But when his reforms led the Emperor to dispense with useless offices, as in his twenty-first, twenty-fourth and twenty-sixth edicts, for the purpose of retrenchment, and to dismiss recalcitrant officials for disobedience to his commands, a howl arose which was heard throughout the empire. The six members of the Board of Rites dismissed in edict twenty-three, with certain sympathizers to give them face, went to the Empress Dowager at the Summer Palace, represented to her that the boy whom she had placed upon the throne was steering the ship of state to certain destruction, and begged that she would come and once more take the helm. She listened to them with the attention and deference for which she has always been famed, and then dismissed them without any intimation as to what her course would be.
When the Emperor heard what they were doing, he sent a courier post-haste to call Yuan Shih-kai for an interview at the palace. When Yuan came, he ordered him to return to Tien-tsin, dispose of his superior officer, the Governor-General Jung Lu, and bring the army corps of 12,500 troops of which he was in charge to Peking, surround the Summer Palace, preventing any one from going in or coming out, thus making the Empress Dowager a prisoner, and allowing him to go on with his work of reform.
It is just here that we see the difference in the statesmanship of the Empress Dowager and the Emperor. When she appointed these two officials, one a liberal in charge of the army, she placed the other, a conservative, as his superior officer, so that one could not move without the knowledge and consent of the other, thus forestalling just such an order as this. To obey this order of the boy Emperor, Yuan must commit two great crimes, murder and treason, the one on a superior officer, and the other against her who had appointed him to office and who had been the ruler of the country for thirty-seven years, either of which would have been sufficient to have execrated him not only in the eyes of his own people but of history and of the world. Nay more, had he obeyed this order, the conservatives would have raised the cry of rebellion, and an army ten times greater than he could have mustered, would have crushed Yuan and his little company of 12,500 men, on the plea that he was about to take the throne.
Yuan then did the only wise thing he could have done. He went to Jung Lu, without whose consent he had no right to move, showed him the order, and asked for his commands. Jung Lu told him to leave the order with him, and as soon as Yuan had departed he took the train for Peking, called on Prince Ching, and they two went to the Summer Palace and showed the order to Her Majesty, suggesting to her that it might be well for her to come into the city and give him a few lessons in government.
As the Empress Dowager had been behaving herself so circumspectly during all the summer months, allowing the Emperor to test himself as a ruler, one can scarcely blame her for not wanting to be bottled up in the Summer Palace when she had done nothing to deserve it. When therefore this second delegation of officials, consisting of the two highest in rank in the empire, came to request her to once more take charge of the government, she called her sedan chair and started for the capital. She went without an army, but was accompanied by those of her palace eunuchs on whom she could implicitly depend, and enough of them to overcome those of the Emperor in case there should be trouble. That force was necessary is evident from the fact that she condemned to death a number of his servants after she had taken the throne.
When the Emperor heard that she was coming he sent a messenger with letters urging Kang Yu-wei to flee, and to devise some means for saving the situation, while he attempted to find refuge for himself in the foreign legations. This however he failed to do, but was taken by the Empress Dowager, and his career as a ruler ended, and his life as a prisoner began.
X
Kuang Hsu—As a Prisoner
Kuang Hsu deserves a place in history as the prize iconoclast. He sent a cold shiver down the spine of the literati by declaring that a man's fitness for office should not depend upon his ability to write a poem, or upon the elegance of his penmanship. This was too much. The literati argued that at the rate at which the Emperor was going, it might be expected that he would do away with chop-sticks and dispense with the queue.—Rounsevelle Wildman in "China's Open Door."