa
5 The Founding of the Korean Chosŏn Dynasty, 1392 81
ji-young lee
6 The Ming Invasion of Vietnam, 1407–1427 97
james a. anderson
7 Ming Grand Strategy during the Great East Asian War, 1592–1598 108
kenneth m. swope
8 The Qing Unification, 1618–1683 129
pamela kyle crossley
v
vi Contents
Part III Contact: East and West

9 The Zheng State and the Fall of Dutch Formosa, 1662 149
tonio andrade
10 The Opium Wars of 1839–1860 164
richard s. horowitz
11 Matthew Perry in Japan, 1852–1854 188
alexis dudden
12 Philippine National Independence, 1898–1904 206
andrew yeo
13 The Sino-Japanese War, 1894–1895 224
seo-hyun park
14 The Death of Eastphalia, 1874 239
saeyoung park
Conclusion
15 East Asian History and International Relations 263
andrew j. coe and scott wolford
Bibliography 282
Index 309
Figures and Tables
Figures
3.1 Maritime East Asia c. 1620 page 48
3.2 Principal daimyo domains and ports of Kyushu c. 1570 52
8.1 Areas under Ming governance c. 1500 131
8.2 Territories controlled by the Ming empire, Tumet and Oyirod
federations, rebel territories in Shaanxi and Shanxi (Li Zicheng),
and rebel territories in Sichuan (Zhang Xianzhong), c. 1640 132
9.1 Taiwan and the Chinese coast 153
Tables
2.1 Dynastic changes and their causes in East Asia, 500–1900 CE 36
vii
Contributors
james a. anderson is Associate Professor in the History Department at the

University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is currently engaged in
research for a new book on the Southwestern Silk Road between China
and northern Southeast Asia during the ninth to thirteenth centuries.
tonio andrade is Professor of History at Emory University. He researches
global history with a focus on China. His most recent book is The
Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in
World History (2016).
andrew j. coe is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt
University. His work is devoted to understanding the causes and
consequences of violent conflict in human civilization.
pamela kyle crossley is Collis Professor of History at Dartmouth College.
Her most recent book is Hammer and Anvil: Nomad Rulers at the Forge of
the Modern World (2019). Her current work is a global history of the Qing
empire.
alexis dudden is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut. She
is currently working on a book project entitled, “The Opening and Closing of
Japan, 1850–2020.”
stephan haggard is the Krause Distinguished Professor at the School of
Global Policy and Strategy, University of California San Diego. He has
written widely on the political economy of East Asia, including Pathways
from the Periphery (1990), The Political Economy of the Asian Financial
Crisis (2000), Hard Target: Sanctions, Inducements, and the Case of North
Korea (2017), and Developmental States (2018). He is the editor of the
Journal of East Asian Studies.
richard s. horowitz is Professor of History at California State University
Northridge. His scholarship explores China’s foreign relations and foreign
involvements in China during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
viii
List of Contributors ix
nadia kanagawa is Assistant Professor in Asian Studies and History at

Furman University. As a cultural and legal historian of classical Japan, her
research focuses on how the seventh- through ninth-century Japanese realm
approached the incorporation, assimilation, and configuration of immigrants
and their descendants.
david c. kang is Maria Crutcher Professor of International Relations at the
University of Southern California. His latest book is American Grand
Strategy and East Asian Security in the Twenty-First Century (2017).
ji-young lee is Associate Professor of International Relations at American
University’s School of International Service. She is the author of China’s
Hegemony: Four Hundred Years of East Asian Domination (2016).
saeyoung park is an independent scholar specializing in East Asian and
particularly Korean history, cultural studies, and critical international
relations.
seo-hyun park is Associate Professor in the Department of Government and
Law at Lafayette College. Her current research project is on the diffusion of
different forms of political violence and military competition in late-
nineteenth-century East Asian international relations.
kenneth m. swope is Professor of History and Senior Fellow of the Dale
Center for the Study of War and Society at the University of Southern
Mississippi. He is the author of On the Trail of the Yellow Tiger: War,
Trauma and Social Dislocation in Southwest China During the Ming–Qing
Transition (2018), as well as numerous other books, articles, and book
chapters on late imperial Chinese history.
richard von glahn is Distinguished Professor of History at the University
of California Los Angeles. He is the author of The Economic History of
China (2016) and other books on the economic and social history of China,
and coeditor of The Cambridge Economic History of China (2021).
scott wolford is Professor of Government at the University of Texas at
Austin. His textbook, The Politics of the First World War: A Course in Game
Theory and International Security, was published in 2019 by Cambridge
University Press.
andrew yeo is Professor of Politics and Director of Asian Studies at the
Catholic University of America in Washington DC. His books include
Asia’s Regional Architecture: Alliances and Institutions in the Pacific
Century (2019) and Activists, Alliances, and Anti-U.S. Base Protests
(2011).
Acknowledgments
This volume was many years in the making. The original idea evolved over
a decade, as David C. Kang grappled with ways to integrate East Asian history
into the mainstream of the international relations discipline. Initial forays in
this vein included his East Asia Before the West: Five Centuries of Trade and
Tribute (2012), a special issue of the Journal of East Asian Studies – where
Haggard was the Editor – entitled International Relations and East Asian
History: Impact Meaning and Conceptualization (2013) and a number of
articles that are cited where relevant. His goal was not to simply sit back and
ask historians to enlighten scholars of international relations, but rather to
initiate a dialogue and have both sides learn from each other. He decided on
the format you have before you: a series of chapters focused on events of
consequence from East Asian history, but that are largely overlooked or
unknown to the standard Western international relations scholar.
Stephan Haggard came into the project as conferences were being held
around early drafts of the papers. Most of the chapters were written by
historians. As with the invitation extended to Andrew J. Coe and Scott
Wolford to ponder a conclusion, Haggard’s participation centered on thinking
through the links between the underlying historical material and major themes
in international relations theory. His interests in the evolution of the East Asian
political economy were continually being pushed back from the postwar period
to earlier antecedents as he began to teach survey courses on East Asian
international relations at both the graduate and undergraduate level.
Above all, both Haggard and Kang were preoccupied with the myriad of
ways China could be gotten wrong, and on both the liberal and realist ends of
the international relations spectrum. History clearly played a crucial role in the
politics of the region, particularly in Northeast Asia. The material was by no
means of solely academic interest: events as distant as the Opium Wars and the
Hideyoshi invasion of Korea continued to resonate deeply. What could a sober
consideration of the long arc of East Asian international relations contribute to
understanding not only the discipline of international relations but its current
practice?
x
Acknowledgments xi
There were a number of people who were involved at one point or another in
this volume, but ultimately did not continue with our project. We particularly
want to thank Amanda Cheney, Jennifer Rudolf, and Han-hui Hsieh.
The generous support of the Korea Foundation was central to publishing
the book, and we are deeply grateful for their support. Kang also received
funding from the USC Center for International Studies and the USC Korean
Studies Institute. Haggard contributed to the effort – albeit more modestly –
through the Korea–Pacific Program at the School of Global Policy and
Strategy at the University of California San Diego. He appreciates the support
of the Lawrence and Sallye Krause chair that he holds and the Pacific Century
Institute. We thank all of our funders effusively for their support of this type
of scholarship, which is unusually interdisciplinary and cross-national.
Lucy Rhymer at Cambridge University Press was a dedicated and supportive
editor, always enthusiastic about moving the project to conclusion. We are
grateful to two referees for helping to make the overall arc and substance of the
book much sharper. Jill Lin provided wonderful research assistant support in
putting all the files together.
Part I
Historicizing East Asian International

Relations
1 Introduction
Stephan Haggard and David C. Kang
What, exactly, are the “lessons of history” for the current East Asian order?1
Graham Allison has asserted that “war between the United States and China in
the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than recognized at
the moment. Indeed, judging by the historical record, war is more likely than
not.”2 Susan Shirk, looking specifically at Asia, follows Allison: “History
teaches us that rising powers are likely to provoke war. The ancient historian
Thucydides identified the fear that a rising Athens inspired in other states as the
cause of the Peloponnesian War.” Also drawing on historical analogy, John
Mearsheimer has recently asserted that “a much more powerful China can also
be expected to try to push the United States out of the Asia–Pacific region,
much as the United States pushed the European great powers out of the Western
Hemisphere in the nineteenth century.”3
But what historical record are Shirk, Allison, and Mearsheimer referring to?
By far, the most commonly examined case studies of rising powers in the
scholarly literature are the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE) and the rise of
Germany under Otto von Bismarck and the Anglo-German rivalry of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 Paul MacDonald and Joseph Parent
examine sixteen cases of relative decline in the “great power pecking order”
since 1870, all from the European experience.5 Kori Schake describes the
British–US hegemonic transition in the late nineteenth century as the “only
peaceful transition between global hegemons since the nation-state era came
into being,” although she makes this sweeping claim based solely on the
European record.6
It is not just power-transition theory that relies exclusively on European
cases. Realist theory in all its variants – rooted in a mechanical notion of
balances of power – grew inductively out of a particularly violent European
historical experience in which a number of similarly sized states competed for
survival.7 The reliance on European examples extends to comparative politics
1
Shirk 2007, 4. 2 Allison 2017, 184. 3 Mearsheimer 2014, 18.
4
Kugler and Lemke 1996, 41; Chan 2004. 5 MacDonald and Parent 2018.
6
Schake 2017, 2. 7 Elman, Elman, and Schroeder 1995, 182–195.
3
4 Stephan Haggard and David C. Kang
and political economy as well. Bellicist theories of state formation – the

argument that “war made the state, and the state made war” – and theories of
the role of institutions in economic growth are derived from European history
as well.8 Indeed, it is a virtual cliché to point out the Eurocentrism of con-
temporary international relations theory.9
To be sure, there are reasons for doing so: the Westphalian order, with its
underpinnings in the concept of sovereignty, did in fact influence the wider
course of world politics, as it was exported beyond Europe to the developing
country periphery. Ironically, new states and their leaders – including in Asia –
were among the most jealous guardians of the sovereignty concept in part
because of their histories of being colonized.
Yet there is also a growing recognition of a “deep bias in international-
relations and comparative-politics scholarship that helps perpetuate the states-
under-anarchy framework.”10 Moreover, there is an equally troubling circular-
ity at work: theories derived from the study of European history were subse-
quently used to explain how this European model of international relations
developed over time.11 As Pinar Bilgin observes, “while theory builds on
history, history is read through theory . . . addressing the Eurocentric limits of
IR [international relations] involves addressing the Eurocentric historical
accounts that students of IR draw upon.”12 These biases are perpetuated
through graduate curricula. David C. Kang and Alex Yu-Ting Lin examined
the syllabi of core international relations seminars at forty-two PhD programs
in the United States and found that 29 percent of the readings use examples
solely drawn from Europe while none of the readings use examples solely
drawn from Asia.13
With the powerful world history movement that has emerged in the last two
decades, it becomes less and less defensible to operate with a canned set of
“greatest hits” from European history as our theoretical and historical reference
point: the Peloponnesian War; the classical European balance of power; the rise
of Bismarckian Germany; the two world wars; the bipolarity of the Cold War
and its end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet those who have not been
trained in non-Western history have few easily accessible sources for ponder-
ing whether different international systems might have operated in quite
different ways: on the basis of very different structures and units and funda-
mental ordering principles.
8
Tilly 1975; North and Weingast 1989, 803–832. For a powerful critique, see Rosenthal and
Wong 2011.
9
Hobson 2004; Rosenthal and Wong 2011; D. C. Kang and Ma 2018, 137–154; Hobson 2012;
Acharya and Buzan 2007, 287–312.
10
McConaughey, Musgrave, and Nexon 2018.
11
Ruggie 1993, 139–174; Elman, Elman, and Schroeder 1995, 182–195. 12 Bilgin 2016, 494.
13
D. C. Kang and Lin 2019, 395.
Introduction 5
Toward an East Asian International Relations

The purpose of this book is straightforward: to remedy this lacuna by providing
an introduction to the international relations of Asia looked at over a longue
duree: from the seventh through the nineteenth century, when contact with the
West definitively upset the Sinocentric order. The book draws on leading
historians and students of international politics, but is nonetheless written in
a straightforward way that would engage a general audience.
We undertake the task with two key purposes in mind, the first of which is
relatively straightforward. First, we seek to offer an accessible overview of the
evolution of the East Asian international system through what might be called
the “early Westphalian” history of the region, which we date to the end of the
nineteenth century. To do this, we do not construct a single narrative; rather we
have focused on key events from this East Asian history as a way of focusing
analytic attention. As in the European canon, these events include key wars,
dynastic changes, and changing inter-unit relationships that had enduring
consequence. The broader purpose is not just didactic. Rather, we also want
to force a consideration of the implications of these cases for international
relations theory. Long understudied by mainstream international relations
scholars, the East Asian historical experience provides an enormous wealth
of new and different cases that promise to enrich a theoretical literature largely
derived from the Western experience.
We are in a position to achieve this most basic of purposes because of
a groundswell of scholarship that has started to consider Asian international
relations over the very long run. This work has emerged from two directions.
First, historians have long been studying these issues but have increasingly
drawn on global history frameworks to place local events in a much wider
theoretical frame. Second, international relations scholars are increasingly
incorporating East Asia into their research, in part because of the rising
prominence of the region in world politics.
Regarding the first intellectual trend, it is not unfair to characterize much of
the historical scholarship of previous generations as privileging national his-
tories. Historians tended to study one period in one particular country, with
China at the center. Perhaps the leading scholar whose work influenced
a generation of students of Chinese foreign policy was John Fairbank.14
From the mid-1940s and for decades following, his scholarship defined the
field, particularly through his 1968 edited book, The Chinese World Order.15
14
Despite being anachronistic, we use the terms “China,” “Korea,” and others for ease of use and
continuity. As Woodside (2006, 1) observes, “The Vietnamese generally did not call themselves
‘Vietnamese’ before the twentieth century, any more than the ‘ancient Greeks’ called them-
selves Greeks; but anachronisms cannot be avoided here.”
15
Fairbank 1968.
Other canonical work included Morris Rossabi’s edited volume China among
Equals, which focused on a period of Chinese weakness.16 Historians produced
accounts of developments in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Central Asia as well,
but these tended to restrict their focus to the country in question.
Historians have begun to look at how regional or even global events and
interactions have influenced local dynamics. Historians of China, Korea, and
Japan are increasingly referring to themselves as “global historians” or
“world historians,” who are more interested in the connections among socie-
ties than on traditionally defined political or cultural units. This new history
still has a core geographical area of expertise, but situates its scholarship more
broadly. Some seminal books that explore the international relations of East
Asian history in this vein include Evelyn Rawski’s Early Modern China and
Northeast Asia: Cross-Border Perspectives, which examines the interactions
among all the actors in that region; Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels:
Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.800–1830, Vol. 1: Integration on the
Mainland, which puts Southeast Asian history into a much larger global
context; and Alexander Woodside’s Lost Modernities: China, Vietnam,
Korea, and the Hazards of World History, which makes the powerful argu-
ment that East Asia was “modern” fully a millennium before Europe.17
Almost by definition, much of the most exciting work in this vein is now
drawing on sources in multiple languages. Kenneth Swope’s history of the
Japanese invasion of Korea in the late sixteenth century draws on Chinese and
Japanese sources. Tonio Andrade’s work on The Gunpowder Age draws on
both Asian and European archives.18
In moving away from Sinocentrism, this new scholarship necessarily had to
come to terms with the nature of the broader regional system. It may seem odd
to call for not focusing research on a hegemonic order on the hegemon, but this
move was crucial for opening up the discussion of core–periphery relations in
premodern East Asia.
From the other direction, scholars of international relations have increas-
ingly been diving into the historical record in search of data and cases that
would permit tests of international relations theory. International relations
scholars had on rare occasions studied Chinese history to explore questions
of grand strategy, focusing for example on the origins of military doctrine and
strategy.19 In the past decade, however, an emerging first wave of social science
scholarship focusing on East Asian history has considered the nature of the
regional system, similarly using sophisticated methods and drawing on a wide
array of regional sources.20
16
Rossabi 1983. 17 Rawski 2015; V. Lieberman 2003; Woodside 2006. 18 Swope 2016b.
19
Johnston 1995; Hui 2005.
20
D. C. Kang 2010; Suzuki 2009; Yuan-kang Wang 2010; D. C. Kang 2013, 181–205.
Introduction 7
Several books exemplify the state of the art of this first wave of scholarship
about premodern East Asian international relations, all focused in various ways
on questions of international order and hierarchy. Feng Zhang’s Chinese
Hegemony and Ji-Young Lee’s China’s Hegemony both focus directly on the
tributary system, and while they disagree on particulars both argue that the
tribute system was, in fact, an international order based on the fundamental
organizing principle of hierarchy.21 Seo-Hyun Park’s Sovereignty and Status in
East Asian International Relations explores how concerns about status and
hierarchy continued for Asian participants even after the arrival of the West.22
In both these new literatures, in history and international relations, some
common themes emerge. Historians and political scientists are both now
thinking in terms of whole systems and how they work. Local histories are
increasingly placed in a wider regional context. But at the same time, both are
seeking to underline the agency of those actors in constituting the system.
Engaging Theory: Hegemony and Hierarchy

The second purpose of this book goes more directly to the issue of how history
informs our assumptions and theories of international relations.23 If the inter-
national relations of East Asia is fundamentally similar to that in Europe – in its
patterns and causes – then studying it would simply be confirmatory of received
wisdom. But if East Asia poses different observable patterns and causes, then
we need to engage East Asia on its own terms and ask whether ostensibly
universal international relations theories – such as those on balancing and
power transitions – are as universal as believed. If not, there may be more
fundamental theoretical insights to be gained about international relations from
the exercise, insights that ultimately grow out of the ability to compare whole
international systems. If East Asia and Europe not only had different cultures,
social structures, and political economic systems, but also had different inter-
national systems, based on fundamentally different organizing principles, it
could provide profound analytic leverage.
In our view, research on East Asian history can directly illuminate at least
four theoretical issues that are central to the discipline of international relations:
the effects of hegemonic versus multipolar international systems; the effects of
hierarchy on international order; the relative causal importance of ideas and
material interests in determining international political outcomes; and the
question of how the past affects the present. Although in different combina-
tions, all of the chapters in this book address one or more of these core
21
J.-Y. Lee 2016a; F. Zhang 2015. 22 S.-H. Park 2017; Larsen 2008.
23
Bially Mattern and Zarakol 2016, 623–654; Reus-Smit 2017, 851–885. For example, International
Organization is devoting the entire seventy-fifth anniversary issue to “Challenges to the Western
liberal order.”
theoretical questions. The conclusion by Andrew Coe and Scott Wolford adds
to this list by taking up several additional questions, including what we can
learn from this long history about international political economy and the role
of domestic politics. But while offering new insights, all of the chapters also
summarize and build upon a growing body of scholarship on the East Asian
order that has come to a general consensus on some core issues.
To begin with one of the more obvious differences between the East Asian
and Westphalian order, we start with the question of polarity. Polarity has long
preoccupied international relations theory. For much of the postwar period, the
debate largely focused on whether multipolarity posed a particular risk of
conflict. (Only for a brief fleeting moment at the end of the Cold War did
unipolar models make a comeback, quickly to fade in the face of China’s rise
and America’s relative decline.) For almost 2,000 years, however, historical
East Asia was a hegemonic system with one dominant member, not
a multipolar system of numerous equally-sized units or a bipolar system with
a great power duopoly. Nor was sovereign equality of states a norm. As such,
East Asia provides an important comparator to the international system that
developed in Europe.
Many scholars define historical East Asia as having emerged during the Qin/
Han era of 221 BCE to 220 CE, becoming a complete international system three
centuries later.24 Nor was this a Chinese historiographical conceit. As Feng
Zhang points out, “Japanese scholars have long argued that an East Asian
international society had come into being no later than the Sui–Tang period
(589–907).”25 The order lasted until the nineteenth century, when Western
imperial powers challenged the system in a more frontal way; the first Opium
War between Britain and the Qing dynasty in 1839–1842 (Chapter 10) is often
taken as a conspicuous breakpoint even though there was a much longer
Western imperial presence (e.g., see Chapter 9, on the Dutch). Regular parti-
cipants in this system included, in addition to China, Japan, the Ryukyu Islands,
the Korean peninsula, Taiwan, Vietnam, occasionally Siam as well as Tibet,
and the very different social organization of the peoples in the long north-
western Central Asian steppe.
The case studies in Part II probe the nature of this hierarchical and hegemo-
nic order, and it is important to underline its persistence. As Yuri Pines writes,
choosing particular starting and end points:
The Chinese empire was established in 221 BCE, when the state of Qin unified the
Chinese world . . . the Chinese empire ended in 1912 . . . for 2,132 years, we may discern
striking similarities in institutional, sociopolitical, and cultural spheres throughout the
imperial millennia. The Chinese empire was an extraordinarily powerful ideological
construct. The peculiar historical trajectory of the Chinese empire was not its
24 25
E.g., Rosenthal and Wong 2011. F. Zhang 2015, 12.
Introduction 9
indestructability . . . but rather its repeated resurrection in more or less the same territory
and with a functional structure similar to that of the preturmoil period.26
Comparisons with Europe in this regard are telling. To be sure, there is
a long-standing theoretical tradition that focuses on the rise and fall of
European hegemons.27 But those hegemonies were either brief or associated
with maritime powers, and sat uncomfortably with models that emphasized
multipolarity and bipolarity. For example, scholars refer to a “Dutch hege-
mony” that might have lasted for a few decades in the early seventeenth
century, but it was notoriously thin; a passing dominance in terms of trade.28
Great Britain’s hegemony lasted perhaps a century, but even then was nested
within a wider continental system of great power rivalries.29 American hege-
mony in the postwar period referred to its relationship with the non-Communist
world; the dominant characterization of the Cold War era was bipolar, not
unipolar, and as we noted, belief in the emergence of a new unipolar order was
relatively short-lived. Neither Dutch nor British nor American “hegemony”
was anything like the centuries of Chinese hegemony’s enduring civilizational
influence across culture, religion, politics, society, and the economy.
When scholars study and theorize about hegemony in its various forms, it
would seem plausible to begin with an examination of the Sinocentric order
rather than the European one. Chapter 2 begins this process with an overview
and periodization of the international relations of historical East Asia, and an
initial characterization of the important patterns and regularities that occurred
over two millennia. Although Chinese power waxed and waned over time,
perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the system was China’s ability to reform
after periods of chaos. After all, for all the utility in comparing Rome and the
contemporaneous Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE), the one most striking
difference is that Rome fell and never recovered, while China did.
Kenneth Swope and David C. Kang (Chapter 2) consider the effects of
oscillations of power within the core and whether they had discernible effect
on the broader system. The central debate in the literature, however, is whether
a persistent hegemonic order might have been more pacific than one in which
relatively equal sovereign states jockeyed for power. The volume outlines the
causes and consequences of a number of wars, including ones that look
systemic in scope (Chapters 4 and 7). But there are reasons to believe that the
China-centered order was more pacific, at least among its core members, and
that the structure of the system was implicated. Moreover, the chapters in this
volume show repeatedly that in the wake of wars, the system managed to
reequilibrate in ways that appear novel in a realist framework. The reasons
take us to some of the mechanisms sustaining the China-centered order.
26
Pines 2012, 2. 27 For example, Modelski 1987. 28
E.g., P. Taylor 1994, 25–46.
29
Spiezio 1990, 165–181.
Not only was East Asia’s structure quite different than Europe’s, the order-
ing principle of historical East Asia’s international system was different from
Europe’s as well. Institutions and norms varied too. Although the contemporary
international order’s fundamental organizing principle is sovereign equality
among states, many international orders have been hierarchic but nonetheless
recognized a wide variety of units as legitimate members. Hierarchy endured
over the centuries not only because of the structural condition of continued
power asymmetry in the region among the member units, but because of an
array of complementary conditions catalogued by Coe and Wolford in their
conclusion to the volume. These included the standard international relations
toolkit – such as threats of force or forbearance on the part of the hegemon – but
also norms, political similarities across the units, and common views of the
disruptive role that unfettered economic interdependence could play.
In reaching a judgment about the incidence of war in the Sinocentric order, it
is important to draw a distinction between two sets of actors in the system, actors
that ultimately took the form of quite different unit types. East Asian states such
as Korea, Vietnam, the Ryukyu Islands, Tibet, and, for long stretches of time,
Japan not only operated within a hegemonic system but accepted Chinese
authority. The Central Asian peoples – which could barely be considered states
at all – did not. This crucial difference had consequences: China’s relations with
the “nomads” were characterized by war and instability, whereas relations with
the Sinicized states were characterized by greater stability. Unipolarity per se –
defined as the distribution of capabilities – cannot easily account for these
disparate outcomes. What is becoming increasingly clear is that a common
culture, defined by a Confucian worldview, and its related institutional
correlates – both international and national – had consequences.
Thus when we argue that the organizing principle of East Asian international
relations was a hierarchy, we do not simply mean that there was a single
dominant power.30 Also implied is the idea that the units themselves are not
to be seen as sovereign states equal in status or even type. We have already
noted that China confronted not only states but nomadic steppe peoples and
transnational pirate networks as well (Chapters 3 and 9). The system thus
invites theorizing about completely hybrid structures. However, even those
subordinate units that were statelike were not seen as juridical equals of China.
To the contrary. At the core of this hierarchical system was the international
order known as the tribute system: a set of institutions and norms that regulated
diplomatic and political contact, cultural and economic relations, and estab-
lished the relationship between the political units. In contrast to the modern
Westphalian ideal, the tribute system emphasized the norm of “asymmetry and
30
The theoretical bases of hierarchy have been thoroughly discussed by Bially Mattern and
Zarakol 2016.
Introduction 11
interdependence of the superior/inferior relationship.”31 Indeed, inequality was

the juridical basis for all tributary relations.
In the study of historical East Asia, the term “tributary relations” refers to the
institutions and norms that regulated diplomatic, political, cultural, and eco-
nomic relations between two units.32 As Coe and Wolford note in the conclu-
sion, this was a decidedly “hub and spokes” as opposed to multilateral world
order and one that emphasized the explicit norm of hierarchy.
But tributary relations were also formalized in two key institutions. The first
was “investiture,” which involved diplomatic recognition and the granting of
titles by the superior state to the secondary unit. On the one hand, investiture
represented a formal recognition of subordinate status; the norm of inequality
was explicit. Yet investiture was also a diplomatic protocol by which China
(and other units) recognized the legitimate sovereignty of their interlocutors,
and thus the status of the leader in that tributary unit as the legitimate ruler.33
Not only did investiture explicitly confirm an unequal relationship between the
giving and receiving units, but as Ji-Young Lee points out, “investiture practice
signified imperial China’s respect for the political autonomy of the receiving
country.”34
The second key institution consisted of “tribute missions,” or the exchange
of diplomatic envoys between the subordinate and superior units. Lee observes
that in East Asia, “diplomacy was conducted through regular exchanges of
envoys . . . in a given social relationship, the meaning of A sending (as opposed
to receiving) tribute to B signified that A acknowledged B’s position to be
superior to that of A . . . tribute practices refer to a reservoir of Confucian
cultural scripts constituting a hierarchical order while regulating actors’
socially acceptable behaviors in the conduct of diplomacy.”35 The frequency
and size of tribute missions were explicitly negotiated between the two units,
and were determined by their status: higher-ranked units were allowed more
frequent missions, could remain longer in the host country, and could bring
a wider and larger range of participants.
Tribute missions also engaged in trade, and higher status units were allowed
greater trading privileges. But such trade was rigidly controlled and was
generally considered incidental to the diplomatic and political purposes of
the tributary order; as we show, the land-based political economies of the
central states in the system relegated trade to an unregulated fringe (Chapter 3).
Some sense of the nature of these relations can be seen by considering dyads
extending into both Southeast and Northeast Asia. During the Ming dynasty
(1368–1644), Vietnam sent seventy-four tributary missions to Beijing, an
average of one every 3.7 years. From 1644 to 1839, during the Qing dynasty,
31
Hevia 1995, 124. 32 F. Zhang 2015, 170. 33
Yu 2004. 34
J.-Y. Lee 2016a, 50.
35
J.-Y. Lee 2016a, 47.
Vietnam sent forty-two missions to Beijing, an average of one every 4.6

years.36 During the Ming dynasty, Lee notes that “Chinese envoys made 186
visits to Korea . . . but Korean envoys made three or four regular visits a year to
China’s capital.”37
Even if disagreements exist on the consequences of this system, its existence
is widely acknowledged as a crucial starting point for understanding the
historical East Asian order. In her important book, Lee concludes that, “if
there is one ontological reality that scholars agree on, it is that East Asian
states and polities shared certain practices in their conduct of relations with one
another . . . diplomacy was conducted through regular exchanges of envoys.”38
Seo-Hyun Park similarly concludes that tribute relations “functioned as a well-
institutionalized, if regionally confined, system of states.”39 Yongjin Zhang and
Barry Buzan write:
That there existed an indigenous social order in the history and politics of what we call
East Asia today is beyond dispute, be it called the Chinese world order, the tributary
system, Pax Sinica, the East Asian order, international society in East Asia or any other.
Acknowledging this is to recognize that East Asian states and peoples had historically
chosen and established complex institutions and practices informed by their history and
culture.40
Although scholarly attention on the tributary system has focused on China,
a wide variety of political actors across Asia used elements of the tributary
system norms and institutions, even when China was not involved. Political
units across East Asia viewed unequal relations – hierarchy – as the natural and
inevitable order. Nonetheless as noted, we can distinguish between a thick inner
core of participants, in which shared normative elements played a more central
role, and a much thinner peripheral layer of participants. Nonetheless, the scope
of these relationships suggests why it is more accurate to call the system the
“tributary system” rather than a “Sinocentric” system, because many actors
operated within the institutions and norms of the tributary system even when
they were not interacting with China itself.41
The view that historical East Asia was an international system with a clear
international order and distinctive organizing principles, norms, and practices
is shared by many scholars. At the very least, examination of East Asia’s
international system and order should remove any teleological idea that the
European and contemporary international orders were inevitable. Research on
the many varied ways in which hierarchy obtained and functioned over the
centuries has barely begun, but it should rest on the full panoply of cases and
not simply the succession of Western hegemons.
36
D. C. Kang, Nguyen, Shaw, and Fu 2019, 913. 37 J.-Y. Lee 2016a, 40.
38
J.-Y. Lee 2016a, 47. 39 S.-H. Park 2017, 54. 40 Y. Zhang and Buzan 2012, 10.
41
MacKay 2016; Kwan 2016; Perdue 2005; Skaff 2012; Elliott 2001.
Introduction 13
Ideational versus Material Causes

A third important strand of theory that the East Asian cases engage has to do
with the role of culture, norms, and ideas in shaping behavior and institutions.
The extent to which the tribute system influenced state behavior cannot be
dismissed, and there is a growing recognition that culture and ideas were
central to how it functioned. As Martha Finnemore notes about the postwar
world, we should expect ideational factors to matter in hegemonic systems,
precisely because of the distribution of power. In a unipolar system, “material
constraints are small. Much is determined by social factors, notably the identity
of the unipole and the social fabric of the system it inhabits.”42
We do not seek to privilege this particular view, but rather retain it as
a sustained hypothesis. As Ayse Zarakol points out, there are two basic
approaches to theorizing about hierarchy in international relations. The first
is broadly concerned with “bargained solutions to problems of order.” Zarakol
notes that the:
trade-off explanation has also been deployed to account for the creation of regional
orders. Kang has argued that the hierarchy that ordered East Asian international rela-
tions from 1368 to 1841 rested on an implicit bargain in which Chinese authority was
legitimated because China crafted the kind of Confucian-inspired social order that was
generally valued by, and so conformed with, its subordinates.43
Throughout the volume, we see actors – operating within the constraints of

the tribute system – nonetheless bargaining for advantage, offering quid pro
quos, and deploying constraints in order to maximize their utility. In the
conclusion, Coe and Wolford outline the way in which a variety of Chinese
practices comport with the well-known toolkit of dominant powers in the
Westphalian system, from military protection and threats to aid and sanctions.
But the alternative conception of hierarchy emphasizes the constitutive
power of ideas, not rationalist bargaining. As Zarakol continues:
in direct contrast to the agentic–contractual accounts outlined earlier, the other dominant
strain of IR research on hierarchy conceives hierarchies broadly as deep structures of
organized inequality that are neither designed nor particularly open to renegotiation.
Such accounts suggest that hierarchy does not just shape the behaviors of actors in world
politics but rather produces both the actors (or at least their worldview) and the space of
world politics in which they act.44
The chapters of the book return repeatedly to the complex calculations
between center and periphery, which encompass material as well as social
and cultural interactions. But it is worth underlining that a variety of scholars
working on the Chinese orders have dug deeply into its cultural or normative
42 43 44
Finnemore 2009, 59. Zarakol 2017, 5–6. Zarakol 2017, 7.
structure as well. Feng Zhang, for example, shows that the tribute system rested
on an “expressive hierarchy” that functioned in “accordance with Confucian
propriety by establishing ethically endowed relationships for the sake of having
such relationships . . . Confucianism was the major, not residual, variable.”45
Qin Yaqing argues that Confucian culture and philosophy provide a profoundly
different perspective on politics than does the atomized, individualist, Western
philosophical tradition. Qin argues that relationality “is based on more than
relations: it is the relational web in which the actor is embedded that regulates
the behavior and constitutes the identity of the actor.”46 As the basis of an
international system and order of remarkable persistence, this emphasis on
ideational and constitutive factors provides a different way to understand the
construction of international orders. Many chapters in this book – most notably
Ji-Young Lee’s treatment of the founding of the Chosŏn dynasty (Chapter 5) –
highlight the importance of ideas and normative issues, and provide a natural
comparison and contrast to the European historical experience.
Past and Present: Are We All Westphalian Now?

The East Asian world endured for many millennia. Its end came in the nine-
teenth century with the arrival of the Western colonizing powers. A simple
explanation of the end of the old order returns to shifts in power and its
exercise. These shifts were by no means limited to the European powers.
Japan responded to its forced opening very differently than China (Chapters
10 and 11) and subsequently posed fundamental challenges to the Sinocentric
order that only added to the pressures emanating from the European powers.
But the story is decidedly more complex than a simple shift in power; norms
should play a crucial role in the analysis of Western imperialism in the region as
well. Ironically, Western powers initially sought to establish a new order in East
Asia that bore little relationship to the Westphalian ideal-type. The countries in
the region, by contrast, responded by advancing demands for legal recognition
that were focused on sovereignty and thus looked decidedly Westphalian; this
process is evident in countries as diverse as Japan (Chapter 11) and the
Philippines (Chapter 12). This experience thus provides insight into how
international systems and orders change and, indeed, end. As a result, it can
provide clues for contemporary scholarship that anticipates the end of the
“American global order,” as Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon call it.47
This debate has played out on many intellectual terrains and reaches far
beyond international relations. How “modernity” came to be understood and
manifest in East Asia has long consumed the disciplines of the humanities;
Korea provides but one example. Scholars such as Christopher Hanscom have
45 46 47
F. Zhang 2015, 7. Qin 2018, 236. Cooley and Nexon 2020.
Introduction 15
explored how Korean writers and scholars understood “modernity” in the early
twentieth century, and how literature changed from a focus on classical Chinese
texts and forms – in line with a Sinocentric focus – to an embrace of the
European novel, all within a few decades.48 Similarly, Gi-wook Shin and
Michael Robinson’s important book on Colonial Modernity in Korea explores
how Koreans learned about and interpreted what it meant to be “modern.”49
Todd Henry’s Assimilating Seoul: Japanese Rule and the Politics of Public
Space in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 has been influential in approaching
a colonial modernity that came out of Asia itself through the lens of Japanese
urban planning, hygiene, and management of public spaces such as shrines and
parks.50
The field of international relations is just beginning to theorize about and
explain how international systems and orders change and end. How East Asia
responded to the arrival of the West was different than what occurred in Africa,
Latin America, and elsewhere. East Asia was arguably the most complete and
enduring case of a non-Western international system. Partly because of its very
size and continental depth, China managed to resist direct or indirect colonial
rule of the British and French variety. Rather, the Western powers sought to
impose an unequal legal system that rested on the exercise of extraterritoriality.
Western imperialism in East Asia was thus not simply colonization and incor-
poration of non-units into the international system. It also involved complex
issues of how actors embedded in a millennia-old international system would
respond to the totally alien set of ideas, institutions, and norms – and indeed
ideology – of the Westphalian system. As Bruce Cumings writes:
Japan’s nineteenth-century choice (Korea’s and China’s, too) was not between
a Western international system and no system but between a Western system predicated
on the sovereign equality of nations but seeking to subordinate Japan, Korea, and China
and an East Asian international system of centuries’ longevity predicated on the
sovereign hierarchies of the Middle Kingdom but affording nearly complete autonomy
to Japan and Korea. It is amazing to see how even the experts on late-nineteenth-century
East Asia take the Western theory as the norm and cannot get it through their heads that
there was an international system (and therefore a norm) in East Asia, that it had lasted
for centuries, and that China, Japan, and Korea knew each other, cross-fertilized each
other, and traded with each other, whereas in the mid-nineteenth century it was the
Western system that was utterly new, deeply threatening, and entirely untried and
unproved in East Asia.51
The chapters in Part III detail the coming of this new asymmetric system and
the distinctive institutions that accompanied it: the treaty port, extraterritori-
ality, and legal pluralism. Yet these chapters also show how Western contact
layered an imperial order on top of the traditional tributary system. These
48 49 50 51
Hanscom 2015. Shin and Robinson 2001. Henry 2014. Cumings 1999, 7.
chapters underline that by systems change, we do not simply mean changes in

the identity, number, or even power of major actors; rather, we also mean
precisely these changes in underlying principles. The chapters in Part III all
consider the profound effect that Western practice of empire and its contra-
dictory conception of sovereignty had on the region.
To understand the full course of change associated with the imperial powers –
including both the European and Japanese – it is important to revisit the longer
arc of imperial contact. It is often forgotten that, in their initial contact with the
region, Western powers – operating through trading companies – were hard to
distinguish from the traders and pirates who made up the flourishing East Asian
trading system. Nor was their subsequent dominance assured (see Chapter 3 on
Japanese piracy, and particularly Tonio Andrade’s treatment of the fall of Dutch
Formosa in Chapter 9); rather, they operated on the outer edges of the core
system we have described here.
By the nineteenth century, however, the Western powers increasingly used
their superior capabilities to assert imperial prerogatives. The pursuit of indir-
ect rule associated with treaty ports and extraterritoriality was rooted quite
obviously in economic as well as strategic preoccupations, as Richard
Horowitz shows in his examination of the Opium Wars (Chapter 10) and
Alexis Dudden argues in her treatment of the opening of Japan (Chapter 11).
Toward the end of the period covered by this volume, imperial competition
was accelerating and imperialism started to take a more direct form in a number
of important cases. In 1898 Germany secured a ninety-nine-year lease on the
Shandong peninsula and Russia negotiated a leasehold on the Liaodong penin-
sula between Dairen and Port Arthur. Great Britain secured a naval base at
Weihaiwei, and France carved out a sphere of influence in southern China.
Most consequentially, Japan emerged as a powerful regional actor in its own
right as a result of victories in wars with China (1894–1895) and Russia
(1904–1905). In this volume, the run-up to the imposition of formal colonial
rule is discussed with respect to the United States in the Philippines (Chapter
12) and Japan vis-à-vis China (Chapter 13) and the Korean peninsula
(Chapter 14).
Once we conceive of international systems as encompassing both structures
of power and purpose, however, we are led to deeper questions of how states
adjust to competing principles. Layered on top of the hierarchical tribute
system was the very different tribute system of the Western imperial powers
and ultimately the imposition of direct colonial rule by both the United States
and Japan. Yet the European powers and the United States also brought their
international legal norms to the region, most notably in the Westphalian con-
ception of sovereignty. A number of chapters in Part III grapple not only with
the standard strategic jostling of the emerging imperial order – one in which
Japan flipped from a victim to a perpetrator – but with the role that residual
Introduction 17
hierarchical norms and new conceptions of sovereignty meant for the emerging
order (see in particular, Saeyoung Park’s analysis of Japan–Korea relations and
the “end of Eastphalia” in Chapter 14).
Contradictions and ironies abound. Most notably, the gradual penetration of
Westphalian norms laid the groundwork for self-strengthening and nationalist
movements that sought to grab the mantle of sovereignty for themselves,
reaching their peak power in the aftermath of the World War II. As Barry
Buzan points out, there are still strong tendencies within the field of interna-
tional relations to emphasize a “one-way view of cultural transmission from the
West to the rest of the world,”52 when in fact these norms – and nationalism
more broadly – were seized by the subjugated with decidedly subversive
purposes.
However, although those Westphalian norms and values have penetrated
deeply into East Asian societies and governments, they have not thoroughly
erased ideas rooted in the Chinese hierarchical order either. A particularly
interesting case in this regard is Japan. Seo-Hyun Park points out that in the
1870s, “the translation of the term sovereignty was chosen carefully to symbo-
lize the power and authority of the state so that [Japan] could compete with the
Western powers, and to a lesser extent, China.” While there were certainly
material reasons for Japanese behavior toward China and Korea in the late
nineteenth century, it would be a mistake, as Shogo Suzuki reminds us, “to
somehow assume that the proclamations of Japan’s ‘civilizing’ role within Asia
was merely rhetoric.” It is doubtful that Japanese leaders were able to detach
themselves “from their particular social world and cynically use the ‘civilizing
mission’ to justify imperialist ideas that had somehow always been latent.”53
The chapters in Part III address these fundamental issues of system change,
encompassing not only structural shifts such as the rising power of Japan and
the United States but the ideational changes that came with modernity.
Selecting Cases
The following chapters provide an analysis of twelve events from East Asian
history that are widely seen among historians and international relations scho-
lars as historically consequential. As noted, the book is divided into three parts;.
Part II deals with the Sinocentric order and Part III with its breakdown in the
nineteenth century. The sample of events in Part II is biased toward wars and
cataclysmic dynastic collapses: East Asia’s first world war, engaging China,
Korea, and Japan (643–668; Chapter 4); the highly consequential emergence of
the Choson dynasty (1392, Chapter 5); the Ming invasion of Vietnam (1407–
1427, Chapter 6); the Hideyoshi invasion of Korea (1592–1598, Chapter 7);
52 53
Buzan 2010, 2. Suzuki 2009, 143.
and the near-century-long Ming–Qing transition (1618–1683, Chapter 8).

Although the cases provide insight into who and why these wars started, they
also explore how these wars were settled and new equilibria established.
Part III focuses on empire, starting with an early example of the defeat of the
Dutch in Formosa (1662, Chapter 9) before turning to the Western onslaught in
China (the Opium Wars, 1839–1860) and the opening of Japan (1852–1854
Chapter 11). The section then turns to the late-century assertion of Japanese and
American interests in the region and the final breakdown of the Sino-centered
order through a consideration of the efforts to achieve independence in the
Philippines (1898–1904, Chapter 12), the Sino-Japanese War (1894–1985,
Chapter 13), and Japan–China relations (particularly in the 1870s, Chapter 14).
Surely other scholars will claim that we have omitted crucial cases and other
events were more consequential. Others will claim that these cases we show
here do little other than confirm the utility of existing theoretical approaches.
Yet we believe that the choice of cases captures both the operation of the
Sinocentric order prior to the penetration of Western powers and the dynamics
of system change that empire wrought on the old order.
In lieu of a concluding chapter that simply sums up the various chapters, we
invited two leading international relations scholars, Andrew Coe and Scott
Wolford, to assess what international relations theory can learn from the study
of East Asian history. They engage the book by considering a number of
controversies: on distributions of power but also on norms, political economy
and the role that domestic politics plays in international relations. The conclu-
sion demonstrates that see this volume not as an end, but as the beginning of
a conversation.
With respect to the design of the chapters, our basic analytic idea was to
begin each with an outline of the “event” and to show the background causes,
then unfold the event itself and its subsequent ramifications. Some events are
more accurately viewed as processes, particularly the eight-decade period of
Ming decline and Manchu conquest (Chapter 8). However, for the most part the
chapters follow the model of exploring an event that can be delineated fairly
sharply.
Although we have divided the book into two main substantive parts, this
introduction is followed by two additional overview chapters. These provide
orienting road maps of the long political arc of historical East Asia and some
distinctive features of its political economy. The political chapter by Kang and
Swope (Chapter 2) provides a conceptualization and periodization of the region
over the very longue duree – roughly 2,000 years – and identifies the major
contours and patterns of the China-centered system. The chapter on regional
economic relations by Richard von Glahn (Chapter 3) focuses on a particular
event – the rise of “Japanese” piracy in the sixteenth century – but uses that
issue to provide a general overview of economic relations in the region.
Introduction 19
Conclusion
Our hope is that an examination of East Asia’s past will not only raise issues
about international relations theory but urge us to ponder the current order
through a new lens as well. An obvious rejoinder to this project was posed at the
very outset of this introduction. All the world is Westphalian now. The China
challenge is a typical power-transition case. China and its East Asian neighbors
are interacting on a global, not regional, scale, and the past is thus arguably
irrelevant. As one of us argued over fifteen years ago, “a century of chaos and
change, and the increased influence of the rest of the world and in particular the
United States, would lead one to conclude that a Chinese-led regional system
would not look like its historical predecessor.”54
Yet that does not necessarily mean that a global – or particularly
a regional – order will look like some previous Western order either, as
Mearsheimer’s observations about the rise of China closely mimicking the
United States might suggest. It is far from clear that the Westphalian order has
taken as firm roots as is typically assumed nor that history is easily forgotten
by the protagonists.
First, states that developed over millennia in vastly different cultural and
structural situations than those of Europe remain different today. There is
a robust scholarship that argues that history does not end, and that the past
continues to influence politics and society in the present. Seo-Hyun Park has
argued that states create and sustain collective identities and memories, and that
they join international orders that are not created on a blank canvas. Park calls
this a “usable past” similar to Thomas Berger’s discussion of how collective
memory sets “sharp boundaries to the kind of historical narrative that can be
adopted and sustained over time.”55
It is simply not possible to address these issues without considering the
current conjuncture and the question of whether a new China-centered order is
being forged today. This new order is anchored in China’s rapid material rise
and its distinctive political economy, increasingly both authoritarian and statist
in economic orientation. The question is how much of this “usable past” traced
in this volume influences and informs East Asia today? How much has
changed?
Arguably, Chinese pre-Qing regimes were more similar to each other than to
today’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP), given the massive shocks of moder-
nization, the leveling of traditional culture during the Cultural Revolution, and
the transition to single party rule. These shocks may also have made China
Westphalian, or more specifically, made China more like a standard autocratic
single party regime.
54 55
D. C. Kang 2003, 67. S.-H. Park 2017, 12; Berger 2012, 24.
But few autocratic single party regimes can call upon the historical and
cultural resources – including the deep historical resentments of a lost past –
that the CCP can. Few countries are massive and centrally located in their
regions. Moreover, there are certainly at least some areas in which ideas or
values have endured from premodern to modern times. For example, Elizabeth
Perry has made the case for a degree of continuity in a quite different sphere.
How Chinese think about justice in the domestic sphere is by no means solely
a legacy of the post-war era:
[the idea] that people have a just claim to a decent livelihood and that a state’s legitimacy
depends upon satisfying this claim – goes very far back in Chinese political thought. It
has roots in the teachings of Confucius (sixth–fifth century BC) and was elaborated by
the influential Confucian philosopher Mencius (fourth–third century BC) . . . The idea
that good governance rests upon guaranteeing the livelihood of ordinary people has been
a hallmark of Chinese political philosophy and practice from Mencius to Mao – and
beyond. It is reflected not only in government pronouncements and policies, but also in
grass roots protests.56
One of the most intense debates in the contemporary scholarly literature on

East Asia centers on whether China poses a threat to the contemporary Western
liberal order.57 It is important to underscore that the purported challenge is by
no means only material; this is not a simple power transition. Rather it is one
that includes challenges arising from fundamentally different conceptions of
political and economic order.
On the one hand, East Asia in the early twenty-first century is increasingly
stable, wealthy, and powerful. Few countries fear for their survival, the excep-
tions being Taiwan and North Korea. The most contentious issues in interna-
tional politics are territorial. Yet as Ryan Griffiths points out:
China’s territorial claims are not based on claims over other sovereign states; or on key
sections of their landmass. The existing territorial grid has already been determined
through diplomacy, war, and the other practices, both fair and unfair, that shape inter-
national relations. Of course, conflicting claims over territory do exist on the margins of
that grid – Taiwan being one of the most prominent . . . But these cases are limited in
number, rooted in history, and not simply conjured whole cloth.58
The political economy is also arguably propitious. After a century of tumult and
change, East Asian countries are once again deeply intertwined with each other
as well as the rest of the world. Although China–US relations appear to have
entered a much more rivalrous phase, it is far from clear that a war of power
transition is likely or even possible.
Yet, Bentley Allan, Srdjan Vucetic, and Ted Hopf pose the question “How
strong is the US-led Western hegemonic order and what is the likelihood that
56 57 58
Perry 2008, 38–39. Acharya 2014. Griffiths 2016.
Introduction 21
China can or will lead a successful counterhegemonic challenge?”59 If China is

fundamentally different in its identity and it is now at best a partial member of
the contemporary order, then can we envision a hierarchical Asian order
emerging around quite different principles than those which are constitutive
of the US-led system? As Iver Neumann argues, “Memories of previous
systems are by necessity relevant for any entry into a new one. Former
experiences and present actions are tied together.”60
If so, the concern about the challenge that China poses to the Western liberal
order may be fundamentally misguided. The risk is not the wars that realists
fear but the emergence of contending ideational orders – for example, built
around authoritarian and semi-authoritarian rule and more statist economies –
that could be in train. To understand these changes, leading with Westphalian
assumptions might be the wrong way to go; reconceptualizing the sources of
order itself is required. Above all, this volume hopes to contribute to that larger
project.
59 60
Allan, Vucetic, and Hopf 2018, 839–869. Neumann 2011, 471.
2 East Asian International Relations
over the Longue Duree
David C. Kang and Kenneth M. Swope
This chapter provides an overview of the international relations of historical

East Asia. We begin with the Qin–Han unification of what is now central China
(221 BCE – 220 CE), extending into the era of contact with the West, stopping
around 1900 when the system had clearly disintegrated, and Western imperi-
alism and the rise of Japan had created entirely new dynamics. Our purposes are
multiple. The first is to provide a stylized periodization and chronology of
crucial events – what might be thought of as key markers – and how they
reshaped the regional order. However, our second is to amplify on a number of
the theoretical themes raised in the Introduction, placing them in appropriate
historical context.
As was discussed in Chapter 1, we begin with the observation that East
Asia was a hegemonic international system, and the fundamental organiz-
ing principle of its international order was hierarchy. Although the con-
temporary Westphalian international order’s fundamental organizing
principle is sovereign equality among states, East Asia’s historical order
was unequal, and recognized a wide variety of units as legitimate. This led
to systematic patterns of war and other violence that were different in East
Asia than they were in Europe. Compared to the routine bellicosity of
a multipolar Europe, in East Asia for long stretches of time internal threats
were more significant than external challenges. This hierarchic and hege-
monic system was also consequential for the units: state formation fol-
lowed consistent – yet different – patterns than occurred in European
history.
Second, given our emphasis upon the significance of China as regional
hegemon, the unification or division of China is an important storyline that
we will focus on. Dynamics at the center were a key element in determining the
nature of the system and key behaviors of the units. It is also important to
underscore that while China was clearly one of the most consequential actors
for much of the past 2,500 years, there were no irreducible features of the
Chinese political system that permitted an enduring characterization over time;
22
East Asian International Relations 23
such teleology is not only a Western trope but one that serves deep political
purposes of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as well. Rather, changing
cultural ideas influenced the various Chinese polities that rose and fell over
time, with modification, adaptation, and debate at every point. As Naomi
Standen reminds us, “we should not . . . foreclose the issue, by adopting
terms and categories, like ethnicity, that imply the inevitability of the modern
Chinese nation-state and posit a linear development toward it.”1 Rather, the
dynamics of change provide a fascinating basis for comparison with other
places and times.
Third, although we do place emphasis on China’s position, new scholarship
is overturning many of the most hoary stereotypes, starting with the presump-
tion that the history of East Asian international relations is simply the history of
China and its dynastic changes. Rather, we have to think of the history of a vast,
vibrant, and diverse region encompassing a variety of political forms on
China’s peripheries, from well-established kingdoms and social orders, to
frontiers of settled farmers as well as nomadic peoples. East Asian history
was not an endless cycle of Asian despotism and stagnant dynasties, one
following another, but a gradual, uneven evolution of economic, political,
and social practices that changed and diffused over centuries among units of
diverse types. The region was more interactive and integrated than is normally
believed. Moreover, China’s neighbors realized the significant latitude offered
to them by the tributary order and effectively carved out their own spheres of
interest.
East Asia was always more integrated with Eurasia, the Middle East, and
beyond than has often been believed. Although China was the major actor for
much of this time, we want to highlight and emphasize the overall variety and
dynamism of the region, as it relates directly to how we conceptualize the
system. The area we are concerned with includes the area that is now central
China, but there were deep and long-standing interactions with peoples all
along the great Central Asian steppe, which ran from Tibet across the north and
west of China all the way to the Pacific Ocean; Korea, the Ryukyu Islands,
Japan, and Taiwan to the east, and a number of political units in what is now
Southeast Asia, including Burma, Siam, and of course Vietnam. This enormous
area might be called “East Asia,” and although many other regions had regular
interactions with Chinese and other traders (Melaka, for example), they were
not in regular constant contact or cultural or social relations.
Finally, we will consider how – and to what extent – Western contact altered
the prior relations we observe. European maritime powers appear to have
possessed certain military advantages, but they were operating at tremendous
distance and the line between state action and private entrepreneurs proves hard
1
Standen 2007, 30.
24 David C. Kang and Kenneth M. Swope
to draw. Moreover, Asians proved quick to recognize and adopt European

military technologies and techniques, contrary to common belief.2 Only quite
late in the game – arguably not until the nineteenth century – did there occur the
kind of clearly identifiable imperialism in which European states, empowered
by the fruits of the Industrial Revolution, subordinated regional actors.
The broad sweep of East Asian history can be divided into roughly four eras,
each with particular defining characteristics. Phase I – hegemony – extends
from prehistory to the Qin–Han dynasties of 221 BCE to 220 CE. It was at this
time that unified political rule emerged in what is now central China. With the
collapse of the Han dynasty in 220 CE, China experienced three centuries of
disunity as various states fought for control. Phase II – state formation – ranges
from the fifth to the tenth centuries CE. This era witnessed state formation
outside of China, particularly in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. The emergence of
centralized, territorial states and the Sui–Tang unification of China during this
era created a truly regional system. By the tenth century, China had fallen into
disarray again.
The Mongol Yuan conquest of China in 1279 marks the beginning of Phase
III – the East Asian world. This phase saw the full flowering of the system –
China remained both united and hegemonic for almost the entire period from
the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries; before then, periods of disunity were
roughly as common as unity.
Phase IV – imperialism – is marked by the decline of Qing China and the
arrival of the West in force in the nineteenth century. This most recent period of
Chinese disunity led to upheaval across the region and, combined with Western
colonization of most of the region and Japanese imperialism, resulted in the
complete disintegration of the traditional East Asian world. European traders
and missionaries had arrived in East Asia in the sixteenth century but only
became truly consequential in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when
East Asia became integrated with the rest of the globe, and the international
system became truly global.
In the first section of this chapter, we briefly discuss Phases I, II, and III –
hegemony, state formation, and the East Asian world. We describe some of the
pivotal events that shaped the relationship between China and the enduring
political entities along its near abroad: Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. As will be
seen, we also need to consider two crucial political entities – the Mongols and
the Manchus – that are on the periphery but ultimately took over, yet were
simultaneously integrated with, China itself.
In the second section, we briefly discuss patterns of war and other violence in
the system. Scholars – and the chapters in this book – tend to focus on wars
2
For a fascinating comparative study of the adoption of gunpowder in China and the West
respectively, see Andrade 2017.
because they are key focal points and are often well documented. But a focus
only on war can overstate the case and leave the impression that history is
simply one war after another. In reality, war in historical East Asia was often
separated by long periods of stability and peace. Studying both war and peace,
and identifying discrete patterns of both, is key to having a fuller picture of the
entire sweep of East Asian history.
Finally, it is important not to misread the extent of Western penetration by the
defining events that characterized Phase IV – the “high” imperial period of the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the arrival of the Dutch and
Portuguese, and later the French and British, was by no means as consequential
as Western accounts like to make out. As Richard von Glahn’s subsequent
chapter on economic interactions will reveal, there was substantial exchange
and economic activity among the participants in the region before the arrival of
the West, carried through networks that left little or no room for early European
traders to operate. Indeed, this is one reason why early European contact
uniformly saw these countries as closed: because they had an enormously
difficult time penetrating the already deep and well-developed trade relations
and networks controlled and regulated by the main actors. This led to
a caricature of Japan as a closed country (sakoku), Korea as a “hermit king-
dom,” and a China uninterested in trade. But as has been shown, that was never
really the case, and not only for economic ties but for the political relations
among the diverse entities in the region as well. Reconstructing the interna-
tional relations of East Asia over the longue duree means repositioning the role
of the West in the region’s chronology.
The Evolution of the East Asian International System

Any periodization of the East Asian international system rotates in no small
measure around two general phases: eras of greater Chinese unity and power,
and eras of Chinese disarray. In the “strong China” phases, Asia’s predominant
pattern was concentrated power, not a balance of power. During phases of
disunity, “China among equals” was always a temporary phenomenon, espe-
cially when viewed over the centuries from Vietnam, Korea, or Japan. Even
during those times that China was conquered, it remained the center of gravity.
As Brantly Womack reminds us, “To say China was ‘among equals’ would be
missing a key element of the regional situation. Even to Toyotomi Hideyoshi,
Japan’s second ‘great unifier,’ the (unachieved) ultimate glory would have been
to rule China. China was at the center of a set of regional relationships that it
could not force, but were not transposable.”3
3
Womack 2010, 158. On the concept of “China among equals,” see Rossabi 1983.
Phase I: Hegemony (221 BCE–220 CE)

Initial Chinese hegemony emerged with the end of the Warring States period
(475–221 BCE) and the unification of what is now central China by the Qin
dynasty (221–206 BCE). Although many ideas that eventually influenced state
formation had their origins during the Warring States or Qin–Han era – such as
Confucianism, Legalism, and the idea of a civil service – none of these ideas
became fully manifest until centuries later in Phase II. What did emerge during
Phase I was hegemony. However, after the collapse of the Han dynasty in 220
CE, there was no uncontested hegemon roughly throughout 200–500 CE, and
then again in 900–1200 CE. With the emergence of the Yuan dynasty (1279–
1368), China remained essentially unified up to the twentieth century.
Much of the research that does exist on East Asian state formation explores
only the emergence of the Qin or Han dynasties.4 But this exclusive focus on
the initial emergence of unified rule in what is now central China ignores the
profusion of state-building that occurred outside of China, in Korea, Japan, and
later Vietnam, and elsewhere during Phase II, between the fifth and tenth
centuries CE. The extant literature treats the initial emergence of unified rule
in China as the only event of consequence in all East Asian history and ignores
the next nineteen centuries of change and growth. This is as if scholars explored
the rise of the Roman empire in the third through first centuries BCE and
concluded that since then nothing of consequence happened in European
history until the end of the Middle Ages.
Located in what is now central China and building upon pre-Qin statecraft
and institutional foundations, the Han dynasty was a centralized government
that saw a flowering of ideas and institutional innovations in politics, society,
and the economy; in addition to its key role in establishing an ideal of unity, the
term has even taken on an ethnic overlay suggesting a long-standing identity.
China expanded and contracted, depending on local conditions and the relative
strength of the political center and the periphery. But Mark Edward Lewis
notes, “China owes its ability to endure across time, and to re-form itself again
and again after periods of disunity, to a fundamental reshaping of Chinese
culture by the earliest dynasties, the Qin and the Han.”5
Pursuant to the goals and findings of the present volume, it is perhaps better
to characterize Phase I as the emergence of hegemony, not state formation.
Within this order, China as hegemon stood at the top of the hierarchy, and
allowed formally unequal and unlike units substantial freedom of action as long
as they recognized its authority. China crafted a variety of different relations
with these units, tributary relations being most central.6 Feng Zhang notes that
4
Kiser and Cai 2003; D. Zhao 2004. On the formation of early Chinese identity with respect to
state building, see Di Cosmo 2002; C.-S. Chang 2007.
5
M. E. Lewis 2007, 1. 6 Swope 2015; Wills 1984; J. A. Anderson 2007; L. C. Kelley 2005.
“China was the undisputed regional hegemon,” while Ji-Young Lee concludes
that the “Chinese state was an empire, but the international order in which it
occupied the central place was hegemonic rather than imperial.”7
This international order was consequential for the behavior of the actors
involved: as this chapter will discuss, in both core and periphery, patterns of
war, alignment, diplomacy, and trade in historical East Asia were fundamen-
tally different from those in historical Europe. There was no challenge to this
order until the nineteenth century and the arrival of the Western powers. The
contrast with the European historical experience is stark. As Bin Wong points
out, “Missing from the Peace of Westphalia was any hegemonic power in
Europe similar to China’s hegemonic position in East Asia.”8 This order also
stands in contrast to the contemporary international order based on egalitarian
sovereignty, which was the foundational conceit of Westphalia. As Joseph
MacKay observes:
For more than two millennia . . . a relatively consistent idea persisted of what Imperial
China was or should be. When China was ascendant, as during the Han and Ming
dynasties, this identity justified Chinese regional dominance. When China was in
decline, it provided a source of aspiration. When foreigners occupied the country, as
did the Mongols under the Yuan dynasty and the Manchus under the Qing dynasty, they
justified their rule by claiming the Mandate of Heaven (tianming) for themselves.9
Every other political actor that emerged in the past 2,000 years in East Asia
had to engage with the reality or idea of Chinese power. Korea, Japan, Vietnam,
the peoples of the Central Asian steppe, the societies of Southeast Asia – all had
to deal with China in some fashion and decide how best to organize their own
societies and to manage their relations with the hegemon. The fact or potential
of Chinese power and the ideas and debates about the proper role of govern-
ment and state–society relations were a fact of life in East Asia. Surrounding
peoples could choose to embrace or reject the idea and fact of China, but they
had to engage it no matter what they chose.
Internal rebellions increasingly threatened the unity of the Han. The begin-
ning of the end came with the Yellow Scarves rebellion of 184 CE, a peasant
revolt fueled by agrarian crisis and high taxes. In 220 CE, the Han finally
collapsed, and for the next 300 years there was no unified rule or regional
hegemon.
Phase II: State Formation in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam

The emergence of Chinese hegemony in Phase I is certainly an important issue,
but was arguably not as important as Phase II, which began in the fourth–sixth
7 8 9
F. Zhang 2015, 2; J.-Y. Lee 2016a, 16. R. B. Wong 2018b, 22. MacKay 2016, 474.
centuries CE. It was at this time that the region experienced the emergence of
a number of states surrounding China, in what is now present-day Korea,
Vietnam, and Japan. In the first few centuries CE countries began to emerge
as political units around the periphery of China. These states constituted the
inner core of the Chinese-dominated regional system where Chinese cultural,
economic, and political influence was direct and pervasive.
Full centralized rule in China only returned with the short-lived Sui dynasty
(581–618) and ultimately the Tang (618–907). As Richard von Glahn char-
acterizes it:
The might and wealth of the Sui–Tang empires (618–907) at their peak deeply
impressed China’s neighbors. Japan, the Korean states, and even (briefly) Tibet imitated
the Sui–Tang imperial model, and to a greater or lesser degree adopted the Chinese
written language, Sui–Tang political institutions and laws, Confucian ideology, and the
Buddhist religion. It was during this era that East Asia – a community of independent
national states sharing a common civilization – took shape in forms that have endured
down to modern times.10
Indeed, it was the Tang dynasty that made perhaps the most direct advances
in national governance, introducing a key institutional experiment:
a government run by talent, not heredity, with civil servants selected through
a public competition assessing candidates’ qualification, open (in theory) to all
males, and held at regular, fixed intervals. This bureaucracy was territorially
defined and centrally administered. Historian Alexander Woodside notes:
The eighth century, indeed, would make a good choice as the first century in world
history of the politically “early modern.” It was in this century that the Chinese court
first gained what it thought was a capacity to impose massive, consolidating, central tax
reforms from the top down, which few European monarchies would have thought
possible before the French revolution, given their privileged towns, provinces, nobles,
and clergy.11
Even here, impressive East Asian state-building was driven by emulation,

not competition. Korea, Vietnam, and Japan emerged as states between the
sixth and tenth centuries CE and existed for more than 1,300 years with
centralized bureaucratic control defined over territory and administrative capa-
city to tax their populations, field large militaries, and provide extensive public
goods.12 They created these institutions not to wage war or suppress revolt – the
longevity of dynasties in these countries is evidence of both the peacefulness of
their region and their internal stability. Rather, Korea, Vietnam, and Japan
developed state institutions through emulation of China. State formation in
premodern East Asia occurred 1,000 years before it did in Europe; and it
occurred under a hegemonic system in which war was relatively rare, not
10 11 12
von Glahn 2016, 169. Woodside 2006, 1. C.-H. Huang and Kang 2019.
under a balance of power system with regular existential threats. This occurred
because of diffusion through emulation in both structure and the substance –
hegemony instead of multipolarity – and the particular political philosophy of
East Asia.
Gina Barnes observes that “instances of state formation on the Korean
peninsula between 500 BCE and 500 CE were multiple and varied in character.
All, however, were secondary states which formed at the periphery of the more
powerful large states of China.”13 For Japan, John Wills notes that, “the real
story of the 600s was a great flow of Japanese students of Buddhism and of
Chinese traditions and political practices to China.”14 As Ken Moriyasu writes,
Built in 710 and 794 respectively, Nara and Kyoto were direct copies of Chang’an, the
cosmopolitan capital of China’s Tang dynasty (618 to 907). From the seventh to ninth
centuries, Japan dispatched 20 missions to Tang China by sea, to learn from its
civilization and to bring back Buddhist texts. These missions are known as the
Kentoshi. Through them, the Japanese learnt how to build a sprawling capital with the
palace in the north, a main street running south and a grid of avenues stretching east to
west.15
By 668 CE, as Nadia Kanagawa points out in her chapter in this volume
(Chapter 4), the Korean Silla kingdom had allied with the Tang to crush the
rival Korean peninsular states of Koguryŏ and Paekche, and Silla had taken
control of the Korean peninsula. On the Japanese archipelago, Yamato had
gone through a period of rapid centralization and declared itself an imperial
realm. The Tang retreated from the Korean peninsula. This massive evolution
of the East Asian world marked the emergence of centralized polities on the
Korean peninsula and Japanese archipelago that would endure until the mod-
ern era.
Moreover, the Japanese were impressed with the military might and potential
of the Tang. Having witnessed the power of the Tang firsthand in the wars on
the Korean peninsula, the Japanese erected defenses along the coast of Kyushu,
seeking to thwart anticipated mainland invasions at Hakata Bay. Hakata would
later serve as a staging ground for Japanese assaults on the Asian mainland. At
the same time, the Japanese fashioned their own means of dealing with foreign
traders and emissaries that was informed by the Chinese tributary order but by
no means a mere copy of it.16 As Karen Wigan concludes about the countries
that comprised the inner core of the system:
Compared to most countries in the late twentieth century . . . China, Korea, and Japan are
among the most venerable nations in the world; although their boundaries have shifted
over time, and the style of their imagining has been continually debated, the notion of
nationhood has resonated long and deeply with the majority of each country’s
inhabitants . . . this sense of region is quite different from what might be encountered
13 14 15 16
Barnes 2001, 1. Wills forthcoming, 4. Moriyasu 2016. Batten 2006.
elsewhere in Eurasia or Africa, where national space is often complicated . . . by cross-

cutting affiliations from a colonial or pre-colonial past.17
The Tang increasingly fell into disarray and ultimately collapsed from within
in 907, leading to three more centuries of divided control. Significantly, the fall
of the Tang did not lead to a system-wide scramble for power. Various units
within China fought for dominance, but neither Korea nor Japan nor Vietnam
sought to take advantage of Chinese disunity and seize hegemonic status.
Indeed, as will be discussed in the next section, internal challenges were
often more consequential than external threat for many of these countries
over long stretches of time. Writing about the tenth century, Naomi Standen
points out that, “during those two hundred years [after the Tang dynasty
collapsed] nobody knew that a Chinese empire would ever again be the
dominant power in East Asia . . . the radically different world of the late Tang
and Five Dynasties (907–960) . . . saw multiple power centers within the same
territory interacting on an entirely different basis.”18
The Song dynasty (960–1279) unified China again, and engaged in endemic
fighting against the Northern Liao (907–1125) and Jin (1115–1234) empires.
But the Song itself lost much of the traditional Chinese homeland; this phase of
weakness is often divided into the Northern Song (960–1127) and Southern
Song (1127–1279) eras. This disunity, ultimately resolved by the Mongol Yuan
conquest, had severe implications for political rule within the Chinese plain.
However, it also illustrated the flexibility of the Chinese tributary order and its
general acceptance as even China’s equals or superiors adopted aspects of the
tributary order to legitimize themselves and establish status hierarchies in
foreign relations.
Vietnam emerged as a viable country during this time. There is, unfortu-
nately, an anachronistic twentieth-century nationalist myth of Vietnamese
history that tends to be taken at face value by Western scholars and indeed
most Vietnamese themselves: that historically, Vietnam feared China and saw
China as its main external threat. So deeply has this modern Vietnamese meme
of chronic war with China taken root that it is often repeated without reflection
by observers and scholars of East Asian security and used uncritically to argue
that Vietnam fears China in the twenty-first century. Yet the actual historical
record suggests that the rulers of the Dai Viet period were much more con-
cerned with internal stability than they were with invasion from China.19 Liam
Kelley is worth quoting at length:
In 968 a man by the name of Dinh Bo Linh became the ruler of the area of the Red River
delta. He did this not by fighting off the Chinese and declaring “independence.” Instead,
he allied himself with a Cantonese warlord and defeated other warlords in the region,
17 18 19
Wigen 1999, 1187. Standen 2007, 1. D. C. Kang, Nguyen, Shaw, and Fu 2019.
some of whom were undoubtedly Han Chinese, but others who were likely Vietnamese
or Tai-speaking peoples. Two years later, the Song Dynasty dispatched an envoy who
granted Dinh Bo Linh the position of commandery prince (quan vuong/junwang),
continuing a long-running practice of granting titles to powerful individuals in the
region. What would be different this time, however, is that eventually this title would
be elevated to the level of “king” (quoc vuong/guowang), and this kingdom would
maintain its position as a tributary state for centuries to come.20
Vietnamese centralization of authority also was not a result of war; indeed,

Vietnam’s emergence as a state had more to do with domestic ideas about how
best to govern. Victor Lieberman’s long survey of Southeast Asia concludes
that, “Interaction with China was probably more important in shaping
Vietnamese self-identity than warfare with Chams, Khmers, or Thais.”21
James Anderson observes about Vietnam that: “By 1086 a clear border had
been mapped out between the two states, the first such court-negotiated border
in China’s history . . . The existence of a formal border between the two polities
was successfully challenged only once in the next eight hundred years.”22
Phase III: An East Asian World

After a century of skirmishing, the Mongols conquered the Song in 1279 and
declared their own dynasty, the Yuan (1279–1368). It was the first unified
Chinese dynasty not established by the majority Han people of China. The
Mongol Yuan used many of the traditional practices of the Chinese state, such
as Confucianism and the tribute system, in their domestic and foreign affairs.
But importantly, the Yuan also used multiple sources of ideational power to
legitimate their rule, including Tibetan Buddhism. It was the Yuan that con-
quered Tibet for the first time. Khubilai Khan led the Mongols to conquer the
Southern Song (1127–1279), thereby unifying China under his Yuan empire.
The Yuan dynasty’s domain encompassed China Proper, Mongolia, Tibet, and
other entities in East and Central Asia. In this sense it presaged the actions of
the Qing along these lines.23 With minor interruptions, China remained unified
until the twentieth century, across three dynasties: the Yuan, the Ming, and the
Qing.
With the Yuan unification and the emergence of states in Korea, Japan,
Vietnam, the Ryukyu Islands, and elsewhere, the thirteenth century saw the
full flowering of the East Asian world. In addition to their internal develop-
ment, these territorial states also conducted formal, legal international relations
20
L. C. Kelley 2010, 8.
21
V. Lieberman 1993, 539. Yet ironically, it was Vietnam’s experience fighting with the Ming and
the technologies gained thereby that facilitated the annexation of the kingdom of Champa in
1471.
22
J. A. Anderson 2013, 271. 23 Crossley 2006.
with each other, and saw international recognition as a legitimate nation as an

important component of their existence. “Tributary relations” refers to the
institutions and norms that regulated diplomatic, political, cultural, and eco-
nomic relations between two units. As Feng Zhang observes, tributary diplo-
macy constitutes “the tribute system’s fundamental institution, embodying its
primary norms, rules, and principles.”24 As the primary official mode through
which the relationship between two political units was explicit defined, these
relations emphasized the norm of hierarchy – inequality – rather than equality.
Tributary diplomacy was formalized in two key institutions. The first was
“investiture,” diplomatic recognition, and the granting of titles by the superior
state. Investiture was acceptance of subordinate tributary status and was
a diplomatic protocol by which one unit recognized the legitimate sovereignty
of another unit, and the status of the leader in that tributary unit as the legitimate
ruler.25 Not only did investiture explicitly confirm an unequal relationship
between the giving and receiving units, Ji-Young Lee points out that “inves-
titure practice signified imperial China’s respect for the political autonomy of
the receiving country.”26
Although Chinese power waxed and waned over the centuries, it remained
a hegemonic system. As Womack writes, “the Mongols and the Manchus
conquered China, but Mongolia and Manchuria did not become the new centers
of Asia, nor did they obliterate the old one.”27 The Yuan dynasty rapidly fell
into disarray, collapsing after little over than a century of formal rule. The Yuan
were replaced by insurgents who took power quickly and named themselves the
Ming dynasty (1368–1644). For nearly 600 years from the Mongol Yuan’s
conquest of China in 1279 to 1840 in the late Qing era, China under three
imperial dynasties remained the indisputable hegemon of the East Asian inter-
national hierarchy. Its position was rarely challenged throughout that era,
perhaps the most notable exception being Japanese general Toyotomi
Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea in 1592. The invasion was successfully thwarted
by a Sino-Korean alliance that emerged out of China’s obligations to Korea as
part of the tributary system of foreign relations.
In his chapter in this volume (Chapter 7), Kenneth Swope examines the
Great East Asian War of 1592–1598, which was the largest conflict on the globe
in the sixteenth century, yet is still barely known outside of East Asia. This war
is a key case for examining the dynamics of East Asian international relations.
Japanese general Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598) sought to overturn the
long-standing Ming order and create a new international system that could
have fundamentally altered the course of Asian, if not world, history had it
succeeded. In the end, the defeat of Hideyoshi’s ambitions preserved the East
Asian world order and China’s hegemonic position therein for another 250
24 25 26 27
F. Zhang 2015, 170. Yu 2004. J.-Y. Lee 2016a, 50. Womack 2010, 154.
years, yet another testament to the viability and malleability of the hierarchical
China-centered international order in East Asia.
Indeed, in part due to the flexibility of this system and the fact that most
participants acknowledged its utility, even such dramatic “events” such as the
fall of the Ming and the rise of the Qing were not fundamentally system-
changing events. Pamela Crossley writes in her chapter (Chapter 8) that the
Ming–Qing transition is often viewed as a particularly violent example of
a dynastic succession within a continuing empire. In fact, it appears to be
much closer to the second category – a multidimensional conflict that con-
cluded with a reunification of China. Crossley’s chapter disassembles the
“event” of the Qing invasion of China and reassembles the chronology and
geography. She suggests that Ming dismemberment was actually a slow pro-
cess with both interior and border dimensions. The Qing conquest of Beijing
was only one component, and the Qing “conquest” was an equally slow process
that was first an “event” of reuniting the former Ming territories, and afterward
a distinct event of adding tangential territories to compose the “Qing empire” as
we tend to know it historically.
Although the steppe peoples generally did not embrace Chinese notions of
civilization, the basic principles of tribute relations ordered relations among the
peoples of the Central Asian steppe. Mei-Po Kwan observes that by the seventh
century CE, the main ordering principles of China–Inner Asian diplomatic
relations had been formed, which were “formally hierarchic, legitimized by
heaven and made manifest by victories on the battlefield, and incorporate
ceremonies, titles, and diplomatic rituals that were common to both the
Chinese and the nomads.”28 Jonathan Skaff writes that Eurasia was character-
ized by “diplomatic rituals . . . elaborate displays of pageantry, status ranking,
obeisance, gift exchanges, and feasting.”29 Kwan notes that by the Song
dynasty, Song–Liao relations were formalized and highly specific, with pre-
negotiated travel routes, standards rules and etiquette, and even rules for dress
and seating arrangements.30 David Wright notes that the exchange of ambas-
sadors and gifts relations embodied “very elaborate and formalized practices of
diplomacy.”31 Feng Zhang points out that the Oirats and other Mongol tribes
actively used tribute missions in their dealings with China, as well as accepting
investiture at various levels.32 For example, between 1411 and 1424 alone,
Arughtai sent twenty-seven tribute missions to the Ming, and “Ming titles or
ranks were themselves a matter of prestige, as well of material interest.” Even
Altan Khan, who created the position of Dalai Lama, was invested as a Ming
vassal. In fact, some of the non-Han warlords specifically sided with the Ming
28
Kwan 2016, 374. 29 Skaff 2012, 8–9. 30
Kwan 2016, 378. 31
D. Wright 2005, 108.
32
F. Zhang 2015, 147.
because they distrusted the Manchus and were not sure what kind of deal they
would negotiate under the Qing.33
From this perspective, the difference between Korea, Vietnam, the Ryukyu
Islands, and Japan’s relations with China in the late imperial period and China’s
relationship with the Manchus, Tibetans, Burmese, Uyghur, Mongolians, and
the chiefdoms of Sichuan and Yunnan is clearer. The Manchus adopted Chinese
state institutions before they invaded China, but not its Neo-Confucian ideol-
ogy. The others never bought into Neo-Confucianism at all. Korea, Vietnam,
and the Ryukyu Islands, in contrast, shared with China an elite who commu-
nicated in the same language, shared a similar sense of right and wrong, were
given an education that emphasized their country’s ritual role in a global ritual
hierarchy, and were able to use this training to maintain their personal access to
power. A strong case can be made that there was a distinct Neo-Confucian order
in later imperial times, and that the states in this order behaved differently than
those in other parts of the world – and differently than these same states
behaved before Neo-Confucianism was rolled out or after it had disappeared.
East Asia is the story of 2,000 years of widening and the slow evolution of
political systems, units, and relations. Despite superficial institutional and
organizational similarities, the Chinese Ming was centuries more sophisticated
than the Tang of 1,000 years earlier.34 These were also clearly territorial
polities: Korea and Japan negotiated formal control over the island of
Tsushima by the fourteenth century, with clear rules, boundaries, and laws
governing treatment of citizens of both countries. Both Korea and Vietnam
demarcated a clear border with China by the eleventh century, and those
borders have remained in essentially the same place up to the present day.35 Ji-
Young Lee observes in her chapter (Chapter 5) that Korea and China spoke
from a similar Confucian vocabulary, and that although there were differences
between the two sides, they were often largely resolved through diplomacy and
negotiation, not imposition by power. Likewise, smaller states such the Ryukyu
kingdom deployed this vocabulary for their own purposes, and Korea evolved
sophisticated ways of “centering the King of Chosŏn in their diplomacy with
the Jurchen tribes, Japan and others.”36
War and Peace in East Asian History

Patterns of warfare were systematically different between Europe and East
Asia.37 As opposed to the recurrent bellicosity of similarly sized multipolar
33
On this phenomenon, see Swope 2018.
34
For example, the Ming claimed to have modeled their weisuo military system after the fubing
system of the Tang. See Swope 2001, 42.
35
Ledyard 1994. 36 K. Robinson 2000; Toby 1984.
37
D. C. Kang 2010; D. C. Kang, Shaw, and Fu 2016.
European states, East Asia was a hegemonic system. Threats came not from the
strongest or biggest state (China), but from the smallest and weakest actors
(peoples from the Central Asian steppe). Mark Dincecco and Yuhua Wang are
representative of the scholarly consensus that, “in centralized China . . . the
most significant recurrent foreign attack threat came from Steppe nomads . . .
external attack threats were unidirectional, reducing the emperor’s
vulnerability.”38 Rosenthal and Wong concur: “periodically, the people living
beyond the Great Wall mobilized armies that could threaten major disruptions.
These types of threats typically brought dynasties to their knees, but they
occurred very infrequently and were separated by long periods of stable
rule . . . rates of conflict were radically different in China and Europe.”39
Indeed, compared to most European polities, China, Korea, Japan, and
Vietnam were remarkably stable internally and externally.
If one is interested in war, it is natural to look where there is fighting. But that
leads to an overweighting of war and a biased assessment for patterns of both
conflict and stability. Just as important as explaining why there was war in some
areas is to explain why there was peace in other areas. Although it is widely
acknowledged that there was endemic skirmishing between China and the
peoples of the Central Asian steppes, it is rarely asked why threats were
unidirectional and arose mainly from nomads, rather than arising from power-
ful states such as Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.40
Indeed, notable in this overview is the startling longevity of the main
participants in the East Asian world. In stark contrast to the European experi-
ence, there were literally centuries when most of these countries did not face
existential threats from the external powers. Domestic politics often drove
system dynamics. Dynastic changes in the hegemon drove systemic change
and appear as central factors in a wide variety of events, not only in China but
on the peripheral countries as well. Table 2.1 provides an overview of the
causes of the rise and fall of these dynasties. What is striking is that only three
out of eighteen dynastic transitions between 500 and 1900 CE came as a result
of war. The three external transitions were the Tang/Silla alliance that crushed
Koguryŏ in 668, the Mongol conquest of both the Northern and Southern Song
dynasties in 1274–1279, and the Ming intervention in Vietnam in 1407 on
behalf of one Vietnamese dynasty against another.
Although most dynastic changes were internal and not external, we should
not characterize these states as inherently unstable. Rather, long stretches of
stable rule were marked only occasionally by disruption. Between 1368 and
1841 there were forty-three years in which China experienced a pirate raid and
38
Dincecco and Wang 2018, 342. 39 Rosenthal and Wong 2011, 162–168.
40
For efforts to grapple with this question, see Barfield 1989; Jagchid and Symons 1989; and
Johnston 1995.
Table 2.1 Dynastic changes and their causes in East Asia, 500–1900 CE
Country Dynasty Dates Cause of fall Internal or external

Korea Koguryŏ 37 BCE– Tang/Silla alliance and decade-long war External
668 CE
Silla 57 BCE– Aristocratic families, civil war, king was figurehead for last century. Koryŏ Internal
907 CE eventually conquered
Koryŏ 907–1392 Yi Sŏng-gye rebelled Internal
Chosŏn 1392–1910 Japanese imperialism External (twentieth
century)
Japan Nara 710–794 Rebellion Internal
Heian 794–1185 Minamoto no Yoritomo seized power Internal
Kamakura 1185–1333 Nitta Yoshisada conquered them Internal
shogunate
Ashikaga 1336–1573 Sengoku warring states era, Hideyoshi (2nd great unifier), Tokugawa (3rd great Internal
shogunate unifier)
Tokugawa 1600–1868 Meiji restoration Internal
shogunate
Vietnam Lý 1009–1225 Trần Thủ Độ forced Lý Chiêu Hoàng to give the throne to Trần Cảnh Internal
Trần 1225–1400 Hồ Quý Ly rebellion Internal
Hồ 1400–1406 Ming China intervened on behalf of Trần dynasty External
Later Lê 1428–1788 Mạc rebellion Internal
Mạc, Lê, etc. 1527–1788 Many rival civil wars Internal
Nguyễn 1802–1945 French imperialism External (Western)
China Tang 618–907 Zhu Wen rebellion Internal
Song 960–1279 Mongol invasions External
Yuan 1279–1368 Zhu Yuanzhang rebellion Internal
Ming 1368–1644 Li Zicheng rebellion Internal
Qing 1644–1912 Empress Dowager Longyu, Yuan Shikai, and Sun Yat-sen Internal
Source: D. C. Kang and Ma 2019.

