Then and There Search

China, 1895 to 1916, episode 8

The Regency's Gamble

In November 1908 the Guangxu Emperor and Cixi die within a day of each other, and Zaifeng, Prince Chun, becomes regent for his two year old son. Within weeks he turns on Yuan Shikai, whose head the dead emperor's reported will demanded; Zaifeng dares not kill him and sends him home instead. The episode follows the regent's bid to keep the constitutional promise on the court's terms without Yuan, opening the National Assembly himself, giving way to it, then packing his cabinet with Manchu princes and seizing the railways, and asks whether the New Policies' own assemblies sped the dynasty's fall. It hears the court and foreign observers most, with scholars on the assemblies.

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

Transcript

Two episodes ago, in January 1901, the court at Xi'an took up reform as its own. In 1906 it promised the empire a constitution, within a few years, when the nation should be educated to it. And Yuan Shikai, governor general of Zhili, was the most powerful Chinese official in the empire, with an army that looked to him alone. Last time, we left the palace to follow Sun Yat-sen and the revolutionaries. Their risings failed one after another, and by late 1907 the romantic, student led phase of their revolution had largely burned out. But their League kept growing, and it went after the soldiers of the New Armies. And I left you with two deaths in the palace, a day apart, in November 1908. This time, we go back inside, and we follow the man those deaths put in charge. First, though, look at where the court stood in the last summer of the old order. Start with Yuan Shikai. In 1907 he was brought up from Zhili to Beijing, made a Grand Councillor and president of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and ordered to hand over all army matters to his rival, the Manchu Tieliang. It was a promotion. It was also a leash. It seems he was thought to be growing too powerful, and the Empress Dowager saw fit to call him to higher things. Foreign diplomats who called at the Foreign Ministry found a square, resolute looking man who gave the same energy to consular squabbles that he had once given to building a national army. Few of them guessed that almost every day he was fighting a hidden battle just to hold on to his place. He had been brought to Beijing to be tied up, he was constantly denounced, and jealous rivals blocked his plans at every turn. And his great patron, the Empress Dowager, who owed him so much, was haunted by the feeling that her end was coming fast, and that the dynasty would die with her. Here is what she meant to leave behind. At the end of August 1908, the court approved a draft constitution and a programme to go with it. It was called the Outline of the Imperial Constitution. It laid down nine years of preparation, with the progress to be made set out year by year. At the end of the nine years, a parliament would be summoned and full constitutional government would begin. The nine years, the court explained, were needed to train the voters and the lawmakers in their duties. The target year was 1917, and the constitutionalists all over the country were already urging the court to move faster. Now look at what the Outline actually said. Its first article declared that the Qing dynasty would rule the Qing empire for ever, and be honoured through all ages. The subject was promised real things: freedom of speech, and no imprisonment or punishment without a trial by competent judges, under the law. A parliament would propose laws. But only the emperor could make them, and only he could decide what the parliament was allowed to discuss. He would summon it, suspend it and dismiss it. He alone would appoint and dismiss officials, he alone would appoint the judges, and he could add to the law by decree. The edict that accepted the scheme put the principle plainly. The supreme authority, it said, "should continue to be vested in the Sovereign, whilst the people should have the right to deliberate on public questions." And the authority of the throne "cannot be encroached upon in the smallest degree." The people would deliberate. The emperor would decide. Cixi was quite willing to go down in history as the woman who gave China a new compact between ruler and ruled. What she could not bear was to see herself surrender the supreme authority. Still, she had promised the vote, and she had admitted the principle that the nation's affairs could be discussed. And a concession like that could only end by eating into the powers of the throne. With the timetable set, she seemed thoroughly satisfied, and she looked forward to a new era in which she would play no small part. She had less than three months to live.

