Zhu Yongqing sent the twelve survivors to Fuzhou, and Shen Baozhen arranged for a ship to send them back to Ryukyu, which was even the case. Not to mention the Ryukyu envoys, Shengfan even killed Qing officials, but those people are like that, everyone has a different worldview, where is there any reason to talk about. Shengfan never went out of the mountains to make trouble, and every year he could pay tribute to the Qing Dynasty camphor and animal skins, creating a lot of profits, and some things were confused and passed, but unfortunately the suzerainty of the Ryukyus was not only one of the Qing Dynasty.

The Ryukyu Kingdom has always been a vassal of China, and it is one of the three major relatives of the Ming Dynasty, and its relationship is closer than that of Korea. But when it came to the Qing Dynasty, the relationship with the Ryukyus was still so good, but the status was not so important, and the Qing Dynasty did not attach much importance to this small country composed of a bunch of islands. However, the geographical location of the Ryukyus is still very good, and it is located as a trade hub between nearby countries, and is known as "Wankokutsuliang". The Qing Dynasty doesn't matter, but Japan is very worried, and the Satsuma Domain, which is very miserable in Japan, has been eyeing the Ryukyus early.

In the 37th year of Wanli in the Ming Dynasty, Shimazu Iehisa, the lord of the Satsuma Domain, sent Hisashi Hisashi Kayama as the general and Hirata Masumune as the deputy general, leading 3,000 soldiers, more than 100 ships, and 600 iron cannons, to invade the Ryukyus from the port of Yamakawa in Kyushu. Soon after, the Ryukyus were defeated, Shuri Castle was besieged, and King Shōnin was forced to surrender, and more than 100 people, including princes and officials, were escorted to Kagoshima by the Satsuma army. This is known as the "Battle of Keicho and the Ryukyus" in history. Later, King Shōnin and Shimazu Iehisa went to Sunfu Castle to meet Tokugawa Ieyasu, and then to Edo Castle to meet Tokugawa Hidetada, the general of the Shoyi. In the 39th year of Wanli, King Shōnin was forced to sign the "Fifteen Articles" with the Satsuma Domain in Kagoshima, recognizing the Satsuma Domain's control over the Ryukyus, and then he was released and returned to Japan.

After the Satsuma clan invaded the Ryukyus, it began to send officials to the Ryukyus, surveyed and distributed fields, demarcated national borders, set taxes, forced the Ryukyus to cede the Amami Islands, and blackmailed the Ryukyus into paying tribute to Satsuma, and the Ryukyu government was forced to grant official positions to the personnel sent by Satsuma. After the war, all the pro-Ming factions in the Ryukyus were dismissed from their official positions, and the three officials Zheng Zhen were beheaded by Satsuma, and Xiang Lirui was taken hostage by Satsuma, and the pro-Japanese Mao Fengyi and Mao Fengchao replaced them as three officials. In the eleventh year of King Shoho, after King Shōning, Ryukyu established a pavilion on the islands occupied by Satsuma, and the two countries sent officials to manage trade and collect taxes at the same time. After that, the Ryukyu Kingdom became a puppet regime of the Satsuma Domain. The Satsuma Domain sent officials to the Ryukyus to monitor the movements of the Ryukyus, and in the 25th year of King Shosada, the Ryukyus "established the two islands of Gumi and Maya, and sent two members of the Daiwa Yokome Command to guard the tributary ships." At the same time, the Satsuma clan forcibly occupied the Amami Islands in northern Ryukyu.

After the Qing Dynasty settled the Central Plains, the King of the Ryukyus sent envoys to the Qing Dynasty to ask for canonization. Emperor Shunzhi of the Qing Dynasty named King Shangzhi as the King of the Ryukyus, but the Ryukyu Kingdom only became a vassal of the Qing Dynasty on the surface, but in fact it was a vassal of the Satsuma Domain. The continuation of the tributary trade between the Ryukyus and the Qing government also had to be exploited once by the actual suzerain, the Satsuma Domain. The Satsuma clan also relied on the Ryukyus to become the only private domain that could obtain international trade income in this disguised way after the shogunate declared the country closed. In 1854, when the American Perry went to Japan for military blackmail, he asked the Japanese government to open the port of Naha in the Ryukyus, but the Japanese refused on the grounds that the Ryukyus were an independent and sovereign state. But Perry turned around and went to the Ryukyus, and the Ryukyu king had to sign an unequal treaty again.

Today, Japan has abolished feudal prefectures, and Ryukyu has been incorporated into Kagoshima Prefecture, but it still exists as a feudal state. The Ryukyuan people killed by Taiwanese Shengban can be understood as Japanese in a sense. If the Japanese government wants to expand, it can only march to the mainland, and they can't afford to provoke them for a while, and it is good to pinch the soft persimmon of the Qing Dynasty. Even if they can't encroach on a few acres of land in the Qing Dynasty, it is not bad to blackmail a sum of money from the Qing Dynasty, and they have just been knocked out by Guo Xing'a.

