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China, 1895 to 1916, episode 13

The Emperor of Hongxian

Yuan Shikai reaches for the throne, and Liang Qichao, the reformer who fled in 1898 and later served in Yuan's government, refuses to help and becomes the voice of the opposition. The episode follows the two men from staged petitions and a unanimous provincial vote, through Liang's farewell letter and Cai E's escape to Yunnan, to the revolt that forces Yuan to cancel the monarchy and his death in June 1916, then closes the season by asking what these twenty years meant for ordinary people and what Yuan left behind. It draws on the republic's own documents, scholars, foreign observers, the Yunnan rebels and Liang Qichao's letter, the season's strongest Chinese public voice.

Beijing China Yunnan
Map drawn by Then and There on Natural Earth's public domain coastlines, rivers and lakes

Transcript

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

Last time, Japan served its Twenty One Demands on Yuan Shikai, and in May 1915, facing an ultimatum, Yuan signed. And at that very moment, with the humiliation barely signed, Yuan made his fateful decision: he would try to found a new dynasty. The writer you heard last time, asking what people could possibly mean by urging the president to ascend the throne, was Liang Qichao. This time, we find out who was urging, and what it cost. It is the last episode of the season, and it belongs to two men who have been with us since the beginning: the soldier and the scholar. The idea had not started in May. Ever since his coup of November 1913, the need to make his position permanent, something more lasting than a display of armed force, had been a daily subject of talk inside his own family. The loudest voice in that family belonged to his eldest son. The observer in Beijing described him as a young man who had absorbed every theory his foreign teachers taught him, without being able to apply a single one. He had been left half paralysed for years, and he had read his way through the literature on Napoleon. He meant to succeed his father as the legitimate heir. And, in the observer's words, "he daily preached to his father the necessity of plucking the pear as soon as it was ripe." Keep that pear in mind. It is going to come back more than once. There had been clues for anyone watching. You heard how Yuan brought back the worship of Heaven. On the twenty third of December 1914, he went to perform it himself. He put on his field marshal's uniform, rode in an armoured car down a road strewn with yellow sand to the Temple of Heaven, changed into a purple robe embroidered with dragons and a headdress in the imperial style, and prayed to Heaven in the name of the republic. Yellow was the emperor's colour. In the old days, no one but the emperor could make that sacrifice. Yuan, to be fair, invited the whole people to worship Heaven along with him, which no emperor would ever have allowed. But the clues were mounting. Yuan himself was more careful. As long as the plan looked premature, he turned it down. What finally moved him was an argument about timing. With the powers of Europe busy killing one another, almost anything in China could be done under cover of the war, so long as nobody touched vested foreign interests. So, very shortly after Hioki served the demands on the eighteenth of January, Yuan's lieutenants quietly began sounding out the leaders of opinion in Beijing on a change: the nominal republic would give way to a constitutional monarchy. All through the bargaining with Japan, while Yuan was supposed to be giving his whole mind to saving the country, his men were teaching official Beijing that the state's salvation lay in bringing back the old empire. And you will remember Yuan's own reckoning: Japan was itself a constitutional monarchy, and giving way in May would assure him of Japan's support. That reckoning is about to be tested. Yuan also knew what he was missing. He believed that if some scholar of national repute could be found to champion the idea openly, with enough authority, the game would be as good as won. There was one obvious man. Liang Qichao, the reformer of 1898, famous ever since, the man who had lent Yuan his name in 1913 and served in his government. Liang refused. He would not lend himself to the work, and sooner than be involved in the plot in any way, he threw up his post in Yuan's government and withdrew to the neighbouring city of Tianjin. In Tianjin, Liang lived in one of the foreign concessions, the districts that foreign powers ran under their own laws, where Yuan's police could not simply walk in and arrest him. It cost Yuan time. But not much. Forced to turn to a man the observer rated of secondary ability, Yuan chose Yang Du. Yang Du was born in 1875, which made him forty that year. He was a scholar from Hunan who had studied in Japan, and in the last years of the Qing he had made his name as an expert on constitutions. He was also an old friend of Liang Qichao. And he had a history with Yuan. In the last Qing assembly, the observer wrote, Yang Du had worked as Yuan's secret agent, and his constant appeals there had helped force the court to call Yuan back to office when the Wuchang rising broke out in 1911. So Yuan had his champion. The monarchy now needed an argument, and an audience.