The Guangxu Emperor, on a postcard dated 1908
The Guangxu Emperor, on a postcard dated 1908. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

That autumn, the Empress Dowager fell sick, and the gravest fears spread quickly. Almost at once it was reported that the emperor was very ill too. Foreigners in the capital called it an ominous coincidence. You remember where we left Guangxu: shut away since the autumn of 1898 in a small palace on an island in the lake west of the Forbidden City. For ten years he had been brought out for audiences and ceremonies, and then taken back to the island. He had never been strong, and through 1908 the court had been calling in doctors from the provinces to treat him. In his last days, the court wanted to move him to the Pavilion of Peaceful Longevity, the place where an emperor should properly die. He refused to be moved from the pavilion where he had been confined since 1898. And he died without putting on the robes embroidered with the dragon, which custom prescribed for a dying emperor. He died at five o'clock in the evening on the fourteenth of November 1908. He was thirty seven. In the language of the court, he had become a guest on high. A last refusal, from a man who had been allowed very few. Then the stories started. The legend ran that as he was dying, he handed his consort a last secret edict: Yuan Shikai was to be beheaded. And that his faltering hand traced circle after circle in the air, until the people around him understood what he meant. In the spoken language, the word for circle sounds the same as Yuan's name. The gesture, so the story went, meant that the dying emperor's last wish was revenge on the man who had failed him ten years before. Ten years before was the autumn of 1898, and the coup that ended the reforms. So how did Guangxu die? Here the sources disagree. Some had little doubt that he was poisoned. Others said that Cixi's own end was inevitable, and that he was hurried to his death so that she could settle the succession first. The court's story was natural illness: a sickly man, ailing for years, who finally died of it. A century later, tests on his hair and remains found arsenic in amounts no natural cause could explain. Who gave it, and on whose orders, has never been proved. Whatever killed him, his death mattered far beyond the palace. He had never been a forceful man. But the prisoner on the island had become a symbol of China, at home and among the Chinese overseas. When he died, there were mass memorials, and altars went up to him in Chinatowns around the world. Kang Youwei's Society to Protect the Emperor was left with no emperor to protect. And for many Chinese, loyalty to the dynasty died along with him. For many in the reformist elite, the turn toward accepting revolution, or at least its coming, began in those two days of November.

The funeral procession of the Empress Dowager Cixi, 1908
The funeral procession of the Empress Dowager Cixi, 1908. Unaccredited, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Cixi had about twenty hours left. And in her last hours she showed that she still held the power, in the family, in the palace and in the empire, to the very end. She proclaimed a new emperor: Puyi, the son of the dead emperor's brother, Zaifeng. And she appointed the father regent, to govern the empire for his son. Puyi was a child of two. It is the father we follow now. You have met him once before, in passing. Back in 1901, he was the young prince who carried the dynasty's apology for the murdered German envoy to Berlin. He was twenty five years old. Cixi had chosen his wife for him, too: a daughter of Ronglu, her most trusted man, the general who had held the army for her in 1898. Zaifeng had travelled abroad, and foreigners judged him a man of not unprogressive mind, strongly in favour of reform. The dead emperor's widow, who was Cixi's niece, became the new empress dowager, Longyu. Before long she and the three surviving widows of an earlier emperor were squabbling for power inside the palace walls. On the fifteenth of November 1908, the Empress Dowager Cixi died, at the age of seventy three. She had been ill for three months. The edict announcing her death said that she had been ill for some time, and that her sorrow at the emperor's death had made her sickness worse. That was how the proprieties had to be satisfied. Hardly anyone took it at face value. Her death, coming so soon after his, raised a general suspicion of foul play. One cautious foreign observer put it delicately. She knew her own end was near, he wrote, and she would not let a frail and nervous emperor steer the empire through so grave a time, so she took the steps necessary to prevent it. She was not mourned the way he was. But her death removed the person who had in fact ruled the Qing empire, and held it steady, for nearly half a century. In the vaults of the palace, the Chinese papers reported, she left a private treasure in silver and gold worth some twenty two million pounds. The foreigners who had watched her closely believed that if the Old Buddha had lived, a modern state might well have been built on the foundations she had laid. And the revolutionaries were at a low ebb that autumn. Under pressure from Beijing, the Japanese government had suppressed their journal, and its leaders had gone off to Singapore, many of them in great distress for money. They were still only a little leaven in the huge mass of China. If any real effort had been made to follow the course the court had just laid down, a foreigner in Beijing reckoned, there would have been no revolution at all. That is a big if. And the person who might have made the effort was gone. Now the strong hand had been removed. In its place came a far less politically astute set of regents, around a child. That evening the boy was taken from his father's mansion into the Forbidden City. On the second of December, the child was carried into the Hall of Supreme Harmony and set on the throne. He cried all through the ceremony, and wanted to go home. His father, kneeling beside the throne and holding him still, tried to soothe him: don't cry, it will soon be over. Officials who heard it whispered that it was an unlucky thing to say. They were more right than they knew. Another long regency was now unavoidable, and foreign observers were instantly uneasy. The court, it was understood, was torn by two violent factions. And everyone in Beijing confidently predicted that Yuan Shikai's last days had come.