166 years in which it experienced a border skirmish along the Central Asian
steppe with peoples along its long northern and western frontiers; but only
twenty-eight years in which China was at war as typically defined by political
scientists.41 Rosenthal and Wong note that “Peaceful economies can provide
more public goods than war-torn ones . . . in China a combination of low taxes
and provision of public goods defined good governance . . . the long periods of
quiet in the Chinese empire enabled rulers and subjects to rely heavily on such
strategies.”42
Similarly, Korea experienced only three dynasties during 1,300 years of exis-
tence. Remarkably long periods of peaceful rule were occasionally interrupted by
instability. For example, Sun Joo Kim writes about the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–
1910) that: “When more than seventy large- and small-scale popular uprisings
broke out one after the other across the Korean peninsula in 1862, the central court
of Chosŏn (1392–1910) was caught in great alarm and fear because no such
widespread revolts had taken place in the more than 450 years since the dynasty
had been founded.”43 In short, no matter what measure is used, historical Korea
and China faced far more benign environments than did their European peers.
Another clear pattern marks interactions with the hegemon. Korea and
Vietnam, existing in the shadow of China, experienced more conflict with
other peripheral actors than they did with China. Indeed, the stabilization of
the Korean border with Ming China in the fourteenth century, regularization of
relations with the Jurchen tribes to its north, and the waning of piracy along its
coasts, led to a decline in military preparedness. Kenneth Lee writes that,
“After two hundred years of peace, Korean forces were untrained in warfare
and were scattered all over the country in small local garrison troops. Koreans
were totally unprepared on land.”44 Mark Peterson observes that, “Korean
history is remarkably stable and peaceful,”45 while Kirk Larsen notes that
there were “critical moments in which the Chinese dynasty possessed both
the capability and the momentum necessary to complete aggressive expansio-
nistic designs [against Chosŏn] but decided not to do so.”46 In fact the main
reason China seems not to have acted is because it deemed that such invasions
of Korea were not in its long-term strategic interest. As Kenneth Swope notes in
the following sections, the Ming officials referred to Korea as “the lips that
protect China’s teeth.” Chinese officials recognized the value of having a loyal
ally between them and the tribes of the northeast and the Japanese, and they
proved willing to join Korea in meeting these threats when their mutual
interests were at stake. Security and friendship seemingly counted for more
than adding additional territory to an already vast empire.
41
D. C. Kang, Shaw, and Fu 2016, 773. 42 Rosenthal and Wong 2011, 189–190.
43
Sun Joo Kim 2007, 993. 44 K. Lee 1997, 99. 45 M. Peterson 2018.
46
Larsen 2012, 9.
Vietnamese rulers also displayed very little military attention to their rela-
tions with China, which were conducted extensively through the institutions
and principles of the tributary system. Rather, Vietnamese leaders were clearly
more concerned with quelling chronic domestic instability and managing
relations with Champa and other kingdoms to their south and west. New
research on Vietnam also reveals similar patterns. Using primary sources
from premodern Vietnam, Kang, Nguyen, Fu, and Shaw find that over a four-
century period Vietnam experienced border skirmishes in a total of fifteen
years. Interstate war occurred in thirty-nine years, or 9.2 percent of total
years. The Vietnamese court was far more often involved in dealing with
internal revolts (fifty-six years) or regime contestation (sixty-four years).47
As would be expected by a relationship organized by hierarchy, the
Vietnamese court even occasionally sought the Chinese court’s cooperation
in putting down rebellions. Liam Kelley observes that “Vietnamese envoys
passionately believed that they participated in what we would now call the
Sinitic or East Asian cultural world, and that they accepted their kingdom’s
vassal status in that world.”48
The patterns identified in this chapter appear to directly challenge a balance
of power approach. As noted previously, despite being far smaller, Japan
invaded Korea in 1592, intending to conquer China. Not only does this war
not follow expected realist theories about how conflict follows the distribution
of capabilities, it was also the only war between China and Japan in over six
centuries. The fascinating question is why these states chose not to fight for so
long, despite having the logistical and organizational capacity to wage war
across water and on a massive scale. the Korean state had the capacity to
mobilize extraordinary military forces when necessary. During the Imjin War
(1592–1598) Korea mobilized up to 84,500 troops along with 22,200 guerrilla
soldiers.49 The Japanese had invaded with a force of 281,840 troops, the initial
invading contingent consisting of 158,700 men.50 By way of contrast, the
Spanish Armada of 1588 consisted of 8,000 sailors and 18,000 soldiers. The
premodern East Asian states had the logistical and organizational capacity to
mobilize and deploy at great distances and across water military power that was
ten times greater than was conceivable in contemporaneous Europe.
Realist approaches that emphasize the causal role of relative capabilities
have difficulty explaining these patterns. Realism would predict that the far
more powerful state (China) would attack the weaker state (Japan), not the
other way around. Realism would further predict that the two weaker states,
Korea and Japan, would ally together against China – yet it was Korea that
sought China’s help to counter the Japanese threat, not the other way around.
47 48 49
D. C. Kang, Nguyen, Shaw, and Fu 2019. L. C. Kelley 2005, 2. Palais 1996, 82.
50
Palais 1996, 78.
Indeed, although the social scientific research of war in East Asian history is
only beginning, there is extensive evidence that states did not balance power
and that smaller states did not ally together to balance a larger threat. For
example, in the eleventh century, the Song never allied with the Xi Xia to
balance the Liao. More perplexing from a realist perspective, in the early
thirteenth century, the Song were so focused on destroying the Jin that they
allied with and ignored the clear and rising Mongol threat for long stretches of
time.51 As Charles Peterson pointed out, Song grand strategy was inextricably
intertwined with its worldview:
It has in hindsight struck observers since the thirteenth century that, with the Mongols
rising in the rear of Chin, it was not a good idea to assist in the destruction of the regime.
But was there ever a genuine choice? The Sung were prisoners of a powerful revanchist
heritage which in turn rested on fundamental conceptions of their place in the world and
in the cosmos. The former demanded unremitting efforts to recover the ancient Chinese
heartland, the latter, uncontested Chinese supremacy over the nations of the world,
morally and politically.52
Nadia Kanagawa’s chapter in this volume on the fall of Koguryŏ in 668 CE
(Chapter 4) shows similar patterns. It was the competing Korean states that
pulled the powerful Chinese Tang empire into the Korean peninsula, as each
kingdom sought to use Tang power for its own ends. These wars did not follow
the expected pattern of an ascendant Tang dynasty becoming more powerful
and expanding outward. Rather the opposite dynamics were at play – the Tang
was pulled in by smaller Korean kingdoms. That such dynamics worked so
clearly against expected realist and materialist theories makes examining these
cases even more important for testing and assessing whether and how our
theories of international relations may be used across time and space.
A hegemonic system with different ordering principles functions differently
than a multipolar system. Indeed, there is evidence that it was not differences in
capabilities, but rather ideational and cultural factors, that drove much of the
conflict during much of premodern East Asia. As noted previously, David
C. Kang identified two broad patterns of violence during the fourteenth to
nineteenth centuries: “China’s relations with the Central Asian peoples on its
northern and western frontiers were characterized by war and instability,
whereas relations with the Sinicized states on its eastern and southern borders
were characterized by peace and stability. Unipolarity – Chinese military and
economic predominance – cannot account for both of these simultaneous
outcomes.”53 Generated by a common Confucian worldview, political units
within the core shared a sense of legitimacy, and the institutions of the tributary
order played a stabilizing role in their relations. It is not surprising that those
units that rejected Confucianism and Sinic notions of cultural achievement
51 52 53
Yuan-kang Wang 2010, 60. C. Peterson 1983, 230. D. C. Kang 2010, 10.
engaged in conflict with those who did. Yet even these units sometimes
accepted titles of authority from China and/or utilized the Confucian-derived
hierarchy for their own ends, as noted in the previous section. Furthermore,
periods of Chinese unity saw far more stability; periods of Chinese disunity
saw greater violence throughout the region.
Phase IV: Imperialism and the Arrival of the West

The most recent period of Chinese disunity began in the late nineteenth century.
The Qing dynasty began to crumble from within, wracked by massive uprisings
such as the Taiping rebellion (1850–1864), which became one of the bloodiest
wars in history, with an estimated twenty million deaths. Although the Qing
survived, it was severely weakened both domestically and internationally. In
this power vacuum Western imperial powers gained increasingly expansive
rights and privileges within China, and the Qing also increasingly lost its
position as East Asian hegemon. The resultant period of Chinese weakness,
Western imperialism, and the rise of imperial Japan led to a century of
instability and warfare, and a reordering of relations throughout the region.
Europeans and Americans had begun to arrive in significant numbers in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as missionaries and traders that arose
during the European Renaissance. Ferdinand Magellan came to Cebu in the
Philippines in 1521, yet was killed just two weeks later. In 1557 the Portuguese
gained a permanent colony on Macau, which they held until 1999 as a trading
entrepôt. Slowly European states began to conquer and colonize various
political spaces in East Asia, but usually operating at the far edges of the core
system that we have described in the previous section. Dutch East India
Company colonies or outposts were established in Atjeh (Aceh), 1667;
Macassar, 1669; and Bantam, 1682. The company established its headquarters
at Batavia (today Jakarta) on the island of Java, and the Dutch East India
Company trade post in Japan on Deshima (1641–1857). Note that it was not
until the Treaty of Saigon in 1862, however, that the Vietnamese emperor ceded
France three provinces of southern Vietnam to form the French colony of
Cochinchina.
As the Europeans began to compete with the Chinese trade networks in
Southeast Asia, they had a much more difficult time. Gang Zhao notes that,
“Wherever Dutch traders landed, Chinese businessmen soon appeared to
compete with them. Because the Chinese traders had a longer history of trade
with the local people, were more aware of their needs, and had a wider
commercial network, they generally won.”54 For example, even in Batavia
(Jakarta), a Dutch colony, the annual average number of Chinese ships arriving
54
Zhao 2006, 53.
for trade far exceeded the number of Portuguese ships arriving. Richard von Glahn
addresses economic relations directly in Chapter 3. Here we simply note that the
initial impact of Western traders was less influential than traditionally believed.
European penetration was rarely politically significant until the nineteenth
century. Tonio Andrade’s chapter on the first European–Asian war (Chapter 9),
where the Formosans drove out the Dutch from Taiwan, is an important story.
These cases show when that imperial system really began to crawl into the
center of the system and upset or rearrange established patterns of authority and
trade. In 1624, the Dutch East India Company established a colony on the
island of Taiwan, intended to serve as a port from which to engage in the rich
China trade. Yet in 1662, the Taiwan colony was captured by a family of former
Chinese pirates, led by the famous general Zheng Chenggong. Andrade shows
that the Dutch did have a level of military superiority vis-à-vis their Chinese
adversary, but East Asian actors retained considerable powers well into the
nineteenth century compared to their European counterparts.
The West truly began to affect East Asia when conquest and colonization
became as important as trading. The first actual colony was Spain’s claim of the
Philippines, which lasted from 1542 to 1898, or 356 years. As noted previously,
the Portuguese won a concession for the port of Macao in 1557, only relin-
quishing the city back to China in 1999 (442 years). The vast majority of
colonization occurred in the nineteenth century, however. Britain claimed
Singapore and Malaya (Malaysia) in 1826; the Netherlands claimed
Indonesia in 1830; Britain won the concession at Hong Kong in 1842 and
formally colonized India in 1858. The French colonized Vietnam and
Indochina in 1858; while Japan claimed the Ryukyu Islands in 1879
and Korea in 1910. Germany, Great Britain, Russia, and France won “unequal
access” to China through treaties forced on the reeling Qing empire during the
nineteenth century. The only country to formally avoid any colonization in
Southeast Asia was Thailand, although the British exerted significant influence
on Siam through the Burney Treaty in 1826 and the Bowring Treaty in 1855.
The United States, for its part, began a westward expansion that resulted in
a series of American possessions: the United States claimed Hawaii in 1893,
Samoa in 1900, and in 1898 began a six-year war to conquer the Philippines
that also resulted in the United States taking possession of Guam. Andrew
Yeo’s chapter (Chapter 12) deals directly with the Philippine declaration of
independence in 1898; the US campaign was an unpopular jungle war in
Southeast Asia that resulted in thousands of US casualties and an estimated
200,000 Philippine deaths.
While this wave of colonization was occurring, a significant marker of the
changing international system and the change in the state of the various East
Asian countries were the Opium Wars of 1839–1860. These wars – discussed in
Richard Horowitz’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 10) – were consequential
for destroying the old system of international relations, based on the tribute
system; and the integration – however partially – of East Asian states into the
Western, Westphalian system of international relations. The transition was
consequential and wrenching for all East Asian societies. The system widened
and changed drastically: most significantly, the colonizing Western powers
presented new and dangerous challenges for some East Asian countries. In
addition, Westphalian principles and institutions obliterated the tributary order
in only a few decades.
The most notable, perhaps, was the Japanese imperial effort. With the open-
ing of Japan by US commodore Matthew Perry in 1858, discussed in the
chapter by Alexis Dudden (Chapter 11), the Japanese embarked on
a revolution of their own that overthrew the long-standing Tokugawa regime
and embarked on a remarkable learning process that changed society, business,
and its government. The result was that within five decades, the Japanese
became the first non-Western industrialized power, and also became the first
non-Western country to defeat a Western power in war in the Russo-Japanese
War of 1904. Japan began a series of colonization that only ended in 1945 after
a long and devastating series of wars with China and the United States in
particular.
Understanding how China and the other East Asian countries transitioned
and adapted from the tribute system to the Westphalian system, what ele-
ments they brought with them, and what still remains today, can help
scholars explain both contemporary East Asian regional dynamics and also
anticipate future change of the international order more broadly. East Asian
countries were forced to deal with Western powers as a fact of international
life. The order changed, as well: hierarchy and tributary relations were of
little use in dealing with these new powers, which brought with them notions
of sovereign equality and diplomacy conducted in European ways and using
European languages. These concepts were not at all self-evident to East
Asians.
How and to what extent enduring conceptions of international order from
both East Asia and Westphalia interact will be an important area of future
research. The chapters in this book highlight the need to make regional
dynamics a central research focus, and not to assume that the Western ideas
and principles will replicate themselves seamlessly around the globe. As
concerns about the future of the contemporary Western liberal order increase,
and as it becomes clear that the periphery has been less enthusiastic about that
order than the democratic capitalist core, realizing that East Asia experienced
a system and order change less than two centuries ago can provide a powerful
lens with which to study how, why, and in what ways international orders
change and evolve, and how different countries deal with these changes
differently.
Conclusion
East Asia was a vast, interconnected region for centuries before the arrival of
the West. Although China often fell into disarray, the reality of Chinese power –
both material and cultural – made this a hegemonic system. The centrality of
Chinese power and ideas was never far away, even for those peoples who
rejected them both. But the system was much more than China, as well: the
peoples of the Central Asian steppe, from Tibet over to Mongolia and beyond,
the peoples of Southeast Asia – from Burma to Siam and Vietnam – all had
regular interactions with each other.
A number of observations arise from this far too brief overview of the region.
First, the historical order was a hegemonic/hierarchical one, with distinctive
patterns of war and peace as a result. Second, ideas and normative factors
appear to be just as consequential as were the distribution of capabilities and the
relative power of the units. Finally, by the end of the nineteenth century, this
was an international order in flux in which empire was about to take a very
different turn. The rise of Japan as the most adroit response to the arrival of the
West, and the difficulties China faced in changing, highlights the unsettled
nature of the region in the late nineteenth century. It is only a century later that
the region appears to be reestablishing stability and prosperity after a century of
chaos and change.
3 The Political Economy of the East Asian
Maritime World in the Sixteenth Century
Richard von Glahn
Narratives of the “Age of Exploration” inaugurated by Columbus’s trans-

Atlantic voyage in 1492 continue to privilege the place of European traders,
missionaries, and conquerors as the paramount agents of globalization.
Western world history scholarship has begun to acknowledge the vitality of
Asian maritime commerce – particularly what Geoff Wade has dubbed Asia’s
“Early Age of Commerce” – before the arrival of the Europeans.1 Yet when it
comes to the post-Columbus period – during the initial formation of a global
economy – Asians vanish from the center stage.2 Western perspectives too
often abide in the long-standing trope that the seas encircling East Asian states
and civilizations rendered them inert and isolated from outside influences until
the forced “opening” of China, Japan, and Korea by Western gunships in the
mid-nineteenth century. But maritime commerce had thrived in East Asia long
before the first wave of globalization. Upon venturing into Asian seas at the
turn of the sixteenth century, Portuguese mariners were amazed to find flour-
ishing trade networks spanning the oceans from India to China. The Portuguese
(followed by the Spanish and the Dutch) would insinuate themselves into
a dynamic of maritime trade and cross-cultural intercourse that had existed
for centuries.3
Presumptions about European maritime and commercial supremacy across
the globe in the wake of Columbus’s voyages die hard. Especially pernicious is
the conviction that the Chinese empire remained eternally indifferent, if not
hostile, to foreign trade, based on the endlessly repeated quotation of the
Qianlong emperor’s (r. 1735–1796) famous letter to the British monarch
George III, in which the Chinese sovereign declared that “we possess all things.
1
Wade 2009.
2
A recent study of the maritime history of the world that attempts to give due attention to maritime
Asia nonetheless dates the end of its “Golden Age” to the conclusion of Zheng He’s voyages in
1433, and its chapter on “The Birth of Global Trade” exclusively features European agents. See
L. Paine 2013.
3
For a balanced digest of this story, see Gipouloux 2011.
44
East Asia’s Maritime World 45
I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your
country’s manufactures.”4 Scholarship on international relations in premodern
East Asia – in Asia as well as the West – remains in thrall to the notion of
a “Chinese world order” premised on the supremacy of the Chinese empire and
the orchestration of diplomatic relations within a rigidly ritualized tributary
system. It is often assumed that the tributary system impeded foreign com-
merce by subjecting it to the imperative of ritual fealty to the Chinese emperor.
But it was only the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) that fused together tributary
relations and trading privileges. Private maritime trade flourished during both
before the Ming and, after 1683, under the Manchu-ruled Qing dynasty (1644–
1911) as well. The prohibition against private maritime trade enacted by the
founding emperor of the Ming, Hongwu, in 1374 was thus an anomaly.
Moreover, the Ming state’s efforts to interdict maritime commerce ultimately
failed when, in the sixteenth century, the economic and political forces
unleashed by the integration of Asian and global trading networks became
irresistible.
A comprehensive history of the political economy of maritime East Asia is
not possible within the scope of this chapter. Instead, I will focus on the
proximate cause of the repeal of the Ming ban on private overseas trade in
1567 – the eruption of “Japanese piracy” along the seacoasts of southeastern
China – to illustrate the interplay of commercial, political, and military forces
that transformed the East Asian international order at a critical moment in its
evolution. Europeans played bit parts in this drama, but the main stages were
occupied by Asian powers (including, in addition to the Ming imperium, the
Korean, Vietnamese, and later Japanese regimes that emulated the Chinese
model of empire); the “port polities” that were a distinguishing feature of this
age of East Asian history; and merchant coalitions, above all the stateless
“Japanese pirates.”
“Japanese pirates” (Wokou [Jap. Wakō] 倭寇), as they were called by Ming
officials, in fact were neither pirates nor Japanese. Instead, they were multi-
national merchant seafarers – mostly Chinese – who in the face of the Ming
prohibition on overseas trade turned to smuggling, and ultimately to raiding.
Many of these smugglers were based in the Japanese islands, or conducted
trade between China and Japan, hence the appellation. Beginning in 1547 the
Ming court made a concerted effort to eradicate contraband trade along the
southeast coast. In response, the smugglers banded together and retaliated with
violent attacks on coastal cities. Armed conflicts between the Ming and the
Wokou reached their peak intensity during the decade between 1552 and 1562.
The Ming forces prevailed, but the Ming court found itself unable to arrest
4
Citations of this letter are legion, and persist to the present. For a recent example, see de Zwart
and van Zanden 2018, 24.
46 Richard von Glahn
clandestine commerce, and in 1567 it revoked Hongwu’s maritime trade ban.

During the final seventy-five years of the Ming dynasty China experienced an
unprecedented boom in overseas trade and became an integral part of the first
truly global trading system.
The transformative effect that global trade had on China’s domestic econ-
omy (and its society and culture as well) has been well-studied in recent years.
But a closer examination of the “Japanese piracy” phenomenon reveals that
the imbrication of trade, diplomacy, and war during the mid-sixteenth century
had far-reaching effects – political as well as economic – across maritime East
Asia. This chapter will explore three features of these interactions: (1) the
reshaping of commercial and political alliances across maritime East Asia
engendered by the emergence of a global trading system based on the
production and exchange of silver bullion; (2) the role of military conflict –
and gunpowder weaponry – in state-making in maritime East Asia; and (3) the
emergence – albeit temporary – of the “port polity” (whose economic base
rested on maritime trade rather than land revenues) as an alternative to the
Chinese model of bureaucratic agrarian empire.
Formation of the East Asian Maritime Trade Network

The main catalyst for the rise of maritime trade in East Asia was the prodigious
economic transformation of China during the Song dynasty (960–1279). The
rise of the rice economy and exploitation of the rich resources of South China
raised agricultural productivity, engendered rapid population growth, and
stimulated the emergence of new technologies and industries. Tea, porcelain,
silk, iron goods, paper, books, and sugar as well as staple foods such as rice,
soybeans, and wheat became the major commodities traded in regional,
national, and even international markets. The evergreen conifer forests of
South China supplied the key raw materials for shipbuilding, one of many
industries that underwent significant technological improvement. The adoption
of deep-keeled ships, stern-post rudders, and the nautical compass enhanced
the capabilities of seafarers to venture overseas. In addition, to an unprece-
dented degree the fiscal base of the Song government relied on indirect taxation
of trade and consumption, and maritime customs became an important source
of state revenues.5
Expansion of overseas trade also was fostered by the formation of transna-
tional merchant networks that linked together the principal maritime emporia
of East and Southeast Asia.6 Arab traders from the Persian Gulf and Tamils
from southern India settled in southern Chinese ports.7 But much of China’s
maritime trade was handled by Chinese seafarers, who commonly joined
5 6 7
von Glahn 2016, 208–278. Wade 2009; Heng 2009. Chaffee 2018.
together in partnerships to pool capital and diffuse the risks of overseas trading
expeditions. Chinese traders entirely dominated maritime trade with Korea and
especially Japan, which by the turn of the thirteenth century became China’s
leading trading partner. Rapid growth in Sino-Japanese trade was driven by
exports of Chinese bronze coin to lubricate the development of a monetary
economy in Japan, which minted no coin of its own. Massive quantities of Song
coin were exported to Japan, and in 1226 the Kamakura shogunate officially
recognized Song coin as its monetary standard.8 Japanese handicrafts – includ-
ing swords, armor, fans, and lacquer – were held in high esteem in China, but in
the twelfth–thirteenth centuries Japan’s main exports to China consisted of gold
and bulk commodities such as sulfur (for gunpowder manufacture), timber, and
mercury. At this same time Ningbo, with ready access to the Southern Song
capital of Hangzhou, emerged as China’s main gateway of international trade.
Hakata (modern Fukuoka) – designated by the Japanese court as the single port
open to foreign traders – became an enclave of Ningbo merchants and shipping
agents, who outnumbered the native Japanese population.
The Mongol conquest of Song in 1279 and the seagoing armadas dis-
patched by Khubilai Khan to invade Japan in 1274 and 1281 disrupted East
Asian maritime trade, but the effects were temporary. The Mongols ardently
promoted commerce, and under their aegis maritime exchange with the
Indian Ocean world and Japan quickly rebounded. Mongol nobles, acting
through commercial agents, became deeply involved in trade; the ortoq
merchant cartel – primarily composed of Central Asian Muslims – at times
enjoyed a monopoly over maritime trade; and powerful merchant families
often gained administrative appointments, including serving as maritime
commissioners. Government officials themselves organized and dispatched
overseas trading vessels. Competition with private merchants intermittently
provoked the government to enact (short-lived) bans on private maritime
trade. But on the whole maritime trade flourished during the period of
Mongol rule over China.9
From the 1330s onward, however, Sino-Japanese trade entered increasingly
turbulent waters. Following the accession of Toghon Temür (r. 1333–1370) as
emperor, the Mongol court under the direction of chief minister Bayan adopted
a harsh attitude toward Japan and – in part, at least, to eradicate the corruption
and graft perpetrated by Ningbo’s maritime commissioners – suspended trad-
ing relations. Traders from Japan refused entry to Ningbo resorted to violent
pillage of other seacoast towns, inciting widespread alarm over nefarious
“Japanese pirates” (Wokou). Trade relations were restored following Bayan’s
fall from power in 1340, but after 1348 China itself was engulfed in civil wars.
As opportunities for trade vanished, seafarers resorted to piracy. In the 1350s
8 9
von Glahn 2014a. Yokkaichi 2008; Heng 2009, 63–71; Enomoto 2007.
Figure 3.1 Maritime East Asia c. 1620
Wokou began to prey on commercial shipping in the Bohai Gulf and the tribute
fleets that delivered grain and other goods from Jiangnan to the Mongol capital
of Dadu (modern Beijing). The precise origins and identity of these “Japanese
pirates” is obscure, but recent scholarship suggests that at this time the term was
applied to transnational groups of seafarers based in southern Korea, northern
Kyushu, and the principal islands – Jeju, Iki, and Tsushima – lying between
them (Figure 3.1).10
10
Enomoto 2007, 106–175; Murai 2013, 123–173.
The Ming Tributary Trade System and the Ryukyu Connection

Upon declaring the founding of his new dynasty, the Ming emperor Hongwu
(r. 1368–1398) undertook drastic measures to eradicate what he regarded as the
corrupting taint of Mongol rule and to restore the values of the agrarian society
enshrined in the Confucian Classics. Hongwu repudiated both the cosmopoli-
tan spirit of the Mongol world-empire and the robust market economy that had
flowered during Song times. Seeking to restore the autarkic village economy
idealized in Confucian doctrines, he created a fiscal system predicated on in-
kind tax payments, conscripted labor service, self-sufficient military farms, and
payments to officials and soldiers in goods rather than money.11 In addition, to
secure border defense and discourage commercial development, the Ming court
issued decrees prohibiting its subjects from venturing abroad, culminating in
a comprehensive ban on maritime trade in 1374.
From the outset Hongwu also was determined to reestablish China’s supre-
macy among its neighbors by creating a Sinocentric world order in place of the
Mongol world-empire. He instituted a highly formalized system of tributary
diplomacy that exalted the ritual hegemony of the Chinese emperor while
compelling deference and a nominal form of vassalage from foreign rulers.
Foreign embassies arriving in China were permitted to engage in three types of
exchange: (1) submission of tribute, such as exotic goods from their home
countries, which were lavishly rewarded with the bestowal of imperial gifts; (2)
official trade, in which the Ming officials reserved the right to purchase (at
prices they determined) goods brought by foreign merchants who accompanied
the embassies; and (3) private trade, whereby the remaining commercial stock
could be sold to Chinese merchants through the intermediation of brokers
assigned by the government. Thus the hand of the Ming government weighed
heavily on all aspects of tributary trade, and effectively throttled the flourishing
overseas commerce, especially between China and Japan.12
Among foreign rulers seeking access to Chinese goods none were more avid
than the Ashikaga shoguns in Japan, who had supplanted the Kamakura
shogunate in the 1330s. As mentioned previously, in the absence of domestic
coinage Japan’s rulers and seigniorial class depended on a steady infusion of
Chinese coin to maintain commercial exchange and revenue extraction. But the
Ming prohibition of private trade, followed by the suspension of Ming coinage
in the 1430s, sharply diminished the export of coin to Japan. Perturbed by ever
more importunate Japanese appeals to expand the scale of tribute trade, the
Ming court on the contrary repeatedly reduced the scale and frequency of
Japanese tribute missions. However, the Japanese were able to avail themselves
11
von Glahn 2016, 285–289.
12
The most thorough study of the Ming maritime ban and its relationship to the tributary system is
Danjō 2013.
of an alternative means of access to the Chinese market via the Ryukyu king-
dom, which ruled the Okinawan archipelago.
At the time of the Ming founding Okinawa had been divided into three
separate chiefdoms, each of which obtained Ming recognition as a tributary
state. In 1429, Shō Hashi vanquished his rivals and united the Okinawan
archipelago under his Ryukyu kingdom. The Shō kings developed close ties
to the Ming court. Altogether Ryukyu sent 171 tribute missions to
China, second only to Korea, and nearly twice as many as any other state.
Ryukyu itself lacked much to offer in trade, apart from horses. Instead, its
principal port, Naha, became the grand emporium of Sino-Japanese trade, and
also the main supplier of Southeast Asian goods to both the Chinese and
Japanese markets.13 Under the conditions established by the Ming tributary
trade system, Ryukyu became the progenitor of the “port polity” model in
maritime East Asia.
In the aftermath of the Ōnin War (1467–1477), even the semblance of unified
rule achieved by the Ashikaga shoguns vanished. Two rival daimyo clans, the
Hosokawa and the Ōuchi, vied for political supremacy – and for control of the
vitally important foreign trade with China and Ryukyu. Merchants based at
Sakai (modern Osaka) and licensed by the Hosokawa took over the Ryukyu–
Japan trade, but the Ōuchi controlled Hakata, Japan’s preeminent international
port. The struggle between the Ōuchi and the Hosokawa culminated in 1523,
when the two daimyo sent competing tribute missions to China. Violent alter-
cations broke out among the rival Japanese groups after they landed at Ningbo,
provoking the Ming court to sever all diplomatic and commercial exchanges
with Japan. Although the Ōuchi were allowed to resume tribute missions to
China in 1539, by then a new dynamic had arisen in the East Asian maritime
world that would render the tribute trade system irrelevant.
The Silver Rush and the Rise of “Japanese Piracy”

Ming control over foreign trade through the tributary system was utterly
upended in the 1530s by the rapid development of silver mining at Iwami in
western Japan. The onset of Japan’s “silver rush” marked the beginning of
China’s “silver century” (1540–1640) – a period in which the Chinese econo-
my’s ravenous hunger for silver would reverberate around the world, stimulat-
ing silver production and export not only in Japan, but in Peru and Mexico as
well. The “silver rush” coincided with the arrival of Portuguese seafarers in
East Asian waters, and word of the enormous profits to be made in delivering
silver to China quickly spread throughout the Iberian merchant networks. The
formation of a globalized trading system driven by Chinese demand for silver
13
Hamashita 2011.
by now is a well-known story.14 The impact of the “silver rush” on intra-Asian

maritime networks and on Japan’s domestic economy has received consider-
ably less attention.
From the outset, the “silver rush” in Japan was linked to international trade.
Legend relates that the Iwami silver lode was discovered when Kamiya Jutei,
a Hakata merchant en route to Izumo to purchase copper, espied a brilliant
gleam emanating from a mountaintop near the seacoast. Locals reported that
the light was emitted from a statue of the bodhisattva Kannon (Guanyin) in
a temple surmounting a mountain where silver had been mined centuries
earlier. Kamiya, taking the dazzling light as a miraculous sign, initiated new
excavations that quickly revealed rich veins of silver ore. The more prosaic
story is that in 1527 Kamiya sent his agent Ota Fujisaemon to purchase silver
from newly opened mines at Iwami. Six years later Kamiya brought technical
experts to introduce a new amalgamation process – knowledge derived from
China, but obtained clandestinely from sources in Korea – to Iwami’s miners,
which triggered a boom in silver production. By 1542 the amalgamation
process was also being utilized at the Ikuno silver mines in Tajima. Korean
court chronicles report that from 1538 Japanese merchants began to arrive with
large quantities of silver to purchase Korean cotton cloth – much to the
consternation of the Chosŏn court, since domestic prices of cotton textiles
soared as a result.15 Whether Kamiya Jutei played any part in bringing this
silver to Korea is uncertain, but it seems likely, given how deeply involved the
Kamiya family was in Hakata’s foreign trade. Jutei’s brother Kazue was the
chief of the company of merchants – 315 altogether – that accompanied
the tribute mission dispatched to China by the daimyo Ōuchi Yoshitaka in
1539, and his agent Ota Fujisaemon captained one of the ships in Yoshitaka’s
1547 mission to Ningbo.16
Word of the silver strikes in Japan quickly rippled across the Asian seas. By
1540, enterprising Chinese traders were swarming to ports ringing Kyushu to
acquire the silver so avidly treasured in China. Over the next several decades
“Chinatowns” (Tōjinmachi 唐人町) inhabited not only by seafaring traders but
also artisans, doctors, and shopkeepers sprang up in Hakata, Hirado, Gotō,
Bungo Funai, Usuki, and other Kyushu ports. From offshore bases such as
Shuangyu, near Ningbo, these rogue traders, in collusion with corrupt coast
guard officers and influential Ningbo business partners, openly defied the Ming
ban on private overseas trade (Figure 3.2).
Also at just this time the Portuguese – following their conquest of Melaka,
the linchpin of trade between the Indian Ocean and the China seas along the
coast of Malaysia, in 1511 – were seeking to expand their seaborne trade into
maritime East Asia. The initial efforts of the Portuguese to gain trading
14 15 16
Flynn and Giráldez 1995b. Yonetani 2003, 130–131. Kobata 1969, 163–180.
Figure 3.2 Principal daimyo domains and ports of Kyushu c. 1570

privileges from the Ming court were soundly rebuffed in 1520. In the following
decades Portuguese from Melaka, the farthest beachhead of the Portuguese
trade empire, would journey to Shuangyu Island – often aboard Chinese junks –
to join in the rapidly burgeoning smuggling trade. Among the Chinese mer-
chants who developed close ties with the Portuguese in this fashion were the
four Xu brothers and Wang Zhi. The Xu brothers, among whom Xu Dong
emerged as the leading figure, regularly ventured to Melaka and ports in the
Gulf of Siam. Wang Zhi was a native of Huizhou (renowned for its empire-wide
web of merchant entrepreneurs) said to have forsaken the steady livelihood of
the salt trade for the heady temptations of overseas fortune. In 1540, Wang and
a partner invested in the construction of a massive ship in Guangdong to deliver
sulfur, silk, and cotton goods to Siam. By the 1540s the Portuguese captain
major at Melaka began to grant licenses for Portuguese ships to make trading
voyages to China, and many Portuguese began to settle at Shuangyu.
According to Fernão Mendes Pinto, whose Peregrinaçam remains one of the
most valuable (even if often unreliable) early European chronicles of Asia,
before it was razed by Ming forces in 1548 Shuangyu Island boasted
a population of 3,000 Christians, including 1,200 Portuguese, and “was the
noblest, wealthiest, and most affluent community in all of India . . . the com-
merce carried on by the Portuguese was worth more than three million in gold,
the bulk of it consisting of silver from Japan.”17
In 1543 (or perhaps the previous year) a Chinese vessel sailing from the
Siamese capital of Ayudhya to Shuangyu was blown off course by storms and
made landing at Tanegashima, off the southern tip of Kyushu. Pinto suggests
that this vessel was captained by Wang Zhi, although some scholars regard this
assertion as dubious. In any event, this voyage would have fateful conse-
quences for East Asian history: it carried several Portuguese bearing the
matchlock firearms known as arquebuses that would spark a military revolution
in Japan.18 In the next several years other Portuguese traveled on Chinese ships
to Japan. In 1549 the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier landed at Kagoshima,
and subsequently journeyed to Kyoto. But it was Xavier’s visits to the daimyo
capitals of Yamaguchi (Ōuchi), Hirado (Matsura), and Bungo Funai (Ōtomo)
that had the most momentous impact on political and economic developments.
The daimyo lords Ōuchi Yoshitaka, Matsura Shigenobu, and Ōtomo Yoshiaki
vied with each other for favor with the Portuguese, who offered not only new
trading opportunities but also access to the arquebuses and cannon that would
soon exert a decisive impact in determining the outcome of Japan’s civil wars.
17
Pinto 1989, 508. The identification of the town described here by Pinto with Shuangyu is based
on Li Xianzhang 1961a, 70–71.
18
The inconsistent stories regarding the initial arrival of the Portuguese in Japan are surveyed in
Lidin 2002.
The Ōuchi controlled the key ports of Hakata and Akamagaseki (the depar-
ture point for tribute missions to China), and in 1541 they annexed the Izumo
domain, including the Iwami silver mines. The tribute mission Ōuchi Yoshitaka
sent to China in 1539 to repair relations with the Ming court was cordially
received. But Ōuchi’s success alarmed his rivals. In 1543, Ōtomo Yoshiaki
dispatched his own tribute mission to Ningbo, only to have the ship refused
entry on grounds of violating the required ten-year interval between tribute
missions. Rather than returning directly to Japan, the Ōtomo vessel lingered at
Shuangyu, where it apparently did business with the local Chinese. Finally
embarking for Japan, Ōtomo’s envoys brought with them several Chinese
merchants, including Xu Dong and Wang Zhi.
Upon their arrival in Japan, Wang and Xu as well as their Portuguese
companions cultivated business relationships with Japanese merchants.
Japanese traders from Bungo Funai (the Ōtomo capital), Gotō, and Hakata
readily leapt into the lucrative exchange of Japanese silver for Chinese silks.
Both Ōtomo Yoshiaki and Ōuchi Yoshitaka sought to enlist Wang Zhi’s aid to
reestablish tributary trade with China. But the Ming court, aghast at the
proliferation of smuggling that accompanied the “silver rush,” was in no
mood to entertain diplomatic overtures. Instead, the court appointed Zhu Wan
as governor of Zhejiang with plenipotentiary powers over coastal defense and
a broad mandate to take decisive action against these “Japanese pirates.” In
1548 Zhu’s forces seized Shuangyu and killed or captured many Wokou
captains, forcing the remnant Wokou and their Portuguese partners to retreat
to Japan. Wang Zhi was among those who escaped to Japan, where he estab-
lished new bases at Gotō and Hirado, in the Matsura domain.
Ironically, Zhu Wan’s success in routing the Wokou from their offshore bases
incurred the enmity of powerful local elites along the southeastern coast who
were reaping clandestine profits from the thriving smuggling trade. Zhu’s
enemies mustered sufficient influence to have Zhu ousted from his position
as governor; enraged by this perfidy, Zhu committed suicide.
Emboldened by Zhu’s demise and with local officials cowed into tacit
silence, Wang Zhi and other Wokou captains reestablished bases in the
Zhoushan archipelago, north of Shuangyu. Styling themselves as sea lords,
they brazenly conducted trade with merchants in the great silk emporia of
Suzhou and Hangzhou. Other Wokou pursued a more militant response, mus-
tering armed forces for reprisals against the coastal regions of China. From
1552 to 1555 Wokou fleets, which according to Ming reports numbered as
many as 200 ships, ravaged the coasts of China – and as far away as Korea –
with impunity, terrorizing the inhabitants. One Wokou assault even reached the
gates of Nanjing, the Ming secondary capital, before being repulsed.
Many of these pirates claimed to be acting in the name of Wang Zhi, who was
presumed to exercise hegemony over the whole maritime region. But the
devastating pirate attacks on China’s coastal regions were led by other Wokou
captains, including Xu Hai, a former protégé of Wang Zhi. In fact, Wang –
seeking to prevent the pirates from disrupting the buoyant smuggling trade as
well as to eliminate rival chiefs – often cooperated with Ming commanders to
apprehend pirate leaders. But Ming officials reported that Wang grew ever
more arrogant, donning official robes, traveling with a guard of fifty men, and
even proclaiming himself “King of the Pacific Seas.” According to the memoir
of a Matsura retainer, Wang Zhi built a grand mansion in Hirado, where both
Chinese and Portuguese trading vessels laden with exotic treasures gathered to
conduct business with merchants from Kyoto and Sakai. This trade was so rich
that “people called Hirado the imperial capital (miyako) of the west.”19
Meanwhile, the Portuguese – undaunted by the loss of Shuangyu and the
imprisonment of a number of Portuguese captains – intensified their engage-
ment in Sino-Japanese trade during the 1550s. The Portuguese established new
bases on islands near Zhangzhou and Guangzhou, and began to voyage to Japan
in their own ships.20
Desperate in the face of Wokou depredations, the supreme commander of the
Ming forces in Zhejiang sent an embassy led by Zheng Shungong to Bungo
Funai to seek the assistance of Ōtomo Sōrin (who had succeeded his father
Yoshiaki as daimyo after the latter’s death in 1551) in allaying the Wokou
menace. Zheng spent more than year at Funai, compiling the intelligence he
would report in his Speculum of Japan, before returning in 1556 with a letter
from Sōrin pledging support.
Ōtomo Sōrin (1530–1587) was perhaps the most aggressive of the Japanese
daimyo in trying to extract political gain from maritime trade. Sōrin’s efforts to
make Bungo Funai the hub of Japan’s foreign trade sprang from his simmering
ambition to become Japan’s paramount ruler. To that end Sōrin cultivated
relationships both with the Wokou (Wang Zhi spent some time at Funai) and
the Portuguese. In 1551, after Sōrin succeeded his father, a new opportunity
presented itself when his chief rival, Ōuchi Yoshitaka, was assassinated by
a retainer, leaving no heir. Sōrin maneuvered to place his brother Yoshinaga as
official head of the Ōuchi regime. Sōrin sent an envoy to Yamaguchi to invite
Francis Xavier to Bungo, and upon Xavier’s departure for China he entrusted
the Jesuit missionary with a letter intended for the king of Portugal. The Jesuit
missionaries at Yamaguchi relocated to Bungo, where Sōrin gave them a lavish
welcome, allowing them to build a hospital, orphanage, and church in Funai
and – nominally, at least – converting to Christianity himself. For the next
decade Bungo became the main focus of Portuguese traders and their source for
the silver they sought to bring to China. Sōrin’s actions bespoke a new political
strategy: in contrast to the agrarian revenue base of Japan’s seigneurial lords,
19
Ōmagari 1977, 15. 20
Oka 2010, 25–86.
Sōrin fashioned Bungo into a port polity whose wealth and power derived from
maritime trade and foreign alliances.
By the time Zheng Shungong returned to China in 1556, a new supreme
commander, Hu Zongxian, had assumed responsibility for the Wokou problem.
Hu had sent his own envoys, Jiang Zhou and Chen Keyuan, to Hirado to
negotiate directly with Wang Zhi. Jiang and Chen, neither of whom held official
rank, constituted only informal emissaries, since Hu could scarcely send a high-
ranking ambassador to negotiate with a renegade pirate. Wang greeted the
Ming envoys with pomp and pageantry intended to convey both his exalted
dignity and his alienation from Chinese traditions and conventions.21 Jiang and
Chen informed Wang that Hu Zongxian would welcome his return and offered
to establish formal trading relations. Wang accepted their offer. Leaving behind
Jiang as a hostage, Chen returned to Zhoushan along with Wang Zhi and
a thousand of his company, who tendered their submission to the Ming
emperor. The emperor’s counselors differed sharply on how to respond: one
party urged that Hu Zongxian’s offer of official trading privileges be honored,
while another group demanded that Wang be executed for treason. The latter
faction prevailed. Wang Zhi was imprisoned, and two years later would be put
to death. Although news of Wang’s arrest shocked his comrades in Japan and
left them in disarray, the Wokou threat by no means had been eradicated.
After Wang Zhi’s imprisonment, the Ming envoy Jiang Zhou was released
and made his way to Funai. As mentioned earlier, the mission that Sōrin’s father
Yoshiaki had boldly dispatched to Ningbo in 1543 was rebuffed by the Ming
court, as were subsequent attempts in 1546 and 1547. Yet Sōrin still harbored
ambitions to establish tributary relations with the Ming. At the end of 1557
Sōrin and his brother Yoshinaga (acting in the name of the Ōuchi) dispatched
a joint embassy to accompany Jiang Zhou back to China. The Japanese envoys
bore a letter stamped with the seal of “the king of Japan” and requested official
trading licenses from the Ming; they also brought with them captive Wokou
intended as gifts to the Ming emperor. But upon their ship’s arrival at Zhoushan
the Ming defense forces deemed the envoys to be surreptitious Wokou spies.
Their vessel was seized and scuttled, and Sōrin’s envoys were forced to return
to Japan empty-handed.
Undaunted, Sōrin continued to promote overseas trade and seek foreign
alliances. He sent diplomatic missions to the Portuguese viceroyalty at Goa
and the Siamese court at Ayudhya, and in 1582 he dispatched the first Japanese
ambassadors to Europe, where they paid respects to the Portuguese king and the
Roman pope. But the Ōtomo regime suffered a series of setbacks that would
prove fatal to the daimyo house. Sōrin’s brother Yoshinaga was captured and
forced to commit suicide by Mōri Motonari, bringing an end to the Ōuchi house
21
Shapinsky 2016, 51–59.
and establishing the Mōri as the dominant daimyo power in western Japan. In
1566 Motonari vanquished the Amago daimyo and seized the Iwami silver
mines, whose wealth vastly enhanced his military power. In 1568 the warlord
Oda Nobunaga occupied Kyoto, a major step toward his goal of national
unification. Meanwhile, Portuguese traders recentered their trading expeditions
at Hirado, in the Matsura domain, which had more direct access to the Iwami
silver mines. Although Matsura Shigenobu welcomed the Portuguese traders to
Hirado, he was less enthusiastic about missionary activities and refused to
convert to Christianity. His neighboring rival, Ōmura Sumitada, proved more
accommodating. Sumitada converted to Christianity and granted the
Portuguese permission to establish a trading base at the fishing village of
Nagasaki. After 1571, Portuguese ships bound for Japan almost exclusively
made port at Nagasaki, which quickly swelled into a thriving town.
But the crucial event that would engender a structural transformation of the
trading networks of maritime East Asia was the Ming court’s decision in 1567
to end its two-century-long prohibition against private overseas trade.
The End of the Ming Maritime Ban and the Transformation

of Maritime East Asia
The Ming court’s abrupt about-face in rescinding the maritime trade ban
followed, ironically enough, its apparent victory over the Wokou adversaries.
In an effort to sever the Portuguese alliance with the Wokou, in 1557 the Ming
court granted Portuguese traders the right to settle at Macau, with access to the
Chinese market via Guangzhou. As the debate over the fate of Wang Zhi in the
same year revealed, a significant cohort of court officials favored the restora-
tion of legal forms of overseas trade. The Wokou menace diminished after the
capture and execution of Wang Zhi, but raids still inflicted significant damage
in coastal regions. In 1563 a Wokou force attacked the southern Fujian coast,
seizing the city of Xinghua before finally being repelled by the Ming general Qi
Jiguang, an innovative military tactician who avidly embraced gunpowder
weapons.22 Although the Ming had gained the upper hand in the military
conflicts against the Wokou, the costly campaigns had taken a substantial fiscal
toll. Most importantly, influential elites in the coastal regions of southern China
clamored for the right to share in the profits of the escalating overseas trade
boom.
The Ming court’s reversal on overseas trade still imposed restrictions.
A maritime trade superintendency was created at Yuegang – a former Wokou
base off the southern coast of Fujian, near modern Xiamen – and Chinese
22
On Qi’s propagation of muskets and his careful attention to the manufacture of firearms and
drilling techniques to combine them with traditional weapons, see Andrade 2017, 172–181.
traders were required to obtain licenses for designated overseas ports.

Determined to concede as little as possible to its erstwhile Wokou enemies,
the Ming retained the prohibition against direct trade with Japan. Only the
Portuguese based at Macau were allowed to conduct trade with Japan.
Consequently, Chinese merchants had to seek out indirect means to engage in
the lucrative exchange of Chinese silk for Japanese silver.
Another source of silver soon emerged in the Philippines. Manila Bay had
long been a trading post that had attracted Chinese and Japanese seafarers, who
exchanged silks, porcelain, and metal goods for gold, beeswax, and forest
products. The Spanish expedition that subdued the Tagalog chieftains of
Manila Bay in 1570–1571 had been ordered to establish a port of call to horn
in on the rich China trade. The Spanish colony founded at Manila in 1571
provided a gateway to American silver through the trans-Pacific galleon
voyages. In 1575 more than a dozen Chinese junks made port at Manila, and
in 1582 the Spanish Crown – now fearing a hemorrhage of silver from its
American colonies to China – restricted the galleon trade between Manila and
Acapulco to two ships per year.23 Within two decades Manila’s Chinese
population swelled to 20,000, vastly outnumbering its several hundred
Spaniard residents.
Manila became a new source of silver for China, but offered little incentive
for Chinese and Japanese merchants to trade with each other. Instead, trade
between China and Japan gravitated to new intermediate ports in Southeast
Asia such as Ayudhya, the Siamese capital, and above all Hội An on the central
coast of Vietnam.
Since the 1520s the Đại Việt kingdom had been rent by power struggles
among its leading families. The Mạc dynasty (1527–1592) usurped the throne
of the Lê king and established control over the Tonkin heartland in northern
Vietnam. In 1558 the Nguyễn lords founded an independent regime with their
capital at Phú Xuân (near modern Hué). The Nguyễn territories hugging
Vietnam’s rugged central coast were ill-suited for rice agriculture. Without
a substantial agrarian base, the Nguyễn adopted a mercantilist strategy of
encouraging foreign trade as a source of revenue. Hội An, about 10 km down-
river from Phú Xuân, was declared a free port. By the early seventeenth century
Hội An became the main crossroads for Sino-Japanese trade, succeeding to the
emporium role formerly performed by Naha.24 Like Naha before it, Hội An
also became a multinational merchant enclave, inhabited mostly by Japanese
and Chinese traders. Although the Portuguese tried to gain a foothold at Hội
An, they were firmly rebuffed by the Chinese and Japanese and excluded from
23
On the Spanish conquest of the Philippines and its significance for global trade, see Giráldez
2015.
24
Iwao 1966, 20–84; Kikuchi 2006, 193–217; Lockard 2010, 234–239.
the city’s trade. The Nguyễn regime’s success in creating a port polity secured
its independence from the Mạc and (after 1592) Trinh rulers of Tonkin.
The rise of Hội An, Macau, Ayudhya, and other ports as intermediaries
between China and Japan spelled the final demise of Ryukyu as the hub of
maritime East Asia. Ryukyu’s preeminent place in commerce and shipping
already had begun to slip in the late fifteenth century, when Japanese vessels
took over trade between the Okinawan archipelago and Japanese ports. Wokou
and Portuguese smugglers further eroded Ryukyu’s intermediary role, and the
repeal of the Ming maritime ban in 1567 rendered Ryukyu’s special advantage
as a conduit of tributary trade wholly obsolete. Ryukyu’s marginalization
within the East Asian maritime trade also undermined its political indepen-
dence: in 1609 the Shimazu daimyo in southern Kyushu imposed de facto
hegemony over Ryukyu, the first step leading to the island kingdom’s eventual
incorporation into the Japanese nation-state.
Silver Production, Foreign Trade, and the Unification of Japan

In addition to fueling the explosive growth in East Asian maritime trade, the
prolific output of the Iwami and Ikuno silver mines instigated an epochal
transformation in Japan’s monetary and fiscal systems. For centuries the
Japanese economy depended on imports of Chinese coin as a means of
exchange. The virtual cessation of coinage by the Ming government since the
early fifteenth century drastically reduced the supply of fine coin to the
Japanese market. Although private coiners in China, Ryukyu, and eventually
in Japan itself stepped up their operations, the degraded quality and extreme
heterogeneity of counterfeit coin caused havoc in Japan’s domestic trade and
diminished the value of daimyo revenues.25 Upon installing himself in Kyoto in
1568, Oda Nobunaga issued a set of regulations intended to restore order to the
monetary system and settle the marketplaces. Nobunaga’s decree established
discount rates for three broad classes of bronze coins (with the poorest dis-
counted by 90 percent) and fixed exchange rates among gold, silver, and fine
coin, while permitting the use of gold and silver to purchase high-value goods
such as silks, medicines, and porcelains. Notably, Nobunaga also prohibited the
use of rice as a means of exchange. Confidence in the value of bronze coins had
sunk so low that Kyoto’s inhabitants had resorted to using rice as an alternative
measure of value and even as a means of exchange. Despite Nobunaga’s initial
prohibition against the use of rice in market exchange, the new land revenue
system he adopted in 1575 converted land revenues formerly assessed in coin
to rice payments, inaugurating the kokudaka taxation system that would later
become a cardinal feature of Tokugawa fiscal administration.26
25 26
von Glahn 2014b. Honda 2015, 100–106.
At the same time silver became more widely used as currency within Japan.
The first mention of the use of silver as a means of exchange comes from
Hakata in 1559. Following the incorporation of the Iwami mines into the Mōri
domain in 1566, silver soon became a mainstay of the regional economy. By the
1570s silver “pieces” (mai 枚) – standardized ingots of 10 ryō (approximately
165 g) – were commonly used for wholesale trade, tax payments, and donations
to religious institutions in the Mōri territories. Nobunaga, who gained control
of the Ikuno mines in 1570, began to tap their silver wealth to purchase guns,
bullets, gunpowder, military provisions, and medicines. Recent scholarship has
emphasized the “mercantilist” character of Nobunaga’s fiscal policies. In
addition to taking possession of the silver mines, he also devoted his energies
to securing control of key ports (above all Sakai, which previously had been
a free city), sea-lanes, and inland transport routes, and he recruited leading
merchants to manage the mines and ports on his behalf.27
The introduction of gunpowder weapons to Japan, like the silver strike at
Iwami, spawned its own mythology. Japanese narratives have repeatedly asso-
ciated the new technology of warfare with the arrival of the Portuguese
(purportedly on a ship captained by Wang Zhi) at Tanegashima in 1543. By
this time Wokou ships were outfitted with European breech-loading swivel
cannon as well as matchlock arquebuses, although these weapons were avail-
able in only limited quantities. Korean annals from the mid-1540s indicate that
it was Chinese merchants who were importing – reportedly in great quantities –
gunpowder weapons to Japan. As Tonio Andrade has shown, civil and military
officials in Ming China had quickly adopted and modified Portuguese cannon
and muskets, and by the mid-sixteenth century these foreign-derived guns were
widely deployed in naval warfare, siege defense, and field battles.28 Most likely
it was the Wokou rather than the Portuguese who were the primary catalysts of
the dissemination of gunpowder weapons to Japan.29
Despite Mendes Pinto’s report during his visit to Bungo Funai in 1556 that
there were already more than 300,000 muskets in Japan, the dissemination of
gunpowder weapons proceeded slowly.30 Correspondence between daimyo
and their military and civil officers reveals that the warlords, although despe-
rate to obtain the new weapons, repeatedly were stymied by the limited supply
available. Over time, Japanese blacksmiths learned the techniques for making
muskets by reverse engineering imported specimens. By the 1560s, the warring
daimyo of western Japan such as the Ōtomo, Shimazu, and Mōri had begun to
field some troops equipped with muskets of domestic manufacture. Foreign
27
Ikegami 2002, 77–92. 28 Andrade 2017, 124–143.
29
Rebutting Udagawa 1990 that muskets were introduced to Japan by the Wokou, Nakajima 2013
contends that there were multiple sources for the diffusion of gunpowder weapons, and the
Portuguese still played a prominent role in this transmission of military technology.
30
Pinto 1989, 278.
trade remained the source of saltpeter for the manufacture of gunpowder, if not
for the guns themselves. In 1567 Ōtomo Sōrin wrote to Bishop Belchior
Carneiro in Macau requesting his help in preventing Portuguese traders from
selling saltpeter to his Mōri rivals, and instead placed his own order for 120 kg
of the crucial ingredient. It was perhaps the Mōri soldiers’ advantage in
gunpowder weapons that explains their triumph over Sōrin’s brother and
conquest of the Ōuchi domain in 1566. Certainly we can say that with
Nobunaga’s campaigns during the mid-1570s, and especially his victory at
the Battle of Nagashino in 1575, gunpowder weapons became decisive in the
outcome of military conflicts.31
Following the assassination of Nobunaga in 1582, Toyotomi Hideyoshi
quickly seized control of Nobunaga’s regime and declared himself imperial
advisor (kanpaku), which he later elevated to regent (taikō). Hideyoshi pursued
a similar mercantilist agenda to solidify his power and bring the remaining
independent daimyo to heel.32 Hideyoshi required the daimyo to maintain
residences in the Kyoto–Osaka capital region (the harbinger of the Tokugawa
shoguns’sankin kōtai system) and embarked on a massive program of building
castle towns both in directly ruled areas and in the vassal domains. The
concentration of public works activities and elite consumption in Kyoto and
Osaka gave further impetus to the formation of a national market. Like
Nobunaga, Hideyoshi assigned privileged merchants (“purveyors to the
court,” goyō shōnin) to take charge of town-building projects and fiscal initia-
tives. Through requisitions imposed on the daimyo lords Hideyoshi mobilized
the men and matériel he would need to launch his military campaigns against
the remaining independent daimyo.
In 1583 Hideyoshi compelled the submission of Mōri Terumoto, bringing
western Honshu under his dominion. In 1587 he completed the conquest of
Kyushu when the Shimazu daimyo surrendered. The year before a Shimazu
army had sacked the Ōtomo capital of Bungo Funai, extinguishing the city’s
brief efflorescence as an emporium of international trade. Hakata, whose
preeminent position in overseas trade had made it a highly contested prize in
the civil wars, was razed three times between 1559 and 1580. Hideyoshi
undertook extensive efforts to rebuild Hakata – a task entrusted to Kamiya
Sōtan, great-grandson of Kamiya Jutei, who had spearheaded the development
of the Iwami mines – but the city never regained its former luster. With the
demise of Funai and Hakata, Nagasaki stood unchallenged as Japan’s para-
mount port for overseas commerce. Hideyoshi immediately placed Nagasaki
under his direct rule, sending a trusted Sakai merchant to serve as governor of
the city, and claimed a monopoly over the city’s foreign trade.
31 32
Udagawa 1990, 17–74. Ikegami 2002, 250–264.
Keen to amass stocks of gold and silver to pay his armies, Hideyoshi like
Nobunaga before him exercised direct control over the Ikuno mines and
encouraged new mining ventures. Although the Iwami mines remained within
the jurisdiction of the Mōri daimyo, Hideyoshi repeatedly demanded that
Terumoto – who became one of his inner circle of advisers – submit substantial
“gifts” of silver treasure. As he began preparations for the invasion of Korea
that would be launched in 1592 (see the Swope chapter in this volume –
Chapter 7), Hideyoshi constructed a massive logistical system to funnel provi-
sions, weapons, and gold and silver treasure from all the provinces under his
control to the newly built castle town of Nagoya, the staging base for the
Korean invasion. (This Nagoya, which was located near modern Karatsu in
Kyushu, to the west of Hakata, should not be confused with the modern city of
the same name in central Honshu.) In 1594 Hideyoshi sent his commercial
agents with a shipment of 13,000 koku of rice (2,145 tons) to Iwami to
exchange for silver, which was to be delivered to Nagasaki to purchase
imported lead (for bullets) and saltpeter (for gunpowder).33 Hideyoshi also
ordered the casting of a special silver currency to pay soldiers’ salaries. In 1595,
after organizing Osaka’s silver refiners into a guild, Hideyoshi inaugurated the
issue of a standard silver currency. The silver boom that had fostered the rise of
Kyushu’s port polities now served as a crucial instrument of national
unification.
The Demise of the Port Polity Paradigm in Maritime

East Asia
Hideyoshi’s unification of Japan, which was consolidated under Ieyasu, foun-
der of the Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1868), extinguished the independence
of the daimyo lords and effectively eliminated the port polity paradigm of
rulership within the Japanese archipelago. Like his predecessors, Ieyasu sought
to reap the fiscal, strategic, and technological benefits of foreign trade, which in
the first three decades of the seventeenth century reached unprecedented
heights in Japan. Granted “red seal” licenses to engage in overseas trade,
Japanese merchants flocked to Hội An, Ayudhya, Manila, and other
Southeast Asian ports, where “Japantowns” (Nihonmachi 日本町) nestled
alongside settlements of Chinese traders. But Ieyasu’s successors, alarmed by
both the drain of silver abroad and the growing success of Portuguese mis-
sionaries in winning converts to Christianity, began to deter foreign trade and
contact. In the late 1630s the shogunate took drastic measures, expelling the
Portuguese, prohibiting Japanese merchants from venturing abroad, and con-
fining Chinese and Dutch traders to the single port of Nagasaki. A few other
33
Honda 2015, 155–156.
avenues of foreign trade – with Ryukyu, Korea, and the indigenous peoples of
Hokkaido – remained open, but the continued outflow of silver to China
prompted the shogunate to enact increasingly restrictive trade policies that by
1669 effectively halted silver exports altogether.
During the final decades of the Ming dynasty much of China’s maritime
trade fell under the control of the Zheng clan, which first came to prominence as
smugglers and pirates operating between Fujian and Japan in the 1620s. In
1628 Zheng Zhilong entered an alliance with the Ming authorities, offering to
suppress coastal piracy in return for freedom to pursue his commercial ven-
tures. Zheng’s bargain reprised Wang Zhi’s strategy seventy years before, but
now the much-weakened Ming state was forced to be more accommodating.
Amid the collapse of the Ming dynasty in the 1640s, Zhilong’s son Zheng
Chenggong transformed the clan’s maritime enterprise into an informal port
polity in coastal Fujian with command of its own merchant fleets and naval
forces. From its headquarters at Xiamen the Zheng regime maintained branch
agencies in Jiangnan cities, Southeast Asian ports (Chenggong signed treaties
with both the Tonkin and Nguyễn courts in Vietnam), and Nagasaki, where
Chenggong himself had been born.34 The arrival of the Dutch from the early
years of the seventeenth century introduced a more predatory, nation-based
model of economic competition that effectively eliminated rival Europeans
from East Asian trade, but never surpassed its Asian adversaries: the Zheng
regime routed the Dutch from Taiwan in 1662, and Chinese merchants’ share of
Japan’s foreign trade remained twice that of the Dutch.35 After ousting the
Dutch from Taiwan the Zheng moved their political base there, but in 1683 the
Manchus finally vanquished the Zheng and incorporated Taiwan into their
burgeoning continental empire.36
By 1700 the port polities that had thrived during the “Age of Commerce” in
maritime East Asia had all but vanished. Ryukyu and the Kyushu daimyo
domains had been absorbed into the hegemonic Tokugawa political order; the
Qing empire had annexed Taiwan and eliminated freebooting traders like the
Wokou from its maritime periphery; and the Nguyễn regime in Vietnam, after
the cessation of hostilities with Tonkin in 1672, shifted its attention southward,
expanding into the Mekong delta and developing an agrarian economic base
centered on rice cultivation. At the end of the eighteenth century the
Nguyễn rulers would efface their origins as a port polity and thoroughly
embrace the Chinese model of an agrarian bureaucratic state, recasting them-
selves as an imperial dynasty reigning over a unified Việt Nam empire. Thus
concluded the possibility of the port polity paradigm as an alternative to the
Chinese model of state formation in East Asia.
34
Hang 2016. 35 See Andrade chapter in this volume (Chapter 9).
36
See Crossley chapter in this volume (Chapter 8).
Multinational merchant communities began to disappear along with the port

polities that had nurtured them. The “Japantowns” that had germinated across
maritime East Asia during the heyday of the “red seal” trade withered away.
The new order was symbolized by Nagasaki, where the Tokugawa shogunate
confined Chinese and Dutch traders to separate walled compounds and forbade
them to intermix with Japanese residents. This model of containment –
intended to allow trade but exclude cultural interaction – was later replicated
in the “Canton System” imposed by the Qing government on European traders
in 1760. Still, in the eighteenth century transnational merchant communities
persisted in European colonial enclaves such as Macau and Manila and in the
port towns ringing the Southeast Asian seas that swelled with Chinese immi-
grants after the onset of the Chinese diaspora beginning around 1740. Indeed,
the enduring legacy of the Wokou traders and the multinational merchant
networks they fostered can be found in the surge of overseas Chinese mercan-
tile expansion into the “South Seas” (maritime Southeast Asia) following the
Qing conquest of Taiwan in 1683. The pervasive insinuation of Chinese capital
and labor into the region’s political economy has prompted historians to refer to
the eighteenth century as the “Chinese Century” in Southeast Asian history.37
Under Qing rule, China’s maritime trade flourished throughout the eight-
eenth century. Neither the “Canton System” nor the Qianlong emperor’s
indifference had any adverse effect on China’s trade with the West. Chinese
imports of American silver – a key index of the scale of maritime trade – rose
sevenfold from the 1720s to the 1820s, faltering only when the Europeans were
distracted by internecine conflicts such as the Seven Years War and the
Napoleonic Wars. China’s trade with Southeast Asia was even more robust:
Kaoru Sugihara has estimated that the volume of intra-Asian trade exceeded
that of East–West trade by one-third as late as 1840.38 But in contrast to the
mercantilist motives of the European powers, the Qing rulers’ benign attitude
toward foreign trade stemmed from concerns about domestic stability: mar-
itime trade provided a necessary livelihood to the inhabitants of the rugged
southeastern littoral, where arable land was scarce.39 Although the Qing leader-
ship did not regard maritime trade as vital to national welfare as did the rulers of
the port polities, they adopted policies and institutions that encouraged the free
flow of commerce, both domestic and foreign, as an expression of providential
solicitude toward their most vulnerable subjects.
37 38 39
Blussé 1999. Sugihara 2009, 265. Calanca 2011.
Part II
The East Asian System over Time

4 East Asia’s First World War, 643–668
Nadia Kanagawa
Between 643 and 668 CE, the majority of the states in East Asia engaged in
a massive war that fundamentally reshaped the region. The victors in the war
were the combined forces of the Tang empire on the continent and the Korean
peninsula kingdom of Silla. The losers included the Korean kingdoms of
Koguryŏ and Paekche, both of which had ceased to exist as independent realms
by 668 CE, and Yamato on the Japanese archipelago, which retreated from the
peninsula after a disastrous defeat. As a direct result of this war, Yamato went
through a period of rapid centralization and declared itself an imperial realm,
while Silla consolidated its control over the Korean peninsula and the Tang
retreated to deal with other threats to its western borders. This complete
reconfiguration of the East Asian world demands our attention not only because
it marked the emergence of polities on the Korean peninsula and Japanese
archipelago that would endure for hundreds of years, but also because it offers
insight into how tributary relations functioned and what they signified in
dynamically changing circumstances.1
During the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), diplomatic relations in East
Asia were structured by the Han court, which defined itself as the central realm,
accepted tribute from surrounding polities, and extended investiture to them.
After the fall of the Han in 220 CE, this diplomatic system was reconfigured as
the polities on the Korean peninsula and Japanese archipelago negotiated a new
set of investiture relations with the Northern and Southern dynasties on the
continent. The new dynamic relied on the division of the continent into multiple
realms, each of which claimed to be the central realm and sought tributary
states to bolster its claims. This division allowed the smaller (but much longer-
lasting) polities of the Korean peninsula and Japanese archipelago to balance
1
I call this war “East Asia’s First World War” because I believe it fundamentally altered the
structure and dynamics of the seventh-century East Asian world. Doing so puts me at odds with
Kenneth Swope (2012, 5–11), who has argued that the war waged in the 1590s when Japanese
forces invaded the Korean peninsula should be called the “First Great East Asian War.” While
I agree with Swope’s contention that the seventh-century war was not waged with the explicit
goal of Asian hegemony, I do not believe that this is a necessary condition for calling it a “world
war.” Whether or not it was the “first” East Asian war, there can be no question but that the
sixteenth-century war was unprecedented in its scale, scope, and significance for the region.
67
68 Nadia Kanagawa
continental powers against each other. The rise of the Sui dynasty in 581 CE,
and its reunification of the north and south, brought an end to this multipolar
order and plunged the region into a period of instability.
Between the rise of the Sui in 581 CE and the fall of Koguryŏ in 668 CE, the
Sui and Tang empires engaged in major campaigns against Koguryŏ at least
seven times. All but the last of these campaigns ended in defeat, and the last Sui
campaign in 614 CE was directly related to the collapse of the Sui dynasty. It
was arguably only as the result of a series of internal crises in Koguryŏ that the
combined Silla–Tang forces were finally able to defeat and destroy Koguryŏ.
The reasons for Sui and Tang persistence in attacking Koguryŏ despite the very
significant costs of these campaigns were complex, and reflected both Sui–
Tang interests and the strategies of Koguryŏ’s rivals on the Korean peninsula.
The rulers of both of the Sui and Tang saw themselves as the successors to (or
rebirth of) the Han, and therefore laid claim to the territory that Koguryŏ seized
from the former Han commanderies in the fourth century. They also recognized
Koguryŏ as a critical threat on their northeastern border, which the records
indicate their advisors counseled them could not be avoided. Finally, they were
drawn into the conflict on the Korean peninsula by Paekche and Silla, who used
the tribute and investiture system to draw not only the Sui and Tang but also
Yamato into their competition to control the peninsula. In this sense, the
ultimate winner of this war was Silla, which successfully drew the Tang into
the conflict on the Korean peninsula, eliminated Koguryŏ and Paekche, and
then consolidated its control of the peninsula.
East Asia during the Northern and Southern Dynasties

Because it falls between two of the great dynasties – the Han and the Tang
(618–907 CE) – the Northern and Southern dynasties period has often been
neglected. It was, however, a critical period both in the history of imperial
China and in the development of East Asia, and an understanding of the
regional dynamics established during this period is essential to understanding
the impact of the rise of the Sui and Tang empires and the war that followed.
These dynamics have been characterized in recent scholarship as “multipolar”
and “pluralistic,” structured not by a single tributary system but by many
tributary and investiture interactions that took place at different levels in the
regional hierarchy and among a range of different polities. These interactions
drew from a model that had been established in the earlier Han dynasty, but also
reflected the capacity of that model to adapt to new circumstances.
The classic Sinitic model of empire was articulated in the texts of the
Warring States period (474–221 BCE). In this model, heaven sanctioned the
authority of a universal sovereign called the “Son of Heaven” who ruled an “all
under heaven” centered on his court and surrounded by various barbarian
East Asia’s First World War, 643–668 69
peoples. The rulers of these barbarian peoples would pay tribute at the court of
the universal sovereign and be invested as vassals. The rulers of the Han
dynasty adopted this empire–tributary framework, granting titles and seals of
investitures to rulers of several East Asian polities that positioned themselves
as subjects by sending envoys with tribute.2 For the Han, tributary relations
became an important symbol of the universality of their imperial rule, while for
the subject states they were a way to gain recognition and legitimacy vis-à-vis
neighbors and competitors. While the Japanese scholar Nishijima Sadao
famously argued that the “investiture system” that defined an ancient East
Asian world was established during the Han dynasty, more recent scholars
have challenged the idea that Han tributary relations approached anything like
a “system,” arguing that they are better described as an idealized framework,
fundamentally bound up in representations of imperial authority, that operated
according to ad hoc rules.3 Building on this observation, Torquil Duthie has
argued that it was actually during the Northern and Southern dynasties, a time
he describes as “an age of disunion and multiple empires, each of which
claimed to be the center of ‘all under heaven,’” that tributary relations with
surrounding smaller polities became a critical symbol of imperial legitimacy.4
One of the major difficulties of studying East Asia in this period is that the
written sources are relatively sparse. Much of what we know is based on
Chinese dynastic histories such as the Weishu (Book of Wei) in the
Sanguozhi (Records of the Three Kingdoms, c. 297 CE), the Songshu (Book
of Song, c. 493 CE), and the Liangshu (Book of Liang, c. 636 CE).5 Many of
these works sought to either explain the downfall of the Han or to identify the
legitimate successors of the Han. By far the most detailed written source from
Yamato is the Nihon shoki (Chronicles of Japan), an official history compiled
by royal order and completed in 720 CE.6 The Nihon shoki begins with the
appearance of heaven and earth and continues through the end of the seventh
century, but it must be read as the product of an eighth-century court that was
seeking to consolidate and legitimize its authority. The major Korean historical
sources are the Samguk sagi (Records of the Three Kingdoms), compiled in
2
M. E. Lewis 2007. Among the states who received such recognition were Puyŏ, on the north-
eastern border, and the Land of Na in Wa, later part of Yamato on the Japanese archipelago.
3
Nishijima 1983. This view of Han tributary relations and much of my discussion of fourth
through seventh century interactions between Yamato and the Korean kingdoms have been
influenced by Torquil Duthie’s (2014, 15–56) analysis.
4
Specifically, he points to the period known as the Three Kingdoms (220–280 CE) as a time when
the competing Wei, Wu, and Shu “empires” each established tributary relations with their
neighbors. Duthie 2014, 25.
5
Mark Edward Lewis (2009, 245) notes that more histories were written in this period than in any
period until the Qing (1644–1912).
6
The text was compiled by a committee that likely included scholars from the continent and
Korean peninsula and was submitted to the throne by Prince Toneri (676–735). For a basic
overview of the text and available translations see Lurie 2006, 282–283.
70 Nadia Kanagawa
1145 CE by Kim Pusik (1075–1151 CE) and the Samguk yusa (Legends of the
Three Kingdoms), compiled by the monk Ilyon (1206–1289 CE). Both the
Samguk sagi and the Samguk yusa were compiled during the Koryŏ dynasty
(918–1392 CE), nearly 500 years after the falls of Koguryŏ and Paekche, and
200 years after the fall of Silla.7 The Samguk sagi, like the Nihon shoki, was
compiled by a later court seeking to legitimize its rule, and therefore frames the
history of the early Korean peninsula to present Koryŏ as the legitimate
successor to the three earlier kingdoms.8
As limited as the sources are, they contain significant evidence that the
fourth through seventh centuries were marked by extensive diplomatic,
military, and cultural interaction between Koguryŏ, Silla, and Paekche on
the Korean peninsula, Yamato (also known as Wa) on the Japanese
archipelago and a series of Northern and Southern dynasties. This inter-
action was, to a large extent, conducted within the framework of tribute
and investiture.
The fourth century was marked by the rise of Koguryŏ as a powerful realm in
Northeast Asia. As northern China fractured into the Sixteen Kingdoms period,
Koguryŏ gained control of the former Han commanderies of Lelang (K.
Nangnang) and Daifang (K. Daebang) between 313 and 314 CE. Koguryŏ
then moved into the Liaodong peninsula, which brought them into conflict with
the Former Yan (337–370 CE), a Xianbei dynasty. Koguryŏ suffered a major
defeat to the Former Yan in 342 CE, and opened diplomatic relations with them
the following year by sending a tributary emissary. They received the title of
“king” from the Former Yan ruler, who had himself taken the title of “emperor”
(huangdi). This tributary relationship was maintained until the Former Yan fell
in 370 CE. During the period of peaceful relations with the Former Yan,
Koguryŏ turned its attentions to conflicts on the Korean peninsula. A major
attack on Paekche in 369 CE resulted in defeat and the death of the Koguryŏ
king.9 Koguryŏ then formed an alliance with Silla, and the two states sent
envoys to the Former Qin (351–394 CE) in 377 CE. Paekche responded by
strengthening its alliance with Kaya and developing relations with the Yamato
court that the Nihon shoki characterized as a tributary relationship in which
Paekche submitted tribute in return for Yamato’s military aid.10 As they
maneuvered for advantage on the Korean peninsula, both Koguryŏ and
7
Jonathan Best (2006, 4) also argues that a lack of Paekche and Koguryŏ sources forced Kim Pu-
sik to rely heavily on Chinese dynastic histories in the Samguk sagi.
8
Given the major gaps in these written sources, archaeology has become increasingly critical to
understanding the emergence and development of the polities on the Korean peninsula and
Japanese archipelago in particular.
9
Best 2006, 74–77.
10
Although both the Nihon shoki and the Samguk sagi contain records of a Paekche prince being
sent as a hostage to the Yamato court in 397 CE, the Nihon shoki’s account of Paekche–Yamato
relations cannot be taken at face value.
Paekche sent envoys with tribute to the Eastern Jin (317–420 CE).11 The
famous Kwanggaet’o stele of 414 CE describes a major conflict between the
two groups that had emerged by the end of the fourth century – Koguryŏ–Silla
allies on the one hand, and Paekche–Yamato–Kaya on the other.
Receiving recognition from a continental empire was clearly important to rulers
of kingdoms such as Koguryŏ, Paekche, and Silla, who actively sought and
maintained these relationships. Past scholarship has tended to emphasize the
ostensibly subordinate side of the tributary relationship, focusing on the way
“imperial” recognition helped to define and protect emerging polities. More recent
scholarship has stressed that Koguryŏ, Paekche, Silla, and Yamato outlasted the
empires of the Northern and Southern dynasties period. For the competing con-
tinental powers, receiving tribute from these smaller but longer-lived polities came
to be an important symbol of legitimacy and a critical way to bolster claims to be
the true successors to the Han. The smaller polities were able to use the division of
the continental realms to their advantage. Rather than negotiating with a single
hegemon, they could switch allegiances or send tribute to multiple “imperial”
realms at the same time, balancing them against each other.
The fifth and sixth centuries were marked by the emergence of a new set of
alliances and the emergence of two major Sinic empires – the Liu Song (420–479
CE) in the south and the Northern Wei (386–534 CE). Neither was able to
conquer the other, and thus both highly valued tributary embassies as symbols
of the universality and legitimacy of their realms. The smaller states in the region
pursued a variety of strategies in responding to this dynamic. Koguryŏ estab-
lished tributary relationships with both the Northern Wei and the Liu Song,
balancing them against each other. In 475 CE, Koguryŏ seized the Paekche
capital and killed the king, a disaster that Paekche only narrowly survived by
moving its capital southward. Consistent pressure from Koguryŏ led Paekche
and Silla to form an alliance, and both Paekche and Silla established tributary
relations with the Liu Song but not the Northern Wei. There is some evidence to
suggest that Paekche and Silla sought tributary relations with the Northern Wei –
in 472 CE they unsuccessfully appealed to the Northern Wei for support in
attacking Koguryŏ – but for the most part the records suggest that they were
only able to sustain diplomatic relations with the southern dynasty of the time.12
The relationship between Paekche and Yamato during this period remains some-
thing of a mystery. The Nihon shoki account of Yūryaku’s reign claims that
11
Koguryŏ in 372 CE and Paekche in 406 CE. Paekche received investiture from the Eastern Jin in
416 CE, marking the first time they had established a tributary relationship and received
recognition under the name Paekche. Samguk sagi, trans. Best (2006, 274, 276). Best (2006,
88–89) notes that this mission is not recorded in the Jinshu (Book of Jin) but is confirmed in the
Songshu.
12
Jonathan Best (2006, 71–74) suggests that Paekche’s lack of relations with the Northern Wei
may have been due to successful efforts by Koguryŏ to block Paekche access.
72 Nadia Kanagawa
Paekche was a Yamato tributary state, but this account is clearly unreliable, and
the narrative does nothing to explain a major gap in Paekche–Yamato relations
from 479 to 504 CE. Taking a step back to survey the new regional dynamics, we
find that Paekche, Silla, and Yamato sent tribute to establish relationships with
the southern Liu Song, balancing the ongoing threat from Koguryŏ, which had
relationships with both the Liu Song and the Northern Wei.
The Songshu records a memorial sent by the Yamato ruler Wu (J. Bu) to
the court of the Liu Song in 478 CE that offers insight into how tribute and
investiture diplomacy functioned in these circumstances.13 In it, Wu follows
the classic diplomatic protocols of tributary relations by describing his realm
as a loyal subject to the great Liu Song court and its “Heavenly Polestar.”
The tributary framework did not allow the possibility of acknowledging
more than one court or Heavenly Sovereign, and thus in sending envoys
with tribute, Wu materially contributed to the construction of the Liu Song
as the only empire on the continent. He went on to request confirmation for
the title “Commissioner Bearing Credentials, Inspector General of the
Various Military Affairs in the Seven Lands of Wa, Paekche, Silla, Imna,
Kara, Jinhan, and Mohan, Great General who maintains Peace in the East,
King of Wa.” The Liu Song ruler responded by granting all but one of the
requested titles – Paekche is conspicuously absent from the list of titles
granted, most likely because Paekche was already a tributary of the Liu
Song.14 Even as he describes Wa as a vassal on the outer borders of the Liu
Song, Wu also boasted of his pacification of fifty-five lands of “hairy people”
and sixty-six lands of “various barbarians.” As Duthie puts it, Wu thus
created and requested recognition for a “fiction within a fiction” – the idea
there was a separate Wa-centered “all under heaven” under the umbrella of
the Liu Song empire.15 The Wa example demonstrates that participation in
tributary relationships with continental empires did not prevent smaller
states in East Asia from pursuing their own imperial ambitions.16
13
Wu is thought to correspond to both “Wakatakiru” in the Inariyama sword inscription and to the
ruler generally known by the posthumous name of Yūryaku, who appears as Ōhatsuse
Wakatakeru in the Nihon shoki and Kojiki.
14
The title granted was: “Commissioner Bearing Credentials, Inspector General of the Various
Military Affairs in the Six Lands of Wa, Silla, Imna, Kara, Chinhan, and Mohan, Great General
who maintains Peace in the East, King of Wa.” Wa rulers had reportedly sent embassies to the
Liu Song court in 438 and 451 as well, and in both cases they had requested confirmation of
a similar string of titles. In 438, the only title granted was “Great General who maintains Peace
in the East, King of Wa.” In 451, titles were granted for Japan, Kaya, Silla, Imna, Chinhan, and
Mohan, with Kaya a substitution for Paekche. See Best 2006, 73–75. For a full translation of the
478 memorial and analysis of its implications in the emergence of Yamato imperial imaginary,
see Duthie 2014, 33–39.
15
Duthie 2014, 32.
16
This is only one example of such a claim, which were by no means limited to Yamato. The
famous 414 CE Kwanggaet’o stele made the dubious claim the Paekche and Silla had long been
paying tribute to Koguryŏ. Best 2006, 84–87.
By the mid-sixth century, the pattern of alliances on the Korean peninsula

had shifted again. Simultaneous threats from Koguryŏ, which continued to put
pressure on the northern border, and from Silla, which was beginning to expand
into the Imna region, caused the Paekche ruler King Muryǒng (r. 501–523 CE)
to resume diplomatic contact with the Yamato court in 504 CE.17 The Nihon
shoki records a flurry of embassies between Paekche and Yamato throughout
the sixth century.18 The goal of many of these embassies was to gain support in
resisting Silla’s efforts to expand into Imna while also fending off Koguryŏ to
the north. Silla successfully moved to take territory from both Paekche and
Koguryŏ early in the sixth century, pursued their advantage in the 530s and
540s by taking further territory from Paekche, and by 562 CE had conquered
Imna and fended off an attempted Yamato–Paekche retaliation.19 By the end of
the sixth century, the alliance between Silla and Paekche had completely
deteriorated, as had the last of the Northern and Southern dynasties.
The Rise of the Sui

The rise of the Sui brought an end to a period of division and instability in China,
but the consolidation of power into the hands of a single continental empire also
disrupted the diplomatic order that had structured East Asia for several hundred
years. Paekche, Silla, Koguryŏ, and Yamato no longer had a choice of continental
empires to engage in tributary and investiture relations, and each pursued intense
diplomatic contact with the Sui as they maneuvered for support in their ongoing
conflicts with each other. Koguryŏ sent multiple tribute embassies to the Sui in
the 590s and received investiture, Silla received investiture from the Sui in 594
CE and sent tribute envoys in 596 CE, while Paekche first established formal
diplomatic contact with the Sui in 598 CE and Yamato sent its first envoys in 600
CE.20 Even as they sent envoys with tribute to the Sui court, each of these realms
was also acutely aware of the threat that the Sui posed and sought ways to balance
nominal submission to the Sui with other alliances.
One way that all three Korean peninsula states sought to balance the Sui
was engaging in what Duthie has called “imperializing” diplomacy with
Yamato, sending envoys with tribute and requesting recognition and military
17
Nihon shoki, trans. Aston (1972), 1:406.
18
After the 504 embassy that reopened diplomatic relations, embassies are recorded in 505, 512,
513, 531, 540, 543, 545, 546, 547, 552, 553, 555, 561, and 575. See Best (2006, 110–128) for an
overview of Paekche–Yamato relations in this period.
19
On Silla’s taking territory from Paekche and Koguryŏ, see Samguk sagi, trans. Shultz and Kang
(2013, 121–122, 123–126). On Silla’s conquest of Imna and defense of the territory, see Samguk
sagi, trans. Best (2006, 338).
20
Best (2006, 158–159) notes that Paekche was in contact with the Sui before this point, and that
they were likely relying on a positive 589 CE interaction between their king and Emperor Wen
(r. 581–604 CE), founder of the Sui.
74 Nadia Kanagawa
support.21 There are no records of Yamato envoys to continental empires

between the Wu memorial of 478 CE and the first envoy to the Sui in 600 CE,
recorded in the Suishu (Book of Sui, c. 636). Given Yamato’s apparent lack of
contact with the continent, it is possible that the Korean peninsula states sought to
position Yamato as an “empire” that could help balance the Sui. It was in this
context that the Yamato ruler sent an embassy to the Sui emperor to proclaim
Yamato’s imperial status in 607 CE, with a famous letter that opened with the
phrase: “The son of heaven where the sun rises writes to the son of heaven where
the sun sets.”22 The classic Sinic imperial order certainly did not allow for the
possibility of two sons of heaven, and the Suishu records the annoyance of the
Sui ruler at receiving this message. Nevertheless, the Sui reportedly accepted
Yamato’s envoy and sent envoys of their own to Yamato the following year. Lee
Sungshi recently argued, on somewhat shaky grounds, that Yamato’s message to
the Sui court was crafted by Koguryŏ advisors at the Yamato court. Whether or
not this is the case, Lee is much more persuasive in arguing that the Sui tolerated
the irritating Yamato message primarily because they were concerned about the
possibility of a Yamato–Koguryŏ alliance.23
In spite of their ongoing diplomatic relationship, tension between the Sui
empire and Koguryŏ was a constant in this period. Because the Sui rulers
presented themselves as the successors to the Han dynasty, they saw their claim
to the territory of the former Han commanderies – seized by Koguryŏ in the
fourth century – as a matter of course.24 Koguryŏ rulers were not passive in the
face of this looming threat. In 598 CE, Koguryŏ invaded Sui territory, and its
rulers were consequently stripped of the titles they had received from the Sui,
but when they apologized for the incursion the Sui reinstated the titles. This
nominal tribute and investiture relationship was upset again when the Sui
discovered that Koguryŏ had been working to find allies to limit their expan-
sion. The Suishu records a 607 CE meeting between the Sui emperor and the
khan of the Eastern Turks during which the Sui emperor was informed that
Koguryŏ had been making secret overtures to the Eastern Turks. Lee Sungshi
has translated the Suishu record of this meeting as follows:
At the tent of Qimin Khan, there happened to be an envoy from Koguryŏ who attempted
to conspire with the Turks. The Qimin Khan did not dare hide him and brought the
Koguryŏ envoy to [the] Yang Emperor of the Sui Dynasty.25
According to the Sui records, Emperor Yang responded to this incident by
demanding that Koguryŏ formally submit to Sui authority, which the Koguryŏ
ruler refused to do.
21
Duthie 2014, 55.
22
Duthie (2014, 40–45) includes a translation of the full passage, as well as relevant passages of
the differing Suishu and Nihon shoki accounts of this interaction.
23
S. Lee 2007, 119–151. 24 Xiong 2006, 214–216. 25 S. Lee 2007, 131.
Following this episode, other states in the region began to use their tributary
missions to exploit the conflict between the Sui and Koguryŏ to their own
advantages by drawing the Sui into the region to distract and weaken Koguryŏ.
In 607 CE, Paekche sent envoys asking the Sui to punish Koguryŏ for incur-
sions into Paekche territory. Silla, which had its own conflict with Koguryŏ in
604 CE, sent a similar request to the Sui in 608 CE. These requests, combined
with the Sui belief in their claim to Koguryŏ’s territory and fear that Koguryŏ
was plotting to weaken their realm led the Sui emperor to take action. He
ordered a large force to attack Koguryŏ in 609 CE. The first attack ended in
failure when late summer rains made it impossible for the Sui troops to advance
further. A subsequent major attack in 613 CE was again unsuccessful, and the
Sui ruler’s excessive use of resources for this campaign led to major rebellions
in his own realm. In spite of these defeats and the mounting resistance to them
in the Sui empire, the ruler ordered another major campaign in 614 CE. The Sui
troops had some successes in this campaign, and they managed to reach the
Koguryŏ capital, where they extracted a promise of submission from the
Koguryŏ ruler. That promise was never fulfilled, and Emperor Yang’s call for
another massive campaign against Koguryŏ went unanswered. His extreme
expenditures on projects such as the Grand Canal and also on the costly and
unsuccessful campaigns in Koguryŏ had turned the people of the realm against
him. By 618 CE he had been murdered and the Sui dynasty had collapsed.
Although the fall of the Sui removed the immediate threat from Koguryŏ’s
borders, the impact of the unification of the Northern and Southern dynasties
had reshaped the dynamics of the region, and the new relationships and
strategies that had formed would continue to play out during the following
Tang dynasty.
The First East Asian World War

