When the teenaged prince, Mutsuhito, succeeded to the throne, he took the name Meiji – Enlightened Rule – and served as figurehead for an elite coterie of reformers who wished to overthrow the old order and forge what was really a new state. The capital was moved from Kyoto to Edo (renamed Tokyo); a young samurai reformer, Ito Hirobumi, drafted a new constitution, a hybrid of those of Germany and Britain, with a premiership and elected assembly, that would serve the ‘sacred’ and ‘inviolable’ emperor of the ‘Sacred Throne established when heavens and earth separated’. The
In twenty years, Japan was transformed into Asia’s most industrialized economy, just as China was disintegrating and so providing an irresistible target for the European empires – both a temptation and a warning to Japan.
Korea would be on the front line in the race between the Europeans and the Japanese to exploit the decline of China. If the Europeans took Korea, it would be ‘a dagger pointed at the heart of the Japan’. Korea, ruled since 1392 by the Joseon family, was traditionally a Chinese vassal. Advised by his charismatic wife, Queen Min, its king Gojong navigated a middle way. Their marriage had been arranged by the king’s domineering father, the
At first the couple loathed each other and she refused to consummate the marriage on their wedding night, but they grew closer, despite losing their first child. ‘A slim woman with a very elegant figure’, Queen Myeongseong – Min – was scholarly and strikingly beautiful, observed an English visitor. ‘The hair shiny ebony, and the skin transparent and pearly … and she had a sparkling intelligence.’ After the
In Tokyo, there was no choice, said Premier Ito Hirobumi, ‘but to go to war’ to keep China out. Emperor Guangxu was ‘surprised by this treachery’, admitting, ‘It’s difficult to reason with the Dwarves’ – who efficiently landed 240,000 Japanese troops in Korea. Japan captured Pyongyang and King Gojong, then smote China on land and sea, its officers comparing the Chinese to ‘dying swine’. In April 1895, at Shimonoseki, Ito forced China to grant Korea ‘independence’ under Japanese influence and cede the prosperous island of Taiwan and the strategic northern city Port Arthur (Lüshunkou) to Japan. Out of nowhere, Japan had grabbed China’s choicest morsels, much to the outrage of Willy.
The kaiser feared a ‘consolidated Asia, the control of China by Japan’, and appealed to St Petersburg, where Alexander III, only forty-nine but an incorrigible boozer who hid banned vodka receptables in his boots, was dying of liver cirrhosis. He was succeeded by his twenty-six-year-old son Nicholas, who sobbed, ‘I’m completely unprepared. What’s going to happen to Russia?’ It is hard to be prepared for power – most democratic leaders have no experience of it when they are elected – and there was no training for the array of gifts necessary to rule as autocrat. He was no colossus like his father, nor a showman like Willy, but his handsome inscrutability, agonizing politeness and uxorious devotion belied his determination to promote Orthodox autocracy and Russian power. In the Japanese victory, Nicky saw the opportunity to do what Romanovs did: expand.
Willy had known Nicky and his half-English, half-German wife, Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, all their lives: they were both cousins of his. Nicky and Alix had met as children and fallen in love as teenagers, but the pious Protestant Alix refused to convert to Orthodoxy – until April 1894, when both attended the wedding of her brother, along with Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm. After Alix turned down Nicky’s proposal, she consulted Willy, who encouraged her to accept. In the miserable days after Alexander’s death, Nicholas married Alexandra.