Yuan Shikai with Te Lan, in a photograph dated 1909
Yuan Shikai with Te Lan, in a photograph dated 1909. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Look at Yuan's position that winter. He had alienated the reformers in 1898. He had made enemies of the reactionary Manchus in 1900, by refusing to back the Boxers. And with Cixi's death he had lost his principal support in the state. On paper, he had never stood higher. In the weeks after her death he was made Senior Guardian of the Heir Apparent, the highest rank in the gift of the throne, and put in charge of the imperial funerals, a lucrative appointment. At that moment Yuan was the most influential Chinese in the empire, and his reputation stood high with the foreign envoys. He had always stood for progress on sound and moderate lines, and his arrival on the Grand Council had brought the government a great accession of strength. And the regent had no love for him. Then there was the will. The story went that in his last hours, Guangxu had drawn up a rough will in his own hand. The Empress Dowager had always hated him, it said. But for his misery of the past ten years, Yuan Shikai was responsible, and one other man, whose name could not be read. "When the time comes I desire that Yuan be summarily beheaded." That is a hard order to inherit. So Zaifeng asked advice. He consulted the most trusted magnates of the empire about what to do with the secret order to behead Yuan. All of them gave him the same answer: be warned in time. Kill Yuan Shikai, and the nation and the foreign powers alike would condemn it. And in the barracks around the capital, the officers of the northern army were still Yuan's men. So the regent dared not carry out his brother's wish to the letter. But he would have Yuan's fall. Instead of an execution, he wrote a decree. The blow fell on the second of January 1909. Yuan Shikai, the decree said, had been chosen by the late emperor for many high posts, and the new reign had heaped further favours on him, believing his abilities would serve the throne well. "He has now, however, been seized with a disease in the feet", it went on, which made it hard for him to move about, and left him unfit for his duties. Therefore, "as a mark of compassion he shall forthwith vacate his posts and retire to his native place for the purpose of treating his complaint." The trouble with his foot, the decree implied, kept him from performing the due ceremonies at court. Those ceremonies meant kneeling and kowtowing before the throne. A bad foot. That was the reason given. It was worded in terms Yuan could not easily forgive, and the regent would one day be painfully reminded of them. Everyone in Beijing remembered that day. The rumour on the street said Yuan's last hour had come. Warned on every side to beware, Yuan read the decree in the Grand Council, left the palace, and drove straight to the railway station. He took the train to Tianjin, dressed as an ordinary citizen. Ten years earlier, he had taken a train down that same line to Tianjin, in the crisis that ended the reforms. This time, he was the one running. Fearing worse, he took refuge in Tianjin's foreign settlements. Rooms were taken for him at a European hotel, and the British consulate was asked for protection. Then another train came down from Beijing. It brought his eldest son, with a message straight from the Grand Council chamber: his life was absolutely guaranteed. On the personal assurances of Manchus in high places, Yuan went back to Beijing, and from there he went home, banished, to Henan. He settled on an estate near Anyang, in the north of the province. There he had himself photographed fishing in a straw cape, the picture of a retired gentleman with nothing on his mind. Nothing on his mind. Hold on to that photograph. One man put it this way: once Yuan went home and the constitutionalists lost their powerful leader, their party "was pitilessly shattered." Whatever the truth of that, the regent had made his choice. And he still had a promise to keep.

Election campaigning, in a cartoon from the Shanghai newspaper Shibao, 31 March 1909
Election campaigning, in a cartoon from the Shanghai newspaper Shibao, 31 March 1909. Shibao, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

