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China, 1895 to 1916, episode 3

A Week in September

In September 1898 the reformers decide the Empress Dowager Cixi must be stopped, and turn to Yuan Shikai, a general with five thousand foreign drilled troops whom the emperor has just put in charge of army reform. Yuan's choice that week decides who rules China and starts the season's spine; the episode asks whether he betrayed the reform or whether Cixi was already moving, and gives real time to the conflicting accounts, including Yuan's own uncorroborated version. It is told almost entirely through foreign observers and scholars; no reformer's own claim is in the sources yet.

Beijing Tianjin
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, the Guangxu emperor spent the summer of 1898 pouring out reform decrees, with Kang Youwei at his ear, in what came to be called the Hundred Days. His aunt, the Empress Dowager Cixi, let the first ones through. Then, in that first week, she had his tutor thrown out and put the army around the capital in the hands of her own man, Ronglu. By September the emperor was sacking officials who stood in his way, Li Hongzhang among them, while the bureaucracy sat still and waited to see what his aunt would do. Both sides could see the moment to strike had come, and both needed the same soldier: Yuan Shikai, once China's resident in Korea, now commanding five thousand foreign drilled troops of the northern army under Ronglu. This episode is about one week in September, and what Yuan did with it. It is the week that set him on the road he will walk for the rest of this story. Start with the emperor. Kang Youwei warned him that his aunt, backed by Li Hongzhang and by imperial clansmen with grudges of their own, was about to move against him and take away his personal freedom. So the emperor decided to get in first, to shut his aunt away and clip her wings before she could do the same to him. As he saw it, it was do or die. And as his first step, he sent for Yuan Shikai. Yuan was in his fortieth year, and on top of his command he was now the provincial judge of Zhili. A provincial judge was one of the senior officials under a provincial governor, in charge of the province's courts and its criminal cases. Yuan came promptly. On the fifteenth of September 1898 he was received in audience, and the emperor sounded him out carefully on his views. At that first audience, Yuan convinced the emperor of his zeal for reform. An edict went out putting Yuan in charge of army reform, and giving him the rank, though not the post, of a vice president of one of the six boards. In practice, it meant Yuan would be in real command of the northern army, while Ronglu, shut up in his headquarters, would command it in name only. The emperor was reaching past his aunt's man for his aunt's army. Yuan was also summoned to an audience with the Empress Dowager herself. So within a few days, Yuan Shikai had been received by both of them, the two people about to fight over who would rule China. And on the morning of the twentieth of September, he was called back for a last audience with the emperor, before returning to his troops at Tianjin. What the emperor said to him in that room, and what Yuan did next, is the question this whole episode turns on.

Kang Youwei had seen the danger coming. If the emperor went on as he was, the old guard would rally around the Empress Dowager, and she would come out of retirement to lead them. The way he saw it, the emperor's course could end only one of two ways. Either the emperor built a party around himself strong enough to stifle all opposition, or the enemies of reform would rise and take back control. For Kang the danger was personal. He had attacked her violently, and criticised her without mercy. Things had gone too far for half measures. So the reformers settled on a plot to seize the Empress Dowager and shut her away, under the emperor's control. Everything hinged on the northern army, and on its commander, Ronglu, the Empress Dowager's kinsman and lifelong friend. Nothing could be done until Ronglu was out of the way. He had been the friend of her youth, and court gossip said more than a friend. He had stood by her through her whole career, and he was the adviser she trusted most. So the plan was this. Yuan Shikai would go to Tianjin and have Ronglu beheaded, there and then, in his own headquarters. Then he would take over the government and bring the northern army to Beijing without delay. In Beijing the Empress Dowager would be seized and imprisoned in the Summer Palace, and the leaders of the conservative party would be arrested. On that list were the two presidents of the Board of Rites the emperor had just sacked, one of them her kinsman Huaitabu, and a hard line minister named Gangyi, whose name will come back. Think about what that plan asked of one man. Ronglu was not only Yuan's superior. Years before, the two of them had sworn an oath of brotherhood. Kill your commander and your sworn brother, march on the capital, and lay hands on the woman who had held power in China for forty years. That was the job. The danger was closing in on the reformers too. After Yuan's first audience, the Empress Dowager told the emperor that Kang had spoken disrespectfully of her private life and her morals, and that he must be arrested. On the seventeenth, the emperor sent Kang a private note, warning him of his danger and urging him to leave Beijing. That day's decree, as the court published it, simply ordered Kang to leave for Shanghai with all speed. Another version has the emperor adding a plea of his own: "devise means to save me without delay". Kang did not go. He spent the next two days in hiding, meeting his followers, who told him "the situation was getting more serious". He asked a friendly missionary, Timothy Richard, to win the British and American envoys over to the emperor's side. But the very envoys he hoped for, and the other foreigners who might have given wise counsel, were all away from Beijing during the crisis. Richard got no thanks for trying. The British envoy later told him he would do well not to interfere in affairs of state. There would be no help from outside. Everything now depended on Yuan Shikai.

