China, 1895 to 1916, episode 1

The War That Broke the Old Order

Li Hongzhang, the viceroy whose modern army and navy were meant to prove China could hold its own, watches Japan break them in nine months of 1894 and 1895, then has to go to Japan himself to sign away Taiwan, Korea and a fortune. The episode follows Li from the first shot to the peace table, where a gunman's bullet wins China slightly better terms, then turns to Kang Youwei, an examination candidate who answers the treaty by getting more than a thousand of his peers to risk their careers on an illegal petition, and asks why this defeat, unlike the Opium Wars, made reform a cause. It leans heavily on foreign observers and scholars; the court's own voice is a single claim.

Transcript

On the morning of the twenty fifth of July 1894, a British merchant steamer called the Kowshing came steaming into a gulf on the coast of Korea, packed with Chinese soldiers. She had sailed from Dagu two days earlier, hired to carry about twelve hundred men and twelve guns to the Chinese troops holding a small town at the head of that same gulf. Dagu was the anchorage at the mouth of the river that runs up to Tianjin, the sea gate to Beijing. Among those on board was Major von Hanneken, a military instructor to the Chinese army. Hanneken had spent years in China working for its most famous statesman, Li Hongzhang, and had designed some of the forts that guarded the northern coast. Around eight that morning, the men on the Kowshing saw a large warship come out from behind an island, and then three more, all of them big ironclads as far as anyone could make out. The lead ship flew the Japanese flag with a white flag above it. As she passed, she dipped her flag in salute, and the men on the Kowshing relaxed. Then signals went up on one of the warships, and two guns told the Kowshing to stop and drop anchor. The next signal said stop where you are, or take the consequences. No war had been declared, and Japan would not declare one for another week. A boat came across from a Japanese cruiser, its men armed with rifles and swords, and Japanese officers went to the captain's cabin to examine the ship's papers. On deck, the Chinese troops had worked out what was happening. They told Hanneken to tell the captain that they would rather die on the spot than be taken prisoner. Hanneken and the British captain had already agreed that the captain would insist on going back to Dagu, since they had sailed before any declaration of war. Hanneken did not go to the cabin. He wrote afterward: "I had told the captain to send for me if need was. I was busy keeping commanders and soldiers at peace." The Japanese did not give the captain time to insist on anything. They told him, curtly, to follow their cruiser, and went back to their ship. But the soldiers would not be taken. In a panic they mutinied, declared they would fight, and would not let the crew and the other passengers obey the Japanese order to leave the ship. The cruiser raised a red flag. She fired a torpedo, which missed, and then opened fire with all her guns. The Kowshing went down in less than half an hour. Of the thirteen hundred or so people on board, about a hundred and seventy escaped by swimming for the shore, and Hanneken was one of them. Boats from the cruiser picked up the British captain, his first officer and a few Chinese. At the rest of the men in the water, the Japanese fired. In China, people called it an act of barbarity, committed without warning in a time of peace. On the second of August, a mob of Chinese soldiers, out of uniform but armed, raided a British steamer at the mouth of the river below Tianjin, crying "Kowshing, Kowshing," and robbed and roughed up the Japanese on board. So before war had even been declared, of about thirteen hundred men on board, only about a hundred and seventy reached the shore. They were the first to pay for a war that would break the old order in China. This season is about what came after. Welcome to the first episode of a new season. Over the next two decades China would lose a war, try a burst of reform and watch it crushed, see foreign armies march into its capital, and go through a revolution. The Qing dynasty, which had ruled China since the sixteen forties, would fall, and with it an imperial system more than two thousand years old. We are going to follow a handful of people through all of it, so let me introduce them. Li Hongzhang, the old statesman who had spent two decades building China a modern army and navy. The Empress Dowager Cixi, who, whatever the title on the throne said, actually controlled the court. An empress dowager is the mother or widow of an emperor. Cixi was the mother of one emperor and the aunt and adoptive mother of the one who reigned now. Yuan Shikai, a soldier who will rise through every collapse in this story, and end it by making himself emperor, very briefly. Liang Qichao, a brilliant young writer from Guangdong, who in these years was the pupil of a man we will meet at the end of this episode. And Sun Yat-sen, a young doctor from the same province, who by the end of the war was already plotting to bring the dynasty down and set up a republic. This season stands on the work of Peter Zarrow, William Rowe, Hosea Ballou Morse, Percy Kent and Putnam Weale, and this episode also on the war accounts of James Allan and the writer known as Vladimir. But we start with a war, and with the man whose war it was.

