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China, 1895 to 1916, episode 9

Wuchang

An accidental bomb exposes a plot, soldiers in Wuchang mutiny before they can be arrested, and they force their colonel, Li Yuanhong, to lead them at gunpoint. Within weeks province after province declares independence, and the court has to bring back Yuan Shikai, on his terms, from the exile it sent him into. The episode follows the reluctant rebel and the general who takes his time, asks why a local mutiny brought down the dynasty and who actually made the revolution, and gives that debate full airtime. It is told mostly through foreign observers, with scholars, the court's edicts and one Chinese public voice on the Nineteen Articles.

Wuchang District, Hankou, Hanyang District China Beijing
Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

Li Yuanhong
Li Yuanhong. Putnam Weale, B. L. (Bertram Lenox), 1877-1930, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Last time, the regent Zaifeng sent Yuan Shikai home to rest his foot, and filled his new cabinet with princes of the imperial clan. Then his government took the provinces' railways back, and paid for them with foreign loans. In Sichuan, the shareholders' protest became a revolt that swept the province, and troops were pulled out of Hubei to put it down. And I left you at Wuchang. This time, the rising itself, and the two men we will follow through it. It starts with an accident. Across the Yangzi from Wuchang lay the major river port of Hankou. In its Russian concession, a group of revolutionaries kept a house where they made bombs. A concession was a district of a treaty port leased to a foreign power, and run by that power's own consuls and police. On the afternoon of the ninth of October 1911, one of the bombs went off by accident. The police came. In the house they found finished bombs and the makings of more, revolutionary pamphlets, flags, white armbands, maps of Wuchang, plans for attacking its gates, and a long list of names. It looked like the membership roll. The plotters had not meant to move yet. Their rising had been planned for later in the year. Two men led the group. One of them, Sun Wu, had part of his face blown off in the explosion, and friends carried him away to be treated in secret. The other, Liu Gong, was still free to act, and he saw clearly the danger of delay. The plans were not finished. But the capture left the revolutionaries no choice except to strike at once, and to strike hard. Across the river in Wuchang sat the governor general, Rui Cheng, a Manchu, who ruled over two vast provinces. His men spent the night making arrests on the clues from Hankou. About thirty people were taken, and as dawn broke the next day, three of them were executed outside his yamen. A yamen was an official's headquarters and home together, a walled compound of offices and courtyards. Among the prisoners still being questioned were Liu Gong's own wife and his brother. Liu had already gone to the soldiers, men of the New Army whom the revolutionaries had been courting for a long time, and hardest of all in the past year. The time has come, he told them. You must rise tonight, if you want to save the situation. That night nothing happened. Whether it was a misunderstanding or a failure of nerve, nobody could say. So he went back to them. The list of names has been found, he said, and it is only a matter of hours before they hunt you down. Your only safety, he told them, is to move. This time they listened. The rising was fixed for midnight. The soldiers did not wait for midnight. At about eight o'clock on the evening of the tenth of October, the engineers of the Eighth Regiment attacked. They were educated men, and many of them belonged to a local revolutionary cell. For a while there was resistance. But the other regiments were half hearted, and they soon saw they were facing an organised movement. Within half an hour the barracks had fallen. The loyal troops ran, and the rest threw in their lot with the rebels. They seized the main arsenal. Then they went for the governor general's yamen, which was held by a loyal regiment of cavalry. Rui Cheng, by his own account, had decided early that the situation was hopeless. Hardly had the attack begun when he and his family fled to a gunboat lying in the river. In the middle of Wuchang rises Serpent Hill, which looks down on the whole city, and the rebels had their guns up there early. The yamen was overrun. Soldiers poured through the maze of courtyards and into the private rooms of the man who, a few hours before, had held the power of life and death over them. It was sacked, and partly burned. In Wuchang, the old order had passed away. Of the eight thousand soldiers in the city, some two thousand were sworn revolutionaries. Nearly four thousand more joined them that night. About two thousand stayed loyal, and most of those escaped across the river to Hanyang, their divisional commander, Zhang Biao, among them. These were the troops Zhang Zhidong had had trained in Hubei by German officers, as well equipped as any in the empire. For a single night's work, it was as much as the most hopeful plotter could have asked for. But the plotters had a problem, and it was the soldiers. They had tasted blood. The strong hand they were used to had just been taken away, and unless someone took hold of them, looting and worse would follow. And Liu Gong and his comrades were young, with no experience of command. They had even printed a proclamation for the next morning, in the name of the General of the People's Army. The general's name was left blank. Nobody had agreed to be him yet. So they went to a colonel named Li Yuanhong. Li was forty seven, a Hubei man, and he commanded the Twenty First Mixed Brigade. He had trained at the naval college in Tianjin and served in the fleet under Sa Zhenbing. After the war with Japan he built fortifications for Zhang Zhidong. Then he went to Japan to train in a Japanese regiment, and came home to help Zhang build Hubei's new army. He was good at it. But his superior, Zhang Biao, was better at flattery, and Zhang kept the first place while Li, the able one, had to settle for second. Now a crowd of mutineers offered him the command. Li refused. His caution held him back, though his more liberal mind, it seems, approved of the course. The revolutionaries would not take no for an answer, and could not afford to. If he went on refusing, they told him, he would be executed. It took two days of intense persuasion, and in the end a gun. Li Yuanhong joined the revolution. Once he was in, though, he never really looked back. He was a strict disciplinarian but a fair one, with plenty of friends and the confidence of his men, and he soon proved one of the most valuable assets the revolution had. And he had two more. The local gentry could live with him. And he was a man who could talk to Yuan Shikai.

