China, 1895 to 1916, episode 2

Carving the Melon and the Hundred Days

Li Hongzhang, discredited by the peace, is sent round the world as China's envoy to the Tsar, and within two years he can only protest as Germany, Russia and Britain carve leased ports out of the coast. The episode follows how that scramble drove the young Guangxu Emperor to Kang Youwei and the most ambitious reform the dynasty had tried, and asks how much of it the emperor could ever carry out. It leans on scholars and foreign observers, with the court heard only through its reform edicts.

Transcript

Last time, Japan broke China's new army and its new navy, and both of them belonged to one man, Li Hongzhang. His army was routed in Korea, and his fleet was battered at the Yalu and then finished off inside its own harbour at Weihaiwei. Li went to Japan to make the peace, and a gunman there put a bullet in his cheek that no one could ever get out. The treaty he signed at Shimonoseki in April 1895 cut Korea loose, gave Japan Taiwan and the Liaodong peninsula, and saddled China with an indemnity of two hundred million taels. Then Russia, with France and Germany behind it, forced Japan to hand Liaodong back, and Li began to lean on Russia as China's friend. In Beijing, a scholar named Kang Youwei got more than twelve hundred examination candidates to sign a petition against the peace, and reform societies sprang up across the country. And Li himself, the man who had signed, was discredited and pushed aside. That is where we pick him up. Because the court was about to send this disgraced old man on the most important trip of his life. In the spring of 1896 a new Tsar was to be crowned in Moscow, and China was asked to send a prince of the imperial blood to represent it. That Tsar was Nicholas the Second. He had inherited the throne in late 1894, when his father died, and the coronation was set for the old capital. The court did not send a prince. It sent Li Hongzhang. In March 1896 he was named ambassador extraordinary to the Tsar, and Russia was glad to have him: China's leading statesman and its strongest administrator. Less than a year after the worst peace in his country's history, the man who signed it was going out into the world as its face. Li was seventy three years old. He left Beijing on the eighth of March with a large suite, and for each capital he would visit, a foreign officer of China's customs service was assigned to travel with him as an adviser. At Shanghai he boarded a French steamer, and when she called at Hong Kong, he would not go ashore. He gave his reasons. He was old and infirm, he wanted to avoid the banquets and the crowds of visiting officials, and Hong Kong had bubonic plague, and he did not want to be held in quarantine at Singapore. The French gave him a brilliant reception at Saigon, he was received with proper ceremony at Singapore, and at Port Said a Russian cruiser took him on board and carried him to Odessa. Port Said sits at the Mediterranean end of the Suez Canal, and Odessa was Russia's great port on the Black Sea. He landed at Odessa on the twenty seventh of April to what the newspapers called an imposing reception, and he stayed in Russia until after the coronation. On paper, his mission had four jobs. Represent the emperor at the coronation. Thank Russia, Germany and France for getting Liaodong back. Deliver letters to Queen Victoria and to the President of the United States. And sound out the Western powers on raising China's customs tariff. Only the last of those really mattered, and here is why. China could not change its own import duties without the consent of every treaty power, even the smallest. The rates had been fixed back in 1858, at five per cent of what goods were worth in those days. Since then the price of silver had fallen, and with it the real value of the duties, so on many important goods the treasury was now collecting two or three per cent instead of five. China's duties were paid in silver, while the countries it traded with increasingly reckoned their money in gold, so every fall in silver was a cut in China's income. Li's proposal was modest. Keep the old rates, but collect them in gold. Russia said yes. Germany was not unwilling, but would wait for Britain. France left it to its man in Beijing. Britain was sympathetic, and the Americans accepted the idea in principle. And nothing happened. The tariff stayed exactly where it was. Keep that pattern in mind; it is going to come back. The real business of the trip was done in Moscow, and it was never announced. With Li in the city for the coronation, the Russians had the chance to talk over the whole problem of the Far East with him. China needed money, and Russia needed China to accept its plans. Russia was building the longest railway on earth, the Trans Siberian, from Europe to its Pacific port at Vladivostok. Its planned route ran the long way round, north along the Amur River and then south, all on Russian soil. Russia now wanted to cut straight across Manchuria instead. In Moscow, Li signed an agreement that let Russia build its railway across Manchuria to Vladivostok, and that bound China to go only to Russian banks to finance its own railways up there. In the same weeks he also signed a secret alliance with Russia: if Japan attacked Russia's Far