If anything, therefore, could excite the jealousy of Chinese statesmen, it would be to see this filial dependency being tampered with by strangers, more especially by their hereditary foes, the Japanese. Better all the world in Korea with Japan excluded, than Japan in with the rest of the world kept out. Slow of apprehension, and still slower of action, her unpractical conservatism in high places reducible only by sap and mine, China brooded over the Korean problem for some years before any result of the incubation appeared. The conclusion eventually arrived at was to neutralise the Japanese action by opening Korea to the whole world under treaty. The realisation of this scheme was as usual placed in the hands of Li Hung-chang, who on the one hand recommended the Korean king to conclude commercial treaties with foreign Powers, and on the other encouraged the latter to open negotiations. Hence the general opening of the country in 1882, with its train of tragic consequences. The terms of the foreign treaties with Korea had not been thoroughly thought out, and the very ambiguity was perpetuated which it was the interest of China to clear away. The treaties purported to be made with an independent State, whereas Korea was a vassal, and the inconsistency was attempted to be remedied by a separate letter from the king to the Powers with whom he had concluded treaties, declaring, notwithstanding, that the Chinese emperor was his suzerain. IV. THE FIRST IMPERIAL AUDIENCE--SUCCESSION OF KWANGHSU. End of the minority of Emperor Tungchih--Audience of the foreign Ministers in 1873--Under derogatory conditions--Death of the young emperor--Empress regent's _coup d'état_ in selecting successor--Her own nephew--Eighteen years' minority of Emperor Kwanghsu. An event looked forward to for twelve long years with patient expectation, and with hope, lively at the beginning but fading away towards the end of the period, that it would prove the sovereign remedy for the defects of Chinese intercourse with the world, was the assumption of power by the young emperor, who attained his majority in 1873. The diplomatic body busied themselves greatly in preparations for their first audiences with the sovereign to whom they were accredited. The Chinese on their part were no less anxiously engaged in devising means of lightening the blow to their prestige in consenting to receive foreigners at all, while dispensing with the prescribed prostrations. Obliged to yield the main point, the Court officials minimised its significance by imposing sundry derogatory conditions as to the building in which the audience was to be granted, and by the terms in which it was referred to in the imperial decree, which represented the foreign Ministers as "imploring an audience," and by other like devices.