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

And where was Sun Yat-sen, the man who had spent years trying to start exactly this? As you heard two episodes ago, he was in Denver, in the American West. He had staged one last rising, at Guangzhou in April, watched it fail, and gone to the United States to raise more money from the overseas Chinese. Neither Sun nor any of his close comrades had planned the Wuchang rising. They had not even been told it was coming. Huang Xing, his right hand man, had heard of the Hubei soldiers' plans in Hong Kong, and had advised against them. By his own later account, Sun read of the rising in a newspaper. And yet, once the revolution was done, many people would decide that Sun, and nearly he alone, had what it needed: the longest revolutionary record of anyone, a worked out vision of what should come next, and enough respect among foreigners to keep the powers from pouncing. So how did a barracks mutiny in one city bring down an empire? Start with the money. By 1911, China's foreign debt stood at a staggering nine hundred million taels, and anywhere from a quarter to a third of the government's revenue went to repay foreign loans and indemnities. That year, auditors sent out to examine the provinces' accounts reported that nearly every province was running huge, chronic deficits. The empire's first annual budget showed the centre was insolvent too. Then the weather. Floods and poor harvests brought grain shortages in 1910 and 1911, and the court failed to respond. There were tax revolts and food riots. In 1910 a food riot at Changsha drove the governor of Hunan out of his post. Few of these outbreaks had anything to do with revolutionaries. But together they showed a dynasty that could no longer govern. And under all of it ran the hatred of the Manchus. Revolutionary writers had dug up old accounts of the massacres of the conquest in the sixteen forties, at Yangzhou and elsewhere, and printed them again for a new generation. Accounts like these fed an anti Manchu feeling and a Han nationalism that did a great deal to bring the dynasty down. The Han were the Chinese majority, as against the Manchus who ruled them. So who made this revolution? Here the sources disagree. In the story Sun's own party would tell for decades afterwards, it was a national rising against the alien Manchus, led by enlightened, self conscious revolutionaries, and above all by Sun Yat-sen, father of his country, the Chinese George Washington. Revolutionaries made the revolution, in that telling, because they saw that the age of empire was over, and did not believe the Manchus were fit to rule. It is a heroic story of sacrifice and struggle and victory against the odds. The other answer starts with the soldiers. The men who began the Wuchang rising had only the most tenuous links with Sun's League, though they were certainly deeply disaffected from the Qing. And look at what carried the revolution once it began: the New Armies, the chambers of commerce and the provincial assemblies. Every one of them was a creation of the court's own reforms. Once the violence spread, the new provincial elites, with military allies beside them, moved in to lead the revolution with few apparent regrets. They feared violence from below, and they meant to make sure the radicals who had started it did not end up in power. In that view, the Qing did not fall to revolutionary arms at all. It fell because its own army commanders would not fight for it, and because the gentry and the rich merchants saw no reason to prefer it over the revolutionaries. A third answer came later, from the Chinese Communists: this was a bourgeois democratic revolution, China's version of the French Revolution of 1789, progressive, but one stage on a longer road. And one foreign observer put the weight somewhere else entirely. Had he wished it, he was sure, Yuan Shikai could have crushed the revolution before the end of 1911. Hold on to all of those answers, because this episode and the next will put each of them to the test. Whoever made it, the result was enormous. It overthrew a dynasty that had ruled for nearly 270 years, and an imperial system some 2,100 years old. Most peasants, if they heard of it at all, took it for one more turn of the old cycle, one imperial family falling and another rising. Most educated Chinese sensed that something without precedent had happened. And in city after city, it came less like a rebellion than like a general strike. For the Han majority, there was little bloodshed. For the Manchus, it was another story.

