The next day, it was the Emperor Kuang Hsu, and not his aunt, who was ceremoniously escorted to prison.
Six of the conspirators were subsequently executed. Another, Kang Yu Wei, escaped under British protection in October, 1898. Dr. Sun Yat-sen was another fugitive. It was in October, 1898, that Lord Charles Beresford arrived at Pekin.
The Empress Dowager resumed the Regency and therewith the formal investiture of that supreme power which she had exercised since, as a girl of twenty-two, a lady in waiting at Court in the time of the Emperor Hsien-Feng, she had unofficially assumed the conduct of affairs, and which she continued to wield until the end. Yung Lu was appointed to be member of the Grand Council, and Minister of War. When he was in Pekin, Lord Charles Beresford had an interesting conversation with Yung Lu.
The Emperor Kuang Hsu remained imprisoned in his palace in the Ocean Terrace at Pekin; and it was rumoured throughout the South that he would presently die. Whether or not the Empress Dowager desired his death, she considered it politic, having regard to the anger which his dethronement inspired in the South, to keep him alive. Moreover, the British Minister, referring to the reports that "the Empress Dowager was about to proceed to extreme steps in regard to the Emperor," solemnly suggested that any such course of action would be highly repugnant to the susceptibilities of Foreign Powers.
Such, briefly indicated, was the posture of affairs in 1898, when the British Government was being urged to initiate a definite policy in China, and when Lord Charles Beresford went to investigate commercial conditions in that puzzling Empire. But the British Government had the rest of the world to consider, as well.
In the preceding year, 1897, it was announced that Russia would winter at Port Arthur; whereupon Lord Charles Beresford remarked in the House of Commons that the winter would probably be of long duration. Germany was in occupation of Kiao Chao, originally demanded as compensation for the murder of a German missionary—a most profitable martyrdom. There were troubles on the Indian frontier; there was fighting in Crete, and consequently there was danger of a war breaking out between Greece and Turkey. It is sufficiently obvious that, under such conditions—at a time when the European nations were each waiting to take of China what it could get; when Russia was more or less in agreement with France and Germany; and when England stood alone;—any very definite move on her part might have led to bigger difficulties than she cared to encounter. At any rate, peace was maintained; the policy of the "Open Door" prevailed; and the influence exerted by Lord Charles Beresford upon international affairs, although perhaps not to be defined, was considerable. For further information concerning this epoch, the student may be referred to China under the Empress Dowager, by Messrs. J. O. P. Bland and E. Backhouse (Heinemann, 1910); China in Transformation, by A. R. Colquhoun (Harper, 1898); and the Blue-book China. No. 1 (1899) C.—9131.
While one British admiral, Rear-Admiral Noel, stopped the trouble in Crete, which had defeated the united intellect of Europe for generations; another, Rear-Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, was employed in conducting a swifter, more thorough and more practical investigation into the commercial military and social conditions of China than had ever before been accomplished; so that its results, set forth at the time in the admiral's many speeches and afterwards in his book The Break-up of China, struck the two great English-speaking peoples of the world, the British and the American nations, with something of the force of a revelation.