a year-round port south of its main base in Vladivostok.David J. Dallin, The Rise of Russia in Asia (1949) pp 59-61, 36-39, 87-122. The key ingredient was that both nations were more fearful of Japanese plans than they were of each other; they both saw the need to collaborate. They cooperated with each other (and France) in forcing Japan to disgorge some of its gains after it won the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894. Russia increasingly became a protector of China against Japanese intentions. The Open Door policy promoted by the United States and Britain was designed to allow all nations on an equal footing to trade with China and was accepted by Russia. All the major powers collaborated in the Eight-Nation Alliance defending their diplomats during the Boxer Rebellion. The British signed a military alliance with Japan in 1902, as well as an agreement with Russia in 1907 that resolved their major disputes. After Russia was defeated by Japan in 1905, those two countries work together on friendly terms to divide up Manchuria. Thus by 1910 the situation among the great powers in the Far East was generally peaceful with no troubles in sight. When the First World War broke out in 1914, Britain, Russia, Japan and China all declared war on Germany, and cooperated in defeating and dividing up its Imperial holdings. At the same time, Russophilia flourished in Britain, founded on the popularity of Russian novelists such as Lev Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and sympathetic views of Russian peasants. Following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, exiles from the radical Narodnaya Volya party and other opponents of Tsarism found their way to Britain. Sergei Stepniak and Felix Volkhovsky set up the Russian Free Press Fund, along with a journal, Free Russia, to generate support for reforms to, and abolition of, Russian autocracy. They were supported by liberal, nonconformist and left-wing Britons in the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom. There was also considerable support for victims of the Russian famine of 1891-2 and the Jewish and Christian victims of Tsarist persecution. Early 20th century There was cooperation in Asia, however, as the UK & Russia joined many others to protect their interests in China during the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901). Britain was an ally of Japan after 1902, but remained strictly neutral and did not participate in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5.Keith Neilson, Britain and the