At first no science was taught or expected, but gradually we succeeded in obtaining the consent of the Chinese ministers to enlarge our faculty so as to include chairs of astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, and physics.  International law was taught by the [Page 210] president; and by him also the Chinese were supplied with their first text-books on the law of nations.  What use had they for books on that subject, so long as they held no intercourse on equal terms with foreign countries?  The students trained in that school of diplomacy had to shiver in the cold for many a year before the Government recognised their merits and rewarded them with official appointments.  The minister recently returned from London, the ministers now in Germany and Japan, and a minister formerly in France, not to speak of secretaries of legation and consuls, were all graduates of our earlier classes.

In 1898 the young Emperor, taught by defeat at the hands of the Japanese, resolved on a thorough reform in the system of national education.  It would never do to confine the knowledge of Western science to a handful of interpreters and attaches.  The highest scholars of the Empire must be allowed access to the fountain of national strength.  A university was created with a capital of five million taels, and the writer was made president by an imperial decree which conferred on him the highest but one of the nine grades of the mandarinate.

Two or three hundred students were enrolled, among whom were bachelors, masters, and doctors of the civil service examinations.  It was launched with a favouring breeze; but the wind changed with the coup d’etat of the Empress Dowager, and two years later the university went down in the Boxer cyclone.  A professor, a tutor, and a student lost their lives.  How the cause of educational reform rose stronger after the storm, I relate in a special [Page 211] chapter.  It is a far cry from a university for the elite to that elaborate system of national education which is destined to plant its schools in every town and hamlet in the Empire.  The new education was in fact still regarded with suspicion by the honour men of the old system.  They looked on it, as they did on the railway, as a source of danger, a perilous experiment.

As yet the intercourse was one-sided:  envoys came; but none were sent.  Embassies were no novelty; but they had always moved on an inclined plane, either coming up laden with tribute, or going down bearing commands.  Where there was no tribute and no command, why send them?  Why send to the very people who had robbed China of her supremacy!  It was a bitter pill, and she long refused to swallow it.  Hart gilded the dose and she took it.  Obtaining leave to go home to get married, he proposed that he should be accompanied by his teacher, Pinchun, a learned Manchu, as unofficial envoy—­with the agreeable duty to see and report.  It was a travelling commission, not like that of 1905-06, to seek light, but to ascertain whether the representative of a power so humbled and insulted would be treated with common decency.