To understand why Chinese soldiers were on a British ship off Korea, you need to know what Korea was to China. For about two centuries, Korea had been a tributary of the Qing. That meant its kings sent regular missions to Beijing bearing gifts and accepted the emperor as their overlord, while running their own affairs at home. In the eighteen eighties China went further. Under Li Hongzhang, it arranged Korea's treaties with the Western powers, set up treaty ports and a foreign staffed customs service there, and kept what amounted to a colonial army in the country. China, in other words, was behaving in Korea much the way the Western powers behaved in China. Which brings us to Li Hongzhang himself. Li came from Anhui, a province in the middle of China. He was born in 1823, which made him seventy one in the summer of the Kowshing. He had made his name in the eighteen sixties by raising an army in his home province, the Huai Army, which helped crush the Taiping Rebellion, the vast civil war that killed millions. The Huai Army was named for the Huai River country of Anhui, and the Taiping war was fought between 1850 and 1864. Since 1870 Li had been governor general of Zhili, the province that wraps around Beijing. A governor general, often called a viceroy in English, ran one or more provinces with wide powers over armies and money. He also steered China's dealings with Korea, pushed railways out toward Manchuria, and above all built China's new army and navy. This was what the Chinese called self strengthening: buy or build Western guns, ships and factories, and use them to defend the old Confucian state. Li had spent two decades at it, fighting for money against expensive wars in Central Asia and against the Empress Dowager's spending. After all those years, China expected to win any war with Japan. Chinese officials had long thought of Japan as an insignificant island on the edge of Chinese civilization. Li's man in Korea was Yuan Shikai. Yuan was born in 1859 in Henan, to a family of officials and soldiers. He sat the civil service examinations and failed, so he went soldiering instead. In 1882 he came to Korea with Chinese troops sent to put down a mutiny in Seoul, and two years later, when pro Japanese reformers seized the Korean palace in a coup, the young Yuan led Chinese troops in and broke it. The Japanese had to fight their way out of the city to the port. The two countries came close to war. Instead, Japan sent a gifted politician named Ito Hirobumi to Tianjin, and he and Li agreed to pull both armies back. Remember Ito. He and Li will meet again across a table, in very different circumstances. Yuan came back to Seoul in October 1885 with a new title, Imperial Resident, still in his twenties. For the next nine years his job, as Li's faithful lieutenant, was simple: hold back Japan in Korea. In the spring of 1894, a rebellion broke out in Korea, led by a new religion called Eastern Learning, against heavy and corrupt taxes. The Korean king, with Yuan at his elbow, asked China for troops, and in early June they arrived. Japan had already decided that if China sent troops, it would send its own. By late June the two armies faced each other on Korean soil. Japan kept pouring soldiers into Seoul, more than ten thousand of them, and pressed the Korean king to remake his government. Reform of Korea was a pretext. What Japan wanted was to replace China as the power that counted in Korea. Li was cautious. He looked for a foreign power to broker a truce, first Russia, then Britain, and got little support from either. At four in the morning on the twenty third of July, Japanese troops broke into the royal palace in Seoul and took it. In London, the British government ruled that this was when the war began. By that ruling, when the Kowshing was sunk two days later, Japan had been within its rights. For Yuan Shikai, the Kowshing was the end. Those were the reinforcements coming to help him, and when they went down, he saw that the game was up. He quietly left the Korean capital and made his way home overland to north China. Leaving his post without orders was, under the old law code, punishable by death. Yet within two years Yuan was back in favour, and his patron Li had found him a new command near Tianjin: turning a division of old style troops into soldiers as good as the Japanese. By then he had a reputation for severity, for a willingness to take responsibility, for nepotism, and for a rare ability to turn even disasters to his own advantage. Remember that last one. We will be seeing a great deal of Yuan Shikai. Four days after the Kowshing sank, the Japanese struck the small Chinese garrison she had been sailing to reinforce. After five hours of fighting the Chinese were beaten, with five hundred killed and wounded to Japan's seventy five. On the first of August, Japan declared war, and the court of the Guangxu emperor answered in kind. Guangxu was twenty two. The court's declaration called the Japanese by an ancient name meant as an insult, accused