After defeating the Qing Empire in the Opium Wars, European powers entered into unequal treaties with China, introducing free trade, extraterritoriality, and free ports under foreign control. Later China restricted trade with Europeans and forced them to stay on Canton Island. In Japan, after 1720, when the shogun Tokugawa relaxed the rules for importing foreign books, the Dutch and their goods, including the scientific knowledge they brought, became the subject of public interest. In the middle of the 18th century, rangaku or “Dutch learning,” developed as an important alternative to the dominant intellectual practices imported from China.
Even though Japan developed in the manner of the Chinese, there were significant differences in the perception of European influence. The Chinese stopped trading with the Europeans after they requested more land, so the arrival of the Europeans did not affect the Chinese much. Other relations developed with Japan: the country, initially closed from the whole world, let the Europeans in, so the cultural interweaving was much stronger (Duiker et al., 2019). Western culture greatly influenced Japanese art and science, Western medicine, astronomy, languages, and experiments with oil paintings.
Work Cited
Duiker, William J., and Spielvogel, Jackson J. The Essential World History, Volume II: Since 1500. Cengage Learning, 2019. Web.