The first argument came from America. You have met Frank Goodnow: the American legal adviser who drafted Yuan's constitution, the one that put every power in the president's hands. In 1914 Goodnow had been allowed to go home and become president of an American university, on condition that he stay available for advice whenever Yuan wanted it. In the summer of 1915 he was back in Beijing for the vacation. The university was Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore. And Yuan, still pretending to stand aside, asked his legal adviser a question: which suited China better, a republic or a monarchy? Goodnow produced his answer in a very few days. The memorandum said, in short, that the republic had failed in China because it did not suit Chinese conditions. China had a long tradition of autocratic rule. Most of its people were uneducated and had little experience of taking part in government. A constitutional monarchy, Goodnow argued, would prepare them for a republic later. His chief worry was the succession: who would come after Yuan. You will remember the answer Yuan had already given to that question. Three names, sealed in a gold box, in a stone house in the palace gardens. Goodnow had helped write that law too. Goodnow's memorandum was more careful than what was done with it. A change to monarchy, he wrote, would only help China if certain conditions were met, and "Whether the necessary conditions are present must be left to those who know China well and are responsible for her future progress." The observer was not impressed. Stripped down, he wrote, the learned doctor's only solution was to overthrow the government and restore the empire under the name of constitutional monarchy. And the moment it was published, in August, the memorandum was put to exactly the base uses anyone who knew China might have foreseen. A foreign professor's name was now on the monarchists' side. In Tianjin, Liang Qichao read it, and began to write. People who knew what he was preparing tried hard to stop him. Influential deputations came to beg him to think of China's dangerous position abroad, and not to add new quarrels to the strain. For a while he hesitated. In the end his political allies persuaded him to strike. His essay attacked what he called the question of guoti. Guoti means the form of the state: whether China was a republic or a monarchy. And it opened with the foreign doctor. Liang was not sure, he wrote, exactly how the talk of a second change had begun. Ostensibly, it was started by the remarks of Goodnow. Everything Goodnow had said, that a form of state must suit the country's conditions, that China should take warning from the republics of Central and South America, was very simple and easily deduced. How strange, Liang wrote, that China's politicians and scholars, as numerous as the trees in the forest, had never noticed these simple points for years, and now made a fetish of them because they came from the mouth of a foreigner. "Is it because no one except a foreign doctor can discover such facts?" He himself, he went on, had said all this, and more, more than ten years earlier. You heard him say it, from exile in Japan, against Sun Yat-sen's newspaper: that China needed a constitutional monarchy, and that a revolution would bring chaos. And then the line every reader remembered. "My regret is that my eyes are not blue and my hair not brown, and hence my words were not acceptable to the nation!" But Liang's real point was not about Goodnow. The time for that debate, he wrote, had passed. The moment to argue for a monarchy was 1911, when the revolution had only just begun. Where were you then, he asked the monarchists. Back then, he wrote, a humble man like himself, a stranger in a foreign land, had feared a republic did not suit China, and had written against it and wept till his eyes were dry. Liang admitted he had opposed the revolution. But once it had happened, the clock could not be turned back. "I am now opposing your theory of monarchical revolution, just as I once opposed your theory of republican revolution, in the same spirit, and I am doing the same duty." A change in the form of the state, he warned, was revolution, and the path of revolution leads to more revolution.

Yang Du
Yang Du. Unknown scanned by 天竺鼠, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

That same August, the monarchy got its society. It was called the Chouanhui. The name means roughly the Society to Plan for Peace and Stability. It was founded in Beijing in the middle of August 1915. Yang Du organised it, with five other men. Among the five was Yan Fu, the translator whose version of Thomas Huxley's essays on evolution had brought the idea of the struggle for survival to Chinese readers in the years after the war with Japan. The society did not hide. Hundreds of branches opened in the provinces, and money, the observer wrote, was spent like water to win members. Then it became known where the society actually sat: inside the Imperial City, in daily touch with the president's palace. The Imperial City was the walled quarter that surrounded the Forbidden City. Yuan lived and worked there, in the lake palaces on its western side. The chief prosecutor of Beijing, flooded with petitions denouncing the society, tried to take action against it. He was forced to leave the capital under threats against his life. After that, people stopped doubting. Almost with a gasp of disbelief, China realised that Yuan was openly trying to make himself emperor. To the observer, the whole movement from that August on was theatre: acting, done in the hope that the people would find it so admirable they would acclaim it as real, and call the dictator their king. Liang's essay turned on the society too. He had one plain question for it: who was the future emperor you have in mind? If it was someone other than the president, he wrote, they were plotting the destruction of the country. And if it was the president himself, the whole world knew the oath he had sworn. Then Liang played a card that Yuan had dealt him. That July, the newspapers had carried an interview between Yuan and Feng Guozhang, once the man at the head of Yuan's first army, and now in command on the lower Yangzi. Feng had remarked that South China might accept a monarchy one day. Yuan's face, it was reported, became stern. He said that when he sent his sons to study in England, he had quietly bought a small estate there, and that if the people insisted on making him emperor, he would leave China and spend the rest of his life abroad. Liang now threw it back at the monarchists. Feng Guozhang, he wrote, had told him himself: the president had prepared a few rooms in England, and "if the people would not spare him he would flee to the refuge he has prepared." Can it be, Liang asked, that you never heard this? And if the president is driven to carry out his threat and desert the palace, what will you say then? It was a neat trap. Either Yuan had lied to Feng, or the society was trying to drive him out of the country. And Liang said what the courts had not dared to. The society's members, he wrote, had "dared openly to call together your partisans and incite a revolution". The judges had not been brave enough to touch them, because they were all so close to the president. He also had an answer for the eldest son's pear. "To pluck the fruit before it is ripe, injures the roots of the tree; and to force the premature birth of a child kills the mother." Let the members of the society meditate on that, he wrote. The essay's effect was immediate, and it reached a very long way. Men understood that armed revolt was in the air. Among the educated all over the country there were ominous mutterings. But they were scattered, and the soldiers held the power, so nobody moved. Yuan read the situation accurately. He could easily become the object of public hatred if the people followed the scholars. So he placed himself outside the argument, and threw the whole responsibility onto the Council of State. You remember the Council of State: the body of men Yuan had picked himself, standing in for the parliament he had destroyed. In September he sent the Council a message. In his opinion, he said, this was not the right time to change the form of the state, but the matter deserved the most careful consideration, and the nation should be consulted by ballot. With that, the observer wrote, Yuan officially washed his hands of a plot in which he had been the prime mover.

