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

by Isaac Taylor Headland

Given: A people who cannot make a nail, to build a railroad.

Given: A people who dare not plow a deep furrow for fear of disturbing the spirits of the place, to open gold, silver, iron and coal mines.

Given: A people who in 4,000 years did not have the genius to develop a decent high school, to open a university in the capital of every province.

These are three of the score or more of equally difficult problems that the Emperor undertook to solve in twice as many days. In order to the solution of these problems there was organized in Peking a Reform Party of hot-headed, radical young scholars not one of whom has ever turned out to be a statesman. They were brilliant young men, many of them, but they so lost their heads in their enthusiasm for reform that they forgot that their government was in the hands of the same old conservative leaders under whom it had been for forty centuries.

They introduced into the palace as the private adviser of the Emperor, Kang Yu-wei, as we have already shown, to whom was thus offered one of the greatest opportunities that was ever given to a human being—that of being the leader in this great reform. He was hailed as a young Confucius, but his popularity was short-lived, for he so lacked all statesmanship as to allow the young Emperor to issue twenty-seven edicts, disposing of twenty-seven difficult problems such as I have given above in about twice that many days, and it is this hot-headed and unstatesman-like young "Confucius" who now calls Yuan Shih-kai an opportunist and a traitor because he did not enter into the following plot.

After the Emperor had dismissed two conservative vice-presidents of a Board, two governors of provinces, and a half dozen other useless conservative leaders, they plotted to overthrow him by appealing to the ambition of the Empress Dowager and induce her to dethrone him and again assume the reins of government. They argued that "he was her adopted son, it was she who had placed him on the throne, and she was therefore responsible for his mistakes." They complimented her on "the wisdom which she had manifested, and the statesmanship she had exhibited" during the thirty years and more of her regency. To all which she listened with a greedy ear, but still she made no move.

During this time were the Emperor and his young "Confucius" idle? By no means. They had hatched a counterplot, and had decided that what they could not do by moral suasion and statesmanship they would do by force, and so they sent an order to Yuan Shih-kai, who as we have said had drilled and was in charge of 12,500 of the best troops in the empire, urging him to "hasten to the capital at once, place the Empress Dowager under guard in the Summer Palace so that she may not be allowed to interfere in the affairs of the government, and protect him in his reform measures."

The Emperor knew that nothing could be done without the command of the army which was largely in the hands of a great conservative friend of the Empress Dowager (Jung Lu) the father-in-law of the present Regent. Yuan was in charge of an army corps of 12,500 troops, but for him to have taken them even at the command of the Emperor, without informing his superior officer, would have meant the loss of his head at once. The first thing then for him to do was to take this order to Jung Lu. Yuan was in favour of reform, though he may not have approved of the Emperor's methods. Jung Lu hastened to Prince Ching and they two sped to the Empress Dowager in the Summer Palace where they laid the whole matter before her. She hurried to Peking, boldly faced and denounced the Emperor, took from him his seal of state, and confined him a prisoner in the Winter Palace. Kang Yu-wei, the young "Confucius," fled, but the Empress Dowager seized his brother and five other patriotic young reformers, and ordered them beheaded on the public execution grounds in Peking.

Naturally the Empress Dowager approved of the "wise and statesmanlike methods" of Yuan in thus protecting instead of imprisoning her, and thus placing the reins of government once more in her hands, and she appointed him Junior Vice-President of the Board of Works, and when she was compelled to remove the Governor of Shantung who had organized the Boxer Society, she appointed Yuan Acting Governor in his stead. "Yuan," says Arthur H. Smith, was "a man of a wholly different stripe" from the one removed, and "if left to himself he would speedily have exterminated the whole Boxer brood, but being hampered by 'confidential instructions' from the palace, he could do little but issue poetical proclamations, and revile his subordinates for failure to do their duty."

When Yuan was made Governor of Shantung a number of the Boxer leaders called upon him expecting to find in him a sympathizer worthy of his predecessor. They told him of their great powers and possibilities, and of how they were proof against the spears, swords and bullets of their enemies. Yuan listened to them with patience and interest, and invited them to dine with him and other official friends in the near future.