East, China or Korea, the two empires would fight it together. None of this was admitted at the time, and the published versions were denied, but over the next few years every one of those clauses was carried out. The railway was to be built by a bank, the Russo Chinese Bank. It was Russian on paper, but four of the leading banks of Paris were among its founders. And the Chinese government itself put five million taels into it on permanent deposit. The bank then set up the company that would build the line, the Chinese Eastern Railway. People would come to call this conquest by railway. From Russia, Li went on to Berlin, reaching it on the fourteenth of June, and again the newspapers reported an imposing reception. In Germany he called on the old Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, long since retired, and in England he was received by the Queen. From Berlin he went to The Hague, and then to Paris, where he had an enthusiastic welcome, and in August to London, where the reception was simple. Everywhere he went, officials and manufacturers hoped for big orders, for guns and for railways. Li placed none, and from one capital after another the press reported their great disappointment. He reached New York on the twenty eighth of August. The Americans met him with a mix of respectful interest and newspaper jokes, and he returned the favour with an impertinent curiosity about them. In New York the President, Grover Cleveland, received him. Then he crossed the continent and sailed home across the Pacific from Vancouver. That autumn he was back in Beijing, with a seat on the Zongli Yamen. The Zongli Yamen was the office the court had set up in 1861 to deal with foreign countries, the closest thing China had to a foreign ministry. A British newspaper in Shanghai had summed up China after the war in five words: "the Chinese bubble had burst". He came home to a court whose whole policy after the war came down to two things: find the money to pay Japan, and lean on the powers that had saved Liaodong. There was no plan to reorganise the government, no plan to develop the country's own resources, nothing to let the empire stand on its own feet. China had a friend now. It was about to find out what friends cost.

To see how, we need to meet a man who very much wanted a piece of China. Kaiser Wilhelm the Second had been German emperor since 1888. He was a grandson of Queen Victoria, restless and ambitious, and he wanted a great navy and an empire overseas to match his grandmother's. Germany had come late to the race for colonies, and in China it had nothing of its own: no port, no base, no coaling station for its warships. It already knew which harbour it wanted. Since its ships first reached those waters in 1860, Germany had coveted Jiaozhou Bay, on the southern shore of the Shandong peninsula, as a naval base. Shandong is the coastal province that juts out into the sea south east of Beijing, a crowded farming country and the home of Confucius. After Liaodong, Germany asked for the bay as its reward for helping China, and for a while the Qing managed to say no. So in the spring of 1897, Germany told Russia, Austria and Italy that it meant to acquire a naval station in China. All that summer and autumn its warships were seen surveying the coasts of Fujian, Zhejiang and Shandong. What it needed now was an opportunity and an excuse. Shandong was also missionary country. In the west of the province, a particularly aggressive order of German Catholics had made itself hated by many of the local people. Missionaries there stepped into village quarrels over land and water, and when a Christian and a non Christian argued over something as small as straying pigs, the missionary could lean on the officials to decide for the Christian. And if the officials would not listen, the missionaries complained to their legations in Beijing, which leaned on the government, which leaned on the officials. The year before, 1896, had already seen many attacks on foreign missionaries, and many murders. On the first of November 1897, two German priests of a Roman Catholic mission, Franz Nies and Richard Heule, were murdered at a village in Juye county, in the south western corner of Shandong. The killers broke into the mission house at night. And now we hit the one question in this story where the answer really does change the picture. Who killed them? Here the sources disagree. One account says the murder was done by robbers, who plundered the whole village, and that the Chinese authorities moved fast: the province's chief judge hurried to the scene to see justice done. The other says the two priests were hacked to death by an anti foreign crowd. If it was robbers, Germany was answering an ordinary crime that China was already punishing. If it was a crowd, Germany was answering an anger its own missions had helped to stir up. Either way, the plan came first. The murders only gave it a date. News of the killings reached the outside world on the tenth of November. The Kaiser was glad to have such a splendid excuse, and he used it to take Jiaozhou by force. He ordered his East Asian squadron straight to the bay. Germany would say it was showing China, and the world, how a strong power protects its subjects abroad. What it actually did went far beyond that.