So what was the case Liang was answering? To hear it properly, we need Yang Du. That spring, months before the society existed, Yang Du had written an eloquent defence of constitutional monarchy. It was a dialogue making the case for a constitutional monarchy, an argument between two men, one asking questions and the other explaining. By August it was in everybody's hands. The observer thought it reactionary and illogical, and yet, he admitted, strangely acute. The explainer begins bluntly. If China does not change its form of government, there is no hope of its becoming rich or strong. China, he says, is doomed to perish. Why? Look at the army. Germany and Japan are monarchies, and their soldiers are the most disciplined in the world. France and America are republics, rich but not strong. Chinese soldiers, he says, used to tell each other, "We eat the imperial food and we must therefore serve the imperial master." Now the imperial family is gone, and in its place is an impersonal republic they know nothing about. And as the talk of equality and freedom has seeped into the ranks, it has become harder and harder to control them. In the south, he says, commanders once had to obey their officers, and the officers had to obey their men. Now we are deeply satisfied if the army of the republic does not openly mutiny. Then money. Industry fears nothing so much as disorder. The rich will not put their money into factories, he says, because they fear another civil war may break out at any moment, and the recent failed second revolution is their warning. Take Mexico as a warning, he says. There is very little difference between that country and China. On paper China has a provisional constitution and legislative bodies. In truth, he says, China has a constitutional government in name only, and is a monarchy in spirit. And then the deepest fear in the dialogue: what happens when the president changes. Look at the people of China today, he says. They know that something terrible is coming sooner or later, and they dare not think about the future. The corrupt official lines his pockets, ready to flee abroad, or at least to the foreign concessions. As long as an able president rules, there is peace. But once an incapable man takes the office, chaos will become the order of the day, and it will end in the president's overthrow and the destruction of the country. So when the questioner asks, at last, whether nothing can save China, the dialogue gives its answer. "If China wishes to save herself from ultimate disappearance from the face of the earth, first of all she must get rid of the republic. Should she desire wealth and strength, she must adopt a constitutional government. Should she want constitutional government she must first establish a monarchy." It was a modern argument, made in the same language as its opponents used. Yang Du's point was not that a republic was wrong, only that it was premature, and that a constitutional monarchy would prepare China for true democracy. Readers soon took it as a warning of what was coming. The new empire's constitution, the dialogue proposed at the end, should be a mixture of the Prussian and Japanese systems. And Yang Du's last words were that it is best to be honest with the people. The observer could not resist. No more damning indictment of Yuan's regime, he wrote, could possibly have been penned. And Liang's answer to his old friend was short. Yang Du, he thought, was basically right about China. He had missed only one thing. Premature or not, the revolution of 1911 had wrecked the very idea of an emperor's sacred aura beyond repair. The awe the throne once inspired had died with the dynasty.

That autumn, the foreign powers spoke. Yuan had been counting on Japan. Japan's prime minister, Okuma Shigenobu, had told the press that monarchy was the right form of government for China, and that if a throne were restored, Yuan was the only suitable man to sit on it. Yuan, naturally, concluded that the Japanese government looked kindly on his plans. On the twenty eighth of October 1915, Japan, together with Britain and Russia, made official inquiries at the Chinese Foreign Office about what this monarchy movement meant. Japan was careful to say that it acted only out of concern for the general peace. But nobody in Beijing had forgotten the ultimatum of May. The warning had an unmistakable note to it, and it caused grave alarm. Among the monarchists, it landed like a bombshell, playing havoc with the house of cards they had built so carefully. Okuma, asked later in Japan's parliament how he squared his interview with his government's warning, simply denied he had ever said it. Some Japanese leaders had signalled support for a new dynasty, and then turned against it. Japan would even sell arms to Yuan's opponents, among them its old friend Sun Yat-sen. So much for the goodwill Yuan thought he had bought in May. Beijing's answer, at the beginning of November, was that the movement had gone too far to be stopped, and that the powers need not worry about public safety. Not satisfied, all the Allied powers, now joined by France and Italy, pressed again. They got a formal note promising that law and order would be carefully kept. And then, aware that pressing further would be fraught with difficulty, they decided to watch and do nothing more in public. Inside the palace, for a week and more, there was a desperate struggle. Yuan was too shrewd not to see how dangerous things were becoming, and that if they went wrong, he would be the chief victim. But family influence and the voices of the schemers were too strong for him, and in the end he gave his reluctant consent to go further. On the seventh of November, a coded telegram went out from Beijing to the governors of the provinces. A certain foreign power, it said, had lately forced Britain and Russia to join in giving advice to China. If China took the advice and postponed the enthronement, it would be admitting the powers' right to meddle. So nothing could be delayed. And then the telegram explained, in so many words, how the play would be staged. When the votes arrived, the government would make a show of wavering, out of regard for foreign opinion. The people, meanwhile, were to show their firm determination to go ahead at all costs, so that the powers would see that China was of one mind. It closed by asking the governors to treat the matter as strictly confidential.

