In 1889, two years after an eccentric American millionaire established the European edition of The New York Herald, the precursor of the International Herald Tribune, Rudyard Kipling dined with some British businessmen in Hong Kong. The imperial rulers of China, most recently humiliated by France, had reluctantly started to modernize their vast domain; and British entrepreneurs, who had long chafed at the Middle Kingdom’s stubborn isolationism, were drawn to the new possibility of investments and profits.
Kipling, however, worried that these men who were doing their best to ‘‘force upon the great Empire all the stimulants of the West — railways, tramlines, and so forth’’ were deeply misguided. ‘‘What will happen,’’ he wondered, ‘‘when China really wakes up, runs a line from Shanghai to Lhasa, and controls her own gun-factories and arsenals?’’
looking beyond borders 