On the fourteenth of November, thirteen days after the murders and four days after the news broke, a small German force landed at Qingdao, the port at the mouth of Jiaozhou Bay. They threw out the Chinese garrison, took the forts and occupied the port. They met no resistance. A British newspaper in Shanghai put it bluntly: "A foreign power with three ships and 600 men finds no difficulty in effecting a descent on a country of three hundred millions". And the Germans had dug in within three hundred and fifty miles of the capital. On the twenty second of November, Germany named its price. A memorial tablet to the murdered priests, put up by imperial order. Money for their families, and for three chapels to be rebuilt, at sixty six thousand taels each. The governor of Shandong to be cashiered and thrown out of the public service. Germany's costs for the landing to be repaid. And then the real demands: sole rights to build railways and open coal mines in Shandong, and a naval station at Jiaozhou. In Beijing, the ministers of the Zongli Yamen were badly shaken, but they put up a bold front. They accepted the tablet and the money, balked at sacking the governor, and refused the last three outright. Li Hongzhang did not mince words. The German occupation, he declared, was "a flagrant violation of the treaties and the law of nations". Germany did not move an inch. Even in Tokyo, officials thought Germany had moved with unnecessary haste, and that a Western power sitting on such a strategic point for long would endanger the peace of the whole Far East. On the first of December, the Kaiser opened the German parliament by announcing that the navy was not good enough, and four days later a new navy bill went in. A few days later his foreign minister told the same parliament that Germany wanted to put no one else in the shade, but demanded its own place in the sun. Reinforcements of ships, men and field guns sailed for China, under the command of the Kaiser's own brother, Prince Heinrich of Prussia, an admiral. On the eighteenth of December there was a farewell banquet for the prince in Hamburg, and the Kaiser gave a speech. If anyone tried to injure Germany's rights in China, he told his brother, "then up and at him with your mailed fist". The prince answered in kind. His only aim, he said, was "to declare in foreign lands the gospel of your Majesty's hallowed person, to preach it to every one who will hear it, and also to those who will not hear it". To those who will not hear it. That is a fair summary of the next three years in China. China had one old trick for moments like this: set the foreigners against each other. This time, nobody came. Russia had its own plans, France was tied up with the Dreyfus affair and was pledged to back Germany anyway, Britain was watching trouble build in South Africa, and America was busy with Cuba. And in the two years since the war, China had done nothing to reform its government or rebuild its forces. It faced Germany alone. Early in January 1898 it began to give way, one point after another. On the sixth of March a convention was signed in Beijing, and one of the signatures on it was Li Hongzhang's. There was nothing else to do. China handed Germany the land on both sides of the entrance to Jiaozhou Bay, the islands, and the water of the bay, on lease, provisionally for ninety nine years. For fifty kilometres around the shores of the bay, the land stayed Chinese in name, but German troops could march through it freely, and its government needed German approval. In all, Germany got more than five hundred square kilometres, plus the right to build railways and dig mines. The railway and mining concessions in Shandong went to Germany, and whenever China needed foreign help, money or materials for anything in the whole province, it had to offer the work to German firms first. Germany could have got a naval station by ordinary pressure in Beijing; China could not have held out. It chose instead to do it as a spectacle that humiliated both the rulers and the people of China. That May, Prince Heinrich was received by the emperor at the Summer Palace with imperial honours, and all was friendly on the surface. The Chinese said of him that he had come uninvited and left unmourned. German settlers quickly turned the land around the bay into the modern city of Qingdao, and in 1903 they founded a brewery there that would become famous. It was, perhaps, the most clearly positive thing Western imperialism ever gave China. To keep the other powers quiet, Germany made Qingdao a free port, and China's own customs service was invited inside the German territory to collect duty on goods going in and out of China. The port, helped by its railway, prospered. Remember those villages in western Shandong, set against the German missions. That is where the movement the world would call the Boxers began.

Now the other powers came running, and I want to tell this part from the chair Li Hongzhang was sitting in. Li was still the most capable statesman China had, but by now he had little real power left. What he had was a seat at the Zongli Yamen, across the table from the foreign envoys. And over the next few months, one after another, they came to that table. Foreigners already held a lot. In sixteen Chinese cities there were concessions run directly by foreigners and their governments, little colonies beyond the reach of Chinese law, the largest of them in Shanghai. Now they wanted more. Each of the three powers that had saved Liaodong expected to be paid, and Germany had simply been the first to collect. In the six months from November 1897 to May 1898, China suffered a run of humiliations that no country of its size had ever been put through. That spring the Chinese word for it was guafen, carving the melon, and the fear behind it was that the empire would be sliced apart and China would cease to exist as a country. That fear changed people. Words like imperialism and guafen became everyday speech, and more and more Chinese came to believe they could change their own lives by taking part in politics themselves. In the next few years it would drive three very different answers: reform from the top, a violent backlash against foreigners from below, and revolution. It was not only ports. It was money. That winter China went looking for another big foreign loan. It needed the money to pay off what it still owed Japan. Britain and Russia both wanted to be the lender, because whoever lent the money gained a hold over the government that