Then and There Search

China, 1895 to 1916, episode 10

The Bargain

Sun Yat-sen lands in China at Christmas 1911 and within a week is provisional president of a republic proclaimed in Nanjing, while Yuan Shikai, the dynasty's premier, holds the army and the north. The episode follows the two men through the deal that traded the throne for Yuan's presidency and asks who won it, Sun who got his republic, the court that got its terms, or Yuan who got the state. It is the first episode with revolutionary and republican voices in their own documents, alongside the court's abdication edicts and foreign observers.

Hankou Beijing Shanghai Nanjing
Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

Yuan Shikai
Yuan Shikai. Photo by Rio V. De Sieux, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, a barracks mutiny at Wuchang spread from province to province, and the court called Yuan Shikai back from his estate to save it. His army burned Hankou, took Hanyang, and stood on the riverbank with Wuchang in reach. And there, just as it was about to cross and finish the revolution, he held it back, and signed a truce instead. At Christmas, Sun Yat-sen came home. This time, the bargain that ended it all. A throne was traded away and a republic was traded for, and by the end, everyone at the table could claim they had won. Only one of them really had. It begins with the guns going quiet. Yuan had his reasons for stopping, and some of them were foreign. He was not deaf to foreign opinion, and he knew that weighty judgment in many quarters held that the time for fighting had passed. Another foreigner put it more bluntly. The truce kept being extended, he wrote, because Yuan saw that the foreign powers, and England above all, did not want any more civil war. The go-betweens were British. The minister in Beijing, Sir John Jordan, passed Yuan's offer on, and the acting consul general at Hankou, Herbert Goffe, carried it across the lines to Li Yuanhong. From that first message grew a whole chain of truces. The terms Yuan proposed for extending the first one went further than a ceasefire. No troops were to move south from the northern army, or north from the southern, and that was to hold at Nanjing as much as at Wuchang. And to talk the situation over with Li Yuanhong, the premier named his own representative: Tang Shaoyi. The revolutionary leaders took their time over those terms. Only on the ninth of December was an agreement signed, stopping military operations everywhere for fifteen days. Everywhere, that is, except Sichuan, Shaanxi and Shanxi, where the telegraph lines were down and nobody could tell the troops. An imperial decree made Yuan plenipotentiary, with orders to send a representative south to talk with the revolutionary leaders and prepare the way for peace. Tang Shaoyi, by choice, would have stayed at home. He was in poor health, and the job was hard, a heavy responsibility, and possibly dangerous. He went anyway. He was Yuan's old lieutenant, and Yuan had chosen him. So the war became a negotiation. And it is worth pausing on what kind of negotiator Yuan Shikai was. If one thing more than any other marked Yuan, a foreigner who watched him closely wrote, it was his gift for bringing things to a point from which there could be no turning back. He took time to think whenever he could. He had stood almost alone from the beginning, and made up his own mind. But once he had chosen a line, he made sure every step was taken to carry it through. To leave things to chance was never his way. That is the man who now sat down to bargain.

But first, in Beijing, there was a piece of the old order to clear away. Early in December, while the extension of the truce was still being argued over, the regent fell. Zaifeng had governed for three years in the name of his small son, the emperor. He went the way the old court did everything: by decree. A decree in the name of the Empress Dowager Longyu announced that the regent had come before her and asked to go. And in it, the regent condemned himself. His choice of officials, and his whole government, had met with public disfavour. The promised constitution had been no more than empty talk, and corruption had spread so far that the people's hearts had turned away and the empire had been dismembered. "Through the mismanagement of one man the whole nation had been thrown into the most grievous distress. It was too late for him to show his repentance by pangs of heart and aches of head" If he clung to office, the decree went on, he would lose the people's confidence, and even if he went on governing, his commands would carry no weight. So he humbly prayed to be allowed to resign the regency, and to have no further part in the affairs of the state. Then the Empress Dowager spoke for herself. She had been living in retreat in her palace, she said, and had not known what the government was doing. But the thought of the rising at Wuchang and the risings that followed, of the war on every side, and of the damage done to the trade of friendly nations, kept her awake at night and took away her appetite. Her verdict on the regent was almost gentle. He was liberal, honest and conscientious, and most earnest in his work. But he lacked the ability to cope with the crisis, he had let himself be fooled, and the whole nation had suffered for it. His seal as regent was to be handed in and destroyed. He was to go home to his own palace, take no further part in the government, and draw a pension of fifty thousand taels a year. From now on, the decree said, the prime minister and his cabinet would be responsible for appointing officials and for the whole work of government. And the prime minister, of course, was Yuan Shikai. Two Grand Guardians were named to watch over the boy emperor's safety. One of them was Xu Shichang. Xu Shichang was Yuan's old friend and ally. Think about where these two men now stood. Three years earlier, the regent had dismissed Yuan and sent him home to his native place. Now the regent was the one sent home, and the government was handed to Yuan's cabinet. A foreign observer found the fall not without its pathos. The regent was young, in years and in experience, a weak man but not an evil one. He had grown up in a fairly liberal household, the son of a progressive prince, and when he took up the reins there had been real hopes for him. Apart from his hatred of Yuan Shikai, which had led him to put private vengeance ahead of the interests of the state, he had meant well. He had not had an easy time of it. The empress dowager, the same observer thought, was the stronger character, with an ambition to follow the career of her famous aunt, Cixi, and her intrigues had made his task harder still. And he had never had the strength to stand up to the bad advice pressed on him from every side. Had Yuan been kept in power, the observer wrote, the ship of state might never have reached such troubled waters. The fall of the regent was the throne's last peace offering to its people. It came too late to buy anything.

