The war with Japan in 1894-1895 found Chang established in the viceroyalty of Hukwang, two provinces in Central China, with a prosperous population of over fifty millions, on a great highway of internal traffic rivalling the Mississippi, and with Hankow, the hub of the Empire, for its commercial centre. When he saw the Chinese forces scattered like chaff by the battalions of those despised islanders he was not slow to grasp the explanation. Kang Yuwei, a Canton man, also grasped it, and urged on the Emperor the necessity for reform with such vigour as to prompt him to issue a meteoric shower of reformatory edicts, filling one party with hope and the other with dismay.
Chang had held office at Canton; and his keen intellect had taken in the changed relations of West and East. He perceived that a new sort of sunshine shed its beams on the Western world. He did not fully apprehend the spiritual elements of our civilisation; but he saw that it was clothed with a power unknown to the sages of his country, the forces of nature being brought into subjection through science and popular education. He felt that China must conform to the new order of things, or perish—even if that new order was in contradiction to her ancient traditions as much as the change of sunrise to the west. He saw and felt that knowledge is power, a maxim laid down by Confucius before the days of Bacon; and he set about inculcating his new ideas by issuing a series of lectures for the instruction of his subordinates. Collected into a volume under the title of "Exhortations to Learn,"[*] they were put into the hands of the young Emperor and by his command distributed among the viceroys and governors of the Empire.
[Footnote *: Translated by Dr. Woodbridge as "China's Only Hope." Kelly & Walsh, Shanghai.]
What a harvest might have sprung from the sowing of such seed in such soil by an imperial husbandman! But there were some who viewed it as the sowing of dragons' teeth. Those reactionaries induced the Dowager Empress to come out from her retirement and to reassume her abdicated power in order to save the Empire from a threatening conflagration. It was the fable of Phaëton enacted in real life. The young charioteer was struck down and the sun brought back to his proper course instead of rising in the west. The progressive legislation of the two previous years 1897-98 was repealed and then followed two years of a narrow, benighted policy, controlled by the reactionaries under the lead of Prince Tuan, father of the heir-apparent, with a junta of Manchu princes as blind and corrupt as Russian grand dukes. That disastrous recoil resulted in war, not against a single power, but against the whole civilised world, as has been set forth in the account of the Boxer War (see [page 172]).
Affairs were drifting into this desperate predicament when Chang of the Cavern became in a sense the saviour of his country. This he effected by two actions which called for uncommon intelligence and moral force: (1) By assuring the British Government that he would at all costs maintain peace in Central China; (2) by refusing to obey an inhuman decree from Peking, commanding the viceroys to massacre all foreigners within their jurisdiction—a decree which would be incredible were it not known that at the same moment the walls of the capital were placarded with proclamations offering rewards of 50, 30 and 20 taels respectively for the heads of foreign men, women, and children.
It is barely possible that Chang was helped to a decision by a friendly visit from a British man-of-war, whose captain, in answer to a question about his artillery, informed Chang that he had the bearings of his official residence, and could drop a shell into it with unerring precision at a distance of three miles. He was also aided by the influence of Mr. Fraser, a wide-awake British consul. Fraser modestly disclaims any special merit in the matter, but British missionaries at Hankow give him the credit. They say that, learning from them the state of feeling among the people, he induced the viceroy to take prompt measures to prevent an outbreak. At one time a Boxer army from the south was about to cross the river and destroy the foreign settlement. Chang, when appealed to, frankly confessed that his troops were in sympathy with the Boxers, and that being in arrears of pay they were on the verge of revolt. Fraser found him the money by the help of the Hong Kong Bank; the troops were paid; and the Boxers dispersed.
The same problem confronted Liu, the viceroy of Nanking; and it was solved by him in the same way. Both viceroys acted in concert; but to which belongs the honour of that wise initiative can never be decided with certainty. The foreign consuls at Nanking claim it for Liu. Mr. Sundius, now British consul at Wuhu, assures me that as Liu read the barbarous decree he exclaimed, "I shall repudiate this as a forgery," adding "I shall not obey, if I have to die for it." His words have a heroic ring; and suggest that his policy was not taken at second-hand.
A similar claim has been put forward for Li Hung Chang, who was at that time viceroy at Canton. Is it not probable that the same view of the situation flashed on the minds of all three simultaneously? They were not, like the Peking princes, ignorant Tartars, but Chinese scholars of the highest type. They could not fail to see that compliance with that bloody edict would seal their own doom as well as that of the Empire.
Speaking of Chang, Mr. Fraser says: "He had the wit to see that any other course meant ruin." Chang certainly does not hesitate to blow his own trumpet; but I do not suspect him of "drawing the longbow." Having the advantage of being an expert rhymer, he has put his own pretensions into verses which all the school-children in a population of fifty millions are obliged to commit to memory. They run somewhat like this:
"In Kengtse (1900) the Boxer robbers went mad,
And Peking became for the third time the prey of fire and sword;
But the banks of the Great River and the province of Hupei
Remained in tranquillity."