borrowed it. On the third of February 1898, Prince Gong told the British envoy that Russia had made such strong threats that China had decided to borrow from neither of them. Two weeks later China signed instead with a British bank and a German bank acting together, for a loan of sixteen million pounds. And on the ninth of May, the last instalment owed to Japan was paid. So China paid off the war by borrowing from the very powers that were carving it up. In 1898 alone, China granted five leaseholds: Jiaozhou to Germany, Liaodong to Russia, a port in the south to France, and two to Britain. A lease meant that China kept its sovereignty on paper, while the foreign power ran the place, garrisoned it and governed its people for as long as the lease lasted. Take France. In February its foreign minister declared that France had "not the slightest intention of imitating Germany in seizing a naval base in China". In April, China agreed to lease France the bay of Guangzhouwan as a naval station for ninety nine years, and the French flag went up there on the twenty second. Britain had long worried that Hong Kong's harbour was ringed by Chinese land, and wanted enough of it to keep the town and harbour safe from attack. It now demanded that land as compensation for what France had got, and China, searching helplessly for support from one power or another, gave way. On the ninth of June 1898 Britain took the whole Kowloon peninsula behind Hong Kong on a ninety nine year lease. Those ninety nine years are the reason Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997. Even Italy asked for a bay the next year. That one time, China said no. And beyond the leases there was something bigger, and quieter. Through secret diplomacy and gentlemen's agreements, the powers divided great stretches of the empire into spheres of influence. Manchuria was tacitly Russian. Shandong and parts of the north were German. The Yangzi valley was British. Fujian, across the strait from Japanese Taiwan, was Japanese, and the south east, next to French Indochina, was French. Inside each sphere, its power had first call on the mines, the railways and every other kind of development, and the Qing had promised not to give any of that land to anyone else. Qing sovereignty over its own territory had become, quite openly, a fiction. The Americans tried to keep the door open. In 1899 they asked the powers to promise equal treatment for everyone's trade inside their spheres, and every power gave the promise. Russia, Germany and France gave up none of their exclusive privileges. So why was China not simply partitioned? Because the powers were watching each other. Their rivalry made sure that no single one of them could swallow China. Britain, above all, held that system together. Confident in its trade, it opposed any power claiming exclusive rights in a corner of China, and backed a single Chinese state. And of all the powers at that table, the one that hurt Li most was the one he had trusted.

The man on the other side of this story was Count Muravyov, the Tsar's foreign minister. Russia had marked Jiaozhou down for itself. But it could only reach that bay overland through Mongolia and Zhili, and it was pledged to back Germany anyway. So it turned its attention to Port Arthur, an ice free harbour on the coast of what Russia already counted as its own sphere. Li had built Port Arthur into a naval base in the eighteen eighties. Within a week of the German landing at Qingdao, Russian warships steamed into Port Arthur. China had already given them permission to spend the winter there. Russia, in other words, was getting ready to swallow the port, and China could do nothing about it. The Grand Council told the provincial governors, in answer to a stream of protests, that China could not resist Russia's rumoured plan to seize Port Arthur. The Grand Council was the emperor's small inner cabinet, the handful of ministers who saw him every morning and drafted his orders. Russia also wanted to counter any advance by Germany, its supposed partner. And to get Port Arthur, Muravyov's government was willing to let go of something else. In 1896 and 1897, with diplomacy and the shadow of force, Russia had made itself the paramount power in Korea, the kingdom whose independence had only just been declared. Russians officered the Korean army and ran its arsenal, and at the end of 1897 a Russian replaced the British head of Korea's customs. Then, with Port Arthur in view, Russia pulled back. It recalled its officers, and in April 1898 it signed an agreement recognizing Japan's commercial interests in Korea. Korea could wait. Port Arthur could not. The only real objection came from London. Lord Salisbury was Britain's prime minister, and he ran its foreign policy himself. Lord Salisbury told the Russians that he had no objection to their taking a commercial port, but that a military port was another matter, and to that there were grave objections. Muravyov's reply was that Port Arthur was "a vital necessity to Russia". Russia, he added, could not be refused what had been given to Japan and Germany. And, as if he were genuinely hurt, he pointed out that the only government making any objection was the British. And he knew Britain was alone. Germany and France were on Russia's side, Japan was still exhausted from the war, and America was busy; in February its battleship Maine had blown up in Havana harbour. Salisbury saw it, and Muravyov saw that he saw it. On the twenty seventh of March 1898 the convention was signed in Beijing. Li Hongzhang was one of the two Chinese ministers who signed it. The same day, the Chinese garrisons marched out of Port Arthur and Dalian, and the next day Russian troops marched in. Russia got both ports on lease, with the waters and islands around them and the peninsula behind them, for twenty five years, which could be extended. The lease was said to be without prejudice to China's sovereign rights. Beyond it lay a neutral zone, Chinese in name but closed to Chinese troops. Port Arthur became a naval port, closed to every ship but Russian and Chinese ones, and Dalian a trading port open to all. And Russia could run a railway from them north to Harbin. Russia also got the right to cut timber and work mines along that line. From this base, Russia began the effective colonization of the whole Liaodong peninsula. Three years earlier, Russia had saved Port Arthur for China. Now it had Port Arthur. Six years later, Japan would go to war with Russia over exactly this ground.