Now the talking could start. The first question was where, and with whom. Yuan's terms had sent Tang Shaoyi to talk with Li Yuanhong. But the revolutionaries at Shanghai, Wu Tingfang and his colleagues, had other ideas. They told Yuan that Li had no authority to negotiate, and that nothing agreed with him would be accepted by the great body of the republican party. And they asked once again for the talks to be moved to Shanghai. Until then, people had not known whether the movement was run from Wuchang or from Shanghai. This settled it. For a few days it looked as if the revolution would split, over what seemed an insult to the man who had come to be seen as its hero. Then Li Yuanhong stepped aside. He put his own feelings away, gave up a position he had never sought, and threw his weight behind the men of Shanghai. The colonel who had been forced into the revolution at gunpoint had now given up the lead in it, because the cause needed him to. Yuan agreed to the change of venue, and Tang Shaoyi reached Shanghai on the seventeenth of December. The next afternoon, the first meeting was held in the Town Hall of the foreign settlement, lent for the occasion by its municipal council. A foreigner felt the weight of the moment. On one side sat the representatives of institutions that had lasted, perhaps, longer than any other institutions of the human race. On the other sat the children of a people reckoned, only a generation before, the most conservative in the world, arguing for a republic in its most advanced form. And both sides were sitting under a foreign roof, on Chinese soil. Tang came with four other commissioners. Wu Tingfang had five beside him. The issue, in the end, was simple: constitutional monarchy, or republic. And the revolutionaries settled it before the talking began. The republic was not up for discussion. They would only discuss how to bring it in, and the only imperial interest they would consider was what to provide for the imperial family. That first sitting went on for three hours of heated argument, most of it about the truce, and how it was not being kept. Tang agreed to telegraph Yuan the republicans' demand that the fighting stop, and that the imperial army stop taking towns, in a long list of provinces. There would be no further meeting until Yuan gave a satisfactory answer. Then the foreign powers leaned in. The foreign ministers in Beijing had met on the fifteenth of December, and on the morning of the twentieth, the consuls of Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and the United States called on Wu and Tang, and handed each of them an identical note. It was unofficial and it was polite. But it said that the struggle put China itself in grave danger, and foreign interests and the safety of foreigners with it, and it urged both men to reach an understanding as soon as they could. Wu Tingfang thanked the consuls. He was a man of peace, he said, and a member of several peace societies. But the Chinese were fighting for liberty, freedom and good government. A peace hastily patched up could lead to another revolution, much worse than this one. That afternoon a telegram came from Yuan, saying the imperial generals had been ordered to stop fighting, and the conference met again. The truce was extended to the last day of the year. And Wu Tingfang made his case. The people of China, he said, would accept no form of government except a republic founded on the will of the people. If they could choose delegates for the provincial assemblies and for the National Assembly in Beijing, why could they not elect a president? A government, he said, was rather like a trading company. If the manager ruined the business, through incompetence or dishonesty, he had no business staying in office. The shareholders must elect a new manager. The Manchus had shown their utter incapacity to govern the people for 267 years, Wu said. "They must go out." But the republicans did not mean to drive the Manchus out of the country, or to mistreat them. They wanted them as equals of the Chinese, sharing the blessings of liberty, equality and fraternity. Then Tang Shaoyi, the emperor's commissioner, said he was ready to accept Wu's view. Only, since the matter was of the greatest importance, he would have to refer it to Beijing. A foreign observer called it an extraordinary about face. The emperor's own negotiator had just agreed, in principle, to the end of the emperor. And what about Yuan? One foreign observer believed that at first, so long as he was made regent in all but name, Yuan would have stood by a Manchu monarchy to the end. But once he was drawn into the talks, his policy began to waver. He had sent his old lieutenant to Shanghai, and he soon found himself committed to a course he had never meant to take. The south and the centre of China insisted so fiercely that the dynasty must go, for good, that Yuan himself was half convinced. And the last argument, the same observer wrote, was a secret promise: that he would be the first president of the united republic. If he had truly been loyal to the throne, that observer thought, he had two honest choices. Go back to war, or resign and retire. He did neither. In his characteristic way, he looked for a middle course, and he found it in the idea of a national convention. The court answered with an imperial edict, in a lofty tone, hoping only that the convention's decision would rest on the interests of the country and the well-being of the people. "Heaven hears what the People hear and sees what they see." Wu Tingfang refused to recognise the edict at all. As far as he was concerned, the republican party was already the source of authority. But since Tang was ready to go on negotiating, Wu did not break off the talks, and on the twenty ninth of December they agreed. The form of government would be decided by the national convention, and both sides would be bound by its decision. Until then, the Manchu government was not to seek or accept any foreign loan. The imperial troops in several provinces would pull back a hundred li, and the republicans would not move into the ground they left. And the republicans added demands of their own: the convention should sit at Shanghai, with a two thirds quorum and decisions by majority, and it should open on the eighth of January 1912. A foreigner thought those terms one sided to the last degree. It said a great deal for the restraint of the court in Beijing, he wrote, that it brought itself to discuss them at all. And that same day, in Nanjing, the revolution chose a president.

