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This removed the danger to the government and at the same time helped it against the hated foreigners. But incidents resulted which the Peking government had not anticipated. An international army was sent to China, and marched from Tientsin against Peking, to liberate the besieged European legations and to punish the government.
Hoover home empty-handed." As one of the precursors of the Boxer affair Chang Yen Mow got into the bad graces of the government, gave up his position and was forced to flee from Pekin and take refuge in Tientsin. Even here he was dragged out of his palace and stood up before a firing squad, and escaped with his life only through vigorous interference by his Director of Mines.
Every year that passed tended to emphasize the fact that modern conditions were cutting Peking more and more adrift from the real centres of power the economic centres which, with the single exception of Tientsin, lie from 800 to 1,500 miles away.
Before a year elapsed a land line of telegraph was being constructed between this port and Tientsin; in a few months the line was in working order, and the Chinese metropolis is now in telegraphic communication with every capital in Europe. This conservatism, respect for antiquity, conceit, prejudice, call it what we will, has something in it that extorts our respect.
I am sure that in our relations with these Chinese we have acted scandalously, and I would not have been a party to the measures of violence which have taken place, if I had not believed that I could work out of them some good for them. Could I leave this, the really noblest part of my task, to be worked out by others? Anyone could have obtained the Treaty of Tientsin.
The one man who could have produced that result in the way Yuan Shih-kai desired to see it, the brilliant reformer Liang Chi-chao, famous ever since 1898, however, obstinately refused to lend himself to such work; and, sooner than be involved in any way in the plot, threw up his post of Minister of Justice and retired to the neighbouring city of Tientsin from which centre he was destined to play a notable part.
Let it not be said, therefore, that Sir Hope Grant's capture of the Taku forts reflected in any way on the courage or capacity of Admiral Hope for the failure in 1859. By this decisive success the road to Tientsin was opened both by land and by the river.
The Lao-hsi-kai dispute, which involved a bare 333 acres of land in Tientsin, has now taken its place beside the Chengchiatun affair, and has become a leading case in that great dossier of griefs which many Chinese declare make up the corpus of Euro- Chinese relations. Here again the facts are absolutely simple and absolutely undisputed.
Li Hung Chang was appointed the Chinese Plenipotentiary to negotiate with Count Ito, and, after a short conference, a convention was signed at Tientsin on April 18, 1885.
For the Japanese wireless and the barracks of the army of occupation are the first things that greet your eyes. Within a few hundred feet of the railway that connects Shanghai, via the important center of Tientsin, with the capital, Peking, you see Japanese soldiers on the nominally Chinese street, guarding their barracks.
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