How do you get a unanimous vote? You write it in advance. The Council of State had passed a law for a national convention of citizens' representatives, to be chosen in each province, to vote on the form of the state. Under it, the voting in each province was run by the provincial authorities, under instructions from Beijing. The instructions came by coded telegram, from Zhu Qiqian, the minister of the interior, and his colleagues. Zhu Qiqian was the minister who had been rebuilding Beijing's streets and gates, and opening old imperial grounds to the public as parks. The vote on the form of the state was to be followed at once by the nomination of Yuan as emperor, without any further voting. The chambers of commerce, the military and the political bodies were to send their own telegrams within three days of the vote, with as many signatures as possible. And since there would be an enthronement edict, the officials were asked to draft the letters of congratulation in advance. On the twenty sixth of October, two days before Japan's warning, Zhu's office sent further orders, designed so that nothing could slip. The officials were to tell the representatives that, a monarchy having been decided on, not a single day should pass without an emperor. The representatives present should then nominate Yuan as Great Emperor, and show their agreement by standing up. Then they would sign a letter of nomination, already written for them, and hand their powers to the Council of State, to act for them until their petition was granted. On the exact wording of that letter, the telegram left nothing to chance. "These characters, forty-five in all, must on no account be altered. The rest of the text is left to your discretion." And there was a final instruction, which is almost touching in its honesty. The nomination letter and the handing over of powers, the telegram admitted, were matters which "transgress the bounds of the law". So the governors were earnestly asked not to send any telegraphic inquiry about them to the bureau running the convention, so that the bureau would not find itself in the awkward position of having to reply. In November, the provinces were even told to start writing emperor instead of president in their documents and petitions, before the votes were cast, so that the question would be settled in practice. Nobody outside the government saw any of these telegrams for months. They came out only after the rising in the south, when Yuan's opponents, who now had the provinces' confidential files, published the secret instructions in full, under a sarcastic title: the People's Will. By the beginning of December the voting was done, and the results were telegraphed to Beijing. The assembly Yuan had appointed elected him emperor with remarkable unanimity. The vote was 1,993 to none. It sent Yuan two memorials, addressed to his sacred majesty, demanding that he accept the Mandate of Heaven. The Mandate of Heaven was the old idea that Heaven granted the right to rule to a worthy dynasty, and took it away when the dynasty failed. The country's name changed by a single character. The Republic of China, Zhonghua minguo, became the Empire of China, Zhonghua diguo. And obsequious officials went back to the old imperial language, addressing Yuan as the heir of the long line of sovereigns going back to the legendary days of Yao and Shun. Yao and Shun, you may recall, were the sage kings Yuan had praised in 1913, when he told the world he had no wish to be emperor. They were the kings said to have handed the throne to the worthiest man, not to their own sons.

Cai E, in a portrait from before 1916
Cai E, in a portrait from before 1916. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Now I need to take you back a little, to the man who would undo all this. His name was Cai E, and he had been Liang Qichao's disciple since 1898. Cai E had been one of Liang's teenage students at the reformers' school in Changsha, in Hunan, in the months before the Hundred Days. He went on to a first class military education at the army schools in Tokyo. In 1911 Yunnan, in the far southwest on the border of French Indochina, was one of the first provinces to follow Wuchang, and Cai E, then commanding a division, was elected its commander in chief. In a few weeks he had driven out every official loyal to the dynasty. There were even reports, back then, that this young man dreamed of founding a dynasty of his own in the mountains of the south. Yuan heard everyone who knew Cai E call him a genius. And it was Yuan's habit to bring to Beijing anyone who might challenge him. He coaxed Cai E into giving up Yunnan, partly by letting him choose his own successor there, and by the start of 1914 Cai E was in the capital. In Beijing he was put in charge of an office for reorganising the land tax. There was no money for it. Its real purpose was to keep him under watch. He chafed. He began a secret correspondence with political exiles abroad, and soon he was an open suspect. Then he did something bold. At the very start of the monarchy movement, to avoid arrest, Cai E put his name at the head of the list of generals in Beijing who petitioned for a monarchy. It bought him safety for a time. But he was secretly in touch with Liang Qichao, who had left the capital to fight the monarchy, and he was watched more and more closely, and there were hints that he would be killed. So Cai E got his family out to Tianjin, and then, one dawn, he slipped away himself, caught the train, and reached Tianjin without being seen. It was well into the morning before the detectives who watched him every night realised he was gone. Telegrams flew in every direction, above all to Tianjin, the great refuge of political fugitives, ordering his arrest. A bare quarter of an hour before the police began their search, Cai E and his family went aboard a Japanese steamer lying in the Tianjin river. From Japan he and his revolutionary friends sailed for the south. He reached Yunnan from Hong Kong, by the French railway that ran up from Indochina. That railway ran from the port of Haiphong, in what is now northern Vietnam, up through the mountains to Kunming, the capital of Yunnan. Yuan, furious, had telegraphed confidential agents in Yunnan to kill Cai E on sight. Cai E was warned in time. He entered the province in December, and found it almost ready for revolt, though short of arms and ammunition. His plan was to strike fast, down from the mountains, through the province of Sichuan to the city of Chongqing, take the upper Yangzi in one march, and close Sichuan to the northern troops.