Sun Yat-sen
Sun Yat-sen. 上海波尔照相馆, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The revolution had been building a government of its own for weeks, and for a while it had been building two. Back in November, delegates of the provinces had gathered at Wuchang, and on the sixteenth Li Yuanhong told the foreign consuls that they had decided to form a government there. He asked for foreign recognition. He did not get it. The envoys of the powers were accredited to the imperial government, and the revolutionaries were not yet even a government in fact. By the third of December, Wuchang had published a written constitution on the American model. It guaranteed the liberty of the person and of the press, and provided for a president, elected for three years, to hold the supreme executive power under the control of a national assembly. But Shanghai had its own leaders. And the men of Wuchang, who had borne the heat and burden of the fighting, had no intention of letting the theorists of Shanghai set themselves up as the central government. The fall of Nanjing solved it. It gave them neutral ground. By the twenty first of December, the delegates of both camps, claiming to speak for thirteen provinces, had gathered there. One of their first acts was to take the post of commander in chief away from Huang Xing, and give it to Li Yuanhong, on the fair ground that he had held the chief command so long that he could not be passed over without good cause. What they still lacked was a leader both camps could accept. And at that moment, Sun Yat-sen landed at Shanghai. His arrival could hardly have been better timed. To his fellow revolutionaries his name stood for liberty, and his long service to the cause set him above party. The rival factions could accept him, provisionally at least, as the republican leader. It was not quite a hero's coronation, though. For years Sun had worked from outside China, organising and raising money, while other men did the work inside, and his ties to the party, it seemed, had grown looser. The first invitation to the presidency had come from the republicans at Guangzhou, not from Shanghai or Wuchang, where his League was strongest. Both of those had held back from committing themselves. And in more than one quarter there had been a strong wish to give the presidency to the men of the moment instead, Li Yuanhong or Huang Xing. On the twenty ninth of December, the delegates met and elected him provisional president. For practical purposes it was unanimous. Only the delegates of one province, Zhejiang, had other views. It was not, a foreigner admitted, a popular election. Most people knew little of Sun, or even of the delegates who claimed to speak for them, and from that angle the whole thing looked like farce. But the delegates had their minds set on a republic, and they had taken a wise step. For many years yet, call it a republic or anything else, China would be governed by the few. So what did this moment mean to the man himself? Sun Yat-sen was forty five. For more than half his life he had wanted to see a new China, freed from oppression and corruption, and for seventeen years he had been a proscribed man, hunted by the throne. He had travelled the world wherever Chinese were to be found, organising support for the day the reformers at home would need it, and more than once he had slipped into China in disguise, at great risk. He was quiet and self effacing, and he could fire up the people he set out to win. But in other quarters he had had to put up with being taken for an obscure plotter, and few had seen in him the man who would lead the coming change. Through all of it, he had carried a picture of his own painting: his ancient country made a modern state, powerful and progressive, with an honoured place among the nations, and the poorest of his countrymen enjoying education and representative government. Now, something of that lifelong dream had come true. He was president of China. Provisional, but president.

A silver dollar of 1912 commemorating the founding of the Republic of China
A silver dollar of 1912 commemorating the founding of the Republic of China. Justine Philip for Museums Victoria, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Between five and six on the evening of the first of January 1912, Sun Yat-sen arrived at Nanjing. By a happy coincidence, a foreign observer noted, the new era began with the new year. The new year, that is, of the Western calendar. The first of January 1912, by the Western solar calendar, was proclaimed the founding date of the Republic of China. That was a small revolution in itself. From now on, the years would be counted not by an emperor's reign, nor from the birth of Confucius or of Christ, but from the founding of the republic. Time itself started over. The year 1912 became Year One of the Republic. Shortly before midnight, the boom of guns announced that the oath had been taken. He had sworn to restore peace, to set up a government based on the will of the people, and to overthrow the Manchu ruler. And once those things were done, he swore, he would resign the office, so that the people of a united China could elect their president. Hold on to that promise. Then President Sun read an address to the Chinese people, published at once as a proclamation. A reporter in Nanjing summed it up. China, the president said, was made up of five peoples: the Chinese, the Manchus, the Mongols, the Tibetans, and the peoples of Turkestan. Together they would form the new country. Until Wuchang fell to the revolution, he said, China had been divided by the rule of a despotic section of the Manchu people. Now most of China had united against that rule, and set up a government based on the will of the whole people. The government of China would be republican. But it was not meant to break the nation into separate republics. It was meant to bind it together, strongly and firmly, under a central government. As the reporter set it down: "The whole system must be based upon unity and nationalism. The army and navy, the fiscal system, education, commerce, and foreign affairs must be directed by one great central machine" Every province and every man would have a voice in it. And the army would be a national army, not split up into provincial units. Remember that phrase, one great central machine. The tax system would be reformed, Sun promised, to lift the burden from those who could not bear it. And he spoke to the foreigners. He thanked the nations of the world for staying neutral, and he wanted them to understand that this was "not a revolution, but a movement for reform." A revolution, then, assuring the world that it was not a revolution. He was confident, he said, that China would earn a seat among the councils of the nations, and that its foreign policy would serve the peace of the world. The new republic took a flag of five coloured bars, red, yellow, blue, white and black, one for each of the five peoples it claimed: Chinese, Manchus, Mongols, Muslims and Tibetans. Men cut off their queues, or had them cut off for them. More slowly, women unbound their feet. In the cities, the handshake began to take the place of the bow. And in Beijing? The speed of it caught Yuan off balance. The revolutionaries proclaimed their republic at Nanjing far faster than anyone expected, and foreign opinion cheered them on, and that, that same observer believed, threw Yuan into confusion. That same observer was scornful of it all: a republic proclaimed by a handful of provincial delegates, with Sun elected to lead it. But it was proclaimed. In Nanjing, a president. In Beijing, still a child emperor, and a premier who held the army.