them of attacking its transports without warning, and ordered Li to have his armies root them out. It closed with a warning: "We exhort our generals to refrain from the least laxity in obeying our commands in order to avoid severe punishment at our hands." Notice who that last line is aimed at. Not the enemy. The emperor's own generals. Japan, meanwhile, had spent a quarter of a century remaking itself on Western lines since its Meiji Restoration, with a conscript army and a modern navy. In 1889 it had adopted a constitution that gave its people a stake in the fate of their country. Li's troops had better rifles and bigger battleships, but in many key areas they were behind. In September, Japanese columns converged on Pyongyang, where about fourteen and a half thousand Chinese troops stood to fight. One column attacked early, on the fifteenth, and was thrown back after twelve hours of fighting. The next day the attack came again, and after a few hours the Chinese were completely routed. The Chinese lost six thousand six hundred men. The Japanese lost six hundred and thirty two. Only one Chinese general showed any personal courage, and none showed any capacity for leadership. Another general had wanted to raise the white flag at the end of the first day. The brave one was killed in the fighting. Li's army was routed. It proved disorganized, strategically inept, and quick to flee the battlefield, and what was left of it hurried back across the Yalu River into China.

Li's pride was his fleet. The Beiyang fleet was China's only effective navy. Beiyang means the northern seas, the stretch of coast that Li had charge of. Its admiral was Ding Ruchang, who had commanded it since 1880, and with a British naval officer on loan as its tutor he had brought it to a fairly high standard. Ding was not a sailor by training. He had risen as an army cavalry officer, and it was Li who put him in charge of the warships. That September the fleet escorted troop transports to the mouth of the Yalu, the river that divides Korea from China. With Ding went several foreigners, among them Hanneken, who had swum ashore from the Kowshing. Ding had two ironclad battleships and ten unarmoured cruisers, twelve ships in all, plus four torpedo boats. At noon on the seventeenth of September, the Japanese fleet came into sight. It was twelve ships as well, but heavier, better matched to one another, faster, and with more quick firing guns. A quick firing gun could get off several rounds in the time an old heavy gun fired one. The first shot was fired at a quarter to one. A foreigner was watching from the shore through field glasses. He saw the Japanese ships keep together and circle the Chinese, pouring in a steady fire, faster and better handled. Some of the Chinese ships looked helpless, and he saw no sign of them working together. But they blazed away valiantly, and more than one Japanese ship was on fire. The Japanese flagship was soon ablaze, and for a while it looked as if she would go down. Her crew got the fire under control, but she was badly hurt and had to be taken out of the fight. One Chinese cruiser caught fire, burned like a mass of flame and plunged under, and as the smoke closed over the spot, the watcher thought of the hundreds of men who had died there in a single moment. Another Chinese ship drifted ashore, close enough that through the glasses he could see her decks strewn with bodies and her crew struggling to land. Then he watched one of China's best ships, which had been labouring for a long time with her pumps throwing water over the side. In his words: "Bravely she fought on unsupported, and her upper deck and top guns were served until she sank." "At length her bows were completely engulfed; the stern rose high out of water, disclosing the whirling propellers, and bit by bit she disappeared. We could hear distinctly the yelling sounds of triumph that rose from the Japanese ships as she went down." The battle went on until five in the afternoon, when both fleets were running out of ammunition. Ding himself was among the wounded. Four Chinese ships were sunk or driven ashore, and one turned tail and ran. About six hundred Chinese were killed or wounded, counting the drowned. The Japanese lost two hundred and thirty nine killed and wounded. You could almost call it a draw. The two big Chinese battleships were still afloat, it was the Japanese who pulled back at nightfall, and the Chinese transports landed their troops. But from that day, the mastery of the sea belonged to Japan. The army routed at Pyongyang and the navy broken at the Yalu were Li's own, the forces he had been building up since the eighteen seventies. In Beijing, the mood changed. Until then the court could make light of the war and carry on preparing a grand celebration of the Empress Dowager's sixtieth birthday. Now, all was alarm. The court found someone to punish. The captain of a small Chinese cruiser who had run from a fight on the day the Kowshing sank, and run again at the Yalu, was beheaded.