A ten cash coin of Yuan Shikai's empire, marked First Year of Hung Shuan
A ten cash coin of Yuan Shikai's empire, marked First Year of Hung Shuan. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Meanwhile, in Beijing, the show reached its climax. On the eleventh of December 1915, the Council of State met in a hurry, found that the national convention had elected Yuan emperor unanimously, and formally offered him the throne in a humble petition. Custom expected a man offered a throne to decline it first, to show he did not want it. Yuan modestly refused. A second petition was handed to him at once, and this one he accepted. His acceptance spoke of how impossible it was for "one without merit and without virtue like myself" to carry such burdens. But the people's expectations were too pressing: "Thus I find myself unable to offer further argument just as I am unable to escape the position." He ordered the ministries to make the necessary preparations and report back to him. There was not a word about the enthronement itself. Cautious to the end, the observer noted, Yuan had worded his acceptance so that it sounded as if he were being forced into it against his better judgment. The empire needed a reign name. Chinese emperors gave their reigns a name, and years were counted by it. The Qing emperors you have met, Guangxu among them, are known by theirs. Yuan's was Hongxian. It means something like Grand Constitutional era. It even sounded modern. Yuan started his reign on the first of January 1916, by the Western calendar rather than the old Chinese one. The year 1915 ended with Beijing brightly lit up in honour of the new regime. That official joy, the observer wrote, was as false as everything else had been, and the crowds did not believe it. For a while, the government gazette printed imperial edicts and presidential mandates side by side: the edicts for Chinese eyes, the mandates for foreigners. The preparations went ahead in style. That January, it was reported, an imperial edict on yellow paper announcing the enthronement was ready to go out, twelve new imperial seals of jade or gold were being made, and a golden chair and a state coach in the style of Louis the Fifteenth were nearly finished. Officials were to carry ivory tablets again, as in the old court dress. The very mention of it, the observer said, sent the price of ivory in Beijing leaping skywards. New titles of nobility were handed out in great batches overnight, princes, dukes, marquises, viscounts and barons, and in very many cases they were turned down. Everybody knew they were not worth the paper they were written on. One title mattered more than the rest. Li Yuanhong, the colonel who had been forced into the revolution at gunpoint, was still vice president. When Yuan accepted the throne, Li was made a prince. He refused it. And when the allowances of a prince were brought to him from the palace, he sent them back, saying that since he had not accepted the title, the money was not his. There were fears, openly spoken, that he would be assassinated. He did not move. And the men Yuan most needed had begun to fall ill. A mild but apparently disabling disease of mysterious origin struck many men at the top of the civil and military services. In other words, Yuan's best generals, the men he had trained himself, could see the monarchy might hand power to his widely despised son, rather than to them. And they sat out what came next. The eldest son had wanted his father to pick the pear while it was ripe. He had picked it. And the men who were supposed to guard the orchard were all on the sick list.

In Tianjin, in December, word reached Liang Qichao that his assassination was being planned. He fled secretly, heading for the south. On the eve of his departure, Liang sent one last document to the emperor elect. It was his answer to what the observer called an attempt to lure him back to Beijing and trap him. He wrote it as a farewell. He was going south to visit his parents, he said, and looking at the palace gate from afar, he knew he was leaving the capital for a long time. He had been the Great President's protege, and his sense of duty would not let him go without speaking. The question of the form of the state, Liang wrote, seemed to have gone too far to reconsider. Yuan's position was that of a man riding on the back of a wild tiger. The Chinese saying is that a man riding a tiger cannot get off. Liang had thought about saying nothing more, he wrote, but when he considered the future, he trembled like an autumn leaf. The foreign advice and the rebel plots could be handled. What Liang bitterly deplored was that the world's trust in Yuan, built over four years of service, would be shattered. "Once, however, a promise is broken, it will be as hard to win back the people's trust as to ascend to the very Heavens." Oaths of office had been sworn several times, he wrote, and before the lips were dry, actions had made liars of the words. And the people, Liang warned, would sum Yuan up in a single sentence: "he started in righteousness but ended in self-seeking". Then he told Yuan who had really done this to him. "The Great President sees no one but those who are always near him; and these are the people who have tried to win his favour and gain rewards by concocting the alleged unanimous petitions of the whole country urging his accession to the Throne. In reality, however, the will of the people is precisely the opposite." Even the high officials in the capital, he wrote, joked and sneered about it. And the small people who crowded the streets and markets went about as if something terrible might happen at any moment. He warned Yuan about his soldiers. There had been a general, long ago, whose troops threw the yellow robe of an emperor around his shoulders and so compelled him to found the Song dynasty. And there had been a mutiny in the Tang, when soldiers forced an emperor to put his favourite consort to death in front of them. If Yuan could not silence his soldiers as a president, Liang wrote, he would not be able to stop them as an emperor either. "To give them the handle of the sword is simply courting trouble for the future." And he reminded Yuan of the country outside the palace. Drought and flood had struck China again and again. On top of that, Liang wrote, there were corrupt officials, robbers ravaging without end, harsh punishments and unusually heavy taxes, and all of it fed the murmurs and complaints of the people. At the end, he set out what a real reform would look like. He begged Yuan to restore less of the old and work for real reform, to set up a real body that spoke for the true will of the people, and to let public opinion grow freely. He hoped Yuan would escape the fate of those branded in China's annals with the name of traitor. He wrote these words, he said, "with tears dropping into the ink-slab". So the reformer of 1898 took his leave of the man who had betrayed the reformers that year. It was whispered afterwards that the letter shook Yuan so badly that he came within a hair of cancelling the whole scheme. But in the end, family influence won again, and Yuan pushed on.