Yuan Shikai as governor of Shandong, between 1899 and 1902
Yuan Shikai as governor of Shandong, between 1899 and 1902. Alfons von Mumm, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

From here on, the story of that week comes down to us in two versions, and they do not differ on small things. They differ on who gave the order, and on whether Yuan Shikai betrayed anyone. Here the sources disagree. Yuan's own version begins on the night of the eighteenth of September, when Tan Sitong came to see him. Tan was by now a secretary of the Grand Council. The servants were sent out of the room. After a few words, Tan denounced Ronglu in scathing terms and laid out the plan, and he said it had the emperor's consent and approval. Then he produced a rough draft of the plot, in ordinary black ink, and asked Yuan to join it. Yuan answered that there was no imperial order for him to do any such thing. Orders in the emperor's own hand were written with the vermilion brush, in a red ink reserved for the throne. So Tan produced a document. It was in black ink, neatly written in the emperor's style, and it said that the emperor was bent on reform, but since conservatives opposed him everywhere, four reformers, Tan among them, were to devise some "sound plan of action". Yuan objected again. It was not in vermilion, and it said nothing about killing Ronglu or confining the Empress Dowager. Tan said the vermilion original was in another reformer's hands and this was only a copy, and he assured Yuan that a sound plan of action meant getting rid of Ronglu and imprisoning the Empress Dowager. Yuan still insisted on a vermilion order. Tan could not show one, and nothing was settled between them. As he left, Tan said, "We depend on you." Yuan decided to sound out the emperor himself. At the audience on the twentieth, he spoke of the new reforms and their difficulties. The emperor, Yuan said, was much affected, but he never mentioned any plan, and gave him no orders except to support reform. From the palace Yuan went to the station and took the train to Tianjin, arriving that evening, and called on Ronglu. Ronglu spoke first. "You have come for my head", he said. A man who had been there just before Yuan had told him everything. That man was Yang Chongyi, one of a group of conservatives, Huaitabu among them, who had been going to Tianjin to confer in secret with Ronglu. Ronglu had been well informed all along. Yuan answered, "What you have heard is but the plot of a few political schemers", and added that "the emperor said nothing to me of such a plan, and he is innocent of such a measure". Then visitors were announced. They stayed until eleven at night, and Yuan went back to his lodging without another word on the matter. Next morning, the twenty first, Ronglu called on Yuan. Friends in Beijing, he said, had been reporting the reformers' every move. "We must rescue the Emperor from their clutches." That evening Ronglu sent for him again. Yang Chongyi was there with an edict sent by telegraph: the plot had been exposed in Beijing, the emperor was under guard, and the Empress Dowager had taken back the regency. As he dismissed Yuan, Ronglu pointed to the teacup and told him to go ahead and drink: "there is no poison in your tea". In this version, Ronglu was only called to Beijing four days later, on the twenty fifth. So in Yuan's story, the emperor gave no order, the plot had leaked before Yuan ever reached Tianjin, and what Yuan told Ronglu was that the emperor was innocent. In the other version, the order came straight from the emperor. At that last audience, in the Palace of Heavenly Purity in the Forbidden City, with every precaution taken against being overheard, the emperor sat on the lacquered Dragon Throne, in a throne room so gloomy the morning light could hardly get in, and gave Yuan the details of his commission. He gave Yuan a small arrow, the symbol of his authority to carry out imperial orders, and a decree making him acting viceroy of Zhili once the job was done. Yuan promised faithful obedience and, without speaking to anyone, left by the first train. He reached Tianjin before noon, went straight to Ronglu, and asked him whether he regarded him as a faithful blood brother. Ronglu said that he did. And Yuan answered, "You well may, for the emperor has sent me to kill you, and, instead, I now betray his scheme, because of my loyalty to the empress dowager and of my affection for you". Then he laid the emperor's instructions in front of him. Ronglu, apparently unmoved, said only that he was surprised the Empress Dowager had been kept in the dark, and took a special train to the capital that same day. And the two stories cannot both be true. On the evening of the twentieth, in one, Ronglu is with the Empress Dowager. In the other, he is in Tianjin, talking with Yuan until eleven at night. There is a third possibility, told privately years later by a highly placed Chinese official: that word of the plot had already got out, and Ronglu, warned in advance, was in a position to force Yuan's hand. The first version was the one the reformers believed at the time, and for years nearly everyone else believed it too. Yuan gave his own only thirteen years later, in November 1911, to a British newspaper's man in Beijing, at the very moment the dying dynasty was calling him back to save it. It is the account of the one survivor of the two men most concerned, and nothing backs it up. Either way, by the evening of the twentieth, the plot was in Ronglu's hands. And even if the first story is true, look at the choice from where Yuan stood. On one side, his sovereign, but an inexperienced and reckless one, steered by a visionary enthusiast. On the other, his own commander, and China's real ruler. She stood for the privileges of the officials and the rights of the Manchus, and she had forty years of power behind her, and the sure touch that came with them. A conscientious official might well have decided his duty lay with her. Whatever his reasons, that December a British newspaper in Shanghai noted that Yuan was coming in for a good deal of censure, and predicted that if a progressive government ever came to power, he "will do well to make an early escape from China". And the first story stuck to Yuan. In 1909, after the Empress Dowager's death, it was used to drive him from office, and in 1912 it made it hard for the republicans to accept him as their president.

