e
punished or put out of office, and those whose enmity was the result of
jealousy. When the war with Japan closed and the Chinese government
sent Chang Yin-huan to negotiate a treaty of peace, the Japanese
refused to accept him, nor were they willing to take up the matter
until "Li Hung-chang was appointed envoy, chiefly because of his great
influence over the government, and the respect in which he was held by
the people." We all know how he went, how he was shot in the face by a
Japanese fanatic, the ball lodging under the left eye, where it
remained a memento which he carried to the grave. We all know how he
recovered from the wound, and how because of his sufferings he was able
to negotiate a better treaty than he could otherwise have done. Then he
returned home, and only "the friendship of the Empress and his own
personal sufferings saved his life," says Colonel Denby, for "the new
treaty was urgently denounced in China" by carping critics who would
not have been recognized as envoys by their Japanese enemies.

In 1896 he was appointed to attend the coronation of the Czar at
Moscow, and thence continued his trip around the world. Never before
nor since has a Chinese statesman or even a prince been feted as he was
in every country through which he passed. When he was about to start,
at his request I had a round fan painted for him, with a map of the
Eastern hemisphere on one side and the Western on the other, on which
all the steamship lines and railroads over which he was to travel were
clearly marked, with all the ports and cities at which he expected to
stop. He was photographed with Gladstone, and hailed as the "Bismarck
of the East," but when he returned to Peking, for no reason but
jealousy, "he was treated as an extinct volcano." The Empress Dowager
invited him to the Summer Palace where he was shown about the place by
the eunuchs, treated to tea and pipes, and led into pavilions where
only Her Majesty was allowed to enter, and then denounced to the Board
of Punishments who were against him to a man. And now this Grand
Secretary whom kings and courts had honoured, whom emperors and
presidents had feted, and our own government had spent thirty thousand
dollars in entertaining, was once more stripped of his yellow jacket
and peacock feather, and fined the half of a year's salary as a member
of the Foreign Office, which was the amusing sum of forty-five taels or
about thirty-five dollars gold, and it was said i