As the next day dawned, a foreign missionary in Wuchang found the city held by soldiers, all of them with white bands on their left arms. They kept their secrets, he wrote. They claimed only to be the Chinese Army. They were "patrolling the city streets and maintaining perfect order and assuring everyone of protection". The mission schools held their classes as usual. People went quietly about their business, or stood unafraid in their doorways, and a rumour got about that imperial troops held the city and had put down the rebellion in the night. After breakfast the missionary climbed up onto the north wall, facing Hankou, and asked the people gathered there who these soldiers were. Nobody could tell him. He found no officers at all. The toughest looking soldiers carried, besides a rifle, the finest of officers' swords, and sometimes a revolver too. An artilleryman straggled along behind an infantryman wearing a fine overcoat that had plainly belonged to an officer. No one seemed to be in command. And yet, he wrote, they all pulled together. Li Yuanhong's orders were strict: as little destruction as possible. The city came through the change with very little damage, and for the Chinese who lived there, life seemed almost back to normal. Perfect order. Except for the Manchus. Their Manchu neighbours were mercilessly hunted out, and whole families were destroyed. The soldiers' blood was up, and they were in no mood to spare any Manchu, man, woman or child. The word had gone out to wipe out the hated race. For a time a fierce blood hunt ran through all three cities, Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang. No member of the once ruling people was allowed to escape, and neither sex nor age was any protection. Where a man's origin was in doubt, there was a rough test. In those parts, Manchus were supposed to have trouble saying liu, the word for six, and the numbers built on it. So suspects were made to count. Any hesitation or stumble, which fright alone might well produce, meant death. Counting, with your life on it. At first the foreigners hardly noticed. What they saw was well regulated order. Li Yuanhong noticed. He was a man of humane instincts, a foreigner wrote, and he had the statesman's sense to see what needless bitterness, and the loss of foreign sympathy, would cost the cause. He set about checking his followers' excesses, rigorously, and thanks to him the killing in the three cities did not last long. It remained a blot on the revolutionary cause. Meanwhile, the revolution was getting itself a government. In the course of the eleventh, the provincial assembly of Hubei went over in a body. By that afternoon it had declared the province's secession from the Qing empire, set up a provisional military government under Li Yuanhong, and announced its aim: a Han national state, called the Republic of China. Within days, the chambers of commerce of Wuchang and Hankou had declared their support and donated money. They also turned out their own militia, to make sure the revolution did not threaten property and business. That night, small parties of rebel soldiers crossed to Hanyang. Hanyang, the third of the three cities, stands where the Han river flows into the Yangzi, and it was the industrial one. By the morning of the twelfth, its great arsenal, with its stores of arms and a large sum in silver, and the iron and steel works beside it had quietly passed under rebel control. Then they crossed the Han river to take Hankou, and nobody resisted their landing. But their first act there was to set fire to two government offices, and the rougher elements in the city took the hint. The prisons were opened, and banks and shops were looted. Within a few days, Li's new government had some thirty thousand men under its flag. Barely a quarter of them were trained soldiers. There was no march north yet. No body of rebel troops could be trusted on a long expedition without Li to hold them, and given how and when Li had been converted, it was too soon to stake the cause on his loyalty.

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

In Beijing, the court had troops ready. They had been gathered for the autumn manoeuvres, and orders went out to send them south. But the response was neither prompt nor eager. Some units were so doubtful that the court thought it unwise even to put them on the trains. So the court swallowed its pride. Within a hundred hours of the first news from Wuchang, it sent for Yuan Shikai, urgently, and ungraciously. The edict came out on the morning of Saturday the fourteenth of October. It made Yuan governor general of Hubei and Hunan, to take over from Rui Cheng, and told him to direct the suppression of the rebels. He was to go straight to his post, and he need not come to Beijing for an audience. A second edict put all the troops of the two provinces under him, and all the reinforcements sent from elsewhere, to act with the army under Yinchang, the Manchu Minister of War, and the fleet under Sa Zhenbing. The same day, the court called another hard man out of retirement, Cen Chunxuan, and named him governor general of Sichuan. As governor general at Guangzhou he had crushed a rebellion in Guangxi with merciless severity. Cen, too, found reasons to delay, and in the end he never went to Sichuan at all. A foreigner put it this way: the man who had been humbled to the dust was now begged to come back, to save the very people who had brought him down. Why Yuan? He was a Chinese, not a Manchu, and he was supposed to command a large and influential following. Foreigners trusted him. And above all, he had created the modern Chinese army, and it was believed that he could keep it loyal. That last point was not as certain as it looked. He had been out of office for nearly three years. His party had found new patrons, the officers of his army had largely changed, and plenty of revolutionaries hated him. His recall had actually been urged weeks before, by Prince Qing among others. Now it came in a panic, in the vain hope of saving the dynasty. So where was he? Remember the photograph, the retired gentleman fishing from a boat in a straw cape? Since his dismissal, Yuan had been living on his estate in Henan like a patriarch of old, surrounded by his many wives and children, telling everyone that he had dropped out of politics for good and wanted only to be left in peace. But his followers kept him informed, and told him to bide his time. And the first shots on the Yangzi found him alert, and already sending out private orders. He answered the court in a memorial, in terms one foreign reader called strikingly sarcastic. He was much ashamed, he wrote, to receive the imperial commands. The dynasty had shown his family favour for generations, and he felt remorse that he had done nothing to repay it. He had been away at his native place, on account of the state of his health. At this time of crisis, he wrote, he ought to obey the decree and go at once to deal with the situation. "But my old trouble with my foot is not yet thoroughly set right, and last winter my left arm became affected and frequently caused me great pain. An habitual complaint of some years' duration can hardly be expected to be cured immediately." And that was not all. With the autumn cold his old asthma and fever had come back, and he suffered from giddiness and nervousness, and his mind wandered when he tried to think. He had called in a doctor, he said. As soon as he was able to get about, he would set out at once. His foot. The same foot the regent had named when he sent Yuan home.