Into January, the talks still seemed to be getting nowhere. In Nanjing, the republican commanders drew up a grand plan. Six columns, by rail and road and by sea, would sweep away all opposition on the way, and converge for a last assault on Beijing, the home of the ancient order. How it would have worked out, nobody would ever find out. Because on the sixteenth of January, somebody tried to kill Yuan Shikai. That day, Yuan had been to the palace. According to that observer, he had gone there to put an outline of the dynasty's exit terms before the Empress Dowager, on his bended knees, and he had won her qualified acceptance. On his way home, his procession would pass a street corner with a small restaurant on it, and a room upstairs. As usual, the upstairs room had its customers. Two of them paid very little attention to their meal. They had three packages with them. They took seats by the window, and kept watching in the direction of the palace gate. Then the one keeping lookout signalled to his comrade, who came at once, just as the horsemen around the premier's carriage appeared at the gate. Each of the two men picked up a package, and opened the window as if to get a better view. The escort came on. Now the carriage could be seen, and in it was Yuan Shikai, "calmly smoking a cigarette", taking no notice of the street. The first horseman had already turned the corner when the explosion came, just behind the carriage, and a little to its left. Yuan's horses reared and broke into a mad gallop, across the road and down a lane, and did not stop until they reached the Foreign Ministry. Yuan was not hurt. The bomb had missed its mark, and, as bombs do, it did its work on whoever happened to be near. It burst in the road. It badly wounded two horsemen of the escort, three passers by and three horses. One horse fell at once and died, and its rider lay under it, showing no sign of life. Another horseman lay on the ground with a shattered arm, while his wounded horse bolted toward the legation quarter, and fell dead in front of the telegraph office. A third horse bolted too. Its rider, thrown at the moment of the blast, was lifted up by his comrades, and died a little later. And on the pavement by the restaurant, three men were dying: a groundnut seller, a peddler, and a porter who had happened to be walking past when the bomb was thrown. Two bombs had been thrown. Only one went off. Police, led by an officer of Yuan's escort, rushed into the restaurant, and found six more bombs beside the two men. The two were very pale. They made no attempt to run. They had foreseen what would happen to them, and they faced it without fear. They were strangled the next day. And Yuan? An eyewitness said he did not even drop the cigarette from between his lips. When he was told what the bomb had done, he was especially sorry for one man, a member of his escort who had been in his service for seven years. That man had been given the day off. His family was arriving in Beijing that afternoon, and he was going to meet them. But when he heard that Yuan was going to the palace, always a risky trip in those days, he gave up his day, and decided that his place was at his master's side. Yuan never forgot that bomb. He believed it had been inspired from Nanjing. And in the south, the newspapers reminded their readers every day that the man who held the balance of power had always played the traitor before, and would surely do it again. So what did Yuan Shikai actually want? He had no reason to love the Manchus, a foreign observer thought, but he believed a monarchy suited China best. And once again, he stood for compromise, the great mark of his country's methods and of his own mind. He would fight for that up to a point. But he would not take the country into a long civil war. At different times, people credited him with every possible plan. He would keep the Manchus on the throne and rule the country behind them. He was after the imperial yellow for himself. Or he meant to be president of a republic, which is what his friends freely predicted. Hold on to the second one.

The court still had a few gestures left, and it spent them on Yuan. On the twenty sixth of January, the throne offered to make him a marquis, the highest rank of nobility a Chinese subject could hold. Yuan declined. The throne insisted. It took four refusals before the throne gave way, and agreed that the honour be put off until the country was calmer. It was, the same observer wrote, the last despairing gesture of a dying power. Because by then, something else had happened. On the evening of Sunday the twenty seventh of January, a telegram reached Beijing. It was a memorial to the throne, and it claimed to carry the signatures of the imperial viceroy at Wuchang and of no fewer than forty six generals of the imperial army. What they asked the throne to consider was abdication. From the start, the generals said, the court's policy had been a peaceful settlement. Now some of the princes, refusing to compromise, were putting that in danger, and the generals saw grave consequences ahead. Every day their troops grew weaker, worn down by fighting bandits and revolutionaries at once. The money for the war was running out. It was an unequal fight, and a national convention was certain to vote for a republic. Meanwhile, the people were paying the price of the uncertainty and the chaos. So, for the people's sake, the generals, still pledging their loyalty, begged the throne to rise to one last great act of self denial. Leave, in other words. And they were asking as the dynasty's own loyal soldiers. It looked as if the army had risen of its own accord and taken a hand. It had not. While the arguments in Beijing dragged on and on, Yuan had been busy through his agents in the country, and he had been using his influence with the army. The generals' telegram was his doing. In the palace, he had thrown his weight behind the Empress Dowager and the faction that favoured abdication. Whether he did it because it was the road to peace and plainly the only possible outcome, or, as his enemies said, because it suited his own hand, the move was typical of him. In effect it was an ultimatum. But it was an ultimatum with a door in it. The court could never bring itself to abdicate at the bidding of a handful of men it looked down on as vulgar democrats. But it could step aside with honour, out of pity for its suffering people, when its own faithful soldiers begged it to. Not every prince took the hint. The militant Manchu princes went on throwing all their weight against abdication, and the rumour was spread that the generals' memorial was a forgery. For a few hours, the situation looked very dangerous. But Yuan had seen it coming. He knew that in the end, only the strong arm would win, and all through the long anxious weeks since the conference he had been building up the troops at his disposal. His precautions, the pressure of the army, and the republicans' own show of force did the rest. The play was played out. On the first of February, the Foreign Ministry was told to make peace. A majority of the imperial clan had decided on abdication. The decree that recorded it named the men whose telegrams had moved the throne. Among them were Cen Chunxuan, the hard man the court had called back in October, and Duan Qirui and the other military commanders. Duan Qirui was one of Yuan's own officers from the northern army. They had asked the throne to adopt a republic quickly and avoid more bloodshed. And the throne said it could not bear to see millions in misery for the glory of one family. It gave Yuan Shikai full powers to settle the terms with the republican army.