When the Tang dynasty was established in 618 CE, it worked to distinguish
itself from the Sui in a number of ways but also largely inherited Sui tributary
relations in East Asia. All of the Korean peninsula states were quick to send
envoys with tribute and to receive investiture from the Tang. Even as they
recognized the potential threat that the Tang posed to their status as independent
states, each of these states also attempted to use tributary status with the Tang to
gain the upper hand in their ongoing conflicts with peninsular rivals.
One of the immediate questions facing the new Tang ruler was how he would
handle relations with Koguryŏ. The collapse of the Sui after repeated disastrous
campaigns against Koguryŏ would have been an unavoidable reality for Tang
leaders, and Tang official histories suggest that the first emperor was not
inclined to go on the offensive in Koguryŏ. Instead, he sent envoys with gifts
of Daoist texts and engaged in exchanges of prisoners of war that normalized
76 Nadia Kanagawa
relations between the two realms. But, as Zhenping Wang describes in his
analysis of Tang foreign policy during this period, the records indicate that
Tang ministers cautioned the ruler against this approach. In 624 CE, when the
emperor planned to send an investiture envoy to Koguryŏ with a conciliatory
message, one of his ministers argued not only that Koguryŏ occupied territory
that had belonged to the former Han commanderies, but also that Koguryŏ’s
existence on the Tang borders was an untenable threat to the Tang position in
the region that would eventually have to be addressed.26 The next several
decades would be marked by escalating tension between Koguryŏ and the
Tang empire.
Much as they had done during the Sui dynasty, the other states in the region
sought to use the tension between the Tang empire and Koguryŏ to their
advantage. Efforts to draw the Tang into the conflicts on the Korean peninsula
began early – in 626 CE both Paekche and Silla sent envoys to the Tang
complaining that Koguryŏ was preventing them from sending tribute and
asking the Tang ruler to take action. While this conflict was resolved with
a Tang-facilitated apology letter from Koguryŏ, it marked the emergence of
a pattern in which Paekche and Silla both regularly sought to involve the Tang
in disputes in the region. Following the accession of the new Tang ruler Taizong
(r. 626–649 CE) in 626 CE, the Tang succeeded in subduing the Eastern Turks.
This shift was significant in that it freed the Tang to devote greater attention and
resources to the Korean peninsula. The official histories also portray Taizong as
having had a strong personal interest in retaking territory held by Koguryŏ, and
describe envoys he sent to gather information about the realm and its fortifica-
tions in 631 CE. But even with Taizong’s more aggressive attitude toward
Koguryŏ, it would take over a decade, a major internal crisis in Koguryŏ, and
repeated requests from Silla to convince the Tang to attack.
In 642 CE, the ruler of Koguryŏ and over 100 members of his court were
murdered in a bloody coup d’état orchestrated by a regional chieftain named Yŏn
Kaesomun. Kaesomun then seized control of the realm and installed the king’s
younger brother as a puppet ruler.27 News of the coup quickly reached the Tang
court, where Taizong reportedly declared the overthrow of the Koguryŏ king –
who had spent time at the Tang court – intolerable. But even with this sign of
upheaval and weakness in Koguryŏ’s leadership, Taizong was persuaded to
proceed with relative caution. The Tang sent an envoy to the king’s funeral but
also granted recognition to the new ruler installed by Yŏn Kaesomun.28
26
Z. Wang 2013, 56.
27
For a full account of the coup as described in the Jiu Tangshu (Old Book of Tang) and Xin
Tangshu (New Book of Tang) see Z. Wang 2013, 57–58. The coup is also recorded in the Nihon
shoki, which describes envoys reporting the death of the king and 180 courtiers. Nihon shoki,
trans. Aston (1972), 2:172.
28
Z. Wang (2013, 56–80) gives a much more detailed recounting of the events of these wars.
Through the upheaval in Koguryŏ, Silla had continued to appeal to the Tang
for support in resisting Paekche and Koguryŏ military incursions, and in 643
CE the Taizong ordered Koguryŏ to cease attacks on Silla. The order was likely
both a real test of how the new leaders in Koguryŏ would respond to Tang
influence and a pretext for taking steps toward an invasion. When Kaesomun
defied the order, the Tang began preparations to invade Koguryŏ, ordering
Paekche, Silla, and other tributaries to provide support. Taizong also made the
highly unusual announcement that he would personally lead the campaign. The
scale of the conflict was significant, with a reported 60,000 troops traveling to
Koguryŏ over land, and further forces sent by sea. Silla is said to have sent
50,000 troops to join the Tang forces in 645 CE, but Paekche broke with the
Tang and sent troops and weapons to support Koguryŏ. While the Tang were
able to secure several major victories over Koguryŏ troops, reportedly killing
as many as 20,000 and capturing 30,000 more in a battle, they were ultimately
unable to break the resistance of the city of Anshi. Taizong eventually returned
to his capital in 646 CE, having suffered the loss of thousands of soldiers during
the return journey through the winter cold.
Immediately following the Tang return to their capital, Koguryŏ sent envoys
to apologize for the conflict and attempt to reinstate the tributary relationship.
The Tang dynastic histories report that Taizong rejected these overtures and
accused Koguryŏ of sending letters that failed to follow proper diplomatic
protocols and treating Tang ambassadors poorly.29 This episode marks a rare
instance in which the Tang rejected tribute outright, and the decision to do so
was a strong signal that the Tang intended to continue its war on Koguryŏ.
Meanwhile, the pattern of alliances in the region had shifted. Up until 645
CE, the Tang had accepted tribute from Paekche and sent envoys to confer the
title of “king” to a series of its rulers, but when Paekche failed to send military
support for the Tang campaign in Koguryŏ and instead used the conflict as an
opportunity to seize territory from Silla, the Tang stance changed. Silla con-
tinued to position itself as a loyal tributary in need of protection from the Tang,
and sent envoys imploring the Tang to punish Paekche for its actions. Paekche
stopped sending tributary missions to the Tang in 645 CE and instead shifted
focus toward its relationships with Yamato and Koguryŏ. As a result, when the
Tang began preparing another force to return to Koguryŏ in 647 CE, their new
strategy centered on defeating Paekche first and using it as a base from which to
launch one part of a pincer movement that would allow them to defeat
Koguryŏ. The Tang sent small groups of troops to the Korean peninsula in
647 CE with the goal of disrupting agriculture in Koguryŏ and weakening it in
advance of a much larger invasion the following year. However, this campaign
was abandoned when Taizong died in 649 CE. By this point, a clear set of
29
The Jiu Tangshu and Xin Tangshu are both cited in Z. Wang 2013, 67.
78 Nadia Kanagawa
alliances had emerged, with Koguryŏ, Yamato, and Paekche on one side, and
Silla and the Tang on the other.
When Gaozong (r. 649–683 CE) took the Tang throne, he received and
accepted congratulatory envoys from all three Korean peninsula kingdoms,
reportedly urging them all to be peaceful with each other. But conflict and
competition among the Korean kingdoms continued over the next decade, and
as Silla faced significant military threats from Koguryŏ and Paekche on both its
northern and western boundaries, it continued to appeal to the Tang for aid. As
in earlier periods, many of these requests for support were framed as com-
plaints that Koguryŏ was preventing Silla from sending tribute to the Tang,
a key strategy for persuading the Tang that taking action against Koguryŏ was
in their own interest. Planning for the final phase of the conflict began after 655
CE, when an envoy from Silla traveled to the Tang court and reported that
Koguryŏ and Paekche had again seized territory from them. Gaozong
responded by ordering preparations for another major campaign against
Koguryŏ and Paekche. Once again, the Tang strategy would be to begin by
attacking Paekche in order to use it as a launching pad for a later attack against
Koguryŏ.
In 660 CE, the Tang reportedly sent 120,000 soldiers and 1,900 ships to
attack Paekche. Working with the Silla forces, the Tang troops were able to
destroy Paekche and capture the king in a matter of months. While it seemed
that Paekche had been destroyed as an independent state, the Yamato court
mounted a counterattack designed to restore the ruling house. A Paekche prince
who had been sent to Yamato as a hostage before the war was equipped for
battle and sent back to the peninsula with a Yamato naval force of 400 ships.
Yamato’s foray into the conflicts on the Korean peninsula ended in complete
disaster. In short order, the entire Yamato fleet was destroyed at the 663 CE
Battle of the Paek River, a major blow to Yamato and the end of any real hopes
of restoring the Paekche royalty. The remaining Yamato troops retreated, and
Tang and Silla forces turned their attention to Koguryŏ.
In spite of the combined efforts of the Tang and Silla forces, fighting in
Koguryŏ dragged on inconclusively for years. Early campaigns inflicted sig-
nificant losses on Koguryŏ forces but failed to capture the capital or to break
Koguryŏ resistance. As Zhenping Wang notes in his account of the war, it was
ultimately a second major internal upheaval that brought about Koguryŏ’s
defeat.30 After the death of Yŏn Kaesomun in 666 CE, Koguryŏ courtiers
split their support among his sons. The brothers initially attempted to rule
jointly, but the Tang records indicate that the elder brother became convinced
that his younger brothers were conspiring against him and fled. He sent over-
tures to the Tang, offering his submission in return for protection. The Tang
30
Z. Wang 2013, 80–81.
were quick to seize this opportunity, which gave the Tang–Silla forces the
opening they needed to finally destroy Koguryŏ and capture its king in 668 CE.
At this point, both Paekche and Koguryŏ had been reconfigured into territories
directly ruled by the Tang.
With the decisive defeat of its rivals on the Korean peninsula, Silla imme-
diately pivoted toward efforts to consolidate its control of the area and to expel
the Tang forces. Although it had by this point pursued a strategy of outward
subservience and loyalty to the Tang for decades, the Samguk sagi records
suggest that Silla leaders had long recognized that the Tang were both
a potential threat and a potential ally. When the Tang failed to fulfill earlier
promises about returning territory to Silla, Silla rulers took action. In 668 CE,
Silla sent envoys to Yamato to reopen contact, which had ceased in 655 CE.
They followed with a mission bringing tribute in 669 CE, and Yamato
responded by sending an envoy to Silla in 670 CE. The flurry of diplomatic
contact between Yamato and Silla continued as Silla began to support groups in
Koguryŏ and Paekche that resisted and rebelled against the Tang.
By this point, the Tang were relying on a seriously overextended military to
maintain their hold on the region, so Silla’s strategy of encouraging constant
resistance took a toll. As the Tibetans had become an increasingly urgent
problem on the western frontier, the Tang had to divert attention and resources
away from the northeast, and by 679 CE the Tang had abandoned the peninsula,
allowing Silla to consolidate its control over the territory. Over the course of the
680s, Tang–Silla relations would gradually improve, and Silla would once
again send regular envoys bearing tribute to the Tang court and receiving
investiture from the Tang ruler.31 As a result of the shock of its defeat,
Yamato rulers embarked on a major campaign of centralization that would
see it adopt new law codes, create a system of realmwide defenses, and
eventually a new conception of its rulers as fully divine sovereigns at the center
of their own “all under heaven.” Yamato also resumed contact with the Tang
after the conflict, sending envoys throughout the seventh and eighth centuries,
before eventually cutting off diplomatic contact in the late ninth century.32
Conclusion
The East Asia that emerged out of these decades of warfare looked significantly
different than the one that had existed for the 400 years of the Northern and
Southern dynasties. Where there had been multiple competing “centers,” there
was now one unified Tang dynasty, which would survive until 907 CE. Silla
31
Z. Wang (2013, 84) notes that Silla sent twenty-five envoys to the Tang between 686 and
886 CE.
32
The last Yamato envoys to go to the Tang left in 838 CE, and a final envoy planned for 894 CE
was ultimately canceled.
80 Nadia Kanagawa
consolidated its control and endured as the dominant force on the Korean
peninsula until 935 CE, but the unification of the Korean peninsula that it had
accomplished would last for nearly 1300 years. Yamato’s massive defeat at the
hands of the Tang and Silla forces and the waves of refugees and returning
prisoners of war that came to Yamato in the subsequent years catalyzed the
process of centralization and state formation that had begun in the early seventh
century.33 The state that emerged at this time has gone through many significant
changes, but arguably some elements of the centralized structure and realm
created at this time would endure for hundreds of years.
Beyond the simple longevity of some of the political forms that emerged out
of this period of warfare in East Asia, examining the dynamics of tributary
relations during this period allows new insight into how they became
a fundamental structure of East Asian interstate interaction. While the basic
framework for tributary–empire interactions was established during the Han
dynasty, it was during the following period of disunion and competing centers
that the majority of the East Asian polities began to participate in tributary
relations. Diplomatic interactions structured around tribute and investiture
became critical for both smaller states and aspiring empires, which mutually
relied on these relationships to define and legitimize their rule. The idealized
tributary relationship demanded that all parties participate in the fiction that
there was only one center and that all subject states were unfailingly loyal to
this center, but in reality, smaller states sent tribute to multiple centers while
also pursuing their own imperial ambitions by structuring their interactions
with neighboring states according to the same hierarchical rules. During the
period of dynamic change brought about by the rise of the Sui and Tang,
tributary relationships remained critical, as each of the smaller states sought
the support of the new singular center. Ultimately, it was Silla that was able to
most effectively use its status as a tributary to draw the Tang into a conflict on
the Korean peninsula. Of course, the Silla strategy worked not only because the
Tang had interests of their own in the region, but also because their attention
was ultimately drawn away from the region by challenges on their western
border. With the Tang threat minimized, Silla and Yamato were once again able
to use tributary relations to maintain relatively stable economic and diplomatic
interactions across the region.
33
Batten 1986, 199–219. For more on the emergence of a centralized government in Yamato see
Piggott 1997.
5 The Founding of the Korean Chosŏn Dynasty,
1392
Ji-Young Lee
In a Korean film set in 1375, Musa: The Warrior, there is a scene where
a Ming Chinese official orders the arrest of Koryŏ Korean envoys arriving in
the Ming on a diplomatic mission. The Ming official shouts, “After murder-
ing our diplomatic envoy, Koryŏ has continued to dispatch spies in secrecy.
Now they send their military in the name of so-called diplomatic relations.”1
This scene portrays the tumultuous Koryŏ–Ming relationship after the Ming
empire’s founding, which replaced the Yuan empire in China in 1368.
The film offers a glimpse at the backdrop against which a new state
Chosŏn came into being in Korea in 1392, at the height of Koryŏ–Ming
military tensions. Albeit indirectly, the Yuan–Ming transition in China in
1368 provided an impetus for the Koryŏ–Chosŏn transition in Korea in
1392. In 1388, the Ming, having suppressed the remaining Mongol forces
of the predecessor Yuan empire led by Naghachu in the Liaodong region,
declared its plans to lay claim on the northeastern quadrant of the Korean
peninsula – the territory that Koryŏ king Kongmin had recovered from the
Yuan empire in 1356.2 Koryŏ Korea responded by sending top generals Yi
Sŏng-gye and Cho Min-su along with 40,000 forces to attack the Ming.3 At
the Sino-Korean border, however, Yi Sŏng-gye turned the army back on Wi-
wha Island in the Yalu River and headed back to the Koryŏ capital. He
dethroned incumbent Koryŏ king U and founded a new dynasty four years
later in 1392.
Scholars have long viewed the founding of Chosŏn Korea as the beginning
of its policy of sadae toward the Ming empire. Literally translated as “serving
1
Musa: The Warrior. Directed by Kim Sung-su, South Korea: CJ Entertainment, 2001.
2
KSC, vol. 33, 1388 (U 14). In this chapter, KSC refers to Koryŏ-sa chŏryo [Abridged essence of
Koryŏ history], comp. and trans. Han’guk kojŏn Pŏnyŏgwŏn (1968), which I accessed through
the DB Korean Classics (http://db.itkc.or.kr/dir/item?itemId=BT#/dir/list?itemId=BT&gubun=
book). KSC vol. 28, 1369 (KM 18), for example, indicates Koryŏ-sa chŏryo, vol. 28, the year
1369, which was the eighteenth year of the reign of the Koryŏ king Kongmin.
3
See KSC, vol. 33, 1388 (U 14), which states that the Koryŏ forces numbered 38,830 soldiers and
11,600 aides.
81
82 Ji-Young Lee
the great,” the principle of sadae is often linked to Chosŏn’s reputation for having
been a model tributary of the Ming empire.4 Yi Sŏng-gye had opposed the Koryŏ
king U and commander-in-chief Ch’oe Yŏng’s plans for taking military action
against the Ming in 1388. His famous dictum, “Four Reasons Why We Should
Not Invade the Ming,” argued against the Liaodong campaign, “because it was
wrong for a small state to go against a great state.”5 When Yi Sŏng-gye was
enthroned as the new king of Chosŏn on July 17, 1392, the very next day he sent
an envoy to the Ming capital and received Ming recognition of his new state.
Throughout his reign, the new king made tremendous efforts to secure the Ming
emperor Hongwu’s investiture – an imperial seal and edict – even after the
latter’s refusals. Consider, however, that by 1397 Chosŏn Korea was preparing
for yet another campaign in Liaodong against the Ming, with Yi Sŏng-gye’s
approval. The plan did not materialize, but how do we make sense of Chosŏn
Korea’s behavior of adopting a policy of sadae on the one hand and planning for
a military campaign on the other?
In this chapter, I argue that the key to understanding Chosŏn Korea’s
seemingly contradictory behavior toward the Ming lies in Yi Sŏng-gye’s efforts
to legitimate his rule and consolidate domestic authority as a new king, in the
process of constructing a new political order after toppling a nearly 500-
year-old Koryŏ Korea. Contrary to the popular narrative, the sadae was
a guiding principle of Chosŏn Korea’s dealings with the Ming empire, but
did not dictate the specifics of foreign policy behavior, at least in the early
Chosŏn period. From Chosŏn Korea’s perspective, participating in the tribute
practice of receiving investiture from the Chinese emperor – that is, upholding
the sadae principle – was a means by which it sought to construct a new ruler
identity, in the form of external validation. The episode of Chosŏn Korea’s
founding is, thus, a story of how Chosŏn’s domestic order building is inter-
twined with the process of Ming’s international order building by way of tribute
practices of investiture and gift-exchanges.
The idea that Chosŏn Korea was a model tributary may be accurate, in the
sense that Chosŏn was a solid participant of a Ming-centered hierarchical
international order, as evidenced by more frequent and regularized interactions
with the Ming than other actors through tribute practices. However, until
Chosŏn–Ming relations reached that point of equilibrium and stability, the
contentious Koryŏ–Ming relations continued into Chosŏn–Ming relations
until 1398, the year the Ming founder Hongwu died before the Ming fell into
a civil war. This was also the year that Yi Sŏng-gye’s reign ended in Chosŏn
without having received investiture from Hongwu.
More broadly, the purpose of this chapter is to examine the dramatic way in
which Chosŏn Korea was founded in 1392 in relation to the Ming empire, with
4 5
For a good discussion, see Clark 1998. KSC, vol. 33, 1388 (U 14).
The Founding of the Korean Chosŏn Dynasty, 1392 83
an eye toward a deeper understanding of the nature and workings of what is

known as the tribute system.6 This chapter’s focus on the founding of Chosŏn
Korea and early Chosŏn–Ming relations provides a good analytical window
into the workings of the tribute system at times of conflicting interests between
China and its neighboring powers. The Chinese-centered hierarchical order in
early modern East Asia did not rest on imperial China’s preponderant military
and economic power over others only. Rather, the making of Chinese hege-
mony had more to do with the taken-for-granted, repeated performances of gift-
exchange and investiture practices of the tribute system, which resulted in
establishing the Chinese-centered view of the world derived from the
Chinese Confucian culture as the international norm.
This “symbolic domination” of the Chinese emperor’s ruler identity above
that of other “barbarian” kings in the collective belief of contemporaries could
have actual political consequences in the neighboring powers.7 By the late
fourteenth century, the Ming emperor’s seal and edict were the socially deter-
mined tokens of kingly authority in Chosŏn Korea that distinguished
a legitimate ruler from other actors who were vying for power but not entitled
to rule. Once the Chinese Confucian worldview was taken for granted as
determining what was legitimate and socially acceptable, that constrained the
foreign policy choices that Chosŏn could make due to domestic consequences.
Not surprisingly, those symbols of legitimacy mattered a great deal to Yi Sŏng-
gye, especially because of the manner in which he came onto the throne – via
a coup.
The chapter demonstrates that the dichotomy in the literature that sets the
tribute system up as an antithesis of war and violence does not hold, and that
the investiture ritual could become a form of negative soft power held by
the Ming.8 At the heart of their diplomatic rupture and tensions were Chosŏn
Korea’s and the Ming empire’s rivalries over the Liaodong region, located
strategically at the border area, where the remaining Mongol forces, Koreans,
and the Jurchens resided. From the perspective of the Ming empire, to the
extent that foreign rulers needed its investiture for reasons of their own
domestic politics, tribute practices could be used as a tool of coercion and
as political leverage, as much as they were a mechanism of peace and
stability.
In the remainder of the chapter, I first examine historical details surrounding
Koryŏ Korea’s military campaigns in the Liaodong region and a path to
Chosŏn’s founding. Second, I address the question of Chosŏn’s sadae policy
6
Much of the chapter’s discussions, especially on the tribute system that focuses on symbolic
domination, legitimation, signaling and coercion, draw from my earlier works. See J.-Y. Lee
2013; J.-Y. Lee 2016a; J.-Y. Lee 2016b.
7
On symbolic domination, Bourdieu 1997, 159–197. 8 J.-Y. Lee 2013.
84 Ji-Young Lee
vis-à-vis the Ming and examine the idea that Chosŏn was a model tributary.
Third, I show how the Ming empire was able to use the investiture ritual as
a means to control Chosŏn’s behavior when their interests collided over the
Liaodong region. In the fourth section, I present my argument that sheds light
on the role of investiture in the process of building a new domestic order
within Chosŏn Korea, focusing on domestic actors and balances of power
among them. I conclude the chapter with some thoughts on what the founding
of Chosŏn Korea tells international relations scholars about hierarchy in
general.
Military Campaigns and the Path to Chosŏn’s Founding

The founding of Chosŏn Korea in 1392 and the puzzling behavior that ensued
vis-à-vis the Ming empire should be placed in the broader historical context of
East Asian international relations in the late fourteenth century, where two
kinds of international order – one centered on the declining Yuan empire
(1279–1368) (the Northern Yuan, 1368–1635) and the other on the rising
Ming empire (1368–1644) – formed overlapping centers of international
authority. Geographically, Korea was situated in the middle of Ming–
Northern Yuan strategic rivalries in terms of the China–Manchuria (Liaodong
region)–Korea triangle in Northeast Asia.9 The establishment of the Ming
empire in 1368 marked a significant turning point in East Asian history
where the Yuan empire’s imperialism transitioned into a hegemonic mode of
international order. The Yuan’s exploitation of Koryŏ Korea had been notor-
ious, as the Mongol rulers “regarded everything and everyone in a conquered
nation as absolute chattels.”10 Tribute practices during the Yuan period were
instruments of economic exploitation and of physical, as opposed to symbolic,
domination.
Koryŏ king Kongmin (r. 1351–1374), witnessing the decline of the Yuan
power by the mid-fourteenth century, sent troops and recovered the north-
eastern quadrant of the Korean peninsula that had been ruled under the Yuan
Ssangsŏng Commandery in 1356.11 In 1368, the Ming forces drove the Yuan
away from the capital. The Yuan requested Koryŏ Korea to send troops to help
“restore Yuan,” but Kongmin refused.12 When the Ming founder Hongwu sent
his envoy to Koryŏ to announce its founding in 1368, Kongmin took immediate
action and severed its tributary relations with the Yuan empire. He sent
9
P. Yun 1998.
10
Herthorn 1963, 70. Similarly, Kim Han-gyu explains the dynamics in his book. See Kim Han-
gyu 1999, 507–521.
11
For the number of forces, see KSC vol. 29, 1370 (KM 19).
12
KSC, vol. 28, 1369 (KM 18); KSC, vol. 29, 1370 (KM 19). For a detailed description of the
circumstances, see Kim Yŏng-su 2006, 332–333.
a tribute-bearing diplomatic mission to the Ming capital and received

Hongwu’s investiture as king of Koryŏ, pronouncing Koryŏ’s status as
a Ming tributary.13
Hoping that the Ming would take attacks as directed against the Mongols,
around the same time in 1370, Kongmin sent armed forces led by Koryŏ
general Yi Sŏng-gye to the Liaodong region, the northern border area adjacent
to the Ming, and recaptured the Tongnyŏng Administration lost to the Yuan
empire.14 While being aware of the risk it was taking vis-à-vis the Ming, Koryŏ
Korea did not back down even after a warning from the Ming.15 Hongwu grew
increasingly suspicious of Koryŏ’s intentions in the Liaodong region, while
Koryŏ felt fearful of a possible invasion by the Ming. Hongwu sought to
reassure Koryŏ, stating, “I hear that your country harbors many doubts [about
the Ming]. Under Heaven, there is China and there are foreign countries. Koryŏ
is a foreign country . . . In the past, a Sui emperor made the mistake of waging
troops and subsequently was mocked. This is something that I detest the
most.”16
Koryŏ–Ming relations continued to deteriorate, however. Several Koryŏ
envoys sent to the Ming did not make it back home. After the murder of
Kongmin by his own eunuch, a new Koryŏ ruler could not secure investiture
from Hongwu.17 Hongwu tried to limit the number of Koryŏ’s Ming tributary
missions to once every three years, banning Koryŏ envoys from entering the
Ming territory for fear that these envoys were collecting intelligence about the
Ming.18 Amid the fear of impending Ming invasions, King U now turned to
receive investiture from the Northern Yuan. These in turn fueled further suspi-
cions on the part of Hongwu who feared Koryŏ might cooperate with its
adversary, the Northern Yuan, against the Ming.19 Hongwu’s investiture of
U as king of Koryŏ, which came ten years after U’s enthronement, was made
possible only when Koryŏ paid large sums of tribute to the Ming empire.20
13
KSC, vol. 28, 1369 (KM 18). 14 KSC, vol. 29, 1370 (KM 19).
15
Kim Yŏng-su 2006, 337–339.
16
Hongwu’s remarks recorded in Koryŏ-sa in the year 1372, the twenty first year of the reign of the
Koryŏ king Kongmin, quoted in Kim Yŏng-su 2006, 342 (author’s translation from Korean).
See also Yun Sŏng-ik 2007, 120.
17
The Ming released them in 1377, the fifth year of the reign of U, which marked a brief détente
before the 1388 campaign.
18
KSC, vol. 33, 1388 (U 14). KSC, vol. 31, 1379 (U 5) records that the Ming warned Koryŏ of its
relations with the Northern Yuan urging it to avoid “regrettable” behavior. See also TS, July 28,
1393, available at http://sillok.history.go.kr/id/kaa_10207028_002. In this chapter, TS refers to
T’aejo Sillok [Annals of the Chosŏn Dynasty during the reign of T’aejo], comp. and trans.
Kuksa P’yŏnch’an Wiwŏnhoe, which I access through their digital archive (http://sillok
.history.go.kr/main/main.do).
19
For example, see KSC, vol. 31, 1379 (U 5).
20
KSC, vol. 32, 1385 (U 11). Koryŏ paid a large sum of goods, including horses, as tributes.
86 Ji-Young Lee
Internally, Kongmin’s Ming policy and the military campaign were both
designed to remove the pro-Yuan faction within Koryŏ – the relatives of the
Koryŏ-born Yuan empress Ki and other powerful families who benefited from
their association with the Yuan empire – and to embark on political reforms of
strengthening his kingly authority, which had been debilitated by the Yuan
rule.21 It is for this reason – domestic power politics – that in 1370 calling itself
a Ming tributary did not prevent Koryŏ Korea from sending armed forces to the
Liaodong region, knowing that such action would possibly risk a military
confrontation with Ming. In the same vein, in dealing with Hongwu, Koryŏ
Korea, after having become a Ming tributary state two years after the Ming’s
founding, actually switched back to becoming a tributary of the Northern Yuan,
only to make great endeavors to restore the relationship with the Ming to no
avail. In other words, Koryŏ kings sought to receive investiture but switched
sides between the Ming and the Northern Yuan to manage external relations,
but within the boundaries of serving their domestic political interests of creat-
ing and maintaining authority against opponents.
By 1387, the Ming military prevailed over the Mongol chieftain Naghachu in
the Liaodong region in Manchuria. In 1388, it subsequently announced plans to
lay claim on the formerly Yuan-controlled area in the northeastern quadrant of
the Korean peninsula, the same area Koryŏ king Kongmin recaptured in
1356.22 Koryŏ king U and his top aides and generals debated how to respond
to this challenge. Despite serious reservations on the part of a majority of
officials, Ch’oe Yŏng and U prevailed over Yi Sŏng-gye and his supporters and
decided to strike at the Ming. As 40,000 Koryŏ military forces were marching
toward the Sino-Korean border, led by Yi Sŏng-gye and Cho Min-su,23 this
became the defining moment that marked the end of Koryŏ as a long-lived
dynasty in Korea. Upon reaching Wi-wha Island at the border, Yi Sŏng-gye
turned the army back to the Koryŏ capital and dethroned U. In 1392, a new
dynasty was founded in Korea.
Once back in the capital, Yi Sŏng-gye restored the use of the Ming-era name
Hongwu and Ming attire, an unmistakable gesture signaling a pro-Ming
policy.24 In the four years between the 1388 campaign and the founding of
Chosŏn Korea, efforts for reforming a corrupt Koryŏ society took the form of
power struggles between moderates such as Yi Saek and progressives including
Yi Sŏng-gye, Cho Jun, and Chŏng To-jŏn,25 while they sought to manipulate
the symbolic power of the Ming emperor in ways that promoted their position
21
Park Won-ho 2005, 66; Kim Yŏng-su 2006, chapter 2. 22 KSC, vol. 33, 1388 (U 14).
23
See KSC, vol. 33, 1388 (U 14).
24
Kim Yŏng-su 2006, 565; KSC, vol. 33, 1388 (U 14) records that the Ming was to send its army
to confront the Koryŏ forces but stopped, as a Koryŏ envoy explained the situation.
25
Kim Han-gyu 1999; Kim Tang-taek 2011, 407–445.
within Koryŏ.26 The day after Yi Sŏng-gye was officially enthroned, his envoy
left for the Ming capital in pursuit of Hongwu’s recognition of the new state.27
Hongwu responded to the request positively. Yi Sŏng-gye sent Chŏng To-jŏn as
an envoy to express appreciation to Hongwu. At the request of those who
founded a new dynasty in Korea, the name Chosŏn was selected by the Ming,
one of the earliest acts considered as Chosŏn’s sadae toward the Ming.
However, within the span of forty years of the Ming founder Hongwu’s
reign, Korea either embarked on or prepared for a military campaign in the
Liaodong region three times vis-à-vis the Ming, while fully being aware of
a danger of going to war with the Ming. By 1397, Yi Sŏng-gye approved
military exercises designed for a campaign in the Liaodong region against the
Ming, which was spearheaded by his most trusted aides and the founding
fathers Chŏng To-jŏn and Nam Ŭn. Upon its establishment, Chosŏn embarked
on various measures to strengthen its military capabilities as early as 1393,
including military reforms, the production of maps, and military exercises.28
An entry in August 1398 of the Chosŏn Wangjo Sillok, the annals of the Chosŏn
dynasty, records the names of those Chosŏn officials to be penalized for their
negligence of military training. Chosŏn Korea was clearly aware that its
campaign in Liaodong would mean that it would confront the Ming militarily.29
The idea that a newly founded Chosŏn would strike at the Ming still appears
to be reckless. The number of men that Chosŏn Korea could enlist would have
been 200,000,30 whereas the Ming empire could call on more than 500,000
men, based on the number the second Ming emperor Jianwen mobilized a year
later in a civil war against his uncle.31 The question is, why did Chosŏn Korea
come to plan a military attack on the Ming, and why did the plan come to an end
abruptly in 1398?
The Question of Sadae and Chosŏn as a Model Tributary

The new state Chosŏn adopted the sadae kyorin (“serving the great, neighborly
relations”) as its guiding principle for foreign relations. Chŏng To-jŏn, a neo-
Confucian scholar and first chief state councilor of Chosŏn who was also in
charge of the military, envisioned relations with the Ming on the basis of the
Confucian notion of propriety and proper conduct, li. Chŏng’s ideas can be
traced back to ancient Chinese Confucian theorist Mencius’s (4 BCE) sadae:
“A man who serves a small state as the great power is one who enjoys Heaven’s
Reason; A man who serves a great power as the small state is one who shows
deference to Heaven’s Reason. He who enjoys Heaven’s Reason will protect
the world; He who shows deference to Heaven’s Reason will protect his
26
See Park Won-ho 2005, 87–90. 27 KSC, vol. 33, 1388 (U 14). 28 Ryu 1999, 13.
29
Park Won-ho 2002, 97. 30 Park Won-ho 2002, 98. 31 Park Won-ho 2002, 99.
88 Ji-Young Lee
state.”32 A renowned Confucian scholar Zhu Xi of the Southern Song (1126–-

1271) commented on sadae: “Heaven is li. It is naturally li that a great state
cares for a small state and a small state serves a great state.”33 However, the
popularized image of “sadaejuŭi (sadae-ism) Chosŏn,” one that is associated
with Chosŏn’s “loyalty” toward the declining Ming in the late sixteenth
century – refusing to end tributary relations even in the face of the looming
national security threats from the stronger Manchus – was not the kind of sadae
that Chŏng To-jŏn had in mind in the early Chosŏn period.
In fact, historians have argued that Chosŏn’s ideologue-like, rigid inter-
pretation of the sadae is only a post-Imjin War (1592–1598) phenomenon.34
According to Yu Kŭn-ho, the sadae was “neither the heart-felt willingness
toward the China-centered ideology (K. hwa-i; C. hua-i), nor the binding
treaty forcefully imposed by China.”35 At its heart, the sadae was a principle
of managing relations between the two states with asymmetrical power,
helping them to find an equilibrium in their bilateral relations where a less
powerful actor would not threaten the interests of the great power, while the
great power would respect noninterference in and autonomy of the less
powerful actor.
Historically, the equilibrium in stable Korea–China relations – a convergence
of interests between the two – did not look identical depending on the strategic
environment they were under. Under the multistate system until the domination
of Northeast Asia by the Mongols in the thirteenth century, Koryŏ Korea’s sadae
policy rested on the logic of power politics, changing sides in terms of who it
would send tribute to and receive investiture from, forming short-term align-
ments in the Northeast Asian theatre.36 Koryŏ received the title wang (king) not
just from the Song, but from the Liao and the Jin, depending on the shifting
power distribution at that time. Understanding the sadae principle in this way,
early Chosŏn Korea’s behavior of planning a military campaign is not necessarily
outside the boundaries of the thinkable.
When we take a deeper historical look at the origins and interactive devel-
opments of actual expressions of the sadae as a philosophical principle, the
tribute system can then be better defined more broadly as a bundle of diplo-
matic practices involving tribute and investiture, emerging from the “cultural
grammar” or “cultural script” of Confucian cosmology. When we think about
a tribute system, historian John K. Fairbank’s famous model of the “Chinese
world order” is the first thing that comes to mind. He argued that the Chinese
empire was governed by a set of ideas and practices developed by the rulers of
China over many centuries, focusing mainly on the periods of stability and
32
Mencius quoted in Yi Ik-ju 2005, 198–199 (author’s translation from Korean).
33
Zhu Xi, cited in Park Hong-kyu 2004, 12 (author’s translation from Korean).
34
Kye 2009; Yi Ik-ju 2005, 198–214; Yu 2004; P. Yun 1998. 35 Yu 2004, 25.
36
Sim Chae-sŏk 2002; P. Yun 1998.
peace.37 The tribute system during the Ming period, in particular, has been
considered as contributing to Asia’s long peace.38 Scholars have viewed the
kind of tributary relations that existed between Chosŏn Korea and the Ming
empire as showing evidence of this line of argument.
It is true that Chosŏn Korea’s relations with the Ming presented something akin
to the “most likely case” of how the tribute system functioned and how stability
might be achieved despite power asymmetry between the two states participating
in tribute practices. From the early fifteenth century, for nearly two hundred years
Chosŏn–Ming relations exemplified perhaps the most stable patterns of bilateral
relations within the tribute system framework in East Asia. With the exception of
Yi Song-gye, the first T’aejo (r. 1392–1398) and the Injo (r. 1623–1649), Chosŏn
kings received investiture - i.e., the title of king (K. kuwang; C. guiwang) from the
Ming emperors without much difficulty. The overall stable patterns of hierarchical
relations continued beyond the demise of the Ming empire in 1644 and even into
the Qing empire.39
Investiture (K. ch’aekpong; C. cefeng) refers to “a public and symbolic act
by which a person conferred a property, office, or right on another person by
means of a material symbol.”40 Underlying this equilibrium of Chosŏn–Ming
bilateral stability was the social understanding of authority relations embedded
in tribute practices. Participants of the tribute practices shared an understanding
of what it meant to pay tribute and to receive investiture. If A sent tribute to
B (as opposed to receiving one), it signified A’s acknowledgment of B’s
position as being superior to that of A; what followed was B’s granting of an
official title upon A (as opposed to receiving a title) with its rank below B. This
meant that B recognized A as a member of the hierarchical system that it
occupied.41
These regularized interactions in the form of tribute practices were condu-
cive to reproducing stability in Chosŏn–Ming relations, as they helped manage
expectations toward the other. Tribute practices, especially investiture ritual,
worked as a signaling mechanism. First, their performances were expected to
be regular and precise. When such expectations for regularity and precision
were not met, investiture ritual functioned as a litmus test, revealing informa-
tion about the state of bilateral ties. Note that investiture was, in essence, “an
action wrapped in a web of symbolism.”42 Its performance, therefore, allowed
Chosŏn and the Ming to hold strategic ambiguity when they communicated
their power relations and pursued their own interests. Taken together, their
37
Fairbank 1942, 129–149; Fairbank 1968; Fairbank 1969, 449–463.
38
For detailed discussion, see J.-Y. Lee 2016a, 56–78.
39
For detailed discussion, see J.-Y. Lee 2016a. 40 Parisse 2000, 732.
41
J.-Y. Lee 2016a, 47–49. See also Sim Chae-sŏk 2002; Kim Han-gyu 1999; Kim Han-gyu 2011.
42
Kertzer 1988, 9.
90 Ji-Young Lee
repeated participation in investiture practice sent signals to each other that they
were committed to the status quo, reproducing a reality of international
hierarchy.43
Investiture as a Means for Coercion

With the repetition of such interactions over a long period of time, what we
witness in late Chosŏn–Ming relations is that such acts of symbolic obeisance
designed to manage asymmetrical power relations with China externally
became a tool of internal power struggles within Chosŏn. Tribute practices
were not “mere symbolic acts” when their incentive structure created consti-
tuencies in domestic politics, especially among those Confucian scholar
bureaucrats who would have liked to create the reality in that image of
universal morality of Neo-Confucianism.
As Chosŏn kings and their Confucian scholar bureaucrats engaged in a form
of symbolic politics vis-à-vis the Ming, they manipulated external recognition
from the Ming emperor in ways that strengthened their positions against
domestic opponents. This in return gave the Ming emperor leverage to use
investiture as a means to serve its interest vis-à-vis Chosŏn. Precisely because
those contemporaries in Chosŏn took for granted investiture as being integral to
domestic legitimation, Chosŏn kings’ hands could be tied and they were
expected to pursue a Ming policy in a certain way. The politics of transforming
Koryŏ general Yi Sŏng-gye into a new king necessitated the Ming emperor’s
naming of him as king of Chosŏn.
Chosŏn–Ming relations exemplify that under the condition that domestic
legitimation was tied to investiture, the tribute system could be as much a tool
of coercion as it was a mechanism for bilateral stability. We arrive at a much more
varied picture of the tribute system that encompasses coercion, diplomatic
ruptures, and the use of force as well as peaceful engagement, when we examine
its workings from the perspective of Koryŏ/Chosŏn as well as the Ming/Qing
over time. Throughout the Ming period, the Ming founder Hongwu’s pronounce-
ment of the Ming’s intention of noninterference in other states’ internal affairs
guided its relations with Chosŏn.44 Compared to the Yuan’s relations with Koryŏ,
where the practice of investiture was not nominal but was used to control and/or
replace the incumbent king, the Ming tended not to use the investiture to extract
resources or compliance forcefully from Chosŏn. Historian Kye Seung-bum
shows that even when the Ming requested Chosŏn troops for its own campaigns
against the Mongols or the Jurchens, it did not make the investiture conditional
upon Chosŏn’s compliance with its requests.45
43
For a detailed discussion, see J.-Y. Lee 2013.
44 45
See Park Won-ho 2005; Kim Yŏng-su 2006. Kye 2009.
However, there were two important exceptions at the beginning and at the end
of Chosŏn–Ming relations, when the Ming manipulated the investiture practice
to its advantage while seeking to control Chosŏn’s behavior. In early Chosŏn–
Ming relations, despite having recognized the founding of Chosŏn immediately,
Hongwu refused to grant investiture to the Chosŏn founder Yi Sŏng-gye over
a dispute in the Liaodong region. It was only after Hongwu’s death that amid
a civil war in the Ming, the second Ming emperor was willing to grant the second
king, Chŏngjong, the title of king of Chosŏn. Hongwu’s coercive measures were
veiled and justified with Confucian propriety or past precedent but had more to
do with the Ming’s efforts to consolidate its position in a strategic border area.46
The Ming’s interest in the Liaodong region is expressed in the phrase
referring to the logic of “lips and teeth” or sunmang ch’ihan (“if you lose
your lips, your teeth will get cold”), referring to China’s strategic interest in the
northeast of the Korean peninsula. A Ming official Lu Kun’s memorial states,
“Chosŏn Korea is geographically located under our arm to the East. Pyongyang
is adjacent to the Yalu River to the West.”47 From his days as a Koryŏ general,
Yi Sŏng-gye, too, was fully aware of the strategic importance of the Liaodong
region and wanted to consolidate governance on the northeastern border near
the Tuman River.48
Chosŏn–Ming relations during much of the reigns of the Ming and Chosŏn
founders Hongwu and T’aejo Yi Sŏng-gye were a virtual repetition of tensions
captured in the scene in the film mentioned at the top of this chapter. In response
to Yi Sŏng-gye’s request for Ming recognition in July 1392, Hongwu’s reply
kept a friendly tone, declaring the Ming’s intention of maintaining noninter-
ference in Chosŏn’s internal affairs as long as there were no problems in the
border areas.49 Chosŏn returned the imperial seal the Ming had given to Koryŏ
king Kongmin, requesting a new seal. The diplomatic row began shortly
thereafter. In May 1393, Hongwu criticized Chosŏn for luring the Jurchens
into the Chosŏn territory and that Chosŏn bribed generals in Liaodong to drive
a wedge between Liaodong and the Ming.50 In its letter of June 1393, Chosŏn
sought to explain that it was a misunderstanding on the part of the Ming.51
Chosŏn envoys en route to the Ming capital were prohibited from passing
through the Liaodong region to travel to the Ming capital. Then in
September 1393, the Ming ordered Chosŏn to make only one embassy in
46
On this point, the Korean historical scholarship suggests many insights. See Park Won-ho 2002;
Kim Gyong-rok 2000, 1–54; Kim Yŏng-su 2006; J.-H. Lee 2006, 1–24; Clark 1998, 272–300;
Larsen 2013, 233–257; J.-Y. Lee 2013, 309–336.
47
Lu Kun, quoted in Han 1999, 32 (author’s translation from Korean).
48
Chong 2017a, 133–181.
49
TS, November 27, 1392. http://sillok.history.go.kr/id/kaa_10111027_001
50
TS, May 23, 1393. http://sillok.history.go.kr/id/kaa_10205023_001; for the details of the
diplomatic row that lasted until 1398, Chong 2017b and Park 2002.
51
TS, June 1, 1393. http://sillok.history.go.kr/id/kaa_10206001_001
92 Ji-Young Lee
three years – which was almost equivalent to the severing of diplomatic

relations.52 Hongwu, threatening that the Ming could invade at any moment,
blamed Chosŏn for harboring territorial ambitions toward the Liaodong region
and warned it not to create a problem at the border. The Ming insisted that
Chosŏn should send the letter writers to the Ming. Further, Hongwu demanded
either the first or second son of Yi Sŏng-gye should visit the Ming capital as part
of a tributary mission, a rare practice in the Ming’s foreign relations.
What is intriguing about the interactions is Yi Sŏng-gye’s reactions. In
response to all of these forceful demands from the Ming, Yi Sŏng-gye sought
to accommodate and even sent his son Yi Pang-wŏn. Only then did the Ming
allow him and his party to pass through the Liaodong region. Once Yi’s son
came back to Chosŏn, relations with the Ming seemed to recover from the
crisis. Yi Sŏng-gye sent back those who crossed the border from the Liaodong
back to the Ming.53 It was at this point that Yi Sŏng-gye requested an imperial
seal and edict again, expressing the desire that Hongwu grant him investiture as
king of Chosŏn.
To Yi Sŏng-gye’s dismay, Hongwu refused, stating that the king was “very
mean and cunning.” He further blamed Chosŏn that the letter requesting inves-
titure contained rude and derogatory characters in it and demanded that all of
those who wrote the letter should be sent to the Ming.54 Hongwu repeatedly told
Chosŏn that they should send him Chŏng To-jŏn, who Hongwu said had written
the state letters and believed was behind Chosŏn’s ambitions in the Liaodong
region.55 Chosŏn sought to reduce the tensions by saying that the languages of the
two countries were different and that the level of scholarship in Chosŏn was less
advanced than that of the Ming.56 In other words, Yi Sŏng-gye made tremendous
efforts and concessions and endeavored to receive investiture from Hongwu.
Then in 1396, Hongwu again demanded Chŏng To-jŏn should appear before
him in the Ming court, while threatening that he would kill all of the Chosŏn
envoys held in the Ming capital. Hongwu even demanded that Chosŏn should
send the wives and children of those envoys held in the Ming. By 1398, the
Chosŏn court turned increasingly hardline. Officials such as Pyŏn Jung-nyang
argued that Chosŏn should not send the families of the envoys to the Ming.57 It
is against this backdrop that in T’aejo Sillok we begin to see entries that discuss
a plan to attack the Ming.
But more interestingly, even while Chŏng To-jŏn was preparing for a possible
campaign, Chosŏn still sought to receive investiture from Hongwu. By 1397,
those Chosŏn envoys held in the Ming were killed. Then in December 1397, the
52
TS, September 2, 1393. http://sillok.history.go.kr/id/kaa_10209002_001; Chong 2017b, 147.
53
Chong 2017b, 149. 54 TS, March 29, 1396. http://sillok.history.go.kr/id/kaa_10503029_003
55
TS, April 17, 1397. http://sillok.history.go.kr/id/kaa_10604017_001
56
TS, December 28, 1397. http://sillok.history.go.kr/id/kaa_10612028_001
57
TS, May 3, 1398. http://sillok.history.go.kr/id/kaa_10705103_001
state letter to the Ming still tried to convey the sadae and explain how it was not
Chosŏn’s intention to include insulting and frivolous words in its letters to the
Ming. The question is: Why did Chosŏn continue to seek investiture from the
Ming, even while it decided to prepare for a military campaign? Why did the
imperial seal and edict matter so much to Yi Sŏng-gye?
Chosŏn’s Power Struggles and Domestic Legitimation

It is worth mulling over the nature of Hongwu’s power vis-à-vis Chosŏn during
this diplomatic row on the issue of granting and receiving the title king of
Chosŏn. Yi Sŏng-gye’s accommodating behavior may be explained by his fear
of the Ming’s superior material capabilities, both military and economic.
Hongwu did make the threat of using force vis-à-vis Chosŏn, and throughout
his reign there were rumors of a possible Ming invasion of Korea. By a logical
extension of this line of argument, Chosŏn might have prepared for a campaign
in Liaodong in order to take a preventive military action while trying to appease
the Ming. However, the fear of Ming power was not the primary reason for Yi
Sŏng-gye’s continued efforts to receive investiture from Hongwu. Yi Sŏng-gye
knew too well that Chosŏn could not sustain a military campaign to victory
against the Ming even if it were to take preventive action and be victorious at
the beginning of such an attack. After all, that was in part why he turned the
army back in 1388.58 It is possible that Chosŏn would have wanted to prepare
itself to defend against an impending invasion from the Ming, while seeking
Hongwu’s investiture as a way of confirming that the Ming would not take
military action against Chosŏn. However, the T’aejo Sillok clearly states that
Chosŏn was preparing for “an attack on Liaodong (攻遼),”59 and this was not in
response to any impending invasion on the part of the Ming.
A second line of argument focuses on Chŏng To-jŏn, who Hongwu repeat-
edly demanded should show up in the Ming court, and Chŏng’s ambitions in the
Liaodong region. Together with Yi Sŏng-gye, Chŏng To-jŏn was one of the
most prominent political figures in the process of founding Chosŏn and was in
fact in charge of overall military reforms and the preparations for a Liaodong
campaign. If we take the T’aejo Sillok and Chŏngjong Sillok records at face
value and accept the views of Chŏng To-jŏn’s political opponents such as Cho
Jun, the preparations were driven by Chŏng’s personal desire to avoid
Hongwu’s wrath. However, this argument may explain why Chŏng was pre-
paring for an attack on the Ming, but not why Chosŏn persistently sought to
receive Hongwu’s seal and edict. Historians have convincingly countered this
58
KSC, vol. 33, 1388 (U 14).
59
It has already been decided that we attack Liaodong (攻遼之擧, 今已定矣) TS, August 9,
1398. http://sillok.history.go.kr/id/kaa_10708009_001
94 Ji-Young Lee
“Chŏng To-jŏn’s personal vengeance” argument and paid greater attention to

his role as someone who sought to more broadly build a new nation. Park
Hong-kyu, for example, shows that Chŏng To-jŏn, through preparations for
a Liaodong campaign, aimed to abolish the private armies that powerful
individuals held and create a centralized Chosŏn military.60
If earlier research examined the role of Chŏng To-jŏn closely, more recent
scholarship rightly points out that it is necessary to place greater emphasis on
Yi Sŏng-gye, the king himself. Lee Kyu-chul, for example, shows that Chosŏn
embarked on several expeditions against Jurchen that could bring itself in direct
conflict with the Ming in the fifteenth century. Looking at the debates leading
up to those expeditions, Lee demonstrates that in most cases, despite having
faced opposition from their officials, it was the Chosŏn kings themselves who
advocated such military campaigns more actively than others. For Chosŏn
kings, the sadae was not an absolute value to uphold, and kingly authority or
power was more important than the sadae.61
Rather than the fear of a Ming invasion of Chosŏn, Yi Sŏng-gye was
motivated primarily by domestic political concerns, amid intense internal
power struggles surrounding the founding of Chosŏn. When we look back at
1388, when Yi Sŏng-gye led the Koryŏ army, which comprised of mostly his
own private forces, before turning them back and dethroning the incumbent
Koryŏ king U, his expedition was a result of the checks and balances on the part
of the then top Koryŏ general Ch’oe Yŏng against Yi Sŏng-gye’s growing
influence. Yi Sŏng-gye had opposed the 1388 Liaodong campaign, probably
knowing that that campaign was not going to be successful and that it would
lead to his and his troops’ demise. Ch’oe Yŏng’s goal was to create many
casualties among Yi Sŏng-gye’s army.62 Between the 1388 military campaign
and the 1392 founding of Chosŏn, Yi Sŏng-gye removed Ch’oe Yŏng from the
Koryŏ political scene for attacking the Ming and his close associates for
various reasons; then he removed Cho Min-su, Mun Ik-chŏm, Yi Saek, and
Kwŏn Kŭn for opposing the proposed land reforms.63 Once Chosŏn was
founded, fifty-six individuals who had opposed the founding were punished
on the grounds that they were plotting a rebellion.64 But some of them were
brought back to Chosŏn politics and even appointed as founding contributors.
Historian Kim Tang-taek concludes that even those who joined Yi Sŏng-gye in
turning the army back on Wi-wha Island in 1388 were removed from politics if
they were considered too powerful and influential.65
Consider a situation where several actors contend for office or rulership. An
external validation from the office of a higher authority – such as investiture
60
Park Hong-kyu 2004, 7–31. 61 Lee Kyu-chul 2013.
62 63
Kim Tang-taek 2005; Kim Yŏng-su 2006, 559, n. 7. Kim Tang-taek 2011, 407–445.
64
Ryu 1999, 4. 65 Kim Tang-taek 2011.
from Hongwu – to one actor among these contenders can carry critical political
significance, especially in times of power struggle. As opposed to a one-way
projection of Ming military power, it was the symbolic power embedded in the
Ming emperor’s investiture – the power to grant legitimacy to Yi Sŏng-gye that
could have helped him undermine opponents.
In the beginning, Yi Sŏng-gye was eager to receive the title king of Chosŏn
from Hongwu, due to the symbolism of such external validation of his authority
in the eyes of his domestic audience. The investiture from the Chinese emperor
was considered integral in the domestic realm of Chosŏn as a “collective
process of social validation,” especially in terms of political order formation
processes.66 Such was the power of the Ming empire – and it was on this
“symbolic domination” that the Chinese-centered hegemony and hierarchical
order in early modern East Asia rested. In the words of Morris Zelditch, “the
stability of authority depends not on each individual’s sense of propriety but on
a collective process of social validation.”67 Hongwu, as the holder of the
mandate of the Son of Heaven, was the one who could grant the legitimate
identity to Yi Sŏng-gye if he named him as king of Chosŏn.68
With regard to this line of domestic politics argument, Chong Da-ham
provides at least two important insights. One is that Chosŏn’s Liaodong
campaign preparations should be understood in the larger historical context
that Chosŏn was in the process of building a new governance structure in the
northeastern border areas, particularly surrounding today’s Hamgyŏng-do and
Tuman River. He notes that it was no coincidence that in the midst of prepara-
tions of a Liaodong campaign, Yi Sŏng-gye dispatched Chŏng To-jŏn to
establish administrative units and build castles in these areas to incorporate
them as part of Chosŏn territory. He further argues that the Liaodong campaign
preparations had to do with Yi Sŏng-gye’s plans for succession. The timing of
the actual campaign preparations was immediately after Yi Sŏng-gye realized
that Hongwu was not going to grant him investiture. With the ongoing diplo-
matic row, once it became clear that the Ming was not going to grant him the
title king of Chosŏn, Yi Sŏng-gye then turned to considering a military option
as the best possible way forward.69
Yi Sŏng-gye continued to seek investiture in part because he wanted to ensure
that Yi Pang-sŏk would be appointed as crown prince to be his successor, with the
support of Chŏng To-jŏn. This plan was going to work, however, only with the
Ming emperor’s investiture. Without the investiture, it created room for other
princes to challenge Yi Pang-sŏk and Chŏng To-jŏn. As a matter of fact, this was
exactly what happened. In August 1398 – the same month in which Chŏng To-
jŏn punished those officials who had been negligent of the military training in
66
Zelditch 2001, 6. 67 Zelditch 2001, 6.
68 69
On the logic of official naming, Bourdieu 1991. Chong 2017a, 133–181.
96 Ji-Young Lee
preparation for the Liaodong campaign – Yi Pang-wŏn, with the help of those
who had been punished, waged the “Strife of Princes” and removed Yi Pang-sŏk,
Chŏng To-jŏn, and Nam Ŭn.70 They felt threatened by Chŏng To-jŏn’s attempt at
disbanding their private armies. But after Yi Pang-wŏn became the third king of
Chosŏn, he abolished private armies and centralized the military.71 With the
“Strife of Princes,” the plan to attack the Ming ended in 1398.
Conclusion
Chosŏn’s reputation as a “model tributary” is in large part attributed to the
principle of sadae, which is known to have guided its hierarchical relations
with the Ming. A deeper look at the politics surrounding the founding of
Chosŏn Korea in 1392 shows that the workings of the tribute system were
closely tied to Chosŏn rulers’ efforts to consolidate domestic authority vis-à-vis
their own opponents. During the process of building a new political order after
a coup, Yi Sŏng-gye’s desire to receive investiture – the sanction from the Ming
emperor as the ultimate holder of Confucian moral authority – gave Hongwu
political leverage to control Chosŏn’s behavior. Early Chosŏn–Ming relations
demonstrate that domestic legitimation is a mechanism through which cultural
and symbolic resources become a tool for power politics.
70 71
TS, August 26, 1398. http://sillok.history.go.kr/id/kaa_10708026_001 Ryu 1999, 1–29.
6 The Ming Invasion of Vietnam, 1407–1427
James A. Anderson
Introduction
In a recent journal article on territorial disputes of the South China Sea, Carl
Thayer concluded “Vietnam seeks to cooperate and struggle with China by
acknowledging its primacy in the expectation that China will respect Vietnam’s
autonomy.”1 This pattern in Sino-Vietnamese relations seems to repeat
throughout history from at least the mid-tenth century when local leaders in
the Red River Delta pushed back against the military force of a northern
regime. A closer look at the political situation faced by Ngô Quyền (吳權,
897–944) was much more complex, and after his brief reign, the Red River
Delta declined into an anarchic period of fighting, which ended only when the
strongest and best-connected military leader Đinh Bộ Lĩnh (丁部領, 924–979)
defeated his rivals and reached out in 971 to his northern neighbor, the
increasingly powerful Song empire. Đinh Bộ Lĩnh and his son’s assassinations
by a political rival prompted local Song officials to call for a general invasion,
which was ultimately thwarted by Vietnamese defenders in 980. From this
short narrative we can see how difficult maintaining equilibrium in the Sino-
Vietnamese relationship has been when interstate relations reacted swiftly to
local political currents. In this chapter we examine one such pivotal event, the
early fifteenth-century Ming invasion of Vietnam, which was closely related to
a rivalry between feuding elite factions occupying the Vietnamese political
landscape.
As David C. Kang notes, the single most significant conflict between
Vietnam and China in the last 600 years was the Ming invasion of the Đại
Viê ̣t kingdom,2 and the radical reforms of Vietnamese leader Hồ Quý Ly (胡季
犛, c. 1350–1410) were the catalyst for this conflict, which at the local level
may be better understood as an interregional rivalry that drew on “Great
Power” backing for support. In 1400 Hồ Quý Ly usurped the Vietnamese
throne from the declining Trần leadership. The Ming soon provided
a massive military response. The Ming occupation of Vietnam would last
1 2
Thayer 2016, 217. D. C. Kang 2010, 99.
97
98 James A. Anderson
only two decades, but this period continues to have an influence on the modern-
day relationship between the Peoples Republic of China and the Socialist
Republic of Vietnam. This chapter draws connections between Hồ Quý Ly’s
radical reforms, the massive Ming military response, and Sino-Vietnamese
relations today.
Following the rise of Hồ Quý Ly and his usurpation of power that brought an
end to the Trần dynasty (陳, 1225–1400), the Ming court’s decision to invade
Vietnam was based on a number of factors, most of which are connected with the
personal rule of the Yongle emperor (永樂, r. 1402–1424). First, the Yongle
emperor’s understanding of Confucian rule included a desire to create a moral
world order for all subjects, remaining true to the precepts outlined in his father’s
court’s influential treatise the Veritable Records (Taizu shilu 太祖實錄), which
the Yongle emperor ordered revised twice during his reign.3 Secondly, the
Yongle emperor wished to outshine his father’s rule, and overshadow his own
usurpation of the throne from his young nephew the Jianwen emperor (建文,
r. 1377–1402), by seizing control of the territory sought by their Mongol
predecessors, including the Đại Việt kingdom. Edward Dreyer has argued that
Yongle attempted to “live up to both the Chinese and the Mongol versions of the
imperial ideal.”4 This effort is best expressed as de (德, “power/virtue”) through
military might, even if such expressions of power beyond the territorial bound-
aries of the Ming state had been prohibited on paper by Yongle’s father the
Hongwu Emperor (洪武, r. 1368–1398). Finally, the Ming court under the
Yongle emperor had originally intended just to restore the Trần ruler to the
throne, but early military success drove Yongle to demand more from this
aggressive campaign. I would contend that this final factor played the most
influential role in the manner with which this episode unfolded. The Ming was
pulled into a regional rivalry, about which it had a very vague understanding.
Ming support was then offered to the weakest party in the conflict, the remaining
Trần leadership, out of a generalized Ming concern for the recreation of
a “proper” order of succession. With the greater military capability, the Ming
was able to upset Hồ Quý Ly and his family’s regime, but without a detailed
understanding of the regional forces that brought Hồ Quý Ly to power, the Ming
was unable to collaborate with the right regional rival to maintain a lasting
presence through a direct occupation of the Đại Việt kingdom.
The Conflict
During the Trần dynasty, the territorial integrity of Vietnam was successful
defended against the expanding Yuan empire (元, 1279–1368), stemming the
3
Rabasa et al. 2012, 29. Whitmore 1977, 51.
4
Dreyer 1982, 178. Cited in S. H. Tsai 2001, 81. See also Baldanza 2016, 58.
The Ming Invasion of Vietnam, 1407–1427 99
tide of Mongol conquest in Southeast Asia. In 1286, following two previous

unsuccessful invasions attempts, Khubilai Khan (r. 1260–1294) was preparing
for another invasion attempt on Japan, but he immediately organized a second
expedition against Vietnam. Khubilai assembled an invasion force of 300,000
men and 500 war junks. He chose a royal family defector Trần Ích Tắc (陳益稷,
1254–1329) to replace Trần Nhân Tông (陳仁宗, 1258–1308) as king of An
Nam (安南 “Pacified South”). The Yuan army captured the capital Thăng Long,
but Trần forces cut off the Mongols’ supply lines. In 1288 the Yuan army
confronted the Trần defenders at the Bạch Đằng River, where, traditional
sources note, Trần Hưng Đạo (陳興道, c. 1232–1300) used the earlier
Vietnamese warlord Ngô Quyền’s famous iron-tipped stake defense for
a second remarkable success.5 The Yuan forces were completely defeated.
Soon thereafter Trần Nhân Tông sent a delegation to Beijing to present tribute
and request vassal status, after “begging forgiveness” for having driven off the
Mongol invaders. Hardly mollified by this behavior, the Mongols initially
planned another attack, but with the death of Khubilai Khan in 1294, this
plan was never realized. After Chengzong (成宗, Temür Öljeytü Qan,
r. 1294–1307) came to the throne, the Yuan court implemented the conciliatory
policy of “great forgiveness, far and near” (大肆赦宥，無問遠近), while the
Vietnamese court adopted a matching policy of “great forgiveness” (寬宥)
regarding its northern neighbor.6 The Đại Viê ̣t kingdom subsequently contin-
ued to act as a tributary vassal throughout the Yuan dynasty, Yuan–Đại Viê ̣t
relations remained stable, and the existing border between the states
remained firm.
The Trần dynasty in a real sense ended with the death in 1394 of the former
ruler Trần Nghệ Tông (陳藝宗, r. 1370–1373), who had been administering the
throne through sons and grandsons for more than two decades. With Nghệ
Tông’s death, a trusted regent Lê Quý Ly (黎季犛), prior to changing his
surname to Hồ, soon took over the administration of the kingdom. In 1398,
while China was in the turmoil of a brief civil war, Quý Ly ordered the
execution of the second-to-last ruler and the de-deposition of the last ruler
(his son-in-law). In 1400 Quý Ly usurped the throne, and one year later he
turned the throne over to his own son Hồ Hán Thương (胡漢蒼, ?–?). Lê Quý
Ly immediately adopted the surname Hồ, and, claiming to be descended from
the legendary Chinese emperor Yu (禹) of the Xia dynasty (夏, c. 2070 BCE–
1600 BCE), he founded the Hồ dynasty (胡, 1400–1407).7 Hồ Quý Ly in 1397
moved his capital out of the Red River Delta, and his new citadel, the “Western
Capital” (Tây Đô 西都), was constructed to the south of the Trân heartland in
5
Lê 2000, 147.
6
Song Lian 1976, 4650. Cited in Huang Fei 2010, 96. For a detailed description of these events,
see J. A. Anderson 2014, 106–134.
7
Baldanza 2016, 62.
the modern-day Vĩnh Lộc district in Thanh Hóa province, which was away
from the Trân’s center of popular support.8 This overt rejection of the Red
River elite clans that had facilitated Trân rule boosted his Thanh Hóa base in
this period of power consolidation, but his lopsided support would be Hồ Quý
Ly’s undoing when he sought to mobilize the entire region against a determined
Ming assault.
Hồ Quý Ly’s efforts to rule Vietnam should remind us of the short reign
of Wang Mang 王莽 and the Xin dynasty (新, “New,” 9 CE–23 CE) at the
end of the Western Han dynasty (202 BCE–9 CE), in that Hồ Quý Ly took
Vietnam in a very different direction from his predecessors.9 While still in
the service of the Trần dynasty, he seized land from the local feudal
aristocracy and leased the plots to commoners.10 Responding to a plot
by Trân clan members to undermine his consolidation of power, Hồ Quý
Ly ordered 370 Trân princes, generals, and high officials executed to wipe
out any remaining Trân resistance. Hồ Quý Ly promoted Nôm (喃) as the
official language to dilute the influence of classical Chinese at court.11 He
criticized Confucian thought, and leaned toward Legalism in its place. Hồ
Quý Ly organized mass mobilizations of his subjects to reconstruct irriga-
tion systems, cultivate new lands, and to colonize lands that had recently
been seized from Champa (modern-day central Vietnam) in the 1402
invasion. He had a road constructed from the former Cham region around
modern-day Huế to the Tây Đô citadel to promote communication across
his expanded realm, and to take advantage of the trade entering the former
Cham territory. Hồ Quý Ly enriched his administration further by partici-
pating in the regional maritime trade network that connected the island
emporium of Vân Đồn (雲屯) to the ports of Champa, Angkor, Melaka,
and the Indian Ocean.12
In the midst of his series of radical reforms, Hồ Quý Ly and his regime also
angered the recently established Ming (1368–1644) court, which had begun
making increasingly onerous demands of Hồ Quý Ly during a series of
diplomatic exchanges that heightened tensions between the two parties.13
Adding to the tension was an effort by the remaining Trần dynasts to appeal
to their tributary overlord, the Ming. A former slave of the ruling family fled to
Beijing to the court of the third Ming ruler, the Yongle emperor, and claimed to
be the son of the late former ruler Trần Nghệ Tông. The Ming court chose
to send this pretender back to Vietnam with a Chinese escort of 5,000 soldiers.
In early 1406 the entourage was massacred at the border under the orders of Hồ
Quý Ly.14 As Kenneth Swope and Kate Baldanza have noted, this massacre
8 9
K. W. Taylor 2014, 168. Personal communication with C. Michele Thompson, 1995.
10
O’Harrow 1979, 160. 11 O’Harrow 1979, 161. 12 Nguyễn 2014, 220–221.
13
K. W. Taylor 2014, 178. 14 Whitmore 1977, 52.
prompted the Ming to charge the usurper with twenty great crimes and assem-
ble a punitive expedition.15
The military response by the Ming court was swift. From autumn 1406 until
spring 1407, a force of 215,000 Ming troops attacked Vietnam with the goal of
restoring the Trần family to the throne. Champa, having faced an unsuccessful
invasion in 1403 by 200,000 soldiers from Hồ Quý Ly’s army during the
leader’s brief reign,16 sent a small contingent of troops that allied themselves
with the Ming forces. The Ming general in charge, Zhang Fu (張輔,
1375–1449), simultaneously warned the populace that Hồ Quý Ly was
a usurper and searched for a potential new heir to the throne.17 However,
once the troops entered Vietnamese territory, their goal changed to regional
domination, and Zhang Fu claimed that no members of the Trần family were
still alive. Immediately both Hồ and Trần clan members and their supporters
fought back against the Chinese army. As Swope notes, the larger Ming force
advanced on several fronts and defeated Vietnamese defenses without great
difficulty. The Ming troops forced Hồ Quý Ly first to flee Tây Đô and then to
abandon the “Eastern Capital” (Đông Kinh東京, or modern-day Hanoi).
Swope notes the Ming army employed firearms and new tactics to fend off
Hồ Quý Ly’s elephant cavalry.18 These tactics had been adopted during Ming
campaigns in modern-day Yunnan,19 where the Mongols had earlier conquered
and absorbed the Dali kingdom but had not quite managed to quell the spirit of
political autonomy among its local inhabitants.
By July 1407, the Ming forces had all the Vietnamese territory under their
control, and the region, now renamed Jiaozhi (交趾) after the Han period
colonial commandery, was brought under total domination by the Chinese
invaders.20 Hồ Quý Ly, his son, and their administration were shipped off to
the Chinese hinterland, where they were forced to serve as common soldiers in
the Ming army. Swope notes that at least 17,000 captives were taken back to
China following the Ming invasion, and that some of these captives including
Hồ Nguyên Trừng (胡元澄, c. 1374–c. 1446), Hồ Quý Ly’s son, were
employed as firearms experts. These captive experts were employed in the
Ming ministry of works, and their descendants served the Ming until 1489.21
Swope, Sun Laichen, and other scholars make the crucial point that military
innovations made in Vietnam as early as Hồ Quý Ly’s administration would
have lasting effects on military technology and strategy practiced throughout
the Ming empire, and most of East Asia, for many decades.22
15
The crimes as listed in the Ming shilu are enumerated and discussed in Zheng 1998, 50–52. See
Swope 2014a, 160–161, Baldanza 2016, 64–65.
16
Sun 2006, 99. 17 Zhang Tingyu et al. 1965, 24:83. 18 Swope 2014a, 161.
19
Swope 2014a, 161. See also Swope 2011b, 112–140; and Brose 2014, 135–155.
20
Whitmore 1977, 53. 21 Sun 2006, 91–92; Li Bin 1995, 156.
22
Swope 2014a, 164; Sun 2006, 91–92.
Keith Taylor has also offered regional division as a primary reason for Hồ
Quý Ly’s inability to secure the loyalty of the majority of the Đại Viê ̣t official-
dom in thwarting the Ming advance. As Taylor writes,
while the Trần were from the Hồng (Red) River plain, Hồ Quý Ly was from Thanh
Nghệ, and he built a new capital in Thanh Hóa. His inability to gain the loyalty of Đông
Kinh was a prominent factor in his failure to overcome the Ming invasion of 1406/7, in
which he abandoned most of Đông Kinh and attempted to defend the southern bank of
the Hồng River.23
The resident elite families of the Red River Delta had accepted neither Hồ Quý
Ly’s usurpation of the Trần throne, nor had they quietly tolerated his seizure of
aristocratic lands and reordering of land tenure in their home region. Referring
to the elite families of Đông Kinh, Taylor notes that, according to Ming records,
“in 1407 . . . over 1,100 local men of prominence declared their allegiance to
Ming and requested that their lands be incorporated into the empire. Ming
records indicate that over 9,000 local men subsequently made the journey to the
Ming capital to be confirmed as officials in the provincial administration.”24
Later Vietnamese historians would emphasize that the local populace, with an
emphasis on the rural peasantry, was unified in its opposition to Ming aggres-
sion in this period.25 In fact, the Red River Delta remained much more open to
collaboration with Ming forces than did the Thanh Nghệ region to its south,
which produced both Hồ Quý Ly’s family and the leadership core of the
successful rebellion launched by Lê Lợi (黎利, 1385–1433).
By the end of 1407 Ming forces had occupied most of the Đại Viê ̣t kingdom,
although sporadic uprisings were not put down until 1414. As John Whitmore
notes, the Ming occupying army consisted of about 87,000 troops scattered in
thirty-nine citadels throughout northern Vietnam, but clustered in the Red
River Delta area.26 The Ming court made the mistake of sending second-rate
officials down to fill special posts in colonial Vietnamese administration,
among them individuals who had failed at the Ming imperial exams or had
been exiled to southern China for a variety of offenses.27 The Ming also
shipped current editions of the Confucian classical canon and instructors to
train a new cadre of local officials to be knowledgeable in Ming imperial
ideology. Learned Buddhist monks were dispatched as teachers for the same
reason.28 Leading Vietnamese families also provided many of the most able
officials to serve in Ming occupation government.29 These families faced harsh
judgment in official Vietnamese historical accounts once the Chinese were
driven out of Vietnam. Many Ming administrators treated the occupation as an
occasion for economic exploitation, which did not win them popular approval,
23
K. W. Taylor 1998, 955. See also Woodside 1963, 12–21; Whitmore 1985, 91–116.
24
K. W. Taylor 1998, 955–956. 25 Nguyên 1995, 124. 26 Whitmore 1985, 112.
27
K. W. Taylor 2014, 178. 28 K. W. Taylor 2014, 178. 29 Whitmore 1977, 64–65.
nor did the purging of a corpus of pre-fifteenth-century Vietnamese books in

a Ming-administered censorship campaign to weed out “heterodox” texts. Once
an initial three-year period of light taxation had concluded, the taxes and levies
imposed on trade and monopolized commodities, such as salt, were later
described by Vietnamese historians as a heavy burden on the populace.30
Keith Taylor argues that this dire description of Ming occupation had been
enhanced in Vietnamese literature produced in the post-occupation period, but
a general popular dissatisfaction with the colonial arrangement seems clear.
The effort to end the Ming occupation required a spark, which appeared in
the form of a minor official Lê Lợi, who hailed from Hồ Quý Ly’s home region.
During the final effort to reestablish a Trần state with the uprising of Trần Quý
Khoách (陳季撗, c. 1409–1414), Lê Lợi, a member of the landed elite from
Thanh Hóa, held the position of general of the imperial insignia (金吾將軍),
nominally in charge of the imperial bodyguard. After surrendering to the Ming
and serving a period of imprisonment, Lê Lợi was reconfirmed by the Ming
administration in his minor official position of tutor (輔導) for Mt. Khả Lam
(可藍) in Lạng Sơn.31 Lê Lợi soon thereafter led the local resistance through
a strategy of attacking the Chinese garrisons and supply lines and gradually
wearing down Ming resolve. Lê Lợi’s forces also employed firearms, copied in
rebel-built arsenals from Ming weapons used against Hồ Quý Ly’s army.32
Swope notes that the production of firearms may have started during Hồ Quý
Ly’s reign to prepare for a possible Ming invasion.33 In 1418, during the Tet
lunar festival, Lê Lợi proclaimed himself “Bình Định Vương” (平定王,
“Pacification King”), and launched a widespread revolt.34 Ming collaborators
among the Vietnamese officialdom were treated without mercy. The rebels
relied on the strategy mapped out by the scholar and tactician Nguyễn Trãi (阮
廌, 1380–1442): “feign friendship on the outside. forge weapons, subscribe
money, and kill elephants, to build up an army on the inside.”35 Nguyễn
Trãi was a great admirer of Hồ Quý Ly, having placed first in the palace
exams during Hồ Quý Ly’s first year on the throne.36 In 1425 Lê Lợi had
taken Hồ Quý Ly’s capital at Tây Đô.37 In 1428, Lê Lợi’s supporters had
established a new court in Thăng Long, now the “Eastern Capital,” and
Vietnamese sources record that at this time the Ming court had recognized Lê
Lợi as the legitimate ruler of a new dynasty. A Nguyễn period court chronicle
notes that the frontier was “restored” to its old location in this year as well.38
Keith Taylor contends as a challenge to conventional wisdom that the end of
Ming rule was primarily a Ming decision, which calls into question that main
premise of the Vietnamese nationalist narrative of resistance to foreign
30
K. W. Taylor 2014, 178. 31 O’Harrow 1979, 164. 32 Swope 2014a, 162.
33
Swope 2014a, 162; Whitmore 1985, 84; and Lo 1970, 171.
34
Zhang Tingyu et al. 1965, 24:97. 35 Hodgkin 1981, 58. 36 O’Harrow 1979, 162.
37
Cœdès 1983, 207. 38 Phan 1960, 12:7–8. Cited in Xiao and Huang 1993, 235.
occupation that endures until today.39 If we look at the occupation as purely

a Ming creation, we need also to look again at the origins of the conflict that
produced the occupation. The Yongle emperor’s initial effort to dissolve the
boundary between Vietnam and China with this direct annexation reflected the
different personalities of the first two Ming rulers. Zhu Yuanzhang (朱元璋,
1328–1398), the Hongwu emperor (洪武, r. 1368–1398), founder of the Ming
dynasty and father to the Yongle emperor, was cautious in frontier affairs, and
admonished his subjects not to disturb China’s neighbors. As written in the
“Ancestral Admonitions” (Huang Ming Zu Xun皇眀祖訓) the Ming court
specifically should not invade Vietnam, among other neighbors of China.40
Peace-seeking and impartial China was to remain a moral example for others to
emulate, emphasizing the ceremonial aspects of tribute relations. The Hongwu
emperor had restricted coastal contact to avoid problems with Japanese Wakō
piracy. Mongol raids still posed a real threat to Ming stability along the northern
and northwestern frontiers. The Hongwu emperor’s problem was that he
required all subsequent rulers to follow his example, and this policy had
a strong effect on foreign relations during this dynasty following the unusual
reign of Yongle. In contrast, the Yongle emperor couldn’t avoid the turmoil on
China’s border. Pursuing an increasingly expansionist policy, he seemed more
interested in military and economic (trade-related) gains in his foreign policy
measures. When the Yongle emperor died, the Hongxi emperor in 1424 and
then the Xuande emperor in 1425 followed Yongle’s policy. However, by 1427,
court advisors recommended abandoning the occupation attempt, quoting
Hongwu’s own opposition. The Chinese courts’ dilemma was such: Vietnam
had once been part of China and so should be able to be civilized; however,
Chinese officials had come to the agreement that local Vietnamese would not
accept this civilizing mission.41 Reviving tributary relations provided a more
practical solution, and this issue was ultimately left undecided.
Modern Vietnamese historians have had a different reading of events.42 It is
generally accepted in Vietnamese scholarship that the founders of the Latter Lê
dynasty (Hậu Lê 後黎, 1428–1788) saw essential differences between
Vietnamese and Chinese cultures suddenly as plain as the mountains and rivers
that divided the two regions. I would agree with Liam Kelley that the new
leadership at Đông Kinh regarded its mandate to rule as a validated intellectual
and moral order shared by northern and southern regimes alike. Even if
proclamations of the early Lê presented Chinese and Vietnamese political
pasts as clearly separated, common values such as those expressed through
the performance of tributary protocol, for example, held the two regions
39
K. W. Taylor 2014, 180. 40 D. C. Kang 2010, 98. 41 Tarling 1999, 150.
42
Recent scholarship has been quite critical of this modern reading of Lê period views. Kelley
2005, 19–20.
together in a special bond. As Nguyễn Trãi declared in his well-known 1428

statement of victory “The Great Declaration of the Wu’s (China’s)
Pacification” (Bình Ngô Đại Cáo 平吳大誥):
Mountains and rivers have demarcated the border [of our country]. The customs of the
North [China] and the South [Vietnam] are also different. We find [in antiquity] that the
Triê ̣u, the Đinh, the Lý, and Trần [dynasties] built our country. Alongside the Han, Tang
Song, and Yuan [dynasties], the rulers [of our dynasties] ruled as emperors over their
own part [of the world represented by the North and the South].43
However, we must also consider the dissenting view within Vietnam’s
leadership that the officialdom’s closer relationship with the Ming led to
compromises deemed unacceptable for some. As Keith Taylor wrote of the
author of the 1428 declaration,
Nguyễn Trãi’s ultimate isolation and elimination – he was accused of regicide and
executed in 1442 – was surely facilitated by his having been alienated from both his
regional compatriots in Đông Kinh, from whom he turned to serve the interests of Thanh
Nghệ, and the ascendant powers of Thanh Nghệ, who disliked his self-righteous preach-
ments about good government and his efforts to enroll Đông Kinh people into govern-
ment service.44
The successors of Hồ Quý Ly’s administration continued to battle with the

ancient regime of the Red River Delta even after direct control by the Ming
invaders had ended. This regional tension would continue into the late imperial
period, and arguably, through to the present day.
Border negotiations continued after the Ming invasion in what was
a particularly active phase in Sino-Vietnamese relations. In 1527, shortly
after the establishment of the Mạc dynasty (莫, 1527–1592; –1677) in the
northern region of the Đại Viê ̣t kingdom, the Ming emperor sent a battalion of
troops, calling for the capture of Mạc Đăng Dung (莫登庸, 1483－1541), the
dynastic founder. Mạc Đăng Dung immediately decided to seek Ming support
for his rule, and he rushed a mission to Beijing to gain recognition. The Ming
court showed little interest in fully abandoning tributary links with the Lê, but
Mạc Đăng Dung persisted. In 1540, sources note that he and his assistants
crawled barefoot to the frontier camp of a Ming delegation as a sign of
submission, offering records of his administration in five frontier prefectures
near Lang Son in exchange for peace at the border. The Ming court finally
recognized this frontier region as the “Annam Protectorate Colonial
Secretariat” (Annandu Tongshisi 安南都统使司) and him as a local magistrate.
Formally, then, the border had shifted with the inclusion of this territory into the
Ming empire. However, in 1530 Mạc Đăng Dung had already abdicated to his
son and took the title Thái thượng hoàng (太上皇, “Ruler Emeritus”), so his
43 44
Wolters and Reynolds 2008, 209. K. W. Taylor 1998, 956.
son continued to rule as “king” of the Đại Viê ̣t kingdom, while Mạc Đăng
Dung himself served as a Ming frontier administrator.45
Despite protests from the Lê court, the Ming court decided that the Mạc and
the Lê should continue to rule Vietnam as covassals of the Ming empire. Thus,
began the period of South and Northern Courts (Nam Bắc Triều, 1533–1592).
Exiled Lê leaders found support from Nguyễn Kim (阮淦, 1476–1545) and his
son-in-law Trịnh Kiểm (鄭檢, 1503–1570), members of powerful Thanh Hóa
clans that hoped to take all of Vietnam from the Mạc. In 1532 the Lê set up
a court-in-exile in Laos. In 1540, the Lê rulers moved back to Thanh Hóa and
began to actively resist Mạc claims to national control. Nguyễn Kim was
murdered during this same year, but the struggle continued. It took the Lê
court forty-seven years before it was able to drive the Mạc out of the capital at
Thâng Long in 1592. Even at this point, the Mạc lingered in the northern border
region until 1677, and the territorial struggle between the now rival Nguyễn and
Trịnh clans through the Tây Sơn rebellion (西山, 1771–1802) eclipsed any
political relevance the Mạc continued to muster. The Tây Sơn rebellion
exploded in 1771, and its leaders were three brothers, the second eldest of
which was Nguyễn Huệ (阮惠, 1753–1792), later known to his rebel followers
as Emperor Quang Trung (光中). This rebel band of brothers, despite using
their mother’s surname, claimed the Trần dynasty usurper Hồ Quý Ly as
a direct descendent, and they traced their family’s origins to Nghệ An (乂安),
which shared a cultural and linguistic bond with neighboring Thanh Hóa, the
home region of the rebellious Hồ Quý Ly.
A reappraisal of Hồ Quý Ly’s achievement in his brief reign started as soon
as the Lê founders had consolidated their rule. Lê Lợi had complained that “the
trivial and demanding policies of the Hồ gave rise to popular resentment and
rebellion. The Ming waited for their chance, and used this treatment to poison
our people.”46 Later, the leading Vietnamese court chroniclers Ngô Sĩ Liên (吳
士連, 1400–1497), Ngô Thì Sĩ (吳時仕, 1726–1780), Lê Quý Đôn (黎貴惇,
1726–1784), and Phan Huy Chú (潘輝注, 1782–1840) all wrote critically of Hồ
Quý Ly’s usurpation of the Trần throne, because the traditional interpretations
of these events was that Hồ Quý Ly’s behavior likened the Vietnamese ruler to
the Ming Yongle emperor, who had also seized the throne by ousting his infant
nephew, the Jianwen emperor Zhu Yunwen (朱允炆, 1377–1402). Modern
Vietnamese historians have rehabilitated Hồ Quý Ly’s image by labelling
him a radical reformer, maligned by his conservative Vietnamese detractors
and derailed by the expansionist Ming. Arguing that Hồ Quý Ly’s efforts were
a logical step in state-building efforts of the Đại Viê ̣t, John Whitmore wrote that
“Quý Ly’s regime overcame the critical dangers of decentralization and foreign
invasion and acted against growing local autonomy.”47 His efforts, although
45 46 47
Goodrich and Fang 1976, 2:1033. Baldanza 2016, 81. Whitmore 1985, 129.
fueled by regional rivalries, managed to launch a military response by the