On the eighteenth of October, the court replied, in the emperor's vermilion ink. A memorial answered in red had been answered by the throne itself. The governor general had always been just and loyal, the reply said, and matters at Wuchang and Hanyang were very critical. "Let him immediately cure himself, and in spite of his illness let him proceed, thus justifying the extraordinary confidence placed in him by the Throne." Cure yourself, and come anyway. The memorial showed how low the imperial power had fallen. The days of unquestioning obedience to the imperial will were over. And every day that Yuan did not come, the dynasty's prestige fell further, and the feeling grew that its life was ebbing fast away. So what was he doing? Yuan was never a man for quick decisions. His judgment was a mix of instinct and slow deliberation. Many people read the memorial as a refusal. But to those who understood him best, it was clear that he was only playing for time. Here the sources disagree. Some at the time believed he was using his position, knowingly, to weaken the dynasty and bring it down. Others found the evidence for that inconclusive at best. What is clear is his price. He was not willing to join with Yinchang and the other Manchus merely to save the Manchu order. He would come out only if he were put in a position strong enough to steer the ship of state his own way. He did not mean to be hampered by Yinchang. He would not have his plans spoiled by officers hostile to him in the main commands. And he wanted the general in the field to be a man he could rely on. In other words, he meant to be a military dictator. He still expected, it seems, to save the dynasty. But on conditions of his own. On the seventeenth of October, Yinchang himself had a long conference with him. Two days later, an edict appeared that leaned toward compromise. And quietly, with the knowledge of the authorities, Yuan sent his own men to Wuchang to talk peace in secret. A hostile foreign observer saw a deliberate policy in all of it. Yuan held back and delayed everything, he wrote, until the incapacity of both sides, the revolutionaries as much as the Manchus, forced the nation to hail him as its only mediator and saviour. The younger princes at court saw it too, and they wanted a fight. An army corps was already at the front. Put the dynasty's fortunes to the test of battle, they urged, and break with Yuan, or refuse his terms, or string him along. And watch him, they said, so that he could be struck down at the first sign of disloyalty. It could have been done. And Yuan knew it. But the princes lost the argument. Yuan's terms were accepted, and the dynasty took one more step down a bitter path of humiliation. On the twenty seventh of October, the government gazette printed the edict. Yuan was made imperial commissioner, with every army unit, every reinforcement and the Yangzi fleet under his command. The General Staff and the War Ministry in Beijing were told to keep their hands off the campaign, so that responsibility rested on one man. Yinchang, the Manchu, was replaced as commander in chief by Yuan Shikai, and ordered back to his ministry in Beijing. And the command of the army in the field went to General Feng Guozhang. Feng was one of Yuan's own officers from the northern army, the man Yuan could rely on. The army he would lead was a part of the six fully equipped divisions Yuan had built himself, in his years at Tianjin. The edict came out on the very day of the main battle for Hankou. We will get to that battle. But first, look at what was happening to the rest of the empire while Yuan was nursing his foot.

Sun Baoqi
Sun Baoqi. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

By the end of October, seven provinces had set up revolutionary governments, often military ones, and seceded from the Qing empire. Within another month, seven more had gone. The provincial capitals Changsha, Xi'an and Taiyuan declared for the revolution in October. Hangzhou, Fuzhou, Guangzhou and Chengdu followed in November. Nearly everywhere, the revolution's victories were bloodless. The pattern was much the same from place to place. The revolutionaries declared themselves, and within a few hours they were the local government. At Yichang, up the Yangzi, they took over quietly on the eighteenth of October. The only official casualty was a clerk in the tax office, shot in the shoulder. Take Changsha, the capital of Hunan. The governor there did not trust the regular troops of the New Army. So he took their ammunition away, gave it to the provincial militia instead, and started sending the regulars out of the city in small companies. The militia were not grateful. They stayed neutral. On the evening of the sixteenth of October, a Japanese steamer reached Changsha with over a thousand passengers, said to include a good many revolutionary leaders. The next day the mood of the city changed. On the night of the eighteenth of October, the regulars lit a big fire of stable straw outside the walls, expecting the gates to be opened for the fire engines. The militia would not open them. On the morning of Sunday the twenty second, the regulars marched out of their barracks fully armed. This time, the militia did not shut the gates. The regulars came in through the east gate nearest the governor's yamen. The governor stepped out of his front doors to meet them, with the militia general beside him, and one glance showed he was hopelessly outnumbered. So he gave the order not to fire, walked back into his yamen, and "went through a hole in the wall that he had already prepared." He had planned ahead. The militia general was seized and executed at the east gate. By two in the afternoon the whole city was in the hands of the revolutionaries, the white flag was flying everywhere, and patrols with white badges on their sleeves were keeping order. Later that day the new provisional government wrote to the British, promising to protect foreign lives and property and to honour China's loans and indemnities. Xi'an was another matter. You remember Xi'an: the ancient capital where Cixi's court took refuge in 1900. Nobody expected it to fall to the revolution. There the local revolutionaries were weak, and to win they had to lean on the city's rough elements and on the bandits and secret societies of the countryside around. Those men soon outweighed the revolutionaries who had called them in. Control passed to the mob, and for three days the city was given over to slaughter, looting and burning. The looting was stopped. The killing of Manchus was not. The Manchu quarter of the city, a missionary wrote, was a grave. According to a British observer on the spot, no fewer than ten thousand Manchu men, women and children, about half the garrison's whole population, were murdered in late October. In the country around, bands of marauders attacked a Swedish mission school, and murdered the woman in charge, most of her own children, the other children of the school and a teacher. And then there was the governor who had no hole in the wall. In Shandong, on the eighth of November, the revolutionaries at Jinan decided their moment had come. They sent a committee to the governor, Sun Baoqi. He was given a choice: join them, or lose his head. His position was too weak to refuse, so he became military governor of an independent Shandong. The title the seceding provinces gave their chiefs was dudu, which meant military governor. If that sounds familiar, it should. Sun Baoqi's revolution did not last. Shandong had never fed itself, the taxes had been suspended, and the new government soon had no money to govern with. There was some fear of what the Germans would do, too. After less than three weeks of independence, Shandong began to drift back to its old allegiance. By the start of December its leaders had asked for pardon, and been taken back into the fold. In the far south, at Guangzhou, the Manchu general sent to command the garrison was assassinated just as he arrived. The governor general there was a hard man who had crushed the Guangzhou rising in the spring. This time he saw no point in fighting what he suspected was inevitable. On the ninth of November the province declared its independence, and the governor general fled to the British consulate, which got him safely away to Hong Kong. At Shanghai, the revolutionaries took the great arsenal on the morning of the fourth of November, against hardly any defence. Most of the officers inside were on their side. One secession followed another, until the imperial writ had ceased to run in nearly every province. In the north, many provinces simply stood aside. They took up a kind of benevolent neutrality, hoping to spare themselves the ruin of a civil war while the Manchus and the republican south fought it out. South of the Yangzi, a foreigner wrote, there was hardly any enthusiasm for the imperial cause anywhere.