So it came down to the price. And the man who wrote the price was Yuan Shikai. He drew up the Articles of Favourable Treatment for the imperial house himself, and had them telegraphed to the south. The south telegraphed them back to him, as the most the revolution was prepared to concede. A deal written by one side, sent to the other, and sent back as the other side's final offer. His go-between with the imperial family was Liang Shiyi, one of the most adroit and unscrupulous politicians the revolution would throw up. Liang was the man Yuan used to persuade the family to abdicate. And the Empress Dowager Longyu, that observer believed, was won over by specious misrepresentation: persuaded that a ceremonial retirement was the only way to save the country from break up and partition. So what did the dynasty get? The first article said it plainly. "After abdication the Emperor may retain his title and shall receive from the Republic of China the respect due to a foreign sovereign." He would remain an emperor, in other words. Just not of China. The throne would receive from the republic an annuity of four million taels, between five and six hundred thousand pounds sterling a year. For the present, the emperor could go on living in the Forbidden City. Later he would move to the Summer Palace, a few miles outside Beijing, with his bodyguard kept at full strength. He would go on performing the rites at the ancestral temples and the imperial tombs, and the republic would provide guards for them. The tomb of the late emperor Guangxu, still being built, would be finished to the original plans, at the republic's expense. The palace staff would stay on. But no more eunuchs would be appointed. In the course of nature, as one foreigner put it, that whole unhappy breed would simply die out. The emperor's private property would be protected. And the Imperial Guards would be kept on, their numbers and their pay unchanged, but placed under the republic's Department of War. Then there were the imperial clansmen. Princes, dukes and the rest of the hereditary nobility would keep their titles. The clansmen would have the same public and private rights as any other citizen, their property would be protected, and they would be exempt from military service. And there was a separate set of articles for the Manchus, Mongols, Muslims and Tibetans, as peoples who stood, it seemed, a little outside the Chinese nation. They would have full equality with the Chinese, and the full protection of their property. Their old restrictions on where they could live and trade were abolished, and they would have complete freedom of religion. Impoverished princes and dukes would be given a living. And the Eight Banners, the descendants of the troops the Manchus had conquered China with, would go on drawing their pay until some other livelihood could be found for them. To one foreigner, the terms seemed neither unreasonable nor ungenerous. That observer saw it differently. It was a bitter pill, he wrote, gilded so that nobody could see what it really meant, and that alone was a grave political error. Some of those promises would not hold. The republic was never able to pay the allowance regularly, and the old court officials sold off many of the imperial treasures, which are scattered across the world today. But the family stayed. It was not expelled from the Forbidden City until 1924, and into the 1920s, in the heart of Beijing, the young emperor still received courtiers, and even envoys from the government. You could see that as the generosity of the revolution. Or as the limit of it, and the compromises it had to make with the past.

Empress Dowager Longyu
Empress Dowager Longyu. Hoạ sĩ cung đình nhà Thanh, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

