the Self-Strengthening Movement. Li had received the privilege of wearing a three-eyed peacock feather in his hat – a rare exception because three-eyed peacock feathers had previously been restricted to only members of the imperial clan – during Empress Dowager Cixi's 60th birthday celebrations in 1894. However, after the Chinese defeat in the war, Li was disgraced and stripped of his peacock feather. The Qing imperial court initially wanted to send Zhang Yinhuan () and Shao Youlian () as their representatives to negotiate with the Japanese, but the Japanese rejected them. Li was selected to take on this mission and was given back his peacock feather. On 24 March 1895, while negotiating with Japan's Prime Minister Itō Hirobumi and Foreign Affairs Minister Mutsu Munemitsu in Shimonoseki, Li was attacked by an assassin, Koyama Toyotarō (), who shot him in the left cheek. Koyama was arrested by Japanese police later and he claimed that he desired for the war to continue. Due to the public embarrassment caused by the attack, the Japanese agreed to the immediate ceasefire Li had urged in the days before, though fighting would continue on Taiwan and in the Penghu Islands. On 17 April 1895, Li signed the Treaty of Shimonoseki with the Japanese, thus ending the First Sino-Japanese War. Tour of Russia, Europe and North America In 1896, Li attended the coronation of Nicholas II of the Russian Empire on behalf of the Qing Empire and toured Europe, Canada and the United States, where he advocated reform of the American immigration policies that had greatly restricted Chinese immigration after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 (renewed in 1892). In a famous interview published by The New York Times on September 3, 1896, Li was asked whether he favored the introduction of the newspaper into China as developed in the U.S. or in Europe. Li's answer was stunningly honest: "There are newspapers in China, but the Chinese editors, unfortunately, do not tell the truth. They do not, as your papers, tell 'the truth, whole truth, and nothing but the truth.' The editors in China are great economizers of the truth; they tell only a part of it. They do not have, therefore, the great circulations that your papers have. Because this economy of the truth, our papers fail in the mission of a great press, to be one of the means of civilization." While in Britain, he