After the Yalu, Ding brought what was left of his fleet to Port Arthur and then across to Weihaiwei. Those two bases sat on either side of the narrow sea that leads to Tianjin and Beijing, Port Arthur at the tip of the Liaodong peninsula and Weihaiwei at the tip of Shandong. Together they were meant to lock the door to the capital. Japanese armies crossed the Yalu into Manchuria and pushed down the Liaodong peninsula, taking the port of Dalian and then Port Arthur itself in November. Manchuria was not just any part of the empire. It was the homeland of the ruling house. Port Arthur was held by the best trained division of China's best army, and it fell to the final assault on the twenty first of November. What followed was a massacre of many Chinese. Some put the number killed after the city fell as high as two thousand. The explanation offered afterward was that the Japanese troops had gone into an uncontrollable fury when they found the mutilated bodies and cut off heads of comrades who had been taken prisoner. And that beaten Chinese soldiers usually threw off their loose uniform coats and passed for farm labourers, so soldier and civilian looked alike. The war was full of gruesome atrocities on both sides, all of it breathlessly reported in the Western press. In China, Port Arthur would be remembered alongside the Kowshing. On the seventh of November, the Empress Dowager turned sixty. Ten million taels had been set aside to celebrate. The day passed almost without notice. A tael was a little over an ounce of silver, the unit Chinese money was counted in. The court called Prince Gong back to his old post. He was the emperor's uncle, had run the court's dealings with foreigners for a generation, and had been pushed out of power ten years before. His task, in his own words, was "piecing together the cup which the present ministers have smashed to the floor." Even Hanneken was summoned to Beijing, which no foreigner in his position had ever been, and had at least one audience with the emperor. He told the court bluntly how things stood. On the twenty sixth of December a decree took the supreme command away from Li; the court was split between his supporters and his enemies, and his enemies had the upper hand. The next day, another decree ordered Admiral Ding sent for trial. He never stood trial. But in January a general who had fought at Pyongyang was beheaded. By then Ding's fleet was shut up inside Weihaiwei harbour, behind a belt of mines the Chinese had laid themselves. On the twentieth of January, twenty thousand Japanese troops landed on the Shandong coast about thirty miles east and marched on the base from the land side. The government had decided the fleet should not go out and fight. Its ammunition had not been properly replenished, and after the Yalu, another battle against the better organized Japanese looked hopeless. The hope was that peace talks would succeed in time, and China might be allowed to keep what was left of its navy. The forts on the south shore of the harbour were attacked on the twenty sixth of January. The soldiers holding them were disheartened and short of pay, and their resistance was negligible. Ding had seen that coming. He sent parties of sailors to blow up the magazines and wreck the guns before the Japanese could take them. It worked, up to a point. The Japanese brought spare parts from Port Arthur, got some of the guns firing again, and turned them on Liugong Island, while their fleet shelled it from the sea. Liugong Island sits in the mouth of the harbour, and it held the fleet's headquarters. Then Japanese torpedo boats slipped inside the defences. They sank Ding's flagship, the Dingyuan, and others with her: in all, one ironclad and four cruisers went down. Surrender was inevitable. On the twelfth of February, Ding wrote to the Japanese admiral: "having fought resolutely, having had my ships sunk and my men decimated, I am minded to give up the contest, and to ask for a cessation of hostilities in order to save the lives of my people." He offered the warships still in the harbour, the island and its forts, on one condition: that every man in the army and navy, Chinese and foreign, be spared and allowed to go home. He proposed that the British admiral in those waters stand guarantee. The Japanese admiral answered the same day. He would take over the ships tomorrow, and he waved away the British guarantee: he placed, he wrote, "implicit reliance on your assurances as an officer." He also urged Ding, for his own safety, to come to Japan and stay there until the war was over, and promised him every consideration. Ding did not go to Japan. Under