On the twelfth of February 1912, the throne abdicated. It was done in three edicts, each in the same form: the emperor announcing that he had received the following command from the Empress Dowager Longyu. Puyi was six years old. So the last words of the dynasty were spoken by a widow on behalf of a child, and countersigned by the premier, Yuan Shikai. The first edict told the story the way the court wanted it remembered. When the republican army rose and the provinces answered it, the edict said, the empire seethed like a boiling cauldron, and the people were plunged into misery. Yuan Shikai had been commanded to send men to confer with the republicans. But north and south were far apart, and so long as neither side would yield, trade would stay cut off and the war would drag on. While the form of government was undecided, the nation could have no peace. It was now plain that the hearts of most of the people were for a republic. The provinces of the south had taken up the cause first, and the generals of the north had since pledged their support. "From the preference of the people's hearts, the Will of Heaven can be discerned. How could We then bear to oppose the will of the millions for the glory of one Family!" For as long as there had been emperors, they had claimed to rule by the mandate of Heaven. Now the dynasty itself announced that Heaven's will was to be read in the people's hearts. So the empress dowager and the emperor vested sovereignty in the people, the edict said, and chose a republican form of constitutional government. In this they would follow in the footsteps of the ancient sages, who had held the throne as a sacred trust of the nation. And then came the sentence that mattered most. Let Yuan Shikai, it said, organise a provisional republican government with full powers, and confer with the republican army on how to unite north and south. Not Sun Yat-sen. Not Nanjing. The dynasty handed its republic to the premier it had once sent home. The new state was to be one great Republic of China, made of the same five peoples, Manchus, Chinese, Mongols, Muslims and Tibetans, with all their territory whole. And the edict closed on a note almost of relief. The empress dowager and the emperor would live in retirement, free from responsibilities and cares, passing their time in ease and comfort, and would see with their own eyes the making of an illustrious government. "Is not this highly advisable?" The second edict set out the terms, and added a line the court plainly believed. "His Majesty the Emperor is understood to resign only his political power, while the Imperial Title is not abolished." The imperial family really did think it was giving up only its political power, and keeping all its ancient ceremonies and titles. The idea of a republic, a government of the people, made no sense in the palace. The third edict gave the deepest reason of all. If the war went on against the wishes of most of the people, the country might be ruined beyond repair, and there might follow a racial war, with the people slaughtering one another. "Between the two evils, We have adopted the lesser one." The terms of those edicts, a foreign observer believed, were virtually Yuan's own. And they were wise terms, he thought. They let the reigning house retire with what was left of its self respect, and spared the country the friction that harsh treatment of the Manchus would have caused. How did the capital take it? The decree was received in Beijing without protest, without excitement, and, it seemed, without interest. That night a deep silence lay over the city. The streets were empty, except for the police and the soldiers on guard. In the morning, people went about their business as usual. The traffic flowed in and out of the great front gate, a little thinner than before, because so many families had already left the city. From the city wall you could look across the yellow roofs of the Forbidden City, brilliant under a bright sun and a clear blue sky, and find it hard to believe that the vermilion brush had written its last decree. But it had. In the old cycle of the dynasties, the fall of a ruling house was followed by a wave of suicides, the last proof of loyalty. This time, not one high Qing official and not one Manchu aristocrat took his own life. The dynasty was gone, and with it, the empire. That same day, Yuan took up his new role, as organiser of what was meant to be a democratic order. He addressed the country for the first time, calling on every official to stay at his post and give his loyal support. He had already sent a courteous telegram to Sun Yat-sen and his colleagues, passing on the edicts. And, foreseeing the demand that he come to Nanjing, he said he would like to. But keeping order in the north might make it difficult. The troops there were "like the trees of the forest for multitude," and "to the northeast the people are not unanimous." Remember that line about the troops. In Nanjing the news was welcome, but it did not satisfy. The republicans disliked the form of the settlement and the way it had been made. Their own government had simply been ignored. In their confidence, they resented what was really less an abdication than an appointment in Yuan's favour. They would have had it a straight surrender to the republic at Nanjing. In their hatred of the Manchus, some of them would have liked to humiliate the fallen dynasty further still. But Sun Yat-sen sent his assembly a message. The abdication of the emperor, he told them, and the union of north and south were "largely due to the great exertions of Mr. Yuan."

Yuan Shikai in uniform, China, 1912
Yuan Shikai in uniform, China, 1912. Not stated, marked as "Copyright 1913 The Bobbs-Merril Company", Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

And he reminded them of a promise. "I was to undertake to resign in favour of Mr. Yuan, when the Emperor had abdicated", Sun wrote, and once Yuan had declared his support for the republic. The promise had gone to Beijing in a telegram from Wu Tingfang, and the assembly had approved it. Yuan had now declared his unconditional support for the national cause, Sun told them. If he were elected to serve the republic, he would surely prove a most loyal servant of the state. He was a man of political experience, Sun wrote, and the united nation looked to his constructive ability. Choose carefully, Sun told them, and do not miss the chance to elect someone worthy. "The happiness of our country depends upon your choice. Farewell." So why would Sun give it up? Partly because he had promised to, in his oath, on the very first night. And partly because he had no real choice. In the bargaining, Yuan held the advantage: he had the better disciplined troops, and he had foreign backing. He had his own Beiyang Army, the strongest in China, behind him in the north, and a deal with Sun's League in the south. The men with money wanted him too. The leading merchants had supported Sun's government at Nanjing, but they welcomed the presidency of Yuan Shikai. Yuan promised to honour the debts of the Nanjing government, pay back some of the losses the revolution had caused, cut export taxes, unify the currency, and abolish the irritating transit taxes. Above all, he promised peace and order. And Sun did not give the presidency away for nothing. He handed it to Yuan in return for promises. Yuan would move the capital to Nanjing, where the revolutionaries were strong, and he would set up constitutional government. The assembly did not like it. It took a good deal of persuading and a long debate before it accepted Sun's resignation, and even then only provisionally. Sun was to stay in office until the new president was elected and installed. The election was set for the afternoon of the fifteenth of February. Sun spent that morning on one last piece of theatre. He went to the tomb of the first Ming emperor, the last purely Chinese dynasty, and there he performed a solemn ceremony, offering back to the old rulers, in symbol, the country the Manchus had taken from them. It was an odd sight, a foreigner thought: the representative of republican institutions performing rites at the shrine of an emperor. But to Chinese national feeling, it made a powerful appeal. That afternoon, the assembly reluctantly went to the vote, and Yuan Shikai was declared elected, unanimously. On the surface, the differences of north and south were buried, merged in the one man who had been the dominant force all along. But the republicans wanted two things, as proof that they had really won. The capital of the republic would be Nanjing. And Yuan would come south to take the oath of office there. Both went against Yuan's own inclinations, and moving the capital offended his political judgment. For Yuan to go to Nanjing and take the oath would have looked, to the whole nation, like surrender to the men who had failed to beat him in the field. And under that lay a deeper quarrel. The south said the republic rested on the constitution made at Nanjing. Yuan said it had been created by the abdication edicts, and so it was up to him to organise the new government as he saw fit. He would hold to that to the end of his life: his power came from the last edicts of the Qing, and in no way from his bargain with Nanjing. In February, a delegation came north from Nanjing with orders to bring him back with them.

