A Study of Modern Chinese Intellectuals' Conception of Japan in the Mid-19th Century through Wang Tao

In the middle of the 19th century, when he worked in the London Mission Society Press, Wang Tao began to know that a great reformation was taking place in Japan through the introduction of the Protestant missionaries, and started to change the Chinese collective imagination of Japan.After he came to Hong Kong at the first years of the 1860s, he began to contact with the Japanese by himself, and he had further understanding of Japanese.Japan began to try to expand after the Meijirshin, while the same time the Qing empire slacked off progressively.The dramatic changes of the position of the two countries made Wang Tao's conception of Japan full of contradictory.The development of Wang Tao's conception of Japan was a representative of the modern intellectuals, which reflected the perplexity and the contradiction of the certain times.