neighboring Ming that swept away the Đông Kinh elite and their power base
long enough for the Thanh Hóa elite under Lê Lợi to become a unified political
force that would borrow heavily from the Chinese model while stressing
essential cultural differences on both sides of the frontier. Cooperating with
and struggling against Chinese authorities continued through periods of peace
and war for leaders of numerous Vietnamese political movements through the
early nineteenth century and again in the post–World War II period. Such
patterns of adaption and resistance continue to express themselves in Sino-
Vietnamese relations in the modern era.
7 Ming Grand Strategy during the Great East
Asian War, 1592–1598
Kenneth M. Swope
This chapter will consider the grand strategic implications and ramifications
of what was probably the largest military conflict in the world in the sixteenth
century. Known as the Imjin War, the Rescue of Korea, the Eastern
Expedition, the Glorious Conquest of Korea, the Japanese Calamity of
1592, or the Great East Asian War depending upon one’s perspective, this
conflict remains shockingly unknown in the West despite its scope and
importance for East Asian history and international relations. Indeed, films,
novels, and comic books are still regularly produced in the belligerent
nations, each offering their own unique takes on the war and its heroes and
villains. For the purposes of the present forum this war is fascinating in that it
pitted a rising power against an established hegemon whereby the former was
clearly trying to supplant the latter in the region. On the one hand this event
can be viewed as a failure to deter on the part of the Ming, but it can also been
seen as a failure of deterrence itself, as the Japanese challenger, Toyotomi
Hideyoshi (1536–1598), willfully ignored the warnings of the Koreans prior
to the war and based his assessments of Ming military capabilities upon
misreadings of scattered pirate campaigns conducted some thirty years ear-
lier. He was clearly unaware that the Ming was in the midst of a military
revival under Emperor Wanli (r. 1573–1620), who was more than willing to
flex his military muscles in order to maintain Ming hegemony in Asia and
prop up his own rule by using military affairs and officials to counterbalance
the influence of civil official factions in government. In fact, from the Chinese
perception, this war was also considered one of the so-called Three Great
Punitive Campaigns of the Wanli emperor (Wanli san da zheng).1 These
campaigns marked the climax of military reforms initiated in the 1570s that
were designed to “make the borders strong and the army fearsome once
again.”2
1
On the Three Great Campaigns, see Swope 2001; Swope 2009, 13–40. On Wanli’s interest in
military affairs, see Swope 2008.
2
See Fan 1993, 227.
108
The Great East Asian War, 1592–1598 109
Before considering the broader strategic importance of the Great East Asian
War and how it has been interpreted by modern historians and international
relations scholars, a brief summary of the course of the conflict is in order. The
most common designation for this conflict, the Imjin War, comes from the
Korean pronunciation of the Chinese designation for the year 1592. As indi-
cated at the start of the chapter it is also known as the Japanese invasion of
Korea, Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea, the Campaigns of 1592 and 1597 (in
Japan); the Rescue of Korea, the Eastern Expedition (in China); and the First
Great East Asian War. This war was one of the seminal events in East Asian
history and was the largest conflict in the world in the sixteenth century in terms
of the numbers of soldiers involved. While the contemporary War of the
Spanish Armada featured approximately 50,000 combatants, this war featured
in excess of 300,000. The war was masterminded by the Japanese warlord
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who set his sights on Korea after unifying the islands of
Japan in 1590. Hideyoshi’s actual motives for the invasion remain unclear and
will be considered at greater length herein. Some writers argue that he was
a simple megalomaniac who desired dominion over the entire world as he knew
it. Others argue that he needed an outlet to exhaust the military power and
energy of potential rivals or that he sought new lands with which to reward his
vassals. Another possibility is that he sought to create a new type of trade-based
empire based on the Asian mainland to replace the Chinese tributary system of
foreign relations. Most likely, it was some combination of all these motives.
In any event, the Japanese started sending out diplomatic missions to the
Korean kingdom of Chosôn (1392–1910) in the late 1580s. Hideyoshi initially
desired to secure Korean assistance in attacking Ming China (1368–1644),
which was the main objective of his conquests. He then planned on attacking
India after China was subdued. Though the Koreans exchanged ambassadors
with the Japanese, they refused to join Hideyoshi’s enterprise, having been
loyal tributary vassals of the Ming since their kingdom’s foundation. Moreover,
different factions of the Korean government presented the king with widely
divergent assessments of the Japanese threat. Much to his later detriment, King
Sônjo (r. 1567–1608) ignored the warnings of those who feared an impending
Japanese attack so few concrete military preparations were made.
Assembling an initial invasion force of over 150,000, with nearly as many as
reserves, the Japanese landed at Pusan on May 23, 1592. Though Hideyoshi
himself did not lead his men (nor did he ever go to Korea), his experienced
troops quickly captured Pusan and drove north in multiple columns toward the
capital city of Seoul. In addition to their vastly greater experience, honed by
decades of civil war and better training, the Japanese held a major technological
advantage in the early stages of the war in the form of handheld arquebus guns,
which are popularly believed to have been introduced to Japan in 1543 by
Portuguese traders, but may also have entered Japan via China. With these
110 Kenneth M. Swope
weapons in the hands of infantry troops, the invaders decimated the ill-prepared
Korean defenders and many key cities and fortresses fell without a fight. The
Korean commander Sin Ip decided to try to catch the Japanese in a trap at the
valley of Ch’ungju, along the route to Seoul, where he believed his flail-
wielding cavalry could encircle and smash the largely infantry-based
Japanese forces. Ignoring the warnings of his fellow commander Yi Il and
refusing to garrison the easily defensible pass of Choryông nearby, Sin found
his forces surrounded and annihilated by the Japanese, his units forced into
a nearby river where the commander himself drowned.
The Japanese then set forth for Seoul, where they arrived barely two weeks
after their initial landing. In the meantime the king and his court had fled north,
heading for Kaesong initially, but later moving onto Pyongyang before even-
tually stopping at the town of Ûiju on the Chinese border. The commander
detailed to defend Seoul threw his weapons into the Han River and fled,
allowing the Japanese to take the city uncontested. After some debate, the
Japanese decided to divide their armies again, with one of the invasion’s two
main commanders, Katō Kiyomasa (1562–1611), heading northeast to secure
that region and the other, Konishi Yukinaga (1558–1600), going in pursuit of
the Korean monarch. Though briefly stalemated at the Imjin River north of
Seoul, the Japanese put increasing pressure on the Korean king, forcing him to
keep fleeing north. The Koreans had already dispatched messengers to seek
military aid from the Chinese, but the commanders and soldiers who normally
would have been stationed along the Yalu River border with China were then
helping suppress a troop mutiny in northwest China. In the meantime, Katō’s
forces managed to subdue most of the northwest and captured two Korean
princes, who had fled there is search of refuge. He even launched a quick strike
into Manchuria, skirmishing with the Jurchen tribespeople who dwelled there.
A small Ming relief column was ambushed and decimated at Pyongyang in late
summer of 1592. Nonetheless, the Japanese fearful that they had overextended
their lines and wary of a larger Ming counterforce, agreed to a fifty-day truce
with the Chinese negotiator Shen Weijing in the autumn of 1592.
The Japanese were also hampered by the rise of Korean resistance on land
and sea. On land the resistance was spearheaded by local Confucian officials
(yangban), who led groups of irregulars called the ûibyong, or “righteous
soldiers.” These fighters were subsequently joined by bands of monk-
soldiers, who were promised the restoration of lost rights and privileges by
the king in exchange for their assistance. Throughout the war these groups
played integral support, harassment and transportation roles. At sea the Korean
navy benefited from the inspired leadership of a military commander named Yi
Sunsin (1545–1598), who deployed a revolutionary new boat known as the
turtleship, which was an early form of ironclad. Along with more traditional
vessels, which were also superior to Japanese models, the turtleships enabled
Yi to cut Japanese supply lines and prevented them from seizing control of the
resource-rich southwestern provinces. This grassroots and seaborne resistance,
along with the onset of winter, contributed to Japan’s inability to extend its
early conquests.
The Ming counterforce of about 45,000 attacked Pyongyang in February
of 1593. Deploying an array of powerful cannons, the Ming armies under
General Li Rusong (1549–1598) captured the city after a single day of
fighting and utterly overwhelmed the Japanese with their superior firepower.
From this point on, the technological advantages the Japanese had enjoyed to
that point in the war would be gone and they would be loathe to engage the
allied forces in large set-piece battles, preferring sieges and skirmishes.
Aided by the Koreans, the Ming forces quickly recaptured Kaesong and
continued to pursue the Japanese back toward Seoul. But Li Rusong belittled
intelligence offered by his allies and was overeager in his pursuit of the
enemy. As a result he plunged ahead without his artillery train and found
himself ambushed by the enemy near the postal station of Pyôkchegwan, just
north of Seoul. The general would have been slain had a subordinate officer
not used his own body as a human shield to save his commander. This defeat
caused the Ming forces to temporarily pull back to Seoul, but a subsequent
commando raid that burned Japanese grain stores at the capital convinced
them to open negotiations with the Chinese.
The peace talks dragged on for more than four years marred by distrust,
misunderstandings, and outright lies on the part of all parties. During the initial
phases of the talks a huge Japanese force under the command of Katō
Kiyomasa massacred the entire population of the Korean city of Chinju,
supposedly in retaliation for a defeat the Japanese had suffered there the
previous year. Moreover, the Japanese never withdrew completely from
Korea but rather established a fortified string of outposts along the eastern
and southern coasts of the peninsula. While thus entrenched they enjoyed
sports such as tiger hunting and kickball. They even hosted European priests
who ministered to Japanese converts and were most likely the first Westerners
in Korea. While the available primary source records are contradictory and
unclear, it seems that both Katō and Konishi intrigued for the purposes of
gaining what they believed their lord desired. In the case of the former, he
argued for a permanent Japanese presence on the peninsula. The latter, who was
entrusted with managing talks with the Chinese, angled for some type of trade
relationship within the framework of the Ming tributary system. Hideyoshi
himself never went to Korea to inspect the scene or direct affairs despite
multiple intimations to his lords concerning his intentions to travel to the
front. Indeed, he seemed content to let matters drag on without a resolution
as he attended to domestic affairs, most notably securing the realm for his
beloved infant son.
For their part, the Ming withdrew most of their troops and decided to let the
peace talks play out, although there were vigorous debates in the Ming court
over the judiciousness of such an approach. The Koreans largely protested the
continued Japanese occupation of their kingdom, but could not force the
Chinese to launch a full-scale effort to dislodge the enemy even though one
Ming precondition for peace was the complete withdrawal of all Japanese
forces. After a farcical series of events, the Ming envoys finally gained an
audience with Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the autumn of 1596. Although the
envoys attempted to continue to pull the wool over Hideyoshi’s eyes so as to
obtain some kind of lasting peace, when he realized that none of his demands
were going to be met, he decided to launch another full-scale invasion of the
peninsula in 1597.
The second Japanese assault came from the south by sea rather than via
Pusan, which the Japanese still held. They were greatly helped by the fact that
Yi Sunsin had fallen victim to factionalism and intrigue the previous year and
was no longer in command of the Korean navy. Wiping out much of the Korean
fleet, the Japanese quickly advanced on the Korean city of Namwôn, which
they captured after a brief, but bitter battle. The second invasion was, if any-
thing, more ferocious than the first, as an angry and humiliated Hideyoshi had
ordered his commanders to sever the noses of their war victims and ship them
back to Japan for rewards. After their victory at Namwôn, the Japanese were
poised to once again strike at Seoul, but this time the allies were better
prepared. The Ming commander Yang Hao sent several divisions south to
intercept the Japanese and they were turned back in a fierce battle near the
town of Chiksan, where the Ming units featured the use of bulletproof armor
that stymied Japanese arquebuses. This allied victory stemmed the Japanese
advance and they retreated to their fortified bastions along the coasts. At the
same time, Yi Sunsin was restored to his command and won a series of
surprising triumphs at sea, which effectively cut Japanese transport and supply
lines again.
Over the next year the allies would mount a series of attacks on Japanese
positions in an effort to drive them off the peninsula.3 The first and most
extensive of these efforts was a siege of Ulsan castle in southeast Korea.
Lasting a couple of weeks, the allied forces under Yang Hao drove Japanese
units under Katō Kiyomasa deeper into his fortress as snow and freezing rain
hampered attacker and defender alike. Just as the defenders were reduced to
starvation and near capitulation, a relief column arrived, led by Konishi
Yukinaga. Fearing he was about to be flanked, Yang Hao fled the field.
Called a “defeat snatched from the jaws of victory,” this battle resulted in
many charges being leveled against Yang Hao and temporarily derailed allied
3
For more on the sieges of the second phase of the war, see Swope 2006.
offensive operations. Nevertheless, by this point most of Hideyoshi’s comman-

ders had lost the stomach for the fight and he began demobilizing his units. By
the time he died the following autumn, only a third of his original commanders
remained in Korea. The final allied offensives, which combined land and sea
operations, were launched in the autumn of 1598. After several early victories,
a freak explosion thwarted an allied assault on the fortress of Sachôn, though
Japanese claims that they took 38,000 noses in this battle are certainly exag-
gerated. A subsequent battle for the fortress of Sunchôn was likewise not
completely successful. Nonetheless, the allies managed to score an impressive
naval victory in the ensuing Battle of Noryang Straits, which marked the end of
the war. In this battle hundreds of Japanese ships were sunk and thousands of
Japanese soldiers were killed or captured. Unfortunately for the Koreans,
however, Yi Sunsin was killed in battle as he rushed to the aid of his ally, the
Chinese commander Chen Lin.
The end result of the war was devastating for Korea, with perhaps 20 percent
of its populace dead and its agriculture and infrastructure devastated. Many
Korean buildings and treasures were destroyed or looted. Tens of thousands of
Koreans were carried back to Japan as slaves. Some later contributed to the
spread of new pottery forms and intellectual trends there. Some authors argue
that the costs of the war hastened the collapse of the Ming and abetted the rise
of the Jurchens under Nurhaci (1559–1626), but such claims are difficult to
prove. For their part, the Japanese withdrew their challenge to the Chinese
tributary order and the course of East Asian diplomatic and commercial rela-
tions would continue along traditional lines until the nineteenth century.
Hideyoshi’s arrangements for his heir also quickly unraveled as rival factions
battled for supremacy at Sekigahara in 1600, both ostensibly supporting the late
overlord’s young son. The forces allied with Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616)
would win this momentous battle, eventually liquidating the house of Toyotomi
in 1615.
In addition to its inherent significance for the comparative study of war and
diplomacy in the early modern world, the Great East Asian War is salient to the
discussion of grand strategy. Like many aspects of imperial Chinese history, the
study of grand strategy remains in its infancy. While it is somewhat taken for
granted that great Western empires such as Rome, Byzantium, and the Spanish
empire of the early modern era conceived and executed long-term grand
strategies, until recently far less attention was devoted toward China in this
respect, despite the well-known existence of an extensive corpus of strategic
texts, the most famous of which is of course, Sunzi’s Art of War.4 Fortunately,
however, this state of affairs is finally being rectified, and in the past two
4
See, for example, Luttwak 2011; Luttwak 2016; Parker 2000. On the Chinese strategic texts and
their traditions, see Sawyer 1993.
decades a number of stimulating works have been published that deal with
grand strategy in imperial China, most notably the Ming dynasty.5 Simply put,
grand strategy is the coordination of all elements of national power (economic,
political, and military) to accomplish national goals, primarily security against
external threats.6 In the case of the Ming, while the specific means of pursuing
its national goals varied extensively in accordance with the aims of interests of
its emperors and competing factions of officials, the overall Ming approach to
maintaining regional hegemony lay in the concept of “Manifesting Awe” (wei
威) to deter its potential enemies from attacking the empire itself and threaten-
ing its allies and tributaries. But when the power and prestige of the empire was
directly challenged, as in the aforementioned Japanese invasion of Korea
(1592–1598), the Ming would respond with force calibrated to meet the threat.
The Ming strategy of Manifesting Awe involved a complex interplay of
military, cultural, and diplomatic facets. In the most brutal sense, Ming hege-
mony was grounded in its vast army and superior military technology. From its
inception in the fourteenth century the Ming, as the first of the early modern
“Gunpowder Empires,” was a military superpower, and it continued to be the
primary exporter of firearms technology across East and South Asia until the
early sixteenth century.7 The early Ming rulers in particular frequently used
military force and the threat of force to impose their will upon their neighbors.
On the cultural front, Ming wares and products flooded Asian and world
markets. They were so desirable that neighboring states such as Vietnam
often produced faux Ming knock-offs for their own trade partners. The right
to conduct lucrative trade, both official and unofficial, was a key carrot of the
Ming tributary order. It would later become a sticking point in the negotiations
between the Ming and Hideyoshi over Japan’s status following hostilities in
Korea. On the diplomatic side, Ming rulers invested their neighbors, including
many Central Asian leaders, with titles and other symbols of authority. This
granted these rulers a certain degree of prestige, accorded them trading benefits
and, as seen in the case of Korea, could offer them military protection from the
Ming. Taken together this tripartite system, as demonstrated by David
C. Kang,8 was remarkably successful at preventing major conflicts between
the participating entities, even if the Ming was generally fighting along one or
more of its frontiers on a small scale.
Therefore, the Ming serves as a useful model for strategic studies for
a number of reasons. First, the Ming state represents the maturation of the
imperial system first created during the Qin (220–206 BC). Even though the
Qing (1644–1912) made many alterations to the Ming imperial structure,
5
The first work of note in English was Johnston 1995. Also see Swope 2015.
6
See Johnston 1995, 36; F. Zhang 2015, 15.
7
For the longer story of firearms in China in general and the Ming in particular, see Andrade 2017.
8
D. C. Kang 2010.
especially in the area of checks on the leadership manifested in the creation of

a Manchu Grand Council, it retained the basic Ming governmental structure
and many of its policies. Additionally, there are voluminous surviving primary
records from the Ming that allow historians and political scientists to get inside
the political debates, issues, and policymaking of the era. Furthermore, the
Ming operated in a distinctly Sinocentric context, meaning that its worldview
and guiding principles were not strongly affected by other worldviews or
diplomatic traditions and practices. This is not to argue that the Ming tributary
system was not malleable or that the Ming were xenophobic, but rather that it
provides a fascinating window for studying alternative diplomatic and strategic
paradigms that can inform our understanding of other systems, places, and
practices.
Most germane to the present discussion are the numerous reevaluations of
the Chinese tributary system that have been put forth by a number of scholars,
most of them political scientists or international relations specialists, in the past
few years. The goal of such works has been twofold. First, they have sought to
bring China into the broader discussion of power politics around the globe, by
both examining its historical situation and examining past behavior as a means
of better understanding the contemporary situation. Along these lines, the
comparative uniqueness of China’s tributary system has been highlighted as
a useful contrast to predominant political science models based on the
Westphalian notion of a balance of power among relatively evenly matched
states in an anarchic system.9 Moreover, claims have been made that this
explicitly hierarchical order was in fact better at maintaining regional stability
than the anarchic model of the West.10 Furthermore, recent scholarship has
significantly expanded our understanding of the inherent malleability of the
tributary system, which though hegemonic in theory, in fact offered a range of
options for participants at all levels of the hierarchy to legitimize their respec-
tive rules and maximize the benefits derived from the system.
And despite how it is sometimes depicted in official texts, the tributary
system was by no means monolithic, nor was it the only means by which
international relations were conducted in East Asia and regional order was
maintained. China’s neighbors were well aware of the possibilities and the
limitations inherent in the tributary order, and recent scholars have stressed this
in their works, even as they build upon foundations laid by scholars such as
David C. Kang. In addition to Feng Zhang, who correctly emphasizes the
importance of individual agency in modifying tributary institutions, notable
in this respect is the recent work of Ji-Young Lee, who argues that “Chinese
hegemony was accepted by other actors based on a combination of domestic
9
See, most notably, D. C. Kang 2010; F. Zhang 2015; J.-Y. Lee 2016.
10
See D. C. Kang 2010, 1–24.
political needs and Chinese ideological and symbolic resonance.”11 In other

words, the symbolic power of China could in fact be deployed by lesser states
in the hierarchy for their own ends and was often in the backdrop of domestic
power struggles.
Feng Zhang also modifies Kang’s argument somewhat in contending that
Ming hegemony was incomplete, while admitting that the tributary system
was nonetheless “a distinct international society with its own rules, norms,
and institutions.”12 Yet this system also allowed for what Feng calls “expres-
sive hierarchy,” which is a strategy of simultaneous integration and differ-
entiation whereby China created a system of bilateral relations with its
neighbors that were hierarchical and differentiated between one another,
reflecting each state’s relative inclusivity within the Confucian-derived
international order.13 Interestingly enough, one of the big sticking points in
the later negotiations between the Ming and Japan over the settlement of the
war in Korea concerned the subsequent status of Japan within the tributary
system. And one of the possible reasons for Hideyoshi’s decision to launch
a second costly offensive in 1597 was the discovery that he was ranked no
higher than the Chosôn king, Sônjo, in the Ming’s conceptualization of his
status as “King of Japan,” which was granted to him by Emperor Wanli’s
decree, albeit without the right to engage in potentially lucrative tribute
trade. Thus, Japan’s position vis-à-vis China was certainly inferior, and
with respect to Korea, it was at best as an equal. This was simply unaccep-
table in both symbolic and material terms for the overlord of Japan, who was
eager to cement his status and ensure the transmission of rule to his heir.
Indeed, as suggested earlier in the essay, the motives behind Hideyoshi’s
decision to invade the Asian mainland remain complex and contested by
scholars. A minority of Japanese scholars have maintained that all
Hideyoshi desired was the resumption of tributary trade with China, which
had been curtailed after an incident in the Chinese port of Ningbo in 1549.
Hideyoshi was, after all, quite cognizant of the value of foreign trade in
helping him to maintain his preeminent, though precarious, military position
in Japan, an insight he gained from his former master Oda Nobunaga (1534–
1582). It is certainly plausible that he envisioned creating a new East Asian
trade order with Japan at the apex. Some of the demands he would later
present to the Ming suggest the importance of trade to Hideyoshi’s designs.
Additionally, Hideyoshi may have viewed the war and the creation of new
trading opportunities as a means toward solving domestic economic problems
by linking the broader Asian trade then going to China to Japanese ports such
as Osaka.14
11
J.-Y. Lee 2016, 5. 12 F. Zhang 2015, 34. 13 F. Zhang 2015, 34–35.
14
Swope 2009, 63. This section of the chapter is derived from my 2009 monograph.
However, while Hideyoshi clearly appreciated the relationship between

political hegemony and lucrative foreign trade, he was much less cognizant
of the basis of China’s regional hegemony. As Etsuko Hae-jin Kang observes,
Hideyoshi, “failed to perceive that other Asian states had a thoroughly dissim-
ilar ideological and political makeup [than Japan] and, more importantly, he
lacked insight into the foundations of the Chinese world order which was based
on the concepts of Confucianism.”15 Hideyoshi simply presumed he could
export the Japanese imperial model wholesale across Asia, while adding his
own trade orientation to the mix.
In addition to economic motives, Hideyoshi’s rather unstable control of the
Japanese islands led him to crave recognition from foreign rulers so as to
further legitimate his own hegemony. After all, he lacked the bloodline to
become shogun, the supreme military ruler of Japan. So he had instead taken
titles from the imperial court, most notably those of regent (kanpaku) and
retired regent (taikō). But further conquests might help him overcome these
shortcomings and cement his status as one of Japan’s great rulers for posterity.
For there could be no greater achievement than conquering China. Hideyoshi’s
bombastic letters to his neighboring rulers and to the Europeans (he asked the
Spanish in the Philippines to supply him with ships) speak both to his desire for
validation and his supreme confidence in his own ability and destiny. He
frequently talked of his desire to extend the peace Japan enjoyed to East Asia
more broadly, while also noting his unprecedented achievement in bringing
said peace to Japan.
With respect to maintaining his own domestic authority, another reputed
motive was the desire to weaken potential challengers by forcing them to
expend their resources, including, of course, their soldiers, in the conquest of
the continent. Such a plan could serve Hideyoshi’s ends regardless of whether
or not the war was successful. If Japan won, these vassals could be rewarded
with lands on the continent, thereby removing them from threatening
Hideyoshi at home. If they were killed in battle then they could obviously
pose no further threat to Hideyoshi. The fact that Hideyoshi did seek to extend
Japan’s institutional structure to Korea to administer conquered lands lends at
least some credence to this theory. The power of any feudal lord was tied to his
ability to reward his vassals. With lands running out in Japan and a seemingly
inexhaustible supply on the mainland, such a strategy made sense. Likewise,
the invasion served as a way to keep his warlords occupied overseas while he
consolidated his control at home, hopefully solidifying matters so that he could
ensure the rule for his heir, who was but a child.16
15
E. H. Kang 1997, 85.
16
Before his son was born, Hideyoshi had designated his nephew as his heir. He was later removed
on likely spurious charges.
Still another motive offered for the invasion of the mainland was a desire to
remove the Christian daimyo from Japan as part of his overarching goal to
excise Christianity from the islands owing to fears of European meddling in
Japanese affairs. While it is true that many prominent Christian daimyo served
in Korea, this was at best a corollary motivation since some of these men were
in fact quite loyal to Hideyoshi personally. It is worth noting that the first
recorded Western Europeans to visit Korea were in fact Jesuit priests who
accompanied the Japanese armies. In exchange the first Korean known to visit
Europe was the product of this conflict as well, returning to Italy with some of
the aforementioned priests.
Finally, some scholars have emphasized the ideological undertones of
Hideyoshi’s invasion, finding elements of later Japanese hypernationalism. In
this formulation Hideyoshi considered it his responsibility to maintain proper
hierarchies within the East Asian cultural sphere and this meant making the
notion of the Divine Land (shinkoku) synonymous with Japan. This included
extending Japan’s customs and peace to the rest of the world. Thus, one
Japanese scholar remarked that Hideyoshi’s campaign “was intended to bring
mukuri kukuri (demons and monsters) within the framework of general peace
and make them tributaries of the divine nation.”17
Therefore, while acknowledging its domestic components and allowing for
the vagaries of individual personalities, I would argue that Hideyoshi’s inva-
sion of Korea can be largely understood against the backdrop of the tributary
system as he posed the greatest direct challenge to the system in its mature
phase prior to the nineteenth century. His understanding of the wealth enjoyed
by the Ming as a result of its being at the apex of the tributary system and
thereby, global trade flows in Asia, was one of the major reasons for his
decision to invade the Asian mainland.18 Hideyoshi sought to supplant the
Ming at the apex of the tributary system, and he envisioned creating a trade-
based empire centered in China that might have borne many similarities to the
burgeoning trade empires of Europe at the time. But his challenge was success-
fully thwarted by the Sino-Korean allies, and the primacy of the tributary
system was preserved. And it was apparently still perceived as viable enough
that it was adopted by the Manchu Qing conquerors of the Ming, whose
forebears had been Ming vassals themselves.19 Such observations make the
tributary system a natural subject for comparative study.
Returning to the subject of strategic culture, much has also been made of
China’s supposedly distinctive strategic culture. Drawing upon the definition
17
See Nakura 1976. On the ideological backdrop to Hideyoshi’s invasion in Japan, see Ooms
1985.
18
Swope 2009, 63–66.
19
On the Qing adoption of the tributary system and its use as a mechanism for establishing their
hegemony in Northeast Asia, see J.-Y. Lee 2016, 135–167.
offered by Iain Johnston, strategic culture “is an integrated system of symbols

that acts to establish pervasive and long-lasting grand strategic preferences by
formulating concepts of the role and efficacy of military force in interstate
political affairs, and by clothing these conceptions with such an aura of
factuality that the strategic preferences seem uniquely realistic and
efficacious.”20 As indicated previously, Ming China provides an excellent
environment for testing such theories because of the extent of its written
tradition, not to mention the conscious repeated invocations of precedent and
historical lessons by officials and policymakers. Ming emperors all received
extensive instruction in history, and proper understanding of the reasons for
past decisions as well as the perceived ramifications of such decisions informed
the policymaking process.
As for China’s strategic culture itself, scholars have offered a variety of
overlapping definitions while simultaneously highlighting different aspects of
Chinese culture that supposedly shaped its grand strategy over the centuries.
For example, following the lead of Iain Johnston, Andrew Scobell concludes
that China “has a dualistic strategic culture. The two main strands are
a Confucian–Mencian one that is conflict averse and defensive minded; and
a Realpolitik one which favors military solutions and is offensive oriented.
Both strands are operative and both influence and combine in dialectic fashion
to form a ‘Chinese Cult of Defense.’”21 For his part, Johnston concludes that
the aggressive strand of Chinese strategic culture has tended to dominate,
though at times his use of examples from the Ming to prove this point is
problematic.
Nevertheless, the advantage of such an interpretation of Chinese strategic
culture is that it allows for the incorporation of different intellectual and
strategic traditions and considers their respective impact upon policymaking
and decisions for war. On the negative side however, perhaps too much
influence is placed upon the textual basis and rationale for policies and more
significantly, actual military actions. While one does find many references to
strategic texts and Confucian philosophy in the dynastic histories and records
or court debates, in fact, these tend to come from court-bound literati. Actual
military commanders seem much less bound by textual authority and conven-
tions and much more interested in actual results. Additionally, as David
Robinson has recently demonstrated, the Ming emperors were far more
immersed in military culture than has heretofore been recognized, and they
often viewed military affairs, including interventions in disputes among
tributaries, as an arena for the exercising of their own prerogatives.22
Interestingly enough, while the interpretation of Chinese strategic culture
offered by Johnston and Scobell has not necessarily gained a tremendous
20 21 22
Johnston 1995, 36. Scobell 2002, 3–5. See D. M. Robinson 2013; Swope 2008.
amount of traction among political scientists and international theorists more

broadly, it has provoked some interesting, even defensive, responses from other
(usually Chinese) scholars working on East Asian international relations. Feng
Huiyun, for example, challenges Johnston’s assertion that Chinese strategic
culture “exhibits an aggressive and expansionist preference.”23
Feng Huiyun operates from the premise that Confucian thought as it emerged
toward the end of the Warring States period (c. 474–221 BC) assumed pre-
dominance in the creation of China’s strategic culture. She contends that
Confucianism “reflected the people’s general aspiration for peace” and was
domestically focused. Therefore, “the Chinese way of expansion of the Chinese
order was through cultural rather than military means and the final goal was not
territorial or political rule over other states.”24 She continues by contending that
“the unique part of Chinese Confucian thought is that . . . it relies on virtue and
self-cultivation of leaders/rulers to maintain peace and prestige rather than
resorting to force for obedience in handling inter-state relations.”25 While
acknowledging that many scholars have contested this idealized notion of
Confucianism’s pervasive influence over state policy, Feng nonetheless asserts
that the constraining influences of Confucianism, with its emphasis upon
nonviolence, defensiveness, and righteous war, have created a Chinese strate-
gic culture that has been primarily defensive since the Warring States era.
Feng Huiyun takes this one step further, maintaining that, “in over 2,000
years of feudal rule the feudal empires of China seldom displayed aggressive
intentions towards other countries nor made any attempts at expansion despite
the capability to do so.”26 Beyond the rather dated references to “feudal” China,
such rosy interpretations of China’s military past would certainly be surprising
to the ancestors of many of China’s fifty-six recognized “national minority”
groups today, whose forced assimilation into the empire resembles that of their
counterparts all over the globe. But Feng takes her argument even further and
claims that “In China’s 5,000 years of history, there were only two large-scale
military expansionist movements carried out by the nomadic minorities of
Mongolian and Manchurian people.”27 In making such statements Feng is
not only seeing traditional Chinese military culture through an overwhelmingly
positive lens, but is also evincing a remarkable degree of Han Chinese chau-
vinism. She further points to the Great Wall as the ultimate symbol of Chinese
defensiveness and pacifism, a popular interpretation that has been most
famously problematized by Arthur Waldron in his classic study of the policy
decisions that resulted in the huge expansion of the Wall during the Ming
dynasty.28 And even more interesting is the fact that while Feng decries
Johnston for positing the dominance of an aggressive, realpolitik streak in
23 24
Feng 2007, 17. Feng 2007, 20. 25 Feng 2007, 25. 26
Feng 2007, 26.
27 28
Feng 2007, 26. See Waldron 1990.
Chinese strategic culture that extends throughout Chinese history, she does the
same in arguing for her own virtuous, defensive-oriented, Confucian model.
Taking a middle position, Yuan-kang Wang has attempted to modify
Johnston’s conceptualization of Chinese strategic behavior. Adopting a much
longer temporal framework, Wang argues that Chinese states from the Song
dynasty (960–1279) onwards have operated in accordance with their relative
power vis-à-vis their enemies. When powerful, Chinese states adopted an
aggressive, expansionist grand strategy. When they were weak, Chinese states
adopted defensive or accommodationist strategies. But in general he contends
that states are in fact “primed for offense,” so we should reasonably expect
offensive actions whenever the opportunity presents itself.29 Nevertheless,
Wang cautions against rejecting the influence of Confucian acculturation and
Confucian influence upon the creation of Chinese strategic culture and grand
strategy.30 Indeed, there were times when Confucianism exerted an ameliorat-
ing influence upon strategic behavior, especially with respect to quelling
domestic revolts. But in general, the anarchic nature of international systems
pushed China toward aggressive realpolitik behavior in the interest of survival,
at least to Wang.31 In other words, power considerations and capabilities trump
variables such as culture or ideology.
Feng Zhang adopts elements of the interpretations of Johnston and Wang,
but argues that Confucianism is an ideological variable in the strategy of
expressive hierarchy, but it plays only a noncausal role in the strategy of
instrumental hierarchy.32 So it informed conceptualizations of international
relations and expectations of “civilized behavior” and discourse, but that did
not necessarily translate into consistently pacifistic approaches to security
dilemmas. Moreover, Feng criticizes scholars such as Wang and Johnston for
ignoring distinctively Chinese cultural frameworks and simply classifying
imperial China as a realpolitik state. Instead, Feng argues, one must emphasize
the specifically Chinese aspects of grand strategy and how they impacted both
Chinese practices and the East Asian international order.33
Yet another variation on these interpretations is the idea of ritual integration,
or ritual hegemony. This thesis posits the notion that what China really sought
was symbolic, ritual domination over other polities, not direct political or
military control. So neighboring states were integrated through investing
them with patents of authority that rested on their mutual acceptance of
Confucian hierarchical principles.34 It is worth noting that this variation is
supported to an extent by David C. Kang’s findings concerning the compara-
tively lower level of effectiveness of the tributary system in ameliorating
29 30
Yuan-kang Wang 2010, 21–23. Yuan-kang Wang 2010, 24–27.
31 32
Yuan-kang Wang 2010, 185. F. Zhang 2015, 44. 33 F. Zhang 2015, 44.
34
F. Zhang 2015, 43.
grievances between and among the Mongols and other Central Asian polities,
which were less Confucianized.35
While this survey has been brief, it illustrates how imperial China in general
and the Ming dynasty in particular have become fertile ground for political
scientists and international relations scholars in recent years. It is worth adding
that virtually all the works examined herein even while focusing their discus-
sions on premodern or early modern history, explicitly consider the contem-
porary implications of their findings. Ji-Young Lee, for example, while
admitting that some of her findings are specific to the time and place she is
studying, suggests that they may be used as a guide to the types of questions
scholars may wish to ask and the types of signs to look for as security dynamics
in Asia change. In other words, the states in question have an ever-changing
sense of their own historical past and relations with one another as well as an
understanding of how to operate within a hegemonic international system,
currently represented by the United States, even as its regional power relative
to China declines.36 And her model is useful in the sense that she considers the
domestic audience for international actions, an observation that seems particu-
larly relevant in light of the recent provocative activities of the People’s
Republic of China in asserting its power in East and Southeast Asia by virtue
of the so-called Nine-Dash Line and the construction of artificial islands to
demarcate China’s territory and sphere of influence. In fact such actions might
be viewed as modern efforts by China to “Manifest Awe.”
While Feng Zhang characterizes the early Ming in particular as an era of
“incomplete hegemony,” in fact I think it is more useful to examine the totality of
the Ming as an ever-evolving implementation of the strategy of Manifesting
Awe.37 From its inception the Ming rulers consistently sought to assert China’s
predominance in Asia by a combination of military threats, trade arrangements,
and symbolic investitures of authority. It is important to realize that these efforts
were multifaceted, nuanced, and intertwined, and understood as such by the
Ming’s neighbors. Recent studies on the Zheng He expeditions, for example,
have emphasized their military implications, while also highlighting their impor-
tance for extending and normalizing the tributary system.38 One scholar has even
referred to the latter efforts as “proto-imperialism.”39 From the Ming perspective
they were simply establishing their strategic lines of defense. These could be
maintained through allies and vassal states or, less commonly, through outright
military conquest and annexation, as in the case of Annam.40
35
See D. C. Kang 2010, 141–149. 36 J.-Y. Lee 2016, 177–186.
37
On Zhang’s notions of incomplete hegemony, see F. Zhang 2015, 154–156. On the concept of
Manifesting Awe and its application throughout the Ming period, see Swope 2015.
38
See, most notably, Dreyer 2007. 39 See Wade 2006.
40
For a recent consideration of the Ming intervention in Annam, see Swope 2016a. Also see
Baldanza 2016.
Along these lines, it must be remembered that the tributary system had
important military dimensions. China’s vassal states were considered to be
under the Ming’s defense umbrella and could petition the Ming court for
military assistance in instances of either domestic or foreign military chal-
lenges. It is worth noting that the two major international wars that the Ming
engaged in prior to the war with the Jin/Qing both involved defense of tributary
vassals. The Ming also cooperated with the kingdom of Chosôn in battling
Jurchen groups, and frequently intervened in steppe clashes that involved
vassal princes or chieftains invested by the Ming. Likewise, the steady Ming
expansion to the southwest was supposedly occasioned at least some of the
time by recalcitrant local chieftains (tusi) who were shirking their tributary
responsibilities to the Ming court. So beyond its obvious diplomatic and
economic dimensions, which have been amply studied, one must not discount
the military dimensions of the Chinese tributary system when making compar-
isons to international systems elsewhere.
Concerning the war under consideration here, drawing a parallel with recent
scholarship, one might characterize this situation as emblematic of
“Thucydides Trap,” whereby a rising power challenges the dominant hegemo-
nic power.41 As noted earlier and commented upon by other scholars such as
Arano Yasunori and Ji-Young Lee, Hideyoshi explicitly sought to create a new
“Japanocentric world order” to displace China in the East Asian hierarchy.42
This vision included not only the military conquest of Korea and China, but
also many of the south sea realms, including Taiwan and the Philippines, and
even India. Hideyoshi grounded his vision in his belief in the superiority of
Japan and Japanese culture as embodied in the divinity of its rulers and by
extension, himself, as he often referred to himself as a “Child of the Sun.”43
Interestingly, however, while Hideyoshi was clearly challenging Ming hege-
mony and while his proposed new order might have more explicitly embraced
foreign trade, he was essentially accepting the validity of Chinese practices and
recognizing the utility of the symbolic domination offered by being at the apex
of the tributary order. He simply wanted to put himself, and by extension Japan,
at the top of this order.
Moreover, as Ji-Young Lee stresses and others, including myself, have also
noted, Hideyoshi was also sensitive to domestic political and military
concerns.44 He craved recognition and fame at home and abroad and sought
such recognition as crucial to maintaining his patrimony. He was a social
upstart and was quite sensitive to his common background, which meant that
legally he had no claim to the exalted military title of shogun. This was a major
factor in his choice to link himself to the imperial house in Japan and accept
41 42
See Allison 2017. See the discussion in J.-Y. Lee 2016, 104–113.
43 44
J.-Y. Lee 2016, 107. J.-Y. Lee 2016, 115.
numerous titles and accolades from the Japanese emperor. He was effectively
borrowing the symbolic capital of the throne while also looking to cement his
status through concrete accomplishments. There could be no more impressive
accomplishment than the conquest of Asia. Such an act would furthermore
serve as a means of rewarding loyal vassals and/or exhausting the military
strength of potential challengers as they fought their way across the continent.
In any case, Hideyoshi was gravely mistaken in his predictions and his
assessments of the Ming and their willingness and ability to fight. For one, he
disregarded the strategic importance Ming China attached to Chosŏn Korea.
Ming officials, as well as the Wanli emperor, repeatedly referred to Korea as
“the lips to China’s teeth” and regarded Korea as China’s respectful child in
the tribute system of foreign relations that had been followed since the
dynasty’s founding. Additionally, as things turned out, the main military
force that normally would have been posted in Liaodong, along the Korean
border, was in the process of quelling a mutiny in northwest China, which is
why the initial Ming response was less vigorous than it otherwise might have
been.
Hideyoshi’s intelligence concerning Ming military capabilities was also
dated and flawed. Under Emperor Wanli the Ming had embarked upon
a program of military rejuvenation that culminated in the successful prosecu-
tion of the aforementioned three major military campaigns simultaneously, one
of which was this very war in Korea. The Ming had also put the Mongol tribes
of the steppe back on the defensive and managed, at least until the early
seventeenth century, to keep the Jurchen tribes of the northeast divided and at
each other’s throats. The Ming armies also enjoyed the services of a number of
gifted and experienced commanders, many of whom had the personal backing
of the emperor. Puzzlingly, Hideyoshi, who was normally known as
a meticulous planner, based his assessment of Ming military capabilities
upon his understanding of the Japanese pirate (Wokou/Wakō) raids of the
1560s, and concluded that they could never stand up to his own seasoned
troops. He had, however, acquired a bit of knowledge about Korea’s military
capabilities, and his projections in this area were more realistic, at least with
respect to the early stages of the war. And the sheer size of the force he
amassed, which totaled half a million including reserves, suggests that he had
some sense of the enormous task that lay before him, even if he discounted the
military potential of the Ming.
In fact the Koreans had asked for assistance from the Ming as soon as the
Japanese landed. By the time the Japanese were advancing north from Seoul
a Ming official from Liaodong sent a report to the Ministry of War stating, “The
Japanese bandits have reached the Taedong River so the Korean monarch and
his ministers wish to escape and I fear the king and his soldiers will enter
Liaodong. To prevent them would not be benevolent, but to receive them will
be to invite trouble.”45 Thus we can clearly see the Ming dilemma. On the one
hand the defense of Korea was part of the Ming’s tributary obligations toward
its vassal. It was also in its strategic interest. But owing to pressing military
obligations on other frontiers, including a troop mutiny that had necessitated
the redeployment of Ming forces that normally would have been stationed in
Liaodong, the Ming were not in a position to send a large force, hence the small
relief column mentioned earlier, which the Japanese handily destroyed. On the
other hand, neither could Korea be readily abandoned, both for reasons of
friendship and prestige.
Nonetheless, there were still doves at court who argued against intervention
in Korea, using the example of the Ming incursion into Vietnam in the early
fifteenth century (which had resulted in a disastrous twenty-year failed annexa-
tion) as a cautionary tale.46 Still others invoked the failed Sui–Tang dynasty
incursions into Korea. Their opponents argued that this situation was far
different. First of all, Korea was friendly and the Koreans had welcomed the
Ming. Second Korea was much closer to China than Vietnam. Therefore,
a large army could be easily supplied by land and sea, and supplies could
reach the front in just a few days. Additionally, there was the obvious fact that
Korea was much more strategically important to China by virtue of its proxi-
mity to Beijing than Vietnam.47
Therefore, after a series of spirited debates at court, the Ming emperor Wanli
decided to intervene militarily in Korea. His decision was predicated on three
major (interrelated) factors. First, and perhaps foremost, it was in the Ming’s
strategic interest to confine the war to the Korean peninsula. As some noted at
the time, Korea was the “lips that protected China’s teeth” and keeping the
Japanese tied down there limited the damage to China itself. Second, there were
many officials in China, not to mention the emperor himself, who seemed to
harbor genuine feelings of friendship and tributary responsibility toward
Korea. To be sure such sentiments were at times patronizing and self-serving,
but neither were they false. After all, the neighbors had enjoyed good relations
to mutual benefit for two centuries. It would hardly do to turn their backs on
Korea when help was needed. Finally, on a personal level Wanli, often stymied
by officials at home when it came to asserting the imperial will, saw the war in
Korea as a way to maintain Ming primacy in East Asia and thereby bolster his
own prestige, at least internationally.48 In this sense Wanli’s actions reinforce
Ji-Young Lee’s conclusions concerning the tributary system’s importance in
domestic politics in Korea and Japan. Wanli clearly had domestic politics in
mind when considering his actions in Korea. More generally, a forceful and
45
Zheng Liangsheng 1987, 2:478. 46 See Swope 2016a.
47
On the Ming debates, see Song Yingchang 1986, 1:9–10.
48
For a longer discussion of the Ming debates concerning the intervention in Korea, see Swope
2013.
effective Ming response to the Japanese challenge could be used by the Chinese
to reinforce their position at the top of the international hierarchy in Asia.
It is perhaps most instructive to see Wanli’s position through his own decree,
issued to the Koreans upon his decision to send military aid. The emperor notes,
For generations you have been our Eastern neighbor and you have always been docile
and obedient. Your gentry take pleasure in learning and culture. I heard that your nearby
land had been invaded and was being plundered by the rapacious Japanese villains and
that your capital city has been looted and Pyongyang has been occupied, forcing your
people to scatter near and far and I was deeply disturbed. And now Your Majesty has fled
for the Western coast and is seeking refuge among the rustics. You must now focus your
attention to the task at hand and strengthen your resolve. For, as soon as I heard the news
yesterday, I ordered the border officials to begin mobilizing troops to come to your aid.
I will also dispatch a high civil and a high military official to act in concert. They will
assemble 70,000 crack troops from the various defense commands around Liaoyang,
which will be sent forth to assist you in chastising the [Japanese] bandits, and in
conjunction with your own country’s men, they will catch the enemy in a vise and
annihilate them. Furthermore, I have issued imperial commands to the tributary kings of
the myriad states in all directions so that they too can assist in helping with this nasty
business. I have also issued an order to the various coastal garrisons of the southeast and
promulgated an edict to countries such as Siam and Ryukyu to assemble an army of
100,000 to join us in attacking Japan and driving them from their nests . . . Now Your
Highness must focus upon maintaining what your ancestors have bequeathed to you.
How can you just lightly cast it all away? Now you must exert all your energy in the
business of saving your state and restoring its prestige, and you should order all your
civil and military officials and ordinary people to likewise exert themselves to the
utmost. For if Your Majesty’s mind is open and you rectify your past transgressions,
then you will be able to recover the territory that you have lost. The masses will face this
calamity out of filiality to their father, and the ministers of your country, recognizing
your righteousness, will certainly all look up to you. Your Majesty will thereby regain
the respect you once had.49
Wanli’s desire to retain sovereign supremacy in East Asia can be seen

through Wanli’s behavior over the next several years and in his communica-
tions with King Sônjo of Chosôn. In these exchanges Wanli alternately exhorts
and berates the Korean monarch, urging him to both rectify his personal
behavior and rally his beleaguered populace. Yet he also promises to send
myriad troops to overwhelm the rapacious Japanese invaders and promises to
send contributions from China’s other tributary vassals. In fact, while some of
the other tributaries, including both the Jurchens under Nurgaci and the Thai
leader at Ayudhya offered to send troops to aid the Ming or even attack Japan,
such offers were refused. It seems that the Ming thought accepting such
assistance would undermine their own prestige or diminish their awesomeness
in the eyes of other potential threats to their supremacy. Interesting enough,
49
Sin 1980, 1:238–239.
Korean aid would be accepted some twenty-seven years later when the Ming
mounted its first major offensive campaign against Nurgaci. By this point,
however, Ming military power had declined significantly and Wanli was nearly
on his deathbed, worn down by decades of illness and factional strife.
While the war was poorly managed by both sides and fraught with diplo-
matic gaffes and misunderstandings, in the end the Japanese were forced to
withdraw from Korea without realizing any of Hideyoshi’s war aims, while the
Ming embarked upon a massive suppression campaign of an uprising in distant
Sichuan province, which marked the completion of the Three Great Campaigns
of the Wanli emperor. From a larger strategic standpoint, the war preserved
Ming China’s preeminent position in the East Asian world. In their eyes at least,
and notwithstanding the contributions of Korea’s own forces, China had
successfully defended its tributary from a formidable enemy and prevailed in
a distant war under harsh conditions. The logistical achievements alone are
noteworthy. Battles were waged on both land and at sea and included sieges,
classic infantry confrontations, and guerrilla-style warfare. The Chinese
proved particularly adept at using their great cannon to devastating effect in set-
piece battles, forcing the Japanese to change their tactics. As the war dragged
on, the Japanese preferred to avoid head-on clashes with superior Ming fire-
power, relying upon stoutly reinforced castles and ambushes. Responding to
these new tactical situations, the Ming increasingly rotated troops from south-
ern China to the front because they had more experience using the tactics
pioneered by the famous Ming general, Qi Jiguang (1528–1588), in combatting
Japanese raiders in the 1560s.50 Qi’s most popular training manuals were also
translated into Korean and their tactics and training methods adopted by the
Koreans for their own military.
Furthermore, contrary to what many scholars claim, this writer is not
inclined to believe that the war drained Ming military and economic resources
to their breaking point. If that had been the case, how could the Ming have
assembled a force of over 200,000 men to deal with the Yang Yinglong Miao
uprising so soon after on the heels of the war in Korea? And how was the Ming
state able to last over four more decades, fighting virtually the entire time?
These activities showed that the dynasty was still very cognizant of its strategic
defense interests and eager to maintain its military primacy. But factionalism at
virtually all levels of the administrative hierarchy, exacerbated by natural
disasters caused in part by unprecedented climate change, undermined the
effectiveness of the government and sapped the political will of Wanli and
his successors.51 In any case, the Ming court remained wary of Japanese
intentions for the rest of the dynasty’s existence, and troops were stationed
50
For a recent assessment of Qi’s accomplishments and influence, see Y. H. Teddy Sim 2017.
51
On these issues relative to the decline and fall of the Ming, see Swope 2014b.
for several years thereafter in Korea to ensure against another invasion, an

invasion which would not come for another 300 years.
Nonetheless, what is perhaps most remarkable about the aftermath of this
conflict is how soon things returned to a relative state of normality. Hideyoshi’s
successor, Tokugawa Ieyasu, could credibly claim to have had little to do with
the war itself since he had remained in Japan for its duration. Though the
Kingdom of Ryukyu was trampled underfoot by the Shimazu clan and forced
into tributary relations with the Tokugawa, the overall state of affairs was pretty
peaceful. Korea and Japan restored relations as equals barely a decade after the
cessation of hostilities.52 The tributary system was reconstructed under over-
arching Qing hegemony with microcosms existing between the Tokugawa and
their neighbors and with Chosŏn assuming a preeminent place under the Qing
despite their ongoing closet Ming loyalties.53 It is true that Japan remained
officially outside the Qing order, but neither did it challenge their hegemony
during the era of Tokugawa rule. And the ongoing importance of Korea to
Chinese grand strategy would be underscored by the willingness of the Qing to
fight the Empire of Japan in 1895 over influence in Korea. Of course China
would lose this war and the geostrategic landscape of Northeast Asia would be
altered dramatically for the next half-century.
Thus, as should be obvious from the preceding discussion, contemporary
international relations scholars and political scientists can certainly benefit
from examining the domestic ramifications of the Great East Asian War of
1592–1598 for all three belligerents, not to mention its important place in the
annals of East Asian military and diplomatic history. For this war marked the
most serious challenge to Chinese hegemony in East Asia over a 500-year
period and for better or worse, the ability of the Sino-Korean allies to stymie the
Japanese invasion, preserved the tributary system for another 250 years. Even
then it is worth noting that several of the wars fought by the Qing in the
nineteenth century involved retaining their primacy within the tributary system
and in East Asia. Likewise, consider the major military operations of the
People’s Republic. Interventions in Korea and Vietnam, clashes in the
Himalayas, and the desire to establish a line of coastal defense by means of
both military power and the ensconcing of friendly allies – all would be familiar
to Ming policymakers.
52
On the restoration of relations between Japan and Korea after the war, see J. B. Lewis 2003.
53
On Tokugawa foreign relations and the tributary order, see Toby 1984.
8 The Qing Unification, 1618–1683
Pamela Kyle Crossley
Over a long period in the seventeenth century, the Qing conquest regime
reunified historical China, adding Manchuria, Taiwan, Mongolia, Tibet, and
Xinjiang. The result was a territorial regime as well as economic transforma-
tions that created the foundation of modern China. It is a habit of historians to
think of the initiation of Qing rule in China as a transition from the former Ming
dynasty (1368–1644) to the new dynasty. This chapter suggests that the process
is better understood as a period of fragmented rule beginning in the later
sixteenth century, followed by a long, complex and uncertain reunification of
territories of historical China – a reunification not completed until 1683. When
viewed from this perspective, the history challenges our habits of “event”
construction, and also suggests that the best chronological theater for the
fragmentation and reunification processes is not found along the northern
borders – where the narratives often focus – but in the southwest, particularly
the province of Yunnan.
The Event Paradigm of the Ming–Qing Transition

Assumptions that Qing as a border regime rose up against Ming, took advan-
tage of massive rural uprisings caused by Ming “decline,” and overthrew Ming
without seriously rewriting the structure of the state, were exemplified in the
ubiquitously influential work of John King Fairbank, who attributed the suc-
cess of the Qing to their ability to assimilate and perpetuate Ming institutions of
domestic administration and foreign relations.1 A striking feature of this
narrative of the Ming to Qing transition is the assumption of a large power
differential, which drives a schema of a weak in situ entity being pierced and
subdued by an external invading force.
This overarching narrative of dynastic transition within a “late imperial”
political continuity owes a good deal to traditional Qing historiography, which
incorporated the Chinese imperial paradigm of each successive dynasty appro-
priating the “mandate of Heaven” directly from a legitimate predecessor. It was
1
X. D. Lin 2012.
129
130 Pamela Kyle Crossley
not the only narrative sponsored by the Qing court,2 but it was important that it
be represented in at least some of the imperial historiography.3 The right to rule
was seen as progressing through a defined chain of dynasties, and an under-
standing of dynastic succession as a distinct event was fundamental to many
imperial representations of legitimate rule.4 It found its way into foundational
American historiography of Qing, and for decades after World War II con-
trolled most English-language narratives of the seventeenth century.
The facts highlighted in this narrative were significant. The predecessor state
of Qing – the Aisin or Jin khanate (1616–1635) – was a Ming border regime,
and as of 1618 was in a declared war against Ming for control of Liaodong
province (closely corresponding to present-day Liaoning province of China). In
1644 the Qing empire (1636–1912) entered Beijing and began campaigns that
would culminate in the conquest of China – and afterward Taiwan, Mongolia,
Tibet, and Xinjiang. The problems with the high points of the narrative are that
it seriously understates the disunion of China from the late sixteenth century on,
displaces the locus of early Qing imperial power from eastern Mongolia to
Liaodong and southern Manchuria, and creates an illusory chronology in which
1644 becomes an origination point for the Qing and encapsulates an entire
narrative of decades of conflict and political transformation. Even the most
traditional narratives do not neglect to mention that the dynasty that Qing
pushed aside at Beijing in 1644 was not the Ming – it was the rebel dynasty
of Shun that had overthrown Ming two months earlier.5 Nevertheless, it is
common to write of the Ming–Shun displacement as occurring within the
context of continuing Ming territorial integrity.
This contrasts to the fact that Qing conquest of former Ming territories was
itself a series of campaigns and negotiations that concluded only in 1683, the
date at which the unity that the Chinese territories had known in the late
sixteenth century was restored. Between about 1580 and 1683, the territories
of historical China were in various degrees of fragmentation and, as
a consequence, unconquerable as a unit. Below, we explore the time and
space of disunity in the late Ming, with focus on four venues: Mongolia;
Liaodong and southern Manchuria; Shaanxi and Sichuan provinces; and
Yunnan province. The last of these, Yunnan, in many ways best represents
the chronological shape of the Ming–Qing transition outside the notion of an
“event.”
The multidimensionality of the Qing conquest of China and the reunification
of historical China in the process is clear in its outlines. During the Wanli period
(1573–1620), the Tumet Mongols appropriated the northern edge of Shanxi and
2
Crossley 1999, 221–270.
3
Crossley 1999; Mittag 2012, Crossley 2012, and Ong 2012; Brokaw and Busch 2018.
4
Robinson 2016. 5 Wakeman 1985; Struve 1993.
The Qing Unification, 1618–1683 131
Shaanxi provinces. Subsequently the Chahar khaghanate under Ligdan seized

control of trade entrepôts in northern Liaodong province, and the rising Jurchen
federation under Nurgaci (1559–1626) demanded a border agreement in
1609–1610 that marked the disintegration of nominal Ming hegemony over
Northeast Asia that had stood since Yongle (1402–1424) times. In the 1630s
Ming lost effective control over growing portions of Shaanxi and Sichuan
provinces, while the Aisin khanate (in 1636 transformed into the Qing empire)
forced the submission of Chosŏn Korea, which detached the Korean court and
military from Ming alliance and accelerated Qing progress in western
Liaodong, approaching the Great Wall.
Put crudely, in 1450 the Ming empire occupied about 6.5 million square
kilometers (Figure 8.1). By 1600 Ming had lost effective control over about
one-twelfth of that, by 1630 they had lost about one-ninth of that, and by
about 1640 they had lost nearly one-third (Figure 8.2). Equally important,
the Qing conquest of Beijing and its environs in north China led not to less
fragmentation within the Chinese territories, but to more. Ming loyalist
regimes were set up along the south China coast and the southwest high-
lands, while the Zheng family rebel dynasty from their base in Taiwan
interfered with the Fujian coast. To continue the same crude quantification,
by 1646 the Qing may have controlled at most about one-fifth of the former
Ming territories.
Figure 8.1 Areas under Ming governance, c. 1500

Figure 8.2 Territories controlled by the Ming empire, Tumet and Oyirod
federations, rebel territories in Shaanxi and Shanxi (Li Zicheng), and rebel
territories in Sichuan (Zhang Xianzhong), c. 1640
What the history shows is weakening of Ming power over its last century and
the devolution of power to rival or emergent power centers – to the Tumet
Mongols, to the Oyirods (later, Junghars, who were moving into Gansu from
the area of modern Xinjiang), to the Chahar khaghanate, to the Aisin khanate
and the Qing empire, to the rebel regimes of Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong,
and to Europeans – the Portuguese from time to time attempted to seize bits of
the Chinese mainland from their perch in Macao, while Spanish and Dutch
forces (struggling against pirate federations for domination of Taiwan)
impinged upon Chinese sea travel east and south. The Qing conquest in its
complete arc reunited all these areas before making its remarkable additions of
Taiwan, Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang. In effect it was the end of a long-
standing multidimensional conflict over Ming territory, reuniting the historical
domain of China and creating a new empire – not a dynastic transition within
a continuing empire, nor displacement of one empire by another.
Mongolia and the Devolution of Power in North China

In 1368 the Ming dynasty began with the defeat of the last of the Mongol rulers
of the Yuan empire in China (1272–1368), and the dispersal of the former Yuan
Mongol population, with some remaining in China and many returning to

Mongolia. The largest identifiable group to withdraw north from China were
the “six tümen,” as they were called in the Chinese records. These federations
considered themselves the continuation of the Yuan empire, and in some
records referred to themselves as the “Northern Yuan.” The Six Tümen faced
geographical and political competition from Mongolian-speaking groups with
distinct histories from the former Yuan population.6
Through the early fourteenth century various uneasy coalitions in eastern
Mongolia, some affiliated with the Kirghiz Turks, and some with the descen-
dants of Chinggis (the Chinggisids, who had brought the federations north from
China) attempted to fend off both Ming pressure from the south and increas-
ingly aggressive incursions from the Oyirod Mongols in the west. In the mid-
fifteenth century the Oyirods centralized Mongolia. But the political and
cultural independence of eastern Mongolia was reasserted with the establish-
ment of Dayan (1470–1543) as the (Chinggisid) Great Khan in 1475, and by the
end of the fifteenth century the eastern Chakhar federation was consolidated.
Ming attempted to manipulate the alliances among the Mongols and under-
mine unity when possible with bribes and promises of favorable military
intervention. The by-product was the accumulation of leaders in Mongolia
who gradually became united in their shared experiences of betrayal by the
Ming. The Oyirods claimed repeatedly that the eastern Chinggisid regimes
were in the pay of the Ming, and attacks from the west were frequently directed
against both the Chinggisids and the Ming. In 1449 Oyirods attacked the region
about Beijing and seized the Ming emperor. At the end of the fifteenth century
Oyirod ambitions in the east subsided, and Mongolia was in a fairly stable
division, east and west. The Oyirods tightened their control over Gansu pro-
vince and lands of the lingering Chaghatay khanate that Ming had attempted to
control in Turkestan.
The Tumet Mongols, who were descended from populations that had long
inhabited the interface between north China and Mongolia, were a division
within the eastern Chinggisid federation, though from the fifteenth century they
showed increasing independence. Their leader in the mid-sixteenth century,
Altan Khaghan (1507–1582) is credited with the recovery of Chinggisid lands
from the Oyirods, and he established a powerful, populous, and centralized
regime at Köke khota (Huhhot), virtually at the Great Wall. Part of Altan’s
career was dedicated to invading China, which occurred repeatedly from 1529
to his sustained attack on Beijing in 1550. From the 1560s Altan moved to
consolidate his authority over all Mongolia by enlisting the legitimating part-
nership of the Dalai Lama (Songnam Gyatso, 1543–1588, the first known,
6
For an overview and further citations to the history of Mongolia in this era, Serruys 1987; Moses
and Halkovic 1985; Crossley 2006.
though later called the “third” assuming that the first two were occulted). The
Ming considered Altan’s amity valuable enough that they enfeoffed him as the
Shunyi wang (“Prince of Discipline and Righteousness”) in 1571, giving his
capital the Chinese designation of Guihua, and granting to Altan and his
representative extraordinary patents for horse trade and special honors at
Beijing. The Dalai Lama took up residence at Huhhot in 1577.7 Altan extended
Tumet power – and informal domain – to northern Gansu, Shaanxi and Shanxi
provinces of China, and he occupied parts of Liaodong.
The infrastructure established by Altan Khaghan was eventually coopted by
Lighdan Khaghan (1588–1634), who fought from his base west of Huhhot to
capture the Tumet capital in 1631. By that time Lighdan found himself in an
impossible situation, fighting both rebellious eastern Mongol federations who
resented his tribute demands and the Jurchens of the Aisin khanate in Liaodong,
who were cutting into the ostensibly Ming province of Liaodong that had been
under pressure from Altan’s Tumet successors.8 This competition between the
Aisin khanate and Lighdan for quasi-Ming, quasi-Tumet territories had
a transformative effect upon both the Aisin and the Ming. Lighdan had been
hired by the Ming to attempt to protect China’s northeastern front against the
Aisin khanate, receiving an annual payment that eventually topped 80,000
ounces of silver a year. When Lighdan died in 1634, his wealth, his troops,
his insignia of office (inherited from Chinggis), and most of his aristocracy
were absorbed by the Aisin khanate. They provided the ideological and mate-
rial infrastructure of Aisin’s transformation, between 1634 and 1636, into the
Qing empire. Ming had inadvertently strengthened the Aisin khanate and
deepened their own territorial losses. In 1643 Qing finally controlled all of
Liaodong province.
Manchuria, Korea, and the Devolution of Power in Liaodong

In the early fifteenth century, the Mongol–Jurchen lands east and north of the
Ming province of Liaodong were on paper divided into “commandaries” that
loosely corresponded to the hegemonic parameters of extended family com-
mercial organizations whose powers were drawn from trade monopolies in the
towns at the Liaodong borders with eastern Mongolia and southern Manchuria.
Competition over control of border markets was often intense. Several of these
organizations were extending their powers into northern Korea by the mid-
fifteenth century, resulting in the centralization and strengthening of some
federations as well as complicating alliances with Ming border officials,
including military commanders of high rank. By the late sixteenth century,
war among the Jurchen organizations was continuous. Nurgaci emerged as
7 8
Jankowiak 1992. Swope 2005, 30–31.
leader of his federation – at the time usually called “Tong” – in 1582, the
same year he took a contingent of his followers to Korea to fight in Ming
service against the Japanese.9
By 1587 Nurgaci was well-connected in the Ming border administration,
well armed, well informed on military technology, and dominant over what is
now southern Jilin province, where he established a capital city for himself. In
1609 he traveled to Beijing to be recognized as regional hegemon at the Ming
court, and struck an apparent agreement that made his boundary with the Ming
arguable, if not enforceable. In 1616 he declared a state – the Aisin khanate –
and in 1618 declared war on the Ming for refusing to honor the terms of his
various agreements with Ming border officers, as well as claims that Ming
agents had conspired in the deaths of his father and grandfather.
The war required rapid centralization and stratification in Nurgaci’s state and
military organizations, laying the foundations not only for the Eight Banners
but also a bureaucratized aristocracy that efficiently accommodated apostates
from Mongolia, China, and Korea. With the strength of recruits from the Ming
army and bureaucracy, as well as seizures of Ming weapons, Nurgaci took the
provincial capital in 1621 and by 1625 was governing a very substantial
population of Chinese-speaking farmers, merchants, and literati. The western
half of Liaodong, leading to the Great Wall, was still held by Ming defenders,
sometimes supplied or reinforced from Korea.
Nurgaci died in 1626 and was succeeded by his son Hong Taiji, who decided
to weaken the Ming ties with Korea – and if possible subjugate Korea himself –
as a means of creating a southern front for further Aisin advancement in
Liaodong. He made an excursion into Korea in 1627 but did not achieve his
goals. His military energies were from 1632 to 1634 directed against Lighdan’s
khaghanate of eastern Mongolia, and after the defeat he absorbed the imperial
titles as well as control over the remaining populations of the former
Mongolian empire. From 1634 to 1636, inspired and empowered by his defeat
of Lighdan and absorption of the Chinggisid rulership, Hong Taiji effected
many changes in the khanate in order to increase his personal power and give
him more efficient bureaucratic control over revenues and troop deployment. In
1636 he declared himself emperor of a new entity, the Qing empire, and
mounted a massive assault on Korea that resulted in forced submission of the
Chosŏn king Injo (Yi Jong, 1595–1649). By the time of his death in 1643, Hong
Taiji had secured Qing control over all of Liaodong province, eastern
Mongolia, and Manchuria.10
The scale of Qing as a conquest state before 1644 is something normally
elided in the event paradigm of the Ming–Qing transition. Aisin–Qing material
force – soldiers, horses, fortifications, weapons, and wealth to operate them
9 10
Crossley 1999, 84–109. Yuanchong Wang 2018.
all – was not initially derived from the conversion of Ming resources
primarily.11 Horses and tribute were rendered by Mongolian populations
from 1607 on, and the defeat of Lighdan in 1634 brought an enormous increase
in Aisin wealth and military resources, a good deal of which was indirectly
derived from Ming payments. The huge Qing expeditionary force into Korea in
1636 was precipitated not only by strategic concerns (Korea as a staging point
for Ming defense forces in western Liaodong) but also as a means of preempt-
ing the high financial demands on Korea from Ming (as high as 100,000 ounces
of silver at a time) and redirecting the money into the Qing coffers. By the time
that Qing forces were invited into Beijing in June of 1644, the new Qing empire
controlled eastern Mongolia, all of Liaodong, and all of Manchuria as far as the
Amur River; Qing exercised financial as well as military hegemony in Korea,
and enlarged their cattle herds and dependent populations with occasional raids
into northern China.
Devolution of Power in Sichuan and Shaanxi

The reign period of the Wanli emperor (1588–1620) in China is generally seen
as the critical period in the “decline” of the Ming empire. It was certainly
a period of political volatility and disruption of some management of Ming
administration – among them, coordination of defense in the Liaodong – but
arguments that it was a period of economic or even military decline are very
difficult to validate. Through the sixteenth century, Ming had managed to
negotiate complex issues relating to fluctuations in specie values, tax reform
to accommodate price and yield changes, rising urban populations, emergence
and distribution of new specializations in manufacturing activity, and the
emergence of new trade dimensions relating to not only the expansion of piracy
networks along the Chinese coasts but also the arrival of new trade partners
from the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal. Ming financial managers did not
think that theirs was a particularly difficult one though they did note that
a century before the state had begun spending well beyond its means (particu-
larly on its enormous military) with concomitant shifting of taxes and com-
modity payments from goods or cash to various kinds of credit accounting.12
In the immediate aftermath of the Wanli period, factors converged that may
have presented overwhelming topical challenges to a government afflicted by
marked but not fatal degrees of disorganization and corruption. The Dutch were
learning how to make their own porcelain, threatening a signal Ming import.
But urban investments, stimulated by previous and continuing influx of silver
11
Swope 2014b.
12
Brook 2010; Dardess 2012; von Glahn 2016; D. M. Robinson 2008. On the military effects see
Swope 2013b.
reaped from foreign trade, attracted capital toward the cities, reducing the rural
investments of land-owning families. Climactic conditions altered, decreasing
yields and threatening subsistence farmers. In 1628–1629 very severe droughts
and persisting low temperatures afflicted Shaanxi and Shanxi provinces, and
recurred in 1634 through 1640, accompanied by official reports of cannibalism.
In these late years, smallpox and accompanying epidemics ravaged the coun-
tryside, despite the ability of doctors in the cities to mitigate the disease. The
Ming government did not provide an efficient response in grain or cash
distribution.
The rural rebel army that by 1633 was led by Li Zicheng (1606–1645) arose
in northern Shaanxi province had not less than 30,000 soldiers, and coordinated
with local rebels to stage attacks on government offices in Henan, Shaanxi, and
Shanxi provinces. Through the 1630s Li struggled to maintain a consistent base
of operations against Ming forces sent to dispel the rebellion, and became more
successful at maintaining a base as the worsening of the droughts brought more
and more soldiers and civilians supporters into his operation, allowing him to
expand into Henan in 1639.13 Ming literati, including a few officials, joined his
campaign and aided in the development of a kind of rebel state propaganda.
From time to time Li allied his forces with another rebel captain, Zhang
Xianzhong (1605–1647), who sustained his expansive campaigns in Shaaanxi
and Henan by periodically surrendering to the Ming and offering to aid them in
the suppression of the widening swathe of rural uprisings in central China.14
Zhang managed to wrest stable control of parts of Hubei province from the
Ming and declared himself “King of the West” (Xiwang). In 1641 Li’s armies
killed a high-ranking Ming prince and confiscated his estate, and by 1643 Li
had the title “Prince of the New Discipline” (Xinshun wang), and established
his capital at Xi’an in southern Shaanxi province. From here he coordinated the
huge army of more than 300,000 that descended on Beijing in April of 1644 and
expelled the Ming imperial family from the palaces, later declaring his new
dynasty of Shun (Discipline). Zhang established a splinter state in Shaanxi
rather than join his forces with Li.
Casualties (both civilian and military) in the great uprisings of Li and Zhang
were frequently reported in the hundreds of thousands.15 From 1628 to 1644
(and in the territories controlled by Zhang, a few years after), Ming control in
Shaanxi, Sichuan, and parts of Shanxi, Hubei, and Henan was attenuated, while
millions of ounces of silver were diverted from the Ming treasury. The ejection
of the Ming imperial family from Beijing caused the Ming defenses to be
dispersed among a set of pretender regimes headed by Ming princes – at
13
des Forges 2003.
14
See Tu Lien-chê 1943. The only comprehensive history in English of the Zhang Xianzhong
rebellion and its place in the fragmentation of the Ming is Swope 2018.
15
Tong 1992.
Yangzhou, Hangzhou, Shaoxing, Kuizhou, Wuchang, Fuzhou, Guilin,

Zhaoqing, Xiamen, Jieyang, and Guangzhou. The Ming general Wu Sangui
(1612–1678), a native of Liaodong, turned to the Qing empire for help in
recapturing Beijing for the Ming – now a ghost regime with a claim to only
what historians often call the “Southern Ming,” much less than half of the
fifteenth-century Ming territories, concentrated in southern China, coastal
China, and southern Yunnan–Guizhou. Li took a force of 200,000 to confront
the Qing armies at the Shanhai Gate in the Great Wall, where he was defeated;
he fled to Shaanxi, where Qing forces captured and executed him.
The Chronological Frame of Qing Unification: Yunnan

While narratives of the Ming–Qing transition normally concentrate on events
in northern China, Yunnan is actually a good location for seeing the true
chronological shape of the multiple military transitions of the seventeenth
century. Though Yunnan was long known to states based in China due to its
abundant copper and silver sources, it was not governed from a state based in
China until the Mongols destroyed the native Dali state there in 1253 and then
governed Yunnan from their Yuan empire in China. Nominally Yunnan was
under Chinese governance for the entire Ming period, but Yunnan is one of
those regions that underscores the irrelevance of modern ideas of “sovereignty”
before the nineteenth century. The history of Ming occupation of Yunnan was
marked by institutions of indirect rule, setting some of the conditions that allow
Yunnan to so effectively frame the actual progress of Ming recession and Qing
ingress during the seventeenth century. Under the Yuan Mongol regime,
Yunnan was a military outpost of Mongol princes, governed by Central Asian
financial and military officers. The Ming invasion of Yunnan of the 1370s was
intended to destroy any Mongol resistance, though Mongols in fairly large
numbers remained in Yunnan and served the Ming after the province’s sub-
mission. From inception, Ming operations in Yunnan were self-funding and
reporting was indirect. The province was turned over to Mu Ying (1345–
1392) – an adopted son of the Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang – and subse-
quently the Mu family established a virtual duchy in Yunnan.16
In 1413 the portion of Yunnan in which aboriginal populations predominated
was split off as Guizhou province, and both Guizhou and a portion of Yunnan
were administered through the “local headman” (tusi) system, under which
traditional leaders – or reliable leaders who could substitute for the traditional
leaders – were given discretion to administer native lands, so long as taxes and
tribute were rendered and rebellions did not occur. The Ming military forces in
16
L. K. Shin 2006; Sun 2003; B. Yang 2004. For the seventeenth century Qing ingress into
Yunnan, Guizhou, and Guangxi, see Giersch 2006, Herman 2018.
Yunnan were reliant for support upon family members to farm the land and sew
the uniforms. But the indirect and self-reliant aspects of Yunnan administration
in the Ming appear to be have been stabilizing. Ming Yunnan was one of the
least expensive and least troubled of the empire’s provinces. These qualities, as
well as the relative remoteness of Yunnan, may have made it attractive as the
base of the Ming resister regime of Zhu Youlang (1638–1662), who was the
child figurehead of a remnant Ming court there between 1644 and 1659, after
which he fled to Burma.17
Wu Sangui,18 the Liaodongese native Ming general who recruited the
Manchus to destroy Li Zicheng’s Shun dynasty and subsequently joined the
Qing conquest, was commissioned by the Qing to eradicate the Ming regime in
Yunnan and occupy the province. The Qing conquest of north China as far
south as the Yangtze River Delta was relatively rapid and efficient. But at the
Yangtze River basin the conquest forces slowed, and the Qing managers
(regents for the boy emperor Fulin, 1638–1661) decided that plans for bringing
all the former Ming territories under direct control were impractical. Local
government throughout Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Sichuan – all territories affected
by decades of disorder and misrule under the Li and Zhang rebel regimes –
needed reconstruction and restaffing from the ground up, which wore down
Qing organizational resources. More important, some south of the Yangtze
were still organized and motivated to resist the Qing advance. Conflicts
increased steeply in length and violence, the terrain became more challenging
to Qing cavalry and heavy artillery, and distances from the command center
made communications unreliable or irrelevant.
Wu was the most prominent of a number of Chinese-speaking Liaodong
natives whom the Qing appointed to command occupation regimes in southern
China, which made them the leading lights of the so-called hanjun (Chinese-
martial) banners.19 They worked on the same general pattern as the Mu Ying
regime of the Ming had operated. Wu Sangui – who had been a high-ranking
military commander under the Ming – took his legacy army into Yunnan and
was permitted by the Qing to run his own government, collect his own taxes,
and make his own laws, so long as he brought the province under nominal Qing
rule. Other generals were set up with similar privileges in Guangdong, Fujian,
Zhejiang, and eventually in Sichuan. How they should be designated was
a problem, but Qing bureaucrats and historians settled upon fan, a Chinese
word for a subordinate, contiguous regime. In English it is often translated as
“feudatory.”20
In Wu’s case, he found that Yunnan’s relative remoteness from the political
center – and its relative political independence – combined with profits from its
17 18 19
J. C. Yang 1943; Struve 1993; Wakeman 1985. Fang 1943. Crossley 1999.
20
Wakeman 1985; Dai 2009.
copper and silver mines, the wealth of its agriculture and fishing, and its
lucrative trade routes with Tibet and Burma to offer the resources for a very
powerful base of his own. The Qing managers in Beijing found the situation
allowed them to concentrate their resources on the construction of civil govern-
ment and military occupation through north China and in Manchuria, the latter
of which was under direct economic and military command from Beijing, and
was under constant, if low-grade, threat both from Russian vanguard forces and
from Korean military commanders eager to exploit Qing focus on north China.
Through the 1660s, Wu prospered and built his provincial regime while the
Qing imperial court busied themselves with building a massive occupation
state.
In the early 1670s things changed. Fulin had died in 1661, and his very
young son Xuanye became the emperor of the Kangxi period (1662–1722).
Xuanye was a prodigious student of the emperorship, and in his teens
became a ruthless political fighter. In 1667 he received a request from
Wu Sangui for approval of Wu’s retirement and succession by his son Wu
Yingxiong. The request seems to have piqued Xuanye’s curiosity, and he
warily investigated the development of the separate powers and territories
of the southern occupation regimes. Xuanye’s response to Wu’s first
request to bequeath his local rulership to his son was to deny it, but in
1674 Wu asked again, soon after a similar request arrived at Beijing from
Wu’s counterpart in Guangdong, Shang Kexi (1604–1676). Xuanye rea-
lized that as long as the southern proxy governments were in place, the
conquest was stalled.21 He determined to dissolve the fan and have the
governors sent back to their home province of Liaodong. The response of
Wu and his colleagues was to rise in rebellion. Wu adopted as his battle cry
a demand to “restore the Ming,” and years into the fighting renounced the
Qing and proclaimed his own state of Zhou.
Becoming the base of a southern bloc fighting the Qing put huge strain on
Yunnan. Wu’s 200,000 full-time military force dwarfed the relatively small
armies of Shang Kexi and Geng Jingzhong (d. 1682), and he was forced to
distribute his troops across southern China. The rebel governors were joined by
the pirate king Zheng Jing (1642–1681) and his son Zheng Chenggong (1624–
1662), who from their base in Taiwan had earlier defended one of the Ming
remnant courts. They declared their own kingdom of Dongning ferried supplies
to shore to be carried on to the rebel forts. Southern forces may have totaled
400,000 troops, with the advantage of defending provisioned fortifications. The
troops the Qing court hastily sent in 1673 to punish the rebels were too few and
too poorly supplied. When they were handily defeated, noblemen among the
eastern Mongols who chafed under Qing domination rose in rebellion, forcing
21
See also Spence 1988.
the Qing to open a northern front and creating even more fragmentation among
the troops they could deploy.
It was not until the late 1670s that the Qing were able to deploy a large
force – somewhere between 500,000 and 900,000 – southward. They were
armed with light mortars that could be dismantled and carried up the steep
hillsides of the southern terrain, produced in mass by Jesuit engineers under
unfriendly pressure from Xuanye.22 Wu Sangui died in 1678, Shang Kexin’s
successor Shang Zhixin died in 1680, and Geng Jingzhong died in 1682. By
1683 the land engagements were ended. Xuanye ordered the clean-up cam-
paigns extended to Taiwan. The Zheng family regime was destroyed and for the
first time Taiwan became governed from a state based in China. Within four
years, Xuanye was ready to launch his campaigns of conquest into central
Mongolia, which had been out of reach as long as the conquest of southern
China was unresolved.
Assumptions of Force and Event Perception in the Transition

The image of Qing military power has many sources. One is a romanticization
by some historians of an “Altaic” culture that prized martial skills and dedica-
tion to superiors above what are evidently more civil values. The Qing Eight
Banner Armies – whose history in some form or other can be traced to at least
as early as 1595 – were after all the earliest and most honored institutions of
Qing sociomilitary control, used to define every male adult as a military slave,
and his family as dependents of the military companies in which they were
enrolled. But the historical and linguistic bases for assuming an “Altaic”
tradition are weak. The immediate sources of military slavery and political
hierarchy among the Jurchens, later the Manchus, are fairly easily traced to
Ming military institutions (in which many of the Jurchens, including Nurgaci
himself, served) and to long-standing Turkic and Mongol traditions that had
influenced Manchuria since at least the eleventh century (the time of the Kitan
Liao conquests of the area). They were not the predetermined cultural attributes
of some distant, deep structural connection.23
In their origins the Eight Banners were small and exclusive – they were the
bodyguards of Nurgaci and his sons. By the time of the declaration of the
khanate in 1616, however, Nurgaci was using the banner structure to govern his
entire population; for the Qing period the population descended from Nurgaci’s
adherents would be administered de jure (but hardly de facto) by the Eight
Banners bureaucracies. But the Eight Banners were themselves not institutions
of uniform military discipline. They were always afflicted by desertion, internal
rivalry, and disobedience by bannermen who thought they were ill-treated. In
22 23
Waley-Cohen 1993, 1531. See also Crossley 1999; Elliott 2001.
times of conflicts between the collegial princes, such as between 1626 and
1631, the banners were the source of internal threats within the regime.
Perhaps more important, after the Aisin/Qing conquest of Liaodong pro-
vince between 1621 and 1643 the Eight Banners were also a shrinking
component of the Qing conquest forces. Even within the Banners, the incor-
poration of companies of bondservants – the necessary men for managing
military logistics and weaponry, administering aristocratic and imperial
households, and general bookkeeping – had swelled their ranks to over half
of the total Banner population; the majority of the bondservants were
Sinophone men of Chinese, Korean, or Jurchen descent. The ostensibly
fearsome Eight Banners force was by 1644 composed of a very large con-
tingent of managers, translators, technicians, artillerymen, accountants, and
cooks. Not surprisingly, when the Qing forces crossed into China, they left
about half of the Bannermen behind – not merely to guard and police the
home territories, but to manage the imperial estates.
Finally, the total Banner troop complement in 1644 could hardly have risen
much above 200,000 individuals. Qing conquest power rested not with the
Eight Banners but with the ability to recruit infantry and to appropriate
weapons from the Ming forces. This had been their tactics since the beginning
of the war against Ming in 1618, and the system of rewards for Ming deserters
had created a Chinese-speaking, Ming-educated elite among the Qing forces
that was prominent from the 1630s on. For a short time these recruits were
incorporated into the Chinese-martial banners. As a result, the Chinese-
martial banners of the 1640s inflated dramatically in size, significantly out-
numbering the Manchu forces. As of 1644 the massive numbers of apostates
swelling the Qing armies created a new land force, the Green Standard Army,
which was without the ostensible indentured status of the Eight Banners, but
was organized as a professional, salaried force along the lines of the Ming
armies.
This new force was the foundation of the Qing conquest of northern China
between 1644 and 1646, but neither its size nor the ability of the Qing
commanders to control it was sufficient to allow a Qing conquest of all of
China to occur. In 1644 the Qing controlled Manchuria and eastern
Mongolia. Li Zicheng’s Shun dynasty still existed, though based at Xi’an
instead of Beijing. Zhang Xianzhong’s Xi dynasty was based at Chengdu
and controlled most of Sichuan province. The Southern Ming dynasty of Zhu
Yousong was based at Nanjing. The Tumet Mongols held Gansu/Ningxia,
and the Oyirod Mongols dominated Tibet, which Ming had never controlled
directly. The eradication of Xi occurred late in the year, and the Southern
Ming was driven further south to Hangzhou. Other Southern Ming regimes
grew up as the Qing moved south – at Guangzhou, Zhaoping, Guilin, and
Kuizhou.
Even after the capture of Beijing and the eradication of the Shun dynasty, the
Qing could not muster the power to directly occupy the territory they gained
south of the Yangtze. By the time Wu declared his Zhou dynasty in 1673, the
remnant Ming courts had inspired the creation of the new regime headed by
Zheng Chenggong, in Taiwan. The Qing conducted the exhausting war – in
terms of finances and of military resources – against these secessionist regimes.
Literally forty years after the Qing conquered Beijing, they eradicated the last
of the regional dynasties and kingdoms that had begun the process of splitting
China to pieces in the 1630s. Within only a few years following, the Qing began
the wars against the Mongol federations that eliminated the forces that had
begun seizing Ming territory in the 1580s, and in the 1750s they finally
destroyed the khanates that controlled eastern Turkestan.
As a series of developments in space (more than time), the Qing uni-
fication of historical China in 1683 more resembles the Mongol Yuan
unification of historical China in 1279 than it resembles, say, the transition
from Sui to Tang, or even from Yuan to Ming. The Mongols first seized
part of north China in 1215, and then by slow succession fought for the
Yangtze basin, and eventually completed the progression by securing
Guangxi and Yunnan, wiping out Song resistance. Geographically this
strongly adumbrated the staging in the Qing unification, which took about
the same period of time – from the capture of the Liaodong capital of
Shenyang to the eradication of the Three Feudatories, about sixty-five
years. These two conquest processes show the same trajectory of reunifica-
tion of historical China after a period of fragmentation and multistate
struggle, followed by a steep increase in the size of the empire eventually
ruled from China – to nearly 14 million square kilometers in the case of
Yuan, and to about 13 million square kilometers in the case of Qing. That,
however, is where the similarities stopped. Yuan remained an empire in
which power was distributed to the aristocracy, and fragmentation from
within was always a danger after Khubilai’s death in 1295. Qing rulers
continued to consolidate and centralize power well into the eighteenth
century, as a by-product destroying the aristocracy as a destabilizing or
devolutionary force.
To construe the Qing unification of China as an “event” associated with the
transition from Ming to Qing would conjure a powerful entity overwhelming
a weak one. Yet the actual time structure of the transition suggests something
else – that when two contiguous land empires clash, the ability of one to convert
the other’s power to its own uses is the essence of conquest. This sounds self-
evident, but what it suggests is that the Qing gained control over formerly Ming
territory not by assimilating or rejecting Ming institutions or methods, but by
converting them to their own uses – and that areas already lost by the Ming
were more difficult to conquer because their resources were depleted or their
infrastructure impaired. If anything, it means that Ming had the greater power
at the beginning of the conflict in 1618, which is undoubtedly true. It also
suggests that even as of 1643 Ming still had the greater power – larger armies,
more hardware, more wealth to back up their military enterprises. But Qing
conquest techniques converted this power to their own purposes.
Though there was no Qing invasion of Ming China, there was a story
line of an emerging conquest power, beginning in 1587, in which recruit-
ment, technological assimilation, and the strategic application of scarce
military power had first amalgamated control over the mixed populations
of southern Manchuria, followed by a two-decade scrabble to secure con-
trol of Liaodong, which led to strategically acute campaigns to intimidate
the Chosŏn court, smash and absorb the weakened and unpopular Chahar
khanate, and occasionally raid Shandong province for supplies. Even after
the opportunity to enter China and ally with Wu Sangui (who was born in
Liaodong before the area fell to Nurgaci), the Qing nevertheless needed
forty years to subdue all the rebel kingdoms and resistance regimes that
had rooted themselves in the countryside – a chronology that I would
suggest is better delineated by the establishment and demise of the pro-
vincial regime of Wu Sangui than by any other regional narrative. Progress
against the areas where Ming had already lost control – Shaanxi, Sichuan,
and Henan – was slower than the conquest of Hebei, Anhui, and Shandong
provinces that Ming held even after April of 1644, because these rebel
kingdoms were poorly organized, economically depressed, and militarily
chaotic. Unlike the Ming imperial government, they were not more power-
ful than Qing, and offered fewer resources for conversion to conquest and
occupation.
Qing military power for conquest of China, and especially for their cam-
paigns in Mongolia, came from Ming military power. Cavalry were important
in most Qing campaigns, but victories depended upon infantry, cannon, and
supplies, all of which increased hugely for Qing once they entered Ming-held
territory. It appears that the Qing had several attributes that made this possible,
which they demonstrated from an early point in Nurgaci’s career to at least the
middle of the eighteenth century. First was the ability to create a reliable and
persuasive reward structure, for persons of all ranks from slaves to aristocrats.
Second was construction and protection of a reputation for incorruptibility and
predictability. Third was curiosity displayed by the Qing elites about all
matters – strategic, financial, technological, cultural, and personal – along
with a determination to make practical use of any advantages that curiosity
revealed. Fourth was a steady centralization of the command structure, as
Nurgaci, Hong Taiji, and Xuanye all stridently opposed factional competition
among the bureaucrats or soldiers – an attribute violently manifested in
Xuanye’s determination to destroy the fragmenting influence of the southern
proxy governments. These characteristics appear to have been among the

factors that created an acquiescence toward Qing rule. They were not in
themselves power or even components of power, but were part of the credible
projection of power that made the transition to Qing occupation acceptable to
the majority population and to the contemporary states of Eastern Eurasia that
might have resisted or even thwarted the Qing transmutation of Ming power
into their own.
Part III
Contact: East and West