And in Beijing, the court was losing its nerve. On the thirtieth of October, in the name of the child emperor, the court issued a decree meant to win the nation back. It was an act of atonement. It is now three years, it began, since we took up the hard task of government, and it has always been our aim to serve all classes of our subjects. "But We have employed incompetent Ministers and have in Our conduct of affairs of state displayed all too little statesmanship. We have filled the executive departments with princes of the blood, thus offending the canons of Constitutional Government". In the railway business, it went on, we let ourselves be blinded, and acted against the wishes of the country. Every reform we hurried on, the officials and gentry used for their own ends. Every old institution we changed, the powerful turned to their own profit. Much of the people's wealth has been taken, and not one measure that helped them has been given in return. When the people were seething with discontent, we did not know it. When danger was close, we were kept in ignorance. And so a rising broke out in Sichuan, then one in Hubei. Now Shaanxi and Hunan were disturbed, and grave news came from Guangdong and Jiangxi. The whole empire was in a ferment, and men's minds were on fire. The fault, the decree said, lay with the throne alone. The decree swore to bring in a full constitution, to consult public opinion on every law, and to abolish everything in the old system that conflicted with it. And the rising in Hubei and Hunan, it said, was the fault of Rui Cheng and others, who had driven the people to rebel and the troops to mutiny. The throne took the blame on itself for having appointed him, and held the troops and the people blameless. Let them only come back to their allegiance, and their past offences would be forgiven. The court called itself a weak body, set above its ministers and its people. It said it was filled with anxiety day and night. The same day, another edict pardoned political offenders. How did it land? Badly. From a princely house, a foreign observer wrote, men expect dignity in misfortune. What they got was fear, spoken too plainly. Three weeks of weakness and panic had been crowned by a supreme act of humiliation and despair. Supporters wavered, enemies took the dynasty's fall as certain, and even members of the Manchu banners were filled with shame. A Manchu prince asked a foreign friend how, after this, his family could ever step down from the stage.