Britain's answer was Weihaiwei, the harbour where Admiral Ding had died. That February the British envoy in Beijing reported that an influential Chinese minister had hinted China would offer Britain a lease of Weihaiwei, if Britain wanted one. Salisbury's first reply was that Britain's policy was to discourage the handing over of Chinese territory, and the offer was premature. Then Port Arthur changed his mind. On the twenty fifth of March he told his envoy that since Russia had altered the balance of power in the gulf, Britain must have a lease of Weihaiwei, once the Japanese left, on terms like Russia's. It was a lease taken to counter Russia, pure and simple. Japan said it had no objection, and the Chinese ministers agreed promptly, perhaps with some relief. The last instalment was paid on the ninth of May. The Japanese marched out, and on the twenty fourth of May 1898 the British flag went up. Watching it happen was a young Chinese naval officer named Zhang Boling. He was twenty two, and he had trained as a naval officer. He had studied at the naval academy Li Hongzhang founded in Tianjin to train officers for his fleet. The Qing flag of those years was the yellow dragon flag, a blue dragon on a yellow field. Zhang watched the dynasty's flag lowered over a Chinese naval base, and he resigned his commission. He decided to give his life to education instead. He went on to found schools in Tianjin, and in 1919 a university there, Nankai. Looking back, he said: "The Nankai schools were born from China’s calamity". Their purpose, as he put it, was "to reform old habits of life and to train youth for the salvation of the country". Hold on to him. By 1915, much of educated China had come to the same conclusion. As for the lease, it was signed on the first of July, and it would last "for so long a period as Port Arthur shall remain in the occupation of Russia". Britain got the bay, Liugong Island in its mouth, and a belt of land ten miles wide around the shore, though Chinese officials kept their authority inside the town itself. Britain never fortified it. Weihaiwei was simply a harbour where a British fleet could turn up at any time, a base for pushing back if anyone else leaned too hard on Beijing. And to keep Germany calm, Britain declared publicly that it had no intention of running a railway from Weihaiwei into the rest of Shandong.

Inside China, all of this hit the educated class like a slap. By the spring of 1898, it was fair to say that every younger official and gentleman in the empire was a reformer of some kind. Even young Manchu nobles caught the fever. Gentry meant the local elite, men who had passed at least the lowest of the examinations and led their home districts. The question was no longer whether China should change. It was how far, and on whose terms. And one man gave the court an answer it could live with. His name was Zhang Zhidong, one of the great provincial viceroys, with his seat at Wuchang. Wuchang sits on the Yangzi in the middle of China, and from there he governed the provinces of Hubei and Hunan. Zhang came from a family of minor officials whose home was in the country around Beijing. He had a perfect classical education and passed the top examination at twenty six. He made his name as a fierce critic, the kind of official who denounced everyone else's corruption. When a minister signed a treaty with Russia that Zhang thought shameful, he demanded the man's head. That got him noticed, and in 1884 he was made governor general of Guangdong and Guangxi in the south. One of his first acts there was to send troops into Vietnam, which helped start a war with France that went very badly for China. So Zhang rescued his career by turning around completely, and became a champion of self strengthening and industry. When he was moved to Wuhan in 1889, he took the ironworks he had planned for Guangdong with him. At Wuhan he founded new style academies and Western style schools. After the war with Japan he even sponsored young reformers in Hunan, Liang Qichao among them, until their radicalism frightened him and he clamped down. In 1898, at the very height of the reform movement, he published a book of his own, called Exhortation to Study. It was carefully written to please both of the parties at court, the emperor's and the empress dowager's, and it made Zhang look like the wise elder of reform. A million copies were bought and read across the empire. Its classical style was flawless, and it made a deep impression on everyone from the emperor down. In July an imperial decree praised it and ordered it distributed. The book opened by telling its readers what they must learn. Learn the shame of not being like Japan. Learn the fear of becoming like India, Vietnam, Burma, Korea, Egypt and Poland. Learn that if China did not change its customs it could not reform its methods, and learn above all the methods of foreign governments. But never let all that learning make you forget the sages. The idea at the heart of it is usually summed up in one line: Chinese learning as the foundation, Western learning for practical use. Keep the Confucian classics and the loyalty owed to the dynasty, Zhang wrote, but study other subjects too. Western nations, he had noticed, also honoured the bonds between ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife, and they kept their classes in order. So their institutions were safe to study. But China was not fit to be a republic. Give people unrestrained liberty, he warned, and "the scholar would always sit at meat, the farmer would pay no taxes, the merchant would garner unbounded wealth, the workman would strike for higher wages". Even "the son would disobey the father", and the wife the husband, until "mankind would soon be annihilated". So China needed a strong central government. Its students should go abroad, and Japan, being nearer, was the place to go. Schools should be set up everywhere, paid for with the money now spent on processions, theatricals and clan halls, and if that was not enough, "then convert the temples and monasteries of the Buddhists and Taoists into schools". And as for who would save the country, Zhang was clear: "the fate of China depends upon the literati alone". The literati were the scholar officials, the men of the examinations. Zhang, of course, was one of them. For the empress dowager's people, this was reform that kept the throne and the classics on top. For the emperor's people, it was reform at all. Everyone could read it and nod. But a young man in the palace was about to go a great deal further than any book.

