Peking is a distant but potent political objective in the novel: its imagined conquest promises control of China and, in the ambitions voiced around it, influence over the wider world. It is not shown as a place the characters reach; instead, it gives shape to their competing ideas about military power, foreign knowledge, and imperial rule.

A Prize in the Political Imagination

Kasigi Omi argues that Japan’s smaller numbers leave it at a disadvantage against China in conventional fighting. Guns and what he calls barbarian skill, he contends, could change that balance. His reasoning makes Peking more than a faraway destination: whoever takes it, he says, would eventually control China, and whoever controls China could control the world.

Foreign Knowledge as Leverage

Omi’s proposal follows from a change in how he sees the world. Blackthorne has shown him that Japan and China are only a small part of it, and Omi now treats knowledge from outside Japan as a resource rather than a source of shame. He wants that knowledge applied to defending Japan and expanding its power. Naga rejects the idea as dependent on barbarian treachery, exposing the disagreement beneath the military calculation: whether learning from foreigners can serve the Land of the Gods without compromising it.

The Taikō’s Unfulfilled Ambition

Peking also figures in the Taikō’s recollection of what might have been. Near the end of his life, he imagines joining Korean and Japanese legions in a thrust toward Peking and taking the Dragon Throne of China. In that imagined division of the future, Japan would go to Toranaga while the Taikō claimed China. The plan is spoken as a counterfactual ambition, not an accomplished campaign; its scale underscores the distance between the Taikō’s former conquests and the future he did not live to pursue.

Significance

These two visions give Peking distinct political meanings. For Kasigi Omi, it is the endpoint of a strategy built on imported knowledge and firearms; for the Taikō, it is the imagined seat of a second empire. Neither vision becomes an event in the supplied narrative. Peking matters instead as a measure of ambition—and as a point where the story’s local struggle for power opens onto the larger, only partly known world.