9 The Zheng State and the Fall of Dutch
Formosa, 1662
Tonio Andrade
Introduction
In 1624, the Dutch East India Company established a colony on the island of
Taiwan. Although initially intended to serve as a port from which to engage in
the rich China trade, it soon blossomed into one of the company’s largest and
most profitable land colonies. Beyond the busy harbors of its capital, Zeelandia,
there stretched miles of fertile fields, which produced tons of fine sugar and
excellent rice. It was, wrote Dutch traveler Wouter Schouten, an “earthly
paradise,”1 “one of the most beautiful pearls in the crown” of the company’s
empire.2 The Taiwan colony was just one of a string of lucrative colonies for the
company, which was on the ascendancy in the seventeenth century, outcompet-
ing the British and capturing Spanish and Portuguese colonies throughout Asia.
Yet in 1662 the colony was captured by a Chinese maritime state run by the
Zheng family.
This chapter examines the history of the Zheng–Dutch relationship
between 1624 and 1662. The Zheng family’s fortunes had been closely
tied to the Dutch colony of Taiwan ever since the Zheng patriarch, Zheng
Zhilong, served as a translator and then a privateer under the Dutch flag in
the 1620s. In 1627, he was recruited by the Ming dynasty and made
a transition from pirate to “patrolling admiral.” This allowed him to build
a legitimate maritime organization, which monopolized trade on the
Chinese coast. The Zheng organization was relatively independent of
imperial control, raising revenue on oceangoing trade: most Chinese ships
that engaged in sea trade had to fly the Zheng flag. In addition, the Zheng
built their own private militia. It was, in a sense, a semi-state within an
increasingly decentralized Ming empire.
In 1644, however, Ming Beijing fell and the Manchu Qing empire occupied
the Forbidden City, setting off a series of wars in China. The Zheng family
1 2
Schouten 2003, 165. Schouten 2003, 171.
149
150 Tonio Andrade
became Ming loyalists, fighting to reestablish the old regime and place an
imperial scion on the dragon throne. By the early 1650s, as other Ming
loyalist structures collapsed, the Zheng family became the main hope for
a Ming restoration. Zheng Zhilong’s successor, Zheng Chenggong, set up
a true independent Southern Ming state, which was based in Xiamen City, just
across the Taiwan Strait from the Dutch colony. When that state was threa-
tened by Manchu forces in 1661, he launched an invasion of Taiwan. The
invasion turned into a bitter and rather more protracted war than he’d
expected, which finally ended in 1662, when the Dutch surrendered their
main fortress to him.
How do we understand this history in the context of international relations?
First, we must keep in mind that the Dutch East India Company, the most
powerful maritime structure of Europe, was able to establish its commercial
empire in East Asia largely because East Asian states were less interested in
extending control over maritime spaces and overseas ports than were European
states. In a sense, Taiwan was susceptible to Dutch East India Company control
because no other state in the region – not China, not Japan, not Korea – was
consistently interested in colonizing it.
Why? One reason may be that none of those governments gained
a significant amount of its revenue from overseas trade. But it may also
be useful to ask why we might consider maritime power projection as
a normative phenomenon when in fact it may have been relatively unusual,
associated rather with the Mediterranean and North Atlantic than with other
parts of the world.3 In any case, the situation changed when the Zheng state
emerged in the 1650s. It was an anomaly in East Asia: a Chinese state
oriented toward seaborne commerce and naval power. It flourished in the
warlike period of the mid-1600s, capturing Taiwan from the Dutch and
establishing a maritime state there. As the Manchu Qing consolidated their
control over China, however, the Zheng state itself became imperiled. It,
too, fell, and the Qing dynasty reluctantly incorporated Taiwan into its
territory. In the Great Qing Peace that followed, East Asian states once
again eschewed maritime power projection, and this chapter ends with
some speculations about maritime patterns within East Asian international
relations.
Taiwan and the Dutch East India Company

The Dutch East India Company didn’t originally intend to create a land
colony on Taiwan. From the company’s establishment in 1602, its leadership
was primarily interested in creating trading entrepôts, and in East Asia the
3
See Andrade 2015, 52–68.
The Zheng State and the Fall of Dutch Formosa, 1662 151
great prize was China. The Middle Country’s massive trade, fueled by
a tremendous thirst for silver, attracted traders from all over. Indeed, evidence
suggests that China was a “silver sink,” the destination for most of the silver
produced in the massive new silver mines that came online in the sixteenth
century, including the famous mines of Spanish Potosí, in the Andes.4 Indeed,
some scholars suggest that China’s demand for silver underlay major devel-
opments in Europe’s economy, and even the phenomenon of European colo-
nialism itself: “There would not have been a Spanish Empire in the absence of
the transformation of the Chinese society to a silver base, nor would there
have been the same sort of ‘Price Revolution’ (i.e. inflation) around the globe
in the early modern period.”5
There were fortunes to be made selling silver in China, and not just silver
from Europe or the New World. Japan’s productive silver mines were also
a great source, and since direct trade between Japan and China was forbidden
by Ming authorities, the Dutch wanted to horn their way into the Sino-Japanese
silk-for-silver trade. The problem was that the Portuguese were already firmly
ensconced, working closely with Japanese and southern Chinese from their
base in Macau. The Dutch first tried capturing Macau, but after failing, they
began building a base in the Penghu (澎湖) Islands, in the Taiwan Strait.6 They
intended the base to serve as a sort of Dutch Macau, a place from which to
intervene in the Sino-Japanese silk-for-silver trade. Unfortunately for them,
Ming authorities ordered the Dutch to withdraw, and when the Dutch refused,
Chinese troops began massing on the islands. Dutch sources indicate that the
Ming officials they dealt with suggested Taiwan as an alternate site for a base.7
This is not corroborated in Chinese sources.8
4
Why was China’s demand for silver so great? Part of the reason was the collapse of China’s paper
money system, which occurred even as China’s economy grew rapidly. Together the two factors
caused China’s silver demand to increase. In any case, increasing demand caused the price of
silver to rise precipitously. China’s gold-to-silver exchange ratio increased from 1:10 in 1346 to
1:4 in 1375. Similarly, one unit of silver was worth twice as much rice and almost three times as
much silk during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) than it had been during the early Yuan dynasty
(1271–1368). The role of silver in China is the subject of much research. See von Glahn 1996.
See also Atwell 1998, 376–416; Flynn and Giráldez 1995a, 429–448; Flynn 1991; Murray 1994,
91–144.
5
Flynn and Giráldez 1995a, 429. See also Flynn and Giráldez 2002, 391–427; Flynn and Giraldez
1997; Fisher 1989, 883–902; Flynn 1982, 139–147. For an argument about the Price Revolution
that incorporates the money velocity and population increase variables, see Goldstone 1991,
176–181. See also Flynn 1984, 361–382.
6
Wills 1974; Blussé 1973, 28–44.
7
Generale Missiven, de Charpentier, de Houtman, Dedel and Specx 1623, 124–126. Cheng
Shaogang has transcribed and translated into Chinese the Generale Missiven having to do with
Taiwan. See Cheng 1995. The dissertation has been published in Taiwan without the Dutch
transcriptions. See Cheng 2000.
8
Officials reported to Beijing that they compelled the Dutch to “raze their fortress and retreat” (拆
城遁徙). Fujianese provincial governor (巡撫) Nan Juyi (南居益), cited in Yang Yanjie
2000, 33.
152 Tonio Andrade
In any case, the Dutch moved their operations to Taiwan, building a fortress
on a thin peninsula jutting out into the Taiwan Strait. The fortress became Fort
Zeelandia, and the siting of it there was not accidental. This area was already
used as a trading center for Chinese and Japanese traders, who met there
clandestinely. Taiwan was also a base for other smuggling groups, and for the
multiethnic pirate bands who roved the seas of China.
The establishment of Dutch rule in Taiwan wasn’t easy, largely because
the hinterlands around Taiwan were home to many Austronesian peoples,
who lived in fiercely competitive fortified villages. These towns and
villages were balanced against each other in shifting alliances, and the
Dutch were drawn into this world of warfare almost willy-nilly.9 They
became, in a sense, “the mightiest village,” sought after as an ally.
Eventually, in the 1630s, the Dutch created a sort of pax batavia, or
Dutch peace, controlling the nearest villages and intimidating those farther
away. This allowed the Dutch to begin bringing in Chinese colonists to
create rice farms and sugar plantations.10 The Dutch policy of encouraging
Chinese migration was a highly deliberate one, accompanied by concrete
incentives, such as free land, freedom from taxation, and subventions for
agricultural development. The colony thus grew rapidly, until by the late
1640s it was one of the most profitable colonies in the Dutch empire, its
sugar sold not just in China and Japan – the main markets – but even in
Europe itself.
Yet it was also in the 1640s that the situation that had enabled the Dutch to
establish a colony in Taiwan abruptly changed: the Ming dynasty fell, and the
Manchu Qing established their capital in Beijing. China was soon wracked by
dynastic warfare, and those wars brought new attention by Chinese govern-
ments to the seas and the Taiwan Strait.
Zheng Chenggong and Chinese Maritime History

The man who would come to dominate Chinese overseas trade – and who
would eventually capture Taiwan from the Dutch – was Zheng Chenggong. The
Zheng family hailed from the province of Fujian, which lies in southeastern
China, on the Taiwan Strait, and whose people were hardy sailors and wily
merchants. The ports of southern Fujian province were bustling international
ports, where Chinese officials oversaw a dynamic and very valuable foreign
trade sector. In the 1500s and 1600s, traders from this region dominated over-
seas trade in East and Southeast Asia, carrying far more in volume and value
than any other group, including the Dutch, the English, the Spanish, and the
Portuguese (Figure 9.1).
9 10
See Andrade 2001. See Andrade 2008, 23–99.
Figure 9.1 Taiwan and the Chinese coast
Indeed, these Chinese traders were far more significant economically than
Europeans. Authors of all stripes greatly overplay the importance of Europe to
world trade in the so-called Renaissance or Age of Discovery. One will
frequently read that in the 1400s, 1500s, and 1600s one or another European
city – Venice or Amsterdam or London – was “the global hub of commerce.”11
Such claims are simply wrong. World trade was centered on Asia, and China
was then – as now – Asia’s most influential economy.
11
Examples abound. See J. Bell 2007, 19, and Greenspan 2007, 180.
154 Tonio Andrade
The Zheng family’s rise to power helps us paint some of the contours of this
world, an age of globalization avant la lettre. Zheng Zhilong was born into
a minor scholarly family on the fringes of China’s elite, and which had some
trading ties. He was a boisterous young man, not inclined to the brush and ink
essential to success in imperial China. He got into fights and trouble with the
law and eventually fled to the Portuguese colony of Macau, one of hundreds of
places where his people, the Fujianese, had created trading settlements. There
he gave up scholarship and began learning the ropes of foreign trade with
a maternal uncle. He met Catholic priests, learned some Portuguese, and was
baptized. Although he never became a doctrinaire Christian – his statues of the
Virgin Mary stood next to images of traditional Chinese gods – his knowledge
of Portuguese served him well.
He left Macau and began sailing the seas, following Chinese routes around
the far-flung Chinese trading networks. For a while he based himself in Japan,
marrying a Japanese woman and fathering a son, the far more famous Zheng
Chenggong. Leaving his new wife and baby, he moved to the newly established
Dutch colony of Taiwan, where the Dutch hired him as a translator, but he
preferred to devote himself full time to more independent pursuits, such as
pillage. In the 1620s, the Dutch let him conduct piracy under their flag, and he
gradually became the leader of a fast-growing organization of Chinese pirate-
merchants, people who made most of their money on trade but who were also
willing to capture rivals’ ships.
By adapting designs and techniques picked up from the Dutch and other
Europeans, he created a powerful fleet of Chinese junks inspired by European
designs and armed with European-style cannons. He thus combined the best
of both worlds. European military techniques gave him an advantage in
warfare against fellow Chinese; Chinese trading contacts gave him an advan-
tage in commerce vis-à-vis the Dutch and Portuguese. In 1628 the Chinese
government offered him a chance to go legit. He accepted, becoming the
Patrolling Admiral of the Coast. In effect, his pirates became the Ming
dynasty’s navy. He built a huge mansion on the Chinese coast, with
a special canal so that he could board a ship right at his doorway. By the
mid-1630s, his family flag flew over most of the thousands of Chinese vessels
that sailed throughout East and Southeast Asia. They carried more in volume
and value than those of the European empires in the region. Indeed, evidence
suggests that by the 1640s, when the Dutch East India Company was nearing
the height of its powers, the Zheng commercial organization had annual
revenues that equaled or exceeded those of both the Dutch and English East
India Companies.12 Given that the Dutch East India Company has been
12
See Andrade 2011, 52–53; Hang 2011, 87 and 222. See also Hang 2016.
determined to be the company with the largest market capitalization in

history, this is an important fact.13
Thus, the Zheng family rose to prominence in a China that was far more open
and dynamic than the image of the Middle Country most of us still carry around
in our heads. Yet this revisionist understanding of traditional China still leaves
important questions unresolved. If Chinese traders were able to outcompete
Europeans and dominate trade in East and Southeast Asia, why did western
Europeans and not the Chinese create the huge trading empires that stretched
around the world after 1500? Why did Europeans take over large parts of India,
Southeast Asia, and eventually Africa, rather than an Asian power such as
China?
East Asian States and the Maritime Realm

During the 1600s, the Dutch republic was one-hundredth the size of China and
one-tenth the size of Japan in land area, and a similarly small proportion in
terms of population. Each of these Asian giants had riches that the Dutch –
although they were forming the wealthiest and most prosperous society in
Europe – could only dream about. Yet in 1624 the Dutch managed to create
a prosperous colony right under the noses of these two behemoths: the colony
of Taiwan. The fact that a few hundred Dutchmen in a dozen or so ships
managed to create a colony 12,000 miles away from the fatherland seems
incredible, and one can similarly marvel at other colonies in the area, such as
the Spanish Philippines or the Portuguese Spice Islands. As a result it is easy to
understand why people have tended to overestimate Europeans’ power and
influence.
Taiwan was certainly known to Chinese and Japanese. Hundreds of mer-
chants, fishermen, and pirates from both countries visited the island, whose
aboriginal headhunting peoples had many things to trade, including gold,
venison, and deer hides. The important distinction, however, is that the
Chinese and Japanese traders who ventured to Taiwan were on their own.
Western European governments often supported or sponsored overseas colo-
nization; Chinese and Japanese regimes did not. In those days, Chinese and
Japanese merchants were allowed by their governments to go abroad. They just
didn’t have the governmental support necessary to set up formal colonies. In
fact, when the Dutch arrived in the Far East, Chinese officials actually encour-
aged them to move to Taiwan, since it was deemed far enough away to keep the
“red haired barbarians” out of China itself.
Why were China and Japan uninterested in overseas colonization? Or,
conversely, what impelled western European governments to sponsor ventures
13
http://digg.com/2017/dutch-east-india-size
156 Tonio Andrade
so far from their own shores? This is one of the most important questions in
world history, especially when we are confronted with the legacy of Zheng He,
whose voyages dwarfed anything the Dutch or any other Europeans mustered
until the nineteenth century.
Zheng He is often portrayed as a “Chinese Christopher Columbus” whose
voyages prefigure the later European voyages of discovery. But in fact Zheng
He had very different aims from European explorers. His fleets were sailing to
the known world, using routes that Chinese sailors had been plying for
centuries. He didn’t establish colonies, and although he and his crews and
passengers did engage in trade, commerce was not their main purpose, and the
expeditions weren’t designed to create and protect new routes. Instead, the
purpose of Zheng He’s voyages was to project the newly established Ming
dynasty’s glory abroad and bring a stream of ambassadors – including kings
of foreign lands – to the Chinese capital to greet the emperor. These ambas-
sadors helped legitimate the emperor as the son of heaven, the ruler of
Tianxia, literally “All Under Heaven.” China was not unique in the world in
considering itself the center of creation, but in those days at least it was
unique in its power to enforce that image. During the Ming dynasty, China
was the largest, richest, and most populous country in the world. The Zheng
He voyages were the work of one ambitious and spendthrift emperor who had
reasons to try to prove his legitimacy (he was a usurper). When he died, they
ceased.14
Western European countries on the other hand faced very different
challenges. Whereas Asian countries had traded with each other for mil-
lennia across the heart of the world economy – the Indian Ocean –
Europeans were cut off. When eventually the Portuguese managed to find
a way around Africa, a process that took generations, they erupted onto the
scene, much like Vikings, raiding a peaceful trading system. In the
Mediterranean and in the seas of Northern Europe, it was considered
normal for a state to project its power across the seas, using naval power
to enforce trade routes and even establish armed outposts, a tradition that
went back to the Greeks and Romans. In Asia, such behavior appears to
have been strange. The wealthy ports that ringed the Indian Ocean were
very trade-oriented, but in the early modern period, their attitude toward
international commerce was based on principles much more modern than
Europeans’: to wit, that the seas should be open to all, that the merchandise
should be taxed upon departure or arrival, but that generally commerce
should be allowed to proceed peaceably. To set up armed colonies in an
enemy’s territory or attack an enemy’s shipping was occasionally resorted
14
One expedition was carried out after this emperor’s death, by his grandson the Xuande emperor
(宣德, r. 1426–1436), but thereafter all such expeditions ceased.
to, but Asian rulers generally found it more expedient to lure traders to
their ports with low tariffs or preferential policies. The Portuguese with
their blazing cannons caught established powers off guard, founding an
attenuated but durable sea empire. Portugal’s successors, the Spanish, the
English, and the Dutch, played by similar rules.
Occasionally, however, there arose exceptions to the rule: Asian govern-
ments that did exercise sea violence. One of the most important was the Zheng
family empire itself.
The Zheng State and the Ming–Qing Wars

In the 1650s, the Zheng state found itself transformed from an apolitical trading
organization to a government-in-exile. The key event occurred in 1644, when
the Manchu Qing established their capital in Beijing. The Zheng family
declared its support for the old dynasty, the Ming, dedicating itself to restoring
the Ming to the dragon throne.
Zheng Zhilong, the former pirate, was not fully invested in the struggle. But
his son and successor, Zheng Chenggong, took up the cause with fanaticism.
Born in Japan, the younger Zheng moved to China and was a pursuing
a promising path as a young scholar. Unlike his father, he was a strong student,
versed in the classics and able to write the classical-style poetry that was so
important to official advancement. In quiet times, he might have passed China’s
difficult examinations and devoted himself to public service as a scholar
official. But in these times of tumult, he chose a different route. He burned
his scholar’s robes and took up arms, vowing to restore the Ming. He estab-
lished a new capital in the coastal city of Xiamen, which he renamed the Ming
Memorial Prefecture, and staffed his new government with scholars and
officials.
He also strengthened his navy and built a powerful army, with companies
of African slaves and battalions of frightening tiger guards (knights who
wore helmets with tiger’s faces painted on them). Soon, he had become the
Qing dynasty’s most fearsome adversary, winning a string of victories in
southern China. Then he plotted his master stroke: to capture Nanjing, the
old Ming capital, and one of China’s most important cities. His attack failed.
In 1659 his army was routed by Qing forces and retreated to southern China.
Beset on all sides by Manchus, Zheng realized that the tides of war had
turned.
Around this time, an envoy from the Dutch reached his court, a Chinese
man named He Bin. Although employed by the Dutch East India Company,
He Bin secretly gave Zheng a map of Taiwan and encouraged him to
invade the colony, saying that the Dutch were weak and the island was
rich and fertile. Zheng called his generals together and announced his
158 Tonio Andrade
decision: he would invade Taiwan and use the Dutch colony as a base to
continue the fight against the Qing. He prepared his invasion carefully,
keeping his plans secret to take the Dutch by surprise. It worked. A Dutch
fleet that had been sent with reinforcements to Taiwan departed just before
the invasion, taking valuable supplies and troops. When Dutch sentries saw
300 Chinese ships bearing down on Taiwan, their masts like a vast mobile
forest, it was already too late. They couldn’t prevent Zheng’s 20,000 battle-
hardened troops from landing on Taiwan. Just five days later, Zheng had
captured most of Taiwan. The Dutch retreated to their main fortress,
surrounded by Chinese troops.
To this point, the lesson of the case seems clear. Zheng Chenggong was
not just a clever brigand. Since the days when his father had sailed his
way to leadership of a huge pirate band, the Zheng family had built
a trading empire and founded a state. Indeed, Zheng Chenggong was
head of a government that claimed the right to rule over all of China. It
was a government unusual in modern Chinese history. Whereas Chinese
governments were traditionally oriented toward the land, with the seas
being conceived as boundaries, Zheng’s government was much more like
western European governments, with the seas being viewed as a strategic
resource. In fact, Zheng’s conception was much more like that of con-
temporary China, where seas are considered not just conduits of trade but
also corridors of power.
Thus, one answer to the question of how Zheng Chenggong captured Taiwan
from the Dutch East India Company is simple: his Chinese state actually
wanted to, whereas traditional East Asian states did not. As a corollary, we
can suggest that Europeans had a free hand in Asia insofar as Asian govern-
ments let them, or were at least indifferent to controlling the seas.
Yet Zheng Chenggong, despite an overwhelming numerical advantage –
20,000 Chinese troops versus 1,200 European ones – nearly failed to capture
Taiwan from the Dutch.
The 1661–1662 War for Taiwan

If the Dutch had adopted a slightly different strategy, they might have held
Taiwan and forced Zheng to retreat to China. How did the Dutch carry out this
stunning feat? We must credit their bravery and resourcefulness, but the main
reason is technological, and this challenges some orthodox understandings of
global history.
Members of the Global History school, in their quest to answer the question
of why Europeans and not Asians came to rule the world during the modern
period, have recently argued that European technological and economic supre-
macy occurred late in time: the late 1700s. It was industrialization rather than
the Renaissance that ushered in an age of true European dominance. Moreover,

global historians have tended to view industrialization itself as an accident of
history, unlinked to any cultural or scientific context.15
But Zheng Chenggong’s difficulty capturing Taiwan, despite such over-
whelming odds, suggests that we must revisit global history’s dominant narra-
tives. How did a thousand or so sick, hungry, and often drunk European soldiers
hold off such a powerful Asian invasion force 12,000 miles from home? The
answer is that the Dutch had two basic technological advantages versus
Zheng’s Chinese troops. First, the main Dutch fortress was built according to
Italian renaissance designs, with geometrical projecting walls. In Europe these
fortresses had been known for a couple of centuries and were proliferating
wildly. Zheng’s men did not understand how to capture one. For nine months
they warily encircled the Dutch, trying one tack after another and failing each
time. Ultimately they were able to capture the fortress thanks to a stroke of luck.
A German sergeant defected to the Zheng side and helped the warlord build
effective counterfortifications.
The second Dutch advantage was a naval one. Dutch ships, with their rows of
broadside cannon, were more effective in most naval battles than Chinese
junks. The Zheng family found ways to copy European designs, which gave
them a lead over other Chinese pirate-organizations, but for reasons still
undetermined, the Zheng seem to have stopped making these hybrid ships,
with the result that on the open seas the Dutch had the better of most naval
battles, each European warship being able to cope with a dozen or more war
junks. Equally important was the advantage of European navigation techni-
ques. The Hollanders’ adeptness at sailing against prevailing monsoon winds
gave them a significant advantage, allowing them to send for reinforcements,
much to Zheng’s surprise and consternation.
So the case of Zheng’s victory against the Dutch shows us that the current
standard narrative of world history – that there was no significant technological
advantage until industrialization – is incorrect.16 At least in terms of military
15
I am oversimplifying the argument a bit, for the sake of brevity. Other factors than industrializa-
tion are also considered to be important, most importantly the vast ecological resources afforded
by Europeans’ dominance of the New World. But the point is that world historians have
generally argued that European dominance and superiority occur late in history, as can be
found in some of the most prominent and successful authors in world history, including Kenneth
Pomeranz, Bin Wong, the late Andre Gunder Frank, and Victor Lieberman, as well as in the
great textbooks, such as Jerry Bentley’s excellent Comparisons and Encounters. See Pomeranz
2000; Frank 1998, 463–546; V. Lieberman 2003; R. B. Wong 2000.
16
It is important to make clear that world history is a very dynamic and diverse field, and there are
scholars who are also challenging what I refer to as the “standard narrative” of world history.
Jack Goldstone, for example, is refocusing on the role of science in the “rise of the west,”
Patricia Seed is working on the science of navigation, and David Ringrose is busy examining
European expansion in global context. Goldstone 2002, 323–389. For an example of Patricia
Seed’s intriguing work, see Seed 2001. See also Ringrose 2001.
160 Tonio Andrade
matters, which is what the Zheng case turns upon, the Dutch had key techno-
logical advantages.
Yet the Zheng matched the Dutch in other aspects of military power,
aspects commonly associated with the famous European military revolution.
The Zheng guns were every bit as good as those of the Dutch, especially the
cannons, which the Zheng had in abundance. The Dutch were also known for
the famous musketry countermarch technique, which their leaders developed
in the late 1500s and which transformed infantry warfare in Europe, radiating
outward from the low countries as other armies adopted it, translating Dutch
military manuals and hiring Dutch drill instructors. Historians have argued
that this technique provided a decisive military edge in warfare against non-
Europeans, but recent work has shown that countermarch-style techniques
were an ancient heritage of Chinese warfare and were adapted to gunpowder
warfare quite early on in China – centuries before appearing in the West.
Zheng Chenggong’s disciplined troops easily triumphed over the Dutch East
India Company troops they encountered, shocking overconfident Dutch
commanders.
Zheng forces eventually defeated the Dutch, forcing their surrender in
February 1662, after a grueling nine-month siege, in which both sides –
but especially the Chinese – suffered disease and starvation. Zheng
Chenggong himself died soon thereafter, but his heirs ruled Taiwan for
two decades, turning Taiwan into a flourishing agricultural colony and
a trading center.
Conclusions and Epilogues

Historians have offered many explanations for the success of European colo-
nialism, from superior economic structures, to better seamanship, to superior
military technology and organization. But the case of Taiwan supports
a different sort of explanation: European colonization was due less to superior
technology or economic institutions than to state support. Whereas a number of
western European states were interested in fostering or condoning overseas
conquest, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese political leaders generally refrained
from overseas adventures and provided little support to the many East Asian
subjects who took to the seas. Indeed, at times all three of these states actively
discouraged overseas trade and adventurism, a striking contrast to the norms of
western Europe.
Why were Asian states less inclined to become involved in overseas adven-
turism than European states? One reason may be that they were less dependent
upon maritime trade for state revenues, but this raises a second question: why?
Oceanic trade can provide massive revenues even to states that are focused on
agricultural taxes.
So perhaps there’s another deeper reason for East Asia’s divergence from
Europe in this respect: the frequency of warfare. Europe was famously warlike,
its territory divided into multiple states competing over the longue durée. This
European state system model, in which multiple states compete in an anarchic
space, has long been seen to be in some sense normative. Yet recently, inter-
national relations scholars, largely inspired by David C. Kang, have suggested
that this European model of international relations – the so-called Westphalian
model – might not be as natural or normative as it has long been seen, or that it
is at the very least an unsuitable paradigm for understanding international
relations in other areas of the world. He has argued that East Asia, thanks to
its Sinocentric state system, was more stable than the European Westphalian
system, seeing fewer war events.
This is a salutary scholarly development, but although it may be true that
periods of lower-frequency warfare were longer in East Asia than in
western Europe, I believe that periods of warfare in East Asia, when they
occurred, were unusually convulsive and violent, and they lasted much
longer than has been appreciated. I have argued elsewhere that those
periods of warfare – particularly the periods 1350–1449, 1592–1680, and
1839–1946 – were key junctures in the history of East Asia, and in world
history more generally.17 It also seems that during such periods, East Asian
states were far more inclined to support overseas conquest and foster
overseas trade. When they did achieve internal unity, the East Asian
international system stabilized, and its states tended to clamp down on
overseas commerce and adventurism.
The case of Taiwan is instructive: the fate of Europeans’ colonies on the
island were subject to changing international orders in East Asia. In the late
1500s, while Japan was beset by internal warfare during its Warring States
period, Japanese ships raged through the seas, and Japanese colonists settled
in many areas of East and Southeast Asia. The Europeans who arrived in East
and Southeast Asia in the early modern period faced significant competition
from the Japanese, especially in Taiwan. But the Dutch attempted to colonize
Taiwan at a propitious time, in the 1620s, just as Japan’s new rulers were
consolidating their control over the Japanese archipelago. By 1635, the new
shogunate had largely forced the lords of Japan to withdraw from the seas, to
the point that Japanese subjects were forbidden from sailing abroad. This
provided an opportunity for the Dutch on Taiwan, who were thus able to
establish their colony.
The colony flourished, becoming one of the largest and most lucrative
holdings of the Dutch empire, helped by a sort of modus vivendi established
with the Ming empire of China, which allowed limited licensed trade but which
17
Andrade 2017.
162 Tonio Andrade
made clear to its seagoing subjects that they could expect no support from the
Ming government. This situation changed abruptly after 1644, when China
erupted into the early Qing wars. The Southern Ming state led by the Zheng
family drew its income from the seas, income that it desperately needed for its
fight against the increasingly powerful Qing. To ensure its access to that
income – and to obtain an overseas base – it came into conflict with the
Dutch, and this is why it invaded Taiwan.
But as the Qing established their control, the situation changed again. The
Qing cut off all overseas trade, establishing a draconian “Coastal Evacuation
Policy,” in which they sought with considerable success to depopulate China’s
coasts in an effort to starve the Zheng regime in Taiwan of revenue. Finally, in
1683, it sent a fleet to capture Taiwan. The fleet was commanded by one of
Zheng Chenggong’s former admirals, Shi Lang, and it quickly forced the Zheng
organization to surrender.
Yet the Qing emperor and many of his advisors did not want to keep Taiwan. It
was, the emperor said, “no bigger than a ball of mud. We gain nothing by
possessing it, and it would be no loss if we did not acquire it.”18 There were
even proposals to return Taiwan to the Dutch. Ultimately, Shi Lang and others
persuaded the emperor and his advisors to change their minds. Taiwan was
incorporated into the Great Qing Empire as a prefecture, appended to Fujian
province.
The Qing opened up foreign trade again, but they, like the Ming, were
largely oriented toward continental affairs. Taiwan was ruled by colonial
intermediaries and rarely considered of vital strategic importance to
Beijing. Indeed, it seems likely that if the Dutch had held onto Taiwan
past 1662, it wouldn’t have been incorporated into the Qing empire. The
effects on great power rivalries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
are difficult to imagine. Perhaps the British would have had a different
relationship with China, capturing Taiwan from the Dutch as they captured
other possessions during the Anglo-Dutch wars of the eighteenth century.
With Taiwan as their possession, they might not have demanded the
colony of Hong Kong. Perhaps the Opium Wars themselves would have
played out differently.
In any case, during the first century and a half of Qing rule, as the Qing
achieved unquestioned hegemony in East Asia, the seas were relatively calm,
and the Qing focused little on expanding their maritime power. They were
content to allow Europeans to trade in their ports, confining them, after 1757, to
the port of Guangzhou. In the mid-1800s, however, as the British, Americans,
French, and, later, Japanese, increased their maritime activities, the Qing began
to get serious about maritime power projection, although they were unable to
18
Teng 2004, 34.
defend themselves against the increasingly severe depredations of their

competitors.
This is a mistake that the current leadership in China is determined to avoid.
Today, Beijing sees the control of maritime space to be a key strategic objec-
tive, which is one reason why Taiwan is considered a core part of China’s
territory. Indeed, one of the first prototypes of its aircraft carrier program was
nicknamed the Shi Lang, after the former Zheng admiral who helped the Qing
capture Taiwan.
10 The Opium Wars of 1839–1860
Richard S. Horowitz
In the middle of the nineteenth century, there were two major conflicts between
Britain and the Qing empire. The first, far better known to a Western audience,
was the Opium War (1839–1842). The second, variously described as the
Second Opium War and the Arrow War lasted from 1856 to 1860 and involved
both Britain and France in a war against the Qing empire. But while Western
scholars rarely consider them together, it makes sense to view them as stages of
the same conflict. Both wars were about two core issues. The first involved
establishing a system of trade beneficial to Great Britain, including low tariffs,
minimal government interference, and the legalization of opium exports to
China. The second was creating a new framework for diplomacy between
Britain and the Qing empire. This system was based on European diplomatic
practice and resolved British sensitivity over of the ritual forms and language
used in Qing diplomacy that were associated with the tribute system.
The Opium War started when the Qing government, concerned about the
social and economic consequences of the opium trade, initiated a crackdown,
cutting off opium imports, and confiscating opium from merchants, both
Chinese and foreign. When the British government decided to pursue military
means to resolve the conflict, they had a clear sense of the trade concessions
that they wanted. But while they were dissatisfied with the diplomatic status
quo, they had only a general idea of what they wanted in its place. They quickly
found results of the treaties ending the first war were unsatisfactory in reshap-
ing diplomatic relations. By the mid-1850s, British diplomats wanted to estab-
lish conditions similar to those governing relations with the Ottoman empire.
While they continued to press for further trade concessions, the biggest differ-
ences with the Qing were over diplomatic arrangements and protocols. The
British, who had long rejected the hierarchical tribute system, were highly
sensitive to any implication that the Qing Throne, or its officials, regarded them
as less than equal. Moreover, they wanted a permanent resident minister (an
ambassador in current usage), resident in Beijing. Periodic visits to the capital,
also a feature of the tribute system, were not an acceptable solution. Their
answer was to make European diplomatic practice and European international
law the new framework for relations between Britain and the Qing empire.
164
The Opium Wars of 1839–1860 165
Britain was able to succeed in the Opium Wars due to superior technology,
better organization, and better intelligence about the other side than their Qing
counterparts. The Qing also suffered from weak leadership and an adminis-
trative structure that was ill-suited to the needs of the time. The Qing bureau-
cratic monarchy tended to spread power out among many officials, and was
dependent for coordination on an active and decisive emperor able to establish
effective priorities and give direction to the many civil and military officials
who reported to him. But neither the Daoguang emperor (r. 1821–1850) nor the
Xianfeng emperor (r. 1851–1862) was really up to the task, and neither
empowered his key advisory committee, the Grand Council, with the respon-
sibility to take on such a role. In contrast to the great emperors who had made
the Qing empire into an Asian superpower, both were incurious about the new
threat they faced. Both discouraged contact by officials with Westerners, which
made it difficult to acquire the information they needed, or establish the
relationships that might have helped to avoid conflict. Wary of incurring the
wrath of the throne, senior officials in the 1840s and 1850s were reluctant to
report bad news or suggest necessary changes of policy. Both emperors,
isolated in their palaces in Beijing, failed to understand the superiority of
British firepower for far too long, or accept the futility of seeking military
rather negotiated solutions. The result was two lopsided wars which cost
thousands of lives and millions of taels, and for which the Qing empire gained
no benefit. In contrast, the Tokugawa regime in Japan made similar concessions
without the cost of war. While there was outrage from political elites about this,
this fury was channeled into a strong interest in learning foreign methods and
technology.
The Canton System and the Background to the Opium War

The Opium Wars are conventionally viewed as the “opening” of China to the
outside world, or even its “awakening.” But several decades of scholarship on
the Qing dynasty have shown otherwise. The Qing empire, from its beginning,
was deeply involved in the world around it as other chapters in this book have
shown.
Western Europeans (and later Americans) represented a peculiar problem to
the Qing, however. Dutch and British merchants appeared in South China in the
1600s seeking trade, and later merchants from other countries began to appear
as well (see Chapters 3 and 9). Over time Qing officials developed a mode of
dealing with them that worked remarkably well for almost a century. Western
Europeans were reluctant to participate in what has come to be called “the
tribute system,” the British in particular objecting to the ritual elements of that
system, in which foreign representatives kowtowed to the emperor. They
wanted diplomatic relationships along European lines – in which sovereign
166 Richard S. Horowitz
states were understood to be equals, at least in the highly ritualized world of

diplomatic practice.1
The Qing in turn saw little necessity for an ongoing political/diplomatic
relationship with governments that were far away and seemed interested only in
trade and missionary activity. In their eyes, trade was welcome, proselytizing
foreign religions was not. Furthermore, the Qing were concerned about for-
eigners bringing disorder to Chinese port cities.
Nonetheless, a profitable trade gradually emerged in Canton (Guangzhou).
When a British captain, James Flint, tried to trade at Zhoushan (Chusan) in
1757, the Qianlong emperor moved to restrict trade to Guangzhou, which
Europeans called Canton and was already the dominant port. The Canton
System, as it was called, created a highly structured framework for trade.
Foreign ships stopped first at Macao to get a “chop” from local officials and
to hire a local pilot, before proceeding upriver to anchor at Whampoa.
Merchants then proceeded a further 16 km to Canton to do business. Foreign
merchants were required to do business with the members of an approved guild
of foreign trade merchants, known as the Cohong (gonghang in Mandarin).
They were restricted to living in a small waterfront district where some thirteen
“factories” (places of business that also had living quarters) were built on
narrow lots, and a few surrounding streets. Foreign merchants were supposed
to remain in Canton only during the trading season, from September to late
spring, and return to Macao when the trading season ended. Foreign women
were required to stay in Macao. Foreign merchants were expressly forbidden
from directly petitioning local officials; any concerns they had were to be
communicated to the Qing government through the Hong merchants.2
In the eighteenth century, the Hong monopoly was paralleled with European
mercantilist arrangements. The major European traders were the British East
India Company and the Dutch East India Company. Both were chartered joint
stock companies that had been granted monopolies of Asian trade to their home
countries, and long functioned as the leading edge of European mercantile
imperialism in Asia. While Europeans sometimes grumbled about the restric-
tions they faced, the Canton trade flourished, and as the decades passed, there
was a steady increase in the number of foreign ships docking at Canton.3
From the perspective of Qing officials, the Canton system had several
advantages. First, it allowed control. Canton was located about 50 km upriver
from the mouth of the Pearl River. Its location made it relatively easy for
Qing officials to monitor the ships coming to trade, and when they believed it
1
For the older view of the “tribute system,” see the essays in Fairbank 1968. Recent scholarship
shows that Qing tributary relations were actually quite flexible, e.g., Wills 2012.
2
The following account draws heavily on Van Dyke 2005. The classic account of the British East
India Company’s trade is Morse 1926.
3
Carroll 2010.
was warranted, to shut off trade. The licensed Cohong merchants served as
guarantors for the foreigners, and while some of the regulations were loosely
enforced, the Hong merchants knew that they were accountable if foreigners
got up to mischief. Second, the system insured that the trade was duly
taxed – the Hong merchants worked closely with the Canton superintendent
of customs (the “Hoppo”) and the revenues were directly paid to support the
operations of the imperial household. Officials often looked to the Hong
merchants for additional revenues, and there were ample opportunities for
official graft. Qing officials sometimes had to bail out insolvent Hong
merchants and repay funds owed to foreigners. Nevertheless, the benefits
of the monopoly from the government’s perspective were worth it. Overall,
far from limiting commerce with Europeans, the volume of the Canton trade
expanded steadily, and brought large trade surpluses to China, bringing in
large volumes of silver helping to expand the money supply and feed the
expansion of China’s economy. Where tribute relationships combined trade
with political exchange, the Canton system created a kind of frontier trading
center, facilitating trade while avoiding the complexities of political and
social relationships with foreigners who showed little interest in abiding by
Qing expectations.
By the late eighteenth century, the British were frustrated by a number of
aspects of the Canton system. First, the British wanted access to Qing officials
and opportunities for diplomatic negotiations to resolve issues and make
adjustments to the existing system of trade. In their eyes, the refusal of Qing
officials to meet with British representatives on the basis of equality was
haughty and disrespectful. Second, the British were frustrated by their ongoing
trade deficit. Britain’s vast imports of tea were not matched by similar Chinese
interest in British goods. Third, the British wanted to have more ports open to
trade and more freedom to travel and trade within those ports. Finally, the
British badly wanted their nationals to be subject to their own legal system
(what is called extraterritoriality) not the Qing legal system, which after a major
incident in 1784 they had concluded was barbaric.
In 1793–1794, the British government attempted to confront these concerns
by sending a lavish embassy lead by Lord Macartney, in an attempt to open up
political relations with Beijing. The Qianlong emperor received Macartney and
contrary to a body of older scholarship responded flexibly to the British
insistence on avoiding the ceremonial aspects of the tribute system. But
Macartney’s requests – including an island off the coast – were viewed as
aggressive, and there were also concerns about possible links between the
British and the Gurkhas who had recently invaded Tibet. Qianlong informed
the British envoy that he had no interest in changing the relationship with Great
Britain, and the embassy was hustled out of the country under armed guard. In
1816 the British sent another embassy led by Lord Amherst. But the Qing side
insisted on following the tribute framework, and the British refused, and the
mission came to a quick end.4
The Opium Trade and the Canton System

British diplomacy failed to shake up the Canton system, but the rise of the trade
in opium began to undermine it, often in surprising ways. British ships began to
bring opium to China in the mid-1770s and by the 1790s about 4,000 chests
were being imported per year (each chest weighed about 65 kg). But after 1820
opium imports rose dramatically, to over 16,000 chests, and more than dou-
bling again in the following decade. The trade in opium was illegal in Qing
China. It had first banned in 1729 by the Yongzheng emperor. From 1796 on
edicts and regulations reinforcing the ban were frequent but ineffectual. On the
British side, opium helped private traders gain an increasingly prominent role,
and lead to the end of the British East India Company’s monopoly on trade (the
Dutch East India Company was dissolved in 1799). On the Chinese side, the
drug trade not only created an addiction problem, but fed government corrup-
tion, and by the 1830s contributed a monetary crisis that affected the entire
country.5
The opium trade arrived at the time when the Qing empire was showing signs
of trouble. The decades after the passing of the Qianlong emperor in 1799 were
not good ones. A growing population created new pressures for land and
resources, while local government was understaffed and poorly funded.
Fueled by government corruption and incompetence, there were major sectar-
ian and ethnic uprisings. On the southeast coast, piracy was also a major
problem. While the Jiaqing emperor and his officials were able to put down
rebellions and suppress piracy, they weren’t able to root out the underlying
causes.6
Opium combined with these ills to create a three-part problem: a social
problem that generated widespread concern, a problem of government corrup-
tion, and a currency problem. Qing officials were concerned about these issues
from the start. Opium sales had been banned in the 1730s by the Yongzheng
emperor, and there were several efforts to reassert the ban. The problem, they
found (as have many governments since) is that while making the trade and
consumption of addictive drugs illegal is easy, actually stamping out the trade is
hard. By the 1830s there were troubling reports of opium addiction among
soldiers and officials were making their way to the throne. It was an open secret
that Qing officials in Guangdong province would tolerate the trade – if paid
4
Harrison 2017; Mosca 2013.
5
For opium import data see M. Lin 2006. For a summary of anti-opium edicts see H. Chang 1964,
219–221.
6
Mann Jones and Kuhn 1978 remains a good introduction.
substantial bribes. This was part of a broader Qing problem in the early nine-
teenth century: systemic corruption. Government officials were overstretched
and badly underpaid, and even honest officials stretched the rules to keep local
government treasuries afloat. By the 1820s, the opium trade had become an
issue of concern, not only among officials, but also intellectuals concerned
about public policy (generally referred to as “statecraft” or jingshi thinkers).
In addition to these issues of corruption and the obvious social costs of
addiction, the much larger problem related to the shift in the balance of trade
and its impacts on the monetary system. Qing China operated on a bimetallic
system of currency. Small everyday items were bought and sold for copper
cash that was minted by the government. But large expenses, including taxes,
were paid in silver – either coins (largely Spanish dollars) or ingots. The
exchange rate between copper and silver fluctuated with the market. Up until
1820, the Canton trade had generated substantial surpluses for the Qing
empire. Foreign merchants brought in substantial amounts of silver to pay
the difference between the value of Chinese exports in tea and other goods,
and the value of foreign goods sold in China. But in the 1820s, China was on
the deficit side – the value of imports outstripping the value of exports. This
coincided with a shortage of silver in China. This “silver famine” was
apparent in the rising cost of silver relative to copper – exchange rates rising
from around a 1,000 copper coins per tael to 1,300 in the mid-1820s. The
rising cost of silver caused widespread hardship. For ordinary farmers who
largely lived on copper, the increased cost of silver effectively raised the cost
of their taxes. The perception that there was a direct link between the opium
trade and the silver shortage fueled much of the debate over policies. In the
years before war broke out, proponents of legalization hoped to focus
resources on ways to replace the export of silver with a barter system for
goods.7
The riches of the opium trade also destabilized the British side of the Canton
trade. Because the trade was illicit, the East India Company wanted to keep an
appearance of distance from it lest Qing officials shut them out in the event of
a crackdown. Opium was produced in India and sold at auction in Calcutta
under the supervision of the East India Company. But chests of the drug were
shipped from India to China by “country traders”: private merchants operating
between Asian ports, and therefore not subject to the East India Company’s
legal monopoly on trade between Britain and Asia. Opium traders made deals
in Canton, but the drug itself was smuggled through other locations – usually
islands off the coast – and paid for in cash. The money was then used to buy
7
M. Lin 2006 is the major work on the currency issue. She argues that it was a fall in global silver
production (particularly in Latin America) that caused the currency problem in China rather than
the opium trade.
bills of exchange from the East India Company, which in turn used the silver to
buy tea and other exports.
The East India Company largely accepted the Canton system and worked
comfortably with the Hong merchants. But the private traders were deeply
frustrated by the limitations placed on them – both by the East India Company
and the Qing government. These merchants, such the heads of Jardine
Matheson which would soon to be the leading British trading company in
East Asia, began lobbying parliament vigorously for an end to the East India
Company’s monopoly on the China trade. Other British mercantile interests,
believing that the end of the monopoly would open up new opportunities for
exports, joined the fray. After years of debate and discussion, in 1833,
Parliament complied. Beginning in the 1834 trading season the monopoly of
the East India Company importing Chinese goods to Britain ended, and the
private traders jumped in.8
By the mid-1830s, the two key forces were in place that would lead to war.
British traders were furiously pressing for changes in the structure of British
trade with China, and they now had an appointed British government official
whose role was to promote their business interests. Meanwhile Qing officials
were increasingly convinced that something needed to be done to stem the ill-
effects of opium imports.
The End of the Monopoly and the Rise of Anglo-Chinese

Conflict
The end of the East India Company monopoly had broad effects. Prior to 1834,
both sides had similar mercantilist arrangements with legally appointed mer-
chants controlling the trade and making considerable profits. Both sides like-
wise had a stake in maintaining the stability of the system. Now this had
changed. The non-Company merchants, advocates of free trade who were
used to going around formal trading arrangement in the process of smuggling
opium, very much wanted to be able to trade with whomever they wanted. And
this desire to transform the China trade almost immediately played out in
a political conflict called the Napier Affair.
Up until the end of its monopoly, the East India Company, through a Select
Committee, had been the overseer of British trade in Canton. The Committee
dealt with the Hong merchants to resolve problems and concerns, both for the
Company and private merchants. With the Honourable Company’s control over
the Canton trade at an end, the British government established a government
position, chief superintendent of trade, and appointed William, the Ninth Lord
Napier, to the role.
8
Greenberg 1969.
In the instructions he received from Lord Palmerston, the British foreign

secretary, Napier was to “watch over and protect the interests of Our subjects
resident at or resorting to the Empire of China for the purposes of trade.” He
was to provide advice to merchants, and to “protect them in the peaceable
prosecution of all lawful enterprises in which they may be engaged.” But he
was to emphasize to Britons in China “the duty of conforming to the laws and
usages of the Chinese Empire” as long as they were fairly applied. Palmerston
warned the new appointee to “observe all possible moderation; and . . . .
Abstain from all unnecessary use of menacing language” and avoid appealing
for military intervention unless absolutely necessary. In short, Napier was to
proceed cautiously and avoid upsetting the status quo.9
But Napier had no diplomatic experience and, influenced by some of the
more belligerent private merchants, ignored instructions and tried to force
immediate changes. On arrival at Macao in July, 1834, he proceeded to
Canton without the required passport. Settled in the British factory, he imme-
diately attempted to bypass the Hong merchants and sent a letter directly to the
governor-general. He was incensed when Qing officials insisted he follow
existing regulations, lashing out in public proclamations. After showing con-
siderable patience with Napier’s inflammatory behavior, in early September the
governor-general Lu Kun shut down trade and stopped merchants from going
to the British factory. Napier ordered the two frigates under his command to sail
past the Boca Tigris, the large fortified island near the entrance of the Pearl
River, hoping to intimidate the Chinese into compliance with his wishes.
Cannon fire was exchanged with the forts; two British sailors (and likely
some Chinese soldiers) were killed in the action. The frigates with great
difficulty made their way to Whampoa, the anchorage where the tea ships
anchored, 16 km downstream from Canton. There the Chinese resourcefully
used booms and sank boats to trap the frigates. In September Napier fell ill.
With pressure growing from some merchants anxious to restart trade, he
decided to leave Canton. Governor Lu insisted that foreign warships leave
Qing waters before allowing the hapless superintendent to leave and trade to
resume. Napier died shortly after he reached Macao at the end of September.
Appeals by some merchants for a military response to avenge Napier’s death
fell on deaf ears in London.10
The Napier Affair in important ways prefigured the war that was to follow
five years later. It showed a fundamental difference in the way each side wanted
the relationship to work: Qing officials understood the Canton trade to be
a mercantile relationship, not a political or diplomatic one, and saw no reason
to change that. For Napier and bellicose merchants such as William Jardine and
9
Parliament, Great Britain 1840, 3–5.
10
Documents are in Parliament, Great Britain 1840. See also H. Chang 1964 and Fay 1975.
Hugh Hamilton Lindsay who stood behind him, establishing a diplomatic

relationship in the manner that they were accustomed in Europe was an
essential part of restructuring the British relationship with China. The relative
ease with which Lu Kun had dealt with Napier, first by cutting off trade and
isolating the British factory, then trapping the two British frigates, lead Qing
officials such as Lin Zexu to be overconfident about their ability to manage the
British in the event of conflict.
After Napier’s failure, the merchants who had supported his effort engaged in
a sustained campaign to convince British decision-makers to take a more aggres-
sive attitude toward China. An important element of this was to argue that the
conflict was not only about commerce but a question of honor. They did this in
part by focusing on the term most often used by Qing officials to designate
foreigners from the west, yi. The handful of Britons with a degree of Chinese
literacy were at odds over how to translate the term. Some believed it was
denigrating and translated it as “barbarian,” others insisted it was a respectful
term that might be translated as “stranger” or “foreigner.” The more aggressive
British merchants in China fastened onto the translation “barbarian.” According
to these critics this was emblematic of the Chinese, who were blinded by a sense
of superiority. They were unable to see the value of “civilized” European
practices, such as the Westphalian system of diplomacy, emerging industrial
technologies, and the benefits of free trade. War was necessary both to avenge
Britain’s honor and to bring China out of its self-imposed isolation. This narrative
was formulated before the war came to be embedded in the way in which the war
was described in contemporary documents and memoirs. Until recent decades,
most historians, especially outside of China, accepted this view.11
As British merchants favoring war were pursuing their case, the status quo
was under fire on the Chinese side as well. By the mid-1830s, two sets of
concerns put the opium issue onto the political agenda: first, incidents in the
early 1830s in which Qing military were found to be ineffective in fighting
internal rebellions, apparently in part because they were suffering from opium
addiction, raised concerns about the social costs of opium in China. Second, the
rising cost of silver relative to copper was a growing concern. In 1836,
a memorial to the throne by a relatively minor Beijing official named Xu
Naiji argued that ending the ban on the trade, and instead bartering tea for
opium could avoid the outflow of silver and would be a more effective policy.
But the emperor was persuaded by the critics of the opium trade that this
solution would make matters worse, and the argument for legalization came
to an end. British merchants, who had been electrified by the possibility of
a legalized drug trade for a few months in 1836, were deeply disappointed.
11
On the translation issue see Liu 2004, Basu 2014. Chen 2017 asserts that the question of honor
was important, and takes a somewhat different position on the translation of yi.
In 1838 court discussions of how to deal with opium began to move in new
directions. In June 1838, Huang Juezi, a director of the court of state ceremo-
nial, submitted a memorial proposing a different approach: to attack demand
for opium by instituting harsh penalties on opium users, including capital
punishment for repeat offenders. After further debate the Daoguang emperor
finally came down firmly on the side of a crackdown. At the end of
December 1838, he issued a new, much stricter law on the distribution and
consumption of opium and appointed Lin Zexu as imperial commissioner to
lead the crackdown in south China.12
The Turn to War

By the beginning of 1839, the fuel for conflict was in place. British merchants
had been building a case for military intervention since Lord Napier’s demise.
Their effort to characterize Qing treatment of British merchants and represen-
tations of Britons as disrespectful offered politicians a way to frame the conflict
as something other than support for opium smuggling. On the Qing side, after
years of discussion, there was now political commitment to confront the opium
issue. But it took a miscalculation by an overly confident Qing official in Lin
Zexu, and a surprising and still unexplained decision by the top British govern-
ment representative, Charles Elliot, to set war in motion.
On March 10, 1839, Lin Zexu arrived in Canton confident. He was an
experienced and competent official, with a reputation for probity, and with
strong links to the statecraft thinkers. During the two-month journey from
Beijing, he dispatched orders to Guangdong officials, and by the time he
arrived, implementation of new opium regulations was already underway.
Lin cracked down hard on Chinese opium traders and smokers. More than
1,600 people were charged with opium offences; some 43,000 opium pipes and
28,000 catties of opium were reportedly confiscated by Qing authorities. Lin
ordered the arrest of dozens of known dealers and smugglers, and promoted
medical interventions thought to assist addicts. The impact of these measures,
in the short term at least, was dramatic; the opium trade in the Pearl River delta
was at a standstill.13
But Lin believed that the opium problem could not be dealt with if the supply
was not cut off, and in Canton the predominant source was British imports from
India. While he had been warned against the dangers of a conflict with the
British, and understood that Qing naval vessels would be no match for the
powerful British warships in the open sea, Lin remained confident that he could
manage the situation. Like other Qing officials of the time, he also believed that
Chinese exports such as tea, and oddly rhubarb (valued as a laxative), were
12 13
H. Chang 1964 and Polachek 1992. H. Chang 1964, 128–129.
essential to the British. Cutting off trade would quickly bring them to their
senses. A foreign government, located so far away, surely wouldn’t want to
pursue war over opium.14
Shortly after his arrival, Lin demanded through the Hong merchants that the
foreign merchants turn over their opium stocks, and threatened to arrest and
charge several of them to sign a pledge that they would not smuggle opium. The
merchant community was divided about how to respond. At this point the
British government representative in the area chose to intervene. Charles Elliot
was now in Napier’s old role as the British government’s superintendent of
trade, and he hurried to Canton “determined to resist sudden aggression on
British life and British property at all hazards.” Elliot, who just a few months
earlier deplored the opium trade, now declared Lancelot Dent, one of the
merchants under Chinese pressure, to be “one of our most respected merchants
at Canton,” and placed him under his personal protection.15
Lin, furious at Elliot’s interference, cut off all trade on March 24 and ordered
all Chinese servants to leave the factories. Lin imposed a blockade on the
factories, preventing local suppliers from delivering goods, until all the opium
in the hands of foreign merchants was turned over to him to be destroyed. For
three long days, Elliot and the other foreign traders withstood the discomfort of
life without servants. On March 27 Elliot folded. He ordered the British
merchants to turn over their opium, and informed Lin that they would turn
over 20,283 chests of the drug.
Elliot never fully explained his thinking. But as Hsin-pao Chang argues, in
taking responsibility for the surrender of the opium, the superintendent was
taking pressure off the British merchants and putting a politically fraught issue
in the lap of the British government. The south China opium market had been at
a standstill for months, and merchants were stuck with massive supplies of
opium that they could not sell. Elliot’s intervention meant that British mer-
chants could now seek compensation from the British government.16
For Lin, Elliot’s decision to turn over the opium appeared to be a major
victory. He reported in a memorial to the throne (together with Guangdong and
Guangxi governor-general Deng Dingchen and Guangdong governor Yiliang)
that the British had been “seized by doubt, fear and consternation, meanwhile
making repentance.” If one reads through the moralistic Qing government
rhetoric, Lin believed they had crumbled under pressure, and acceded to his
demands. He followed this by composing and having translated into English
a letter to Queen Victoria hoping the youthful British monarch could be
convinced by moral suasion to accept the end of the opium trade. By the end
May of 1839 the promised opium had been turned over. Commissioner Lin
composed a prayer to the god of the sea, and with a meticulously organized
14 15 16
Mao 2016, 86–88. Parliament, Great Britain, 1840, 356. H. Chang 1964, 165–167.
force of 500 laborers and sixty officials, proceeded to destroy the opium by
pounding it with salt and lime, and then dissolving it in water before releasing
the solution into the sea.17
But Lin had miscalculated. While trapped in Canton, Elliot’s reports to
Palmerston outlined a case for war: that the Chinese government, by detaining
the merchants in Canton, had acted coercively and the case of Dent had made
clear the necessity of exempting Britons from the cruelty of Chinese courts.
Opium smugglers would surely violently disrupt the China coast in response to
the opium ban. He urged Palmerston that what would be best for all involved
(including the Chinese) “will be a prompt and powerful interference of Her
Majesty’s Government for the just vindication of all wrongs, and the effectual
prevention of crime and wretchedness by [bringing about a] permanent
settlement.”18
It was not until August 29, that Palmerston received the reports of what had
occurred in Canton the previous spring. The foreign secretary was convinced by
William Jardine, just back from China, and proposed that a small fleet could
blockade the China coast. Palmerston got approval to proceed, and so a limited
expeditionary force was to be sent from India in late spring, conveniently avoiding
disruption to the Canton trade, which closed in March and reopened in September.
In February Palmerston framed the goals for the war – and did it in
a fundamentally contradictory manner. First he drafted a letter addressed to
the “Minister of the Emperor” and asserted that China had “committed violent
outrages against the British Residents at Canton, who were living peaceably in
that City, trusting to the good faith of the Chinese Government; and that those
same Chinese officers, forgetting the respect which was due to the British
Superintendent in his Character of Agent of the British Crown, have treated
that Superintendent also with violence and indignity.” He rejected the legiti-
macy of the campaign against opium and made the following demands:
1. Full compensation for the confiscated opium.
2. “Satisfaction” for the insult to Superintendent Elliot and agreement that in
the future the superintendent would be treated “in a manner consistent with
the usages of civilized Nations, and with the respect due to the Dignity of the
British Crown.”
3. That one or more islands off the coast of China serve as a base for Britain’s
trade in China.
4. That the Qing government make good any debts owed by the Hong mer-
chants to British merchants.
5. That the Qing government agree to pay Britain for the cost of sending an
expeditionary force to China.
17
Kuo 1935, 240; H. Chang 1964, 173–174
18
Lovell 2015, 67–68; Parliament, Great Britain, 1840, 374.
Finally Palmerston announced that the British military and naval forces had
been sent to China to “act in support of these demands.”19
But these demands to the Qing government did not fully state the commer-
cial and diplomatic concessions he expected. A letter, also dated February 20,
1840, addressed the two plenipotentiaries, Superintendent Charles Elliot and
his cousin Admiral George Elliot (who was sent to assist). Palmerston insisted
on several other points: that China open several ports to British residence and
trade; merchants should be free to trade with whoever they want (i.e., the
abolition of the Cohong monopoly); there must be a fixed and published tax
rate on imports and exports (customs duties); that the British government could
appoint superintendents of trade or consuls to the ports, and they would be able
to meet and communicate with Qing officials; and that Britons would be
granted extraterritoriality in China. Curiously, Palmerston left the issue of
opium half open: the Chinese could ban the importation of goods, and if they
were smuggled in, they could confiscated. But “in no case shall the Persons of
British Subjects be molested on account of the importation or the exportation of
goods.” In other words, China could not try to arrest, attack, or detain Britons
engaging in illegal trade.20
Even while Palmerston was framing the goals of military action in political
and diplomatic terms, the Whig government’s support for war in China was
stirring a raucous debate in British political circles. Critics deplored the British
government’s support of opium interests – and it was at this time the moniker
“Opium War” was coined. In April of 1840, the Tories brought a vote of no
confidence against the government for its mishandling of China. After a long
debate, the government survived, but just barely, and the war proceeded.21
The British Sail North

While Palmerston and the Cabinet had decided on war by early November of
1839, the effects of that decision would not appear in China until the beginning
of June 1840. Meanwhile, in the second half of 1839, having left Canton,
Charles Elliot maintained the limited forces available to him in a tense face-off
with Qing naval units. Lin refused to allow merchants to trade until they signed
a bond promising not to trade opium, and Elliot refused to allow British
merchants to sign it. Forced out of Macao, Britons occupied Hong Kong
Island, making it a base of operations. There were two major skirmishes
between British warships and Qing military units – the first battles of the war.
In both cases Qing forces fought bravely but were overwhelmed by British
firepower. But Lin Zexu’s reports to the throne did not give a clear sense of how
badly the battles had gone. It would take several more months before it was
19 20 21
Morse 1910, 621–626. Morse 1910, 626–630. Lovell 2015, 95–108.
clear to the Daoguang emperor and his ministers that it was the government of
Great Britain, and not a piratical group of British merchants, that was causing
all the trouble.
In spring 1840, a large British expeditionary force assembled in Singapore,
with at least twenty warships including three ships of the line, and dozens of
transports to carry troops from Europe, South Africa, and India. But in the
summer of 1840, the British made a surprising move. Instead of confronting
Commissioner Lin and the authorities in Canton, they sailed north and seized
control of Zhoushan Island, near the great port of Ningbo. From there ships
were sent to several ports on the coast attempting to deliver a letter from
Palmerston to “The Minister of the Emperor of China.” The British were trying
to short circuit a frustrating pattern in Canton of endless discussion, often over
the forms of communication, and force the emperor to confront the reality of
British demands.
The expedition north to Tianjin and the show of force that this involved
brought about an opportunity for diplomacy. The governor-general of Zhili,
Qishan, forwarded Palmerston’s letter to Daoguang, and was able to convince
the Elliots to accept a shift in locale to Canton. In the autumn of 1840, there was
a de facto cease fire, and in December and January Charles Elliot (his cousin
having resigned in ill-health) reconvened in Canton and undertook a tragically
doomed effort to find an agreement.
By late January, Elliot and Qishan reached a verbal agreement on a proposal
from Elliot: a $6 million payment to Britain, the cession of Hong Kong to
Britain, diplomatic intercourse to be direct and on an equal basis, and
a resumption of trade at Canton, beginning after the Chinese New Year. It
was a decent compromise, and the British pulled out of Zhoushan (which was
a disease trap for British troops) as an indication of good faith. But neither
government liked the work of its negotiator, and no formal agreement was
signed. To Daoguang, the cession of Hong Kong was intolerable, and Qishan
was sacked and charged with misconduct. The throne quite simply did not
understand the military realities of the moment. When word of Qishan’s ouster
reached Elliot, he now pursued the capture of Canton, and having surrounded it,
traded the preservation of the city for the reopening of trade.
Meanwhile, when the terms Elliot and Qishan had apparently agreed to
reached London, a furious Palmerston sacked Elliot for making the foreign
secretary’s public demands, rather than his private ones, the basis of the peace
negotiations. Sir Henry Pottinger was dispatched to China to prosecute the war
and get an agreement more to Palmerston’s liking, arriving in August of 1841.
Pottinger promptly headed north. The British seized control of Xiamen, in
Fujian, reoccupied Dinghai in the Zhoushan islands, and then seized the key
port of Ningbo. The following March, a Qing effort to eject the British from
Ningbo failed miserably, and then the British proceeded to take Zhapu and
Zhenjiang, with horrific casualties. Finally convinced that further resistance

would be disastrous, in July Daoguang appointed Yilibu and Qiying – high
officials and imperial kinsmen – to negotiate the peace. At the end of August,
the Treaty of Nanking was signed bringing the conflict to an end.22
While the Qing government had hundreds of thousands of troops under arms,
and vastly outnumbered the British, they had several disadvantages. They were
spread in small garrisons among the provinces where they played
a constabulary role, and were positioned to suppress the internal rebellions
that had become increasingly common in the preceding years. Redeploying
units was slow and expensive. Membership in the hereditary banner and Green
Standard armies was largely by connection rather than ability, and units were
often short of men, sometimes because officers padded the rolls with fake
names to bring in extra income. By European standards, Qing soldiers were
poorly armed, using matchlock smoothbore muskets that had been phased out
in Europe at the end the seventeenth century. Qing cannon were likewise based
on earlier European designs. Since the departure of the Jesuits, and the limited
engagement of Qing troops with capable competitors, artillery had fallen on
hard times.23
The British by contrast had relatively small numbers of men. But their land
forces were well armed with rifle and smoothbore muskets with fixed bayonets,
and some used the percussion caps, a new technology which made them more
reliable, as well as advanced artillery using explosive shells. Thanks to the
efficiency of the Royal Navy, the British could move their troops around
remarkably quickly. Moreover, the British brought with them in 1840 a new
weapon: the steamboat. Where the placement of Canton upstream had enabled
the Qing forces to limit and trap Napier’s sailing vessels, steamships enabled
the British to move upriver with ease, both in Canton and later further north.24
The British were far more effective in collecting intelligence as well. While
both sides suffered from a lack of capable linguists able to understand the
language of the other side, the British were considerably better off. The small
corps of translators cultivated by the East India Company, private merchants,
and missionary groups provided reasonably accurate translations of Qing
documentation. Prior to Commissioner Lin’s arrival, there had been no similar
effort to collect information about the British. The Qing collection of informa-
tion remained within private networks, and Lin’s successors did not continue
his efforts in this regard.25
Finally, a key dynamic in the war was the personality of the Daoguang
emperor – a ruler who was conservative in his orientation. Whereas his grand-
father, Qianlong, could be flexible and pressed for information about Qing
22 23
The preceding narrative draws on Lovell 2015 and Fay 1975. Mao 2016, 27–42.
24
Headrick 1981, 43–54. 25 Chen 2017, 61–102; Mosca 2013.
threats, Daoguang tended to fall into passive continuation of existing prece-

dents. He would either lavishly praise or harshly punish his leading officials.
They in turn tended to feed him what he wanted to hear. Far too often, officials
either massaged the truth or straight out lied about what had happened to
protect themselves. As a result it took far too long for the Qing leadership to
understand the futility of continuing the war.26
A Failed Peace
The Opium War ended on August 29, 1842, with a more or less complete
capitulation to British demands. The Treaty of Nanking, signed by Sir Henry
Pottinger and the Qing appointees Qiying and Yilibu, ceded Hong Kong to
Great Britain, opened the five ports for residence and trade (Canton, Xiamen/
Amoy, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai), defined patterns of diplomatic address
and communication, and agreed that China would pay $21 million of indem-
nities to Britain for destroyed opium, reparations for the detention of Britons,
and to offset the costs to Britain necessitated by the war.
A second treaty, the Treaty of Bogue, signed on October 8, 1843, included
detailed regulations for trade, ended the Cohong monopoly on foreign trade,
and incorporated an acknowledgment of extraterritoriality for Britons. It also
included a most favored nation clause, so that any subsequent concessions to
other countries would apply to Britain.
Britain got, in short, everything that its merchants wanted, aside from formal
legalization of opium imports. But one of the lessons of the war for the Qing
empire was that any crackdown on opium imports was impossible. For the next
eighteen years trade in opium was formally illegal but generally accepted, with
the trade carried on in “hulks” anchored offshore. By 1856, opium imports were
more than double the level that they had reached in 1838, and they dwarfed all
other maritime imports in value. The opium monopoly constituted the second
biggest source of revenue for the British colonial government in India.27
But the peace created at the end of the first war was a tense one. The treaty
ports were duly opened, but responses varied dramatically by locale.
Shanghai – something of an afterthought at the time of the war – proved the
most accommodating to foreigners, and by 1850 was emerging as the new
center of foreign life on the China coast. In other ports, the foreigners were
greeted less enthusiastically. In Canton, which had been at the center of so
much of the earlier conflict, there was strong resistance from both local elites
and officials, and foreigners continued to be excluded from the walled city.
For the British government, there was a growing frustration that while the
war had produced major changes to the conduct of trade and the lives of
26 27
Mao 2016, 146–148. J. Y. Wong 1998, 399–406.
foreigners on the coast, it had not brought the political changes they desired.
The Qing government continued to assign the governor-general of Guangdong
and Guangxi to be its primary interlocutor with foreign governments, and the
officials appointed to that role showed little flexibility in dealing with British
diplomats.
While several Qing officials and intellectuals – such as Fujian governor Xu
Jiyu and the intellectual Wei Yuan – showed engagement with the problem
posed by the foreign presence, Daoguang never really faced the question of
why his forces had been so badly defeated. There was no serious inquiry into
the problems Qing forces faced, the gaps in technology and organization, or
even the problem of endemic misrepresentation of the truth by officials report-
ing to the throne during the war. Several prominent officials including Lin and
Qishan were punished for failing to defeat the British, but in the absence of
a strong imperial endorsement for discussion of the problems and the need for
change, little of substance happened.28
In 1850, Daoguang died. His successor, the nineteen-year-old Xianfeng
emperor, was immediately confronted by a major crisis as the Christian-
influenced Taiping rebellion exploded out of rural Guangdong and Guangxi,
spilled into the Yangtze valley, and seized control of Nanjing, which became
the center of their regime and which they called the heavenly capital. For more
than a decade the Taipings controlled large portions of central China and
threatened the very existence of the Qing dynasty. Qing regular troops proved
no more effective against these rebels than they had against the British. Other
rebellions varying in size also began to sprout across the empire.
Over time the Qing polity showed both resilience and ingenuity in dealing
with internal rebellions. Civil officials jumped into military roles recruiting,
training, and equipping new armies and imposing new taxes to pay the bills.
But there was no similar flexibility in dealing with the British and other
Western powers. In fact, Xianfeng rejected even the modestly accommodating
diplomacy of the late Daoguang years and encouraged a harder line. In 1853
when Sir John Bowring, the governor of Hong Kong and the British plenipo-
tentiary to the Qing empire, and US diplomat Robert McLane traveled to north
China to request a revision of the treaties, they were bluntly refused.
The Arrow Incident and the Renewal of Military Conflict

The Second Opium War, or the Arrow War as it is often described in English,
was a complex four-year conflict. It was primarily prosecuted by the British
government against the Qing empire, but France was an active ally of Great
Britain. Russia and the United States, while both noncombatants, were deeply
28
Mao 2016, 490–497.
interested parties, who took advantage of the war to renegotiate their own
treaties with the Qing empire. Like the earlier conflict, the British were con-
cerned about both expanded trade opportunities and transforming the diplo-
matic institutions. But whereas in the first war trade was the primary focus, now
the issues of diplomacy were the primary area of contention.
The war began with a minor incident manufactured by the acting British
consul in Canton, Harry Parkes. On October 8, 1856, Chinese naval forces
boarded what was said to be a British lorcha, Arrow, lying at anchor on the
river, suspecting that it was engaged in smuggling. Parkes claimed that Qing
officers “regardless of the remonstrances of her master, an Englishman, seized,
bound and carried off twelve of the Chinese crew, and hauled down the English
colours that were then flying.” Parkes insisted that this represented a grave
insult to Britain’s honor. Almost everything about Parkes’s claim was dubious:
the ship was Chinese owned but had been registered in Hong Kong under
a false British owner to avoid Chinese law. The Hong Kong registration had
expired prior to the incident, and the claim that there was a flag flying was
disputed.29
Regardless of the flimsiness of his case, the hotheaded Parkes spun this
into a major crisis. He rejected Governor-General Ye Mingchen’s clumsy
efforts to mollify him, ignored embarrassing evidence that the Arrow was
in fact involved in fencing goods seized by pirates, and asked Sir John
Bowring to request the British navy bombard Canton in retaliation.
Bowring, concealing the fact that the Arrow’s registration had expired,
convinced Rear Admiral Sir Michael Seymour to do so. On October 23,
even after Ye had returned all of the arrested crewmen to British custody,
Royal Navy ships bombarded the Barrier Forts 8 km downriver. Seymour
then opened fire on Canton, targeting Governor-General Ye’s residence,
causing considerable destruction in the city. Unsatisfied with the return of
the arrested sailors, Bowring now insisted that Ye open up Canton to
foreigners.
But Ye refused to concede, and a standoff followed. The British force of 300
or so marines, while well-armed, was too small to capture and control the
Guangdong capital. Bowring appealed to London for an expeditionary force to
teach the Chinese a lesson. Meanwhile, as 1856 grew to a close and into the
spring of 1857, there was enough popular resistance in Canton to keep the
British nervous.
Thanks to steamships it now took just two months for the news to reach
London. Lord Palmerston, now prime minister, and his government decided to
support the direction that Bowring was pointing: to a new war in China.
29
J. Y. Wong 1998, 43–142. The following paragraphs on the origins of the war draw on this
source.
The response of the political elite to Bowring’s efforts to make war with
China was not positive. The prominent minister of parliament Richard Cobden,
a friend of Bowring for decades, was appalled by what the Hong Kong gover-
nor was trying to do and authored a resolution that stated that the government
had not provided the necessary evidence to support military action. In the
debate that followed, Bowring’s actions were harshly criticized for going
well beyond the bounds of necessity. Palmerston responded by wrapping
himself in the flag: Ye Mingchen, he insisted was “one of the most savage
barbarians that ever disgraced a nation. He has been guilty of every crime
which can degrade and debase human nature.” Palmerston accused Cobden and
the antiwar group of asserting that “Everything that was English was wrong,
and everything that was hostile to England was right.”30 Nevertheless Cobden’s
motion passed.
Palmerston called a quick election, held in late March, believing that the
voting public would support his position. After a campaign of blatant jingoism,
Palmerston won. His plans for China proceeded.
The singular absurdity of the Arrow incident as a casus belli has made it
a focus of attention. But in the end, this flimsy incident wasn’t the cause of the
war, it was an excuse. The real issues that lead the British government to war
were familiar ones: a drive to expand trading opportunities for British mer-
chants and to transform the framework of diplomacy. The trade concessions
they wanted included legalizing opium, greater freedom to travel in China, and
standardizing taxes on imports and exports to China at a low level.
Diplomatically, the British wanted to break out of the system in which the
governor-general of Guangdong and Guanxi was their primary interlocutor,
and have at least some diplomatic access to the Court in Beijing.31
Sir John Bowring was the key figure in driving Britain to war. In 1855, he
scored his greatest diplomatic success in forcing King Mongkut of Siam to
accept the sort of treaty he hoped for in China.32 The Hong Kong governor was
now convinced that only military force could bring the changes that were
necessary: “the time has come to hold strong language and to support that
language by stronger demonstrations” he wrote to US politician Robert
McLane. With military force “a few months would open the Yang-tse-kiang,
locate us in Peking – make the whole of the coasts accessible.” He assigned his
protégé Harry Parkes to Canton a few months later.33
The Second Opium War

