In this paper, I examine the royal articles that were published in the Russian illustrated journals of the late nineteenth century. There have been few studies on representations of the Tsar in modern Russian society, primarily because Soviet historiography has, so far, focused on only two elements of the Russian society-the intellectual high society and the world of the "people." In this paper, I analyze the representations of the Tsar in the illustrated journals of the late nineteenth century in order to fill the gap between the two aforementioned elements. Illustrated journals such as Niva, Vsemirnaia Illiustratsiia, and Rodina, which were entirely new variants of the Russian print media, became highly popular during this period. As most publishers were of Western origin and were familiar with the European tradition of entertaining visual magazines, they imitated the style of the European media when they started their own journals in Russia. The readers of these journals consisted of the urban dwellers in European Russia, who began to form a new social group after the Great Reforms of the 1860s. The images of Russian monarchs that were published in these European-style illustrated journals were quite different from the traditional representations of the saintly Tsar. First, royal portraits in these journals were influenced by the carte de visite style of taking celebrities' pictures, which was fashionable in Western Europe in the 1860s. Second, these journals juxtaposed the articles on the Tsar and his family with those on other European royal houses. Third, these royal articles focused on the private life and the body natural of the Tsar. Good examples of articles that combined all these three elements are the ones on the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Russian illustrated journals featured secularized, relative, and humanized images of the Tsar for the purpose of entertaining their readers. This tendency was in contravention to the strategy of representation pursued by Nicholas II, who intended to portray himself as a saintly Tsar and gave much importance to traditional rituals. Nicholas II planned to unite the Russian Empire on the basis of the age-old practice of worshipping the Tsar. In modern Russian society, however, the images of the Tsar had already been secularized through their circulation in these illustrated journals. This gap in the representation of the Tsar may have contributed to the difficulties that Tsarism had to face after the 1905 revolution.

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As one condition of the program instituted under the Boxer Protocol of 7 September 1901, the emperor of China was required to make a formal apology to the emperor of Germany for the murder of Baron von Ketteler in Beijing during the Boxer uprising. However, the Qing Dynasty's decision to send a mission of expiation to Germany was motivated less by the rules of the Protocol than an intention to improve relations between the two countries, while Germany's main intent was to receive a formal apology for Ketteler's murder. This divergence in expectations would greatly complicate negotiations over how the audience between the Chinese ambassador and the German emperor was to be conducted and cause increased friction between the two countries. The problems concerning the audience decorum involved 1) the submission of an official communique, which Prince Chun 醇 was to perform in the presence of Wilhelm II and 2) the German demand that the Chinese "kowtow" at the emperor's feet as a sign of apology. The Chinese vehemently protested the demand to "kowtow" as an act of "national disgrace." As the negotiations bogged down, the original Chinese expectations about the mission were dashed. The Qing government desired the use of a precedent established in 1896 when Li Hongzhang 李鴻章 was granted an audience before Wilhelm II and submitted to him a formal letter; but the German emperor insisted that Prince Chun's Chinese retinue kowtow, despite initial opposition by his own Bureau of Foreign Affairs. Upon the advice of diplomats who had directly experienced life at the Qing Court, the Bureau argued that since the kowtow was a religious act, it was inappropriate within the realm of international diplomacy, showing that there were concerned parties in both countries who were willing to compromise via diplomatic precedents and interpretations. Wilhelm II did heed the criticism offered by his diplomats and public opinion, showing a disposition to compromise, but giving into such pressure also threatened to demean his imperial authority. Therefore, resolving the "kowtow problem" required some gesture from the Chinese, which appeared in the form of a prodigious appeal to the emperor from Prince Chun to graciously excuse his Chinese retinue from kowtowing, which freed the Germans to relent without any loss of face on the part of their emperor. It was in this way that through a compromise between the two countries on the question of diplomatic ceremony, the problems surrounding the mission of expiation were solved prior to the signing of the Boxer Protocol.

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The purpose of this article is to examine the effect of cash on delivery service on the development of the mail order business in prewar Japan. C.O.D. was established as a postal service in 1896, and helped decrease the business cost incurred by time lags between the settlement and delivery of parcels. In addition, the fact that C.O.D. was provided as a governmental postal service was significant in three ways. First, a nationwide postal network was made available to users, including those in rural areas. Secondly, settlement and delivery was implemented without any problem. Thirdly, suppliers who dispatched goods via C.O.D were regarded as reliable dealers. Consequently, the mail order business was made available to all suppliers, regardless of their sales volumes, and developed rapidly, to the extent that by 1922, Japan rose to second in the world behind Germany in the number of C.O.D. parcels delivered in 1922 (no statistics are available for the US and UK). However, after 1923, the service experienced little growth, owing not only to such environmental factors as the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, the Showa financial panic of 1930, and the increase of retail outlets; but also because 1) it was impossible to prevent fraud on the part of unscrupulous businessmen peddling goods of inferior quality, due to the failure to implement an inspection system, and 2) the decision on the part of the postal service to end door-to-door delivery of C.O.D. parcels due to budget constraints. Consequently, the number of parcels returned to sender increased, burdening suppliers with the cost of postage and handling and the loss of a sale opportunity for the returned goods.

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