Under the pretext of the new emperor's accession to the throne in exchange for the Sino-Japanese "Reconciliation Regulations," Japan sent a delegation of Senator and Foreign Minister Vice-Minister Tanetomi Shimashima to China to probe the Qing court's understanding of Taiwan's sovereignty. Vice Island Tanechen is very cautious, because his balance this time is not easy to grasp, Japan's national strength is not good at the moment, if it fails to slander people, and the Qing Dynasty is provoked, they Japan will not be able to bear it. But the deputy envoy Yanagihara Maemitsu is more flamboyant, he is not careless, but he has found enough self-confidence. It is not that there are no officials among the officials in China, but these people are very outdated in their thinking and cannot keep up with the situation at all. Yanagihara Maemitsu, who has studied both Chinese and Western, believes that he can definitely handle these Chinese with different Western studies.

"It is truly appalling that the Ryukyus refugees took refuge on the island of Taiwan, but they were brutally killed, and the murderers are still at large!" Yanagihara Maemitsu was tentative, he wanted to know very much what the Qing Dynasty thought about this matter, and he was very clever enough not to mention the fact that Ryukyu was Japanese territory, as if he were just asking casually.

"We have known for a long time that the 'Fan' people killed the people of Liu. The two islands of Ryukyu and Taiwan belong to our territory, and they belong to the natives who kill each other, and the right to adjudicate is completely mine. I have my own measures to compensate the people of Liu, so what do I have to do with your country, and bother to ask?" Mao Changxi, the secretary of the Ministry of Industry and the prime minister's yamen, did not understand the concept of "sovereignty" in the modern West at all, but only gave the Japanese an answer based on the facts, and this reply was very decent.

"Since you know the people who care for the Ryukyus, why don't you punish the Taiwanese people?" Yanagihara Maemitsu still didn't mention the ownership of the Ryukyus, but only asked why the murderer was not punished.

"The murderers are all 'shengfan', so they are left out of the way, and they are not cured. Japan's 'Ezo' and the United States' 'Red Flower' are all not subject to kinghood, which is also the case of all countries. Mao Changxi still knows some foreign affairs, but his concept is still the view of the world.

"Human life is at stake...... Tsubajima Tanetomi still wanted to argue with reason, but was pulled from behind by Yanagihara Maeko. After the deputy island minister said half of his words, he told the deputy to stop, and he could only say goodbye to Mao Changxi and withdraw from the prime minister's yamen for discussion.

"What Qingchen said is not justified, why not fight on the basis of reason?" The vice-island minister is still very practical, so after quitting the prime minister's yamen, he questioned Yanagihara Maemitsu on the street, anyway, no one on the streets of China can understand Japanese, and they don't have to worry about secrecy.

"Outside of life, it is not easy to be cured! Fandi is not under the control of the Qing State, it is not the territory of the Qing State, what kind of saliva are we wasting with them, we will go to the Shengfan! Yanagihara Qianguang directly misinterpreted Mao Changxi's meaning, and directly explained that it was not easy to manage, and directly explained that it could not be managed. With just such a sentence, the territory of eastern Taiwan has been turned into a terra nullius.

Yanagihara Maemitsu's crooked theory was not made up by himself, and there are also historical origins that can be traced back -- in February of the sixth year of Tongzhi, the American merchant ship "Rover" was wrecked off the east coast of Taiwan, and the landers were killed by the local "Shengfan". Wilson, the U.S. consul in Xiamen, approached the governor of Fujian and Zhejiang, Yamen, to negotiate, and the local officials of the Qing court, in order to shirk their responsibilities, put forward the argument that the local people were "not returned to the king".

Wilson naturally could not approve of the prevarication of the Qing court magistrates, and reproached: "Over the past two hundred years, the Chinese have gradually expanded from the west coast to the east coast in the area of activity in Taiwan, cooperating with the Chinese government's administrative power over Taiwan, and in fact have never recognized the sovereignty of Shengfan as the land where they now liveThere is no basis for it. ”

Liu Mingdeng, the chief soldier of Fujian Taiwan Town, and Wu Dating, a concurrent scholar and politician of Fujian Taiwan Province, said at the beginning of the report to the imperial court on this matter: "The land of birth, the bird road and sheep intestines, the deep forest is dense, and it is rarely visited by people, and the territory has not been collected." I set up a ban on earth cattle and strict entry and exit prevention, so the murderous and heavy human life, the intention is far-reaching. ”

These magistrates, who were deeply influenced by China's traditional "view of the world" and were ignorant of the concept of "territorial sovereignty" in the modern world, smug themselves and thought that they had found an excellent reason to shirk responsibility for the incident. ”