And keeping the promise, in 1909, meant elections. The idea was to set up representative assemblies at every level, as a way to forge a modern citizenry that would still be loyal to the throne. Assemblies for counties, townships and cities had begun in 1908. In 1909 came the provinces. That election was something new in the whole history of imperial China. It was strictly limited. The vote was for men only, and the education and property requirements were so stiff that the electorate came to less than half of one percent of the empire's people. A man qualified by holding an examination degree, a diploma from a new school, a past official post, or a substantial fortune. In most provinces the voting was indirect: the voters chose electors, and the electors chose the assemblymen. Even so, an estimated two million subjects of the Qing went to the polls, and got a taste of political participation nobody had dreamt of before. Two million voters, in an empire of some four hundred million people. Small, slow and indirect. And still, for those men, something entirely new: being asked. So who won? Perhaps nine in ten of the new assemblymen were gentry, holders of degrees from the very examinations the court had just abolished. But nearly a third of them had gone back to school, at a new style Chinese school or abroad, to learn a Western curriculum. Of the twenty one provincial assemblies, fourteen were headed by a holder of the jinshi degree, and six more by a holder of the provincial degree. The jinshi was the top rung of the old examination ladder, won in the capital by a few hundred men every three years. By their degrees, they looked like the old order. In fact most of them, jinshi holders included, belonged firmly to the reformist new gentry. Men like these were older and more traditional than the revolutionaries, but nobody could call them ignorant of the world. Take one of them. Zhang Jian had passed the jinshi by the age of forty two. He had come first in the whole empire, in the palace examination of 1894. And instead of a career in office, he used the prestige and the contacts that came with his degree to raise money and run factories. His cotton mills were at Nantong, on the north bank of the Yangzi, and in 1909 he was elected president of the provincial assembly of Jiangsu. Real capitalists like him tended to back the reformers at court, not the revolutionaries. The constitutionalists' most vocal leader was Liang Qichao, who argued again and again that what China needed most was a constitution, not a revolution. What did the elections produce? Not contentment. They only increased the demands for a constitution. The new public institutions were growing faster than the Qing could control them. And these men wanted a degree of self government in their own provinces, within a constitution. If the dynasty would not give it, or could not, its own natural supporters could turn against it.

On the fourteenth of October 1909, the assemblies met, each in its provincial capital. Observers were impressed by their dignity and decorum, and by the sincerity and good sense of the men leading provincial opinion. Zaifeng, for his part, carried on working through the programme he had inherited. Constitutionally, the assemblies were little more than debating societies. In practice, they quickly became the mouthpieces of the reformist elite and its creed of constitutionalism. They vied with the governors sent from Beijing for control of policy in their own provinces. They took over the campaigns to win back rights from the foreigners, and from the court's own new ministries. And they pressed the court hard, for three things: a constitution now, a permanent national assembly, and a responsible cabinet. A responsible cabinet meant ministers with real power to decide, chosen by the national assembly, not by the throne. Then they acted together. They made a collective demand that the national parliament be brought forward, to meet within two years. Not nine years. Two. Through these assemblies, for the first time, the elites of each province came together as a body, conscious of their own strength. They had turned an administrative reform into a political movement. They also added to a long drift of power away from Beijing and into the provinces, a drift that had begun with the great rebellions of the eighteen fifties, and would end, years later, in the age of the warlords. But they spoke, at least in part, for real interests in their provinces. They were a kind of provincial nationalism, and a stage in the growth of a popular nationalism in China. And they would outlast the dynasty, to remain for decades among the strongest political institutions in China. The regent had built a stage. The question now was who would stand on it.

A year later, on the third of October 1910, the National Assembly met for the first time, in Beijing. It was a provisional body, set up in the meantime, until the permanent assembly the constitution promised for 1917. It had some two hundred members. Half were named by the throne, from the princes and nobles, the officials, the scholars and the biggest taxpayers. The other half were chosen from among the members of the provincial assemblies. A prince of the imperial clan, Pulun, presided. He had led China's delegation to the World's Fair at St Louis in 1904, the fair where Cixi's portrait went on show. And the regent opened it in person. Here, for once, we hear Zaifeng himself. From the moment he took up the regency, he told the members, "the situation has been beset with difficulties and day and night are fraught with alarm." He was twenty seven years old. All the princes and ministers, he said, were wholeheartedly united in carrying out the last wishes of the late emperor and empress dowager, to prepare in good order for constitutional government. He could not adequately express his gratification, he said, at being there in person to see the new chamber open. A great and universal struggle for the progress of civilisation was going on in the world. Every great measure of state rested on good government and good laws, and still more on the wholehearted harmony and sympathy of all classes. This chamber, he said, was the place for the representation of public opinion. Its members enjoyed the confidence of the throne. They should do their utmost to help the nation's aims, serve as a pattern for the parliament to come, and "glory in this splendid measure which has hitherto never existed in China". The same day, the child emperor was made to issue a decree of his own, calling on the members to cleanse their minds of prejudice, cultivate public spirit, show their loyalty to the throne and do their duty by the people. Day and night fraught with alarm. From a regent, in a public speech, that is a remarkable thing to admit. Alarm, and a hall full of men who had come to Beijing to disagree with him.