Down in the south, Cai E had a problem with his timetable. The key to any rising was the Yangzi, and the key to the Yangzi was Feng Guozhang, at Nanjing, who held the balance of power on the great river. Feng had spoken of the would be emperor with open contempt, and he had let the republicans know that once they reached the Yangzi valley, he would bring his troops over to them. Yuan's spies found out. Following his usual method, Yuan ordered Feng to Beijing as chief of the general staff, a post that would put him under Yuan's eye. Feng found one excuse after another to delay. But finally he telegraphed Cai E: unless Yunnan hurried, he would have to leave Nanjing, and hand the river to one of Yuan's own men. So, to save Feng, Cai E sent the ultimatum fourteen days too soon. It went before his troops had crossed the mountains into Sichuan and taken Chongqing, which would have shut the door on the northern armies for good. It worked for Feng. With Yunnan in open revolt, Feng could telegraph Beijing that he could not possibly leave Nanjing without rebellion breaking out. Yuan understood the threat, and grimly accepted the checkmate. But the early warning gave Beijing time, and it largely crippled the Yunnan offensive. Had Cai E been given those two weeks, the observer believed, he would probably have fought the most brilliant modern campaign China had seen. He was an excellent soldier. On Christmas Day 1915, ominous rumours ran through the diplomatic quarter in Beijing. Within days everyone knew: Yunnan had sent the government a thinly veiled ultimatum. Cancel the monarchy and execute its chief supporters at once, or the province would take whatever steps it saw fit. The text was published by a brave newspaper editor in Beijing on the thirty first of December, and it electrified the capital. The first telegram reminded Yuan of his oaths. "Not once but twice hath the President taken the oath to observe and obey the Constitution and protect and maintain the Republic." How could a man rule a people, it asked, when he ate his own words and tore up his own oath? The vote, it said, had been presented as the unanimous will of the people. Everyone knew it was the work of ignoble men, whose bribery and intimidation had been sanctioned by the authorities. It even quoted Yuan back at himself, his own idea that a dynasty is as cheap as a worn-out shoe. The men of Yunnan, who had received favours and high posts from Yuan, said they offered their advice like men sailing together in a boat in danger. They asked him to renew his promise to protect the republic, and publicly swear that a monarchy would never appear again. And it ended like this. "In sending this telegram our eyes are wet with tears knowing not what more to say. We respectfully await the order of the President with our troops under arms." It was signed, simply, the governors of Yunnan. The second telegram named names. The movement, it said, had been born in Beijing, and its ringleaders were all Yuan's intimates. The society organised by Yang Du and five others had set the fire ablaze. It demanded that Yuan publicly execute twelve men. Yang Du's name came first. Yan Fu was on it, and Zhu Qiqian, whose circular telegram, Yunnan said, had brought down the republic, and Liang Shiyi, the fixer who had once talked the imperial family into abdicating. "We await a reply within twenty-four hours." Yuan's government sent a stream of telegrams to Yunnan, trying to talk the leaders out of revolt. Pride, the observer thought, kept Yuan from stepping back from the false position he had taken. And very gravely, the standard of rebellion was raised in Yunnan's capital, and the people were called on to shed their blood.

The rebels called their army the National Protection Army, the army to protect the nation, which meant the republic. The war that followed is known as the National Protection War. Cai E led the military side, from Yunnan. Liang Qichao led the political side. And the whole movement, the observer wrote, was inspired and very largely directed by Liang the scholar. This rising felt different from the failed revolt of 1913. There was a soberness and deliberation about it that struck close observers as ominous. At first, it looked hopeless. Yuan acted with his old energy. Troops were sent toward Sichuan in great numbers, hauled up the rapids of the upper Yangzi in fleets of junks seized for the purpose. A junk was the flat bottomed Chinese sailing boat that carried most of the river's traffic. It became a race between the mountain men of Yunnan and the plainsmen of the north, for Chongqing. Yuan's men got there first, and Chongqing was saved. Then came heavy, endless fighting in the mountains. The southern troops had less mountain artillery and fewer supplies, and fell back on guerrilla warfare. The original Yunnan force was nearly wiped out, and many of the survivors died of disease and exposure. Cai E pushed himself through all of it, on forced marches over those mountains. And yet the south kept winning where it counted. Yuan could find almost no reliable generals who were not on the sick list, and so the southern commanders, against long odds, won some victories. Guizhou, Yunnan's neighbour, joined the revolt almost at once. Yuan put eighty thousand men in the field against the south, with eighty thousand more mobilised behind them. He asked France to close the frontier with Indochina. France refused, and rebels and guns kept coming into Yunnan along the French railway. He sent an embassy to Tokyo to buy Japan off with special industrial concessions. Beijing was coldly told that, owing to court engagements, the emperor of Japan could not receive any Chinese mission. Meanwhile, Yuan's money was running out. The government printed paper money to fill the gaps, and the shortage of silver grew so bad that it spread panic. On the twenty third of February, a mandate put off the enthronement indefinitely. It came too late. By the end of February, Beijing admitted Guizhou was in open revolt, rebel troops were reported moving into Hunan, and in Sichuan local troops were rising in growing numbers. A third province came over next: Guangxi, under a respected old soldier, Lu Rongting. Liang Qichao made his way to Guangxi in person, and on the sixteenth of March it formally declared its independence. It was understood, too, that a fateful interview with the British minister weighed heavily with Yuan. The British minister in Beijing was an old friend who had known Yuan intimately since his Korea days, and believed so remarkable a character could do little wrong. And in Guangzhou, the ruthless governor Long Jiguang, whom Yuan had planted there in 1913 and lately made a prince, was edging toward the other side. Yuan had given him the princedom hoping it would spur him to crush the south. Precisely the opposite happened, the observer wrote, since even murderers can read the signs of the times.

