ve no hesitation in
pointing to the extension of the Indian Empire and the renovation
of Japan as two of them. But where would he look for the third?
Possibly to some upheaval in Turkey, Persia, or Asiatic Russia.
In my opinion, however, China is the only country whose history
supplies the solution of the problem. The opening of that colossal
empire to unrestricted intercourse with other countries was not
a gradual evolution from within--it was the result of a series
of collisions between the conservatism of the extreme Orient and
the progressive spirit of the Western world.

Each of those collisions culminated in a war, giving rise to a
cloud of ephemeral literature, in which a student might easily lose
his way, and which it would
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require the lifetime of an antediluvian to exhaust. I think, therefore,
that I shall do my readers a service if I set before them a concise
outline of each of those wars, together with an account of its causes
and consequences. Not only will this put them on their guard against
misleading statements; it will also furnish them with a syllabus of
the modern history of China in relation to her intercourse with
other nations.

During the past seven decades the Chinese Empire has been no less
than five times in conflict with foreign powers; and on each occasion
her policy has undergone a modification more or less extensive.
Taking these five conflicts seriatim--without touching on those
internal commotions whose rise and fall resembles the tides of
the ocean--I shall ask my readers to think of the Flowery Land as
a stage on which, within the memory of men now living, a tragedy
in five acts has been performed. Its subject was the Opening of
China; and its first act was the so-called Opium War (1839-42).
Prior to 1839 the Central Empire, as the Chinese proudly call their
country, with a population nearly equal to that of Europe and America
combined, was hermetically sealed against foreign intercourse,
except at one point, viz., the "Factories" at Canton.

This state of things is depicted with a few masterstrokes in a popular
work in Chinese entitled "Strange Stories of an Idle Student." The
first of these tales describes a traveller meeting in the mountains
an old man, in the costume of a former dynasty, whose family had
there sought a refuge from the anarchy that preceded the fall of
the imperial house. This
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old fellow had not even heard of the accession of the Manchu c