Now go back to the twenty seventh of October, and the fields outside Hankou. The fighting centred on a position along the railway outside the city, called Kilometre Ten. The imperial troops came across the plain in open order, into heavy rifle fire and machine guns, and kept coming as steadily, an eye witness said, as if it were a sham fight on the manoeuvre ground. The revolutionaries wore a deep blue that passed for black. The imperial troops wore grey. At one point a band of some three hundred blackcoats rose from cover and advanced, with imperial cavalry close by, and foreigners watching expected a lively skirmish. Instead the band turned and ran at the double. They turned out to be the Death or Glory Boys, sworn to give their lives for the revolution. They seem to have decided their lives could be given to better advantage on another day. Kilometre Ten fell at about eleven in the morning. By evening, after a stubborn fight, the imperial troops had taken the station at Dazhimen. The revolutionaries had fought bravely and well. But in the end, training and discipline told, and at the close of the day the imperial army was knocking at the gates of Hankou. They were beaten above all by artillery, with the guns of the warships in the river sweeping their flank. Their courage left nothing to be desired. Their rank and file complained of poor leadership, and with reason. This was the army Yuan Shikai had built, doing what it was built for. The fight for the city went on for days. The rebels counterattacked the next morning and drove the imperial troops back. On the twenty ninth there was street fighting at the edge of the foreign concessions, and the revolutionaries lost an estimated five hundred killed and fifteen hundred wounded. The day went to the imperial troops, and they turned to looting. For four days they made no real progress. Yuan, meanwhile, had reached the imperial base at Xiaogan, or was just about to. Feng Guozhang had the command in the field. And it was decided that Hankou must be taken at all costs. On the morning of the first of November, the operation began that would destroy it. The plan, as the imperial side told it, was to shell the points where the rebels were massed, and then clear a way through the heart of the city to the river. Their men had been sniped at from every side, by soldiers and by men in plain clothes. There had been no rain for a long time, and everything was bone dry. A strong north east wind was blowing. An eye witness watched the flames stretch out along the wind and wrap around every tall building, until it became a furnace in minutes. It soon became plain that the city was doomed. The fire blazed all through the night of Wednesday the first of November, lighting up the sky and the countryside for miles. Towards morning the wind dropped, and the fire began to die down against the fire walls. Then at first light on the second, the imperial batteries opened up again, and the watchers counted twelve fresh pillars of smoke start up in as many minutes. Imperial troops on the river pontoons took pot shots at people trying to escape in small boats. In the city, banks and pawnshops were broken open, and looting went on without restriction, imperial soldiers often prominent in it. One of the leading men of the Chinese community put it to a foreigner simply. "It is our rice they eat", he said, and our clothes they wear. Why, he asked, did they give us no warning, so that we could carry out a little food and clothing? They have the hearts neither of men nor of beasts, he said, "but Heaven sees". And the tears stood in his eyes. There was a school for the blind in the city, and a hospital. A launch had tried to reach them on the first day, and been driven back. When rescuers finally got through on the second of November, they found the little blind boys out on the lawn, among the piled up boxes and bedding. All night they had stood huddled together on a patch of grass, turning their sightless eyes towards the flames as they came nearer. They could hear the fire coming, one of them said, the flames hissing and crackling, and then the crash of the roofs and walls falling in. The heat grew until they had to turn their faces away to keep them from being scorched. A blind boy at a mission hospital in Hankou said: "We could not see and did not know where to run all we could do was to stand and wait for death." They lived. Willing hands carried the wounded out on stretchers, and imperial soldiers escorted the rescue of their own wounded enemies. So was Hankou burned on purpose? Here the sources disagree. One story had it that the burning was the work of Tiezhong, a Manchu adviser who had fled Wuchang with Rui Cheng on the first night, and whose wife and children, it was said, died in the massacre of the Manchus. Now second in command to Feng, he was said to have planned to burn Hankou, and to have made sure there were no half measures. The revolutionaries charged that the destruction was deliberate from the start. The other view was that taking the city was a military necessity, honestly begun, but that discipline was let go at the moment it mattered most, and a military measure was allowed to become an orgy of blood and fire. The cruelty did not all run one way. The revolutionaries had killed prisoners and misused the Red Cross flag, and it was credibly reported that on the thirtieth of October they cut off a hundred imperial soldiers, drove them into a warehouse and set it on fire. Two thirds of the people, it was estimated, had already fled before the fire came. Most of those who stayed got away in front of it. On the third of November a protest was made to Feng Guozhang, and a proclamation followed at once. About a third of the city was saved. The rest was gone. The army loyal to the court had razed most of Hankou. And it was the last gasp of organised resistance by the Qing.

While Hankou burned, Yuan moved up again. On the first of November, the same day the operation against Hankou began, the cabinet of princes went. Prince Qing and the others, the edict said, had reported that they had failed in their duties, and asked to be dismissed. Their request was granted. Among those asking to go was Zaize, who begged that capable men be appointed in their place, according to constitutional principles. Yuan Shikai was appointed premier. Since he had already left for Hubei, he was to finish the outlines of his task there, then come to Beijing at once, form a cabinet and reform the government. Until Yuan came, Prince Qing and the others were to carry on as before. In the new order, a foreign observer wrote, the throne would be only the picturesque emblem of authority, and the emperor's edicts would express the will of a responsible ministry. And so there would be no misunderstanding about the court's intentions towards him, another edict left him in control of every soldier and sailor in Hubei, and of the whole navy on the Yangzi. In effect, he had been given supreme power, in the place of Prince Qing. Less than three years earlier, the court had dismissed this man and sent him home. Now it handed him the government and the army together. And he still did not hurry.

Yuan's envoys were in Wuchang that autumn, urging peace. What he offered was a limited monarchy, a constitution under the Manchus. What the revolutionaries wanted was a government in which the imperial family had no place at all. The envoys went home across the river with a letter from Li Yuanhong. It is the reluctant colonel at his most eloquent. He thanked Yuan for his kind intentions. Of course, he wrote, the Manchu government would be delighted if Yuan's conditions were agreed to. But the Chinese had suffered too much oppression under the Manchus. Ever since the slaughter of the reformers, the government had promised a constitution, and the promises had come to nothing. Look at the heads of the ministries, the governors general and the governors, Li wrote, and you will see that all the principal posts are held by Manchus. Four hundred million Chinese, their lives and their property wasted by a mere handful of Manchus. Then he turned to Yuan himself. Was Yuan not, he asked, the most famous and most able man among the Chinese? Had Yuan forgotten that when they took away his command, he narrowly escaped being murdered as well as dismissed? The Manchus, Li wrote, were trying the old trick that had beaten the Taiping rebels: using Chinese to kill Chinese. And suppose the revolutionaries had accepted his terms, Li asked. Did Yuan have any means of forcing the Manchu government to keep its promises? A constitutional monarchy or a republic, he went on, made little difference, so long as it rested on a constitution. The form of the government would be settled by a conference of delegates from the provinces. And the people agreed that the Manchus must have no voice in it. "For you to live in retirement for your own enjoyment as you have done is of no benefit to China." Province after province had gone over, Li wrote, and all the gunboats and torpedo boats with them. Between the revolution and Beijing, there was no Manchu force left at all, except Yuan's own little army. So turn republican, he urged, take your troops, and march on Beijing. And if what Yuan wanted was honours from the Manchus, he had better pray that the revolution kept winning, because the Manchus would heap honours on him only for as long as they needed him. Then came the proverb. "When the rabbits are caught the hounds are cooked." His merit would be too great to escape jealousy, Li warned, and his power would keep him under constant suspicion. He would never be allowed to retire to his estate again. Li had one more story for him. When the foreign armies entered Beijing in 1900, he wrote, Li Hongzhang had the chance to make himself emperor, but he was stubborn and let it go. "You may learn from his experience." "I am but a military man and do not know much", Li wrote. He was only sorry that Yuan had to think things over for so very long before he could make up his mind. "All the brethren of this land are waiting for you." This from a man who had refused the command himself, until they threatened him with death.