The Guangxu emperor was twenty six in the spring of 1898. When her own son died young in 1875, the Empress Dowager had the little boy named emperor, which kept her in power as regent through his childhood. He was three years old when he was put on the throne. She gave up the regency in February 1889, when he came of age. But she never stopped stepping in whenever she judged it necessary. At court she balanced reformers and conservatives, and never committed to either. Now she lived mostly in semi retirement, at the Summer Palace outside the city, and as her nephew moved into his twenties, she stepped into the background. The emperor himself was shut away in the palace, physically frail, and yet eager to learn what other countries had done. In 1894, Chinese Christian women had presented a richly bound New Testament to the Empress Dowager for her sixtieth birthday, and it caught his curiosity. From then on he set out to learn all he could about Western religion and customs. He had even taken lessons in English. And by the spring of 1898 he had come to feel that there had to be a change, some kind of change, if the state was to be saved. Two things happened that spring that cleared his path. In April, twelve hundred of the younger officials and new graduates in the capital, including some Manchus, sent up a memorial telling the emperor not to trust the advice of his ministers. They wanted him "to use his own judgment and summon his courage in dealing with the crisis". And on the twenty ninth of May, Prince Gong died. Both the emperor and the Empress Dowager respected him, and for years he had kept the most reactionary Manchus in check. He was no enemy of reform, and he would have backed his nephew, but he would also have thrown his weight against anything extravagant. Now that brake was gone. The man who opened the door was Weng Tonghe. Weng was the emperor's tutor, which meant he could walk into the emperor's presence at any time, and he sat on the Grand Council. He was a leader of the southern party at court, the faction most of the Chinese ministers backed, against a northern party that stood with the Empress Dowager and the Manchu nobles. Around her stood men like Ronglu, her partisans and the emperor's bitter opponents. Weng was no reformer himself. His interests were tied up with the old officialdom. But the reformers were in his party, and early in June 1898 he brought Kang Youwei to the emperor's personal notice and strongly recommended him. Kang was not a stranger. Since January, with the emperor's express permission, he had been sending up proposal after proposal. Earlier that year he had been called before the Zongli Yamen to explain his ideas, they were reported to the emperor, and the emperor had asked for them in writing. Kang did not want to overthrow the dynasty. What he wanted, in time, was a constitutional monarchy, with the throne leading reform. In a parliament, he explained, "the ruler and the citizens discuss the nation’s politics and laws together". And "The ruler remains in general charge." Though in Kang's scheme, that ruler would have very little to do. For now, though, Kang urged the emperor to act as forcefully as Peter the Great, or Japan's Meiji emperor. He sent the emperor his books, one on how Peter the Great had remade Russia, and one on how Japan had remade itself in recent years. The emperor read them and was greatly impressed. His written program was sweeping: rewrite the laws, reform the administration, put young men with Western ideas in charge, with foreign advisers to help them, and follow the road Japan had taken. On the eleventh of June 1898, the emperor issued his first reform decree. It declared that reform was necessary, and promised a new imperial university in Beijing. It was largely built on Kang's ideas, and it marked the start of what would be called the Hundred Days. A companion edict told the viceroys to find officials with good reputations in everyday life and "a knowledge of modern things". The reform edict itself was blunt. "There are some among the older officials," it said, "who affirm that the old ways are best and need no alteration, and that the new plans are not required. Such babblings are vain and useless." Then the emperor laid the question in front of his officials. With an untrained army, limited funds, ignorant scholars and untaught craftsmen, was it hard to tell who was strong and who was weak? "How can a man armed with a wooden stick smite his foe encased in a coat of mail?" That is the emperor himself saying it. "Our present system is not of the slightest use." Clinging to the old ways, the edict said, was "like wearing thick clothes in summer and thin ones in winter." It ordered every official, from princes down to scholars, to find out which foreign country had the best system in each branch of learning, and learn from that one. "Make a special effort and determine to learn the best of everything." The next day another decree urged princes and imperial clansmen to travel abroad and study foreign institutions. These decrees alarmed the Manchus. But they had gone to the Empress Dowager first, and she had approved them, so protest was useless. But she could smell danger. And she was already moving.