Qing law, a commander who gave up his post faced beheading, and his family faced death and the loss of everything they owned. Ding handed command of the fleet to his second in command, and killed himself. The second in command passed it to the third, and killed himself too. On the island, the general commanding the forts and his deputy did the same. By dying, they turned their names from cowards into heroes, and they saved their families. What was left of the fortress surrendered on the twelfth of February, with one ironclad and four cruisers. In Shanghai, Chinese officials refused at first to believe Ding had surrendered at all. No commander, they said, would put his whole family's lives at risk like that. Li's fleet was gone. His army was beaten. He had nothing left to bargain with.

China had already been trying to make peace for months. In November, Li sent one of his foreign advisers to Japan to ask for terms, and the Japanese refused even to receive him, because he did not carry the authority of the Chinese government. In December the court sent two envoys, one of whom, as governor of Taiwan, had offered his troops cash rewards for Japanese heads. The emperor had invited an American to advise the envoys, and he was not hopeful. He wrote to his wife that the Japanese "are greatly elated over their successes and feel very keenly the contemptuous treatment which China has extended to them in the past, and are inclined to humiliate her as much as possible." At their meeting on the second of February, the Japanese told the envoys that their papers did not give them real power to sign, which showed the Chinese court was not yet sincere about peace. The two envoys protested that they were not even allowed to telegraph home in cipher. A coded telegram had come for them, they were told, and it would be handed over once they supplied their government's private code to translate it. Their mission was over. Japan wanted something bigger. It wanted China to own itself defeated before the whole world, and to send a man of real rank, with full powers, to sue for peace. There was only one such man. So the court sent Li Hongzhang to Japan, with full powers to make peace. He was seventy two, and he arrived at Shimonoseki, a port at the western tip of Japan's main island, in March 1895. Across the table sat Ito Hirobumi, now Japan's prime minister, and the foreign minister, Mutsu Munemitsu. Once before, in Tianjin, Li and Ito had talked their way back from the edge of war. This time Ito held every card. Behind him, the Japanese army in Manchuria had kept rolling forward, and by early March nothing stood between it and Shanhaiguan. Shanhaiguan was the pass where the Great Wall meets the sea, the gate between Manchuria and the plain around Beijing. And while the talks went on, a Japanese expedition seized the Penghu islands, the keys to Taiwan. On the twenty fourth of March, Li was being carried back in his chair from a session of the talks. A Japanese fanatic fired at him, and hit him in the face. The bullet entered his cheek an inch below the left eye, and it stayed there; no one could get it out. Li, unmoved, got down from his chair and walked quietly to his room. Inside, he was filled with rage, and ready to hold the Japanese government responsible. His staff feared more attacks. At home, Chinese who remembered the Kowshing and Port Arthur were worked into a fury. Western nations joined in condemning the crime. In Japan, the reaction was dismay. Japan's war party had not wanted peace without big gains of territory. Now even the war minister said the gunman had "undone the great achievements of the nation." The emperor of Japan sent a message of his deepest grief, the empress showered attentions on the wounded envoy, and sympathy poured in from every class of Japanese society. And because the talks had been "interrupted by an untoward incident," in the wording of the agreement that followed, Japan's emperor ordered his negotiators to agree to a truce. An untoward incident. That is one way to describe shooting an old man in the face. Japan offered, unasked, a three week armistice for the northern fronts, and it was signed on the thirtieth of March. Li went on running the negotiations from his sickroom, where he was confined for seventeen days. Ito was embarrassed, and it showed in the terms. The area Japan demanded in Manchuria was cut back. The indemnity was reduced by a third. Claims to special privileges inside China were dropped, and Japan gave up its demand to occupy Shenyang, the old home of the dynasty, as security. That bullet did more for China than a victory in the field would have.