In Beijing, the National Assembly had opened its second session on the twenty first of October, and it was proving almost as awkward for the court as Yuan was. These were the men you met last time, who had spent a year demanding a parliament and a responsible cabinet, and been told to go home and wait. Now nobody was telling them to wait. On the second of November, an edict told the Assembly to draft a constitution at once and submit it. When the edict was read to them, the whole House stood to hear it, and amid thunderous applause a motion was moved, seconded and carried to draw up the main principles of a constitution. The House adjourned, and met again in the afternoon. And that afternoon a draft of the principles, which in essence had been prepared beforehand, was read out, lightly amended, and adopted unanimously. The memorial to send it to the throne went through just as fast. It is a remarkable document, because for once the men writing to the throne were telling it the truth to its face. The revolution has spread in every direction, they wrote, and the empire is already tottering. There is only one remedy: make sure the constitution is sound. Every constitutional monarchy took the British constitution as its model, they wrote, and so would they. But writing a whole constitution would take a long time. And in the meantime, people might suspect the ministers around the throne of whispering that once the danger was past, the emperor could go back on his word. After all, they wrote, Napoleon the Third of France had done exactly that, once his danger was over. But if a short scheme of the constitution were proclaimed first, the whole nation would rejoice, and say the emperor was truly listening to his people. "This report will spread abroad and will do more good than a million soldiers." So they had prepared a short draft of nineteen articles. Do not delay, they warned. If the constitution were not proclaimed at once, the imperial favour would never reach the people, and the revolution would go to lengths nobody could speak of. They spoke so plainly, they said, out of loyalty. And they awaited the throne's commands "with fear and trembling." They asked one more thing: that in the meantime, the soldiers too be allowed to give their opinion.

The nineteen articles turned the old order upside down. The powers of the emperor would be limited by the constitution, and the constitution would be drafted and passed by the parliament. The prime minister would be elected by parliament, and only confirmed by the emperor. No member of the imperial house could be prime minister, a minister of state, or the head of a province. No treaty could be made without parliament's approval. Parliament would vote the budget, even the money for the imperial household. And the emperor's army could not be used inside the empire except under rules that parliament laid down. Until a parliament met, the National Assembly would stand in for it. Only the first article sounded like the old days. The dynasty would reign for ever. Three years earlier, the court's constitution had said the people would deliberate and the emperor would decide. Now the people's assembly would decide, and the emperor would sign. Men of moderate opinions hoped the articles would become the Magna Carta of Chinese liberties. They put an end to the absolutism of the throne. The court did not argue. It sanctioned the articles the very next day. They were to be printed on yellow paper and proclaimed to all its subjects, and the emperor would swear to them in the temple of his ancestors. In the oath that followed, the throne confessed that it had failed to find good men, and that its failure had turned its subjects against it. "Within the space of one month disturbances have spread throughout the length and breadth of the Empire and there is danger of the interruption of Our dynasty. Deeply do we grieve for Our faults." It had consented to carry out all of the Assembly's proposals, it said. It swore, for itself and its descendants, never to act against the articles. "May Our Ancestors bear witness to this Our Oath." A foreign observer called it the completion of the Manchu surrender. Everything, it seemed, was in place for a limited monarchy, with Yuan Shikai to offer it and to guarantee it. There was one weak point, and it could not be fixed. Whether the Manchus kept their promises, and whether Yuan kept his, depended on Yuan alone. A British observer put it in a sentence. "There was no one to guarantee him, and in the South he was not trusted." The army near the capital showed how things now stood. A general named Wu Luzhen, whom the court had just sent to take charge at Taiyuan, believed a limited monarchy under the Manchus offered no hope at all. He had been plotting with other generals to advance on Beijing for the republic. The plot was betrayed. Wu was murdered in the night at Shijiazhuang, where the line from Taiyuan meets the main line from Beijing, at Manchu instigation. His fellow conspirator, General Zhang Shaozeng, lost his nerve. Pleading ill health, he asked to be relieved of his command, and when the throne agreed, he hurried off to Tianjin as fast as the train would carry him, into the safety of the foreign concessions. Ill health was going around that autumn. Then the Assembly used its new power. On the eighth of November, under article eight of the new principles, it elected Yuan Shikai premier. The majority was overwhelming. There were scarcely half a dozen votes against. The court confirmed it by edict the next day, and it was announced that Yuan would leave for Beijing at once. He did not leave his base at Xiaogan until the eleventh of November. Beijing was a frightened city. A great exodus had begun, and wild rumours ran of reprisals the Manchus meant to take. At about six on the evening of the thirteenth of November, Yuan Shikai reached the capital by train. He wore the Yellow Jacket, and he walked the whole length of the platform before getting into his carriage, with a personal bodyguard carrying double swords. The Yellow Jacket was a riding jacket in the imperial colour, one of the highest honours the throne could give a subject. The streets from the station to his house were lined with three thousand men of the Imperial Guards. A Beijing newspaper called him China's first constitutional premier. As for the Assembly that elected him, its members soon began to stay away, until it could no longer find a quorum. It had served its turn, and it died, unwept, unhonoured and unsung. And the concession, a foreigner wrote, had come too late to serve the Manchu cause. Had the regent and the empress dowager Longyu set their quarrels aside at any time in the past two years, and given freely what was now wrung out of them, the dynasty might have grown great again. Instead, they had given the republicans time to grow.

