It is true that as lately as 1900 a combined foreign force was obliged to march in extreme haste on Pekin in order to save those ministers, who were in great peril there. But it was peril arising out of an insurrection against the Government, rather than immediately from the Government's own action. Nevertheless it is also true that the very clever old Empress, who was then ruler of China, deliberately contrived to convert the activities of the revolutionaries into an attack upon the foreigners, rather than upon the Government itself. And it is to be noted that in co-operation with that combined army, which thus again invaded China's once sacred capital, was a force of the other branch of the yellow race, the island branch, the Japanese. {230} The story of that island branch is certainly no less interesting than that of the continental. At what point far back in the story they branched off from a common stock we do not know, but it is more than probable that they came from the same original source. We found Kublai Khan, when master of China and of an immense part of the world besides, sending out from China an expedition against the islanders, of which the fate was much like that of the Grand Armada which the masterful power of Spain launched against our own islands. Japan kept her independence then, and has fought for it again and asserted it conclusively far later. [Sidenote: The awakening of Japan] She too, in her story, seems to have repeated, as did China, something very like the series of changes through which society passed in Europe, with its feudalism and the rest of it. But whereas in modern China this feudalism seems to belong to some era very, very far back in her story, so that she has almost lost all memory of it, with Japan, on the contrary, it is a very recent chapter--later even than with us of Europe. It is a condition from which she has indeed only just shaken herself free. 1867 is generally given as the date at which Japanese feudalism passed. And it passed in a fashion for which there is certainly no parallel in Western story. The Daimios, who were the feudal lords, of their own accord agreed, as the only means of ending their mutual fighting, to give up their local powers into the hands of the Mikado. The white men knew very little about Japan until the sixteenth century. No overland travellers, like Marco Polo, had been there to bring back news to the West. About the middle of the sixteenth century a few Portuguese trading vessels touched it, and the very famous Jesuit missionary Xavier introduced Christianity. Here, however, as elsewhere, the Jesuits seem to have caused trouble by interfering with politics, {231} and the exclusion of the foreigners was enforced more strictly than ever. Gradually, especially towards the end of the eighteenth century, trade with foreigners began to grow, chiefly with the Dutch, the Russians, and the Americans.