The delegates' discussions in Beijing were still raging on the night of the twenty ninth of February. At about seven that evening, without any warning, the Third Division suddenly rose. They were a picked northern corps, quartered near the new Foreign Ministry buildings, where Yuan had his residence. They began to loot, and they went about it systematically. As it turned out, they had arranged to start at three different points at the same moment. One band went into the rich business quarter along the great avenue that runs north to south through the eastern part of the city, and broke into every shop and house thought to hold valuables. Shopkeepers who did not hand over enough treasure fast enough were roughly handled, and a few were shot or bayoneted. Within an hour, the avenue and the lanes off it were a terrible sight. Furniture, doors, windows, porcelain and glass were smashed, and then fires broke out, mostly around the Foreign Ministry, which vanished in a dense cloud of smoke. There was very little wind that night. If there had been, Beijing might have burned to the ground. Another gang, perhaps a thousand strong, went to the great road of Everlasting Peace, a little to the west. Rickshaw men who knew where the rich lived guided them from shop to shop. Half an hour later, a bazaar on the east side of the road was set alight. It was built mostly of wood, and soon a huge blaze lit up the whole neighbourhood. The yellow roofs of the Forbidden City gleamed like gold. And on those roofs, figures could be seen, watching the fires. Behind those roofs lived a child who, by the terms you have just heard, was still an emperor. Fires kept breaking out in that quarter until after midnight. In that area alone, hundreds of houses burned to the ground. The eastern gate of the imperial city went up early, recalling, if only faintly, the day scarcely more than ten years before when the great front gate had burned in the Boxer fury. And through all of it, the foreigners were left alone. Families fled their burning homes, and gangs of looters ran this way and that, leaving a widening trail of ruin. And through the middle of the rioters, untouched, smart bodies of foreign troops passed quickly and silently, bringing isolated foreigners in from around the city to the legation quarter. From every side came the rattle of rifle fire. The looters' habit was to fire off a score of shots to frighten householders out of resisting. A third band went to work outside the great front gate, among the rich shops of the Chinese city. There, a brigade of old style troops under Jiang Guiti, long time enemies of the Third Division, turned out and kept the mutineers within some bounds. Elsewhere, troops thought to be reliable were sent in to restore order. In most cases, the chance to loot was too strong for them, and they joined in. So did the police, after throwing away their jackets and caps. And thousands of porters and idlers swelled the looters into a mob too big to control. Like a great fire, it would have to burn itself out. From about one in the morning, the soldiers began to leave the city. Each man led a pony loaded with loot, and wore the look of a man who knows he has done a good night's work. The next day there was quiet, but it was the quiet of fear. For Yuan Shikai, it was a bitter humiliation. He sent a message to the foreign missionaries, merchants and residents of Beijing. One of his chief duties, he said, was to keep peace and order in the capital, and until now he had always succeeded. "Unto you, strangers in a strange land, I wish particularly to convey my sincere regret." Every possible precaution had now been taken, he said, to stop it happening again. With the night, it happened again, in the west of the city. Once more the Third Division led the way, starting with a big pawnshop, and a mob of men in uniform, with the dregs of the city behind them, spread ruin through the beautiful courtyards of the West City. For forty eight hours, Yuan's picked troops plundered and burned parts of his own capital. It spread. Baoding, the provincial capital, was sacked over two nights. At Shijiazhuang, where you saw General Wu Luzhen murdered, not a shop or a house escaped. At Fengtai, just outside Beijing, there was looting among the railway warehouses, and for a while the line to the sea was in danger. Then British troops came up from Tianjin by train and gave the marauders an hour's notice to leave. They thought it wise to accept. The soldiers were not out to kill. They were out to get rich. But plenty of innocent people were shot all the same, some by armed men in uniform, police among them, who robbed whoever came past, looter or refugee. By night, it had been a spectacle, impressive and almost grand. In the cold light of the morning, it was smouldering ash and cracked, tottering walls. So why did Yuan's own soldiers sack Yuan's own capital, at the very moment the delegates had come to take him south? Here the sources disagree. On one side, Yuan arranged it himself, as a deliberate piece of intimidation: a small outbreak, by some accounts, to be staged by a trusted officer and quickly put down, to prove to the men from Nanjing that he could not leave the north. On the other side, the evidence for that does not carry conviction: Yuan, of all men, was not rash, his power rested on his control of the army, and the soldiers had reasons of their own, because they knew many of them would soon be disbanded, and the rest would have their pay cut. Some of those regiments had just come back from Hankou and Hanyang. They had looked across the river at the wealth of Wuchang, had held it at their mercy, and been ordered to stay their hand. Now they were to be paid less. They had served their turn, and they had not got what they thought they were owed. There were even claims that Manchu agents had stirred the soldiers up, hoping to make a chance to restore the dynasty. Whatever the cause, the result was the same.