Following his success in the “Chinese election” of 1857, Palmerston proceeded
with his plans for an expeditionary force to China. He decided new leadership
30 31 32 33
Palmerston 1857. Morse 1910, 672–673. Horowitz 2004. Bowring 1855.
was needed, so he appointed James Bruce, the Eighth Earl of Elgin, to lead the
British effort. Bowring remained governor of Hong Kong until 1860 but was
stripped of his diplomatic responsibilities. France, which had joined with
Britain in the Crimean conflict, now decided to join the British, demanding
satisfaction for the death of a French Catholic missionary in Qing custody in
Guangxi province. The United States and Russia chose to stay out of the
military conflict but closely followed developments.34 The war that followed
was drawn out for reasons that need not detain us here. But a complex series of
negotiations lead to the signing of the Treaty of Tianjin in June 1858, with both
the United States and Russia joining in parallel treaties.
The new treaties increased the number of treaty ports open to trade and
allowed foreign ships to navigate the Yangtze river. Trade regulations quietly
set an import duty on opium, effectively legalizing it. Foreigners with
a passport from their consul could travel inland, but not reside or do business.
Catholic and Protestant missionary work was made legal, and a manipulation of
the French treaty by an interpreter led to foreign missionaries being allowed to
reside wherever they wanted. Finally, the British and French would be able to
send envoys to reside in Beijing.
This should have ended the war, but a year later, when ratifications were to be
exchanged, and British and French representatives were to proceed to Beijing,
the British envoy Frederick Bruce (Elgin’s younger brother) ignored the direc-
tions of Qing commanders and attempted to force his way up the Baihe (Bai
River). Qing forces opened fire, sinking four British gunboats, badly damaging
others, and forcing the British and French into an embarrassed retreat. With this
first Qing victory the war was reignited. But finally in the summer of 1860,
Elgin returned at the head of a large Anglo-French expeditionary force. In an
amphibious landing they attacked and seized the Dagu forts from the poorly
protected land side, and then captured Tianjin. The Anglo-French army
advanced to Beijing, defeating Qing forces in several battles along the way.
With the defenseless capital descending into chaos and looting, the Xianfeng
emperor fled to Rehe, leaving behind a Peace Commission of three officials, his
younger brother Yixin (Prince Gong), Guiliang, and Wenxiang.
The Peace Commission handled the situation skillfully, initiating negotia-
tions and quickly reaching an agreement while avoiding the occupation of the
walled city by foreign troops. The result was the Conventions of Beijing, which
affirmed the Treaties of Tianjin and added a large indemnity and other conces-
sions. But before it was signed, in an effort to punish Xianfeng, British and
French troops systematically looted and then burned the Old Summer Palace,
northwest of the walled city.
34
The following account draws on J. Y. Wong 1998 and Banno 1964.
While Xianfeng remained in Rehe until his death a year later, the Peace
Commission took on a leadership role that no Qing official had done in twenty
years of conflict with Britain. In a famous memorial, the three commissioners
called for a fundamental rethinking of Qing strategy. The peace commissioners
asserted that developing a peaceful relationship with the foreign powers and
focusing on suppressing rebellion made far more sense. They also insisted that
a new structure was necessary to manage relations with Western powers. A new
foreign ministry, known as the Zongli Yamen, was created in 1861 in Beijing,
in time to receive the new resident ministers who arrived to set up legations that
spring. With Prince Gong and the Manchu statesman Wenxiang in charge, the
Zongli Yamen transformed the Qing relationship with Britain and other
Western powers, beginning the great revival known as the Tongzhi restoration,
and the self-strengthening movement, the first stage of China’s move to
modernization.35
For a decade, a degree of cooperation prevailed. The Qing leadership
focused on reasserting domestic control and found the improved relations
with foreigners invaluable. A foreign officered maritime customs inspectorate
became a permanent part of the Qing administrative system in the early 1860s.
Under Inspector General Robert Hart (a former British consular official) it
served as a revenue generator for a state in desperate need of funds and as an
honest broker to resolve trade disputes; and provided information and technical
advice to the Qing government. Both modern weaponry and rising customs
revenues from foreign trade were invaluable in defeating the massive domestic
rebellions that afflicted the empire. The British were confident that their
interests lay in the revival of the dynasty and were generally satisfied with
the new diplomatic arrangements.36
If British goals in the Second Opium War were fairly transparent, the same
cannot be said for the Qing empire. Xianfeng did not want to make any
concessions until they were forced. Ye Mingchen, the man who was supposed
to deal with the British, seemed almost paralyzed, recognizing the futility of his
position, yet unable to offer any compromise – perhaps realizing that to do so
would get him in trouble with the throne. But by the time of the Tianjin
negotiations, it was apparent to officials with actual administrative responsi-
bility that there was no reasonable alternative to coming to a peace deal. For
those who were dealing with the Taiping and other rebellions – settling con-
flicts that could not be won – to focus on those that could be won must have
made sense.
But the Tianjin Treaty generated opposition. A group of officials – mostly in
Beijing at the Hanlin Academy, the Censorate, and the Board of Rites – pressed
the emperor on to continue resistance, believing that with correct leadership
35 36
Banno 1964, 202–218; M. C. Wright 1957. Smith et al. 1991.
and driven by the will of the people Qing forces could overcome superior
technology and defeat the British and French. Interestingly the concession that
most rankled opponents of the Tianjin Treaty was the resident minister clause,
allowing British and French governments to send diplomats to reside in
Beijing. While senior officials repeatedly insisted that this was a necessary
compromise, not terribly different from the presence of Jesuits in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries, or the Russian Ecclesiastical mission, which
served as a de facto diplomatic role, Xianfeng repeatedly tried to avoid it.
Critics of the resident minister worried that it would damage the dignity of the
Qing state and disrupt state ceremonies. Other objections were practical: that
the presence of legations would lead to the breakdown of the tribute system;
foreign representatives would attempt to spy on the Qing government; and
foreign representatives would inappropriately try to influence government
policies.37 In fact, the British did see representation in Beijing as a way to
influence the Qing and bring about political change. As US envoy William
Reed skeptically suggested this was an attempt to replicate the growing British
influence in the Ottoman empire, and a resident minister would facilitate
“invigoration of the central authority of this disorganized empire as England
thinks she has effected in Turkey.”38
Conclusion
The settlements that ended the Second Opium War – the Treaty of Tianjin and
the Conventions of Beijing – established the core of what became known as the
“treaty system” that structured China’s relations with foreign powers until
World War II. This included treaty ports in which foreigners could freely reside
and trade, and effectively govern themselves (the number grew steadily over
time); import and export tariffs fixed at a low level by treaty; extraterritoriality;
freedom to travel widely within China; and missionaries being allowed to
reside wherever they pleased. Britain had also obtained Hong Kong as a base
for both commercial and naval operations in East Asia.
But the conflicts were not simply about trade, they were also about systems
of diplomacy. Not only did the Tianjin Treaty provide for resident ministers, but
the British also inserted clauses about the language to be used in referring to
foreigners (yi was banned) and the ways in which representatives of the two
governments were to address each other. In practice, once the foreign diplomats
were lodged in Beijing in the spring of 1861, the Qing empire was integrated
into the Westphalian system of diplomacy. Within a few years, W. A. P. Martin,
a former US missionary employed by the Zongli Yamen, was translating works
on international law and diplomatic practice into Chinese for distribution to
37 38
Banno 1964, 18–26. Reed 1858.
officials around the country. Within a decade Chinese diplomats, including

some trained in European languages, were going abroad; and by the mid-1870s
there were resident Qing diplomats in Europe and the United States.
As Qing critics of the Treaty of Tianjin feared, over the next few decades the
tribute system faded out. Faithful tributaries were either swallowed up by
foreign empires (such as the French in Vietnam and the Japanese in the
Ryukyu Islands) or in the case of Korea substantive relations were redefined
in European-style treaties. The fuzzy suzerain relationships of the tribute
system had no place in the modern world of sovereign states claiming territorial
sovereignty.39
The treaty system that the Opium Wars created was multilateral. While
Britain had done virtually all of the fighting, the other powers quickly obtained
the same concessions (except of course for Hong Kong). The mix of free trade
and legal privilege suited others countries as well and created a broad interest in
maintaining the system to protect foreign merchants, missionaries, and the
financial institutions to which the Qing state, and its successor the Republic
of China, was indebted. In 1899 fearing that Britain’s commitment to free trade
was faltering, and exclusive concessions to other powers would shut out
American business, US Secretary of State John Hay pursued the diplomacy
of the open-door notes (at the suggestion of Alfred Hippisley, a Briton
employed in the Chinese customs) and made the “open door” for trade
a foundation of US–China policy. In the decade after Yuan Shikai’s demise in
1916, when the power of the Beijing government disintegrated and warlordism
prevailed, foreign powers enforced continued observance of the treaty system.
But there were economic, political, and psychological costs to all of this, and
the costs were borne by the Chinese. The treaties were unequal because they
were not reciprocal: Chinese had none of the privileges in Britain or France or
the United States that foreign nationals had in China. It would be decades – as
imported opium began to be replaced by domestic – before Britain would allow
China to launch its own antidrug campaigns and confront the social problem of
addiction. Thanks to extraterritoriality, foreigners lived among Chinese but
could do so with virtual legal impunity as foreign consular courts often showed
little interest in punishing crimes committed by their nationals against Chinese,
while crimes by Chinese against foreigners became fodder for diplomatic
disputes and demands for compensation. Chinese officials found their authority
delimited and their legitimacy undermined. While there probably was never
a sign that said “Dogs and Chinese Not Admitted” in the Shanghai public
garden, as the often repeated story suggests, the emotion behind the myth was
genuine: the treaty system made Chinese second-class citizens in their own
country.40
39 40
Horowitz 2004, 479–481. Bickers and Wasserstrom 1995.
In the early decades of the twenty-first century, what the Chinese Communist
Party has branded the “century of humiliation” following the Opium War has
become a staple in patriotic education. This narrative legitimizes the rule of the
Chinese Communist Party, which brought humiliation to an end and has made
China strong. In the eyes of Chinese statesmen, there are also lessons to be
learned. The sensitivity about sovereignty and a deep dislike of foreigners
interfering in what they consider to be China’s internal affairs is only the
most obvious. Not surprisingly, a view of this history also tends to generate
skepticism about the good intentions of a Western-led international system. As
China emerges as a global power and begins to reshape the international order,
the lessons of defeat in the Opium Wars will not be forgotten.41
41
Kaufman 2010; Lovell 2015, 340–359.
11 Matthew Perry in Japan, 1852–1854
Alexis Dudden
Matthew Perry’s July 8, 1853, arrival off the coast of Uraga just south of the
Japanese capital at Edo (today’s Tokyo) marked the United States’ first sig-
nificant use of “shock and awe” tactics in international relations. The squadron
of four ships – including the navy’s first steam-powered warship, USS
Mississippi, and the steam frigate USS Susquehanna – under Perry’s command
lay at anchor belching their black smoke and with a formidable array of
cannons aimed at the shore. Gunners stood at their stations, and Perry ordered
seventy-three blank shots fired to demonstrate the potential of the devastating
power at his command. This moment would have profound consequences for
Japanese and world history – it would ultimately impress on Japanese officials
the need to reorient their nation’s geography to modern advantage.
At the time of Perry’s arrival, for nearly two centuries Japanese leaders had
attempted to isolate Japanese from the rest of the world, using the country’s
island nature to keep the outside world at bay and Japanese at home. Some
international trade and diplomatic relations had occurred, but for all intents and
purposes the law was straightforward: Japanese were allowed to leave Japan for
whatever reasons they wished; return meant their execution. Perry’s was not the
first attempt to establish diplomatic and trading relations with “closed Japan,”
as Herman Melville famously described the country in Moby Dick, yet Perry
was determined like none before to succeed at all costs. As countless small
Japanese ships came out from shore to try to drive the American vessels away,
Perry hoisted the signal flag: “No communication with shore; allow none from
shore.” He had learned from Nicholas Biddle’s mistakes, whose failure in 1847
to prevent the Japanese from boarding his US Navy ship only compounded his
failure to convey the authority necessary to obtain communication with repre-
sentatives of Japan’s ruler, the Tokugawa shogun. When locals again similarly
tried to swarm Perry’s ships, American sailors used bayonets and pikes to drive
them off and tossed back lines hurled on the decks. The logbook records that
a few Japanese even tried to shinny up the anchor lines, yet they, too, were
driven back into the water.
As has been depicted in numerous plays, musicals, and movies, eventually
a small boat appeared carrying several men in uniform, one of whom declared
188
Matthew Perry in Japan, 1852–1854 189
in his only English: “I can speak Dutch.” Fortuitously for the future course of
that afternoon and world history, Matthew Perry’s entourage included a Dutch-
speaking interpreter. What followed was diplomatic dexterity on Perry’s part as
well as a series of bold decisions made by local Japanese authorities who were
abundantly aware of the differential in their shore guns and the guns aimed at
their town.
Yet, it was not only the guns and the “black ships” (as they have come to be
called) that would “open” Japan. Rather, decades of internal turmoil would find
their release with Matthew Perry’s arrival and the subsequent trade treaties
between Japan and foreign nations that at once allowed foreigners to live and
work in Japan and also enabled Japanese society to build itself into an industrial
power with a constitutionally grounded system of governance – the first in
Asia. The following pages examine this moment in detail because it remains
a historical event whose trajectory continues to impact world events.
The rest of the chapter then considers aspects of Japanese society’s response
to its forced engagement with the world in the wake of Perry’s “shock” to its
system – particularly in returning Japan to the sea and opening an era in which it
became a great maritime power. I argue that flexible US diplomacy succeeded
and dovetailed with internal Japanese forces. The results would swiftly trans-
form the country by the end of the nineteenth century into the only Asian nation
not to be colonized but to become a colonizer in its own right.
In short, this moment of “opening” would generate a highly complex reac-
tion within Japan: at once leaders would come to fashion a new nation accord-
ing to Westphalian norms to advance the nation internationally (beginning with
simple gestures such as standing and shaking hands with representatives of
foreign countries instead of bowing on the floor); simultaneously, they would
strengthen the nation within by defining a racially exclusive notion of ethnicity
that while not unique to Japan in its methods would ultimately define Japanese
as superior to those in areas it would colonize; and, finally, leaders would
understand from Perry’s arrival the critical component of naval capability in
the mix.
July 8, 1853, 17:00, Uraga. President Fillmore’s Letter

to the Emperor of Japan
Much has been written about the moment of contact between Matthew Perry
and Japanese officials. What is important to think about is both what the United
States hoped to accomplish and how it achieved those goals. Whether true or
not, Perry repeatedly wrote and claimed to others that he had no desire to use
force, and both Secretary of State Edward Everett and President Millard
Fillmore ordered: “Make no use of force except in the last resort if attacked.”
Several failed attempts to open diplomatic relations with Japan and the United
190 Alexis Dudden
States had taken place in the 1830s and 1840s, but in the wake of the First
Opium War in China (1839–1842; see Chapter 10) with Britain gaining sub-
stantially more concessions there than other nations, the US government
decided not to fall further behind in Asia and this time to act with far greater
purpose.
Since Marco Polo’s travels in the fourteenth century, “closed Japan” had
long captured the imagination of entrepreneurs and adventurers with lovely if
false tales of streets lined with gold and so on. Now, American commercial
interests – especially New England’s powerful whaling lobby – prevailed on
the US Congress to fund the Perry expedition to Japan in what would be the
United States’ most expensive overseas mission yet taken. At the same time,
foreign knowledge of Japan at the time was far less than Japanese knowledge of
the world: the Americans did not know, among other things, that the shogun –
not the emperor – actually governed the country; whereas the Japanese under-
stood that China was falling to British conquest, which appeared very similar to
American overtures, and that Japan’s weapons were far inferior to foreign ones.
As whaling ships increased in the seas around Japan, stories of American
seamen stranded on Japan’s shores and taken hostage – all released – would
routinely make newspaper headlines and fuel notions of a “heathen” and
“godless” land (on several occasions, stranded Americans were forced to
walk on paintings of Jesus Christ or the Virgin Mary before their release to
Dutch officials in the southern port of Nagasaki). A key feature of President
Fillmore’s letter that Perry was charged with delivering included:
Many of our ships pass every year from California to China; and great members of our
people pursue the whale fishery near the shores of Japan. It sometimes happens that one
of our ships is wrecked on your Imperial Majesty’s shores. In all such cases we ask and
expect, that our unfortunate people should be treated with kindness, and that their
property should be protected, till we can send a vessel and bring them away. We are
very much in earnest about this.
Whaling firms would also find common interest with other businesses in the US
president’s request for permission to obtain coal and other provisions such as
fresh water and food at designated Japanese ports to ease trans-Pacific cross-
ings – all of which, as prominent US politicians such as William Seward and
Daniel Webster would understand it, were a logical extension of the United
States’ Manifest Destiny, moving from within today’s forty-eight contiguous
states to the purchase of Alaska, involvement in the Hawaiian Islands, expan-
sion into Central and Latin America, and across the Pacific Ocean to the
Hawaiian Islands, Guam, China, Japan, and the Philippines.
And there was Matthew Perry himself, hero of the Mexican–American War
(1846–1848), and so personally determined to achieve the privilege of “open-
ing” Japan that he fired William Aulick from his command even though Aulick
was already in Guangzhou, China, preparing the ships for sail. To maximize his
chances of success, Perry made a trial run en route to mainland Japan in the
Ryukyu Kingdom (commonly called Okinawa). This moment proved more
violent than his later endeavors near the capital at Edo, including among other
indiscretions at the royal palace in Shuri the first recorded instances of
American servicemen raping Okinawan women. From the Ryukyu visit,
though, Perry learned how to convey the level of standing and power that he
wanted to display. On the evening of July 8, 1853, when a local official from
Uraga and his Dutch-speaking interpreter boarded the Susquehanna to begin
negotiations with Perry, Perry hid himself in his own cabin, speaking from
behind closed doors to his interpreter in order to convey information and show
his prestige. The gambit worked. Opposite from Nicholas Biddle’s disastrous
moment in 1847 of brushing off a minor Japanese official who body slammed
him aboard his own ship, Perry became known instantly among the Japanese as
the “Lord of the Forbidden Interior.”
The “Lord of the Forbidden Interior” was clear: despite countless entrea-
ties from the Japanese official, Perry would not sail south to Nagasaki to be
received through the Dutch outpost there, nor would he tolerate the
Japanese boats that still surrounded his ship. The local official managed
to disperse the little boats, yet he could not provide Perry with information
about how or whether the letter from the US president would be received.
Guards stood watch all night on the ships, and along the shore Japanese
manned their few battle stations, keeping beacon fires lit lest the Americans
try to invade.
At dawn the following day, squads of Japanese soldiers marched up and
down the beach, and two larger boats rowed out to Perry’s ship, bearing a man
who claimed to be the regional governor. In truth, Kayama Eizaemon was just
the local police chief, yet Perry was also not the highest ranking US naval
officer as he had claimed to the Japanese. Creative deception on both sides
worked, however, because the Americans believed they should display
President Fillmore’s gold-sealed vellum-printed letter housed in a stunning
rosewood box to this official. The Americans showed the letter and insisted it
be delivered on land. The Japanese said fine, please sail to Nagasaki, and from
there the letter would be sent to the emperor (never mind that the emperor was
not running Japan at the time). The “Lord of the Forbidden Interior” refused.
The Japanese said it would take four days to go to Edo and back. Perry gave
them three. While this conversation took place, Perry ordered four surveying
boats – fully armed – to cruise the bay, take soundings, and map it. The
Americans had, after all, spent 30,000 dollars (roughly one million dollars
today) to purchase a German map of Japan from the Dutch, which despite
depicting the country’s land features extremely well did not help much with
navigation.
192 Alexis Dudden
After two days, Perry sent the Mississippi closer to shore to press his case.
The police chief disguised as a governor rowed out to ask why, and Perry
responded that he needed a larger anchorage in case he had to summon more
ships (never mind that nearly the entire Far East Squadron was with Perry at the
time). He also transferred a letter and white flag saying that if the use of force
were necessary the Americans would destroy Japan, and here was the flag for
Japan’s surrender. The following day – Day Three – Kayama returned to
Perry’s ship with the news that a shogunal official would receive the gilded
letter from President Fillmore on land and then take it to Nagasaki, at which
point it would be sent somehow to the emperor. Perry did not budge and sent the
famous written response, which his interpreter explained: “He has a letter from
the President of the United States to deliver to the Emperor of Japan, or to his
secretary of foreign affairs, and he will deliver the original to none other. If this
friendly letter of the President to the Emperor is not received and duly replied
to, he will consider his country insulted, and he will not hold himself accoun-
table for the consequences.”
Given how little the American delegation actually knew about how Japanese
politics worked – beginning with the fact that the shogun ran the country not the
emperor – the local official realized that playing the emperor game as they were
doing with Perry was not in his country’s interests, and by that afternoon he
returned to Perry’s ship with the news that a suitably credentialed government
official would receive the letter on land on July 14. Thus began Japan’s formal
engagement with the modern world.
After nearly a year at sea with this purpose at hand, Wells Williams, chief
interpreter for the mission, recorded in his diary the mood among the American
sailors: “The squadron was full of bustle, getting arms burnished, boats ready,
steam up, men dressed and making all the preparations necessary to go ashore
and be prepared for any alternative.” The Japanese asked Perry to move his
ships a little to the southwest to the beach at Kurihama (present day Yokosuka
and not coincidentally home port of the US Seventh Fleet). Again, the two
steamships, roaring with their black smoke, put the full power of their cannons
on display to the shore, and soon the Americans would be able to see what had
caused tremendous noise throughout the night: overnight Japanese carpenters
had built a special reception hall flanked by two smaller prefabricated buildings
(the wooden beams still had the construction plans visible on them).
Moreover – and in one of the more enduring scenes from this moment –
about 5,000 Japanese soldiers, with many on horseback and carrying sixteenth-
century guns and contemporary swords, positioned themselves behind nearly
a mile of blue and white horizontally striped curtains strung up along the
shoreline. In short, both sides were prepared for multiple contingencies.
Flanked by 250 armed marines, Perry rowed to shore in full dress despite the
heat of the midsummer morning, and, though doubtful, some have recorded
that in addition to pistols Perry also armed himself with knives in his boots and
hat. Noticeably, this moment of “shock and awe” seems less to do with
potential violence – although the Americans were fully prepared to annihilate
this Japanese town and its people – and more to do with the vanity of the lead
negotiators on both sides.
As will be discussed later, domestic turmoil in Japan was at such a tipping
point that Perry’s arrival would simply be the catalyst for changes already in the
making within Japan. For several decades, the Japanese government in Edo had
been in debate over how best to deal with the increasing number of foreigners
showing up along the country’s shores, and Perry, by pure historical chance,
became the first person successfully to press the issue from without (and not
a Russian or British naval captain, for example). Perry wanted this achievement
to crown his career and also to promote his own son’s interests (Oliver Hazard
Perry, though technically not credentialed nor of age for certain positions, was
along for the ride and soon would be named to high diplomatic posts in China).
For their parts, two Japanese officials sat in utter silence on elegant red carpets
throughout the entire ceremony – neither well-credentialed nor in any way
disposed to open Japan to the “hairy barbarians” as foreigners were known.
After the American naval band finished “Hail, Columbia,” Toda Ujiyoshi,
a fifty-year-old samurai in direct service of the shogun (hatamoto/bannerman),
and sixty-five-year-old Ido Hiromichi allowed President Fillmore’s letter to be
placed in a splendid red and gilt lacquer box placed in the center of the room.
While in Edo, shogunal advisors had decided that receiving the US presi-
dent’s letter would not infringe on Japanese sovereignty, yet they had little plan
for what would come next. Through interpreters, Ido conveyed the govern-
ment’s position (which was essentially what the Tokugawa government had
been practicing with other foreigners – especially the Russians – since roughly
the turn of the nineteenth century): “As the letter has been received, you can
depart.” Perry did not like this. He said he would return the following spring.
The officials wanted to know whether he would bring his ships. He said he
would bring many more ships, and after he returned to the Susquehanna
that day, he ordered the squadron to sail north – not south toward China as he
had stated at the end of the ceremony, but toward Edo itself. Again, the police
chief disguised as a governor rowed out and came aboard the departing
Susquehanna (clearly Perry had conveyed the precise level of determination
so at least the local officials realized he was not bluffing). Perry impressed upon
Kayama that when he returned the following year his larger fleet would need
better anchorage, and he intended to survey Edo Bay for that purpose (in 1845
American whaling captain Mercator Cooper had actually done this when he
repatriated fifteen stranded Japanese sailors, but the Japanese government did
not know this). Naming his spot in Edo Bay “American Anchorage,” Perry’s
“black ships” finally departed Japan for China on July 17, 1853, and Wells
194 Alexis Dudden
Williams observed: “(This) day to be noted in the history of Japan, one on

which the key was put into the lock and a beginning made to do away with the
long seclusion of this nation, for I incline to think that the reception of such
a letter in such a public manner involves its consideration if not its acceptance.”
Japan in Transformation: Tokugawa in Decline

The significance of this moment in Asia’s international history lies in the fact
that the decisions Japanese leaders made about the course of their country in the
aftermath of Perry’s arrival would cause radical changes to Japanese society
that made Japan the only Asian nation not to be colonized by other powers but
to become a colonizing nation itself. This is not a moral judgment. It is a fact,
and the choices Japanese leaders made then remain elemental to the modern
Japanese state.
Countless studies in Japanese and English have mulled the question: what
made Japan so different from other Asian countries? Some of these have
racialized overtones: how did “they” do it when the “rest” did not? To avoid
this line of thinking, it is interesting to note that the most consistent point of
agreement among more than a century’s worth of analysis – especially studies
that interrogate and compare feudal systems and their collapse around the
world – is that there was nothing particularly unique to the Japanese aristoc-
racy’s repression of its peasantry through the mid-nineteenth century nor were
its autocratic forms unusual. Different from contemporaneous, early modern
aristocracies, however, and special to Japan was that this system – especially
the ruling Tokugawa family – lasted too long. Put simply, the Tokugawas and
ruling clans far outlasted their European counterparts. Their claim to rule had
long failed to be economically sustainable. There is no single reason why this
happened, yet it is clear that the Tokugawa shoguns took advantage of Japan’s
geography to block trade and intercourse with the world in ways that suited
their interests alone and in ways that European monarchs would not.
By the early nineteenth century, politically astute and interested samurai
throughout the country – especially younger ones – voiced discontent with the
Tokugawa system. This was a system of political, social, and economic control
known as “The Great Peace Under Heaven” that was established in 1603,
following several large-scale battles that would end centuries of interclan
warfare with the victorious Tokugawa Ieyasu on top as shogun. Brilliantly,
Ieyasu created a rigid hierarchy of families and professions all under a Neo-
Confucian world order that circularly defined Tokugawa rule as benevolent and
virtuous because it was benevolent and virtuous. Lowest in this order was the
merchant class, which, in this definition, could not be virtuous because it
handled money (by converting into cash the rice allowance annually granted
to leading families and their retainers).
Three generations into the system, however, by the 1630s, the shogun and his
advisers went further: they determined that external knowledge and influences
could be detrimental to their survival and essentially shut off the country from
international trade. Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Dutch merchants could
exchange with Japanese merchants in the south at Nagasaki but far removed
from the shogun’s palace in Edo. As a result, the domestic economy became
dominated by the merchants to the extent that within a century of the founda-
tion of the system, merchants – at the bottom in the social hierarchy – were
beginning to purchase aristocratic titles from samurai families or marrying into
them. In short those defined as lacking “virtue” increasingly bought their way
into it. Alternatively, some merchants and their advisors/scholars in Osaka in
particular determined to define themselves as “virtuous” and began to comment
on shogunal rule (sometimes at the cost of the scholars’ lives). (Notably, Osaka
saw the appearance of the world’s first futures market and was a city on
a greater scale than Paris by 1800 in terms of population and mercantile
activity.)
In short, on the one hand, for the most part, the Tokugawa shoguns displayed
considerable acumen for controlling their population to the extent that they
ensured their own rule until 1868. Yet, on the other hand, their near paranoiac
determination to refuse to engage with the outside world sealed their own fate.
Knowledge of the foreign world would creep in through the window in
Nagasaki, and shoguns and their key officials had rudimentary understandings
of European and American life by the time Matthew Perry arrived – far more
than Americans, for example, had of Japanese. Meanwhile, the merchants
undergirding all aspects of life within understood profit and capital accumula-
tion as well as Europe’s Father of Capitalism Adam Smith, if not better.
Tokugawa-era Japanese merchants did not see the need to include an “invisible
hand” to explain how one made a profit. Yet, in the mix, the Tokugawa family
and its supporters were essentially at the behest of the families with deep
connections to the enriched merchant families (who themselves benefited
greatly from the extreme form of protectionism that their closed country
afforded their products).
Sometimes protest of Tokugawa rigidities took the form of public display of
maps of the country to show inherent points of weakness should foreigners
invade (including the map which formed the basis for the German appropria-
tion of it and Matthew Perry’s subsequent purchase through Dutch offices; its
author was placed under house arrest). Other forms were manifestos explaining
that the ruling classes were human, too – as in not divine kings – or that the
ruling classes needed to prepare the country for the outside world lest it lay
itself prone to indefensible attack from without. Disagreement with the
Tokugawa mandate remained punishable by death, yet articulate and increas-
ingly published critique dovetailed with long-standing and expanding peasant
196 Alexis Dudden
rice riots and general unrest. Even before the official US missions to Japan
commenced, the Tokugawa government addressed growing malaise with what
are known as the “Tempo Reforms” (1841–1843), which only added further
restrictions on individual movement within the country and also on the ability
to organize into political groups. Shogunal authorities reinforced police control
and issued lengthy lists of prohibitions against purchasing certain commodities
all with the goal of shoring up their rule while denying the reality of a world
changing around Japan.
Most historians consider these few years – just a decade before Perry’s
arrival – as the end of the Tokugawa grip on power precisely because the
measures decreed were so excessive that they almost guaranteed the system’s
doom. The effect on Japanese society, broadly speaking, was not only to
generate further antipathy among the peasants (who had always suffered
under the shogun’s excessive tax demands) but also to propel angry and
aware samurai to begin to organize themselves for action – regardless of the
costs – all before Matthew Perry rode ashore with his demands. Thus, in the
mid-nineteenth century, although Japanese leaders would find themselves late
arrivals on the world stage vis-à-vis the historical transition from a feudal state
into a modern nation – late compared to the French and Americans, for
example, but not to the Russians or the Chinese – conditions existed in Japan
that made leaders emerging from Matthew Perry’s “shock” to the country eager
for change and equally eager to avoid being conquered by foreigners as they
were aware was happening in neighboring China.
The “Opening” Unfolds

In the wake of Matthew Perry’s return landing on March 8, 1854 – as promised
the summer before and this time with three steamships and a shore party
doubled in size to nearly 500 armed US sailors and soldiers – important choices
confronted Japanese officials. Although the samurai still ruling the country had
not yet begun consciously to study how to build a nation, that is precisely what
some began to do. Notably, groups of young samurai focused on the key
features necessary for building a modern form of government: industry, mili-
tary, and education. And, in the decades following Matthew Perry’s “shock and
awe,” Japanese leaders transformed their country in ways that would blend
together these critical elements to found the first nation in Asia. Eventually,
they would call the entity “Great Japan,” to mirror “Great Britain,” all of which
came about through great social upheaval.
When Perry returned to Japan in 1854, he was again prepared for battle, yet
his charge was now for trade. The gifts he brought with him were an additional
if not more powerful means to impress his hosts. US manufacturers had
donated elaborate presents, famously including the latest models of Colt
pistols, rifles, and ammunition, a complete telegraph, and the most popular
object of all: a quarter-size steam train from Norris & Brothers in Philadelphia
(an engine, one car, the coal tender, and nearly 120 m of track). Although the
Americans did not know it, several of these objects would dovetail with
Japanese policy planning already underway: in 1850, the Saga clan in southern
Japan began to build the country’s first furnace able to make cannons (this clan
opposed the shogun, and they were profoundly aware by geographical proxi-
mity to China of the need to modernize their defenses despite the shogunal
ban). In the wake of Perry’s first arrival, similar furnaces began to spring up in
regions north of Edo. Also in southern Japan, regional lords ordered the
construction of shipyards that could mount cannons on ships (shipbuilding
was not new to Japan; the Tokugawa government’s stringent laws first
destroyed the country’s oceanworthy ships in the seventeenth century and
continued to proscribe ship size until its collapse in 1868; the Choshu lord in
the south was among the most prominent to begin to disobey). Perceived
military need spurred these early efforts to industrialize. It was not only those
opposed to the shogun who recognized the need for technological advancement
coincident with Matthew Perry’s arrival: in 1855 the Tokugawa government
itself began building an iron foundry, and shortly thereafter it built a steamboat,
and with French assistance (since other powerful nations rushed in on the heels
of the Americans) established the Yokosuka Iron Foundry and Dockyards in
1865.
The 1868 overthrow of the Tokugawa system and foundation of the Meiji era
(1868–1912) was a top-down revolution, literally a “reweaving” of Japanese
society from within that abolished all Tokugawa-era hierarchies and restored
the emperor to the position of ruling the country. In the first several years of
governance, the emperor and his advisors would radically transform the coun-
try, including among other things renaming Edo to Tokyo (“Eastern Capital,”
ensuring “Kyoto” would henceforth be history), and renaming the country by
abolishing “The Great Peace Under Heaven” and aristocratic family control of
the country’s land and self-consciously emulate the greatest power of the day
(Great Britain) by becoming “The Empire of Great Japan.” Meiji leaders,
moreover, negated the aristocracy/military equivalency (what the samurai
had been) by creating in 1873 a modern conscript army and navy. They
established a central bank, a postal system, and, most famously, the railroad.
Of perhaps greatest importance, Meiji leaders centralized social, political, and
economic control around the emperor, defining him in Japan’s 1889 constitu-
tion as an “inviolable” supreme leader to whom subjects – not citizens – owed
absolute loyalty (a profoundly Confucian element in a modern constitution that
revealed its structural incompatibility during the 1930s and 1940s).
In what historians call the bakumatsu (the end of shogunal rule), both the
Tokugawa regime in its death throes and the emerging Meiji government would
198 Alexis Dudden
commence the industrialization of Japan through strategic, heavy industry – the

exact opposite path of European capital accumulation, which began with light
industry, especially textiles. The social ramifications of this decision could not
have been starker, and it is significant historically that the processes that would
bring about these changes happened even before samurai opposing the shogun
overthrew the government. In short, nothing is inevitable until it happens.
Perry’s return visit resulted in the 1854 Treaty of Kanagawa (named for the
area near the mouth of Edo Bay in which he moored) and was Japan’s first
diplomatic endeavor to open the country in limited ways to trading with
countries other than China, Korea, and Holland; America was primary, yet
Britain, France, and Russia were soon to follow because most appealing to all
was the understanding that stranded sailors could be rescued from Japanese
shores and that certain fixed points of entry would offer coal and provisions to
ships. Championed as a hero upon his return to the United States in
January 1855, the historical significance for Japanese of Matthew Perry’s
accomplishment would be realized in the decades to come.
The Treaty of Kanagawa stipulated that a US consul would reside on
Japanese soil, and President Franklin Pierce appointed New York businessman
and ship owner, Townsend Harris, the first diplomat to the post. Harris faced an
entirely different reception from Perry because his was demonstrably
a peaceful mission – the opposite of “shock and awe.” Taking up residence in
a dilapidated Buddhist temple about 160 km south of the capital in the town of
Shimoda, numerous conditions on both sides worked against Harris. On top of
being blatantly marginalized by those in power in Edo (and think here about the
possibility of an American representative living in Pyongyang), soon after his
arrival Harris rather unwittingly ordered the slaughter of cattle on temple
grounds to the horror of locals. That said, the locals had already determined
to dislike Harris even before his unthinking action, and together with officials
of all ranks the Japanese ignored all of Harris’s requests for meetings or
assistance. Meanwhile, Washington became preoccupied with domestic mat-
ters such as the collapse of the Whig Party and southern state discontent. In the
meantime, a series of wildly violent typhoons ransacked the area in which
Harris lived, convincing many that whatever benefits the Perry “moment”
might have had for Japan at the time, the gods were now displeased with the
changes afoot.
Finally, well over a year after his arrival in Japan, the shogun granted
Townsend Harris an audience in Edo, not a little ironically on December 7,
1857 (Pearl Harbor Day, 1941). Harris stood throughout the meeting rather than
kneeling and bowing on the floor, at once surprising the shogun and succeeding
in his own form of diplomatic “shock and awe” (no weapons involved).
Realizing he would make little if any progress from his post in distant
Shimoda, Harris remained in Edo for over half a year, among other things
explaining to the shogun’s advisers how to levy import and export taxes at ports
where US vessels would call. Also, he worked with them to produce the first in
a series of official trade agreements between a newly modernizing Japan and
distant, industrialized lands. On July 29, 1858, the Treaty of Amity and
Commerce was signed on board the sidewheel steamer USS Powhatan. Even
more than the document Perry secured, Harris’s treaty would forever change
Japan: diplomats would be exchanged between the countries; foreigners could
live in the treaty ports and had the right to lease land and build residential and
commercial structures in designated areas; also, foreigners would not be sub-
ject to Japanese laws, defining them via prevailing colonial systems of extra-
territoriality as inferior to the laws of the outside world.
Japan Responds: The Maritime Dimension

For Japanese officials, the challenges were enormous. Looked at historically,
the largest issue involved transforming Japan into a place that would shed the
obvious “unequal” measures inherent to these conditions, primarily the belief
that Japan was not as civilized as its treaty partners were. Practically speaking,
however, the largest hurdle was immediate: on ratifying the treaty in
March 1859, the shogun’s advisers committed Japan to sending a delegation
to the United States, a trans-Pacific voyage not undertaken by Japanese sailors
since Hasekura Tsunenaga’s mission to Mexico in 1613. Japanese officials
understood the high stakes. Failure to make this voyage would reveal weakness
and thus lay bare the country to foreign attack.
This particular mission – but also the wider effect of the opening to the
United States – very quickly put a premium on Japan identifying and develop-
ing its naval capabilities (something that China, by way of comparison, did not
begin until too late). All of this brings us to the importance in the mix of
someone who might not have been important at all if the Tokugawa shoguns
had been less determined to try to block the foreign world from their island
country. In particular, it was illegal for Japanese who left the country to return,
which made a young ship’s hand far more critical to the moment than he might
have been by any predictive measure. To say that all Japanese know about John
Manjiro (as Nakahama Manjiro would become known) is an overstatement.
That said, ever since public schooling began in Japan over 100 years ago
Manjiro has been a national hero in the curriculum: Johnny Tremain,
Abraham Lincoln, and Neil Armstrong all rolled into one (save between
1941 and 1945 when Japanese children would be forbidden to learn anything
in their textbooks about anything good that had ever taken place between Japan
and the United States). Manjiro’s mastery of the English language is the stuff of
legend as are his cinematic exploits, including being the first Japanese person to
reach the California gold rush (1849), as well as being the first commoner to
200 Alexis Dudden
return to Japan from abroad and be granted samurai rank because his knowl-
edge proved of such use to the country.
Less integrated into the great narrative, however, is the significance of
Manjiro’s understanding of Japan’s maritime nature and particularly what
changes the country’s leaders needed to make to maximize its potential. In
1841, at age fourteen Manjiro found himself and four others trapped in their
tiny fishing boat during a storm off Shikoku Island in central Japan and dragged
far to the southeast onto Torishima (a tiny island due south of Tokyo).
Fortunately for Manjiro, six months later William Whitfield sailed his whaling
ship, the John Howland, from New Bedford, Massachusetts, to hunt the Japan
grounds; en route he discovered Manjiro and the others. Four of the five
Japanese who survived the ordeal stayed on in Hawaii when Whitfield stopped
there for provisions, but John Manjiro returned to Massachusetts with the
captain and mastered English. In 1851, he finally made it back to Japan,
where his skills proved invaluable first to the shogun and then subsequently
to officials in the Meiji government during their ongoing treaty negotiations
with foreigners such as Perry and Harris among other things. Manjiro’s father
had died when he was nine, and, although he wanted to return to Japan to his
mother after Whitfield rescued him, he knew that the laws forbidding his return
might mean his execution (when he eventually made it home he saw the “lost at
sea” marker his mother had placed in the local cemetery; today, there is a large
and expensive family tomb in Tokyo).
For all his fame and legend, however, Manjiro’s endeavors to engage Japan
with modern navigational learning are not so well remembered, nor is the key,
related role that his efforts played in practical and intellectual ways in helping
launch Japan’s first navy, critical in the years following Matthew Perry’s
arrival. This is at once surprising and not. To begin, even though Manjiro
would ultimately achieve samurai rank, he was born a commoner. In a word, it
would have been more than difficult at the time to credit such military and
intellectual prowess to someone so lowborn (in the thinking of the day).
Moreover, the mathematics, astronomy, and skills involved in the knowledge
that Manjiro introduced are difficult and not nearly as swashbucklingly roman-
tic as other parts of his story. That said, without the navigational techniques that
Manjiro made legible to the handful of samurai selected as Japan’s early naval
cadets, state planners would have been even more impeded in creating and
building their forces as well as modernizing Japan’s eventual fleet, all of which
proved critical to the creation of the modern nation.
Looked at differently – and keeping Japan’s island nature at the center of
things – the protagonists of Japan’s transformation in 1868 (the year the new
Meiji government was launched) were as successful as they were in no small
part because they relied on their country’s maritime nature as an overarching
guide: Japanese people would again go out into the world to engage with it and
its ideas and return to Japan with what they learned to debate for use at home.
The new nation would eventually have ships of its own to take them abroad as
well as a navy to guard its shores, and intensely practical reasons involving
decisions that Japanese leaders made shaped the nation’s course: Japanese
traveled overseas again aided significantly by the modern navigational techni-
ques that John Manjiro brought home with him and which the government put
to use (even though it was still classified as “barbarian knowledge”).
In Fairhaven, Massachusetts, Manjiro attended several schools, eventually
settling at Bartlett Academy where he studied the most advanced navigational
theories of the day. Important for their use in Japan, Manjiro’s studies
included geometry, trigonometry, geography, astronomy, all of which would
mesh with what Tokugawa officials in Nagasaki were learning from the Dutch
traders there. Thus, such subjects would find informed reception. The naviga-
tional techniques that Manjiro mastered in Fairhaven combined all of these
skills in ways that were at once cutting edge and intensely useful and even
surpassed what the Dutch offered. However, he carried these to Japan on the
eve of revolution and just as the American treaties came into effect. Among his
studies was Nathaniel Bowditch’s The New American Practical Navigator:
Being an Epitome of Navigation, which is commonly referred to as “the sailor’s
bible.” The book first appeared in 1802 and has been in print ever since. It
remains onboard US Navy ships and countless others, even with the develop-
ment of GPS techniques. It instructed all sorts of necessary things that young
sailors hoping to make their fortunes aboard a New England whaling ship
needed to know: how to measure tonnage and casks of whale oil; how to make
surveys, read tides and currents; and how to use a sextant. Students often began
to tackle this book in earnest at around age fifteen, and among its hundreds of
pages of geometrical and algebraic equations, young navigators learned also
how to find longitude “by a meridian altitude of the moon” and “by the altitude
of the pole star,” as well as how “to find the time at sea by a planet’s altitude.”
Most studies of modern Japan emphasize the significance of political thin-
kers such as Locke, Mill, and Rousseau, whose ideas would transform the
country into a modern nation; they also stress the importance of modern
military strategists such as Clausewitz and Lafayette in the mix. The intensely
utilitarian nature of Nathaniel Bowditch’s work, however – as well as John
Manjiro’s complete translation – likely made it appear less of a branded set of
ideas and more like a dictionary, as if Japanese naturally boarded ships in the
1860s and resumed sailing the high seas. Things could not have been more
different, however, especially since the Tokugawa regime had so diligently
prevented Japanese from heading out on large ships into the seas that sur-
rounded them for so long. Thus, although cartography, astronomy, and geo-
metry had already gained traction in Japanese thought through scholars
studying with Dutch traders, important fundamentals such as how to combine
202 Alexis Dudden
all of these things together and use them in order to get safely across the Pacific
Ocean, for example, remained at bay.
Once employed in the shogun’s service, Manjiro received a commission to
translate the Bowditch in its entirety into Japanese (at his own suggestion), an
act which coupled with his English interpretation skills made him invaluable to
the state (and something unthinkable in Manjiro’s world at the time of his birth
as a poor fisherman’s son). More broadly, Manjiro’s translation of the Bowditch
would prove nothing short of key to strengthening Japan against the maritime
powers threatening it from without, and the text’s inclusion in the curriculum of
Japan’s first naval academies was instrumental – initially in Nagasaki (1855–
1859); then at the Tsukiji Naval Academy in Tokyo – yet it would take time for
students there such as the future admiral and founding member of the Imperial
Navy Enomoto Takeaki to make its fundamentals their own. In the meantime,
Manjiro’s abilities manifested themselves critically at various turns, especially
so in 1860 when he facilitated Japan’s ability to make good on the country’s
obligation to return a visit to the United States to ratify the treaty that Townsend
Harris had accomplished. After all, that 1858 agreement stipulated that
Japanese delegates would go to the United States for a signing there, meaning
that they would have to cross the Pacific, and, as mentioned, failure to do so
would reveal potentially devastating strategic weaknesses to the outside world.
Looked at broadly, beginning with the United States, the international
treaties that the Tokugawa government agreed to in the 1850s established the
presence of permanent foreigner settlements. These newcomers challenged
long-standing social norms, while the gunships that enforced their privileges
from offshore at once undermined the Tokugawa shogun’s hold on rule by
urging competing factions to align with one group of foreigners against
another – or against them altogether – and by making clear to all concerned
with the future that what political scientists call “power projection” meant that
Japan would need similar warships to secure its integrity, lest it collapse into
disarray (as was happening in China).
The best example of this was the Iwakura Mission (1871–1873), which
remains the best government-sponsored study abroad trip ever and one that
would have profound practical implications for the future course of Japan. In its
final years, the Tokugawa regime had dispatched several missions to the United
States and Europe, yet they paled in scope and effect to the Iwakura grand tour.
Over 100 Japanese traveled for over two years on an itinerary that reads like an
amplified version of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days (which not
by complete chance was published in 1873): the United States, Great Britain,
France, Belgium, Holland, Russia, Germany, Prussia, Denmark, Sweden,
Bavaria, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Egypt, what is now Yemen, Sri Lanka
(then Ceylon), Singapore, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and China, before heading
home. Government leaders, journalists, scholars, students, and industrialists
together toured these places to consider ideas and objects that would be useful
in building a new Japan – all at government expense. Many already were
famous, such as Ito Hirobumi (1841–1909), who was so integral to creating
the Japanese nation that for decades history books referred to him as the
“George Washington of Japan.” Tsuda Umeko (1864–1929) was only six
years old when she departed Japan on the mission, and she remained in the
United States until she was eighteen and returned to Japan for several years
before beginning Bryn Mawr College. She based that experience and model on
her creation of the first college for women in Japan (which bears her name
today) in addition to being a tireless advocate of girls’ and women’s education
and equality in society.
In the mix, Japan’s first modern arms race was on, and essential to any of the
study abroad missions was the acquisition of ships. Immediately following
Matthew Perry’s first visit in 1853 the shogun ordered two oceangoing ships for
Japanese use for the first time in nearly 250 years. Within a few years the Kanko
Maru and the Kanrin Maru arrived, both secured from Holland via contacts in
Nagasaki. The 1860 voyage of the Kanrin Maru from Uraga Bay (where
Matthew Perry initially arrived) to San Francisco marked the first Pacific
crossing by a Japanese ship in 250 years, and also Japan’s first modern
diplomatic foray. A number of sources credit the Dutch captains who brought
the new ships to Japan with teaching navigation to the Japanese. This is true in
terms of establishing basic curricula at the naval schools; examined a little
more closely, however, it is clear that without John Manjiro this historically
crucial ocean voyage among other things would likely have been far more
difficult if not a wholescale failure (in no small part because the shogun’s rigid
social order still held for the Japanese men on board even if the highest-ranking
members could not sail or read charts). In a word, Manjiro’s combined skills
turned numerous potential hazards into victories for Japan.
Many of the men who would emerge for historians as the biggest names of
the era were part of the entourage, including Katsu Kaishu and Fukuzawa
Yukichi. As chief cadet at the newly formed Nagasaki Naval Academy, Katsu
Kaishu was captain of the Kanrin Maru for its nascent Pacific crossing. Of
minor samurai background, however, he would serve under the direction of
Admiral Kimura Yoshitake. A US naval engineer and inventor, John
M. Brooke, joined this ship while a second ship under full American command
and crew, the Powhatan, carried most of the Japanese delegates, including the
mission’s three chief envoys, Shinmi Masaoki, Muragaki Norimasa, and Oguri
Tadamasa. Again, although not the most famous nor certainly not the highest in
prestige, Manjiro was critical to making the voyage possible. Not only would
he take control of the ship on occasion when others of greater rank and more
prestigious birth lacked his oceangoing experience – something that might
likely have been impossible on land – but he was also able to convey Kimura
204 Alexis Dudden
and Katsu’s good intentions and collegiality to Brooke (who appears in his own
journal writings to have been on the verge of calling off the trip entirely out of
frustration with the men’s lack of ability and seasickness among other things).
Within weeks, the Kanrin Maru was set for San Francisco, where the Japanese
envoys would embark on their famous and much-praised journey across the
United States: “Not like the Chinese at all . . .” went a famous saying at the
time.
In Closing
The 1868 Meiji Ishin literally “rewove” Japanese society and witnessed the
overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate and restored the emperor to complete
and authoritarian control. Under the rallying cry, “Revere the Emperor! Expel
the Barbarian!” anti-shogunal forces renamed Edo as Tokyo, brought the
adolescent emperor there from his impoverished seclusion in Kyoto, placed
him in the former shogun’s palace, and endowed him with “inviolable” privi-
leges to rule their emerging nation-state – itself an entirely new political
experiment in parliamentary and constitutional government modeled on
a combination of European nations and the United States.
At the time, China also had numerous foreign advisors (some of whom had
great fondness for China and Chinese people and wanted the country to thrive)
and also numerous political thinkers aware that they, too, needed to act boldly lest
China be completely torn apart by outside pressures. Foremost among them was
Li Hongzhang who, watching changes within Japan, advocated in the 1870s
among other things for China to build several iron-clad ships to defend the coasts.
Unfortunately for most Chinese people, however, their ruling family was even
more self-interested than Japan’s Tokugawas. And, although no single person is
ever responsible for the success or failure of a system of government – or
a society for that matter – a woman known as Empress Dowager Cixi who
effectively ruled the Qing dynasty to its death in 1861–1908 stands out for
making extremely bad decisions at most critical historical junctures (at least as
far as the survival of her country was concerned).
During an era when countless young Chinese (and Japanese, Koreans, and
Vietnamese) would endeavor to learn as much as they could about the world
beyond what was long familiar in order to strengthen their countries, Cixi
focused on lavish projects that glorified only an imaginary past and benefited
only herself and her inner circle. To be sure, the artistic remains of her spending
choices are truly beautiful. Yet, when foreign and domestic advisors at the time
insisted that the government prepare Chinese soldiers for modern warfare, she
and her advisors redirected the allocated funds to these lovely objects. In one of
the most notorious examples in modern Asian history, when Japanese and
Chinese troops initially engaged in combat in 1894 – at a moment that many
historians measure as Japan’s foray into the transnational colonizing politics of

the day – like their Japanese counterparts, Chinese troops were dressed in
modern uniforms and equipped with then-modern weapons yet they had only
one round of ammunition because the Empress Dowager had used the rest of
the money designated for military modernization on her most important pet
project: reconstruction of the resplendent Summer Palace where eunuchs
towed her around a moat on a marble barge. Today a UNESCO World
Heritage Site, at the time it cost the Qing dynasty control of their country.
Equally important to consider, some currently maintain that changes begun in
Japan with the Meiji era are definitional to a “correct” interpretation of the
Japanese spirit and call now for a second Ishin to revitalize the nation (there is
even a recently established political party by this name). Details of this view
include the reinsertion of the emperor to a position of political power (the post–
World War II constitution names the emperor as a “symbol of the State”), a lifting
of the constitutional ban prohibiting Japanese forces from fighting overseas, and
also a redefinition of religious organizations to allow their participation in public
affairs among other things. Other Japanese, for their part, see in the historical
Meiji moment the establishment of conditions that laid the groundwork for the
rise of fascism and the utter destruction of their country during World War II’s
devastating toll on the homeland. They would uphold the ban on sending troops
overseas while allowing Japan to have a standing military to protect the nation if
attacked and keep the emperor defined as is (and maybe reallow female emperors
to the throne – something done away with in the Meiji moment).
In this context, therefore, when considering the truly remarkable changes that
swept through Japan during the second half of the nineteenth century, it is equally
critical to understand that the changes engendered tremendous social dislocation
and came at great costs to the majority of Japanese. In short, the results of the
political, social, and economic dislocations in the wake of Matthew Perry’s
“shock and awe” to Japan’s system are in no way evened out today, and the
contemporary political use of the nation’s modern transformations have become
one of the root causes of the so-called history wars that infect Asian international
relations between the current government in Tokyo and the areas formerly under
Japanese colonial rule until 1945. Groups favoring historical understanding of
the grandeur of the successes for Japan of this moment use language such as
“Take Japan Back” or “Make Japan Great Again.” Yet for all the exciting and
positive changes those moments brought to Japanese society – such as public
education for all, railroads, and the right for some to vote – divisions over how to
understand the world that arrived in Japanese ports in the wake of Matthew
Perry’s uninvited arrival are as deep today as they were then.
12 Philippine National Independence, 1898–1904
Andrew Yeo
Scholars often point to war and great power conflict as major ruptures marking
important turning points in history. It is no surprise, then, that students of US
foreign policy and diplomatic history often treat the Spanish–American War in
1898 as a key juncture signifying US power in Asia. Commodore George
Dewey’s decisive naval victory at the Battle of Manila Bay in May 1898
cleared any doubts about America’s role in the Pacific, and solidified the
United States’ position as an imperial nation at the turn of the twentieth century.
Often missing in this historiography, however, are the voices and actions of
the people most affected (and afflicted) by great power conflict. Filipino
revolutionaries were important actors in the Spanish–American War.
Unfortunately, their narratives are often lost in favor of macro-historical treat-
ments of US expansionism in the late nineteenth century. Consequently, the
Philippine struggle for national self-determination remains peripheral to the
study of Asian international relations during this period.
To address this lacuna, I turn the spotlight on the Philippines independence
movement and the transnational spread of liberal ideas. Where and how did
ideas of national self-determination emerge in the Philippines? Drawing on
arguments found in international relations, I explore the transnational diffusion
of norms and liberal ideas among Philippine intellectuals, principally formed in
Europe, but transported to the Philippines during the 1880s. In essence, this
chapter explains how the diffusion of liberal ideas culminated in the declaration
of independence from Spain, only to be followed shortly thereafter by US
military occupation and the Philippine–American War from 1899 to 1902.
The central “event” highlighted in this chapter is therefore not the Spanish–
American War or the Philippine–American War, but instead the declaration of
Philippine independence on June 12, 1898. The reading of the “Act of the
Proclamation of Independence of the Filipino People,” accompanied with the
unveiling of the new Philippine national flag, and a performance of the national
anthem, took place almost a full six months prior to the end of the Spanish–
American War. The focus on independence rather than war is thus a reminder
that great power conflict intersected with (or was juxtaposed within) a much
longer struggle for Philippine independence.
206
Philippine National Independence, 1898–1904 207
Ironically, Philippine efforts at self-rule remained unpersuasive to US pol-

icymakers. Americans, including William Howard Taft, the governor-general
of the Philippines, believed that their “little brown brothers” needed close
guidance “to develop anything resembling Anglo-Saxon political principles
and skills.”1 Such sentiments, however, ignored reality on the ground. Shortly
after their declared independence, Filipino leaders managed to form
a legislative body, hold elections, and draft a new constitution. This all took
place before the signing of the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898, which
officially ended the Spanish–American conflict and ceded the Philippines to the
United States. Despite US intentions to colonize the Philippines, Filipino
political leaders ratified their own constitution on January 21, 1899, marking
the birth of the first Republic of the Philippines. Of course, the existence of both
a Philippine nationalist government and a US occupying force was untenable.
Three weeks later, fighting would ensue between US forces and Philippine
guerillas, drawing the United States into its “first Vietnam” over the issue of
national self-determination.
In exploring the steps that led to Philippine independence, and its immediate
and long-term aftermath, I organize this chapter into five sections. In the first
section, I provide some historical context behind the rise of the Philippine
intellectual class in mid- to late-nineteenth-century Europe. These ilustrados
would lay the ground work for reform and eventual revolution. In the second
section, I draw on concepts from international relations to demonstrate how the
ilustrados functioned as carriers of ideas, agents of change, and norms entre-
preneurs. Their writings, speeches, and actions played a key role in spreading
ideas of liberal political reform and Philippine nationalism in their homeland.
The third section explores the transition from the reform movement to revolu-
tion in the 1890s. Here I emphasize the transnational linkages between the
ilustrados and their impact on younger revolutionaries such as Andrés
Bonifacio and Emilio Aguinaldo. I also highlight the institutionalization of
liberal–nationalist ideas through the Biak-na-Bato and the Malolos constitu-
tions. The establishment of the first Philippine republic should have demon-
strated to both Spain and the United States the capacity for Filipino self-
government. The fourth section discusses the consequences and aftermath of
the Philippine declaration of independence: the Philippine–American War and
further colonial rule at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Philippine lives.
The fifth section concludes by discussing how the Philippine independence
movement and ensuing war represented an early example of the colonial
struggles that would roil Asia in the twentieth century as newly emergent
nationalist elites sought to dispel colonial powers.2
1
Quoted in Miller 1982, 134.
2
I thank the editors for suggesting making the connection to other nationalist movements in Asia.
208 Andrew Yeo
The Rise of the Ilustrados
Early State–Society Relations in Colonial Philippines

The Spanish imperial footprint in the Philippines remained relatively light
outside of Manila, the capital city. Unlike the colonies in the Americas,
Spanish conquistadors who arrived in the Philippines in the late sixteenth
century found few natural resources to extract. Hence, there was little need
for mass exploitation of indigenous labor in the absence of mining or hacienda
agriculture.3 Instead, the Philippines, and more precisely Manila, developed as
a center for “galleon trade.” Chinese traders sold goods in Manila in exchange
for Mexican silver, and then resold them across Asia and eventually Europe.4
Very few Spaniards left the entrepôt of Manila.
To offset the shortage of civilian officials in the Philippines, Madrid there-
fore relied on the Catholic Church and its friars to administer its colony.
Although the governor-general in the Philippines wielded immense executive
power, including command of the colonial army, in practice secular rulers
carried little authority over the friars who relied on local knowledge and
influence to retain power in the provinces. A large percentage of the population
did convert to Catholicism. However, only 5 percent of the local population
spoke Spanish by the end of the nineteenth century.5 Conversion took place in
the local language, and there was no concerted effort to educate Filipinos
through Spanish language.
Consequently, there was no widespread intelligentsia in the Philippines until
perhaps the mid-nineteenth century.6 Education institutions, mostly run by the
Church, were woefully underdeveloped. The Philippine colony, which con-
sisted of over 7,000 islands, also lacked a common language. The unavail-
ability of print, language barriers, and a poor education system help explain
why “the great nationalist upheaval that rocked the Americas between 1810 and
1840 had no counterpart in the archipelago until the 1880s.”7
Liberalism and Education in Spain

To understand the timing of the Philippine nationalist movement in the latter half
of the nineteenth century, one needs to understand the political context of nine-
teenth-century Spain. Spain itself was under the throes of political and social
change leading to periods of instability and violence. The first republican govern-
ment established in 1812 only lasted two years before King Fernando VII and his
3
However, Patricio Abinales and Donna Amoroso (2017, 60) mention that hundreds of thousands
of people were “uprooted and resettled” leading to the destruction of the indigenous economy.
4
B. R. Anderson 1998, 194. 5 B. R. Anderson 1998, 195. 6 B. R. Anderson 1998, 196.
7
B. R. Anderson 1998, 197.
Carlist supporters reestablished traditional authority in 1814. Despite conser-

vative rule, a new liberal constitution appeared in 1837. The next three decades
were marked by military revolts, bringing both moderate and progressive
governments to power. This liberal period eroded the power of the Church,
resulting in the secularization of most religious orders in mid-nineteenth-
century Spain.
Rising anti-Catholic attitudes in Spain during the mid-nineteenth century
carried repercussions for state–society relations in the Philippines. The ability
of the friars to continue their religious work in the Philippines depended on
“their secular usefulness to the Liberal governments” as colonial
administrators.8 Thus, the friars were expected to act as representatives of
Spain and “uphold the authority of the mother country.”9 However, the friars’
antipathy toward liberal Spain and its secularization led them to stymie pro-
gressive ideas. The Church’s rejection of liberalism would eventually put the
friars in increasing conflict with the rising tide of Philippine nationalism.10
Although the religious orders in the Philippines suppressed liberal reforms
from Spain, the secular clergy (i.e., Filipino priests) and Filipino elites
challenged the authority of the friars. Filipino soldiers led a mutiny in
Cavite in 1872. Spanish authorities used the mutiny as a pretext to arrest
Filipinos suspected of harboring liberal attitudes. Three Filipino priests were
executed for allegedly supporting the mutiny and spreading anti-state pro-
paganda. Nevertheless, the Cavite mutiny foreshadowed further native
unrest.
The primary site of social conflict during the second half of the nineteenth
century was in higher education.11 As Benedict Anderson argues, “A serious
education was not easy to acquire in the colony, where the Church was violently
opposed to any inroads of liberalism from Madrid and controlled most local
schools.”12 With opportunities for higher education blocked in Spain, Filipinos
began seeking greater opportunities abroad. The rising demand for education
coincided with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1868 and the rising wealth of
mestizos (particularly Chinese mestizos). What began as a trickle of young,
relatively well-to-do mestizos to Europe turned into a steady flow by the 1880s.
The ilustrados (enlightened ones), the first true intelligentsia in the Philippines,
emerged from this early wave of migration to Europe.13 Many young Filipinos
in Spain studied medicine and law. Several, including the famed José Rizal, left
for Spain as their own families were targeted and victimized for participating in
anti-friar activities. Forming their own exile community, the Filipinos corre-
sponded with one other using Spanish.
8 9
Schumacher 1997, 3. Schumacher 1997, 3. 10 Schumacher 1997, 3.
11
Abinales and Amoroso 2017, 104. 12 B. R. Anderson 1998, 198.
13
Majul 1974, 2; Schumacher 1997, 17; B. R. Anderson 1998, 198.
210 Andrew Yeo
As carriers of ideas14 and norms entrepreneurs,15 the role of the ilustrados

cannot be understated when explaining the transnational diffusion of reformist,
and later revolutionary, ideas. These ideas would lay the groundwork for
national self-determination and the future conflict with the United States over
Philippine independence. In describing the emergence of this new intellectual
class, Anderson writes the following:
[They] began a cultural assault on benighted clericalism and, later, on Spanish political
domination. No less significant was the fact that, going to the same schools, reading the
same books, writing for the same journals, and marrying each other’s sisters and
cousins, they inaugurated the self-conscious consolidation of a pan-Philippine . . .
mestizo stratum, where their elders had formed dispersed clusters of provincial caci-
ques. It was these people who, at the very end of the century, began calling themselves
“Filipinos,” a term which up till then had designated only Spanish creoles.16
What the ilustrados experienced in Spain, and in Europe more generally,

profoundly shaped their thinking. The most valuable education the ilus-
trados received was not in the universities, but “in seeing the relative
backwardness of Spain in relation to its European peers.”17 Spain’s educa-
tion system was something left to be desired, and the universities and
intellectual life were “far behind those of the rest of Europe.”18 As John
Schumacher argues:
The experience of freely discussing all ideas, of attacking or rejecting institutions of
Church or State, of proclaiming the dogmas of liberty and progress would prove a heady
stimulus to their aspirations. On the other hand, many of them would be appalled to
observe the grave defects of Spanish political, social, and intellectual life at hand.
Accustomed to having the mother-country held up to them as the ideal, they were
saddened to learn that their idol had feet of clay when they saw how far more progressive
the other countries of Europe were. The indifference of official Spain to Philippine
affairs would add to their disillusionment. Noting the achievements of other countries
and recognizing their own native qualities as in many respects superior to what they saw
in Spain, some Filipinos began to think on what they could make of the Philippines
themselves.19
The Propaganda Movement

In Europe, the ilustrados grew more confident in setting a course of action for
social and political reforms in their home country. José Rizal, the most famed
ilustrado, was himself conscious of an emerging intelligentsia class to which he
belonged. Writing in the 1880s, Rizal wrote that the ilustrados were in “con-
stant communication with the rest of the Islands, and if today, it constitutes only
14
Philpott 2001. 15 Keck and Sikkink 1998. 16 B. R. Anderson 1998, 198.
17
Abinales and Amoroso 2017, 105. 18 Schumacher 1997, 20. 19 Schumacher 1997, 20.
the brains of the country, in a few years, it will constitute its whole nervous
system and will manifest its existence in all the acts of the country.”20
Rizal completed his medical studies in Spain, but he also travelled and wrote
extensively in places such as Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and France between
1882 and 1892. Benedict Anderson explains the significance of Rizal’s travels
throughout Europe. It was only through the “spectre of comparison” that Rizal
could see the backwardness of Spain relative to other European countries. As
Anderson writes, “This put [Rizal] in a position generally not available to
colonial Indians and Vietnamese . . . that of being able to ridicule the metropolis
from the same high ground from which, for generations, the metropolis had
ridiculed the natives.”21 The incompetence of Spanish rule and the hypocrisy of
the Church provided fuel for Rizal’s writings, particularly his novels Noli Me
Tangere (Touch Me Not) and El Fililbusterismo (The Subversive). Reflecting
the transnational nature of his writings and their impact, the novels were written
in Spanish, published in Germany, and smuggled into the Philippines where the
works were translated into local language and circulated surreptitiously.22
From Europe, the ilustrados published their ideas in newspapers, books, and
pamphlets in what became known as the Propaganda movement. In addition to
Rizal, key leaders of the movement involved lawyers, journalists, and doctors,
including Marcelo del Pilar, Graciano Lopez-Jaena, and Mariano Ponce. They
demanded equal political rights for Filipinos. The movement also addressed
“administrative reform, eradication of corruption in the government, recogni-
tion of Filipino rights as loyal Spaniards, extension of Spanish laws to the
Philippines, curtailment of the excessive power of the friars in the life of the
country, and assertion of the dignity of the Filipino.”23
Taken collectively, the writings of the ilustrados produced “a greater social
and political awareness among Filipinos.”24 Gregorio Sancianco’s book, El
progresso de Filipinas (The progress of the Philippines), published in 1881,
coincided with the first signs of collective action among the diaspora in Spain.
In his book, Sancianco wrote, “If then, the Philippines is considered part of the
Spanish nation and is therefore a Spanish province and not a tributary colony; if
her sons are born Spanish just as are those of the Peninsula; if finally, recogniz-
ing in the Peninsula the rights of citizenship, one must equally recognize it in
the Filipinos.”25 It is important to note that the Propaganda movement did not
call for independence from Spain. Its focus was limited to political reforms and
the demand for equal rights under the Spanish monarch.26
In the late 1880s, the Propaganda movement became closely associated with
the biweekly La Solidaridad (Solidarity), founded in Barcelona by Graciano
20
Quoted in Majul 1960, 125. 21 B. R. Anderson 1998, 229.
22
Abinales and Amoroso 2017, 108. 23 Abinales and Amoroso 2017, 106; Majul 1974, 2.
24
Majul 1974, 2. 25 Quoted in Schumacher 1997, 23. 26 Majul 1974, 2.
212 Andrew Yeo
Lopez-Jaena, Marcelo del Pilar, Mariano Ponce, and others. The exile com-
munity had published earlier newspapers, such as the Circulo Hispano-Filipino
(Hispano-Filipino Circular) in 1882 and España en Filipinas (Spain in the
Philippines). However, the former lasted only two issues due to lack of funding,
and the Chinese mestizos saw the latter as insufficient in advancing greater
demands for reform against Spanish authorities.27 The first issue of La
Solidaridad was published on February 15, 1889, as an eight-page issue. It
included an editorial that stated the newspaper’s aims: “To combat all reaction
and all backward steps; to applaud and accept every liberal idea and to defend
progress; in a word, to be a propagandist first and foremost of all democratic
ideals, hoping that these may reign in all nations here and beyond the seas.”28
The publication included news items relevant to the exile community and short
stories, but its main articles articulated the grievances of the propagandists
including the lack of representation in parliament, equality of rights, censor-
ship, education, and the corruption of the friars. La Solidaridad targeted
a European audience, particularly Spanish liberals who might take up the
cause of reformers. However, as argued in the next paragraph, its readership
reached the Philippines and played an important role in disseminating liberal
ideas to Filipinos in a period where local print was strictly censored.
La Solidaridad remained in continuous print for two years. By the end of
1890, however, differences in leadership and direction produced divisions
among members. Most notably, these differences were represented by the
organization’s two principle members: Del Pilar and Rizal. For Rizal, the
effectiveness of the Propaganda movement had reached its limit; the idea of
Filipino nationhood needed to be spread directly to the people. At the core of
Rizal’s dissatisfaction was the movement’s failure to persuade Madrid to
institute real change in their treatment of Filipinos. As Onofre D. Corpuz
states, “The propaganda of La Solidaridad was doomed to fail because its
message was primarily directed to the Spaniards, who would not listen.”29
Expressing disillusionment with the reform movement, Rizal wrote in one of
his last letter’s from Europe, “I shall not write one more word for La
Solidaridad. It seems to me it is in vain.”30 To bring reformist ideas, or
more importantly the notion of Philippine national identity back home, lead-
ing ilustrados such as Rizal and Lopez-Jaena therefore returned to Manila in
the early 1890s.31
27
Corpuz 1989, 199. Tensions existed within the Filipino exile community over race between
“native Filipinos” (i.e., the non-Spaniards, including Chinese mestizos) and the Spanish mes-
tizos and creoles. On this point, see Corpuz 1989, 200.
28
Quoted in Corpuz 1989, 201. 29 Corpuz 2007, 227. 30 Quoted in Quibuyen 1999, 33.
31
La Solidaridad and the reform movement in Spain would eventually whither as the group faced
increasing financial difficulties, defections, and counterpropaganda from critics in Spain. See
Abinales and Amoroso 2017, 109.
The impact of the Propagandist movement remained equally limited in the

Philippines as in Europe. Beyond Spanish repression and censorship, addi-
tional barriers including language (newspapers and documents were printed in
Spanish) and geographic distance made it difficult for ordinary Filipinos to
connect with the reformist movement.
The 1890s would bring a close to the reformist phase of the Philippine
nationalist movement. The propagandists in Europe were ultimately unsuccess-
ful in bringing about policy change. However, this important group of transna-
tional actors sowed the seeds of independence and national self-determination.
Living in self-exile, their absence from the Philippines helped them develop
a greater self-awareness of their distinct national character. In Europe, they
were drawn to ideas of liberty and progress that were transmitted back to the
Philippines.32
Although they wrote for a Spanish audience, their writings were also
“enthusiastically read and reinterpreted by unintended audiences” in the
Philippines. This included less privileged students in Manila, peasant leaders
disgruntled with oppressive Catholic friars, and local elites.33 The Propaganda
movement of the 1880s also helped radicalize other ilustrados and younger
Filipinos. It contributed, if not inspired, the political education of the next
generation of nationalist leaders including Andrés Bonifacio and Emilio
Aguinaldo, two figures who ultimately transformed the reform movement
into a revolution a decade later.
Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, banned in the Philippines but read clandestinely,
was arguably the most influential piece of writing in shaping Philippine
nationalism. The novel forged an “intellectual relationship” between enligh-
tened propagandists in Europe and disgruntled Filipinos in Manila unable to
effectively mobilize.34 Its words helped readers imagine the Philippines as its
own society and nation.35
More broadly, the plight of Filipinos in the colonies was transmitted through
publications printed overseas. Books, newspapers, and pamphlets helped trans-
mit liberal and national ideas from Europe to the Philippines. For instance,
Andrés Bonifacio translated parts of Noli Me Tangere into Tagalog. He also
owned a copy of Rizal’s novel, El Filibusterismo, and three volumes of La
Solidaridad. As Onofre Corpuz argues, “The truth of the matter is that the ideas
of revolution were no more the monopoly of the men in Manila than ideas of
reform were the exclusive property of the ilustrados abroad.”36 In describing
the shift from reformism to radicalism to revolution, Corpuz writes:
As the decade of the propaganda began (1880) Bonifacio was a young seventeen,
Mabini sixteen, Aguinaldo eleven, and Emilio Jacinto a boy at five. They did not
32
Cortes et al. 2000, 127. 33 Abinales and Amoroso 2017, 109–110. 34
Corpuz 2007, 230.
35
B. R. Anderson 1998, 230. 36 Corpuz 2007, 234.
214 Andrew Yeo
experience the reformisms of the Propaganda but would inherit the fruit of its failure . . .
they grew into manhood during the decade 1881–1890 learning from their elders, their
political awareness being awakened or influenced by the latter.37
From Reform to Revolution
The Katipunan
Writing from Brussels in May 1891, José Rizal wrote to his colleagues that he
was taking a temporary leave from the Propaganda movement to earn money
before waging a “stronger crusade” back in Manila.38 Rizal had become
embroiled in a political contest for leadership earlier that year with Marcelo
del Pilar. His disillusionment with La Solidaridad and political infighting likely
contributed to his decision to leave Madrid. Rizal’s final letter from Europe in
October 1891 indicated a more radical shift in his thinking, and his frustration
of living away from his homeland.
Rizal briefly left for Hong Kong to practice medicine before returning to
Manila in June 1892 to form La Liga Filipina. Established just eight days after
his arrival, Rizal intended to use La Liga as a platform to build and encourage
moral and political principles for Filipinos. These principles would become the
basis for national unity.39 Self-reformation was key for La Liga in preparation
for eventual independence from Spain.40 Unfortunately, La Liga only lasted for
four days, ending with the arrest of Rizal on July 6, 1892.
On the day of Rizal’s arrest, Andrés Bonifacio, who attended the inaugural
La Liga meeting, established the Katipunan.41 The Katipunan operated as
a secret, revolutionary society with the goal of uniting and bringing indepen-
dence to the Philippines. In contrast to the Propaganda movement, the
Katipunan derived its membership from the lower, non-ilustrado class. As
Patricio Abinales and Donna Amoroso argue, it was a “change from Rizal’s
Spanish to Bonifacio’s Tagalog” with a “movement shift from elite reformism
to lower-class radicalism.”42 The aspirations of the Katipunan “were virtually
identical to those stated by Rizal and the propagandists.” However, the leaders
of the Katipunan believed that the political, moral, and social transformation of
the Philippines would only come with the overthrow of Spanish rule.43
Due to its secret nature, the Katipunan grew at a snail’s pace its first two
years. After adopting an organizational model and recruitment system similar
37
Corpuz 2007, 229. 38 Quoted in Corpuz 2007, 245; Quibuyen 1999.
39
Filipino political theorist Cesar Majul (1974, 19) writes, “Rizal viewed man primarily as a moral
being and society therefore as a system of moral relations.”
40
Cortes et al. 2000, 132.
41
Katipunan means “association” in Tagalog and is short for Kataastaasan Kagalanggalang
Katipunan ngmgs Anak ng Bayan.
42
Abinales and Amoroso 2017, 110. 43 Cortes et al. 2000, 135.
to Rizal’s network of provincial and local councils for La Liga, membership

grew more rapidly. The circulation of the Katipunan’s first newspaper in
March 1896, the Kalayaan, also helped the rebels spread their ideas more
widely. That same month, Emilio Aguinaldo, six year younger than
Bonifacio, joined the Katipunan.
As the Katipunan’s activity expanded, it was only a matter of time before the
Spanish authorities discovered the underground movement. Colonial adminis-
trators suspected the existence of a secret society, and the organization was
eventually outed by a friar on August 19, 1896. Colonial police gained access to
meeting notes, publications, receipts, and most importantly, the membership
list. Members were hunted down. Some were imprisoned and tortured. The
authorities also rounded up many prominent Filipinos in Manila, mistakenly
believing that the Katipunan’s source of support lay with the elite. Fortunately
for the revolution, key leaders, including Bonifacio and Aguinaldo, managed to
escape.
A series of rebellions ensued, which transpired into a revolutionary move-
ment. Although Bonifacio is often hailed as the “Father of the Revolution,” it
was Aguinaldo’s military successes which helped push him past Bonifacio to
lead the Philippine revolution against Spain.44 For Aguinaldo, the Katipunan
was incapable of sustaining a revolution. He instead advocated the establish-
ment of a revolutionary government built along republican lines.45 At the
Trejeros Convention held on March 22, 1897, Philippine delegates agreed to
form a supreme council to replace the Katipunan. The council elected
Aguinaldo as president, and Bonifacio was given the position of director of
the interior.46 Bonifacio presided over the election, but he declared the results
invalid and refused to submit to Aguinaldo’s leadership. With political rivalries
intensifying, Bonifacio was eventually arrested under charges of sedition and
court-martialed. He was sentenced to death and executed by his fellow Filipino
revolutionaries on May 10, 1897.47
By the end of May 1897, Aguinialdo’s stronghold in Cavite had fallen to the
Spanish. Aguinaldo retreated to Biak-na-Bato in Bulacan province where he set
up his revolutionary government and called for guerilla warfare. More germane
to the ideas in this chapter, Aguinaldo established the Biak-na-Bato constitu-
tion. The constitution, “declared the separation of the Philippines from Spain,
presented a bill of rights, and established a government along republican
lines.”48 The Biak-na-Bato assembly elected leaders into the supreme council,
again choosing Aguinaldo as president.
44
Corpuz 2007, 258. 45 Majul 1974, 4. 46 Majul 1974, 5.
47
As Cortes et al. (2000, 160) explains, Bonifacio was ultimately killed by fellow Filipinos within
his own secret society in a power struggle, and not by the colonial enemy.
48
Majul 1974, 5.
216 Andrew Yeo
Although Aguinaldo and his associates did not establish the Philippine
Republic until over a year later, some Philippine scholars have referred to the
Biak-na-Bato government as “the first republican government for the
Philippines.”49 The administrative provisions in the Biak-na-Bato constitution
were apparently drawn from the Cuban constitution of Jimaguayu, but there was
“no parallel to the four articles pertaining to the bill of rights.”50 The infusion of
liberal ideas into the Biak-na-Bato constitution was instead a manifestation of
earlier demands made by the ilustrados against the Spanish government.
Guerilla warfare made it difficult for the Spanish government to completely
stamp out the Philippine insurrection. Meanwhile, Aguinaldo became increas-
ingly concerned with the Spanish regime’s recruitment and arming of local
volunteers to apprehend the revolutionaries. A truce was therefore in order and
signed between Aguinaldo and Spanish governor-general Fernando Primo de
Rivera on December 14, 1897. The truce, known as the Pact of Biak-na-Bato,
was designated to last for three years until September 1900. In exchange for
political reforms, including the secularization of parishes, the Philippine revo-
lutionaries were required to surrender their arms. Moreover, Philippine leaders,
including Aguinaldo, agreed to their exile in Hong Kong. The Spanish govern-
ment agreed to finance their living expenses during exile, which was to be
covered in three installments. Aguinaldo and nineteen of his compatriots left
for Hong Kong at the end of 1897. Although the fighting subsided, neither the
regime nor the revolutionaries fully kept their end of the bargain. Rebellions
continued to erupt in different parts of the country.51
Spanish–American War
As the Spanish entered a truce with the Filipinos, war loomed on the horizon
between the United States and Spain. Aguinaldo and other exiled Filipinos
came into contact with US officials at the consulate in Hong Kong.52 The
assistant secretary of the navy, Theodore Roosevelt, had already dispatched
Commodore George Dewey to Hong Kong in November 1897 should war
break out between the United States and Spain. With Spain withholding pay-
ment to the exiled revolutionaries, and with encouragement from US officials,
the “Hong Kong junta” invalidated their truce with the Spanish. Aguinaldo
planned to return to the Philippines to organize an army and resume the
revolution.53 The United States declared war against Spain on April 21,
1898, and on May 1, Commodore George Dewey entered Manila Bay, quickly
49
Cortes et al. 2000, 162. 50 Majul 1974, 5n6. 51 Majul 1974, 164.
52
Aguinaldo 1899, 6.
53
Majul 1974, 7; As mentioned previously, the Biak-na-Bato Pact did not cease hostilities. By
early 1897, guerilla warfare had resumed with rebel attacks taking place in the provinces. See
Corpuz 2007, 325–327.
overpowering the Spanish fleet. Ending his exile, Aguinaldo returned to the
Philippines a month after the Battle of Manila on May 19, 1898, and declared
Philippine independence on June 12.
US hostilities against Spain opened an opportunity for Aguinaldo to align
himself with the Americans. However, the decision to side with the United
States was neither self-evident nor automatic. First, the Spanish colonial regime
cobbled together a last-ditch effort to coopt Filipinos in their looming battle against
the greater American threat. Spain faced a no-win situation if forced to fight US
invaders and Filipino rebels simultaneously. Promising reforms they had pre-
viously denied to the ilustrados, the colonial authorities quickly assembled
a Filipino militia and a consultative assembly in hopes of winning native support
against the Americans. Volunteer officers in the Filipino militia would carry
“assimilated ranks” in the Spanish Army.54 A month after the US declaration of
war, the colonial regime managed to enlist 12,000–14,000 Filipinos.55
The consultative assembly addressed many of the earlier goals of the reform
movement a decade earlier. The Spanish regime appointed eighteen men to the
consultative assembly, mostly of the ilustrados class, which included propa-
gandists in Europe and former members of the Katipunan. Pedro Paterno, the
Filipino lawyer who brokered the truce between Aguinaldo and the Spanish
government, and a leading member of the consultative assembly, announced
that the Spanish would permit reforms “based on Spanish sovereignty, Filipino
autonomy, and representation in the Cortes.”56 In effect, Spain was prepared to
grant Filipinos an autonomous government.
If on the one hand the Spanish were offering the chance for real reforms, on
the other hand, it was unclear what a US victory might bring for Filipinos.
Much has been made about an oral exchange between Aguinaldo and the newly
promoted Admiral Dewey onboard the US flagship Olympia. The United States
had already provided Filipinos supplies, ammunition, and transportation to
resume their fight against Spain. However, Aguinaldo expressed to Dewey
his fear that a US victory without Philippine independence might result in
a potential war between the two sides. For weeks, Aguinaldo had sought
a written guarantee from the United States ensuring Philippine independence.
Spencer Pratt, a diplomat stationed in Singapore, relayed Dewey’s alleged
remarks to Aguinaldo that a written agreement was unnecessary. The words
of Dewey “were sacred” and “the government of North America was a most
honorable, just, and powerful one.”57 Later, on board the Olympia, Dewey
stated to Aguinaldo that Philippine independence would be guaranteed by “the
honorable word of the Americans,” which was more efficient than written
documents.58 As such, Americans and Filipinos should treat one another as
54
Corpuz 2007, 327. 55 Corpuz 2007, 330. 56 Corpuz 2007, 330.
57
Cortes et al. 2000, 168. 58 Aguinaldo 1899, 10.
218 Andrew Yeo
allies and friends.59 There is no reason to believe that Dewey was insincere, and
at the time, the admiral may not have anticipated US colonization of the entire
archipelago.60 However, Dewey did not speak for the White House, which had
already shifted its position toward annexation after the Battle of Manila in
August 1898.
The Spanish surrender was a theatrical farce, and it excluded Filipinos from
any role they might play in gaining their independence. Following the siege on
Manila, US and Spanish military commanders negotiated the process of
Spain’s surrender in advance. To uphold Spanish honor, Dewey would conduct
a “token bombardment” on two Spanish fortifications in Manila on August 13.
Dewey’s flagship would then send a prearranged signal, at which point the
Spanish would raise a white flag of surrender to sign a truce.61 Filipino
representatives had no part in this discussion. In fact, the US military com-
mander ordered Aguinaldo not to enter Manila until US troops secured the
city.62 As James Blout, a US Army officer involved in the conflict noted, the
Filipinos fought with the United States on the faith of a “gentleman’s agree-
ment,” regarding independence, only to have that agreement repudiated once
US victory was in sight.63 Blout writes,
The bitterness that lies away down in the secret recesses of the hearts of the Filipino
people today has its source at this point. They had a “gentleman’s agreement,” as it
were, with us, not in writing, made at a time when the thought of a colony had
never entered our minds. They fought a common cause with us on the faith of that
agreement.64
The First Republic of the Philippines and US Imperialism

Spain surrendered on August 13, 1898. The following day, the US military
proclaimed its occupation of the Philippines, issued in English, Spanish, and
Tagalog.65 General Wesley Merritt requested that Emilio Aguinaldo withdraw
Philippine troops from the areas outlying Manila to avoid potential conflict.
Aguinaldo complied, still holding onto a faint hope that Admiral Dewey would
honor their oral agreement. Thus when Dewey ordered the seizure of all
Filipino ships in Manila Bay, anger and disappointment permeated across the
Filipino leadership.
Rather than break into immediate hostilities, Aguinaldo advised caution and
moderation. A peace treaty between Spain and the United States had yet to be
59
Cortes et al. 2000, 171; Wolff 1960, 66–69.
60
Dewey had not received any orders from Washington DC and looked to guidance on the US
Navy’s war plans, which made no reference to occupation of the Philippines beyond Manila. See
Karnow 1989, 114.
61
Karnow 1989, 124. 62 Cortes et al. 2000, 187. 63 Blount 1913, 128–129.
64
Blount 1913, 129. 65 Corpuz 2007, 429.
signed, and the Americans might still be persuaded of Philippine national self-
determination. The revolutionary government moved ahead with plans for self-
rule through the establishment of a representative assembly “to strengthen their
cause in the eyes of the international community and vis-à-vis the United
States” with the thinking that the US leaders might “be faithful to their own
much-professed Jeffersonian principles.”66 La Independencia, the newspaper
of the new Philippine government launched in October 1898 (and shut down
a few weeks later by the US military government) stated in its first issue
“Governing all Luzon, we wish to show all nations that we are capable of
governing ourselves.”67
Aguinaldo moved the de facto Republic of the Philippines to Malolos on
September 10, and on September 15 provided his inaugural speech to open the
National Assembly (referred to as the Malolos Congress). The Treaty of Paris,
which formally ceded Spanish control of the Philippines to the United States,
was signed on December 10, 1898. In the meantime, Aguinaldo and other
leaders continued to expand governing structures for an independent Philippine
republic. On January 23, 1899, Filipino leaders unveiled the Malolos constitu-
tion, formally establishing the Republic of the Philippines (referred to as the
Malolos Republic). Aguinaldo was sworn in as president. The new constitution
established a representative form of government, separation of church and
state, and a strong, single chamber legislative house vis-à-vis the executive
and judicial branches.68 It also added a long list of individual rights.
As mentioned in the introduction, the “event” of Philippine independence
took place on June 12, 1898, in Biak-na-Bato. However, the existence of the
first Philippine republic should give readers pause in considering how the
ilustrados played a pivotal role in spreading liberal ideas two decades earlier,
ultimately leading to this watershed moment. Rosario Mendoza Cortes and her
collaborators draw out the connections linking the Propaganda movement to
the newly established Maololos government in early 1899.69 The authors write,
“The Propaganda, as a campaign for rights, and the Revolution, as a struggle for
liberty, were part of the lives of the men in the Malolos Congress.” The
constitution itself included the title, “The Filipino and their national and
individual rights.”70 Even with the specter of war with the Americans looming,
Aguinaldo believed the time had come to lay down their arms and live under
a constitutional law in harmony with other nations. As Aguinaldo proclaimed,
“We are no longer insurgents, we are no longer revolutionists . . . We are from
now on Republicans, that is to say, men of law able to fraternize with all other
nations, with mutual respect and affection.”71
66
Cortes et al. 2000, 191. 67 Quoted in Wildman 1901, 164.
68
Abinales and Amoroso 2017, 115. 69 Cortes et al. 2000. 70
Cortes et al. 2000, 206.
71
Quoted in Cortes et al. 2000, 206.
220 Andrew Yeo
Aftermath: War and Colonial Rule

During the second half of 1898, the actions of Filipino leaders in Malolos
reflected a nation ready to move forward with self-rule, even as US troops took
control of Manila and proceeded with military occupation to other regions. If
President William McKinley remained indecisive about the United States’ role
in the Philippines at the conclusion of the Spanish–American War, in the weeks
prior to ratification of the Treaty of Paris, the imperialists at home had won him
over.72 Two weeks after signing the Treaty of Paris, McKinley issued
a proclamation ordering the extension of US sovereignty across the entire
Philippines. Parts of the text of McKinley’s “benevolent assimilation” address
is worth quoting at length, especially when juxtaposed with the brutal character
of the Philippine–American war that would ensue just a few weeks later:
the authority of the United States is to be exerted for the security of the persons and
property of the people of the Islands and for the confirmation of all their private rights
and relations. It will be the duty of the commander of the forces of occupation to
announce and proclaim in the most public manner that we come not as invaders or
conquerors but as friends, to protect the natives in their homes, in their employments,
and in their personal and religious rights. All persons who, either by active aid or by
honest submission, co-operate with the Government of the United States to give effect to
these beneficent purposes will receive the reward of its support and protection . . .
Finally, it should be the earnest and paramount aim of the military administration to
win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines by
assuring to them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties
which is the heritage of free peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of the
United States is one of benevolent assimilation, substituting the mild sway of justice and
right for arbitrary rule. In the fulfillment of this high mission, supporting the temperate
administration of affairs for the greatest good of the governed, there must be sedulously
maintained the strong arm of authority to repress disturbance and to overcome all
obstacles to the bestowal of the blessings of good and stable government upon the
people of the Philippine Islands under the free flag of the United States.73
General Elwell Otis, the US governor-general of the Philippines, feared that
Aguinaldo would interpret McKinley’s proclamation as a direct challenge to
Philippine independence. He therefore delayed publishing the proclamation
until January 4, 1899. As Otis confessed, “there were certain words and
expressions such as ‘sovereignty,’ ‘right of cession’ and those which directed
immediate occupation . . . though most admirably employed . . . might be
advantageously used by the Tagalog war party to incite widespread hostilities
among the natives.”74 To avoid conflict, General Otis altered McKinley’s
original proclamation. Among several unauthorized edits, Otis erased mention
of “American sovereignty over the Philippines.”75 However, some members of
72 73 74
Karnow 1989, 125–38. McKinley 1898. Quoted in Miller 1982, 52.
75
Miller 1982, 60.
the Filipino government had already seen copies of the original proclamation.
They rejected McKinley’s words as a sign of temporary appeasement until the
United States could impose a much more oppressive form of colonial control
akin to Spanish rule.
Relations worsened between the two countries with tensions extending
between the Philippine and US armies. A skirmish on the evening of
February 4, 1899, escalated into a firefight. In Washington DC, Congress did
not have the required two-thirds majority to ratify the Treaty of Paris ahead of
the February 6 vote. However, reports of violence allegedly instigated by
Filipinos against US soldiers helped tip the scales in favor of ratification by
one vote past the two-thirds majority (57 in favor, 27 against). Some scholars
speculate that the Americans had contrived the outbreak of war.76 Aguinaldo
had shown relative restraint up to this point, hoping to persuade the US Senate
that the Philippines were capable of self-governance. However, the duplicity of
American actions – beginning with Admiral Dewey’s oral agreement to respect
Philippine sovereignty, to General Otis’s alteration of McKinley’s proclama-
tion – had reached a boiling point. The firefight between the two militaries on
February 4 would mark the beginning of a three-year war lasting until 1902.
Historians have referred to the Philippine–American War as America’s “first
Vietnam war” due to its brutality and tactics.77 Unable to match the superior
firepower of the US military, the Philippine army and their supporters resorted to
guerilla tactics. Unfortunately for Filipinos, whatever sense of Christian duty
compelled the Americans to civilize their Philippine brethren, it did not prevent
the US military from resorting to brutal violence. The US military pursued
a “depopulation campaign” to weed out nationalist sympathizers in rural areas.
As the US governor of Abra province described, “Whole villages had been
burned, storehouses and crops had been destroyed, and the entire province was
as devoid of food products as was the valley of Shenandoah after Sheridan’s raid
during the Civil War.”78 Additionally, the US military established concentration
camps, corralling villagers to eliminate support for Philippine resistance. The use
of torture was common. The practice of modern-day waterboarding – then
referred to as a “water-cure” – was used against Filipinos to extract
information.79 According to one estimate, approximately 22,000 Philippine
soldiers and 500,000 civilians were killed during the three-year war on Luzon
and Visayan Islands, and 100,000 Muslims in Mindanao.80 In comparison, 4,234
US soldiers died, and 2,818 were wounded.
Aguinaldo was eventually captured in March 1901. Leadership was also
divided as a group of moderate nationalists had become more amenable to
76
Miller 1982, 59; Schirmer and Shalom 1987, 10; Cortes et al. 2000, 212.
77
Abinales and Amoroso 2017, 117; Shaw and Francia 2002, 156 n20.
78
Quoted in Schirmer and Shalom 1987, 16. 79 Jones 2012, 1–2; Cortes 2000 et al., 256–259.
80
Abinales and Amoroso 2017, 117.
222 Andrew Yeo
collaborate with the Americans and form a government under a US protecto-

rate. By 1902, guerilla resistance had mostly dissipated.
It is ironic, that the United States, while waging a bloody campaign to
eliminate Philippine resistance, continuously evoked liberal ideas and princi-
ples in support of colonization. For instance, Secretary of State Elihu Root
drafted a commission to establish a civil government in the Philippines. This
commission was designed “not for our satisfaction . . . but for the happiness,
peace, and prosperity of the people of the Philippine Islands” and that “the
principles of government which they should establish and maintain in the
Philippines were those which had been made as the basis of the American
system . . . essential to the rule of law, the maintenance of individual freedom,
and the preservation of liberty and law.”81 Eventually, the administration of
Philippine affairs would fall under the jurisdiction of the US Bureau of Insular
Affairs (BIA). The BIA carried the task of administrating colonial policies
while simultaneously reconciling colonization with “American republican and
democratic traditions.”82 Although the United States eventually permitted
autonomous governance, legally speaking Philippine independence would
not happen until after World War II in 1946.
Conclusion
June 12, the date marking Aguinaldo’s declaration of independence from Spain
(and regardless of the fact that the country was (re)colonized by the United
States six months later), is still celebrated today as Independence Day in the
Philippines. It is therefore appropriate to pinpoint Philippine independence as
a significant event in Philippine history. Fueled by the transnational spread of
liberal ideas from Europe to the Philippine colony, this event marked a high
point in the Philippine movement for national independence. Unfortunately, it
was not the culmination of a two-decade-long process of national self-
determination. Nationalist mobilization and war did not produce a free and
independent Philippine republic. Although one might view US colonial rule as
the new stable equilibrium, the push for Philippine independence, albeit
through largely institutional means, persisted well into the first half of the
twentieth century.83
Beyond the Philippines, the declaration of independence and its aftermath
carries important insights for historical international relations in Asia. The
focus in this chapter has been on individual agents of change, most notably
the ilustrados and their revolutionary successors, with the latter generation
81
Quoted in Cortes et al. 2000, 247. 82 Cruz 1974, vii.
83
Philippine elites, who remained codependent on US power, navigated a long-term transition to
independence by negotiating with the United States and through legislative and electoral means.
drawing inspiration from the writings of the former. This does not imply that
other political factors and structural conditions – including political upheaval in
Spain, and US economic expansion and imperialism – were less important.
However, it highlights two important facts. First, nationalist movements often
carried an international dimension, either through the transnational spread of
ideational or material support or by virtue of being situated within the politics
of larger great power competition. Second, the anti-colonial struggle in the
Philippines was an early indicator of the challenges that would confront similar
movements of national self-determination in colonial Asia in the twentieth
century. The Indian movement against the British was already in motion during
the time of Philippine independence, but other anti-colonial struggles including
Koreans in colonial Japan and the Vietnamese in colonial Indochina (France)
would exhibit similar characteristics with the Philippine independence move-
ment. Newly emergent national elites would borrow or gravitate toward
a particular set of ideologies (i.e., republicanism, communism, Christianity,
etc.) to frame their nationalist discourse. But as the Philippine independence
movement suggests, intellect and reason (or ideational power), while effective
in mobilizing the masses, were mostly insufficient in persuading colonial
powers to relinquish their colonies.
Thus violence, if not outright war, became a common repertoire among
twentieth-century nationalist independence movements. In the West, it is
often forgotten that the first US experience with guerilla tactics and jungle
warfare against a nationalist movement in Southeast Asia took place almost
seventy years prior to the Vietnam War. Unlike Vietnam, however, the
Philippine combatants were a group of nationalists who aspired to adopt the
same liberal, republican form of self-rule as espoused by their American
colonizers. The irony of the Philippine declaration of independence and the
United States’ response should not be lost on international relations scholars,
and is therefore worth highlighting as one of twelve important events in Asian
history.
13 The Sino-Japanese War, 1894–1895
Seo-Hyun Park
Introduction
The Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895)1 is conventionally described as the “clash
of two orders,” with Qing China and Chosŏn Korea representing the old order
and Meiji Japan representing the new.2 It was the culmination of more than
a decade-old rivalry between China and Japan over the Korean peninsula. The
immediate trigger for the outbreak of violence was Chinese military intervention
in Korea in the spring of 1894. At the prodding of the Qing envoy in Hansŏng
(Seoul), Yuan Shikai, the Korean court requested military assistance from the
Qing in order to quell the peasant rebellions that had spread into a Donghak
(Eastern Learning) movement. Japan sent its own troops to Korea, claiming that
the Qing had violated the terms of the 1885 Tianjin Convention, in which the
two sides had agreed to mutually withdraw their military forces from the Korean
peninsula and to notify each other in case of any future troops dispatch.
Even after a ceasefire was brokered between the Korean government and the
rebels, and ignoring protests from the Qing and Western powers, Japanese troops
remained in Seoul. On July 17, 1894, Japan successfully negotiated and signed the
Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation, which replaced the existing
unequal treaty Japan had signed under duress. Perhaps emboldened by this newly
acquired status, the Japanese government maneuvered to install a pro-Japanese
government in Korea.3 One of the first steps taken by this new Korean government
was to expel the Beiyang (Northern) Army of Qing China from Korean territory.
Japan and China declared war against one another on August 1, 1894.
To the surprise of many observers, including many in Japan, the Japanese
forces defeated the Chinese in successive battles on land and sea, first in the
battle of Pyongyang on the Korean peninsula and the naval battle in the Yellow
Sea in September 1894. Japan continued to win battles in Port Arthur (Lushun)
in November 1894 and in Weihaiwei in February 1895. With its capital Beijing
under threat, the Qing conceded defeat and signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki
1
The Sino-Japanese War is also known as the Jiawu zhanzheng (甲午戰爭), Nissin sensō (日清戦
争), and Ch’ŏng-il jŏnjaeng (淸日戰爭) in China, Japan, and Korea respectively.
2
S. C. M. Paine 2003. 3 Mitani 2011, xiv.
224
The Sino-Japanese War, 1894–1895 225
on April 17, 1895. The terms of the treaty dictated that China recognize the
complete independence of Korea, pay Japan 200 million taels in war indem-
nities, and cede control of the Liaodong peninsula, Taiwan, and the Penghu
Islands to Japan. In addition, the Qing government opened four more treaty
ports, gave railroad concession rights to Japan, and granted unilateral extra-
territorial privileges to Japanese nationals in various industry and manufactur-
ing sectors in northeast China.
Leading explanations for the Sino-Japanese War using international relations
theory adopt some version of the “rise of Japan” narrative. The focus of these
studies is to explain the outbreak of war in 1894 as a result of the disruption in
the systemic status quo or as an early warning signal toward Japan’s expansion-
ism. In the following, I examine two distinct theoretical frameworks, which
identify as the key causes of war between Qing China and Meiji Japan:
heightened threat perceptions owing to the changing military and economic
balance of power between the two sides; and the rise of the military as an
organization in Japan. While theories of power transition or military expan-
sionism driven by pathological civil–military relations offer plausible explana-
tions for the Japanese decision to go to war, neither account fully captures the
broader strategic context of late-nineteenth-century East Asia.
First, it is important to note that the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 occurred
in an environment of prevailing institutional uncertainty and repeated failures of
negotiated outcomes both before and after the war. Much of this was owing to the
fact that East Asian governments were attempting to adjust to the breakdown of
existing diplomatic institutions while simultaneously managing the new rules of
the game in “international society.” Rather than treating the Sino-Japanese War
of 1894–1895 as a purely bilateral interstate conflict, moreover, I argue that the
war is better understood as part of a series of actual and potential diplomatic and
military crises involving not only China and Japan, but also Britain, France,
Germany, the United States, and, in particular, Russia. Finally, the significance of
the Sino-Japanese War then lies with not only its immediate outcome of establish-
ing Japan’s new status in Korea and in the region, but also its long-term
consequences for East Asian international relations – that is, intensified strategic
competition among the Western powers – and now, Japan – over not just
economic privileges in treaty ports but control over territories in East Asia.
Existing Accounts of the Sino-Japanese War Using

International Relations Theory
The Rise of Japan and Decline of China

In a recent article, Andrew Greve and Jack Levy argue that the Sino-Japanese
War was the result of Japan’s status dissatisfaction following the Meiji
226 Seo-Hyun Park
restoration and its successful modernization allowing it to reach power parity

with China.4 By extension, an arms race – then war – between China and Japan
was an inevitable outcome produced by such disruption in the existing status
quo. In a similar vein, S. C. M. Paine has referred to the Sino-Japanese War as
a pivotal turning point in which the world witnessed a “reversal in the Far
Eastern balance of power.”5 These perspectives tend to overestimate the strict
dichotomy between an “old/Asian” China versus a “new/Western” Japan. By
doing so, they reproduce the common misconception that the Sino-Japanese
War was a war waged by a strong, modern Japan against a weak, backward
China. This dichotomous portrayal is misleading on several accounts.
For starters, both Japan and China underwent significant military reforms
prior to the 1890s. In a well-documented case of Western learning and rapid
modernization, the Meiji government modeled its military after the French,
Germans, and the British in the 1870s and 1880s.6 What is less acknowledged
is the fact that under Li Hongzhang’s (1823–1901) leadership, the Beiyang
army and fleet had undergone modernizing reforms since the early 1860s,
which is a decade earlier than Japan’s military modernization. In fact, historians
have recently argued that the warships built at Jiangnan Arsenal in the 1870s
and the 1880s were among the most technologically advanced in Asia.7 Li also
hired foreign military instructors, established the Tianjin Academy for military
education in the 1880s, and sent military officers abroad for further training.8
This modernized army also tested its mettle against internal revolts in China in
the 1860s and 1870s. After 1881, Chinese forces also engaged in several battles
against France in Tonkin (Vietnam), eventually culminating in the Sino-French
War of 1884–1885.9 Photographic and pictorial evidence from journalistic
accounts of the Sino-Japanese War also appear to corroborate the view that it
was a “war that took place between two east Asian countries that had moder-
nized their armies for decades under Western influence . . .. Both Chinese and
Japanese war pictures conveyed an ordered advancement of their modern
military troops.”10
Qing China lost the war against Japan, then, not because of reasons “tech-
nical or technological – it was political.”11 While Japanese military moderniza-
tion occurred under a newly consolidated revolutionary government, the Qing
court faced greater opposition to and costs for wide-scale reforms due to the
presence of hundreds of thousands of soldiers in long-standing armies since the
seventeenth century.12 A second and related political barrier was the lack of
a cohesive war plan in China, owing to the absence of a centralized military
command. The Qing court was internally divided on how to deal with Japanese,
4 5
Greve and Levy 2018. S. C. M. Paine 2003; 2017.
6 7
Drea 2009, 23–69; Lone 2000, 5–20. Andrade 2017, 274–276; Yue 1999, 16–24.
8 9
Fröhlich 2014, 230–231. Fröhlich 2014, 216. 10 Fröhlich 2014, 234.
11
Andrade 2017, 274. 12 Andrade 2017, 275–276.
Russian, and other encroachments into the Korean peninsula. While reformists
such as Li Hongzhang sought to avoid conflict and buy time for self-
strengthening efforts, others called for active military defense against
Western and Japanese threats to Chinese interests. The Chinese armies were
spread thin, however, having been deployed for “frontier defense” in Central
Asia since 1875. But the Qing court had one notable advantage – that is, the
explicit and implicit backing of many Western powers, who had commercial
and strategic interests in China. By waging war against China, Japan risked
diplomatic isolation at best and Western intervention at worst.13
This is why, on the eve of the Sino-Japanese War, Li Hongzhang continued to
rely on diplomacy and delayed deployment of troops from his sizeable Beiyang
Fleet. The war itself was not a full-scale war between two fully mobilized
nation-states. It was a limited war, fought between the Japanese army and navy
on the one hand, and Qing China’s regional force on the other. According to one
description:
China fielded only a regional force, and officials outside the northeast were in
varying degrees either uninvolved or actively distanced themselves from the war.
Also, while Japan employed about 174,000 troops on the battlefield, roughly
60 per cent of the nearly one million Chinese soldiers were untrained conscripts.
In addition, the Chinese government did not want war and looked for the earliest
possible truce.14
In other words, domestic political factors, rather than inherent technological
advantages or a clear overwhelming economic and military power imbalance
favoring one side over the other, played critical roles in determining the
Chinese and Japanese path toward war.
The Rise of the Japanese Army and Japan’s Path Toward

Imperialism
Another dominant narrative of the Sino-Japanese War involves the rise of the
military in Japanese politics, leading the country on a path toward imperialism
and overexpansion.15 Japan’s victory in the war had the effect of elevating the
status of the military in Japanese society and led to cultural distancing from and
denigration of the Chinese in the Japanese mass media.16 From this view, the
Sino-Japanese War is the beginning of a linear path toward Japan’s increasingly
aggressive foreign policy, led by the military, that culminates in the coloniza-
tion of Taiwan, Korea, and northeast China as well as successive wars against
Western imperial powers.
13
Larsen 2008, 57–71; Andrade 2017, 285–286. 14 Lone 2000, 29.
15
Snyder 1991, 112–152; Tsuzuki 2000; Beasley 1987; Hackett 1971; Conroy 1960.
16
Dower 2008; D. Keene 1971.
228 Seo-Hyun Park
Yet, the reality was far more complicated. In the decade leading up to the
Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese military suffered from internal divisions,
opposition from civilian politicians, and the threat of military intervention
from those Western powers with economic and strategic interests in Asia. In
fact, both Qing China and Meiji Japan, despite frequent clashes over the
Korean peninsula in the 1870s and 1880s, were careful to pursue diplomatic
solutions, eventually culminating in the Tianjin Convention of 1885.
It is also important to note that during the war itself, the Japanese army
showed limited aims. The Japanese army lacked sufficient planning for not
only the type of war that was to be fought on the Asian continent but also the
settlement of the war in its aftermath. Even with a more centralized organiza-
tion, compared to the Qing, the Japanese army showed a lack of preparedness,
evident in its hiring of 153,000 civilian contractors, laborers, rickshaw men,
and coolies to sustain its war machine; long delays in supply lines because of
poor quality maps and lack of knowledge of terrain; soldiers, desperate for
food, being forced to forage and steal; and epidemic outbreaks and a shortage of
field hospitals, military doctors, and even opiates.17 Yamagata Aritomo, com-
mander of the First Army during the war, reportedly declared just prior to the
outbreak of hostilities that Japan’s chance of victory was “too small.”18 When
Yamagata was unexpectedly recalled to Tokyo in December 1894, a division of
Japanese soldiers was left stranded without food and adequate winter clothing
in Haicheng (in northeast China), surrounded by 20,000 Chinese forces.
Japan’s overall military successes were in spite of this lack of, rather than
because of, a coordinated war effort by the Japanese military.
Even while engaging in coercive diplomacy, Japanese leaders were careful to
signal limited expansionist aims in China – particularly to Western diplomats in
the region. The Japanese army and Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi deliberately
avoided a strategy of a direct assault against Beijing and rather opted to
gradually move northward up the Korean peninsula, and later, to open
a second front in Taiwan (even further away from Beijing) as a hedge.19 In
other words, we should not overstate the significance of Japanese participation
in the Sino-Japanese War in support of the view that military modernization led
to an unfettered and inevitable path toward imperialism. While it is important to
note that the military gained newfound status and support within Japanese
politics following its unexpected victory over the Beiyang Fleet, what the
military wanted before, during, and after the war was not that much different
from their civilian counterparts. In the decades surrounding the Sino-Japanese
War, Japanese leaders were united in their quest for overturning the unequal
treaties they had signed with Western powers and establishing themselves as
economically and militarily competitive Westphalian sovereign states.
17 18 19
Drea 2009, 84–85. Lone 2000, 28. Lone 2000, 36–39; Mitani 2011, xiv–xv.
The “rise of Japan” narratives of the Sino-Japanese War overlook the broader
underlying causal context of the war. Nor do they capture the true significance
of the war in terms of the enormous transformations it necessitated in East
Asian international relations. Focusing exclusively on either the Sino-Japanese
competition for regional hegemony or Japanese military modernization
assumes that bilateral diplomatic conflict and domestic institutional priorities
were developing in a vacuum. Both of these explanations leave out or under-
emphasize an entire contingent of important characters and conditions – that is,
the Western powers and imperial competition within the region. As Yamagata
Aritomo remarked, in 1893, on the eve of war against China, “Neither China
nor Korea is our enemy: it is Britain, France, Russia.”20 Japanese, Chinese, and
Korean foreign policies before, during, and after the Sino-Japanese War were
the result of their shifting views of the West and one another at the level of
domestic and regional politics. The Sino-Japanese War did not end “tradi-
tional” East Asia; it was already transitioning via extraterritoriality in treaty
ports, foreign missionaries, and internal rebellion. Thus, by the 1890s, and
especially after 1895, the region was no longer a contained system, but rather
“open.”21
Why Did War Erupt in 1894?

