So unmistakable a declaration as this from a friendly, impartial Power would, it might reasonably be thought, have caused China to abandon her shadowy pretensions. It did not have that effect, however. Her agents in Korea committed no overt act which was likely to provoke remonstrance from the Treaty Powers; but they lost no opportunity of preserving in the Korean mind at least the fiction of dependency upon China. Yuan Shi Kai, for example, “Claimed, and to a large extent obtained, the position of Chinese Resident at Seoul. His official title was ‘Director General Resident in Korea of Diplomatic and Consular Relations,’ and his substantive rank in his own country was that of Intendant of Circuit, a rank corresponding, according to the Anglo-Chinese Treaty, to that of a Consul.... Resident Yuan was permitted to proceed to the Audience Hall in his chair and to be seated in the presence of the King, privileges not accorded to the representatives of the other Powers.” (Wilkinson’s _The Government of Korea_.) The privileges thus claimed by this representative of China were obtained in the course of several years after the conclusion of the Convention of 1885. They were largely ceremonial in character and none of the representatives of the Treaty Powers ever recognized the right of the so-called Resident to interfere in any manner in their business with the Korean Government. Whatever there was peculiar in his relations to that Government was a question of an understanding, practically secret, and never formally enunciated or recognized, between the Korean Court and himself. The conditions then prevailing in Korea were highly conducive to the existence of such anomalies. An amiable but weak King; a corrupt Court and Government, with two powerful factions struggling for supremacy and stopping at nothing to gain it—these were ideal conditions for the exercise of Chinese diplomacy. It accomplished nothing in the end, however, even in the hands of such an astute and able man as Yuan Shi Kai. Japan, of course, never recognized his pretensions, but, biding her time and always dealing with Korea as an independent state, devoted herself to the promotion of the rapidly growing commercial and industrial interests of her people in the peninsula.