Court Life in China: The Capital, Its Officials and People

by Isaac Taylor Headland

IX

Kuang Hsu—As Emperor and Reformer

In 1891 the present Emperor Kuang Hsu issued a very strong edict commanding good treatment of the missionaries. He therein made the following statement: "The religions of the West have for their object the inculcation of virtue, and, though our people become converted, they continue to be Chinese subjects. There is no reason why there should not be harmony between the people and the adherents of foreign religions."—Hon. Charles Denby in "China and Her People."

IX

KUANG HSU—AS EMPEROR AND REFORMER

AS a man, there are few characters in Chinese history that are more interesting than Kuang Hsu. He had all the caprices of genius with their corresponding weakness and strength. He could wield a pen with the vigour of a Caesar, threaten his greatest viceroys, dismiss his leading conservative officials, introduce the most sweeping and far-reaching reforms that have ever been thought of by the Chinese people, and then run from a woman as though the very devil was after him.

He has been variously rated as a genius, an imbecile and a fool. Let us grant that he was not brilliant. Let us rate him as an imbecile, and then let us try to account for his having brought into the palace every ingenious toy and every wonderful and useful invention and discovery of the past twenty or thirty years with the exception of the X-rays and liquid air. Let us try to explain why it was that an imbecile would purchase every book that had been printed in the Chinese language, concerning foreign subjects of learning, up to the time when he was dethroned. Let us tell why it was that an imbecile would study all those foreign books without help, without an assistant, without a teacher, for three years, from the time he bought them in 1895 till 1898, before he began issuing the most remarkable series of edicts that have ever come from the pen of an Oriental monarch in the same length of time. And let us explain how it was that an imbecile could embody in his edicts of two or three months all the important principles that were necessary to launch the great reforms of the past ten years.

I doubt if any Chinese monarch has ever had a more far-reaching influence over the minds of the young men of the empire than Kuang Hsu had from 1895 till 1898. The preparation for this influence had been going on for twenty or thirty years previously in the educational institutions established by the missions and the government. From these schools there had gone out a great number of young men who had taken positions in all departments of business, and many of the state, and revealed to the officials as well as to many of the people the power of foreign education. An imperial college had been established by the customs service for the special education of young men for diplomatic and other positions, from which there had gone out young men who were the representatives of the government as consuls or ministers in the various countries of Europe and America.

The fever for reading the same books that Kuang Hsu had read was so great as to tax to the utmost the presses of the port cities to supply the demand, and the leaders of some of the publication societies feared that a condition had arisen for which they were unprepared. Books written by such men as Drs. Allen, Mateer, Martin, Williams and Legge were brought out in pirated photographic reproductions by the bookshops of Shanghai and sold for one-tenth the cost of the original work. Authors, to protect themselves, compelled the pirates to deliver over the stereotype plates they had made on penalty of being brought before the officials in litigation if they refused. But during the three years the Emperor had been studying these foreign books, hundreds of thousands of young scholars all over the empire had been doing the same, preparing themselves for whatever emergency the studies of the young Emperor might bring about.

One day during the early spring a young Chinese reformer came to me to get a list of the best newspapers and periodicals published in both England and America. I inquired the reason for this strange move, and he said: