Boundaries were smashed and broken as modernity struck its first blows in Asia in the nineteenth century. The British and the French chipped away at the borders of China, and the USA ripped open the seal that enveloped Japan in sakoku. Imperialism, or neo-imperialism, represented a way of overcoming boundaries, of decreasing the salience of other territorial units. However, it was also a way of expanding boundaries, of projecting one's own territory and sustaining the priority of these new (modern) borders over the claims of (allegedly pre-modern) indigenous peoples. Boundaries themselves began to take on a distinctly modern persona–and they were the property of the modern, Western powers.