It was still a hard peace. Li fought the money in writing. He agreed to put an indemnity in the treaty, but warned that the sum demanded was more than China could pay under its present system of taxes. A war indemnity was the bill a defeated country paid the winner for the cost of the war. If China failed to pay, Li pointed out, Japan would call it a breach of the treaty, and the war might start again. China's customs revenue, the one income it could pledge to foreign bankers, was already mortgaged for war loans. The war had ruined China's credit, and it had been forced to pay seven and even eight and a half per cent interest. The customs on foreign trade were run for the emperor by foreigners, under a British inspector general, which is why Western bankers trusted that money and no other. And to raise taxes at home, Li wrote, "would lead to great discontent," and probably to rebellion, on top of the people's anger at the emperor for what they would call a humiliating and dishonourable peace. The Treaty of Shimonoseki was signed on the seventeenth of April 1895, in Japanese, Chinese and English. Here is what it cost. First, Korea. China recognized the full and complete independence of Korea. On paper that set Korea free. In practice, with China out of the way, it made Korea a Japanese protectorate, and Japan annexed it some fifteen years later. Second, territory. China ceded the island of Taiwan, which Japan had long coveted, and the Penghu islands. On Taiwan itself, officials and local leaders declared a republic of their own rather than be handed over, and Japanese troops crushed it within a few months. Taiwan would stay Japanese until the end of the Second World War. China also ceded the Liaodong peninsula in southern Manchuria, with the ports of Dalian and Port Arthur. Third, money: an indemnity of two hundred million taels, paid in eight instalments. For scale, the whole of China's customs revenue, the income foreign bankers would lend against, came to about twenty two and a half million taels a year. Japanese troops would stay in Weihaiwei until the money was paid. Fourth, trade. Four more cities became treaty ports: Shashi and Chongqing on the Yangzi, and Suzhou and Hangzhou on the Grand Canal. A treaty port was a city where foreigners could live and trade under their own consuls and their own laws. And Japan won the right to build factories in the treaty ports. Until then, foreign factories had been illegal in China, and few had been built. That clause mattered more than it looked, because of an older one. Under earlier treaties, the other powers held most favoured nation rights, so whatever one of them won, the rest received automatically. So the Western powers got the right to build factories in China too, and most used it almost at once. It opened the floodgates to foreign industrial investment. Foreign investment in China came to almost eight hundred million dollars by 1902, and well over one and a half billion by 1914. Then there was Liaodong. Korea had never been Qing territory, and Taiwan was an offshore island, but Manchuria was the homeland of the ruling house. Until now, the powers had followed an unspoken rule that the Qing empire itself was off limits to colonization. The Liaodong clause tore that rule up. Add it up, and China had not just been beaten; it had been humbled. Its armies had not won a single battle, and its fleet had been driven to hide in fortified ports. The indemnity had saddled it with a national debt, which it had never had before. And all of it had been done by an Asian power that China had despised. The inspector general who ran China's customs was an Irishman who had served the emperor for more than thirty years. "China's collapse has been terrible," he wrote in a letter ten days before the signing. China had been beaten only at one small spot on the fringe of its huge empire, but "it is the shell of the egg that is cracked," and to him it looked "a bad case of Humpty Dumpty." Someone had to answer for it, and the obvious man was Li. He had built China's only trained army, and his own people held its commands. When peace came, it brought a general discrediting of the emperor's ministers, Li above all, and for a time he was pushed aside into obscurity.