The matter finally stabbed the Prime Minister's Yamen. After the meeting, Premier Yamen did not deny the wording of the negotiations between Fujian and Zhejiang, but at the same time, he instructed the relevant officials of Fujian and Zhejiang in a secret letter, and specifically emphasized the issue of the ownership of Taiwan's "Shengfan" region: "Although it is not a legal rope, its territory is the ground of China, and the debate with the consul of that country and other countries should not reveal the theory that it is not China's territory, so as to cause foreigners to have their hearts." In the political discourse system of the Prime Minister's Yamen: 1. Taiwan's "Shengfan" area belongs to the "Chinese ground" and is undoubtedly China's territory; 2. "Shengfan" is not under "Wanghua", and Chinese law cannot govern "Shengfan". The two can coexist, and the latter is not a negation of the former. The former is similar to the "territorial sovereignty declaration" of the modern West; The latter is based on the traditional Chinese "view of the world".

In the traditional "view of the world" system, the general outline is "the whole world, not the king's land", and the central dynasties of the past dynasties regarded themselves as the center of civilization. Radiating outward from the center, there are different levels according to the degree of "civilization". In turn, it includes: Fan, Miao, Yi and local Tusi who live in their places and defend the territory for the country; the four descendants of the vassals who guard the gate and pay tribute; Beyond the vassals is the unknown. Its classic description is: China is in the middle of the world, and the four are in the middle of the world. China and the people of the five directions are "the world" and live together in the "four seas". There is no specific limit of territorial sovereignty in this "view of the world," and everything depends on the degree of "civilization and enlightenment."

After the Qing court included Taiwan in the territory during the Kangxi period, its "Lifan" policy has always been based on this concept of "view of the world" - although the whole island of Taiwan is within the territory, its people are divided into two levels, according to the level of education; "Fan" is divided into two kinds: one is "those who live deep in the inner mountains and do not obey the education are born", and the other is "those who live together on flat land and serve in accordance with the law are familiar fans." The former belongs to the "outside of the flower", and the latter must pay the "salary", and the imperial court can also transform the "raw fan" into the "cooked fan".

This way of categorizing the people into familiar and raw people, as well as the political discourse system of "turning outside and turning inside" derived from it, are based on the degree and boundaries of indoctrination and etiquette, and have nothing to do with the boundaries. Therefore, in the eyes of the Qing court, it was not inappropriate to describe the "Fandi" in eastern Taiwan as "unreturned to the king" and "outside the life of Fanhua", and it could be regarded as a "successful negotiation" worthy of reference.

However, the US consul Wilson could not "forgive" him, he could not understand the "view of the world" of the Qing court officials, and could only understand the "Fandi has not been returned to the king" as the quibble of the Qing court magistrates: "Fandi is China's territory, but China is not responsible for the killing of American sailors by the Fanren." In Wilson's view, this way of passing the buck is simply unreasonable. Although there were also foreigners in the United States, such as Indians, Wilson still did not accept the Qing court's argument, preferring to understand that Fandi was not Chinese territory.

The Rover incident ended with Wilson and the local Taiwanese Tufan signing an agreement on their own, and the Qing court thought it had a plan and played the role of a vague "guarantor" in it. In the eyes of the Qing Dynasty, they did this very beautifully, and they didn't lose a penny, so they gave the big thing of killing the foreigners. However, no one in the Qing Dynasty realized such a major event as the obscurity of Taiwan's land.

As everyone knows, Wilson, who had strongly demanded that the Qing court recognize its sovereignty over Taiwan's "Fandi," immediately began to concoct the "theory that Taiwan's Fandi has no owner," and entered Taiwan many times to collect all kinds of information as needed. Wilson was also an ambitious man, ready to carve out a territory for the United States of America in East Asia. It's a pity that the U.S. Civil War was raging at that time, and even the domestic Dongshang Republic couldn't handle it, so how could it have the energy to invade China in Asia. Wilson, after his plan was not supported by the U.S. government, became an accomplice of Japan, and sold the report he had painstakingly returned to the Japanese.

In his first memorandum to the Japanese government, Wilson described his "theory that Taiwan has no land": "If the Chinese government has discovered the island itself, it can also be said that the Chinese government itself has abandoned the island. The Qing government imposed political education on some of the islanders, so it stands to reason that the Qing government should also govern the other part, but the Qing government could not produce effective evidence in fact. This seems to be a fallacious reason, but the Japanese like it.

Japan, which has long been influenced by Chinese culture, apparently understood the Qing court's concept of "Tianxia", and once upon a time, it was also part of this "Tianxia" - during the Ming Jiajing period, the missionary Xavier tried to naturalize Japan with Christ, but was refused, and the Japanese reasoned: "If Christianity is indeed the true religion, then the wise Chinese will definitely know it and accept it." This made Matteo Ricci, who came to the East later, deeply realize that in order to naturalize the East, he must first naturalize China.

Yanagihara Qianguang understands everything, but he just bites the vague statement of the Qing Dynasty, if you don't admit that Fandi is in your charge, that is not your place, you don't care, we will take care of it for you.