Feng Guozhang
Feng Guozhang. User Magnus Manske on en.wikipedia, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Back on the Yangzi, the fighting was not over. Huang Xing had come to Wuchang on the twenty eighth of October, to help the new regime, and he now commanded the revolutionaries massed at Hanyang. After the burning of Hankou, Yuan had held his army back. Then the order finally went out: take Hanyang. The rebels attacked first, across the Han river, and the attack failed. It came in pieces, and it was not strong enough. Then, at first light on the twenty second of November, the imperial army attacked the hills that guarded Hanyang. Both sides had fine artillery and machine guns. The revolutionaries held a strong position, and they were determined to die before they would give it up. It was noon the next day before the first line of hills fell, and only at a terrible price in killed and wounded. Early on the twenty third an entire brigade went in to reinforce the attack. With hardly a pause, the fight raged along the whole front through the twenty third, day and night, and all through the twenty fourth. The front ran more than five miles along the Han, and the fighting took a terrible toll. On Sunday the twenty sixth, the imperial troops threw their whole strength against the last big hill before the city. They gained ground, but again at a terribly heavy cost. And the question began to be asked whether it was too heavy. Even past that hill, there was still Tortoise Hill, and the defences of the city at the end of a narrow causeway. Feng Guozhang, it was said, was already thinking of changing his plans. If he was, he showed no sign of it. He did not have to. That night the defenders broke apart. The Hunanese regiments, holding the outer positions, complained that the Hubei men behind them were shooting them in the back to stop them falling back. Some of them probably were hit that way, by careless firing if nothing worse. The Hunanese believed it. Worn down by the imperial attack, they refused to go on fighting, and in the night they pulled back to Wuchang. On the twenty seventh of November, Hanyang fell. The dragon flag of the Qing flew again from Tortoise Hill. And the victors took their revenge. Guns and merciless rifle fire were turned on every fugitive in reach, whatever their calling, sex or age. As soldiers, the men from the north had proved themselves first class fighting machines. But there, a foreigner wrote, the praise had to end. So now Yuan's army held Hankou and Hanyang. Across the river, Wuchang was in reach. In Wuchang, the revolutionaries were frankly discouraged. Li Yuanhong, and even Huang Xing, had to admit that their forces could not stand against the trained soldiers of the north. Li even sent word that he was ready to accept a government on constitutional, not republican, lines. One more push. Yuan did not push. The British minister in Beijing had been protesting about the danger to British subjects at Hankou. Yuan replied that the imperial troops were acting purely in defence, and "that if an armistice on mutually satisfactory terms could be arranged, he would gladly give orders to suspend hostilities." He let a British consul in Hankou carry the message to Li Yuanhong. Li asked for fifteen days, and a meeting at Shanghai of delegates from all the revolutionary provinces, to choose men to negotiate with Yuan's. Yuan offered three. Each side would hold the ground it had, and neither would bring up reinforcements or dig new works. The warships would drop down the river below Wuchang, and the British consul would sign as witness. Wuchang accepted, and the agreement was signed on the third of December. The day before, the revolutionaries had taken Nanjing, and the two sides were back on almost equal terms. No event of the whole campaign hit harder. Nanjing was the southern capital, where the first Ming emperor had set up his court after driving out the Mongols, and for three weeks it had been the last great city south of the Yangzi still flying the dragon flag. Three days was never going to be enough. The next day Yuan proposed fifteen more, and named his own man to talk to Li, and one truce followed another. The last of them ran up to the eve of Christmas. Some said that proved Yuan was never sincere about saving the dynasty. His army was about to cross the river and finish the revolt, and he held it back. He knew what the end at Wuchang would be, if he pushed it to the bitter end. He also knew that taking Wuchang would only be the first step in reconquering the whole south, and that nobody who understood how the south felt believed that could ever be done. So Yuan, with his success at Hanyang behind him, stopped at the river and chose to bargain instead. At Christmas, Sun Yat-sen came home to China at last. Next time, the bargain: Sun Yat-sen proclaimed provisional president of a Republic of China at Nanjing, and Yuan Shikai dealing with the throne on one side and Sun on the other. Who would get what they wanted?

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