ABSTRACT
China was for the first time confronted directly and dramatically by the ‘new Japan’, the dynamic, rapidly modernizing Meiji Japan. Soejima made it his purpose to render preposterous China’s long-held posture of world supremacy and to undermine or eliminate the vestiges of Chinese condescension toward his own country. His embassy was purposely designed to provide visible evidence of the power and progress of Japan and thus to give the Chinese fair warning that it could persist in its traditional attitude of arrogance toward Japan and other nations at its own peril. The Soejima mission to China had multiple objectives. The announced purposes were to exchange ratifications of a treaty recently concluded by the two countries and to present a message of congratulations from the Japanese Emperor to the young Chinese monarch who had just assumed ruling power in China.