Now, the Empress Dowager. Both of them struck that week. The emperor struck hard and blindly. His aunt struck hard, and well. She had meant to wait for that train trip to Tianjin in October, so that she could talk to Ronglu in person about how to deal with the hostile southern provinces. But she did not wait. She called a council of her strongest supporters: the Grand Council, the heads of the ministries, Manchu princes and nobles, and the two sacked ministers. They decided on a counter revolution, backed by troops that Ronglu would send up. On the twenty first of September, she came back suddenly into Beijing from the Summer Palace and declared herself regent once again. That morning the emperor was made a prisoner. He was hurried off to a small palace on an island in the lake west of the Forbidden City, and parted even from his favourite, the Pearl Concubine. Concubines were the emperor's secondary consorts, ranked below the empress. The island was called Yingtai, the Ocean Terrace. He would be kept there, under a kind of house arrest, for the rest of his life. The same day, the Empress Dowager had an edict issued in the name of her fallen nephew. "I, the Emperor, am working day and night with all my powers," it said, but he feared being overwhelmed by the press of work. It recalled that Her Majesty had twice before taken up the government in times of crisis, with great success. And so: "Moved by a deep regard for the welfare of the nation, I have repeatedly implored Her Majesty to be graciously pleased to advise me in government, and have received her assent." From that day, the edict said, she would conduct the business of government herself. On the twenty second the emperor, a prisoner in a pavilion of his own palace, sent up a humble memorial begging her to take up the government again, and asking to be allowed to bow to her the next day. She graciously accepted. On the twenty third he led the princes, nobles and high ministers in their congratulatory bows. Later, the court told that week in the emperor's own voice. By then the court was far from its capital, and negotiating a peace with the foreign powers. That was in January 1901. An edict in his name said that the reformers, taking advantage of his illness, had secretly plotted sedition, "and it was only by an appeal for guidance on Our part to the Empress-Dowager that We were saved from immediate peril, and the evil was rooted out in the course of a day." Saved. A prisoner on an island, thanking his jailer for the rescue. The same edict called the reformers revolutionaries, not reformers, and said the harm they had done was greater than that of the Boxers, "those dealers in magic". And then, in the same breath, it declared that the whole system of government must be radically reformed. But that is a story for later. For days after the coup, people in Beijing suspected the emperor had been put to death. Rumours of his illness went round constantly, and at that court a sudden illness was often how a convenient death began. The foreign envoys let the Chinese ministers know that they considered themselves accredited to the emperor alone, and that any accident to him would raise grave suspicions. They kept asking pointedly after his health, until, at the British envoy's suggestion, the doctor of the French legation examined him. That reassured them. His life was saved by fear of what the foreign powers would think, and by how hard it was to find a successor in a hurry. And by one brave viceroy. Liu Kunyi, the viceroy at Nanjing, spoke up for the emperor, and that helped keep him alive. Zhang Zhidong, the viceroy at Wuchang, hurried to swallow his encouraging words about reform, and telegraphed the Empress Dowager urging strong measures against the reformers. Ronglu was brought to Beijing, onto the Grand Council, given the Board of War to oversee and a string of other offices, and kept command of the northern army: a concentration of power with no precedent in the dynasty's history. An imperial clansman took his old post at Tianjin, and the Empress Dowager's kinsmen were handed commands and governorships across the empire. Every open reformer lost his post, and the replacements were men whose loyalty, to the Empress Dowager, was beyond question. On the twenty third a decree stripped Kang Youwei of his rank and ordered him arrested and beheaded on the spot. Another ordered the arrest of a former Chinese envoy abroad who had sided with the reformers, and seized his estates. Only strong protests from the foreign envoys saved his life. He was banished instead to the far frontier in Turkestan, with no property, friends too frightened to help, and endless demands for payment for even the necessities of life. On the twenty sixth, she revoked nearly all the reforms. The abolished offices in Beijing came back, with their salaries. The reformers' paper, Chinese Progress, was closed down. The right of any subject to write to the throne was withdrawn. The temples that had been ordered turned into schools went back to being temples. In November the old tests for military degrees returned: archery on foot and on horseback, brandishing swords, and throwing weights. That pleased the ordinary Manchus around Beijing. But out in the provinces, the Manchu garrisons at Hangzhou and Zhapu, six thousand men, had already put away their bows and matchlocks, taken up Mauser rifles and started drilling in Western tactics. The imperial university in Beijing survived, and so did the new schools in the provincial capitals. The plan for a school system across the whole empire did not. By the end of the week, the emperor's reforms were almost all gone, and the court was more firmly than ever in the hands of conservatives, men who would turn out to sympathise with the Boxers. She was not the monster of the old stories. But she was no leader for a country in a crisis like this one.