Yuan Shikai with his officials after taking the oath in Beijing, 10 March 1912
Yuan Shikai with his officials after taking the oath in Beijing, 10 March 1912. Unknown. Uploaded by 用心阁 on 2005-11-26., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Nothing more was heard about the president going south. The delegates telegraphed Nanjing, insistently, that Yuan must not be asked to leave the north just yet, and they urged that he take the oath in Beijing. Nanjing had no choice but to agree. The delegates, the observer wrote, had been completely cowed. On the afternoon of Sunday the tenth of March 1912, Yuan Shikai was sworn in as provisional president, in the new building of the Foreign Ministry in Beijing. It was a simple ceremony, with none of the old pageantry. The powers had not yet recognised the republic, so there were no foreign diplomats and none of their uniforms. Apart from the officers, most of the Chinese wore the sombre frock coat of the West. A few wore Chinese dress, and nobody wore the gorgeous robes of the old official world. Around him stood the delegates from Nanjing, the representatives of the vice president, Li Yuanhong, and of the military governors of the provinces, the heads of the ministries, generals of the Manchu, Mongol and Chinese banners, admirals, one gentleman from each province, and men from the chamber of commerce. Two ushers led the president to the centre of the hall, and there he stood, facing south. The emperors had always sat facing south. Everyone in the hall bowed to him once, and he bowed back. Then he read his oath. He swore "to promote the democratic spirit, to remove the dark blots of despotism, to obey strictly the Constitution, and to abide by the wish of the people". He swore to make the country safe, united, strong and firm, and to bring happiness to the five peoples of the Chinese race. And then the line that mattered. "As soon as a President is elected by the National Assembly I shall vacate my present position." He signed it, sealed it, and handed it to one of the delegates, Cai Yuanpei. Cai Yuanpei was a renowned scholar, and the minister of education in Sun's government at Nanjing. Cai paid a handsome tribute to the president's abilities, and said he hoped that some day the president would find a chance to visit the South. Yuan answered with great modesty. He was conscious of his own lack of virtue, he said, and he doubted his ability. Sun had recommended him, and Sun's modesty was well known to every Chinese, so he felt all the more embarrassed in taking on so heavy an office. Then he thanked the delegates, and withdrew. The visit to the South would have to wait. Three days later, with Nanjing's strong approval, he made Tang Shaoyi his premier. Then look at how he shared out the rest of the government. He readily took men nominated by the south for the less important ministries. But everything to do with the army and the police, and the all important ministry of finance, he kept for his own men. And the money question came first. The country was virtually penniless, and the new government's attention turned almost at once to finding loans.

Nanjing had one more move to make. The day after Yuan's oath, Sun's government at Nanjing promulgated a Provisional Constitution for the republic. It began with principles. The sovereignty of the republic was vested in the people. All citizens were equal, with no distinction of race, class or religion. They had freedom of speech, of publication, of assembly and of religion, and no citizen could be arrested, nor his home searched, except according to law. Laws would be made by a National Council. It would pass every bill, the budget, and every public loan. The president would be commander in chief of the army and navy of the whole of China. But to appoint the members of his cabinet, or an ambassador, he needed the Council's agreement. He could declare war or make a treaty only with its consent. And every bill he introduced, and every law and order he issued, had to be countersigned by his cabinet. The Council could impeach him for high treason, by a three quarters vote, with more than four fifths of its members present. And within ten months, he had to call a National Assembly, which would write the permanent constitution. Remember the constitution Wuchang drafted in December, with a president holding the supreme executive power on the American model? The Provisional Constitution put a cabinet and a council between the president and his power, to hold the new man in check. It was a fence. And everyone knew whom it was built around. Later, one man made the same point from the other side, in a dialogue making the case for a constitutional monarchy. Its spokesman claimed that once the government moved to Beijing, Sun's party had "tied the hand and foot of the government by means of the Cabinet System and other restrictions with the intention of weakening the power of the central administration in order that they might be able to start another revolution." That was the grievance of Yuan's side, and you will hear it again. So who won the bargain? The court kept its title, its palace, its temples and its four million taels a year. Sun Yat-sen got his republic. For its presidency, he took two promises: the capital would move to Nanjing, and there would be constitutional government. Yuan was to keep neither. And Yuan Shikai got the state. He got the army and the police and the treasury, and he made his official residence in the old imperial offices, right beside the Forbidden City. He had his commission from the abdication, his election from Nanjing, and his oath taken where he wanted it. And from the day of the abdication, that observer believed, Yuan was forever calculating whether he dared to stake everything on one throw of the dice, and take the throne himself. Remember the imperial yellow. For now, though, he had a constitution written to fence him in, and a parliament still to be elected under it. He would soon find out what it could do, and so would the men who wrote it. Next time: a republic in name, and the first real test of that fence. Usurper, or state builder? That question is about to get very sharp.

Sources