Dan Snow

So in hard power terms, it's a success.

We need to fight the Chinese in order to liberate them.

Yeah, exactly.

So part of our sharing all the wonderful things we've learned is now, unfortunately, we're going to have to invade you and occupy you in order to make you see these benefits.

Right.

And it's that conquest of Korea, that they fight China over sort of domination of Korea, they occupy Korea.

Does that bring them into competition with the Russians?

And it's a victory not of, you know, sort of Afghans defeating a British column by using clever guerrilla tactics in the harsh climate.

It's a victory of steel and Western-looking battleships and repeating rifles and barbed wire.

You know, it's a conventional war.

Yes.

Yeah.

And then the 1930s happened.

But let's finish this episode by bringing Japan to it.

Probably it's when the future looked brightest.

You win the Russo-Japanese War.

You're allied to the British naval, the Japanese officers training of the Royal Navy in Dartmouth and all this kind of stuff.

Japan's on the winning side of the First World War.

It gets more concessions, does it, at the end of the First World War?

Sort of a few more bits of China?