She shut herself in and literally walled her borders, not so much to keep out invasion but to retain for herself and her people her stoical civilisation and the secrets in the arts and crafts of which she was the sole possessor; for Chinese internal affairs concerned no one but herself and her people, and her peculiar industries were conducted and perpetuated on an apprentice system--father to son handing down by word of mouth the methods of success in the various arts. As European nations rose and fell--as the grandeur that was Spain succeeded the glittering adventures of Portuguese navigators, as the Dutch, French, and British struggled for mastery on the outer seas, and while Europe resounded with the stern music of the tramp of Napoleon's legions, China, with her centuries of arrested civilisation, maintained an inscrutable attitude, and, slumbering in brooding silence, preserved her aloofness from any interest without her borders. The wave of European trade-expansion surged high upon her barrier of inclusiveness before she awoke to what was to her a new era--the age in which man might demand for man equable treatment in the way of trade, upon a basis in the constitution of which China had no experience and no say. Hitherto China's conception of outer trade was merely the collection of tribute, and her first association with trade with the "foreign devils" from the outer world was quite in conformity with that idea, for her piratical junks set out and joyously exacted toll indiscriminately. But this was hardly the legitimate form intended by the merchants of the West, and compensation for the misconceived acts of her subjects being demanded, China was invited to subscribe to treaties which might open her doors to the introduction of more cultured methods of barter. Unreluctantly, however, as China assented to the development of trade by foreign nations in her seas and along her coasts, for many years the severest possible restrictions were placed upon Chinese leaving their country for the purpose of trade. "Treaties" were concluded with the Western nations for the sake of peace, but by the Chinese in general these treaties were regarded as mere subterfuges whereby to disarm the vigilance of the prey. Treaties for the furtherance of trade were entered into with the Western nations in turn from the end of the seventeenth century onwards, but none of these entailed any territorial concessions nor threatened "the integrity of China." The thin end of the German wedge seems to have been inserted into Chinese affairs by the conclusion of a secret treaty in 1880 between Germany and China, whereby the latter, who was ready to grant or promise any manner of concession in return for being left alone, gave Germany trading privileges, which she had already granted to other nations. But Germany's influence in China was nil until after the Chino-Japanese War of 1894.