Now let's leave Li and the diplomats for a moment and go to the capital. That spring, candidates from all over China had come to the capital for the highest level of the civil service examinations. For more than a thousand years, the road into China's government ran through these examinations: years of memorizing the Confucian classics, then a ladder of tests in the county, the province and the capital. Pass the last one and you became a jinshi, a presented scholar, with a career as an official open to you. One of the candidates was a thirty seven year old from Guangdong, from near the city of Guangzhou, named Kang Youwei. Kang came from a solid gentry family, and from an early age he set out to become a Confucian sage. In his own estimate, at least, he became one. At twenty one, after a period of intense study, he had a breakdown, and then an awakening. "While sitting in meditation," he remembered, "I suddenly saw that the ten thousand creatures of Heaven and Earth and I were all of the same body; a great light dawned, and I believed I was a sage: then I laughed with joy." So this was not a modest man. Hold on to that; it will explain a great deal. He had read the classics and Buddhism and many Western books in translation, and from early on he had appointed himself to save humankind. He had already broken the rules once. In 1888 he had sent an illegal demand for reform straight to the throne. Here is why it was illegal. Mere examination candidates, even grown and experienced men like Kang, had no right to petition the emperor. A petition to the throne was called a memorial: a formal written submission that only officials could send, through set channels. Banding together was worse. The dynasty was allergic to factions; an official was meant to serve the emperor as a lone, loyal individual. In April 1895, while Kang was in Beijing for the examination, word broke of the treaty's humiliating terms. At the end of April he drafted a petition to the emperor. It demanded that the dynasty refuse to surrender to Japan, and that it begin, at once, a series of fundamental reforms. Then he did something that had never been done. He organized more than twelve hundred of his fellow candidates, from eighteen provinces, to sign it together, a collective protest to the throne that was against the law. It amounted to a mass protest. The signers risked the wrath of a court that had committed itself to the treaty and did not tolerate criticism. These were men who had spent years preparing for exactly this examination, and they were signing a protest against the court that would decide their careers. The petition was long; people nicknamed it the ten thousand word memorial. It called on the government to promote industry, modernize the army, build railways, a postal service and a merchant fleet, employ good men, including the skills of Chinese living overseas, and improve farming through training schools. It did not shrink from asking the government to raise taxes. None of that sounds radical now. But it imagined a far more active government than China had ever had, and an active people too: citizens who worked not just for their families and villages, but for the country's growth. Its real point went beyond fighting on against Japan. Kang and his signers were demanding a fundamental reordering of the entire political system. It was handed in before the treaty's ratifications were exchanged on the eighth of May. And it went no further. Officials in Beijing confiscated it, and neither the emperor nor the Empress Dowager ever saw it. So the petition failed. And it made Kang Youwei a name. After the war, his writings began to appear openly in the newspapers that had become essential reading for gentry and students in the cities. He founded a study society for strengthening the nation, with branches in Beijing and Shanghai, and its chief secretary was his pupil, Liang Qichao. Reform societies sprang up everywhere. That same year, a young scholar in Hunan who would soon become one of Kang's followers wrote to his brother that a scholar could not stand apart and despise the peasants as ignorant. "If you first gain their hearts," he wrote, "in the future when war comes, you will have help in the midst of confusion." And in Guangzhou, in that same wave of horror after the defeat, Sun Yat-sen and his friends planned to seize the city and found a republic. The rising was crushed before it began, and Sun became a fugitive. Two men, and two very different answers to the same disaster. Keep both of them in mind. So why this defeat? China had been losing wars to foreign powers since the eighteen forties, and each defeat had handed the foreigners more rights: commercial, religious, diplomatic, even territorial. The first of them was the Opium War with Britain, from 1839 to 1842, which began when China tried to stamp out the opium trade. Yet China's elites had been so confident in their culture that none of those defeats forced a truly fundamental rethink. Japan's victory did. This war, far more than the Opium War, was the real turning point of the dynasty's history. Partly it was who had won. To lose so badly to a small neighbour China had despised convinced many that the country had to remake itself on Japan's model, at almost any cultural cost. More students than ever were sent abroad to study, to Japan as well as the West. Not everyone felt the shock. The letter about the cracked egg had said it plainly: "the heart of the country knows nothing of the war," and would not make allowances for defeat. But the ones who did feel it are the ones this season is about.

