Fogel - Maiden voyage : the Senzaimaru and the creation of modern Sino-Japanese relations

FIGURE 1. Sketch of Senzaimaru with characters.

THIS BOOK IS FOCUSED PRIMARILY on the year 1862 and the events in that year leading up to the first official meeting of Chinese and Japanese in over three centuries. The year 1862 was much like any other year, only different, as most years are. The previous year is probably more famous now with the first inaugural of President Abraham Lincoln (18091865), followed soon by the commencement of the American Civil War after the Souths attack on Fort Sumter (South Carolina) on April 12, while across the globe Tsar Alexander II (18181881) freed the Russian serfs from centuries of servitude in early March. Nonetheless, 1862 was to be the first full year of the War Between the States, featuring the most famous naval battle in US history to that point between two ironclads, the Unions Monitor (launched January 30) and the Confederacys Merrimack (launched March 8), in the Battle of Hampton Roads on March 9.

Later that year, on June 19, the government of the United States (finally) outlawed slavery, though the Civil War would drag on with horrendous loss of life and destruction for another three years. The Battle of Antietam (Maryland) on September 17 resulted in some 23,000 casualties, the bloodiest single day in all US history. Five days later on September 22, Lincoln announced that on January 1 he would issue what has come to be known as the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing over three million slaves in the states then in revolt. Many other battles would be fought over the course of the year.

In order to help finance the Civil War, the US government instituted the first income tax in 1861 and the following year the Internal Revenue Service came into existence. President Lincoln introduced paper currency on February 25, 1862, over a millennium after it was first issued in China during the Tang dynasty (618907). Undoubtedly also related indirectly to the war, the first telegraphic hookup between New York and San Francisco was established on November 6.

In 1862 many cultural figures of note were born (such as Gustav Klimt, d. 1918, in Austria) and many died (such as Henry David Thoreau, b. 1817). While at least the free states in the United States were celebrating Independence Day on July 4, that very day Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson, 18321898) extemporized the stories that would become his classic Alice in Wonderland. Late that spring and summer also witnessed what would have been an extraordinary event, had it been true, when Fyodor Dostoevsky (18211881) made a grand tour of Europe and interviewed Charles Dickens (18121870)it turns out to have been an elaborate hoax. Dostoevsky had published Notes from the House of the Dead just eighteen months before, and Dickens had published Great Expectations in 1861. The whole tale of this meeting of master novelists ultimately was too good to be true.

Meanwhile in China the Taiping Rebellion had been raging for over a decade by 1862, but the rebels, once poised to topple the Qing dynasty (16441911), now lacked most of their original leadership and were losing ground with each passing day. After besieging Shanghai with its large foreign community on several occasions in the first half of 1862, the Qing armed forces, with assistance from the American adventurer Frederick Townsend Ward (18311862) and his Ever Victorious Army, handed the Taipings a stunning defeat in the Battle of Cixi at a site some ten miles outside Ningbo. Ward was shot in the fighting on September 21, and he died the next day. As we shall see, the Taiping forces attacked in the outskirts of Shanghai a few days after the central event of this book transpired, and the Japanese visitors to China were unexpectedly close, if not quite direct, witnesses to it. The Taipings, however, soon withdrew from the city on the orders of their leader, Heavenly King Hong Xiuquan (18141864), to help defend their Heavenly Capital, the occupied city of Nanjing.

The Xianfeng Emperor (r. 18511861) had died in August 1861, and he was succeeded by his five-year-old son, the Tongzhi Emperor (r. 18621874). Obviously the boy was too young to rule the empire, so it was at this point that his mother, the infamous Empress Dowager Cixi (18351908), among others took over the actual running of government (Queen Victoria [18191901] was coincidentally widowed in 1861 and would begin her long personal reign thereafter). Chinas first modern foreign office, the Zongli Yamen was founded in March of 1861, and it would become an increasingly important institution with the passage of time; it held ultimate responsibility for handling the