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In 1880 European envoys invaded the primitive kingdom of Corea for the purpose of forcing their trade on the forbidden land of the Far East, and by 1881 the draft of a commercial treaty was drawn up at Pekin, and Commodore Schufeldt, an American naval official, took it to the Court of Seoul for acceptance and signature.
The Corean king, helpless against the principal powers of the Western World, signed the treaty. Thus was it arranged that Corea was to open her ports to foreign trade and another market secured for the exploiters of the western toilers to unload their surplus product upon.
French capitalists in the meantime had a corps of explorers on the frontiers of China, whose duty it was to discover the best route into some of the richest provinces of interior China.
In 1882 the French Government decided to establish a definite protectorate over Tonquin,
The weak kingdom of Annam was taken under the protecting wing of France, and before the end of 1882 France had captured the Capitol of Tonquin and the town of Hanoi, in the delta of the Red River. This put the French in a position to tap the wealth of the richest mineral province in China.
In 1883 the French fleet, representing itself as a friendly power, was allowed to safely pass the forts of the Min River. Once this point was gained, France without any formal declaration of war attacked Chinese possessions and destroyed many forts.
The Chinese displayed great energy and resource in forming defences against any advance inland, and the French Government was brought to face the fact that unless they were prepared to send a large expedition of not less than $0,006 more men to attack Pekin, there would be no possible hope of making Ching surrender any of her possessions.
France failed to send extra men, and on June 9, 1885, a treaty of peace was signed, which gave France nothing more than she had before her treacherous invasion two years previously.
In 1889 the young Emperor Kwangsu (who reigned only; he did not rule) was married. The marriage was celebrated with the usual state, and more than five million dollars is said to more been squandered by China's Government in honor of the event, and this at a time when hundreds of thousands of China’s workera were on the verge of starvation.