They had already asked him once. Over fifty delegates from the provinces had met in Shanghai, and resolved to petition Beijing for a parliament. That was at the end of 1909, and the delegates carried their petition north to the capital themselves. On the tenth of January 1910, the regent rejected it. His reply was a long decree, and it was a careful one. The empire was vast, it said, the preparations unfinished, and the people's level of intelligence uneven. If a parliament were opened suddenly, opposition might run rife, and hold back constitutional government itself. And then, it went on, it would be open to question "whether the representatives, who present this petition, can face Our four hundred million brethren." In other words: who exactly do you speak for? Then came the heart of it: "Constitutional Government will certainly be established, and a Parliament will be surely opened, but what is to be carefully considered is the question of time and order. As safe gait is essential in a long walk", so it would be unwise to look for immediate results from so important a task. The provincial assemblies were open, it said, the national assembly would follow, and with that the foundation of a parliament would be complete. With that answer, protest as they might, the provinces had to be content for the time being. They petitioned again that summer, and they were turned down again. Now, in the autumn of 1910, they had a chamber of their own in the capital to ask from. The National Assembly at once urged that the first parliament be summoned earlier. It memorialised the throne, and this time the governors of the provinces backed the memorial by telegram. Even the regent's own governors. Zaifeng began to see how insistent the demand had become. There was some hesitation. Then, on the fourth of November 1910, a decree gave way, part of the way. Parliament would meet in 1913. The decree was long, and it went over well worn ground. Once again it warned against the dangers of haste. Sincere as that warning may have been, and well founded too, in the people's ears it sounded like one more excuse for putting off their right to vote. It closed with the pious hope of "a successful consummation at the appointed time, giving repose in Heaven to the spirit of the late Emperor", and satisfaction on earth for the people's hopes. The same day, a sterner decree followed. The governors were to order the provincial delegates "to disperse and return to their own homes, each following his calling in peace, and quietly awaiting the arrangement of all details by the Throne." Go home. Mind your business. We will call you. The Assembly was not satisfied. It demanded that parliament be summoned at once, and that the Grand Council be made responsible to it. It sent up another appeal, and pressed for a responsible cabinet straight away. Then it went further. It impeached the Grand Council itself, first as a body and then man by man. The attack was so strenuous that even the thickest skinned of officials began to feel uneasy. In several of the great cities there were serious demonstrations. Seen from the government's side, the Assembly had freely overstepped the limits set for its debates, and was trying to take for itself almost the powers of a parliament. And the government had already given a great deal: it had cut the remaining wait for a parliament roughly in half, and it would soon agree to a cabinet. That, it seemed, should have satisfied any reasonable person. But it had stopped being a matter of reason. For the first time in China's history, the people, wisely or unwisely, had been given an articulate voice. The floodgates were open. On the date, though, the government stood firm: 1913, and not a year sooner. On the eleventh of January 1911, the Assembly was sent home until its next session. Public opinion was strong. But the constituted authorities were stronger still. For now.

