They had also set up trading posts in China by this point, after much pushback from China, most notably in Canton (present-day Guangzhou), right at the mouth of the Pearl River. This idea worked very well locally, with Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Tibet and others all treated as tributary states, paying annual or seasonal tributes (the Tibetan Empire was, of course, directly ruled over by the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912), but even then it was mostly autonomous, with Beijing at the time mostly staying out of the local affairs), but when the Europeans gained the technology to travel long distances at sea, trouble began brewing.įast forward to the 19th century, where the British Empire is the single most powerful naval entity on the planet. This was a recurring theme in Chinese foreign relations throughout the imperial era, as the prevailing concept of foreign relations was based around the "Middle Kingdom" ideology, where China was, quite literally, the centre of the universe, and therefore any other people must be subordinate to them. They were met violently, and formal trade relations didn't start until some twenty-odd years later, when the Portuguese established Macau as one of their trading bases. The Portuguese were one of the first European powers to create formal, direct trade relations with China, landing in what is now Tuen Mun in 1521. Bay Gate), a small peninsula opposite the Pearl River Delta from Hong Kong.
Paul's Cathedral (大三巴牌坊), built by the Portuguese in the late 16th century in Macau (澳門, lit.
0 kommentar(er)