Li had one card left, and he may have been holding it all along. Before leaving Beijing for Japan, he had paid special visits to the Russian and French legations. In March, Russia ordered its Mediterranean squadron to the Pacific. And at Shimonoseki, Li argued against giving up Taiwan, but did not think it urgent even to mention Liaodong. He had reason to expect that someone else would take that up. On the twenty third of April, right after the terms were announced, Russia, joined by France and Germany, threatened military action unless Japan gave Liaodong back. Russia feared what Japan could do with a foothold in Manchuria, if it decided to push toward Siberia. And Russia had long wanted to reach warm water on that coast. It acted, as every state does at such moments, out of self interest. Russia's own great Pacific port, Vladivostok, froze over in winter. France joined because it was Russia's ally. Germany joined because it wanted Russia drawn into Asia and away from the problems of the Near East. Britain declined. Japan could not resist three great powers at once, and yielded. When the treaty's ratifications were exchanged at Yantai on the eighth of May, a Russian fleet of seventeen warships was there to watch. So Liaodong was saved, but not by China. It was saved by the interested intervention of three Western powers. Interested. Keep an eye on that word. For Li it was an awakening. He had feared Russia's designs on Korea, and had leaned on the trading nations, Britain and America. But it was the military powers, led by Russia, that had stepped in, and the trading nations had done nothing. From that time on, he depended more and more on Russia. His motives were questioned; even the sums supposedly paid to him were talked about openly in the clubs. The kinder reading is that he was cutting his losses, and making terms with the enemy he feared most to save what he could of China's hold on its northeast. Russia said it had acted in China's interest, and many Chinese believed it, at least for a short while. The bill came quickly. China needed money at once for the first instalments of the indemnity, and Russia arranged the loan, through French bankers, at a remarkably low four per cent. In return, China declared that no other power would get any control over its revenues unless Russia got the same. Germany, as thanks for its help, demanded a bay on the coast of Shandong. And Russia, which had just saved Port Arthur for China, would soon want it for itself. And in time Li Hongzhang himself would go to Moscow, for the coronation of the Tsar, and talk over the whole problem of the Far East with the Russians. Within a few years, people would talk of the foreign powers carving China up like a melon. That is where we go next time: Li among the great powers, the scramble for China's ports, and a young emperor who finally listens to Kang Youwei.

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. 23-25, 27-29, 30-32, 32-33, 35-36, 36-38, 38-39, 39-40, 42, 44-45, 47-48, 50-51, 55-57, 80-82, 129-130, https://archive.org/details/internationalre03mors
• James Allan, Under the Dragon Flag: My Experiences in the Chino-Japanese War (1898), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16407
• Percy Horace Kent, The Passing of the Manchus (1912), p. 11-12, https://archive.org/details/cu31924021495258
• Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (2005), pp. 2, 10-13, 13-14, 21-22
• Vladimir, The China-Japan War: Compiled from Japanese, Chinese and Foreign Sources (1896), pp. 372-374, 382-384, 400-403, 413-415, https://archive.org/download/in.ernet.dli.2015.285116/2015.285116.The-China-_text.pdf
• William T. Rowe, China's Last Empire: The Great Qing (2009), pp. 227-229, 229-230, 232-234, 234-235, 238-240