The Assembly had won one thing, though. Early in December the Grand Councillors, who had no mind to be made answerable to the Assembly for what they did, resigned. Their resignations were not accepted. But on the twenty fifth of December, the throne conceded the immediate formation of a cabinet. A cabinet. The thing the reformers had wanted most. It arrived in May 1911. On the eighth, a decree abolished the Grand Council and the two other high councils of state, and created a Cabinet and a Privy Council in their place. The prime minister was Prince Qing. You have met him: the prince who signed the Boxer peace beside Li Hongzhang, and who lost his nerve over the boycott of American goods. He was seventy three now, an imperial clansman who had been raised through every rank of prince, with offices and honours heaped on him, and connected by marriage to a great many of the highest princes and officials in the empire. The common saying was that "his front door is a market place", and that "every official who enters the precincts of his palace has to pay toll to the gate-keeper." He was described as "a decrepit old man, irresolute, wily, corrupt, and inefficient". And yet the court that had sent Yuan Shikai home could find no one more capable than this old man to guide the empire. Then came the names. The cabinet had thirteen members: four Chinese officials, one Mongol, and eight Manchus, most of them princes of the imperial clan. People called it the princes' cabinet. At the Ministry of Finance sat Zaize, the imperial prince who had once toured the world to study how other countries were governed. The regent had already made himself commander in chief of the army and navy, and put two of his own younger brothers at the head of the general staff and the navy. It had been coming for a while. At the end of 1909, of the fifteen highest posts in the eleven main ministries, nine were held by Manchus, one by a Mongol, and five by Chinese. To foreigners watching, the Manchus had learned nothing, and they still thought of the empire as theirs. The regent had let himself be pushed by the men around him. He preferred Manchus and ignored the claims of the Chinese, and princes of the blood now held political power that had always been denied them before. For more than two centuries the dynasty had shared its top posts between Manchus and Chinese. Now power was being drawn into Manchu hands, and within them into the hands of the imperial clan. It was bitterly resented, and it fanned an anti Manchu feeling that was already spreading up through the Chinese scholar elite. And the money made it worse. The reform schemes, a new navy, costly new buildings, had opened the door to corruption on a scale never seen before. The court's drive to centralise was read not as an effort to weld the country together under an honest, strong government, but as a plan to drain the nation's lifeblood for the benefit of those in high places. People had been slow to believe that the old Empress Dowager was sincere about reform. Now public opinion was convinced, rightly or wrongly, that every trace of Manchu sincerity had long since disappeared. In Beijing they had a saying for the new cabinet: "the head and face alone were changed." For the moment, the concession was worth very little. It was not much more than a change of name. And the new rules had cut back the National Assembly's powers. It could advise. It could not legislate. This cabinet, the responsible cabinet the reformers had demanded for so long, was probably the last straw. The provincial assemblies protested that princes of the blood should not head a cabinet. The regent answered that appointing officials was the throne's prerogative, exactly as the Outline of 1908 laid down, and that it was not for assemblymen to interfere. The people would deliberate. The emperor would decide. The regent himself may well have meant well. But his counsellors, behind their promises of reform, were felt to be dodging the just demands of the people. It would have been an immensely difficult situation for an old and experienced ruler. And the regent was neither. So here is the regent's gamble, laid out whole. He would keep the promise Cixi had made, but on the court's terms, at the court's pace. He would do it without Yuan Shikai. And he would keep the real power inside the family. From inside the palace, each piece of that made sense. From the provinces, it looked like a dynasty pulling up the drawbridge. Inside the palace, almost nobody could read the writing on the wall. The rare exceptions were Prince Qing himself and one other old minister, and their worries were put down to age and infirmity. Meanwhile, business in the capital was booming. Beijing was full of the people who serve a country trying to modernise in a hurry: financiers, and salesmen of warships, of guns of every pattern, and of machinery of every kind.