Tan Sitong
Tan Sitong. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The emperor kept his life. Not everyone around him was so lucky. On the twenty fourth, the arrest of sixteen more reformers was ordered. Some escaped, some were only dismissed, but six were taken. The two men doing most of the hunting were Gangyi, now running the Board of War, and the head of the Board of Punishments, who also commanded the police of the capital. Even the new bureaus of commerce, agriculture and science were punished. Their three directors were thrown out of office, for having audaciously styled themselves high commissioners. One of the three was named Duanfang. Keep his name in mind. One of them was Tan Sitong. He could have run. He refused to leave Beijing. Tan was born in 1865, the son of the governor of Hubei. He had a romantic idea of what men like him were for. As he put it, "in an age bound by autocracy, knights-errant alone can help us to arouse ourselves and prevent the people from becoming more and more benighted, weak, and degenerate". Knights errant were the wandering swordsmen of Chinese legend, who righted wrongs and paid for it with their lives. He and young men like him saw themselves as ready to die for their countrymen. Alongside him were three scholars of the Hanlin Academy, a censor, and Kang Youwei's younger brother, Kang Guangren. A censor was an official whose job was to watch other officials and criticise the government to the throne. The Hanlin Academy was the emperor's own academy of the very best examination graduates, who drafted his edicts. The three Hanlin scholars were the same three men, besides Tan himself, whom the black ink paper in Yuan's story had named to devise that sound plan of action. They were condemned summarily, and on the twenty eighth of September all six were beheaded, in public. The executions took place at Caishikou, the old vegetable market in the south of the city, where the capital's criminals were put to death in front of the crowds. Apart from Kang's brother, these were men of high official rank. Putting six such men to death so summarily was rare, and it showed how frightened the court was. No one was bold enough to claim Kang Guangren's body. The next day the executioners dragged it away and threw it unburied into the paupers' burying ground, the greatest dishonour and misfortune there was. A British newspaper in Shanghai wrote: "The blood of the martyrs will be the seed of the new China." All over the empire, reform minded scholars, even many who had doubts about Kang, were crushed by it. It seemed that reform from the top might be impossible after all. And as the emperor's program fell apart, a dangerous idea spread: that the real problem was Manchu rule itself. Tan's friend Tang Caichang would try an armed rising at Wuhan in 1900, and even Sun Yat-sen's talk of a republic began to sound less outlandish. Tan's death joined the reformers who wanted to save the dynasty to the revolutionaries who would bring it down, though neither side said so.