On the twenty second of March 1916, the emperor elect issued a mandate cancelling the entire monarchy. He would form a responsible cabinet instead. The decree told the story Yuan's way. Ever since the revolution, it said, the advocates of monarchy had pressed him, hoping to put an end to all the strife for power and begin a reign of peace. Each time, he said, he had rebuked them. Then the Council of State had put the question to the citizens' representatives, and they had elected him unanimously. He had declined in earnest words, he said, because accepting would break his oath. But the Council had argued, firmly, that the oath of the chief executive should be kept or set aside according to the will of the people. "Their arguments were so irresistible that there was in truth no excuse for me further to decline the offer." So, the decree said, he had hidden behind the excuse of preparations, to satisfy the people, but had never actually carried them out. He had been content in retirement by the river in Henan, he wrote, and he had come out of it only by mistake, elected by the people after the revolution, to prop up a tottering structure. You remember that retirement: the court had dismissed him in 1909, and sent him home to rest his foot. Why would he want a throne, the decree asked, when the whole of Chinese history showed the sad fate of the descendants of emperors? And then came the line that sums up the whole decree. "As my sincerity has not been such as to win the hearts of the people and my judgment has not been sound enough to appraise every man, I have myself alone to blame for lack of virtue. Why then should I blame others?" He would, he said, suppress himself in order to yield to others. The acceptance of the throne, made on the eleventh of December, was cancelled. The petitions from the provinces naming him emperor were all sent back, to be passed to the petitioners for destruction, and all preparations were to stop at once. "In brief I now confess that all the faults of the country are the result of my own faults." When he thought about the state of the country, he wrote, he lay awake in the darkness of midnight. Peace broke out. The "eighty-three days dream" of the Hongxian era was over. Nobody was fooled. Everywhere, the observer wrote, the decree was taken as an admission that Yuan was nearly beaten, and that a little more would finish him. His promise to open a proper legislature on the first of May was met with derision. By the middle of April, five provinces had declared independence: Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, Guangdong and Zhejiang. Eight more were preparing to follow. The southern provinces, run in practice by their own military men, called Yuan a traitor to the republic. A Southern Confederacy was organised, with a supreme military council sitting at Guangzhou, and Long Jiguang had been won over against his master. And Liang Qichao was moving from place to place, inspiring move after move.