Sheng Xuanhuai
Sheng Xuanhuai. Unknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The day after the cabinet, the regency made its second move. On the ninth of May 1911, a decree announced a new policy for the railways. The man behind it was Sheng Xuanhuai. You met him in the Boxer summer, passing word to the foreign consuls that the viceroys expected an edict stripping them of rank and ordering them to kill themselves. By 1911 he was the imperial Minister of Posts and Communications. He was an immensely wealthy man, close to seventy, and he had done great service to his country in commerce and industry. He had run the China Merchants steamship line and the Hanyang ironworks, and founded China's first modern bank. He had two great aims: to reform the currency, and to bind the provinces together with railways. He must have seen that his policy would be unpopular. But he badly misjudged how strong the opposition would be. It took courage to put forward a sound policy that could only be unpopular. And perhaps the old man honestly meant to do his country one last service, and halt the break up he could see coming. He also knew about the National Assembly. In its first session it had demanded the right to approve every foreign loan before it was signed, and its members from the provinces would never dare approve big ones. So he decided to move fast. Only finishing the business within a few months, he reckoned, could save his plans from endless delay. In April he signed a loan of ten million pounds with a syndicate of foreign banks, mostly for reforming the currency. To see why the railways were explosive, go back a little. After the war with Japan, the court had hastily signed agreements with foreign companies to finance and build railway lines. Since then, all over the country, provincial gentry and merchants had campaigned to win those rights back and build their own lines, raising large sums from cheap and immensely popular share offerings. National interest and self interest could coincide. The great line south from Hankou to Guangzhou had been signed away to an American firm. Hunanese investors said they would build it themselves, and in 1905, after a large but peaceful protest movement, they got the governor general at Wuhan, Zhang Zhidong, to settle with the Americans and hand the rights to them. In Zhejiang, when the government signed a British loan for the line from Shanghai to Hangzhou in 1907, gentry, merchants and students rose in protest, and scores of local branches of their movement sprang up overnight. The two Chinese companies went ahead and built the lines themselves, by 1909. So by now, a railway in the provinces was not just a railway. It was a flag. In Sichuan, the governor general had set up a railway company in 1904 to build lines around Chengdu, and when little private money came in, he put a surtax on property to pay for it. The levy was collected as shares, so that a great many ordinary landholders in Sichuan found themselves part owners of the railway. The company was made fully private in 1907. But it was riddled with corruption, and it had very little to show. Now the regency's decree laid down that the country must have trunk lines, and that the speedy building of railways was the only way to hold its long frontiers. Until now, it said, lines had been built at random. Guangzhou had raised half its capital but built few miles of track. Sichuan had lost much of its money, and no prosecution had got it back. Hunan and Hubei had had a railway bureau for years, with nothing to show for it. "Thus have the resources of myriads of the people been lost through waste or embezzlement." So every trunk line that a provincial company had been founded to build, and had delayed, was to be taken back by the state. Merchants could still build branch lines. And the decree closed with a warning. Should there be anyone, it said, "who without regard to the public interest deliberately interfere with this railway policy or stir up strife and resistance, let them be treated as rebels." Rebels. For shareholders. In principle, plenty of people agreed with the court. Modernisers of every stripe thought railways were a good thing, and perhaps, as the court said, they belonged under the central government. Foreigners who watched thought the policy thoroughly sound: China's railways were too bound up with one another to be left to separate provinces. But not, most nationalists felt, if the price was letting foreigners build them. And provincial gentry and merchants had spent a great deal of money and political capital to win these lines back. Now the court was taking them. Some said the provinces' real quarrel was not with the principle at all, but with Sheng and his associates, the Sheng oligarchy, as people called them, and with the terms on which the shareholders were to be bought out.

Eleven days later came the money. On the twentieth of May 1911, Sheng signed a contract for the Huguang railways with a group of four foreign banks. The banks were British, French, German and American. The Americans had forced their way in. In the summer of 1909, President Taft had cabled the regent personally, asking that American bankers be given a share, and Zaifeng's government gave way. The loan had been under negotiation since the days of Zhang Zhidong, who died in the autumn of 1909 with it still unsigned. Huguang was the old name for the two provinces of Hubei and Hunan, governed together under one viceroy. The loan was six million pounds at five percent, with four million more to follow later, repayable over forty years. It was secured on the railways' takings and on salt taxes and transit taxes of Hubei and Hunan, and guaranteed by the Chinese government. The money would build the Hubei and Hunan section of the railway from Hankou to Guangzhou, about nine hundred kilometres, and a line west up the Yangzi past Yichang. Any extension into Sichuan was left for a later agreement. Building and control were to stay entirely with the Chinese government. An English engineer, a German and an American would each take a section, using Chinese materials wherever possible. The four banks would take the loan in equal shares, none of them answerable for the others. As railway loans went, its terms were more favourable to China than any before it. And look at what it covered. The stretch through Hunan was the same line that Hunanese investors had won back from an American firm in 1905, to build with their own money. None of that mattered. The currency loan had already stirred up criticism in the provinces. The railway loan came much nearer home to the people. When it was signed, the storm broke. To the provinces it looked simple. Lines they had fought to win back from the foreigners, with their own money, were being taken by a Manchu court and paid for with foreign loans.