In order to understand the underlying and immediate causes of the Sino-
Japanese War, we need to first and foremost recognize the fact that it was not
an isolated incident in late-nineteenth-century East Asia. It came on the heels of
numerous diplomatic and/or militarized crises, big and small, and was also
followed by a series of bilateral and multilateral conflict. Here, I identify two
major causes of prolonged conflict in the East Asian region in the nineteenth
century: the uncertainty of rules within an institutional and strategic environ-
ment of legal pluralism; and the presence of multiple strategic competitors who
were bilaterally and multilaterally rewriting the rules of the game. First, Japan
and China both began to recognize that their future strategic interests would be
affected by their respective position in Korea and their externally recognized
status in the regional and international order. Second, Japan and China were not
only competing with one another, but against Western powers, who simulta-
neously had a stake in maintaining the existing treaty port system but did not
want to risk costly military action. War became a more viable option by 1894,
when it became clear that Japanese merchants continued to be shut out of
Chinese-dominated Korean treaty ports, even after a bilateral agreement in
1885 stating Japanese and Chinese commitment to recognizing Korea’s status
as an independent nation. The Donghak rebellion, to the Japanese leaders, was
20 21
Lone 1994, 25. Katzenstein and Shiraishi 1997; Osterhammel 1986.
230 Seo-Hyun Park
further evidence of domestic instability in Korea inviting Chinese and Russian

intervention – and likely irrevocable loss of Japan’s influence on the Korean
peninsula.
Breakdown of Legal Pluralism

According to rationalist theories of war, wars result from uncertainty about
one another’s future intentions (i.e., lack of information) or perceived costs of
early concessions, especially if they can negatively affect a country’s future
bargaining position or lock in permanent advantages (i.e., commitment
problems).22 The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War was not simply
a breakdown of bargaining between two adversaries under conditions of
rapidly shifting military power, but involved multiple, more powerful coun-
tries who could affect their future bargaining power. A prewar concession
would have affected not only their economic and strategic interests in Korea,
but their ability to deal with Western powers. This was especially detrimental
to Japan, whose two major foreign policy goals at the time were to overturn
the unequal treaties it had signed with the West and to check the southern
advancement of Russia. Thus, for the Japanese, codifying the “independent”
status of Korea, both to protect Japan’s economic and strategic interests
against Chinese dominance and to prevent the further spread of economic
imperialism via a Western-led multilateral treaty port system, was critical to
any negotiated outcomes.
Defining and declaring sovereign independence, however, was complicated
by Japan’s and Korea’s ambiguous status within the treaty port system that had
been established since the Opium Wars. Whereas China had largely been able to
manage and contain the influence of Western powers within its treaty ports, Japan
adopted a different course of domestic legal reforms in the hopes of convincing
Western treaty powers to abolish extraterritoriality and consular jurisdiction in
Japan.23 In the decades leading up to the 1894–1895 war, however, “the legally
pluralistic Qing Empire clashed with the increasingly centralistic Japanese state,
which had abolished most remnants of government-sanctioned legal pluralism
and tolerated little or no foreign interference in its legal system, even when only
foreigners were concerned.”24 For almost thirty years, the Chinese and Japanese
had been involved in complex extraterritorial disputes, until “the Treaty of
Shimonoseki marked the shift from a bilateral to a unilateral extraterritorial
regime, which made it possible for Japan to join the ranks of the Western treaty
powers. Now the Japanese were . . . able to share all the privileges the other treaty
powers had gained through the most-favored-nation arrangements.”25
22
Fearon 1995; Powell 2006. I thank Scott Wolford for suggesting this framing.
23
Kayaoglu 2010, 100–101. 24 Cassel 2012, 149–150. 25 Cassel 2012, 160.
Leading up to the war, Japan and China continued to battle over extraterri-
toriality and the uncertain rules of the game. As Pär Cassel notes, extraterri-
toriality itself was “a practice, which evolved and took shape in contact with
a legally pluralistic environment.” The administration and enforcement of
foreign jurisdiction continued to be contested in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries in a “context of competing institutions and legal orders.”26
Crucial in this new transitional environment was the performance of competing
rules in front of Western audiences. In the 1880s, Qing China began unprece-
dented interventions into Korean politics and aggressively enforced the ritual
protocols expected of a tributary state, including demands of a public display of
fealty to the Qing court by the Korean king. In spring 1890, following the death
of the Great Queen Dowager Cho, the Qing court insisted that the Chosŏn king
publicly perform the kyoyŏng rite in which he would greet the Qing embassy
outside the walls of Seoul and kowtow to the imperial letter of condolence.27
Legal pluralism, moreover, allowed convenient and varied interpretations of
diplomatic agreements, further frustrating Japanese leaders and causing them
to abandon negotiations with Qing representatives in 1894. It should be noted
that the Sino-Japanese War was not the first time Japan had tried to negotiate an
acceptable outcome with the Chinese. The Treaty of Ganghwa (1876) to open
Korea had been mediated by the Chinese, and Japan and China had attempted to
avoid military escalation over Korea in 1882, 1884, and finally in the 1885
Tianjin Convention. But the Japanese grew increasingly frustrated and skep-
tical of these agreements. In the Imo military revolt of 1882, members of the
traditional Korean army, demanding fair pay and opportunities as in the
Japanese-trained army, attacked the Royal Palace and the Japanese legation.
The Chinese sent 4,500 soldiers to Korea, and the Japanese responded with four
warships and a battalion of armed soldiers. At the insistence of Japan, an
agreement was reached with the signing of the Jemulpo (Incheon) Treaty on
August 30, 1882, stipulating that Korea pay war reparations to Japan, consent
to the deployment of Japanese troops to protect their legation in Seoul, and
dispatch an apology mission to Tokyo. But the Japanese learned, to their
dismay, that the Chinese also signed a trade agreement with Korea in 1882,
leading to a rapid increase in the number of Chinese merchants and the volume
of trade between the two countries.28
A coup led by mostly Japanese-educated (or inspired) Korean reformers in
December 1884 led to another round of military clashes between Japan and
China. The coup was short-lived, and the coup leaders were executed or exiled.
Conservatives in the Korean court soon returned to power with the assistance of
the new Chinese resident-general Yuan Shikai, and his 1,500 Chinese troops,
26
Cassel 2012, 8. 27 Van Lieu 2009, 84–85.
28
Hamashita 2001, 72–77; Joo 2011, 125–131; Larsen 2008, 68–70.
232 Seo-Hyun Park
sent to Korea by Li Hongzhang. On April 18, 1885, Li and Itō Hirobumi met in
Tianjin to sign an agreement, whereby both sides promised to pull their
expeditionary forces out of Korea in four months; King Kojong of Korea
would be advised to hire military instructors from a third party (neither
Japanese nor Chinese); and neither country would send troops to Korea without
prior notification of the other. For the Japanese, this was an attempt to diminish
China’s exclusive influence over Korea, but the Chinese continued to increase
their economic and political influence over Korea, with the appointment of
Yuan Shikai as resident-general of Korean affairs (1885–1894).29
By 1894, Japan recognized the fragility of the 1885 Tianjin Convention and
also its inability to deter Chinese attempts at gaining influence in Korea. As
stated previously, negotiations between Japan and China were complicated
even further by the fact that they were operating in different institutional
environments: China as a firmly entrenched and privileged actor in the treaty
port system; Japan navigating its precarious position as a disadvantaged new-
comer to the rapidly expanding system of nation-states. Unlike the other
Western powers, Japanese commercial and strategic interests were incompa-
tible with the old order, in which China and the Western powers had vested
interests. As a latecomer to the preexisting environment of legal pluralism,
Japan was confronted at once with Chinese defense and utilization of dualistic
legal interpretations and Western reluctance to treat Japan as an equal nation-
state. In 1894, Japan was not only responding to a militarily weak China, but
participating as a newly created modern nation-state in the international
system.
Russia on Their Minds

Japan and China were not the only two external powers interested in expanding
their influence on the Korean peninsula. Japan was increasingly fearful of
a Russian invasion of Korea and did not believe China could protect its former
tributary state.30 Pro-Russian reformers emerged in Korean politics as well,
some of whom were disappointed with the lack of Japanese support for
previous reform attempts. Others were suspicious of Japanese intentions in
Korea and sought Russia (and the United States) as potential allies in counter-
balancing Japan and China. Korean neutrality proposals had been floated by
various representatives and foreign policy advisors from France, Germany,
Russia, Britain, and to a lesser extent the United States, since 1882.31
The threat of Russia loomed large in Japanese strategic thinking, especially
with the commencement of the building of the Trans-Siberian Railway (1891–
1897). Russia was identified as a long-term threat, and Korea was identified as
29 30 31
Conroy 1960, 154–156; Beasley 2000. Jin 2016, 43–44. Jin 2016, 128–131.
a likely battleground.32 What differentiated Russia from the other Western

powers was their geographical proximity to Japan. Russian plans for construct-
ing a Trans-Siberian Railway added urgency to existing Japanese security
concerns about checking Russian power in Korea and in northeast China.
From Japan’s perspective, any concessions to China in 1894 could mean
additional opportunities for Russia to exploit its already increasing influence
over Korea and Manchuria as well as the expansion of Chinese dominance over
Korea.
From the Russian perspective, Korea was useful as a balancing mechanism
against Japan. The Russian government provided military instructors to the
Korean court in exchange for the lease of Port Lazarev (Yŏnghǔng, near
Wŏnsan). In response, the British occupied Port Hamilton (Kŏmundo) near
the southern coast of Korea. Ernest Satow, the British envoy to Japan (1895–
1900) and China (1900–1906), stated: “Whatever the ostensible reason for
going to war with China may have been, there can be little doubt that the main
object was to anticipate the completion of the Siberian Railway and to prevent
Russia’s gaining free access to the Pacific Ocean.”33
The significance of the Sino-Japanese War lies in more than its utility as
a case study in specific theories of conflict and war. It was in many ways
symptomatic of the distress and crisis that had built up in the existing regional
order and led to enormous consequences for institutional change in the
domestic and international systems, the politics of nation-state-building,
and state socialization.34 In the next section, I illustrate how one of the
most important consequences of the Sino-Japanese War is ironically that it
does not end conflict. Indeed, repeated crises (domestic and international),
attempts at crisis management via alliances, treaties, and diplomacy, and
breakdown of agreements intensified existing rivalries and escalated military
confrontation. Such uncertainty and institutional disruption heightened
domestic perceptions of threat throughout East Asia and shifted the domestic
political environment as well as shaping the possible courses of action for
leaders.35
32
Auslin 2005, 17–19. 33 Giffard 1994, 17.
34
Buzan and Lawson 2015; Duara 1999; Zarakol 2011.
35
Ja Ian Chong and Todd H. Hall (2014, 9) similarly highlight the role of systemic and domestic
political pressures in a period of repeated crises and uncertainty. Contesting the often assumed
parallels between the German–Anglo rivalry prior to World War I and the contemporary China–
US relationship, they write: “World War I is not just an instance of war between a rising power
and an established one; it is also an example of how great power relations can break down in an
era of dense and dynamic political, strategic, and economic ties. Examining specific sources of
strain and fragility in that system can help to identify the potential hazards that may emerge in
coming years.” Specifically, Chong and Hall “highlight three major complications that con-
tributed to the outbreak of World War I: security commitments, domestic political pressures, and
repeated crises.”
234 Seo-Hyun Park
Consequences of the Sino-Japanese War
China Strikes Back, and So Do Others

In 1895, Japan did not immediately “usurp” China as leader of Asia or rebalance
the regional order. Rather, a period of power vacuum and open competition for
spheres of influence commenced as the “perception of Chinese weakness led to
far more aggressive intrusions by the foreign powers in China.”36 The Japanese
military expanded, but so did China’s, Russia’s and those of other major powers.
Japan became the nth player, not the only or even the most powerful player, in the
new regional arms race and military competition.
Western imperialism began in earnest after 1895. Japan’s arrival at the scene
added urgency and accelerated military competition among the Western powers
in northeast China and Korea. Edward J. Drea writes:
Japan’s victory had exposed China’s military weakness, which the western powers
were quick to exploit, placing the empire in danger of dismemberment. In
January 1898 Germany secured a ninety-nine-year lease on the Shandong Peninsula
as a settlement for the murder of two German missionaries. Two months later Russia
negotiated a long-term agreement with the Chinese court for a leasehold on the
Liaodong Peninsula between Dairen and Port Arthur (where Russian warships had
been anchored since the previous December). Great Britain reacted by extracting
concessions in April for a naval base at Weihaiwei. France carved out a sphere of
influence in southern China, and Japan sought railroad concessions in Fujian opposite
its Taiwan colony.37
Despite efforts to assuage the suspicions and fears of Western powers,

Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War alarmed those seeking influence in
China. In what is referred to as the Triple (or Tripartite) Intervention, Russia,
France, and Germany forced Japan to back off some of its war gains – speci-
fically, to return the Liaodong peninsula to China – six days after the signing of
the Treaty of Shimonoseki to end the war.38 Such Western intervention in the
settlement of the war between Qing China and Japan led to a significant
increase in Japanese perception of threat. It “shocked the Japanese public,
who were still elated by the outcome of the war, and made it painfully clear
that Japan, though a regional power to be reckoned with, remained at the mercy
of the West.”39
Following the Sino-Japanese War, Japan continued to accommodate Western
powers and avoid confrontation with China and Russia in Korea. At various
times, Japan considered allying with the Qing, Britain, and Russia. In addition,
Japan helped train and modernize the Chinese army after 1897, while avoiding
too close of an “alliance” with China and backing down on diplomatic conflict
36 37 38
S. C. M. Paine 2003, 4. Drea 2009, 97. S. C. M. Paine 2003, 304–306.
39
Drea 2009, 90.
over Japanese immigration to Hawaii for fear of Western military intervention.

Even as the Japanese army and navy continued to expand throughout the next
decade, as they sought to increase their influence in Korea and Taiwan,
Japanese leaders initially stayed the course on their diplomacy-first strategy
of accommodating the Western powers and remained cautious of provoking
them – in particular, Russia and Britain. During Japan’s participation in the
multinational military intervention in China during the Boxer rebellion (1900),
and leading up to the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), the priority of
Japanese leaders was to continue to signal nonrevisionist intentions and to
avoid diplomatic isolation.40
At the same time, Japan continued to expand its military and security
apparatus (both domestic and overseas) as it occupied Taiwan and extended
its influence in Korea. As Japan monitored and shied away from confronta-
tion with Western powers, it continued to engage in military campaigns,
with the help of intermediaries and other nonstate actors such as legal
advisors, mercenaries, bandits, and local chieftains, against indigenous
peoples and other islanders in Taiwan and rural insurgents in Korea.41
Between 1895 and 1902, Japan was involved in a military campaign to
subjugate Taiwan. Even though Li Hongzhang had ordered Chinese forces
in Taiwan not to resist, local guerrilla groups continued to fight against the
Japanese occupiers. In fact, the number of Japanese casualties in Taiwan
during this period, estimated at 8,322, was only slightly less than that in the
1894–1895 war.42
Japan also continued to confront Russian influence in Korea and Manchuria.
While even key military leaders, such as Yamagata Aritomo, had supported
diplomatic solutions on Korea prior to the Sino-Japanese War, the Triple
Intervention and increasing hostility toward Japanese intervention in Korean
politics led to heavy-handed tactics on the part of the Japanese, including the
murder of the Korean queen by Japanese assassins in October 1895. As a result,
King Kojong fled from his palace to the Russian legation, which led to the
increasing influence of Russia at the expense of the Japanese, an outcome the
latter had precisely tried to prevent by going to war against the Chinese in
1894–1895.
Subsequently, in its bid to secure territorial spheres of influence rather than
protecting commercial activities, Japan formed an alliance with Britain (1902),
entered into the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), made Korea its protectorate
after defeating the Russians in 1905, and eventually annexed Korea (1910). As
Kirk W. Larsen argues, “a Westphalian order of sovereign and equal nation-
states” in nineteenth-century East Asia was a fiction,43
40
Lone 2000, 41–87; Drea 2009, 92–100. 41 Barclay 2018; Uchida 2014.
42
Tsuzuki 2000, 131. 43 Larsen 2013, 250.
236 Seo-Hyun Park
The reality was that, like most nations of the time, Korea was being ushered into an
international order of imperialism . . .. Despite all the talk of treaties, legations, and
the family of nations, the new powers with which Korea was engaging were not
interested in supporting Korean independence. Rather, they sought either equal
access to the unequal privileges of informal imperialism or the more direct exclu-
sive assertion of special privilege, up to and including the formal direct annexation
of Korean territory.44
The Global Status Hierarchy and Imperial Nationalism

in East Asia
A key consequence of Japan’s victory in the Sino-Japanese War was that it
became a stakeholder in the Westphalian territorial model of organizing
nation-states. Japan was able to renegotiate its unequal treaties, and gained
international prestige and standing. Yet, the Triple Intervention also con-
firmed the existence of a global status hierarchy, and Japan’s (and East
Asia’s) place in it. And this global hierarchy had military, legal, economic,
and racial dimensions.45 With the spread of social Darwinist thought, further-
more, to East Asian international relations, “Japanese leaders often felt
compelled by geostrategic considerations to extend or consolidate territorial
sovereignty in order to protect Japan’s flanks, under time pressure and with
finite resources.”46
During the Sino-Japanese War, both Japan and China engaged in the battle
over “civilization” – with the dual aim of demonstrating advanced culture and
power to external (Western) observers and of mobilizing popular support for
the purpose of internal state-building. For example, Japanese leaders were not
only determined to showcase the military efficiency and discipline of their
army during the Sino-Japanese War, but also to impress upon Western obser-
vers their advanced “civilization.”47 Japanese wartime propaganda, photos,
and illustrated magazines all emphasized the modernity of Japanese ships
and uniforms as well as their civilized behavior. Recent research shows that
a common theme in pictures of the Sino-Japanese War are “[c]oncepts of
44
Larsen 2013, 250.
45
Buzan and Lawson 2015; Shimazu 1998, 95–96; E. Keene 2014. On the role of race in interstate
conflict and cooperation – specifically, in threat perceptions and propensity toward militarized
conflict against “others,” see Búzás 2013, 583. He argues: “Racial difference predisposes state
toward discord, but it does not make interracial cooperation impossible. When more than two
racially different agents interact, one is more likely to cooperate with the less threatening racial
other . . .. Although racial difference did not prevent the German–Japanese alliance, it caused
friction between the allies, decreased popular support for the alliance, and contributed to making
it a ‘hollow alliance’ that involved little cooperation.”
46
Social Darwinism was prevalent among groups of journalists in the late nineteenth century and
motivated military and political decisions big and small, including war and imperialism.
J. I. Chong and Hall 2014, 16–17; Ringmar 2006; Price 2004; Barclay 2018, 17.
47
Lone 2000, 30.
international law, including the conclusion of war treaties or the idea of the
humanitarian treatment of the wounded that spread globally following the
agreement of the Geneva Convention in 1864.”48 A recurring motif is
the friendly care of Japanese soldiers toward Chinese children, and a number
of publications emphasized Japan’s respect for international law throughout
their war against China.49
Yet, fiscal constraints continued to plague the military after 1895. So did
internal dissent within the Japanese military (between the army and navy, and
within the army) and discord between the army and the civilian leadership.50
Even as domestic threat perceptions heightened in Japan in the late nineteenth
century, the preferences of the Japanese military or government were rarely
unified nor fixed.51 They varied according to the domestic and international
political context; “a national consensus on how to deal with a usually hostile
and always chaotic international environment was never sustained and only
very rarely achieved since 1853.”52
While there might not have been a clear consensus on strategic direction
either among military or political leaders around the time of the Sino-Japanese
War, winning the war in 1895 created certain opportunities and constraints for
various positions on the future of Japanese foreign policy. For example, anti-
Russian sentiments increased in the Japanese Diet and among the public,
especially after the Triple Intervention, and emboldened those who sought
more aggressive measures in Korea.53 At the same time, victory in war added
legitimacy to Japan’s state-building efforts and helped to create a mobilized
national citizenry.54 In particular, the war vindicated the rapid Westernizing
reforms undertaken by the Meiji government because it delivered two tangible
outcomes for the Japanese public to see: treaty revision and military victory.
Despite the enormous public pressure to do otherwise, the government had long
eschewed foreign conflicts so that Japan could proceed with necessary domestic
reforms. Success in war gave value to the years of patient nation-building . . ..
48
Frölich 2014, 242. 49 Frölich 2014, 243–247; Howland 2008; Howland 2007.
50
Mitani 2011, xvi–xvii.
51
Steven Ward (2013, 631–637) argues that it is after 1931 that perceptions of status immobility in
a Western-dominated racial and status hierarchy drive Japan toward increasing revisionism via
two mechanisms: rise of ultranationalist and militarist groups and the shifting political (and
rhetorical) balance of power in the favor of revisionism away from the moderates who were
unable to legitimate staying the course following the League of Nations’s open condemnation of
the Mukden incident.
52
Barnhart 1995, 2. 53 Duus 1995, 120; S. C. M. Paine 2003, 315–316.
54
In China as well, the Sino-Japanese War helped nation-building efforts. There was a sense of
optimism within Chinese society due to the reporting of the Self-Strengthening movement and
advancements in railways, telegraph, and steamships. While most Chinese-language news-
papers were foreign-owned in the second half of the nineteenth century, after the Sino-Japanese
War “groups of Chinese intellectuals, shocked by China’s defeat, started to set up their own
newspapers to promote their new ideas for China” (W. Tsai 2014, 150–151).
238 Seo-Hyun Park
Although the war did not completely overcome divisions within the government, the
national unity created by shared foreign policy goals during the hostilities had helped to
ease the split. After the war, cabinet ministers were more inclined to create meaningful
alliances with political parties, while the latter muted some of their criticism of the
cabinet and supported arms appropriations.55
As J. Samuel Barkin and Bruce Cronin argue, the “distinguishing feature of

modern nationalism is the claim that nations should be politically self-
determining and that group sentiment (national solidarity) should serve as the
sole criterion in defining the nation. The nation-state is accordingly legitimated
to the extent that it represents the political aspirations of a particular nation.”56
While both Japanese and Western historiography tends to take for granted the
creation of a strong, unified nation-state immediately following the Meiji
restoration, both Sheldon Garon and Naoko Shimazu show how state power
and national unity was not automatically created via a top-down state-building
process but rather negotiated between the central government and diverse
societal interests.57 Conscription, war commemoration, and war monuments
between 1894 and 1945 helped create a national citizenry in Japan.
55
S. C. M. Paine 2003, 298. 56 Barkin and Cronin 1994, 111.
57
S. C. M. Paine 2003; Nish 1985; Garon 1997, and Shimazu 2009.
14 The Death of Eastphalia, 1874
Saeyoung Park
Few have interrogated the seeming inevitability of the Westphalian or modern

system of international relations.1 This is a puzzling research gap as the
architecture of international relations that became globalized at the turn of
the twentieth century constrains the range of international relations encounters,
processes, and policy options possible today. The particular contours of our
international relations system powerfully shape the “rules of the game,”
thereby limiting the possible choices from which we choose our futures.
Hence, “uncovering the processes by which the international order had been
formed in the past” is an “indispensable tool for reforming it in the future”
(Armitage and Pitts 2017, 2). Undoubtedly, the question of Westphalian ori-
gins, of how our modern system of international relations became a naturalized
reality is one of central importance.2
The starting point of enquiry for this project is to question our Westphalian
reality historically. It locates the birth of the modern international relations
system in the death and erasure of its last viable alternative – the East Asian
tributary system, which I call Eastphalia.3 In order to better understand the
nineteenth-century systemic shift from the so-called East Asian tributary sys-
tem (Fairbank 1968; Wills 1984; D. C. Kang 2010) to a Westphalian interna-
tional system (Krasner 2001; Beaulac 2004; Hinsley 1986; Schmidt 2011), this
1
In this chapter, East Asian name order is: last name, first name. The chronology of Chosŏn Korea
(1396–1910) can be divided into Chosŏn 1396–1897, Great Han empire 1897–1910.
2
On normalization and how standardization limits and defines what is legible, normative, or
aberrant thereby serving as a source of research error, see Foucault 1995; Lampland and Star
2009.
3
The Westphalian international system is a construct as much as the “tribute system,” “moder-
nity,” “the Sinocentered world order,” “tradition.” As a category of analysis, these concepts
possess histories to which we should be attentive. To the frequent enquiry of “why that matters”:
historiographical checks ensure that your variable is not “plural in singular disguise.” While
acknowledging their problematic nature, I use these constructions – “Westphalia” or
“Eastphalia” – my preferred tongue-in-cheek term for the pre-1870 East Asian int’l system
sometimes referred to as the E. Asian tribute system. Neither term refers to the Westphalia and
Eastphalia extant in Germany today. Scholarship on Westphalia is substantive. Stéphan Beaulac
(2000, 162; 2004) argues that crediting Westphalia “for the birth of our state system” is “a mere
legal reification.”
239
240 Saeyoung Park
chapter examines a case plucked from the leading edge of this transformation:
the 1875 Un’yō crisis between Japan and Korea.
In 1875, the Japanese ship Un’yō fired upon Chosŏn Korean shore batteries
and destroyed a fort at Yŏngjong. Seen as historically insignificant, whatever
importance this incident holds arises from its classification as an instance of
“gunboat diplomacy” that led to the 1876 Kanghwa Treaty – otherwise known
as the first unequal treaty exercised by Japan.4 After this moment, no East
Asian country could claim to lie outside of a Western-derived system of
international relations with its accompanying conceits and sociolegal proto-
cols. The Un’yō clash takes place at a time of epistemological confusion and
flux in regional relations. The terminology of international relations such as
“unequal treaty,” as well as protocols governing the identification of ships,
registration of naval markings, in other words, the conceptual and bureaucratic
protocol that serves as the architecture of contemporary international relations –
this was just coming into being in this part of the world.5 In fact, what
twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars often miss is that small, relatively
unknown encounters like the Un’yō constitute the moments of productive
friction that generated the meaning of categories such as sovereignty and
dependency, thereby creating consensus on the sociolegal markers that would
later demarcate international relations status (e.g., “independence”). As I see it,
the Un’yō case is one of many intellectual “pivots” – recalibrations through
which both Japan and Korea exercise agency, determining the direction of what
we may call the transition to the Westphalian system. Empires make them-
selves felt through systems of knowledge, protocols, and paperwork that are not
built overnight. They also have to learn how to exercise power.
Like many other systemic changes, East Asia’s induction into the
Westphalian international relations is most legible retrospectively. The kind
of “systems encounter” of interest to this article comprises a collision between
two constitutive sets of interlinked conceptual and legal regimes, institutional
apparatuses, and bureaucratic protocol.6 Often moving at a glacial pace, such
systemic changes are not easily visible to a human eye in the midst of unfolding
4
Japanese attempts to secure extraterritorial privileges with the 1871 Sino-Japan Regulations of
Amity (中日修好條規) were unsuccessful (Cassel 2011, 103–7; Zachmann 2009, 14) and their
first favorable unequal treaty is the 1876 Japan–Korea Regulations of Amity (日朝修好條規,
also: Treaty of Kanghwa). By 1871, Japan was party to sixteen unfavorable treaties (Auslin 2004,
211). Gunboat diplomacy, “unequal treaty” – these terms are not and were not distinct theoretical
typologies. By their legal nature, contestation is inherent to a treaty and so “unequal treaty”
describes an outcome, not a separate technique of power.
5
On nineteenth-century changes in migration bureaucracy, passports, and border controls, see
McKeown 2011.
6
Several complementary approaches exist. Mark Ravina offers a “world cultures” framework
against the simplistic rubric of Westernization vs. Easternization (Ravina 2005; 2017). Seo-Hyun
Park’s exploration of the “changing definitions of sovereignty” in Korean–Japanese relations (S.-
H. Park 2013) is helpful.
The Death of Eastphalia, 1874 241
events, partly because our capacities for observation are not calibrated to
appreciate changes that occur at such speeds – no more than we can notice
the sun aging. As such, the presence of systemic change is most visible through
a longue durée lens and within the historical record as moments of surprise and
irritation, or in complaints about disappointing or nonsensical behavior, or in
a counterparty’s failure to meet diplomatic expectations formed by centuries of
precedent and history. So, against scholarly precedent in brushing off late-
nineteenth-century East Asian complaints of aberrant Japanese international
conduct as the “traditional” Korean love of etiquette or as Chinese critiques of
a new “modern” Japan, I consider these frustrated instances of misrecognition
as the fricative encounter of two different systems of knowledge and power
(Tsing 2005). I have specifically chosen a confrontation between two East
Asian neighbors with a long history of relations, rather than one between an
Eastern and a Western entity, in order to reveal the Westphalian transition as
a systemic harmonization. Such an approach not only rejects a triumphant
modernist narrative of the so-called West and Western values over the East or
a historically ignorant one where maritime militarization produced an over-
whelming “Western dominance” as “vast, ancient, and previously isolated
civilizations came into regular contact with the rest of the world” (Sharman
2019, 2).
We do not and will never know exactly when Eastphalia died, but the
moment of its demise loosely mirrors the modern–premodern divide that
governs the professional knowledge of East Asia – as well as the transition
from states to nation-states in the region. Dating the induction into Westphalia
is inevitably fraught as dates are poor instruments to mark historical realities
that are processes and not moments. Students of this region are already familiar
with conventional, simplistic “before and after” makeover snapshots of the
nineteenth-century transformation of East Asia: the before is associated with
the plight of “traditional” empires and kingdoms facing imperial (Western)
aggression, the after with the rise of nationalism, nation-states, scientific
education, gender liberation, republicanism, and the familiar trappings of
what we may consider to be the modern world, or more truthfully, the world
that we live in. Whatever this date may be, the induction into Westphalia marks
a critical stage of global convergence that drew East Asia firmly into the
universe that we live in now, one governed by Westphalian norms and proce-
dures. This article casually dates this moment as 1875 with the Un’yō incident.
Although any nineteenth-century date after the First Opium War could
probably do just as ably, I have chosen 1875 because of the visible sociolegal
markers that evidence this change, and also because I see the Westphalian
transformation as one that occurs most materially at the level of procedure,
bureaucracy, protocol, and paperwork. After the Un’yō incident, there were no
remaining East Asian countries that continued to resist contractual treaties,
242 Saeyoung Park
ambassadorial and consular exchanges, or in other words, the apparatus of

international diplomacy that constitutes an imperial arsenal of domination. For
the Westphalian transformation was indeed, and most clearly, an imperial one,7
where the law, and not the gunboat, deserves the most credit for imperial
successes.8 When British warships departed after the First Opium War, in
their place stood no massive occupying force, but an occupying regime of
law. It would be through new legal renegotiations that imperial Japan would
finally liberate itself from its own unequal treaties (Auslin, 2004).
Another reason to study Japan’s role in the death of the tributary system is to
highlight its role in mediating and translating Eastphalia to the West – and by
extension, to modern scholars. Much of what the West learned about the East,
and of what constitutes the first phase of Western professional knowledge about
East Asia, is heavily derived from Japanese sources and perspectives.9 A close
reading of the Un’yō talks reveals how Japanese diplomats quietly and persis-
tently collected information, asking questions shaped by new Westphalian
metrics – questions that puzzled and made little sense to Koreans or Chinese
at the time, but that would ultimately lead to ill-fitting but powerful reevalua-
tions of tribute relations within an entirely different system. Regardless of
centuries of real sovereign history and power, many East Asian counterparties
in this exercise found their sovereignty rewritten, and were faced with the need
to defend authority on terms that they had previously never had to meet.
This chapter first describes the Un’yō incident, before examining the discus-
sions between Korea and Japan in the following year, which concluded with the
1876 Treaty of Kanghwa. These fricative diplomatic encounters with their
moments of frustration, miscommunication, and puzzlement illustrate the
banal and quiet ways in which worlds of meaning are built and destroyed.
7
The meanings of empire are historically specific. Qing China was a different empire from
eighteenth- to nineteenth-century Britain. Decontextualized definitions of imperialism as mere
predatory expansionism is sloppy, allowing one to draw false equivalences between imperial
Rome, imperial Tang, and imperial Britain without considering their distinctive logics of empire.
Social Darwinistic ideas of national-cum-racial competition buttress nineteenth-century Western
empires (Burton 2003, 1–26; 2015). The politics of difference in late imperial China lack zero-
sum hierarchies of race/ethnicity. Anthony Pagden offers a useful differentiation of empire
(Pagden 1995).
8
“Law” serves as shorthand for a “regime of law,” meaning the discourses, norms, statutes,
institutional, state, and private practices that evince and materialize the “law” (Ruskola 2013;
Cassel 2011). Sensitive to the circumscribing power of new ideas and protocols, sociolegal
methodology is useful in tracking epistemological changes into new ontological realities.
Further, as a mediating arena between theory and social reality, the law is the filter through
which almost all legitimate modern state violence must first proceed, whether we speak of
memos that pave the way for torture, of the dispossession of peoples, or of the forcible remaking
of states.
9
On the enduring influence of Japanese-language scholarship and Naito Konan (Kyoto school),
see Fogel 1984, on Shiratori Kurakichi’s (Tokyo school) influence on Korean history, see Pai
2000.
Inevitability and the Un’yō Incident

What little historians have written about the Un’yō incident of 1875 can be
summed up in a few sentences.10 In September, the Japanese warship Un’yō
(雲揚) commanded by Inoue Yoshika set sail for Chosŏn Korea ostensibly to
survey the coastline from the southwest of the peninsula to the Gulf of
Liaodong.11 As far as we know, the Korean authorities were not notified of
the Un’yō’s mission. Japanese sources suggest that the Un’yō anchored near the
southern portion of Kanghwa Island at the mouth of the Han River, which cuts
through Seoul. A small boat flying a Japanese flag proceeded from the Un’yō
toward the coast in search of fresh water. Chosŏn shore batteries fired upon the
unknown vessel. The Un’yō then destroyed the Korean batteries then retreated.
Another small boat was lowered with about thirty soldiers, which landed on
a small island south of Kanghwa called Yŏngjong. A skirmish ensued, resulting
in thirty-five Korean casualties. The Japanese forces looted and set fire to the
town. Afterwards, the Un’yō returned to Japan.12
The Korean accounts generally agree with the details in the previous para-
graph except for a few key differences. From their perspective, Kanghwa Island
had always been a strategically sensitive place, as it stood between the capital
and maritime visitors as the “gate to the sea” (haemun).13 For much of Chosŏn
history, there had been a military presence at Kanghwa as it was one of several
known safe havens for Korean monarchs in the case of crisis.14 The yellow flag
flown by the smaller vessel from the Un’yō was not recognized as a national or
Japanese identificatory marker by the coastal guards, but warning shots were
fired. Prior to the Un’yō’s arrival, the French and the Americans had also
engaged Korean defenses at Kanghwa in 1866 and 1871, respectively. The
Korean documents suggest that warning shots did not cause damage or casual-
ties, but that the Japanese retaliated anyway by destroying the town of
Yŏngjong. Only much later did they know that they had fought with the
Japanese navy. The possible gravity of the incidence was not immediately
clear to the Korean central government. For unknown reasons, it seems that
10
For what little scholarship exists on the Un’yō incident (운양호사건 雲揚號事件unyangho
sakŏn) see Deuchler 1977, 23–25; Palais 1975, 258. For nineteenth-century regional relations
see Conroy 1960; Duus 1995; Schmid 2002; Larsen 2008.
11
This mission was supposed to produce a survey encompassing Chŏlla to Yingkou, in Liaodong
bay. The Un’yō’s first known entry into Korean waters occurred earlier, in May 1875. Deuchler
claims that it was there purportedly to “expedite negotiations with Korean officials” (1977, 23).
Also see: Dai Nihon gaiko bunsho, vol. 8, no. 36, pp. 91–94. www.mofa.go.jp/mofaj/annai/ho
nsho/shiryo/archives/8.html
12
Palais argues that this was not the only act of military aggression against Korea in 1874. Later in
Oct. and Dec., there was a minor disturbance near Tongnae (southeast Korea) (1975, 258).
13
Referring broadly to the Yŏngjong commandery. Kojong sillok (1875) 12/12/9/7:2.
14
In the Manchu invasions (1626, 1637), Kanghwa Island and Namsan Fort served as royal safe
havens and have historically served in that role over the Chosŏn period.
244 Saeyoung Park
Yi Mindŏk, the local military commander, failed to report the incident for
another three or four days.15
The next year, Korea and Japan signed the Kanghwa Treaty. In English
and East Asian language scholarship, the Un’yō crisis is regarded tele-
ologically as one of several events that comprise Korea’s march to colo-
nization. Hence, little attention has been devoted to the 1875 Un’yō clash
as it has been understood retrospectively as a footnote in a series of events
that undermined Chosŏn sovereignty. It is not my intention to challenge
that perspective by arguing for its revised importance. Instead the Un’yō
incident and its fallout allows us to ask different questions in this chapter,
to interrogate the basics of empire building, and to observe the surprise,
chaos, and frustration observed at the frontlines of systems-making – in
other words, how a concatenation of small, and at the time seemingly
unimportant, changes result in the collapse of entire worlds, such as the
indigenous conceptual regime of international relations known as the
tribute system.
Eastphalia under Siege

On relations between Japan and her East Asian neighbors in 1876, three
points on the historical background, modes, and grounds of conflict are
relevant to our discussion. First, Japanese relations with both China and
Chosŏn Korea were at a low point. Despite their “equal” treaty with China
in 1871, the Meiji seizure of the Ryukyu Islands in 1872 and the attempted
conquest of Taiwan in 1874 were not confidence boosting. Further, in contrast
to the pragmatic stability that had characterized Chosŏn–Tokugawa affairs
since their early seventeenth-century post-Imjin War reconciliation, relations
were tense between Chosŏn Korea and Meiji Japan prior to the Un’yō
incident. Relations had not been repaired since the 1868 Meiji restoration
despite numerous Japanese efforts, and even as the Un’yō set sail for the
Chosŏn coast, the Meiji diplomat Moriyama Shigeru was preparing to leave
Pusan, Korea, after another failed mission to renew diplomatic relations.
Early post-restoration overtures to Korea via the daimyo of Tsushima had
been unsurprisingly rebuked, as his “irregular” communiqués had been
accompanied by his insistence that he would no longer use Korean seals of
15
There is the briefest of notes in the Kojong Veritable Records (Kojong sillok 1875, 12/12/8/
22:1): 永宗僉使李敏德以“異樣船蘭芝島留碇”啓: The Yŏngjong commander (ch’ŏmsa) Yi
Mindŏk has reported that a foreign or unfamiliar vessel has anchored at Nanchi Island (This Han
River island no longer exists. As a twentieth-century garbage dump, it was cleaned up, the
surrounding land reclaimed.) On the twenty-fifth day, there is a memorial discussing the receipt
of a report from Yi reporting an attack. Yi identified a larger steam driven warship, but reports
the number of Chosŏn casualties, injuries, and the identity of the enemy as unknown. Yi was
dismissed from office on the twenty-fifth. http://sillok.history.go.kr
authority.16 No Chosŏn acknowledgment was forthcoming in 1871 when the

newly minted Japanese Foreign Office announced that it had taken charge of
Korean affairs, a significant bureaucratic change. In June 1873, the prefect of
Tongnae (in today’s Pusan) sharply rebuked Japanese officials over their
request to close the Japan House. Hence, Moriyama Shigeru’s failure in
1874 to persuade Chosŏn Korea to resume relations was unremarkable
given the cold reception to earlier overtures since 1867. And so, the Un’yō
incident marks a turning point as the crisis resulted in the first successful face-
to-face meeting between the Chosŏn central government and Japan since the
institution of the latter’s new regime.
Leaving one system for another is a process and not a moment. As an uneven
and contested process it engenders alternating moments of resistance traceable
in moments of critique, confusion, and positive gestures designed to affirm and
support threatened positions. At times, Chinese and Korean officials would
observe that the regions shared commonalities of diplomatic practice. Chen
Qiyuan (1811–1881) reported a conversation with the acting Japanese consular
official Kumashiro Encho. “He said to me: ‘In my country, we read Literary
Sinitic books, write in the Literary Sinitic script, and practice [similar] rituals.
We were originally one [big] family’” (Fogel 2009, 78).17 Such conversations
marked the expectation of Japan’s neighbors that Japan could and was indeed
equipped to properly perform the anticipated responses. From this perspective,
Japan, given its centuries of experience consorting with its neighbors, could
manifest itself ably within a shared system of diplomatic signification unlike
those outside of Eastphalia.
Yet Chinese and Korean nineteenth-century state records are rife with
irritated reactions at what seemed to be moments of Japanese diplomatic
amnesia as Japanese officials kept querying both parties about the nature of
Qing–Chosŏn relations (Larsen 2008) and how each understood their centu-
ries-old relationship. Importantly, these questions were doubly strange because
they came from the Japanese. For Chinese and Korean officials, it was not
surprising when the French, the Americans, or the British asked odd questions
about Qing relations with Chosŏn or what the Qing or Chosŏn thought about
certain titles or statuses. It was markedly strange when such questions came
from their neighbor, with whom they had had intercourse for several centuries,
because both sides knew in that moment of questioning that Japan already
16
Tsushima, a frontier island between Korea and Japan, has historically exploited its ambiguous
status to benefit from Korean–Japanese commerce. Prior to Westphalia, Tsushima had an
important function in mediating and rectifying the gap between Chosŏn and Tokugawa world-
views, and if necessary, through what modernists may consider to be diplomatic fraud; its
refusal to continue playing this role by strategically employing both Korean and Japanese
symbols of power was a sign that the flexibility of Eastphalia was coming to an end.
17
I am using Fogel’s excellent translation here with a substitution of “Literary Sinitic” for
“Chinese.”
246 Saeyoung Park
knew the answers, given its own familiarity with both parties. So why were
they asking again? To make an informal comparison that highlights the sense of
foreignness, it would be as if your decades-old neighbor came over to your
house and started questioning you anew about your relationship with your
spouse, even though they had known you for years. And so the Chosŏn sources
are riven with an understandable sense of confusion as the Koreans observed
the Japanese inducting themselves into a different textual and political com-
munity through a new political practice – part of which was constituted by
asking questions about sovereignty and status. What the Koreans did not know,
as we will see in the next section, was that there was a different cost possible to
these questions.
The second point is that most of the conflict that gave rise to the modern
international system and the death of Eastphalia occurred in diplomatic nego-
tiations. Despite the space that it occupies in historical accounts, military
aggression was a flashy but minor midwife of the Westphalian transformation.
That point is not meant to diminish the harm or the unpredictable yet powerful
role that brute force can play, nor is it meant to endow any of the players with
a moral aversion to warfare. Simply, the communicative power of legal and
political conflict exceeds that of military aggression. While the simmering
potential threat of force distantly undergirded negotiations, it is important to
avoid retrojecting the belligerent and militarized Japan of the 1890s onto a far
different country of the 1870s; both Japanese and Korean sources suggest that
the Un’yō turned its aggression onto Yŏngjong because they were not able to
overpower Korean shore defenses. When we recognize the disparity between
military capacities and the powerful legacies of the unequal treaties, we can
begin to see that neither Korea nor China were extraordinarily alarmed at the
time and why, contrary to current nationalist scholarship and the indictments
that would later be levied against the “traditional” officials who shepherded
these agreements, such treaties made rational sense at the time. Further, that
Japanese gains were made in the arena of bureaucracy, ritual, and protocol not
only troubles narratives that conceive of causative intersections between mili-
tary violence, nation-building, and structural change; it also highlights the real
power gleaned from cultural disenfranchisement or the politicization and
creation of “traditional” and “backward” categories – forms of aggression
that disenfranchised and empowered the gradual induction of this region into
Westphalia. The invention of tradition occurs concomitantly with and in rela-
tion to the construction of modernity, and hence, Westphalia and Eastphalia are
mutually reconstituted through the characterization of East Asian relations as
“tributary,” “traditional,” “unequal,” and the resulting legal regimes that arise
out of conflicts of ritual and protocol not only erase Eastphalian alternatives but
also create Westphalia. Systemic destruction requires a different kind of war
and violence than just guns.
Why does protocol matter? Tracing the differences in protocol matters in

three ways: (a) methodologically, it marks moments of conflict between
Eastphalia and Westphalia; (b) debates over ritual are debates over power and
serve as a primary arena of interstate conflict; (c) new norms and metrics of
power can be created through conflicts. Protocol also matters because it is what
makes diplomacy work on the ground. In this light, what has been variously
referred to as “etiquette” or “ritual” constitutes a landscape of signification that
allows communication to occur based on some shared foundation that is
comprised of a common code or symbolic language. The architecture of
international relations – across different societies and ways of life – requires
some shared protocol, which is embedded in a larger tradition that is born of
precedent, law, past practice, standardization, and textual knowledge. Note that
the necessity for protocol and its productive significance is what has allowed
students of international relations to claim that there is such a thing as a system
of East Asian international relations called a “tribute system” although no East
Asian actor in the premodern past ever used the terms “Chinese world order” or
“tribute system.” Reading ritual as power and appreciating its capacity to
empower – and not seeing it merely as a reflection of power – is what allows
us to see the significance of Korean and Chinese irritation over Japanese
questions concerning Chinese–Korean relations.
The third point is that sovereignty, and the metrics which render that con-
structed reality legible, constitutes the point of greatest conceptual difference
between Westphalian and Eastphalian praxis. The fact that a concept is con-
structed – and in particular, that it is a historically specific product – does not
mean that it lacks purchase or ontological materiality. As “the sovereignty of
a state in theory is a necessary condition of its membership of the international
system in practice” (Hinsley 1986, 41), the recognition of Westphalian sover-
eignty is a self-reifying boundary that separates those who can speak for
themselves from those who require others to speak for them on the international
stage. Since sovereignty, like liberty, is a concept that materializes itself in
relation to its possible absence, we can therefore also understand Western
nineteenth-century “innovative” extraterritorial practice as the ideological
axis of exploitation around which the modern international system coheres.
Encounters where sovereignty is recognized as well as those where it is
stripped away are central to the reproduction of Westphalian order, as the
following examples suggest.
Unyō Talks: Slippages

On January 30, 1876, the Korean official Sin Hŏn was appointed as the chief
negotiator (taegwan) for talks on the Un’yō clash as well as on Japanese–
Korean relations. The discussions were preceded by weeks of procedural
248 Saeyoung Park
negotiations. Three rounds of face-to-face meetings in February would even-

tually lead to a signed treaty. Both sides opened by voicing a commitment to the
idea of a positive restoration (復) in their affairs, with Count Kuroda Kiyotaka
framing his mission as a return to more peaceful times (復修舊好).
kuroda: Our two countries have sent us (lit. high officials) here to work on important
matters, and in order to restore good relations.
sin: Today, we restore the friendly relations that we have enjoyed for the past three hundred
years. “With sincere words, we can cultivate harmony (講信修睦),”18 and indeed
produce accord between our countries.
However, this polite opening betrays a gap in understanding, it obscures

a conflict present on one of the multiple symbolic registers in play that is not
readily visible to modern eyes. In this exchange, Sin Hŏn is quoting from the
Liji, or the Book of Rites – a foundational East Asian work guiding diplomatic
process and performance that was part of the canon that constituted a “good
education” in early modern East Asia. Not only is the seasoned diplomat Sin
Hŏn gesturing to larger ties of education and class in claiming a shared faith in
the power of diplomatic agency by quoting the Book of Rites, he is also wittily
flattering Kuroda as a man of “talent, virtue, and ability.” Sin is actually
offering a compliment while expressing common desire for peace.
A scholar-official in pre-1900 East Asia would probably have possessed
almost scriptural familiarity with the Liji. In particular, government officials
whose state careers required over a decade of study to master the Confucian
canon and statecraft texts to pass their civil service exams were especially adept
at reflexively weaving in allusions to these texts in their public and private
discourse. In descriptions of their encounter, such references are notably absent
in Kuroda’s statements, situating the latter in a different political and textual
space. As a taegwan, or chief diplomatic (lit. reception) officer, Sin performs
social expectations of his role by manifesting his knowledge of the classics and
proper protocol but his Japanese counterpart refuses to engage him on the same
conceptual plane.
After a few exchanges to determine their respective positions and differences
concerning the Un’yō incident, Kuroda abruptly switches to questions about
Sin’s title. At first, these enquiries about Sin’s capacities seem out of place in
a discussion about determining the facts of the Un’yō clash as well as the
question of future reparations.
kuroda asks: [We] are high officials from two countries that are meeting face to face
in order to come to a resolution on these matters. Do you have the authority to make
decisions?
18
A fuller quote with preceding characters from the Liji Liyun禮運: 選賢與能，講信修睦, “They
chose men of talents, virtue, and ability; their words were sincere, and what they cultivated was
harmony.” Trans. James Legge
sin replies: You were sent here from afar and so cannot report and consult
[immediately with higher authorities] and that is the reason why you have the title
“chŏnkwŏn”（全權）, but in our country we do not use the title of chŏnkwŏn when
operating domestically. Also, we are in the vicinity of the capital.
It is tempting to read Kuroda’s questions about Sin’s title as provocative and
pointless needling. But is it? Indeed, most scholars that have written on nine-
teenth-century East Asian relations have so far been dismissive of debates over
protocol, or worse, characterized the focus on diplomatic ritual as another sign
that Chosŏn had lost touch with changing times. However, when thinking of
this question in the comparative context of intense Meiji efforts to determine
Chosŏn status (Meiji–Qing missions), Kuroda’s question has a purpose and
meaning that may not have been intelligible to Sin, or merely legible as
irritating poking.
Kuroda’s question, “Do you have the authority to make decisions?” seems to
make no sense from our modern Westphalian international relations perspec-
tive, as the idea that two ambassadors or representatives of countries can gather
and speak for each nation’s interests and thereby make agreements or enter into
contracts (treaties as one type) seems to be a self-evident capacity. While
embassies and envoys have existed for millennia around the world, the stan-
dardization of the ability of a third person, in this case, an ambassador pleni-
potentiary to represent and physically embody sovereignty, and the idea that
that person could have that power merely by appointment (rather than through
rank or blood) and that such a capacity could be communicated via occupa-
tional title and by credentialing paperwork is a practice that materializes with
Westphalia. That diplomats were not merely representatives and that they
actually possessed, albeit temporarily, plein pouvoir and were projections of
sovereignty that could exercise sovereign power in proxy – all of this emerged
quite late in Europe around the eighteenth century,19 and was only standardized
with the Vienna réglement of 1815 (Callières 1983; Fassbender and Peters
2012, 828–829).
Before the rise of nation-states, envoys worked more like brokers and
agents, and did not constitute a standardized, controlled displacement of
sovereign power. Arguably, sovereign power under states lacks easy venues
for temporary relocation as it rests – as it did in many monarchies – in the
divine body of the monarch. The ability to refract and project sovereignty in
diplomatic bodies was also key to making real the fiction of Westphalian
egalitarianism. In the diplomatic corps, in that arena of international relations
where ambassadors plentipotentiary had access to the monarch, and where
nations dealt with each other on an equal footing through a diplomatic
19
The late eighteenth century is also when the first global financial crisis involving Asia, North
America, and Europe occurs.
250 Saeyoung Park
architecture founded on sovereign equity, Westphalian principles operated

the closest to their ideals. The principles of modern international relations
dictate that the ambassador plentipotentiary’s access to a monarch would be
egalitarian not because of the ambassador’s quotidian identity, but because
for that encounter, they embody their nation, and should therefore be treated
as an equal by the receiving monarch – despite, perhaps, a lack of royal blood
or rank that may ‘naturally’ afford them such privileges in the local system of
meaning.20
Answering the question literally, Sin counters by noting that their titles are
different. Kuroda’s title was a Japanese translingual translation of the Western
equivalent of “ambassador plenipotentiary,” and is equated to the characters全
權in Literary Sinitic. The characters in the title chŏnkwan (C. quanquan) means
“all powers” or “total sovereignty,” a title and a concept that was invented
through translation and does not have a local equivalent. In such small ways,
the intellectual architecture of Westphalian international relations crept into
East Asian foreign affairs.
Un’yō Talks: Kanghwa Treaty as Contract

The following analysis connects the contents of the 1876 Treaty of Amity,
otherwise known as the Kanghwa Treaty, with the making of nation-states
and the destruction of the Eastphalia state system.21 In its simplest form,
a treaty can be understood as a contract, and a contract can be an instrument of
ontological change in its power to name, categorize, and demarcate parties,
their respective relations and demarcate temporal horizons. Contracts can
also be political documents with transformative epistemological capacities;
this power manifests itself most clearly in circumscribing debate or in impli-
citly or explicitly fixing the range of options open to both parties. In other
words, to contest or revise an “unequal treaty” requires a party to operate
within the treaty’s legal regime, within the universe of signification, history,
and argument that comes with that treaty because a revision is an act that
requires some recognition from the counterparty. So once you’re the signa-
tory to a contract, you’re bound not only to its terms but also to its metrics;
attempts to go “outside” that document – perhaps in order to revise it – are
trapped within the intellectual universe produced by the contract in order to
20
And it is that context where we can see why the kowtow (ketou) miscommunication occurred
and was actually being contested in the Macartney Mission (Hevia 1995).
21
For reasons of space, the discussion is limited to paper I and III; my genealogy of “unequal
treaty,” as a relatively late-nineteenth to twentieth-century invention whose construction
obscures the recent vintage of the Westphalian system is not included here. Prior to 1839,
E. Asian countries did execute what we may call treaties today, but within a different intellectual
universe; for an example see the 1636 concord between the Qing and Chosŏn Korea.
remain legible.22 One could, of course, ignore the contract and hope that it
goes away. But the logical world of the contract is not destroyed, it remains
intact despite one party’s attempts to pretend it is not so.
Prior to the Un’yō incident, Japan and the West were involved in the
diplomatic exercise of determining whether Chosŏn was a sovereign state or
a dependency of Qing China according to Westphalian terms. This would
determine whether Japan would have separate relations with Chosŏn Korea
or would have to negotiate with Qing China on any issues that may arise
concerning Korea. Importantly this categorization had far less to do with the
actual realities and self-governing capacity of the parties involved, as Chosŏn
Korea and others in Eastphalia had enjoyed autonomy over their affairs for
centuries.
However, according to Westphalian norms, Chosŏn’s tributary relations and
the tribute system overall translated to diminished sovereignty for most parties
involved, with the exception of China. The egalitarian conceit of Westphalia,
where the national community is manifested by state engagement on an equal
plane with unequal results is one that is diametrically opposed to a heterarchical
international relations system that is hierarchical in rhetoric but egalitarian in
practice. Eastphalia made little sense and was not recognizable from
a Westphalian perspective because sovereign autonomy within hierarchical
relations is not possible within the theoretical conceptualization of the
Westphalian system.
This section reads the Kanghwa treaty as a fricative moment in the Westphalian–
Eastphalian encounter, and primarily focuses on two seemingly innocuous clauses,
Article I and III. This chapter’s reading of the text illustrates how Korean sover-
eignty is reconstituted, albeit imperfectly, within Westphalian terms.
Article I
The first clause of the Korean–Japanese Treaty of Amity (better known as the
1876 Treaty of Kanghwa) seems strange in light of our retrospective knowl-
edge of Japanese colonization (1910–1945) and that imperial Japanese ambi-
tions for Korea materialize shortly after the 1868 Meiji restoration (Conroy
1960). Article I states: “Korea, being an independent state, enjoys the same
sovereign rights as does Japan. In order to prove the sincerity of friendship
existing between the two nations, their intercourse shall henceforward be
22
For a fascinating example of the circumscribing effects of power on (even) a discourse of
resistance, see Thomas Pegelow-Kaplan’s The Language of Nazi Genocide, which describes the
discursive dilemma faced by local Germans who sought exemptions for Jewish friends,
partners, and colleagues whose appeals to authority mimicked the discriminatory language
and categories of the state in order to be legible to power. On intellectual history of the Kanghwa
Treaty, see Yi T’aejin (2005).
252 Saeyoung Park
carried on in terms of equality and courtesy, each avoiding the giving of offense
by arrogance or manifestations of suspicion,”23 and at first it does seem out of
place as it affirms the independence and sovereignty of Chosŏn Korea in an
“unequal treaty.”
Examining the Westphalian construction of sovereignty in the Kanghwa
Treaty from a sociolegal perspective resolves the seeming contradiction
between the liberal rhetoric of sovereignty and the actual aim to diminish
sovereign power in practice. Standing,24 or the capacity to act and exercise self-
determination, and sovereignty are interdependent covariates in the
Westphalian system. Briefly: contractual agreements, including state treaties
or individual bills of sale require that the actors entering the contract possess
sufficient agency. Hence, for Korea to enter into this unequal treaty as an
autonomous actor – and not Qing China on behalf of Korea – Japan would
have to recognize its Westphalian independence. Arguably, the seemingly
contradictory Kanghwa Treaty is an example of how a country can gain
Westphalian sovereignty while losing real sovereign power in reality.
Article III
The treaty was offered in two scripts, in Literary Sinitic (classical Chinese) and
in Japanese kanbun. It would be the first agreement between Chosŏn Korea and
another state where a script other than Literary Sinitic, the “Latin” of the
region, would be used.
A nineteenth-century English translation for this paper states: “All official
communications addressed by the Government of Japan to that of Korea shall
be written in the Japanese language, and for a period of ten years from the
present date they shall be accompanied by a Chinese translation. The
Government of Korea will use the Chinese language.”
This translation is incorrect. From the Literary Sinitic, a more accurate
translation would be:
Henceforth, regarding the official communication (kongmun) between the two coun-
tries: Japan will use the language of their country; for a period of ten years from now,
there shall be a Literary Sinitic (hanmun) version. The Government of Korea will use
their real language (jinmun).25
23
The English version is from the uncredited translation from “Treaty of Kanghwa with Japan and
Regulations, Etc (1876–1881).” 1895. I have made minor orthographic edits for clarity.
24
The meaning of “standing” in this chapter and its associations with agency and majority are
related to usage in liberal political theory and not to legal notions of locus standi.
25
Emphasis mine. Kongmun: 公文; Hanmun: 漢文; jinmun: 真文. Jinmun can be translated
literally as “real,” “true,” or “authentic” script. It is not a common term in Chinese, Japanese,
Korean, or in Literary Sinitic, and is still a matter of some contemplation for this author. Literary
Sinitic doesn’t offer a stylistic prohibition against word repetition as in English, so it is least
likely that “jinmun” refers to Hanmun (as the old translation incorrectly assumes). It’s referring
The difference between the former and the latter, let’s call them Version
A or B, hinges on what you think two words, hanmun and jinmun, might
mean. Neither of these words literally mean “Chinese,” if we take “Chinese”
to mean “the language of the country we call China.” Hanmun refers to
a written script that much like Latin became a shared mode of communication
that facilitated business, state, and cultural intercourse within the Sinic
sphere. Indeed, a few millennia ago, the script originated somewhere in the
territory that today falls under PRC control, and although grammatically and
orthographically different (post-PRC simplification) to written Chinese
today, a twenty-first-century person mistakenly thinking of Hanmun as the
same as “Chinese” is not entirely without merit. However, I am taking
a position – which is not contradictory to a position that sees Hanmun as
related to contemporary Chinese today – that writing in Hanmun did not make
someone Han Chinese or Qing Chinese in the nineteenth century any more
than speaking in English might make a Dutch person more American today. In
fact, a claim that a premodern person (particularly a non-Western one) was
somehow more susceptible than a contemporary person to cultural transfor-
mation, or would have been more “Chinese” because they used millennia-old
characters invented before China came into existence – this line of thinking is
suspect without rigorous reasoning.
Before the rise of nation-states and before Westphalia, the idea that Hanmun,
like all scripts, had to monopolistically “belong” to a body-politic, and that
language and identity were so tightly braided that writing in Hanmun could
possibly even make a Korean less than Korean would have been strange.26
From the perspective of multilingual and multiscript states, or East Asian states
prior to the Westphalia, writing in a particular script did not bear the fraught
marriage of national culture and national identity that it could in the twentieth
century (Y. Lee 2010; Ko and Koh 2014). The idea that a script, and by
extension, a culture, has a national identity and that its usage could bind
one’s political allegiances is a fairly new one in world history. It also coincides
with the making of nation-states. One way of describing the “engine” of the
nation state is that its capacity to empower itself, to “speak” for a people
to a third script named for its character – an authentic language. The main takeaway is that
(J. shinbun)/jinmun seems deliberately odd and ambiguous.
26
This nineteenth-century problematic linkage between script and identity has been responsible
for a twentieth-century nationalistic cultural and linguistic cleansing on the Korean peninsula
that has disastrously cleaved most Koreans from much of Korean cultural products. One can
find text written prior to 1970 (more definitively for pre-1900 material text) that is inaccessible
without translation or specialized dictionaries for average Koreans. There is irony in the fact that
postcolonial South and North Korea states have made true what colonizers could not – to make
real via a nationalist linguistic cleansing the imperialist claims that the targets of colonialism
were people without culture. On Korean vernacular and its relation to the “Sinographic” world
see Ko and Koh 2014. See Pollock 2000, 591–625.
254 Saeyoung Park
requires it to maintain congruence of the following trifecta: national borders

(political authority), with a national culture, and a national identity (often
distinguished by a national language and history) have aterialized as mean-
ingful categories and possibilities through instruments such as this treaty
(D. A. Bell 2003).27
This chapter’s earlier analysis of the Un’yō talks showed how Westphalian
terminology began to creep into Eastphalian protocol and processes. In the case
of the treaty stipulations, we are seeing the ideational architecture of nation-
states float further into Eastphalian spaces, with consequences that cross the
domestic–international divide. The inclusion and the category-making of jin-
mun as “the actual or authentic language” and whatever that was, as not being
Japanese or Chinese, and that such distinctions would have political impact and
force – this was new. Prior to Westphalian induction, the coupling of national
culture and power did not exist – that is, it was not believed that cultural
participation in the Sinic sphere through the use of Literary Sinitic or through
Confucian rites could produce political consequences diminishing sovereignty
and agency. From the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, the countries
now known as Japan, the two Koreas, and China have all engaged in substantial
language reforms in order to make themselves comprehensible as nation-states
by making what was thought nations, unlike states, should have: a “guoyu.”28
The tensions in the Un’yō crisis were merely harbingers of change whose logic
was unclear when the “choice” was first encountered, but would later be
ubiquitous.
Conclusion
The case study at hand is of a familiar East Asian power quietly disrupting the
world of its neighbor by using instruments whose capaciousness for harm was
hazily visible at best. The difference and departure from past protocol would
certainly have been noticeable – that’s the site of the tension that we see in the
texts. But like an iceberg, much of the treaty’s attendant ideational architecture
and interlocked structure of international relations and international law lay
hidden from view. Having experienced their own unequal treaties, and having
27
The work on French linguistic homogenization as nation-state formation is useful. Also, see
Hunt 2004.
28
Guoyu, 國語or 국어, “national language,” often used interchangeably with “the language
spoken in Taiwan” or “what is spoken in Korea” (han’guk mal, lit. Korean speech, trans.
Korean; In North Korea, Chosŏn mal = Korean). Some examples of language changes and
homogenization: gender pronouns 他 (he) 她 (she)were introduced into modern Chinese in the
early twentieth century. The PRC has a simplified script, while Hong Kong and Taiwan use the
presimplified “complex” characters. While the two Koreas claim to occupy positions at oppos-
ing ends of the political spectrum, both states have had similar disruptive campaigns to “purify”
the national language and excise Japanese and Chinese elements.
a new class of leaders whose political capital was derived from new nation-
making, Japan possessed far more familiarity and incentive to behave in certain
ways. It is reasonable to ask: Would the relatively straightforward reading of
Japan “mimicking” the West offer a better starting point to create a model to
understand the encounter discussed in this chapter?
I prefer not to use mimicry because its usage often seems nebulous and
poorly defined in research save in two areas: critical theory (mimicry according
to Jacques Lacan and colonial mimicry according to Homi Bhabha), and in
biology, where one may observe evolutionary mimicry for the sake of predator
evasion or species proliferation. These uses of mimicry seem quite dissimilar
but share the following common denominators: that there is an “original” and
a “mimic,” the mimic is a copy, often lesser than the original, and the value-
added in mimicking is as much drawn from looking like the original, as in
doing the act that also happens to be a replication. There is a distinction
between mimicry and modelling that is detectible in the slight negative inflec-
tion held by mimicry – unlike the replication one sees in children copying adult
behavior that is conventionally thought of as testing or “learning” versus
mimicry, which is a claim of an advantage gained by copying but failing to
be the original. Mimicry may be an imperfect fit for the Un’yō crisis because
the concept of mimicking presumes that intention and duplication are at cross-
purposes, that the intention of the “mimicker” is not the same as the “original”
actor. Japan’s calculus in using treaties of amity and friendship – in using the
tools of international law – seems fairly similar to others that have sought to use
them. It is trying them out because there is an advantage to be gained. Japan was
already within Westphalia, so why would it not use the ideational instruments
that came with it? Ultimately, what I am suggesting is that the research stress
should be on the question of nineteenth-century standardization and why, and
less on Westphalian standardization. The “West” is not static and is itself
transformed.
I see the Westphalian moment in East Asia as one of systemic harmonization.
Harmonization, a term that I am borrowing from the study of global governance
or regulatory law, entails more than the eventual dominance of one set of
statutory interpretations over another (Drezner 2005; 2008). The term “harmo-
nization” belies a highly contested terrain that is anything but harmonious,
where able, bellicose agents on all sides fight to privilege their own systems of
meaning. In this project, “harmonization” describes a process that begins with
many alternatives, many possible systems, but that ends with a singular result.
Hence, it captures a particular kind of structural transformation that is an act of
erasure, where a competitive set of practices and meanings becomes extinct and
is rendered retroactively unintelligible (Dreyfus 2009; Lear 2006). I am speak-
ing of a specific kind of destruction as not all deaths produce unintelligibility.
“Retroactive unintelligibility” describes the death of Eastphalia and constitutes
256 Saeyoung Park
a particular type of erasure where we cannot imagine a return to the past and we
cannot imagine why we would have ever wanted to be in that state in the first
place.29 It is caused by what Hubert Dreyfus calls a “cultural collapse” or
“world collapse” with “culture” or “world” referring to a system of meaning. It
is a thorough and peculiar form of destruction where the viability of the
competitor world is retroactively nullified as well as annihilated. The erasure,
caused by a retrojected nullification of significance, is why we cannot imagine
returning to a system of non-nation-states in the wake of the Westphalian
harmonization. It’s not simply that it’s impossible, it’s unimaginable – unavail-
able and invisible as an option in our political spectrum of choices.30 Using
Dreyfus’s “rule of thumb” for the unintelligible – there is no nostalgia for
Eastphalia, no desire for a return. The dearth of choices, or that certain alter-
natives to our world seem backward, incomprehensible, and inapplicable to our
circumstances, therefore practically unimaginable – this state of being consti-
tutes one way that the death of Eastphalia affects us today.
In the Un’yō incident and its accompanying talks, what was harmonized, or
written out, was a competing and flexible system of international relations that
29
“Imagination” is not meant conventionally as in “exercising a capacity to name a thing,”
because clearly, we’re talking about it – about a world of states that preceded nation-states.
“Imagination” here means what is intelligible, what can make sense, can be significant, and
legible given a particular system of meanings. “Retroactive unimaginability” results from
a “cultural collapse” or a collapse of a system of meanings that had rendered previous
procedures and processes sensible and significant (having meaning). Dreyfus interprets Lear’s
work on the impact of buffalo extinction (functionally extinct, down to a herd of ~100) on Crow
Indians’ way of life as an example of world collapse. Rituals of adulthood, masculinity,
economies of production, and capital accumulation based on the hunting and consumption of
buffalo – in essence, an entire culture that had come to revolve around the buffalo – that world
became unintelligible with buffalo extinction: it no longer made sense. Drawing on Dreyfus’s
ideas of world-death allows a theoretical expansion regarding analyses of change and encounter
beyond the limited, well-trodden tropes of rationality and irrationality, meritorious vs. hege-
monic competition – it expands our toolkit in studying death and demise beyond the unhelpful
binary of death as not alive, relevant, nor extant. Andrew Isenberg (2001) argues that the
nineteenth-century destruction of the bison was part of the effort to cripple Native American
populations through starvation and economic devastation.
30
In systemic change, a cultural collapse is not adequately captured by the concept of “competi-
tion” – especially the presumed “competition on merit” that undergirds Westernization para-
digms. Competition assumes that while the two competitors may not be equal, they somehow
have equal standing to compete, e.g., they are both states or they are both sanctioned national
representatives in the same Olympic marathon. In a competitive marathon, a loser is lesser after
the race and the winner is the winner because one ran faster. At most, the loser’s present and
future are impacted by the competition’s results. If the “marathon” were a case of world
collapse, we would have to shoot the loser and retroactively destroy any trace of the viability
of their competitiveness, as well as their standing to have been in that race or any race with the
winner in the past. Cultural collapse or world-death is not mere extinction. Dreyfus describes
nostalgia as an alternative ontological possibility in the aftermath of an extinction, where one
can desire a past and can imagine a return, although it may be unavailable. However, retroactive
unintelligibility or cultural collapse comprises a specific, rare, and retrojected erasure, an
epistemological and ontological death.
were comprised of bilateral relations within multiple hierarchical universes –

a Sino-centered universe, and a Korea-centered universe, among others (Hevia
1995; Wills 2009). This heterarchical system, which I call “Eastphalia,”
accommodated non-nation-state histories and imaginaries, and is one of the
richest and enduring sets of case studies for those who are interested in how
a world might have functioned (quite well!) without nation-states. It has at
times, been narrowly equated with one of the constitutive elements of the early
modern East Asian international system, otherwise known as a Sinocentric
world order or the tribute system. It was one of the last viable alternatives to
Westphalia.
In terms of global history, the nineteenth-century Westphalian harmoniza-
tion finally inducted the last part of the world that possessed alternative and
viably competitive institutional, bureaucratic, and historical resources against
the forces of empire. With New World settlements imperial expropriation did
not always shield their expropriation with sociolegal instruments, the erasure of
Eastphalia occurred through legal means.31 The centuries of trade and contact
between the East and the West during which Westerners had been disciplined
by Eastern laws and norms meant that it was infeasible to “discover” East Asia,
to declare it “unsettled” or to deny the existence of states that already exercised
sovereign authority. Instead, as Lydia Liu (2004) and Teemu Ruskola (2013)
have described, existing East Asian forms of law and sovereignty were erased
or rendered unintelligible, and as I show in the case of Korea, reconstituted
within Westphalian terms.
No one should mistake my interpretation of the Un’yō incident as a return to
a “Western impact, Eastern response” framework that plagued the first genera-
tion of scholarship on East Asia (as well as some current books published by
nonspecialists). The understandable disgust with the triumphalist assumption
that “Eastern responses” were, at best, a mimicry of inherently superior
Western and modern ideas sparked a call for Sinocentered or local-centric
(e.g., Korea-centric, Japan-centric) scholarship in the 1990s (Cohen 1997).
The localist turn privileging indigenous perspectives and dynamics was an
important measure against the pervasive Eurocentrism that we associate with
books on China that aren’t written with any Chinese-language sources.
However, the X-centric turn against explanatory frameworks involving exter-
nal transformative impetuses has resulted in a dearth of scholarship concerned
with the kind of rare change that is engendered within international encounters,
and in particular, the violence that accompanies such transformations. Imperial
violence manifests itself in gunboats and also in new hierarchies of desirability
that privilege “Western” or “modern” signifiers, which are in turn internalized
by local populations in service of their own agendas. Imperialism is also what
31
See Pagden 1993; Pagden 1995.; Anghie 2005.
258 Saeyoung Park
led to the construction of a “traditional” East Asia.32 Unlike the familiar

colonial violence of resource expropriation in the New World, this violence
took the form of dislocating an entire region from its own past, in reappraising
that history and its capacity to inform the future – to offer intelligible futures, to
present a range of legible political options – as “backwards,” or “despotic,”
after the Westphalian moment.
What is at stake in reframing the Un’yō incident within a world systems
analysis instead of imperialism (Wallerstein 1974; Frank 1998)? The two
approaches are not mutually exclusive, but the choice of the former is
a reflection of the failures of explanations that claim comparative technological
superiority, military might, or even a superior rationality purportedly inherent
to Western political ideas as causes for the East Asian transformation that does
indeed occur at the turn of the twentieth century. Systems structure – their
accompanying protocols and norms provide the plumbing through which state
power, sovereignty, individual agency flows, expresses itself, and becomes
recognizable by third parties, and no single party owns it. The Westphalian
transition is a dialogic process that is never monopolized by the “West.”
Certainly some countries can claim to be more impactful nodes than others in
many systems. By way of example, while the United States today might be an
important actor in global capitalism, it is circumscribed and shaped by the
rules, governance, history, and multinodal dynamics of that system, and they
cannot objectively claim unilateral control. Framing the Un’yō incident as
a moment of structural transformation strips away the possibility that the
Westphalian induction can be considered mere Westernization or moderniza-
tion – at least no more than the historic US entry into global finance can be seen
as British-ization. The framework of systemic harmonization thereby reduces
“Westernization” and “modernization” to their rightful place as analytically
incoherent, but powerful politicized tropes through which various historical
actors have demarcated who was marginal and who was not at opportune times.
Hence, the self-conscious articulation of twentieth-century East Asian nation-
alists should not be taken as unquestioned fact or as mere assent of superior
“modern” values, but as political positioning designed to forward their own
agendas.
Despite years of critique, the positively valenced, intellectually incoherent
yet powerful concepts of modernity and modernization continue to constrain
innovative thinking. Often, we forget that modernity did not just make itself, its
emergence also gave rise to a concomitant construction of a premodern, illib-
eral regressive and static past. It is not clear to me if we can ever cast off the
32
The making of a traditional East Asia is concomitant with the creation of “modern” nation-
states – a shift heretofore generally perceived as a progressive, anti-colonial response to
imperialism, but one whose liberal narratives this project unsettles.
intellectual shackles of the false modern–premodern epistemic divide unless

we appreciate how deeply it remains imbricated in the rise of Westphalia and
the death of Eastphalia, a non-nation-state system in the late nineteenth century.
The death of the tribute system was a result of imperialism, no doubt, but what
we have missed before is that the liberal rhetoric of competition (national or
otherwise) obscures a secondary, more powerful exclusionary practice whose
effects are arguably longer lasting; in other words, what we call the modern era
in East Asia is associated not just with the replacement of a state system with
a nation-state system, it is also about the creation of a mimetic husk, of a static
premodern past that never existed. This project has tried to make this self-
invested imperviousness an object of inquiry.
Only by neutering modernization and our inherent tendency to imbue it with
positive and liberal readings, and by objectively appreciating the illiberal
formation of the modern, Westphalian international system can we begin to
appreciate the impact of this error. The error does not simply affect our analysis
of marginal countries or non-Western peoples, but also of the current interna-
tional system within which we exist. Appreciating the violent dimensions of
systemic change does not simply produce an ethical value-add to our study of
international relations, it also allows us to excavate the spectrum of possibilities
that are artificially closed off and rendered invisible in the present because we
are the children of Westphalia, inculcated and indoctrinated in its claims of
inevitable universality. An objective research agenda needs to account for the
weight of that positionality. Not all world deaths leave visible ruins; some leave
absences that have been carefully curated by the survivors.
Conclusion
15 East Asian History and International Relations
Andrew J. Coe and Scott Wolford
Modern international relations theory purports to be universally applicable: it

should tell us about politics among any group of states, in any era. However, as
Haggard and Kang note in the Introduction, most modern international rela-
tions theory is inspired by observations of interstate politics only in the West of
the Modern Era (after 1500, for which we adopt the anachronism of
“Westphalia”), when scholars judge that a set of recognizably modern
European states had formed. But the problem is even worse than that: large
parts of international relations theory were developed based on the much
shorter and narrower history of the US–Soviet competition in the Cold War
and the period of US preeminence that followed it. Though the collection of
quantitative empirical data has enabled scholars to test parts of international
relations theory against most states’ relations since 1816,1 these data can tell us
little about how well the theory does in earlier eras and in regions other than
Europe.
Modern international relations theory deems four variables to be the most
important determinants of the character of interstate behavior. Realism and
much of the bargaining theory of war emphasize the importance of the dis-
tribution of power among states.2 Liberalism focuses on the role of states’
regime types in shaping both preferences and behavior.3 Theories of interna-
tional political economy privilege the interests of influential domestic actors
within states in explaining patterns of exchange.4 Finally, constructivism con-
centrates on the development and promulgation of norms that govern states’
behavior and conceptualizations of their interests.5
The international system that evolved in East Asia from antiquity into the
nineteenth century (what we call Historical East Asia, or simply HEA) differs
from established views of Western systems on all four variables. With regard to
the distribution of power, unipolarity was both far more pronounced and far
more durable in HEA than in the West. China enjoyed a much greater
1
See Sarkees and Wayman 2010.
2
On realism, see Waltz 1979; on bargaining and war, see Fearon 1995; Powell 2006.
3
Moravcsik 1997. 4 Frieden et al. 2017. 5 Wendt 1999.
263
264 Andrew J. Coe and Scott Wolford
preponderance of power over other states in the region than Great Britain, the
United States, or any other state ever possessed, and this preponderance was
rarely disturbed over the course of at least a thousand years. In contrast to the
occasional flowering and eventual spread of democratic regimes in the West,
the states of HEA were consistently ruled by highly autocratic regimes, typi-
cally dynastic monarchies that were not constrained by assemblies of nobles or
elected representatives. The political economies of states in HEA were usually
dominated by land rents, with interstate commerce playing a much smaller role
than in the West. Finally, the prevailing norms in HEA explicitly endorsed
hierarchy in foreign relations and Sinicization in domestic culture, in contrast
to the sovereign equality and plural cultures of the West.
These four key differences imply that HEA offers particularly fertile ground
on which to test modern international relations theory’s claims to universality.
If this theory can adequately explain the patterns of interstate behavior in HEA,
then scholars can be more confident in applying it elsewhere with little mod-
ification. If it fails the test in some respects, then the history of East Asia
provides the grist needed to refine the theory and expand its applicability,
generating a new sense of what state systems have in common and where
they differ.
The events discussed in previous chapters speak to many international
phenomena, and so can be used to examine a variety of modern international
relations theory’s predictions. We cannot address the full array of relevant
outcomes, so we organize our discussion around a select few phenomena:
cooperation under hegemony, the enforcement of order, international norms,
trade relations, changes in the balance of power, changes in polarity, and state
formation. For each, we briefly outline the relevant theories in the study of
international relations and the predictions they make. We then assess the extent
to which each theory’s predictions are consistent with behavior in HEA. Where
international relations theory comes up short – and we do find some short-
comings – we offer suggestions for how HEA can inspire new questions and
further development in the theory of international relations.
Cooperation under Hegemony

