Li Hongzhang

For three decades the scholar-official Li Hongzhang was the man foreign governments dealt with when they dealt with China. A general who helped crush the Taiping Rebellion, he became the leading promoter of the Self-Strengthening Movement, building arsenals, a modern navy and military schools for the late Qing dynasty, and he signed the humiliating treaties that ended the wars of 1895 and 1900. Admirers abroad called him the "Bismarck of the East"; Chinese nationalists long condemned him as a traitor.

Li was born on 15 February 1823 near Hefei, in Anhui province, into a family of scholar-officials. He passed the highest level of the imperial examinations in 1847, at the age of 24, entered the Hanlin Academy and studied under Zeng Guofan, the official who would become his patron. When the Taiping Rebellion spread into Anhui in the 1850s, Li helped organise local militia against the rebels, then joined Zeng's staff in 1858.

In 1861 Zeng sent Li home to raise a new force. With the troops he recruited around Hefei, Li sailed down the Yangtze in British steamers in 1862 to defend Shanghai, where his men became the Huai Army and Li was made governor of Jiangsu. He armed them with Western weapons and, working alongside foreign-led units including that of Charles Gordon, recaptured Suzhou, Changzhou and other cities in 1863 and 1864. The killing of rebel leaders who had surrendered on promises of safety enraged Gordon, who reportedly went after Li with a rifle. Li then helped suppress the Nian rebellion in northern China in the later 1860s.

In 1870 Li was made viceroy of Zhili, the province around Beijing, and commissioner for trade in the north, posts he held with short breaks for most of the rest of his life. From Tianjin he effectively ran much of China's foreign policy, settling disputes with Britain, France and Japan and directing Chinese policy in Korea. When the Tongzhi Emperor died in 1875, Li brought troops into the capital to secure the succession of the Guangxu Emperor under the regency of the empress dowagers, among them Cixi. He fortified Port Arthur, built up the Beiyang Fleet and opened a military academy at Tianjin in 1885 with German instructors.

Li had long feared a clash with modernising Japan. When the First Sino-Japanese War broke out in 1894 over Korea, it was largely his own army and navy that fought, with little help from his rivals, and corruption left them short of supplies. Their defeat discredited him and the whole self-strengthening project. Sent nonetheless to negotiate peace at Shimonoseki, he was shot in the face by a Japanese gunman on 24 March 1895; the attack embarrassed Japan into a ceasefire, and on 17 April he signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki, under which China ceded Taiwan, the Penghu Islands and the Liaodong Peninsula to Japan.

In 1896 Li represented China at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II and went on to tour Europe, Canada and the United States, where he criticised restrictions on Chinese immigration. In Britain he visited Gladstone and was knighted by Queen Victoria. According to Russian accounts he was paid to support Russian railway and lease agreements, though the reliability of those accounts has been questioned.

When the court backed the Boxers against the foreign powers in 1900, Li called the declaration of war a false edict, and southern governors used his stance to stay out of the fighting. After foreign armies took Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion, he became China's chief negotiator and on 7 September 1901 signed the Boxer Protocol, which imposed enormous indemnities. Worn out, he died in Beijing two months later, on 7 November 1901. Opinion on him remains divided: some historians see a reformer hemmed in by conservatives and rival powers, while the reformer Liang Qichao and later mainland textbooks blamed him for China's humiliations.

Our 1880 map shows the Qing Empire at the height of his power, and our 1900 map shows it after the defeat by Japan, in the year of the Boxer crisis.