Zhao Erfeng
Zhao Erfeng. George Ernest Morrison, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The storm broke first in Hunan. When the decree arrived there, it was the signal for instant protest. The governor of Hunan sent a private telegram of warning to Beijing. The decree, he wrote, had caused great indignation among the masses, and the whole people were raising a clamour. Every day there were meetings, with the most violent speeches. It was impossible to reason with the people, or to stop their meetings by force. "I have done my best to admonish the people, and have agreed to memorialise on their behalf praying for the Imperial clemency, and have warned them against rioting. At the present moment they have dispersed, but it will be difficult to appease them finally." When he did pass on their petition, Beijing had him severely reprimanded. The court could not see what the fuss was about. It had stopped the special taxes on rice, salt and houses that paid for Hunan's railway, it said, and promised that no shareholder would lose. The people "should have been filled with rejoicing on this account." Instead, it decided, the provincial assembly had misunderstood, its petition was full of errors, and its attitude amounted to a threat. Guangzhou and Sichuan protested even more strongly, and got rebukes just as stern. It was in Sichuan that it went furthest. In Sichuan the terms were harsher. Shareholders there would get back, in state bonds, only a little over half of the cash they had paid in, while in the neighbouring provinces bonds were issued for the full amount. Much of the lost money had gone in speculation on the Shanghai stock market. But underneath the money, the real issue was the one that had been building for years: where the provinces' control ended and Beijing's began. The railways had made it a test case. Over the following months, a Sichuan Association of Comrades to Protect the Railway brought in thousands of people from every part of the province: scholars, students, soldiers of the provincial New Army, local militia, labourers, and gangsters of the Society of Elder Brothers. The Society of Elder Brothers was the great secret brotherhood of the west, strong among boatmen, soldiers and the poor. In Chengdu, people set up altars to the dead Guangxu, with a couplet beside each: public affairs to be settled by public opinion, and Sichuan's railway to stay in the people's hands. The dead emperor had become a shield against his own dynasty. The man who had to deal with it was the governor general, Zhao Erfeng. He was a hard frontier soldier who had spent years fighting in the Tibetan borderlands west of Sichuan, where his methods had earned him the name Butcher Zhao. At first, the protesters went by the book. They petitioned Zhao, and through Zhao they memorialised the throne. All they got back was another sharply worded rebuke. So they turned to passive resistance. Shops closed, employees struck, students stayed away from the schools and colleges, and people refused to pay their taxes. Normal life simply stopped. Reasoning got nowhere, and Zhao had the men said to be the movement's ringleaders arrested. Among them was the president of Sichuan's new provincial assembly. It was the signal for a change of tactics. Crowds came to Zhao's compound, and his troops drove them back only with difficulty. Many in the crowd, it was said afterwards, came carrying the memorial tablets of the dead Guangxu, and burning incense. That was the seventh of September. Scores of protesters were killed or wounded in Chengdu. After the arrests, the militia rose against the governor general, and angry peasants were on the march too. In county after county, tax offices and police stations were attacked, and warehouses were looted for food. Secret society men, bandits, gentry and revolutionaries all joined in, and nobody could quite tell who was leading whom. Cut off in Chengdu, the protesters wrote their appeals on wooden boards, coated them with oil, and dropped them into the rivers to float down to the towns below. People called them water telegrams. What soon became known as the Sichuan revolt had begun, and it rapidly grew to an amazing size. The whole province seemed on the verge of rising against the dynasty. A movement that had begun against foreigners had turned, almost everywhere, against the Qing government instead. So, did the dynasty's own reforms bring it down? The court built the assemblies to forge loyal citizens. Instead, the reformist elite who spoke through them turned against the throne, and became the engine of revolution. By the middle of 1911, a sudden, anxious feeling had gripped the country that the dynasty had lost the mandate of Heaven. That was the old belief that a dynasty ruled only while Heaven approved of it, and that rebellion and disaster were the signs that Heaven had withdrawn its favour. Beijing needed troops in Sichuan, fast. Enter Duanfang. In 1900, as a provincial governor, he had protected missionaries who fled into his province, and in 1905 he was named to go abroad and study how Japan and the Western countries were governed. In May the regency had put him in charge of the trunk railways. Now he was ordered into Sichuan, at the head of New Army troops from Hubei. Duanfang was sincere and able, and he was destined to die at the hands of his own soldiers. Zhao Erfeng would be murdered in Chengdu. Neither man would live to see the new year. And as troops were drawn off toward Sichuan, the garrison left behind at Wuchang, the capital of Hubei, across the Yangzi from Hankou, was a New Army garrison riddled with revolutionaries. In Beijing, the National Assembly was due to meet again in October. Next time: Wuchang. And remember that photograph of a man with nothing on his mind.

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