A Decisive Turning Point in Sino-Japanese Relations: The Senzaimaru Voyage to Shanghai of 1862

Western scholarship on East Asia has taken note of the Japanese group voyage to the United States in 1860, most prominently in Masao Miyoshi's study of that mission, to officially ratify the treaty imposed upon their country by Townsend Harris (1804–78) and the government of the United States.¹ Considerably less well known are the Japanese missions to Shanghai of 1862 and 1864, both domestically inspired and both frank admissions in their respective forms that there was a brave new world out there confronting Japan, that Commodore Perry (1794–1863), Townsend Harris, and the United States were only the beginning of an imperialist onslaught, and that as a result Japan had to take a more activist role in its own future by going out to examine the outside world. The future belonged to international trade and diplomacy, and, in a metaphor of a few years later, Japan could join the table at dinner or be served up with the main course.²

On the Chinese side of things, before the 1880s we know next to nothing of how the Qing government looked upon Japan, soon to become its most important neighbor in every respect. Modern Sino-Japanese relations do not begin with the many thousands of Chinese students flocking to Japanese institutions of higher learning, as significant as that event will be later in the century. Modern Sino-Japanese relations truly commence with voyage of the Senzaimaru from Nagasaki to Shanghai in 1862. The nature of the relationship the Japanese so tentatively sought at the time reads like a blueprint in microcosm for the negotiations that ensued over the next three decades, before war and aggression replaced peaceful diplomacy as the dominant mode of operations.

I have written on a number of occasions about the 1862 mission of the Senzaimaru (and the 1864 mission of the Kenjunmaru).³ Until several years ago, however, scholars of this topic were operating in the absence of documentation on the Chinese side. We had a good number of travel narratives from the Japanese aboard the Senzaimaru and a fair number of studies,⁴ some of them excellent, but nothing seemed to have remained extant on the Chinese side. That meant nothing from the Shanghai daotai (circuit intendant), Wu Xu (1809–72), with whom the Japanese met twice, and nothing from the many Chinese with whom they interacted in Shanghai; it also meant nothing about how the Chinese reacted to the case made by the Japanese government for trade.

The strangeness is only compounded by the fact that mention of the circumstances surrounding the arrival of the Senzaimaru is made in several prominent Chinese sources. In his Dongfang bingshi jilüe (Summary of military events in the East), Yao Xiguang (b. 1856) noted the visit of a group of Japanese officials to Shanghai, their request of the Dutch vice-consul for assistance in trade, "because Japan had no trading relations with China," and their meeting with the daotai of Shanghai, Wu Xu.⁵ Later, the Qing shi gao (Draft history of the Qing dynasty) noted clearly: "In the first year of the Tongzhi reign [1862], the Nagasaki Magistrate sent men to Shanghai to ask if they might establish a consulate [there] to handle the commercial and customs affairs of their country. The Superintendent for Trade Xue Huan would not allow it."⁶ If news of their arrival, their meeting with Wu Xu, and their requests for a consulate and the like reached such a highly-placed official as Xue Huan (1815–80), they had to have been transmitted by local officials in Shanghai through channels to Beijing. What raw materials did the authors of these and similar works have to work from? We had not so much as a hint.

Then, from the archives of the Zongli Yamen, the first Chinese foreign office, which are now located on the grounds of Academia Sinica in Taibei, a set of documents relating to the voyages of the Senzaimaru as well as the Kenjunmaru were discovered in 2001 by a Japanese...