Yuan Shikai's funeral procession on the Palace Approach near Qianmen Gate, 1916
Yuan Shikai's funeral procession on the Palace Approach near Qianmen Gate, 1916. Rowanwindwhistler, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In May came the final blow. Sichuan, a province with more people than France, declared its independence, and the whole northern army on the upper Yangzi was caught in a trap. Sichuan's governor was a man Yuan had trusted completely. On the twelfth of May, the banks in Beijing stopped paying out silver. The government banks had scarcely a dollar left, and a last attempt to borrow in America had failed. From every quarter, men now telegraphed Yuan that he must go, and Feng Guozhang was one of them. The southern government elected Li Yuanhong president, on the ground that Yuan had ceased to be president the moment he accepted the throne. And every enemy Yuan had ever made was hurrying home from exile. Sun Yat-sen was back in Shanghai by the beginning of May. At a conference called at Nanjing, Feng Guozhang produced a telegram from Yuan saying he was willing to go, if his life and property were guaranteed. By the end of May, there was no government left in Beijing at all. The capital's writ ran no more than ten miles beyond the city walls. Government departments refused Chinese money and demanded foreign dollars. What kept the city from looting was its police and gendarmerie, sixteen thousand men. Officials sent their valuables out of the city, or into the Legation Quarter, for safe keeping. Yuan's nervous collapse was known in every legation. What was left of the government, the observer wrote, was a city state, run by Liang Shiyi, Yuan's money man, who spent the last weeks juggling the market in copper coins, and netting a few thousand more for his own purse. Even in 1900, when the court fled from the Boxer war, the observer thought, there had been a certain dignity left. Now there was not even that. The vice president, Li Yuanhong, had managed to move his household out of the palace grounds. Some foreign powers offered him protection. He turned it down. Endless rumours ran among the common people that there would be great trouble at the Dragon Festival, on the fifth of June. Early on the sixth of June 1916, word ran through Beijing that Yuan Shikai was dead. At first nobody believed it. But by eleven it was known for certain in the Legation Quarter that he had died a few minutes after ten that morning, of uraemia, with the surgeon of the French legation attending him almost to the end. Uraemia is the poisoning of the blood that follows when the kidneys fail. The doctor's certificate put an end to the rumours of suicide. He was fifty six. A few minutes before he died, he is reported to have whispered, hoarsely, "I did not wish to be Emperor. Those around me said that the people wanted a king and named me for the Throne. I believed and was misled." It is close to what Liang had told him in his farewell letter: that the men around him had concocted the petitions. Only Yuan offered it as his excuse, where Liang had offered it as a warning. He left a last mandate. In it he said he blushed to admit that he had not achieved one ten thousandth part of his intention to save the country and the people. The country's foundation was not yet secure, he wrote, and the people's hardships not relieved. "I was just thinking how I could retire into private life and rest myself in the forest and near the springs in fulfilment of my original desire, when illness has suddenly overtaken me." Under the provisional constitution, the vice president would now exercise the president's powers. The next day, Li Yuanhong became president of the republic. Among the signatures on the mandate was Duan Qirui's, as secretary of state and minister of war. Duan, the officer from Yuan's northern army you met at the abdication, would hold much of the real power in Beijing in the years ahead. So who was he, this man we have followed for twenty years? The case against him is easy to make. He betrayed the reformers of 1898, who came to him for help. He betrayed the Qing, who called him back to save them in 1911. And in 1915, he betrayed the republic. He crushed the parliament, stamped out the elected assemblies, ruled by decree, and in the end destroyed his own regime. But hold on before you sign the verdict. Yuan inherited a government that was bankrupt, bleeding a deficit of thirteen million yuan every month. The land tax, the old backbone of imperial revenue, stayed in local and provincial hands, and Yuan collected almost none of it. He tried to reform the courts and the finances, to bring modern educated men into government, to build schools, to suppress opium and to restore the country's infrastructure. He was trying to carry on the late Qing's New Policies, and the government he took over could not reach down into the counties the way even the Qing had. The observer in Beijing had his own verdict. Yuan, he wrote, was killed by his foreign friends, by the advice he was given in law, in finance, in politics and in diplomacy. At every turning, the men who should have taught him to be loyal to the republic's Western ideals showed him how to be disloyal instead. He was never a confident emperor. He showed a deep ambivalence about the throne, and an indecision quite unlike him, and he did not reach for it the way the founders of the old dynasties had. He seems to have believed what Goodnow and many of his advisers believed: that the people were too ignorant and the country too backward for a republic. But he misread his own country. The conservatives who still took monarchy seriously saw him as the man who had betrayed the Qing, and the liberals thought monarchy a step backward. They might have taken him as a military dictator. They would not take him as an emperor. So here is my verdict. Yuan was a builder of states who never believed the people he governed had any part to play in building one. He was brilliant at holding power and blind to where it came from. And at the very end, he could not tell his own wish from the advice of the men around him. What did he leave behind? Yuan had built China's best army divisions himself, in the eighteen nineties and after, and their leading generals were his proteges. After his death, the trend toward military rule became outright warlordism. There followed a period with no effective central government at all. And the risings of 1913 and of 1916, the second revolution and the war to protect the republic, had added their own share to the militarising of Chinese society. For ordinary people, that meant more of the very troubles Liang had warned Yuan about in his farewell letter. Warlords pushed taxes and conscription beyond what people could bear. Passing armies made life precarious, and village militias, bandit gangs and outside armies blurred into one another, none of them a reliable friend to the farmer. With no money and no leadership, the dykes and irrigation works that farming depended on went on falling apart. And soldiers, underpaid and often hungry, simply took what they wanted from peasants and merchants. Think back to where we began, in 1894. A dynasty that thought Japan an insignificant island, and a young man in Korea working for Li Hongzhang to keep Japan out. Twenty years later, the Qing were gone, and Japan held its gains in Shandong and South Manchuria by treaty. The young man from Korea had outlived the dynasty he served and the republic he swore to protect, and he left behind nothing he had built so well as his army. And the others? Li Hongzhang and the Empress Dowager Cixi were long dead, she in 1908, he in 1901, the same year the Boxer peace was signed. Cai E's forced marches over the mountains of Sichuan had broken his health, and tuberculosis finally claimed him. He died in Japan in November 1916. He was thirty three. Liang Qichao would serve in one more government, briefly, in 1917, and then leave politics for teaching and writing. He died in 1929. Liang had once written a verse with the line "Ten years after you will think of me". Every word he had spoken, he complained, became a subject for thought only ten years after he said it. In his essay against the throne he wrote that his hope was that there would be no occasion for the country to think of his present words ten years hence. But Yuan's death did open one door. With him gone, China's thinkers could suddenly speak with fewer restraints. That year Cai Yuanpei, the scholar who had taken Yuan's signed oath from his hand at his inauguration, was appointed head of Beijing University. And the young radicals he brought there turned on the whole old order. One of them, Chen Duxiu, proclaimed that "Confucianism and the Chinese monarchical system possess an inextricable relationship". The emperors were gone. Now the argument was about what they had left in people's heads. In Yuan's last days, the first of Zhang Xun's troops had arrived in Beijing: the old general whose men had sacked Nanjing for Yuan in 1913. His men still wore the queue, the long braid of the Qing. In the summer of 1917, Zhang Xun would march them into Beijing and put the boy emperor Puyi back on the throne. It lasted twelve days. That is a story for the warlord years, when the generals Yuan made fought over what he left. The soldier is gone, the scholar has won his argument, and the throne is empty. But it is not, quite yet, forgotten. Thank you for listening to this season.

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