Within days of the first edict, more decrees came out, and these ones bore all the signs of having been forced on the emperor by his aunt. The first stripped Weng Tonghe, the emperor's own tutor, of all his offices and honours, and sent him home to his native place. The man who had opened the door for Kang was gone, at the Empress Dowager's demand, before the reform had properly begun. The second ordered that all senior officials, on any new appointment, must come in person to give thanks to both the emperor and the Empress Dowager. Without taking back the regency, she now had a hand on every important appointment. And the third made Ronglu governor general of Zhili, with command of China's only organised army. So in the first week, she showed she could strike down her enemies, she put her finger on the pulse of the government, and she put the army in the hands of her own man. Remember all three. On the sixteenth of June, the emperor received Kang Youwei in person for the first time. The audience lasted more than two hours. Kang was still only a junior official, and it was rare for a man of his rank to be received by the emperor at all. That same day he was made a secretary of the Zongli Yamen, with wide authority to start reforms in every part of government. He took no high office. He did not need one. His power was his hold over the emperor's mind. From then on, decrees poured out at a bewildering pace. Over the summer, young zealots joined Kang in Beijing, Liang Qichao and Tan Sitong among them, and together they drafted reform decrees issued in the emperor's name. The reformers had their own paper, Chinese Progress, an outspoken weekly that sold ten thousand copies, and that year it became a daily. Liang had made his name as a writer for the reform press in Shanghai. In private, he went further than his teacher. He wrote in a letter that "Monarchism is simply selfishness while democracy is simply public-mindedness." And to his students he raised a treasonous question: could the Qing, as foreign Manchus, ever lead the reforms China needed? The Manchus were a people from beyond the Great Wall, ruling a country of Han Chinese. Keep that question in your pocket. It is going to grow. So what did the Hundred Days actually decree? Here is a taste. The examination system was changed to test current affairs instead of the classics. The famous classical essay, the hallmark of a scholar, the basis of the country's intellectual life and the road to office, was abolished. This was the eight legged essay, a rigid form of composition on a line from the classics that candidates had drilled in since boyhood. Now imagine you are a man of forty who has spent twenty five years mastering it. There would be an imperial university in Beijing, and schools teaching a Western curriculum in every province and down into the localities. Buddhist monasteries were to be turned into public schools. Naval colleges were ordered, to rebuild the fleet, and a bureau in Shanghai was to translate Western science and textbooks. Sinecures were abolished, and with them three entire governorships, of Hubei, Guangdong and Yunnan. A sinecure was a paid post with no real work attached, the kind of job a well connected family could buy or hand down. New bureaus of commerce, industry and agriculture were set up. The central government ran on six great boards, or ministries, for appointments, revenue, rites, war, punishments and public works, much as it had for more than a thousand years. Work began on replacing them with Western style cabinet ministries, and on an independent judiciary. The army and navy were to be modernized, and even the examinations for military degrees were remodelled. There were decrees on relief work for the poor, on machinery, on a medical school, and on schools to teach the growing of tea and silk. In future, anyone hoping for high office would first have to tour foreign countries and see how they were developing. Manchus with no taste for office were given permission to go into a profession or a trade. And the government was to publish an annual budget of what it took in and what it spent. And yet, for all of it, the program stopped well short of a parliament or a constitution. For now the aim was to strengthen the emperor's own power, so that he could push the reforms through. And one change Kang must have enjoyed, after his illegal petition of 1895: low ranking officials and even ordinary scholars were now encouraged to write to the emperor directly. They took him at his word. By the ninth of September a decree was begging people not to drown the emperor in memorials. Four days later, another one gave every subject in the empire the right to send him a sealed memorial. Now, look at that list again from the other side of the desk. Every reform on it was sound, every one struck at a real abuse, and every one could have been carried out. But it was reform by decree, from the top, a pyramid standing on its point. At one end of it stood an emperor who was frail and untested, and at the other an adviser with no experience of running anything, a single minded enthusiast whose head had been turned by his sudden rise. And Kang's arrogance and self