The two men the court wanted most were not among the dead. Remember the train Yuan Shikai took to Tianjin on the twentieth? Kang Youwei was on it. He had left Beijing before daybreak. At Tianjin he had a narrow escape, and got away on a British steamer. At Shanghai every incoming steamer was searched for him, but outside the port, at Wusong, he was moved straight onto a British mail steamer, the Ballaarat, leaving for Hong Kong. In Hong Kong he took shelter in the police barracks, and from there he went on to Saigon and Singapore, and out into the wider world. Whenever he was under the British flag, the British gave him special protection, to avoid the diplomatic mess a murdered or kidnapped refugee would have caused. The Cantonese merchants' guild in Shanghai sent a resolution to the press thanking the British for saving his life. The court put a price of a hundred thousand taels on him, dead or alive, ordered his books destroyed, and had his family's graves destroyed. On the twenty third, officers raided his family's village near Guangzhou looking for every Kang they could find. The family had been warned, and got away a few hours before. And Kang's pupil, Liang Qichao, got out too, though he barely escaped the Empress Dowager's fury with his life. Like Kang, he had help from the foreign legations. He took refuge in the Japanese legation, and Japanese diplomats got him to the coast and aboard a Japanese warship. He fled to Japan. He was twenty five. Back in Beijing, on the twenty fourth, a censor was thrown out of office for the crime of having once recommended him. In February 1900 the court put the same price on Liang as on Kang: a hundred thousand taels, alive or dead. In Japan he found asylum, and threw himself into writing about politics and law. Within a few months he had started a newspaper in Yokohama for Chinese readers, and copies of it were soon being smuggled back into China. Exile did not silence Liang Qichao. It gave him a printing press beyond the Empress Dowager's reach. And thirteen years after he ran for his life, he would be named to the Ministry of Justice in a new cabinet in Beijing, as proof that the throne was sincere about reform. The man forming that cabinet was Yuan Shikai.

The Empress Dowager now held the emperor. Through 1899, her court kept coming back to the next step: removing him from the throne altogether. But by that summer her own party was split, with Ronglu locked in a bitter rivalry inside it. When it was proposed to bring Li Hongzhang back to Tianjin, Ronglu blocked it, saying Li's return would alienate Britain, but really to keep his own man as viceroy near Beijing. The split showed her how insecure her position was, and she put off the deposition once again. Then a plea came from the emperor, asking the Empress Dowager to let him abdicate. There was a custom for this. An official who wanted to retire pleaded bad health in three memorials in a row. The first two were refused, and the third got the real answer. This one got its first refusal. Everyone could count to three. Chinese officials sent in memorial after memorial protesting against any attempt to depose the emperor, and Ronglu's influence was enough to delay a decision. Then the Manchu princes and nobles closed ranks against Ronglu, and from then on his influence with the Empress Dowager faded fast. That November, Gangyi hurried back to Beijing to use his own influence against him. In November the proposal to depose the emperor came back. Most of the Manchus supported it. Some of them, and many powerful Chinese officials, opposed it strongly: Li Hongzhang, Liu Kunyi and Zhang Zhidong among them. Li's opposition may be one reason that in December he was sent far from the capital, to Guangzhou, as acting viceroy. On New Year's Day 1900 a decree came out in the emperor's name. "As our health is still weak," it began, the usual New Year ceremonies and court banquets would not be held. An emperor's weak health, announced in public. By now, Beijing knew what that could lead to.

