Dr. Sun managed to slip across the lower border into Annam disguised as a blind beggar. No sooner was he across the border than he began again, wandering from one Chinese colony to another in Annam, in Tongkin, down in the Straits Settlements, over in the Philippines—always preaching revolution.
In 1898 K'ang Yu-wei, one of the reformers whom Sun had been allied with, travelled too fast in his efforts to win the ear of the puppet Emperor, was betrayed by Yuan Shih K'ai, so it was said, and had to flee to save his head. Then the Empress-Dowager laid a heavy hand upon all reformers within reach. Once more Sun escaped. After the Boxer uprising, which was not at all of Sun's doing and was entirely out of sympathy with his schemes, the Empress-Dowager seemed to be bitten by the general sentiment for reform and she promised much for China that raised the hopes of the new element. But like most Manchu promises, they were not to be depended on.
DRILLED IN THE UNITED STATES.
Back Sun went to America, and he added a new detail to his propaganda. He found a young graduate of Leland Stanford University, Homer Lee, who was military mad and incidentally an enthusiast on the subject of freedom for China. Lee was made General of the Reform Cadets, who were Chinese youths of San Francisco, fitted out with uniforms and guns and taught to do the hay foot, straw foot in hired halls night after night.
The idea spread to other cities in the United States and to Manila. The Reform Cadets became a wide-spread organisation. American drillmasters were hired to coach them; they had target practice and they gave exhibition drills.
Out in San Francisco the agents of the Chinese Government once tried to prevail upon the city and State authorities to break up the organisation because it was technically an armed band of aliens on American soil. The effort failed.
Such was the man who may become yet the greatest man among the Chinese in his own country as he has been out of it. In due course Dr. Sun Yat-sen was proclaimed President, with a provisional Government at Nanking.
Sun Yat-sen, revolutionist in the most conservative land under heaven, fugitive for fifteen years from the keenest and most relentless trailers of men, hidden spirit of strange secret societies whose ramifications have made mole tracks through every land where Chinamen are—this man is now President of the Republic of China by decree of the Provisional Military Assembly at Nanking.
Out of the underground passages of plot and intrigue the nature of which no Occidental could hope to understand, and through which this wiry little man has been wriggling and back tracking for more than a dozen years, a new national figure suddenly jumps to command the attention of the world. During years past the world has occasionally caught glimpses of the round black head and narrow, ascetic features of this Dr. Sun, now in Singapore, now in London, now in San Francisco.
There had been little paragraphs in the world's news about an agitator, a Radical, who seemed to be tilting with straws at the impregnable citadel of the Manchu clan in Peking. The Revolution began in China and even then, when the name of Sun Yat-sen was coupled with it people outside of China cracked jokes about a faker, a charlatan, who was trying to capitalise the upheaval at home for his own benefit.