Cooperation is a process of “mutual adjustment” in which states sacrifice the
pursuit of some individual goals to achieve collectively desirable outcomes,
such as freedom of the seas, low trade barriers, reduced arms burdens, and the
avoidance of costly war.6 Yet cooperation is difficult to achieve when states are
tempted to exploit each other.7 One solution to the collective action problem is
for a uniquely capable actor to provide a public good, often in return for some
6 7
Keohane 1984, 13. Olson 1965.
East Asian History and International Relations 265
private benefit. This informs hegemonic stability theory, which explains why
the last two global hegemons, Great Britain and the United States, provided
public goods such as freedom of the seas in return for special international
rights and privileges.8 This ensures the stability of the global trading regime,
where, so the argument goes, multilateral cooperation would have otherwise
failed as it did in the leaderless years between the world wars.9 Since World
War II, the United States has shouldered much of the burden of ensuring
freedom of the seas, and its preferences shape communications and commercial
standards even when military power is not clearly in play.10 It has also led the
construction of multilateral institutions, including NATO and the UN Security
Council, the GATT/WTO, and the IMF and World Bank, which reflect its
preferences in areas of security, trade, and finance – even human rights.
Cooperation under hegemony operated differently in HEA. Like the
Westphalian hegemons described by hegemonic stability theory, China
designed institutions and practices (including the practice and content of civil
service exams) that reflected its preferences, but these entailed not the multi-
lateral provision of public goods but many bilateral exchanges of private goods,
accompanied occasionally by the active refusal to provide public goods (e.g.,
the Ming restrictions on maritime commerce).11 China offered military protec-
tion, economic aid, and political recognition to aligned states,12 just as multi-
lateral institutions are designed to do under US hegemony. But China’s
relationship with each Sinicized state was isolated from the others and unme-
diated by multilateral institutions. Tributary relationships, institutionalized
through widely accepted social roles and practices,13 entailed bilateral
exchanges of both legitimacy and trade goods. First, China granted legitimacy
to local rulers through investiture, the acceptance of which recognized the
ruling dynasty’s dominion of “all under heaven.” Second, the tribute trade
was also lucrative, supported by large infusions of South American silver. Yet
channeling trade through hub-and-spoke bilateral links ensured that domestic
rulers beholden to landed elites retained control over the domestic distribution
of the gains from trade. This led Chinese to label everyday traders, most of
whom were Chinese, “Japanese pirates,”14 if only because they violated rules
that ensured the political dominance of landed wealth.
The contrast between US and Chinese hegemony is striking, all the more so
because the former structured cooperation in a similar fashion both before and
after the Cold War, when its nearest competitor (the Soviet Union) effectively
abandoned superpower competition. Explaining why the two systems differ so
dramatically in their relative provision of public goods should shed light on the
workings of both systems. The “closed system” of HEA combined maritime
8 9
Ikenberry 2001. Kindleberger 1986. 10 Krasner 1991. 11
von Glahn chapter.
12 13
Swope chapter. Lee chapter. 14 von Glahn chapter.
and landed interests,15 yet no maritime power – like Japan – managed to

compete seriously with China, a continental empire based on the exploitation
of land rents. China’s ability to dominate the market by regulating its con-
sumption surely played a role in this, as tributary states sought alternative
sources of investiture only when China itself was divided.16 As long as ruling
“all under heaven” meant controlling exclusive access to the system’s largest,
most centrally networked market, China could structure international coopera-
tion to its advantage. David C. Kang highlights the cooperative success of this
system, which compared to contemporary Europe saved enormous amounts of
blood and treasure,17 even as it restricted other forms of cooperation more
common in the Westphalian system. Even at its peak after the world wars, the
United States has never enjoyed a comparable level of preponderance, though
whether China’s privileged position derived from geography, the limited num-
ber of Sinicized states, or both, cannot be determined from the available
evidence. Future inquiries might also ask how Korean–Japanese relations, for
example, might have differed in a counterfactual multilateral system under a
different form of Chinese hegemony.
Enforcement of Order
All the traditional paradigms of international relations theory have concerned
themselves with explaining the enforcement of international order, but they
focus on different constituent elements of order. Realism asserts that order is
dictated by the international distribution of power, and maintained by the
stability of that distribution.18 Institutionalism theorizes that order is built
through institutions that structure interactions in order to enable states to
achieve gains from cooperation.19 Liberalism gives causal primacy to domestic
interests and their aggregation into national interests by domestic politics, so
that international order depends on the character of domestic order in relevant
states.20 Finally, constructivism locates order in the creation and socialization
of norms that govern how states engage with one another.21
All four constituents of order are readily observed in HEA. Interstate rela-
tions in HEA clearly took place in the shadow of China’s overwhelming,
durable preponderance of power. The institution of the tribute system forma-
lized rules of state behavior, adjudicated disputes, rewarded adherents, and
punished deviants. The concentrated power of landed elites in most of the
region’s states dictated their restrictive attitudes toward commerce and pre-
ference for similar autocracies abroad. Finally, many states in the region were
governed by norms of Sinicization in domestic politics and hierarchy in
15
Lee chapter. 16 Kanagawa chapter. 17
D. C. Kang 2010. 18 Waltz 1979.
19
Keohane 1984. 20 Moravcsik 1997. 21
Finnemore and Sikkink 1998.
interstate politics, a set of ideas that rationalized the system and, as we note in
later sections, made the idea of returning to a unipolar system attractive even
during periods of crisis at the center.
More recent theories in international relations analyze the many individual
tools for enforcing order implied by the larger paradigms: political recogni-
tion and its removal;22 the design of international institutions;23 the provision
of aid or imposition of economic sanctions;24 and military protection or
intervention.25 China made use of a similar toolkit for enforcing order. It
bestowed or removed political recognition in the form of tributary investiture;
it provided states with opportunities for commerce or excluded them from
these; and it offered protection and sometimes intervened militarily in
response to violations of the order. Like Great Britain and the United
States, China attempted to install, assist, and maintain regimes that would
uphold its preferred domestic and interstate norms. And it sought to discipline
or eject those governments that would not, rather than just coexisting with or
deterring them.
Kang notes that external threats and power played little role among states in
HEA relative to those in Europe,26 but “relative” is the key term here. Over the
longue durée, China sometimes used force to compel obedience to the prevail-
ing order, and other states in HEA clearly anticipated this possibility. Japan
erected coastal defenses in fear of invasion by the early Tang dynasty,27 which
itself invaded Korea to reverse a coup against a favored leader.28 This fear was
also realized when the Yuan dynasty came to power and attempted to invade
both Japan and Vietnam.29 The Song and Ming each invaded Vietnam in
response to the local toppling of a favored government,30 and the Ming later
encouraged and supported a coup in Koryŏ after its government attempted to
retake territory from China.31 The persistence of the territorial dispute with
Korea led the Ming to refuse investiture for the first Chosŏn king and support
civil conflict (the “Strife of Princes”) that led to more obedient successors.32
Finally, Korea put down a coup led by modernizing reformers in the nineteenth
century with assistance from the Qing, restoring traditional rule.33 China’s
stable dominance meant that such interventions were infrequent, with a strat-
egy of deterrence – “Manifesting Awe” in the Ming dynasty34 – sufficient to
preserve order most of the time. However, even though actual use of force was
22
Kinne 2014.
23
Koremenos et al. 2001. See also the other articles published in that issue of International
Organization.
24
On aid, see Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2007. On sanctions, see Hufbauer et al. 2009.
25
For protection, see Benson 2012. For intervention, see Regan 2000. 26 D. C. Kang 2010.
27
Kang and Swope chapter. 28 Kanagawa chapter. 29 Anderson chapter.
30
Anderson chapter. 31 Lee chapter.
32
Lee chapter. On leadership change and war, see Wolford 2007; Wolford 2012.
33
S.-H. Park chapter. 34 Swope chapter.
rare, the overwhelming threat of military intervention was surely a fixture in the
background of China’s relations with other states.
Like later hegemons, China was also not typically predatory toward states
whose regimes were in good standing, and perhaps as a result it could often
count on the support of those regimes for its efforts to enforce order. When it
moved to repel Japan’s invasion of Korea in the Imjin War, Vietnam and other
clients were quick to offer material and diplomatic support.35 And just as with
Great Britain and the United States, when China did deviate from the dictates of
the prevailing order, other states resisted, sometimes violently. Toyotomi
Hideyoshi launched the Imjin War in response to China’s refusal to grant
Japan a tributary status consistent with its newly consolidated power.36
Vietnam repelled invasions from the newly risen Song and Yuan dynasties
and violently resisted annexation by the Ming, and it engaged in diplomacy to
convince the Yuan and Ming of the mutual benefits of restoring the tributary
order.37 Korea moved to preempt seizure of some of its traditional territory by
the new Ming dynasty, and when this failed and a new regime arose in Korea at
Ming behest, its first king prepared to use force when the Ming subsequently
refused to offer him investiture.38 Thus, both material power and legitimacy
appear essential for maintaining the order and China’s supremacy within it.
These similarities aside, the particular kind of order that pertained in HEA
was distinct: its promotion of Sinicization of culture, autocracy in domestic
politics, hierarchy in international politics, and strict regulation of commerce
differ radically from the liberal culture, democratic politics, egalitarian inter-
national politics, and free commerce favored by the British and American
hegemonies. Arguably, China was also more successful than Great Britain
was or the United States has been in promoting its favored order, if longevity
is accepted as a criterion. One possible explanation is China’s unusual degree of
preponderance. China rarely faced a rival for dominance that might offer a
competing vision of order, as the British faced with other European powers or
the Americans did with the Soviet Union; and as we discuss in later sections,
even China’s competitors strove to dominate the same order, not to replace it.
To date, international relations theory has not produced a unified perspective
on international order that integrates what we know about particular constitu-
ents of order (power, institutions, domestic interests, norms) with what we
know about individual tools of order (recognition, sanctions, intervention).
Comparing HEA to the West should help with developing such a perspective,
allowing for variance in dimensions like the extent of hegemonic primacy and
ideational bases of the system that are unavailable in a solely Westphalian
context. In particular, it suggests that a hegemonic international order is stable
when the dominant state’s predation is low enough to avoid generating a
35 36 37 38
Swope chapter. Swope chapter. Anderson chapter. Lee chapter.
balancing or disrupting coalition of other states, and the rewards of order are
high enough for these states to collude with the hegemon to maintain it. This in
turn makes the enforcement of order cheaper and easier for the hegemon,
rendering it willing to pay the costs of doing it and to eschew predation.39
International Norms
Norms tell states what is appropriate and inappropriate in international rela-
tions, how others are likely to respond to certain actions, how to interpret one
another’s actions, and who responds to what actions and in what sequence. In
game-theoretic terms, international norms are part of the common conjecture:40
the shared information that tells states what game they are playing, who else is
playing it, and what others’ alternatives, preferences, and strategies are. Norms
can also structure expectations and behavior after the material conditions that
gave rise to them change, which makes their content still more valuable and
norms themselves the stakes of intense political competition. Norms’ value and
durability also explain why violations are occasionally punished by means up
to and including force.
However often it is violated by the states that give it legitimacy,41 the
defining Westphalian norm is sovereign equality. Though hierarchies exist,
they are viewed as purposive alienations of sovereignty, the product of negotia-
tions between states that are de jure equals.42 By contrast, HEA’s normative
structure developed around the de jure inequality of the tributary system,
reinforced through recognized ritual and habitual practice.43 Different origins
notwithstanding, in HEA we see similar systematic violations of norms even as
their legitimacy goes unquestioned. States competed within boundaries defined
by those norms, yet they also challenged and changed them, both in eras of
Chinese dominance and when new norms irrupted into the region in the nine-
teenth century. The Un’yō incident saw Japan use Western diplomatic forms in
its attempt to reassert ideas of a Meiji imperium in detaching Korea from the
Qing;44 and Filipino revolutionaries adopted Western forms by trying to secure
recognition (notably not investiture) from the United States after the latter
seized the archipelago from Spain.45
Norms were also sticky; even when the mantle of “all under heaven” was
contested between multiple Chinese dynasties, Korean kingdoms sent tribute to
multiple sources, both in China and Japan.46 And when Japan invaded Korea in
what became the Imjin War, the hope was to win the recognition afforded China –
to supplant it, not to build a new normative system.47 Finally, violations were
39
Coe and Vaynman 2015 explain the stability of the nuclear nonproliferation regime in exactly
this way.
40
Morrow 2014. 41 Krasner 1999. 42 Lake 2009. 43 Lee chapter.
44
Saeyoung Park chapter. 45 Yeo chapter. 46 Kanagawa chapter. 47 Swope chapter.
often punished with war, from China’s ejection of Japanese forces from Korea
after Hideyoshi’s invasion to the decades-long occupation of a Vietnam whose
invested rulers were usurped by an unrecognized challenger.48 The content of
norms may have been different across these two systems, but it is notable that
they emerged, worked, and survived in much the same way: through a combina-
tion of power and practice,49 punctuated by instances of challenge and
response.50
David C. Kang argues that HEA’s normative structure facilitated longer
spells of peace between the Sinicized states than those enjoyed by states within
the Westphalian system.51 International relations scholars should take this
contrast seriously, because it raises several important questions. First, to what
extent does a de jure hierarchical system like that of HEA depend on corre-
sponding material disparities? In other words, how specific is HEA’s
“Confucian peace” to the structural facts of overwhelming Chinese preponder-
ance and a relatively small number of states?52 Or to the normative order?
Kanagawa’s account of “East Asia’s First World War” suggests, in fact, that the
normative standard of de jure hierarchy can fuel rather than suppress conflict
when there is open competition for the top spot in that hierarchy.53 By contrast,
a system with norms of sovereign equality might return to peace more easily
when there is no major prize attached to being the hierarch. Incorporating
observations of HEA into Westphalia-centered international relations scholar-
ship can facilitate such comparisons, because both HEA and Westphalia have
experienced periods of multi- and unipolarity, both under different normative
systems.
Second, to what extent does the strategic extension of normative structures,
like recognition, affect observed rates of war across systems? Both systems
experienced lengthy periods of peace among their core members, even if HEA’s
spells were longer, but in neither case was recognition extended into regions of
imperial competition or conquest. The European great power peace of the
nineteenth century did not extend far beyond Europe itself – and even that
“peace” saw multiple Russo-Ottoman wars, one of which (the Crimean War)
drew in Britain and France. The period also saw numerous wars between
European and Asian states, including both China and Japan, not recognized
as part of the interstate system by either the states waging the wars or the
dominant datasets in international relations scholarship. Likewise, China was
in nearly continuous conflict on its western and northern frontiers with “bar-
barians,” a term applied to both nomadic steppe tribes, even those with whom
treaties were concluded and borders demarcated,54 and, for no small period of
time, the Russian empire.55 If normative systems systematically exclude
48 49 50
Anderson chapter. See Morrow 2014. See Slantchev 2005. 51 D. C. Kang 2010.
52 53 54
R. E. Kelley 2012. Kanagawa chapter. Tackett 2017. 55 S. C. M. Paine 1996.
political units in constant conflict with the in-group, then we should perhaps
focus as much on the frontiers of normative systems as we do on their cores.
Finally, the collision of normative systems, highlighted in Part III of the
book by the Un’yō incident,56 the attempted Philippine revolution,57 and
the Opium Wars,58 may help shed light on a number of important ques-
tions. First, scholarship typically focuses on how the Westphalian system
supplanted (if incompletely) HEA’s hierarchical arrangement, but not how
states or private actors (say, traders) in one system might strategically adopt
the forms of another and what the consequences might be for war and
peace. Japan’s strategic use of Westphalian norms to challenge a tributary
system in which it was not favored may have something to say about
challenges to the contemporary global order as the states that guarantee it
enter the twilight of their global dominance – much like the Qing in the late
nineteenth century.
Second, the collision of HEA and Westphalian norms offers a unique chance
to see two different common conjectures in conflict; game theorists should read
Saeyoung Park’s account of the Un’yō incident with great interest,59 because it
tells us that under some circumstances even the bedrock assumptions of Nash
Equilibrium are too strong (i.e., that weaker solution concepts like
rationalizability60 – which does not assume common knowledge of other
players’ strategies – may be more useful). Power and ideas interact to explain
outcomes in the strategic models analyzed by game theorists, yet most applica-
tions to international relations remain wedded to the Westphalian common
conjecture. Without some grounds for comparison, this has limited both the
game forms and informational environments available to international relations
scholars, and opening up the divergent ideational box of HEA even as the basic
workings of power remain constant can allow for a wider range of models on
which to build a more general understanding of strategic interaction in inter-
national relations.
Trade Relations
International relations theory contains two very different perspectives on the
politics of interstate commerce. The first, which we will refer to as mercantilist
theory, was inspired by the experience of European powers from the sixteenth
through the nineteenth century. The second, international political economy,
which we will call IPE theory, builds upon new theories developed in econom-
ics and was inspired mostly by the experience of the West in the twentieth
century.
56 57
Saeyoung Park chapter. Yeo chapter. 58 Horowitz chapter.
59 60
Saeyoung Park chapter. Watson 2013, 67–77.
The mercantilist theory views commerce as part of a zero-sum interstate

competition. States try to increase exports and decrease imports by raising
tariffs on goods coming from outside their empire, encouraging domestic
production, and entering new markets abroad. The resulting current account
surplus is used to pay for a more powerful military, which is then used to open
or capture more markets, which in turn leads to more wealth. One state’s wealth
and power thereby come mostly at the expense of others, and commerce is
essential to gaining and maintaining power relative to other states. The dis-
ruptive consequences of trade for domestic politics are largely tolerated but
sometimes mitigated by the granting of trading monopolies to specific actors
loyal to the government. Revenue from taxing commerce fills government
coffers, and in exchange the government gives merchants commercial and
military protection.
The IPE theory views commerce as inherently positive-sum: voluntary
exchange should be mutually beneficial.61 In contrast to the mercantilist theory,
restrictions on commerce are theorized to derive primarily from domestic
rather than international politics: interest groups that would lose from freer
commerce organize to seek protective restrictions on commerce from their
government. These restrictions are bad for the country (and its trading partners)
overall but good for the protected interest group. Because they are costly and
designed to benefit particular interest groups, these restrictions tend to be
narrow, focused on particular goods and services or particular factors of
production.
Superficially, the politics of trade in HEA look very different from what
either theory would expect. States outright prohibited foreign commerce at
times, and even when it was not prohibited it was tightly regulated and often
suppressed.62 In some states and periods, trade could be conducted legally only
by the government; at other times, trading privileges like those employed by
early modern European governments were granted, but only to foreigners
rather than locals. Despite its predominance, China did little to protect mer-
chant enterprises, either commercially or especially militarily, to the extent that
armed European merchants found easy prey when they began to compete for
trade in the region.63
An obvious explanation for why the mercantilist model is not useful for HEA
is that, unlike in imperial-era Europe, trade was not a viable way for states to
gain power over their neighbors. China would remain dominant over Japan,
Korea, and the rest, even if China closed itself completely to trade and the
others sought maximum advantage from it, at least until the late nineteenth
61
For a collection of edited articles that develop the IPE theory, see Frieden et al 2017.
62
See von Glahn chapter on Ming China, Andrade chapter and Horowitz chapter on Qing China,
Dudden chapter on Tokugawa Japan.
63
Andrade chapter.
century. Thus, from the perspective of any government in HEA, trade could
increase its power relative to other states, but only marginally. In these respects,
the situation is similar to that within the contemporary West. Analogously to
HEA, the dominance and protection of the United States, and warm relations
among Westernized states, meant there was no intense military competition
among these states. Consistent with the IPE theory, the benign international
atmosphere leads states to view commerce as mostly a question of domestic,
rather than interstate, winners and losers. Policies occasionally entrench and
protect particular domestic interests at the cost of those domestic and foreign
actors who would benefit from freer commerce, but they rarely have implica-
tions for the distribution of power and influence.
And yet despite this surface resemblance of the international context in HEA
to the one that inspired the IPE theory, that theory’s predictions also fail to fit
the politics of HEA’s trade. Rather than narrow restrictions on otherwise fairly
free commerce, HEA often witnessed broad restrictions or total bans on trade.
It appears that in HEA, trade posed serious domestic political risks to the
region’s governments, as it could lead to the rise of a class of wealthy, powerful
merchants who might threaten the dominance of landed elites. This is why
trading privileges were tightly controlled by the government and often afforded
only to foreigners (and geographically isolated foreigners at that), whose
increased wealth in principle posed no domestic threat. The lack of commercial
or military protection naturally constrained the growth of the merchant class
within these states and prevented it from becoming a serious threat.
Restrictions on trade in HEA lapsed only when a state was internally riven,
so that its government’s control over trade faltered, internal military competi-
tion was stimulated, and trade once again became an effective way to compete
for (domestic) power. Civil conflict in late-sixteenth-century Japan enabled the
rise of trade and of elites enriched by it, which then caused civil conflict in
China64 and a Japanese invasion of the East Asian mainland.65 The collapse of
the Ming enabled the rise of a trade-based state on China’s coast that also
proceeded to fight for control of China.66 Freer trade lasted only until landed
elites in the open state reunified, or until a foreign government intervened to
restore landed elites to power. Extraordinary measures were then taken to
reassert control over trade. The early Ming in China expelled merchants,
attacked entrepôts, and executed smugglers,67 and the early Qing went so far
as to depopulate China’s coasts,68 later imposing the restrictive Canton system
on foreign trade.69 Early Tokugawa Japan banned oceangoing ships, restricted
foreign trade to a single port and with only the Dutch, and prohibited subjects
who went abroad from returning home.70
64 65 66 67
von Glahn chapter. Swope chapter. Andrade chapter. von Glahn chapter.
68 69 70
Andrade chapter. Horowitz chapter. Dudden chapter.
The difference in restrictiveness toward trade between HEA and the con-
temporary West may be due to differences in their underlying political econ-
omy. The relatively static, agrarian economies of HEA gave rise to a stable
coalition of domestic actors – landed elites – who would benefit from broadly
restrictive policies, and the region’s autocratic governments enabled even such
a small coalition to impose its favored policies. By contrast, the rapidly
changing, diversified economies of the contemporary West make it difficult
to identify stable sets of actors who would benefit from a broad restriction, and
the West’s democratic governments make it hard for any small coalition to set
policies that would seriously harm the rest of society.
The broad restrictions on commerce in HEA were costly, and when they were
particularly stringent, they could impose extreme costs on neighboring coun-
tries, especially those more economically or politically dependent on trade.
This might help to explain the occurrence of the Imjin War, wherein a revolu-
tionary Japanese leader whose political support was based on trade gambled on
a massive invasion of the mainland with the declared aim of replacing the
hegemon with one more inclined to free commerce. To date, most international
relations theorizing about the politics of trade focuses either on its conse-
quences for international security (the mercantilist theory) or on its conse-
quences for domestic politics (the IPE theory). There is a need to develop an
integrated theory that explains how the domestic and foreign effects of com-
merce interact to influence governments’ choices of both trade and security
policies. HEA provides a rich array of cases and broad patterns that could be
mined to develop and test such a theory.
Changes in the Balance of Power

International relations theory traditionally places great weight on the interna-
tional distribution of power in explaining the character of interstate relations.
Changes in the balance of power, especially between the most powerful states,
can lead to upheavals in the international system. These upheavals are often
preceded by intense competition in arms and alliances, are sometimes precipi-
tated by large wars that draw in many states, and sometimes result in serious
changes to the international order. Changes in the balance of power are
theorized to derive from the aftermath of wars,71 differences in economic
growth rates,72 and the spread of new military technology.73 Modern interna-
tional relations theory based on bargaining models stipulates that these factors
cause war whenever the shift in power they induce is large, likely, and swift
enough.74 This body of theory was inspired by the results of “formative” wars
such as the two world wars; ructions in the European balance of power caused
71 72 73 74
McDonald 2015. Gilpin 1978. Bas and Coe 2012. Powell 2006.
by competition over trade routes and colonies from the sixteenth century on;
and the spread of firearms and, more recently, nuclear weapons. Each of these
phenomena sometimes led to wars, as a declining power fought a rising power
to try to preserve the status quo.
HEA evinces all of these theorized causes of shifts in the balance of power.
Large wars occurred, though rarely; states’ economies grew at different rates;
and new military technologies arose and spread over time. However, these do not
seem to have led to intense interstate competition over security: little in the way
of arms races, alliance formation, proxy conflicts, or systemic war occurred.
Major wars typically did not give rise to subsequent wars of opportunity –
although China was fighting large border conflicts when the Imjin War began,
there is no evidence that Hideyoshi was aware of this or that it motivated his
invasion of Korea.75 There is also little of the fierce competition over trade routes
or colonies that frequently upset Europe’s balance of power. Finally, there is no
indication that new military technologies such as firearms – which were, after all,
invented in HEA – led to wars to prevent their spread.
The most obvious answer to why these factors led to war in Europe but not in
HEA is the durable and overwhelming power of HEA’s hegemon relative to the
rotating cast of barely dominant powers in Europe. These factors led to war in
Europe because even the dominant power of the moment was never more than a
single defeat in war, a single bad recession or loss of a valuable trade route, or a
new military technology away from losing its position. These factors thus
generated – or threatened to generate – shifts in the balance of power that
were relatively large. By contrast, bad losses in border wars, deep economic
contractions, and the spread of firearms still left China vastly more powerful
than its closest rivals in HEA. The balance of power therefore never shifted by
more than a marginal amount, making no accommodation necessary, and so no
wars were fought to avoid changes in the balance of power. The massive pool of
resources on which the Chinese government could draw ensured that, so long as
its domestic rule was intact, little could threaten its dominance.76
The only serious shifts in power appear to have coincided not with interstate
economic or political events but with civil conflict inside China. An incipient
transition in dynasties, or a serious military contest for power within China,
could temporarily undermine China’s dominance over other powerful actors in
HEA, and the window of opportunity such civil conflict created was sometimes
exploited by these other actors. Indeed, the correlation between dynastic
transition in China and war and regime change elsewhere in HEA is remark-
able. The transition from Sui to Tang in China coincides with a coup in Koryŏ
and the replacement of the Sui-invested regime.77 As the Tang dynasty
75 76
Swope chapter; Swope 2009. See also Gowa and Ramsay 2017.
77
Kanagawa chapter.
collapsed, Vietnam formed as an independent state, violently expelling Chinese

forces from its territory,78 and the Korean Silla dynasty was conquered and
overthrown by Koryŏ.79 The fall of the Yuan in China led Koryŏ to try to
reclaim territory by force from China.80 The weakening of the subsequent Ming
dynasty in China precipitated the overthrow of the Tran dynasty in Vietnam81
and enabled the rise of a new state within China, the Zheng port polity,82 at the
same time that it facilitated an invasion and reunification of China by the
Qing.83 Finally, the Opium Wars coincide with the rise of the Taiping rebellion
against the Qing,84 and China’s subsequent weakening invited Japan to use
force to assert control over Korea in the Sino-Japanese War.85 Only once
China’s dominance was irrevocably lost, as evidenced by dramatic defeats at
the hands of Britain, France, and Japan in those wars, did interstate politics in
HEA begin to look more like Westphalian balance-of-power politics.
The importance of domestic upsets to the international balance of power in
HEA raises the question of whether domestically induced shifts in local or
global balances of power may also have occurred in other systems. In more
recent times, it is possible that the preoccupation of the Nixon administration
with the Watergate investigation, or of the Clinton administration with
impeachment proceedings, may have helped to precipitate conflicts such as
the Arab–Israel War of 1973 or the Kosovo War of 1999. And the occurrence of
wars in the Caucasus and Balkans just after the collapse of the Soviet Union
was not coincidental.
HEA therefore suggests a profitable addition to the repertoire of factors that
are theorized to create large shifts in the balance of interstate power and thereby
lead to preventive war. There is now strong evidence that the (anticipated)
spread of nuclear weapons has led to such wars in the last several decades,86 but
the preventive war / commitment problem theory has not really been tested
across the last two centuries, for which the necessary data on wars is readily
available.87 It should be feasible to gather data on instances of domestic upset
in major powers, including changes of leaders and political institutions,88 to see
if these are correlated with either aggression against those major powers or
either aggression against or regime change in their client states.
Changes in Polarity
Modern international relations theory holds (at least implicitly) that changes in
polarity, defined as the number of great powers in a system,89 can be violent or
78
Anderson chapter. 79 Kanagawa chapter. 80 Lee chapter. 81 Anderson chapter.
82
von Glahn chapter; Andrade chapter. 83 Crossley chapter. 84 Horowitz chapter.
85
S.-H. Park chapter. 86 Bas and Coe 2016; Debs and Monteiro 2014.
87
But see S. R. Bell and Johnson 2015. 88 See, e.g., Wu and Wolford 2018.
89
Waltz 1979.
peaceful, intentional or accidental. The United States joined the great power
club after the Spanish–American War, Japan after the First Sino-Japanese War,
both wars the culmination of drives for regional hegemony. On the other hand,
the world wars reduced the several great powers to two, and not because any
belligerents intended to leave the club. The Soviet Union fell from the ranks
peacefully when it collapsed, creating unipolarity by accident, and peaceful
accessions in the future – by, for example, India or a united Europe – are also
possible. International relations theory evinces less agreement on how long
different polarities might last. Scholars assumed that unipolarity, when it
emerged after Cold War bipolarity, would be short-lived.90 Yet at this writing
unipolarity has endured three decades compared to bipolarity’s four – nothing
to sniff at. The absence of balancing against the United States poses its own
puzzle, leading to answers rooted in the unipole’s benign intent,91 its will-
ingness to provide collective goods,92 and the difficulties of catching up
militarily after the collapse of the last remaining competitor.93
By contrast, changes in polarity were extremely rare in HEA. The modal
configuration over several centuries was overwhelming Chinese unipolarity
in a system with dramatically fewer states. But changes did occur. In the
seventh century CE, China’s division into competing kingdoms produced
multipolarity, as two Chinese kingdoms competed with the Japanese
Yamato kingdom for predominance in Korea.94 Likewise, the collapse of
the Ming in the seventeenth century saw their territory overrun and their
status atop HEA’s hierarchy usurped by the Qing, not because the latter won a
revisionist interstate war but because the Ming state was fatally weakened by
domestic unrest – a state failure that precipitated a series of wars culminating
in the reunification of China and a return to unipolarity.95 Indeed, the collapse
of the Ming and, much later, the Soviet Union represent two instances of state
failure in great powers – often considered immune from such processes. Rare
interruptions aside, Chinese unipolarity was the defining feature of HEA’s
international politics. Succeeding dynasties preserved their positions through
the provision of a combination of private goods (i.e., investiture, access to
China’s market, and protection from China’s own overwhelming military
power) and over time ostensibly more stable polarities routinely gave way
to a resurgent unipolarity.
How does this pattern comport with modern international relations theory?
The first and most obvious divergence is the endurance of unipolarity. Kenneth
Waltz calls two great powers “the smallest number possible in a self-help
system,”96 yet Japan’s failed bid to topple the Ming in the Imjin War stands
90
Waltz 1997; Waltz 2000; Mearsheimer 2001. 91 Ikenberry 2001.
92
Kydd 2005, 189–253. 93 Gowa and Ramsay 2017. 94 Kanagawa chapter.
95
Crossley chapter. 96 Waltz 1979, 136.
out for its rarity in HEA. Nominal incentives to balance notwithstanding, Japan
would not try again for over 300 years. Even acknowledging the fact of
unipolarity after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Waltz avers that “unipolarity
appears to be the least stable of international configurations.”97 Second, it is not
just that HEA’s unipolarity endured, but that when multipolarity or opportu-
nities for it emerged, unipolarity eventually returned. East Asia’s First World
War, which saw multiple Chinese dynasties competing with Japanese Yamato
for the mantle of controlling All Under Heaven,98 ultimately resolved in
unipolarity; likewise, the Ming–Qing transition did not see the emergence of
any significant challenges to the notion of a region ruled by a single major
power.
One obvious source of these differences is the extent of China’s dominance;
catching up to, much less overtaking, the dominant power was prohibitively
costly. In the “closed system” of HEA,99 China controlled what H. J.
Mackinder might have called the regional “heartland” – the largest landmass,
market, and source of wealth – from which it could dominate others by denying
access and, in the tributary system, political legitimacy.100 With this military
and economic dominance also came normative dominance. Even when China
split into multiple states, Korean kingdoms sought investiture from each in the
expectation that one would, eventually, rule “all under heaven.”101 The legal
fiction of HEA is sovereign inequality, in contrast to the Westphalian legal
fiction of sovereign equality: both define shared expectations about the games
being played, the payoffs associated with them, and other states’ strategies.102
Common knowledge that a single power should and would win the right to
grant legitimacy to the leaders of tributary states structured competition
between competing Chinese and Japanese dynasties, guiding their aims in
ways that a system defined by sovereign equality would not.103 In this specific
geopolitical configuration, anarchy appears to have been what states made of it –
and they did not make enduring violent competition.104 States gave and sought
tribute from higher- and lower-ranked entities, respectively, and they expected
wars to rearrange but not fundamentally alter these relationships. If a favorable
geographical position explains why China achieved unipolarity, then norms of
sovereign inequality, reinforced by both time and ritual,105 might explain
why HEA was never multipolar for very long. Only with the irruption of
Westphalian legal norms and the rise of a modernizing Japan, hurried along by
European victories on the Chinese periphery106 – that is, with the opening up of
the formerly closed system – did Chinese unipolarity disappear into global
multipolarity.
97 98 99
Waltz 1997, 915. Kanagawa chapter. Lee chapter. 100 Mackinder 2004.
101
Kanagawa chapter. 102 Morrow 2014. 103
D. C. Kang 2010. 104 Wendt 1992.
105
Lee chapter. 106 Dudden chapter.
State Formation
Traditional international relations theories take states, as well as their anarchi-
cal order, as given,107 which comes at the cost of accurate assessments of the
relationships between anarchy and war,108 and between war and its conse-
quences for the international system itself.109 When international relations
theory considers the origins of the state at all, it adopts a traditional view of
the Westphalian system as rooted in persistent violent conflict, which necessi-
tated that rulers centralize authority, enhance revenue extraction, and demar-
cate borders. Comparisons to processes of state formation, as well as
integration into the state system, in HEA promise to be fruitful, because the
tributary system was not just another system of territorial states; it was an old
system of territorial states, predating its Westphalian counterpart by centuries.
To be sure, there were key similarities. States taxed their populations to
support armies, though Kang and Swope in their chapter point to “emulation,
not competition” in the development of these centralized, extractive, and armed
political units.110 They note that states typically mobilized armed force against
domestic competitors more so than foreign ones, yet whether the threats that
armed organizations confront happen to be foreign or domestic, the desire to
build centralized, bounded territorial entities to ease extraction and clarify who
is whose subject is strikingly similar. Korea’s long and violent process of
unification, for example, involved a mix of local and foreign forces,111 and in
the tenth and eleventh centuries the Song dynasty embarked on a process of
centralization and military adaptation aimed at reclaiming the “Sixteen
Prefectures” lost to the Khitan Liao empire during the Jin dynasty.112 Nor
was there in early modern Europe a consistently fine line to draw between
states and nonstates as the sites and prizes of organized violence.113 States were
a solution to problems of organized violence in both systems, though HEA and
Europe differed in the rates at which states failed to deter threats of organized
violence during and after the process of state formation.114
If state formation itself was similar, HEA and Westphalia differed more
substantially in how states came to be accepted as members of the system. The
former’s investiture was granted from an imperial center, while recognition in
the Westphalian system is nominally multilateral, though any given case gen-
erally depends on the coordinating value of acceptance by the great powers.115
Failing to recognize this difference has consequences. The dominant dataset
employed in modern international relations research, the Correlates of War data
107
Bull 1977; Waltz 1979; Moravcsik 1997; Wendt 1999. See Wagner 2007; M. Kim and Wolford
2014.
108
Wagner 2007. 109 McDonald 2015. 110 Kang and Swope chapter.
111
Kanagawa chapter. 112 Tackett 2017. 113 Wimmer and Min 2006; Wagner 2007.
114
See, e.g., D. C. Kang 2010; D. C. Kang et al. 2016. 115 Coggins 2011.
(COW), uses a roughly Westphalia-plus-Yalta operationalization for mem-

bership in the system from 1816. That is, a polity is recognized as a state if it
has diplomatic missions from Britain and France or, after 1945, membership
in the United Nations.116 Yet polities that do not meet these criteria waged war
against and negotiated treaties with one another – the First and Second Opium
Wars,117 to take but two significant examples – yet the COW dataset recog-
nizes these as “extrastate” wars waged between a state and a nonstate entity.
Indeed, China fails to enter the COW data as a member of the state system
before the end of the Second Opium War, because up to that time it refused
Western diplomatic institutions. The same goes for Japan, which invaded
Korea in 1592, prompting Chinese intervention and eventually signing a
treaty ratifying its defeat in 1598. China under the Manchus also negotiated
treaties with European powers, including the Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia
in 1689.118 Scholars of international relations might gain from viewing
Westphalian recognition as a variable, rather than a constant, since treating
it as the latter arbitrarily (and nonrandomly) excludes some very statelike
polities from consideration.
If processes of state formation were basically similar, what else is at stake for
international relations scholars in ignoring HEA? First, while it can be valuable
to hold constant the international-legal system from which a sample of states is
drawn, the reality of war and treatymaking across HEA and the West, as well as
the similarity of conflict processes within them, suggests that it might be better
to pool observations from both legal systems. From an inferential standpoint,
we need more observations of the move from peace to war and back to peace,
and HEA is a promising place to look. Second, comparing the behavior of states
across the two systems, to say nothing of those operating at their junctures,119
can only help shed light on fundamental questions of international order. It may
thus be time to revise how we think about state system membership, and this
volume’s discussion of HEA offers some tentative steps forward. Kristian
Gleditsch and Michael Ward propose an expanded list based on effective
independence,120 and Tanisha Fazal adds to the COW system participation in
a treaty with either Britain or France.121 Yet these fixes would still miss crucial
interactions within non-Westphalian systems.
No solution is perfect. For example, China and Japan disagreed, even before
the encounter with Westphalian systems, about whether Korea was indepen-
dent or a vassal even in the framework of HEA.122 Still, comparison of the
processes of state formation and system membership holds out the promise of
expanding the temporal and geographical scope of available data, introducing
116
Sarkees and Wayman 2010. 117 Horowitz chapter. 118 S. C. M. Paine 1996.
119
Saeyoung Park chapter. 120 Gleditsch and Ward 1999. 121 Fazal 2004.
122
Swope chapter.
new dimensions of variation that might explain the patterns of war and peace
and of exchange and diplomacy that make up international relations. Such
comparisons can also raise other questions about both the bias in, and the
endogenous nature of, observations in state systems. Why are there so few
states in HEA compared to Westphalia, or why, given Chinese dominance, were
there so many? And how does the formation of states differ both before and
after China’s rise to dominance in the region? Finally, if HEA’s unipolarity can
explain China’s peaceful relations with Sinicized states but not its wars on the
steppe,123 we might ask why states did not form in the steppe despite apparent
efficiencies (like the avoidance of frequent war with China) associated with
state formation.
Concluding Remarks
Modern international relations theory’s Eurocentric roots are a hindrance to
understanding international relations writ large, from the ebb and flow of
commerce to transitions between war and peace. This volume’s examination
of HEA shows that meaningful variation exists among historical international
systems in the number of states, the distribution of power among them, their
normative-legal systems, and the patterns of commerce and violent conflict
they experienced. This chapter represents our initial reactions to accounts of an
international system that is unfamiliar to mainstream international relations
scholars but that facilitates the kind of structured, careful comparison of
institutions and behavior on which the social–scientific method is based. If
we want to understand how power, ideas, and institutions shape politics, then
we would be remiss to pay attention only to those configurations of power,
ideas, and institutions that exist today. This volume opens up a variety of
avenues for international relations scholars to do just that – not only to learn
from history but also to place it in its proper context, as a basis for comparison
to the workings of the contemporary international system and its possible
futures.
123
D. C. Kang 2010.
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Index
Abinales, Patricio, 208, 214 maritime trade and foreign alliances centered
Aguinaldo, Emilio in, 54, 55–56
and Dewey, 218 Shimazu army’s sacking of, 61
declaration of independence from Spain, weapons disseminated in Japan and, 60
222 Burma
and the illustrados, 207, 214 East Asian international order and,
and the Katipunan, 215 34
and the Spanish surrender to the U.S., 219 East Asian regional interconnections and,
truce signed with the Spanish 23, 43, 140
government, 217 Buzan, Barry, 17
Aisin or Jin khanate (1616–1635) Buzan, Barry and Yongjin Zhang, 12
Liaodong province and, 134, 135, 142 Búzás, Zoltán I., 236
Nurgaci’s establishment of, 135 investiture (K. ch‘aekpong, 91–96
Allan, Bentley, Srdjan Vucetic, and Ted Yi Sŏng-kye’s denied by Hongwu
Hopf, 20
Allison, Graham, 3 Canton System, 272
Amoros, Donna J., 208, 214 British frustration with, 167–168, 170
Anderson, Benedict, 209, 210, 211 East India Company and, 169–170
Anderson. James A., 31 framework for trade created by, 166
Andrade, Tonio, 6, 16, 41, 60 Hong merchants and, 166–167, 170, 171,
Armitage, David, 239 174, 175
opium trade and, 168
Barkin, J. Samuel, and Bruce Cronin, 238 silver and, 64, 167, 169–170
Barnes, Gina L., 29 Tokugawa shogunate’s confinement of
Beaulac, Stéphane, 239 traders as a model for, 64
bellicist theories of state formation. See trade facilitated by, 166–167
military expansionism; power-transition Cassel, Pär Kristoffer, 231
theory Central Asian steppe
Bentley, Jerry, 159 regional interconnections and, 23
Berger, Thomas, 19 Chang, Hsin-pao, 174
Best, Jonathan, 70, 73 Chong, Da-ham, 95
Biddle, Nicholas, 188, 191 Chong, Ja Ian, and Todd H. Hall, 233
Bilgin, Pinar, 4 Chosŏn Korea (1392–1910). See also Great
Blount, James, 218 East Asian War; Unyō incident
Bonifacio, Andrés, 215 Confucian vocabulary adapted by, 34
Bowring, Sir John disadvantaged status in the treaty port
Bowring Treaty of 1855 with King Mongkut system, 230, 232
of Siam, 41 founder. See Yi Sŏng-Kye
British. See Great Britain language stipulations in the Treaty of
Bungo Funai Kanghwa and, 254
Chinatowns (Tōjinmachi) in, 51 stability of, 37
Francis Xavier and, 53 the Sino-Japanese War and, 224
309
310 Index
Chosŏn Korea—and the Ming empire. See also Dudden, Alexis, 16, 42
Yi Sŏng-kye Dutch presence
Jurchen groups as a common enemy, 123 European and American penetration of East
King Sŏnjo (r.1567–1608), 109, 116, 126 Asia and, 9, 25, 40–41, 166
Korea viewed as “the lips that protect maritime trade based in Taiwan and,
China’s teeth”, 37 150–152, 155
Liaodong region and, 91–96 Matthew Perry’s arrival in Japan, 189
military strengthening measures, 87 Zheng-Dutch relationship. See Zheng clan
Musa The Warrior and, 81, 82, 91 Duthie, Torquil, 69, 72, 73
sadae (“serving the great”) and, 81–82,
87–89, 94, 96 East Asian international relations. See also
tributary relations, 32, 89–90 Eastphalia; Sinocentric order; tribute
Coe, Andrew J. and Jane Vaynman, 269 system
Coe, Andrew J. and Scott Wolford, 8, 10, 11, dynastic transitions and, 29–37
13, 18 four-phase periodization of, 24–25
constructivism and the global status hierarchy, 237, 278
traditional paradigms of international hegemonic order of, 8, 10–11, 22, 115
relations and, 263, 267 periods of lower-frequency warfare and,
Cooley, Alexander and Daniel Nexon, 14 9, 161
Correlates of War data (COW), 280 Qin-Han unification establishment of,
Cortes, Rosario Mendoza, Celestina Puyal 22
Boncan, and Ricardo Trota José, 219 rationalist bargaining of Westphalian system
Crossley, Pamela Kyle, 33 exercised by actors, 10
Cumings, Bruce, 15 reordering of East Asian relations and, 276
Sino-Vietnamese relations and, 97–98,
Đại Việt kingdom. See also Mạc dynasty 106–107
(1527–92); Trần dynasty (1225–1400); Taiping rebellion and, 40
Mạc dynasty (1527–92); Trần dynasty Western imperialism and, 5, 8, 14–17,
(1225–1400) 18, 259
Hồ Quý Ly’s state-building efforts and, 107 Eastphalia. See also East Asian international
Ming dynasty and, 98, 100–101, 102–107 relations; Sinocentric order
power struggles since the 1520s, 58–59 as a construct, 239
Yuan Empire and, 98–99 Sinocentric world order defined as, 255
daimyo of Western Japan. See Hosokawa clan; economic sanctions as a tool for enforcing
Mōri clan; Oda Nobunaga; Ōtomo clan; order, 13, 267
Ōuchi clan; Shimazu clan Elliot, Charles, 173, 174, 175–177
Daoguang Emperor (r. 1821–1850) Elliot, George, 176
opium distribution and consumption event construction
and, 173 narratives about dynastic change and, 5, 23,
Opium War and, 165, 177 35, 36, 129, 130
design of international institutions. See also narratives of the Ming-Qing transition and,
tribute system 33, 135–136
centralized bureaucratic control and, 28–29 Philippine independence and, 219, 223
China’s civil service examination system research on East Asian state formation
and, 28, 248, 265 and, 26
projection of sovereignty and, 250 extraterritoriality
as a tool for enforcing order, 267 British trade with China and, 167, 176,
Deuchler, Martina, 243 179, 186
Dincecco, Mark and Yuhua Wang, 35 ideology of the Westphalian system and,
discourse of resistance 15–16, 247
the circumscribing effects of power and, 251 Sino-Japan Regulations of Amity and, 240
the language of the Kanghwa Treaty and, the end of “traditional” East Asia and,
245, 251 229, 231
Drea, Edward J., 234 Treaty of Amity and Commerce and, 199
Dreyer, Edward L., 98 Treaty of Shimonoseki and, 225, 230
Index 311
Fairbank, John K., 5, 89, 129 Kamiya Jutei (Hakata merchant) and, 51, 61
Fazal, Tanisha M., 280 Ningbo merchants and shipping agents
Feng Huiyun, 120–121 and, 47
Finnemore, Martha, 13 silver and, 54, 60
France Han dynasty (206 BCE-220 CE)
colonial Indochina, 40, 41, 223 centralized government of, 26
European and American penetration of East tribute system during, 67, 68–69
Asia and, 3, 16, 25, 207, 225, 229, 234 Hanscom, Christopher, 14
impact of Western imperialism and, 25 Henry, Todd, 15
Second Opium War and, 164 Hideyoshi. See Toyotomi Hideyoshi
Sino-French War, 226 Hirado
Frank, Andre Gunder, 159 Chinatowns (Tōjinmachi) in, 51
Fulin (Shunzhi-period emperor, 1638–1661), Francis Xavier and, 53
139, 140 Portuguese traders in, 57
Wang Zhi and, 55
Garon, Sheldon, 238 Hồ Quý Ly 胡季犛
Germany Đại Viê ̣t state-building efforts and, 107
European and American penetration of East Sino-Vietnamese relations and, 97, 100, 106
Asia and, 3, 16, 25, 41, 207, 225, 229, 234 usurpation of the Trần throne, 36, 99–100,
Gleditsch, Kristian S. and Michael 102, 106
D. Ward, 280 Holland. See Dutch Presence
Global History school Hong Taiji, 135, 144
Europeans’ dominance of the New World Hong-kyu Park, 94
viewed by, 159 Hongwu Emperor (r. 1368–98)
international relations of East Asian History investiture of Yi Sŏng-kye denied by, 82,
viewed by, 5–6 91–96
Goldstone, Jack A., 159 maritime trade ban, 45
Gotō, 51, 54 opposition to invading Vietnam, 104
Great Britain. See also Elliot, Charles tributary diplomacy formalized by, 49,
Britain-American hegemonic transition and, 84–85
3, 9 Yuan dynasty overthrown by, 36
Canton System and, 167–168, 169–170 Horowitz, Richard, 16, 42
European and American penetration of East Hosokawa clan
Asia and, 16, 25, 225, 229, 234 Ōuchi clan and, 50
extraterritoriality and, 167, 176, 186
Lord Macartney, 168 ilustrados (enlightened ones), 211, 212, 213,
Napier Affair and, 170–172 See also Rizal, José
Opium Wars and, 164, 165 and the liberal ideas of the Biak na Bata, 216
profit from the opium trade, 168 rise of, 207
yi (barbarians) and, 172 Imjin War (1592–1598). See Great East Asian
Great East Asian War (1592–1598), 108–128 War (1592–1598)
alternative names for, 108, 109 international political economy (IPE). See
conflict summarized, 109–113 Canton System; maritime trade; tribute
dynamics of East Asian international system
relations and, 32–33, 128, 278 East Asian regional interconnections and,
realist theories challenged by, 38 23, 25, 43
Greve, Andrew Q., and Jack S. Levy, 226 restrictions on commerce in Historical East
Griffiths, Ryan, 20 Asia and, 274
traditional paradigms of international
Haggard, Stephan and David C. Kang, David relations and, 7–8, 18, 263, 267, 274
C., 263 international relations theory. See also Ming
Hakata (modern Fukuoka) dynasty (1368–1644)–and Vietnam; East
Chinatowns (Tōjinmachi) in, 51 Asian international relations; Eastphalia;
demise of, 61 event construction; military expansion-
Japanese military and, 29 ism; Sinocentric order; tribute system
312 Index
international relations theory (cont.) John Manjiro (aka Nakahama Manjiro) and,
agency of regional actors and, 7, 13, 199–203
115–116, 241, 242, 244, 258 Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan), 70, 73
balance of power. See Westphalian interna- Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), 42, 235
tional system Sino-Japanese silk-for-silver trade and,
Eurocentrism of, 4, 263, 281 51, 151
four determinants of interstate behavior, 263 Townsend Harris and, 198–199
Historical East Asia (HEA) and, 5, 7–8, 10, Japanese pirates. See Wokou (“Japanese
12, 269, 281 pirates” [Jap. Wakō])
ideational and constitutive factors of Johnston, Iain Alistair
societies and cultures and, 10, 13–14, strategic culture defined by, 118–121
39–40, 82–83 Jurchen federation
perspectives on commerce. See international Chosŏn relations and, 34, 37
political economy (IPE); mercantilist Ming hegemony over Northeast Asia,
theory 134–135
the “rise of Japan” narrative and, 227
traditional paradigms of. See constructivism; Kamiya Jutei (Hakata merchant), 51, 61
international political economy; liberal- Kanagawa, Nadia, 29, 39, 270
ism; realist theory Kang, David C., 13, 39, 97, 115, 121, 161, 266,
international relations theory—tools for 267, 270
enforcing order. See also design of inter- Kang, David C. and Alex Yu-Ting Lin, 4
national institutions; military protection or Kang, David C. and Kenneth M. Swope, 9,
intervention; political recognition and its 279
removal Kang, David C. and Stephan Haggard, 263
cooperation under hegemony compared, Kang, David C., Dat X. Nguyen, Ronan
266 Tse-min Fu, 38
economic sanctions and, 13, 267 Kang, Etsuko Hae-jin, 117
investiture (K. ch‘aekpong, C. cefeng) Kanghwa Treaty. See Treaty of Kanghwa
authority relations in tribute practices and, (1876)
11, 32, 89–90 Kelley, Liam C., 31, 38
Chosŏn kings and, 89, 91–96 Kim Pu-sik (1075–1151 CE)
Koryŏ kings and, 85 Samguk sagi (Records of the Three
multipolar order of China after the fall of the Kingdoms), 69–70
Han and, 68 Kim, Han-gyu, 37, 84
negative soft power held by the Ming and, Kim, Tang-Taek, 94
83, 90–91, 92–96 Kingdom of Ryukyu. See Ryukyu Kingdom)
Yi Sŏng-kye’s denied by Hongwu, 82 Koguryŏ. See Korean peninsula
Korea
Japan. See also Bungo Funai; Gotō; Great East Guoyu, 國語or 국어 ”national
Asian War (1592–1598); Hakata (modern language”, 254
Fukuoka); Hirado; Sino-Japanese War; Korean peninsula. See also Chŏson Korea;
Tokugawa regime; Usuki Koryŏ Korea; Liaodong; Sino-Japanese
as closed (sakoku), 25, 44, 188, 190, 195 War
daimyo of western Japan. See Hosokawa East Asian international order and, 8, 10,
clan; Mōri clan; Ōtomo clan; Ōuchi clan; 28, 34
Shimazu clan East Asian regional interconnections and,
disadvantaged status in the treaty port 23, 25
system, 230, 232 European and American penetration of East
discord in the military after 1895, 237 Asia and, 229, 233
East Asian international order and, 8, 10, 16, Korea viewed by the Ming as “the lips that
28, 34, 277 protect China’s teeth”, 37, 91, 124, 125
European and American penetration of East pattern of alliances on, 70–73, 76–79
Asia and, 235 state formation on, 29
Hội An used for Sino-Japanese trade, 58–59 Tang dynasty (618–907) and, 29, 35, 36, 39,
Iwakura Mission (1871–1873) and, 202–203 67, 68, 75–80, 276
Index 313
Koryŏ Korea (918–1392), 36 Tonkin heartland in Northern Vietnam

Kongmin (r. 1351–1374), 81, 84–85 controlled by, 58
Korean historical sourcesw compiled during, MacDonald, Paul and Joseph Parent, 3
69–70 MacKay, Joseph, 27
Ming investiture of Koryŏ kings, 85, 91 Mackinder, H. J., 278
Musa The Warrior and, 81, 82, 91 Majul, Cesar, 214
Northern Yuan and, 85, 86, 90 Manchu Qing empire. See Qing dynasty
territory in the Korean peninsula and, Manchuria
85–86, 91 Qing rule of China and, 129, 130, 140
Yi Sŏng-kye’s opposition to King U, 81–82, Manifesting Awe (wei 威), 114, 122, 268
86–87, 94 Ming invasion of the Đại Việt kingdom
Kwan, Mei-Po, 33 and, 98
Kye, Seung-bum, 90 Perry as “Lord of the Forbidden Interior”, 191
Perry’s tactics of “shock and awe”, 188,
Larsen, Kirk, 37, 236 192–193
Lê Lợi黎利 (1385–1433), 102, 103, PRC’s “Nine-Dash Line” and, 122
106–107 maritime trade. See also Canton System; port
Lee, Gyu-cheol, 94 polity paradigm; Wokou (“Japanese
Lee, Ji-Young, 7, 11, 12, 14, 27, 32, 34, 116, pirates” [Jap. Wakō]); Zheng clan
122, 123, 125 economic transformation of China during the
Lee, Kenneth, 37 Song dynasty and, 46
Lee, Sunghsi, 74 Eurocentric views of East Asian commerce
Lewis, Mark Edward, 26, 69 and, 44–45
Li Hongzhang, 204, 227, 232, 235 European and East Asian international
Li Zicheng (1606–1645), 132, 137–138, commerce compared, 156–157, 160–163
139, 142 Hồ Quý Ly’s seizing of the ports of
Liaodong Champa, 100
Great East Asian War and, 125 Mongol conquest and, 47
late Ming and, 130, 134 Zheng state based in Xiamen and, 150, 162
leaders of the fan (feudatory) southern proxy Matsura domain
governments and, 140, 144 capital of. See Hirado
Qing rule of China and, 130, 134 Matsuru Shigenobu, 56–57
the Sino-Japanese War and, 225, 234 Wang Zhi and, 55
trade with the Jurchen, 134 Mearsheimer, John J., 3, 19
the Unyō mission and, 243, 243 Melville, Herman, 188
Yuan-Ming transition and, 81–82, 86–87, mercantilist theory. See also maritime trade;
91–96 Wokou (“Japanese pirates” [Jap. Wakō])
liberalism Eurocentricism of narratives of the “Age of
China as a threat to contemporary Western Exploration”, 44–45
liberal order, 20–21 Historical East Asia as a source for an
concepts of modernity and modernization integrated theory explaining domestic and
and, 258, 259 foreign effects and, 274
construction of sovereignty in the Kanghwa Nguygễn regime’s foreign trade strategy
Treaty and, 252 and, 58–59
Philippine independence and, 206, 210, 216, Nobunaga’s fiscal policies and, 59–60
219, 223 politics of interstate commerce and, 272
traditional paradigms of international military expansionism. See also power-
relations and, 42, 263, 267 transition theory
Lieberman, Victor, 6, 31, 159 the distinctive logics of empire and, 242
Lin Zexu (Qing official), 173–175, 176, 177 Eurocentrism of its application to state
Liu, Lydia, 257 formation, 4, 22, 161
Ming dynasty’s occupation of the Đại Việt
Mạc dynasty (1527–92) kingdom and, 98, 102–107
Ming court and, 105–106 seventeenth-century Yunnan and, 138–141
Nguygễn regime’s independence from, 59 the Sino-Japanese War and, 225, 226, 228
314 Index
military protection or intervention Hideyoshi and, 61

pattern of alliances on the Korean peninsula Iwami mines and, 60, 62
and, 67, 70–73, 77–79 Moriyasu, Ken, 29
positioning in the international hierarchy in
Asia and, 125–127 Napier, Lord William, as Chief Superintendent
as a tool for enforcing order, 267 of Trade for Britain, 170–172
Zhang Xianzhong’s campaigns in Shaanxi Neumann, Iver, 21
and Henan, 137 Ngô Quyền 吳權 (897–944), 97, 99
Ming dynasty (1368–1644). See also Great Nguyễn Kim 阮淦 (1476–1545), 106
East Asian War (1592–1598) Nguygễn Huễ and the Tây Sơn Rebellion
emperors. See Hongwu; Wanli; Yongle (1771–1802), 106
institutional and organizational maturation Nguygễn regime
of the imperial system, 34, 114 independent regime founded by, 58–59
Korea and. See Chosŏn Korea—and the rice cultivation adopted as an economic base
Ming empire by, 63
Manifesting Awe (wei 威) and, 114, 122, Zheng clan smugglers and, 63
268 Nguygễn Trãi (1380–1442), 103, 105
and the Ming-Qing transition, 33, 129–145 Nihon Shoki (Chronicles of Japan), 69
prohibition against private overseas trade Nobunga. See Odo Nobunanga
rescinded by (1567), 57 Nurgaci (1559–1626). See also Aisin or Jin
Qi Jiguang’s military tactices, 57, 127 khanate (1616–1635)
Sinocentric order of, 32, 115 Great East Asian War and, 113, 126,
territories controlled by, 131 134–135
tributary relations fused with trading Manchu Qing Eight Banners and, 135,
privileges during, 45, 49–50, 114 141–142, 144–145
tributary relations with the Koryŏ, 85
Ming dynasty (1368–1644)—and China’s Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582), 57
“silver century”, 51, See also Wokou fiscal policies, 59–60
(“Japanese pirates”) gunpowder weapons and, 61
collapse of China’s paper money system Toyotomi Hideyoshi and, 61, 116
and, 151 Ōmura Sumitada, 57
Europe’s economy and, 150–152 opium trade. See also Canton System
Manila Bay and, 58 British profit from, 168
Sino-Japanese silk-for-silver trade and, Qing concern with the social and economic
151 consequences of, 164, 170
Ming dynasty (1368–1644)—and Vietnam Opium Wars (1839–1858), 182–187
Mạc and Lê courts and, 105–106 causes summarized, 164–165
overthrow of the Tran dynasty and, 276 Daoguang Emperor and, 165, 177
Zhang Fu 張輔 (1375–1449) and, 101 East Asian international society challenged
Mongol Yuan. See Yuan dynasty by, 8, 42, 186, 242, 271, 276, 280
Mongolia. See also Yuan dynasty establishment of a framework of diplomacy
Altan Khaghan, 33, 133–134 between Britain and the Qing Empire, 164
chieftain Narhachu, 81–82, 86 establishment of trade beneficial to Great
East Asian international order and, 33–34 Britain, 164
Khubilai Khan, 31, 47, 98–99 “Opium War” as a moniker, 176
Oirots, 33 Taiwan and, 162
Oyirod Mongols, 130–133, 142 US diplomatic relations with Japan and, 190
Qing rule of China and, 129, 130, 135–136, Xianfeng Emperor and, 165
143, 144–145 Opium Wars—First Opium War
regional interconnections and, 43 (1839–1842), 164
Tumet Mongols, 132, 133, 142 negotiations between Lin Zexu and Charles
Yuan dynasty and, 31 Elliot and, 174–175
Mōri clan Opium Wars—First Opium War
dominance of, 56–57 (1839–1842), negotiations between Lin
gunpowder weapons of, 60–61 Zexu and Charles Elliot and, 176
Index 315
Opium Wars—Second Opium War independence in 1898, 219, 223

(1856–1860), 164 Katipunan established by Andrés
Ōtomo clan Bonifacio, 215
capital of. See Bungo Funai rise of the Philippine intellectual class. See
gunpowder weapons of, 60 ilustrados (enlightened ones)
Sōrin (1530–87), 55–57, 61 silver trade in Manila Bay and, 58, 208
Yoshiaki, 53–54, 56 Pines, Yuri, 9
Yoshinago, 55, 56 Pinto, Fernão Mendes, 53, 60
Ottoman empire piracy. See also Wokou (“Japanese pirates”
British governing relations with, 164 [Jap. Wakō])
Ōuchi clan Jiaqing Emperor’s suppression of, 168
Hosokawa clan and, 50 polarity
Mōri clan dominance over, 56–57, 61 absence of balancing against the United
Oyirod Mongols, 130–133, 142 States and, 277
multipolarity of East Asia during the
Paekche. See Korean peninsula Northern and Southern dynasties,
Pagden, Anthony, 242 67–68, 69
Paine, S. C. M., 226 patterns of warfare and, 34–40
Palais, James, 243 role of culture and, 10, 13, 28–29, 39–40
Palmerston, Viscount unipolarity in Historical East Asia, 8, 22,
Lord Napier and, 171 79–80, 264, 278, 281
Palmerston, Viscount, military action in political recognition and its removal. See also
China supported by, 175–177 investiture; tribute system
Park, Saeyong, 271 Historical East Asia’s normative structure
Park, Saeyoung, 17, 27 and, 271
Park, Seo-Hyun, 7, 17, 19 as a tool for enforcing order, 267
Park, Won-ho, 85 as a variable rather than a constant, 280
patterns of exchange. See international political Pomeranz, Kenneth, 159
economy port polity paradigm
Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE), 3, 4 hegemonic Tokugawa political order and,
Perry, Elizabeth, 20 62
Perry, Matthew maritime trade in East Asia and, 45–46, 64
changes in Japan’s system and, 196–198, Nguygễn regime and, 58–59, 63
204–205 ports of Kyushu and, 51, 52, 55–56, 62
Dutch-speaking interpreter, 189 Ryukyu Kingdom and, 50
guise as “Lord of the Forbidden and the Zheng clan, 63, 149–163, 276
Interior”, 191 Portugal
opening of Japan (1858), 42, 188–205 alliance with the Wokuo, 57
tactics of “shock and awe”, 188, 192–193 European and American penetration of East
Treaty of Kanagawa (1854) and, 198 Asia and, 25, 40–41, 44, 156–157
Peterson, Charles, 39 Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier, 53, 55
Peterson, Mark, 37 Melaka and trading at Shuangyu Island,
Philipine-American War (1888–1902) 51–53
as America’s “first Vietnam war”, 221 Portugal—colony of Macao, 40, 41, 57–58,
Philippine-American War (1888–1902), 41 61, 151
and McKinley’s “benevolent assimilation” ZhengChenggong and, 154
address, 221 Pottinger, Sir Henry, 177, 179
Philippine-American War (1888–1902), power-transition theory. See also event
and liberal ideas evoked by the U.S, 222 construction
Philippines. See also Philippine-American Britain-American hegemonic transition and,
War; Spanish-American War 3, 9
Catholic Church as administrators for Chinese-led regional system as a challenge
Spain, 211 to, 19–21
European and American penetration of East Eurocentrism of, 4
Asia and, 41, 207 the Sino-Japanese War and, 225
316 Index
Qi Jiguang (1528–88), 57, 127 Ryukyu Kingdom

Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735–96), 64 Confucian vocabulary adapted by, 34
Canton System and, 166, 168 demise of its political independence, 59, 128
letter to Geroge III, 45 East Asian international order and, 8, 10, 34
Qin-Han unification (221 BC–220 AD), 8–9, East Asian regional interconnections and, 23
22, 24, 27, 114–115 Ryukyu Kingdom—and maritime trade in East
Chinese hegemony traced to (Phase 1 of East Asia
Asian history) demise of, 50, 59
historical East Asia traced to port polity paradigm and, 50
Qin, Yaqing, 14 private coiners in, 59
Qing dynasty (1644–1911). See also Canton
System; Opium Wars; Taiping rebellion Sadao, Nishijima, 69
as a conquest state before 1644, 135–136 Sancianco, Gregorio, 211
emperors. See Daoguang Emperor; Fulin; Schake, Kori, 3
Hong Taiji; Qianlong Emperor; Xianfeng Schouten, Wouter, 149
Emperor; Xuanye; Yongzheng Emperor Schumacher, John, 210
Empress Dowager Cixi, 204 Scobell, Andrew, 119
European and American penetration of East Seed, Patricia, 159
Asia and, 163 Shimazu clan
Grand Council, 115 gunpowder weapons of, 60
Jiaqing Emperor’s suppression of piracy, 168 Kingdom of Ryukyu and, 59, 128
multi-dimensionality of its reunification of Shimazu, Naoku, 238
China, 63–64, 143 Shin, Gi-wook and Michael Robinson, 15
private maritime trade during, 45 Shirk, Susan, 3
territories controlled by, 132 Siam
Treaty of Nerchinsk with Russia (1689), 280 British influence on, 41
tributary system preserved by, 118 East Asian international order and, 8, 10
Qing dynasty (1644–1911)—Eight Banners East Asian regional interconnections and,
Green Standard Army and, 142 23, 43
Liaodong province and, 139, 142 silver
Nurgaci’s state and military organizations Canton System and, 167, 169–170
and, 135, 141–142, 144–145 Ming Dynasty and. See Ming dynasty
(1368–1644)—and China’s “silver
Rawski, Evelyn, 6 century
realist theory, 21 Sinocentric order. See also East Asian interna-
Eurocentrism of, 3 tional relations; Eastphalia; investiture;
fall of Koguryŏ and, 39 Ming dynasty; tribute system
Great East Asian War (Imjin War) and, 38 and core-periphery relations in premodern
traditional paradigms of international East Asia, 6
relations and, 263, 267 East Asian states and peoples and, 12
Ringrose, David, 159 Eastphalia as a term for, 255
Rizal, José, 209, 214, 215 Great East Asian War of 1592–98 as
Robinson, David, 119 a challenge to, 32–33, 128
Robinson, Michael and Gi-wook Shin, 15 Hongwu’s formalized system of tributary
Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent and R. Bin Wong, diplomacy and, 49, 84–85
35, 37 incidence of war and, 10
Rossabi, Morris, 6 international relations of historical East Asia
Ruskola, Teemu, 257 and, 9, 17–18, 22–43
Russia Ming and, 115
European and American penetration of East stability of compared with the Westphalian
Asia and, 16, 41, 140, 193, 225, 227, 229, system, 115, 161
230, 235, 237, 271 tributary system as a more accurate name
Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), 42, 235 for, 12
Treaty of Nerchinsk with the Qing Western imperialism and, 5, 14–17, 18,
(1689), 280 24, 259
Index 317
Sino-Japanese War Sun, Laichen, 101

advanced “civilization” showcased in, 237 Suzuki, Shogo, 17
Chosŏn Korea as the old order and Meiji Swope, Kenneth M., 6, 32, 37, 101, 103
Japan as the new, 224 Swope, Kenneth M. and David C. Kang, 9, 279
European and American penetration of East
Asia and, 225, 227, 229, 236 Taiping rebellion (1850–1864)
Japan as a stakeholder in the Westphalian reordering of East Asian relations and,
territorial model and, 229, 236, 277 40, 276
Japanese foreign policy and, 238 Taiwan
military reforms in Japan and China and, Dutch maritime trade based in, 150–152,
204 155
nation-building efforts in China and, 237 East Asian international order and, 8,
nation-building efforts in Japan and, 161–163
238 East Asian regional interconnections and, 23
Treaty of Shimonoseki, 225, 230, 234 Qing rule of China and, 63, 129, 130, 141,
Skaff, Jonathan Karam, 33 161–163
Song dynasty (960–1279), 30 Zheng clan’s defeat of the Dutch, 157–160
Sino-Japanese trade during, 46 Tang dynasty (618–907)
sovereignty. See also political recognition and Gaozong (r. 649–683), 78
its removal Korean peninsula and, 29, 35, 36, 39, 67, 68,
investiture practice and, 11, 32 75–80, 276
the Westphalian international system and, state-formation in China and, 8, 24, 28–30
16–17, 250, 252 Taizong (r. 626–649), 76–78
Spain Taylor, Keith W., 102, 103, 104, 105
European and American penetration of East Thayer, Carlyle A., 97
Asia and, 41, 207 Thucydides, 3, 123
Philippines and. See Philippines; Spanish- Tibet
American War Altan Khaghan and, 33, 133
Spanish-American War British invasion of, 167
and McKinley’s proclamation, 221 East Asian international order and, 8, 10,
and regional hegemony, 277 28, 34
Treaty of Paris (December 10, 1898), 207, East Asian regional interconnections and, 23
219, 220, 221 impact on Tang-Silla relations, 79
truce leading to Spanish surrender, 219 Qing rule of China and, 129, 130
Spanish-American War and event construction, trade and interconnectivity of, 23, 43,
206, See also Aguinaldo, Emilio 140
and the voices and agency of Filipino Tumet Mongols and, 142
revolutionaries, 206 Yuan dynasty and, 31
Standen, Naomi, 23, 30 Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), 62, 113,
state formation. See also military expansion- 128, 194
ism; political recognition and its removal; Tokugawa regime (1603–1867). See also Great
port polity paradigm; power-transition East Asian War (1592–1598); Unyō
theory; sovereignty (雲揚) incident
Eurocentrism of bellicist theories of, 4, 22 “Great Peace Under Heaven” established by,
fifth to tenth centuries AD in East Asia 194–196, 197–198, 278
(Phase II), 24, 27–31 impact of international treaties agreed
Westphalian and the History of East Asia to, 202
compared, 281 international treaties agreed to, 165
Sugihara, Kaoru, 64 kokudaka taxation system inaugurated by
Sui-dynasty Nobunaga, 59
incursions into the Korean peninsula, Meiji overthrow of (1868), 197–198
73–75, 85 Nagasaki compounds created for Chinese
Sui-Tang unification and Dutch traders, 64
East Asian regional system and, 8, 24, 28 technological advancement during, 197
incursions into the Korean peninsula, 68, 125 tributary order and, 128
318 Index
Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598), 25, See also tributary relations fused with trading
Great East Asian War (1592–1598) privileges during the Ming, 45, 49–50,
invasion of Korea (1592–98), 32, 108–128 114
Japan’s status in the tributary order and, Western Europeans’ rejection of, 164,
116–118, 123 166
Japanocentric world order envisioned by, Yamato court and, 70, 72–74, 79, 80
32–33, 123 Yi Sŏng-kye’s interest in investiture as King
Ming military strength underestimated by, of Chosŏn and, 82, 90, 91–96
108, 124 Yuan period and, 84–85, 86
Oda Nobunaga and, 61, 116 Trịnh Kiểm鄭檢 (1503–1570), 106
Tokugawa Ieyasu’s vanquishing of, 113 Tumet Mongols
Trần dynasty (1225–1400), 105 Ming and, 133, 142
Hồ Quý Ly’s usurpation of, 99–100, 102, 106 territories controlled by, 132
Lê Lợi and, 103
Yuan Empire and, 98–99 United States. See also Perry, Matthew;
Treaty of Amity. See Treaty of Kanghwa (1876) Philippine-American War; Spanish-
Treaty of Kanagawa (1854), 198 American War
Treaty of Kanghwa (1876) absence of balancing against, 277
the Unyō incident and, 240, 242, 244 American and Chinese hegemony compared,
Treaty of Kanghwa (1876)–as contract, 251 9, 19, 266
Article I and Westphalian sovereignty, Britain-American hegemonic transition and,
252 3, 9
Article III language stipulations, 254 European and American penetration of East
treaty port system Asia and, 3, 16, 25, 41, 42, 207, 225,
Japan’s and Korea’s ambiguous status and, 229
230, 232 Townsend Harris and, 198–199
tributary missions Unyō (雲揚) incident
Korean relations with China and, 12, 81 agency of regional actors in determining the
trade controlled by, 11 direction of the Westphalian system and,
Vietnamese relations with China and, 12 241, 242, 244, 258
tribute system. See also tributary missions and relations between Chŏson Korea and
China-Inner Asian diplomatic relations and, Japan, 245, 250, 251
10, 33–34, 39, 122 Sin Hŏn’s exchange with Kuroda, 250
Chosŏn-Ming relations and, 89–90 summary of, 244
Confucian worldview and, 10, 13, 14, 40, Usuki
82–83 Chinatowns (Tōjinmachi) in, 51
Han dynasty and, 67, 68–69
Heaven-sanctioned authority and, 68–69, Vaynman, Jane and Andrew J. Coe, 269
266, 278 Vietnam. See also Đại Việt kingdom; Hồ Quý
investiture and. See investiture Ly; Mạc dynasty; Nguygễn regime; Trần
Japan’s status in, 116–118, 123 dynasty
Japanese adaptation of, 29, 194–196 centralization of authority of, 30–31
major conflicts prevented by, 114 Champa kingdom and, 31, 38, 100, 101
malleability of, 30, 32–34, 115–116, domestic instability and regime
166, 167 contestation, 38
Manifesting Awe (wei 威) and, 114, 122, 268 East Asian international order and, 8, 10,
multipolarity of East Asia during the 34, 37
Northern and Southern dynasties and, East Asian regional interconnections and, 23
67–68, 69 French colony of Cochinchina and, 40, 41
as a name for the Sinocentric system, 12 historical international relations in Asia and,
Sino-Korean alliance. See Chosŏn 221, 223
Korea—and the Ming empire Hội An, 58–59
stability of compared with the Westphalian Sino-Vietnamese relations and, 97–98,
system, 115 106, 276
Sui and Tang unipolarity and, 79–80 Trinh rulers of Tonkin, 63
Index 319
von Glahn, Richard Japanese envoys sent to the Ming court

economic relations in East Asia discussed and, 56
by, 18, 25 Ming court’s reversal on overseas trade,
might and wealth of the Sui-Tang empires 57–58
discussed by, 28 Qing dynasty and, 63
Ryukyu as a hub of maritime East Asia
Wade, Geoff, 44 and, 59
Waltz, Kenneth N., 278 Wang Zhi as a, 53–56, 57, 60, 63
Wang Zhi, 53–56, 57, 60, 63 Zheng Shungong’s meeting with Ōtomo
Wang, Yuan-kang, 121 Sōrin, 55
Wang, Zhenping, 76, 78–79 Zhu Wan and, 54
Wanli reign period (r. 1572–1620) Wolford, Scott and Andrew J. Coe, 8
assessment of, 136 Womack, Brantly, 25, 32
devolution of Ming power during, 127 Wong, R. Bin, 27, 159
military revival during his rule, 108, 124 Wong, R. Bin and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal,
Mongol tribes of the steppe and, 124 35, 37
Three Great Campaigns (Wanli san da Woodside, Alexander, 5, 6, 28
zheng), 108, 127 Wright, David, 33
Wanli reign period (r. 1572–1620), military Wu Sangui (1612–1678)
intervention in Korea, 125–127 fan (“feudatory”) government established in
Yang Yinglong Miao uprising, 127 Yunnan by, 138, 139–141
Ward, Michael D. and Kristina Qing defeat of rebel kingdoms and resistance
S. Gleditsch, 280 regimes and, 138, 139–141, 144
Ward, Steven, 237 rebellion of the fan (feudatories), 140
Westphalian international system
balance-of-power lessons from Historical Xianfeng Emperor, 165
East Asia, 276 Xinjiang
changes-in-polarity lessons from Historical Qing rule of China and, 129, 130
East Asia, 281 Xuanye (Kangxi period emperor 1662–1722),
concept of sovereignty and, 4, 16–17 140, 141, 145
as a construct, 239, 263 reunification of China (1683), 63, 130, 162
Correlates of War data (COW), 280
evolution of the East Asian international Yamagata Aritomo, 228, 229
system and, 5, 14–17, 42 Yamaguchi
Japan as a stakeholder after the Francis Xavier and, 53
Sino-Japanese War, 229, 236 Yamgata Aritomo, 235
military protection as a tool of, 13 Yasunori, Arano, 123
multipolar system of sovereign equality Yi Sŏng-kye
among states, 8, 22, 115, 161 Chosŏn established by, 82, 86
shift away from the tributary system and, investiture as King of Chosŏn sought by, 82,
11, 241 83, 90, 91–96
warfare in East Asian history as a challenge military action against the Ming and, 81–82,
to, 34–40 86–87, 94
Whitemore, John, 102, 106 Yongle Emperor (r. 1402–1424)
Wigan, Karen, 30 Ming court’s invasion of the Đại Việt
Wills, John E., Jr., 29 kingdom and, 98, 100–101, 103–104
Wokou (“Japanese pirates” [Jap. Wakō] 倭寇) Yongzheng Emperor’s banning of opium,
appellation defined and seafarers identified 168
with, 45, 48 Yuan dynasty
Chinese mercantile expansion into the, 64 collapse of, 32, 133
diffusion of gunpowder and, 60 Koryŏ Korea and, 85, 86, 90
global trade during the Ming and, 45–46, 54 maritime trade during, 47
Hideyoshi’s assessment of Ming military Tibet and, 31
capabilities and, 124 Trần dynasty and, 98–99
Hu Zongxian’s diplomatic mission and, 56 tribute system during, 84–85, 86
320 Index
Yuan dynasty (cont.) expressive hierarchy discussed by, 14,

unification of China (Phase III of the East 116, 121
Asian world), 24, 26, 30, 31–32, Zhao, Gang, 40
143 Zheng clan
Yuan Shikai, 36, 186 informal port polity established in coastal
as Chinese Resident-General of Korean Fujian, 63, 149–163, 276
affairs, 224, 232 Taiwan captured from the Dutch by, 41,
Yunnan 149–163
Mongols and, 101, 143 vanquishing by the Qing (1683), 63, 162
reunification of China during the Qing, 129, Zheng Zhilong as translator and privateer
138–141 under the Dutch flag, 149
Wu Sangui’s fan (“feudatory”) government Zheng clan—Zheng Chenggong (1624–1662)
established in, 138, 139–141 background of, 152–154, 157
Southern Ming state based in Xiamen, 63,
Zarakol, Ayse, 13 150, 157
Zelditch, Morris, 95 Taiwan captured from the Dutch, 157–160
Zhang Xianzhong (1605–1647), 132, 137, Wu Sangui’s rebellion supported by, 140
139, 142 Zheng He expeditions, 44, 122, 156
Zhang Yongjin and Barry Buzan, 12 Zhu Wan, 54
Zhang, Feng, 7, 8, 26, 32, 33, 115, 122 Zhu Yuanzhang. See Hongwu Emperor

David C. Kang - Stephan Haggard - East Asia in The World - Twelve Events That Shaped The Modern International Order-Cambridge University Press (2020)

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East Asia in the World

This innovative volume provides an introduction to twelve seminal events in

stephan haggard is Lawrence and Sallye Krause Professor of Korea–

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

List of Figures and Tables page vii

Part I Historicizing East Asian International Relations

Part II The East Asian System over Time

Part III Contact: East and West

james a. anderson is Associate Professor in the History Department at the

nadia kanagawa is Assistant Professor in Asian Studies and History at

Historicizing East Asian International

Stephan Haggard and David C. Kang

and political economy as well. Bellicist theories of state formation – the

Toward an East Asian International Relations

Engaging Theory: Hegemony and Hierarchy

interdependence of the superior/inferior relationship.”31 Indeed, inequality was

Vietnam sent forty-two missions to Beijing, an average of one every 4.6

Ideational versus Material Causes

Throughout the volume, we see actors – operating within the constraints of

Past and Present: Are We All Westphalian Now?

chapters underline that by systems change, we do not simply mean changes in

and the near-century-long Ming–Qing transition (1618–1683, Chapter 8).

One of the most intense debates in the contemporary scholarly literature on

China can or will lead a successful counterhegemonic challenge?”59 If China is

David C. Kang and Kenneth M. Swope

This chapter provides an overview of the international relations of historical

to draw. Moreover, Asians proved quick to recognize and adopt European

The Evolution of the East Asian International System

Phase I: Hegemony (221 BCE–220 CE)

Phase II: State Formation in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam

Even here, impressive East Asian state-building was driven by emulation,

elsewhere in Eurasia or Africa, where national space is often complicated . . . by cross-

Vietnamese centralization of authority also was not a result of war; indeed,

Phase III: An East Asian World

with each other, and saw international recognition as a legitimate nation as an

War and Peace in East Asian History

Country Dynasty Dates Cause of fall Internal or external

Source: D. C. Kang and Ma 2019.

Phase IV: Imperialism and the Arrival of the West

Richard von Glahn

Narratives of the “Age of Exploration” inaugurated by Columbus’s trans-

clandestine commerce, and in 1567 it revoked Hongwu’s maritime trade ban.

Formation of the East Asian Maritime Trade Network

Figure 3.1 Maritime East Asia c. 1620

The Ming Tributary Trade System and the Ryukyu Connection

The Silver Rush and the Rise of “Japanese Piracy”

by now is a well-known story.14 The impact of the “silver rush” on intra-Asian

Figure 3.2 Principal daimyo domains and ports of Kyushu c. 1570

The End of the Ming Maritime Ban and the Transformation

traders were required to obtain licenses for designated overseas ports.

Silver Production, Foreign Trade, and the Uniﬁcation of Japan

The Demise of the Port Polity Paradigm in Maritime

Multinational merchant communities began to disappear along with the port

The East Asian System over Time

East Asia during the Northern and Southern Dynasties

By the mid-sixth century, the pattern of alliances on the Korean peninsula

The Rise of the Sui

support.21 There are no records of Yamato envoys to continental empires

The First East Asian World War

an eye toward a deeper understanding of the nature and workings of what is

Military Campaigns and the Path to Chosŏn’s Founding

a tribute-bearing diplomatic mission to the Ming capital and received

The Question of Sadae and Chosŏn as a Model Tributary