righteousness drove away the allies they needed. The decrees of the first months, laying broad foundations, were mostly accepted without a fight. Then, emboldened, the reformers began to strike at the roots. Abolishing a sinecure did not just hurt the man who held it. It hurt whoever had sold it to him, and everyone who was hoping to get one, for himself or for a nephew. A reform of the post threatened the patronage over three million taels of spending a year. The Manchu decrees threatened ordinary Manchus with the prospect of having to work for a living. The new right to memorialize took away a monopoly the senior officials had always held, and a published budget threatened the very system by which officials drew their incomes. The northern party at court was united in sullen resistance, though it dared not oppose anything openly. Most of the country did not care yet either way. And the vast bureaucracy did nothing. It took no steps to carry out the emperor's wishes. It waited, quite still, to see what his aunt would do. So the emperor's remaking of the Chinese state was a revolution only on paper. The emperor did not wait. On the fourth of September, the officials of the Board of Rites were caught holding back a memorial sent up under the new rules. The Board of Rites, one of those six boards, ran ceremony, the examinations and the court's dealings with tribute states. The emperor sacked them all on the spot: both presidents of the board, one of them a kinsman of the Empress Dowager, and all four vice presidents, and gave their places to reformers. Three days later, on the seventh of September, it was Li Hongzhang's turn. He was dismissed from the Zongli Yamen. His fall was put down to his support for Russia's plans in Manchuria and his hostility to Britain. The next day the British envoy reported that Li had recently shown himself "markedly antagonistic to our interests". His dislike of the reforms surely played its part. And Li went where his instincts told him. He was convinced the ship of state was only safe with the Empress Dowager's hand on the helm. Over that summer many at court, and even moderate reformers like Li and his protégé Yuan Shikai, had grown alarmed at what Kang and his followers were doing, and drew closer to the Empress Dowager. There was even a train ride on the calendar. At the end of August, with the Empress Dowager's approval, it was settled that she and the emperor would go to Tianjin by railway on the twenty ninth of October, to review the troops. The purists at court were scandalized at the thought of the Son of Heaven riding the fire carriage. Old China called a train a fire carriage, and Son of Heaven was the emperor's oldest title, the ruler who held his mandate from Heaven itself. As it turned out, that trip would never happen. A firm friend of China, who had spent half a century in its administration, saw it plainly. In a letter not meant for the public, he wrote that the emperor's head was set in the right direction, but his advisers had no experience of work, and "they simply killed Progress with kindness". They had "stuffed it, against its powers of assimilating and digesting, with food enough in three months for three times as many years". By September, the conservatives feared for their privileges, and the reformers feared what their enemies would do. Both sides could see the moment had come to strike. Leading officials seem to have convinced the Empress Dowager that her nephew was threatening the dynasty itself. She was afraid for her own position, and court rumour said the reformers were plotting against the Manchus. And here is the thing about a palace struggle in Beijing in 1898. Whoever wanted to win needed the army. The army near the capital belonged to Ronglu, the Empress Dowager's man. But under him was a soldier we already know, commanding five thousand troops drilled on foreign lines near Tianjin. It was Yuan Shikai, Li's old man in Korea. Yuan was in favour of reform himself. That did not mean he was willing to hand the government over to inexperienced and untried men. Both sides gathered their forces, and both sides turned to Yuan Shikai. An emperor with his stack of decrees, and an aunt with her decades at court, both needing the same soldier. Next time, a week in September, and what Yuan Shikai did with it.

Sources

• B. L. Putnam Weale, The Fight for the Republic in China (1917), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4522
• Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire, Volume III: The Period of Subjection, 1894-1911 (1918), pp. 32-33, 35-36, 39-40, 44-45, 55-57, 80-82, 82-83, 101-103, 103-104, 104-106, 106-107, 107-109, 109-110, 110-112, 112, 116-118, 118-119, 126-127, 129-130, 131-133, 133-134, 134-136, 136-137, 139-140, 140-142, 154-156, https://archive.org/details/internationalre03mors
• Percy Horace Kent, The Passing of the Manchus (1912), pp. 11-12, 12-14, 14-16, https://archive.org/details/cu31924021495258
• Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), pp. 2-4, 7-8, 15-16, 16-18, 18-19, 128-129
• William T. Rowe, China's Last Empire: The Great Qing (2009), pp. 227-229, 229-230, 232-234, 234-235, 235-237, 238-240, 241-243, 248-250