Even before the nineteenth century, the Koreans had only maintained diplomatic relations with its suzerain China and with neighboring Japan. Foreign trade was mainly limited to China conducted at designated locations along the China–Korea border, and with Japan through the Waegwan in Pusan. By the mid-nineteenth century Westerners had come to refer to Korea as the "Hermit Kingdom". The Daewongun was determined to continue Korea's traditional isolationist policy and to purge the kingdom of any foreign ideas that had infiltrated into the nation. The disastrous events occurring in China, including the First (1839–1842) and Second Opium wars (1856–1860), reinforced his determination to separate Korea from the rest of the world.