Beijing was also watching the sky. The Chinese calendar counted years in a cycle of sixty, and every year in it had its own pair of characters. The coming year, 1900, was a Gengzi year, and it would have an extra eighth month, inserted to keep the moon's calendar in step with the sun. A year of that kind with that extra month had always been thought to bring disaster on the dynasty, and none had come round since 1680. The Chinese year of the Hundred Days had already opened with an eclipse of the sun, with five sixths of it blotted out over Beijing. The two omens together made a deep impression on the people. The Empress Dowager was not a woman to be turned aside by omens. And there was a new man rising in the Empress Dowager's circle. Prince Duan was a prince of the imperial clan, a great grandson of the Jiaqing emperor, a strong supporter of the Empress Dowager and a rising man at court, and he joined the princes against Ronglu. On the twenty fourth of January 1900, a decree was issued in the emperor's name alone. It recalled that he had been made emperor by adoption, as son of the Xianfeng emperor, the Empress Dowager's late husband, and that his own son was to have become the heir of Tongzhi, her son who had died young. For a year now, it said, he had been an invalid, and "ever keeping in our mind that we do not belong to the direct line of succession", he had begged the Empress Dowager to choose an heir from the imperial clan. She chose Pujun, the son of Prince Duan. He was fourteen. A second decree made the boy heir to her dead son. His tutors were named too. One was Chongqi, the dead emperor's father in law. The other, in personal attendance on the boy, was Xu Tong, a Chinese bannerman known for his hatred of foreigners. The Banners were the hereditary military households the Manchus had organised when they conquered China, and some Chinese families had been enrolled in them from the start. And the order of things was spelled out. At the New Year, the emperor would bow to the Empress Dowager alone, and then the heir and all the princes and nobles would bow to her in the throne hall. The emperor had not been deposed. But he had been made to say, in his own name, that he was not in the proper line of succession. The point had been raised against him back in 1875, and she had ignored it then, when it suited her. Now that her plans had changed, she dug it up. But he had been on the throne for twenty five years, and he had kept the full three years of mourning that made him the rightful heir of the Tongzhi emperor. People across the empire knew it, and they distrusted her. The reformers in the provinces were loyal, to a man, to the emperor himself, and so were most of the Chinese officials. A eunuch who served at court later said he had been there when the emperor was forced, physically, to sign, and that afterwards the emperor collapsed when a small blood vessel burst. Eunuchs, castrated men, were the servants of the inner palace, the only men besides the imperial family allowed to live inside it. The empire did not take it quietly. On the twenty sixth of January a telegram reached the emperor from Shanghai, signed by more than twelve hundred people, assuring him of their loyalty and begging him not to abdicate. The Empress Dowager was furious. The man whose name headed the list was later arrested at Macao, where the Portuguese held him until the Boxer rising broke out. But forty six collective protests like it came in, and they made her pause and put off the deposition, though she never gave it up. Meanwhile Liu Kunyi was ordered to Beijing to answer charges, and put off going until the spring. On the twenty ninth of January she took a middle course. The emperor's thirtieth birthday in August would have no special ceremonies, and no high officials were to come to Beijing to congratulate him. But the special examinations always held to celebrate an imperial occasion would go ahead, and the court would wear full robes for a week. Still, the heir to the throne was now Prince Duan's son. And that made Prince Duan a man the whole court had to reckon with. At the very end of 1899, an English missionary was murdered by a band of armed men in Shandong. A decree on his murder, on the fourth of January, was soothing. That same month, another decree caught the eye of the foreign envoys. Robbery and pillage were on the rise in every province, it said, and officials must tell the difference between gangs of rebels and loyal subjects. And it said that "if law-abiding and loyal people combine to drill for their own protection, or villages join for mutual defence, this is only to fulfil the subject's duty of keeping watch and ward". The American envoy wrote home: "I myself have some anxiety as to the effect of its strange wording". The French envoy called its terms "vague and elastic", with "a double meaning". The British envoy only noted that "it is regarded in some quarters with misgiving". Loyal villagers, drilling for their own protection. Out in the countryside, young men were doing exactly that, and they had their own ideas about who the enemy was. And they remembered the story of Tianjin. In 1900 the leaders of the Boxer movement believed Yuan Shikai had betrayed the reformers, and hoped he would back them. By then Yuan was governor of Shandong, and the foreigners in Tianjin were nervous about what he would do. Next time: the Spirit Boxers, the Empress Dowager's most dangerous choice, and Yuan Shikai, once again, right in the middle.

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