How Did the Qing Train Itself Out of Existence? — The 1911 Revolution: Causes and Founders
《神州大地》第 12 集 · 語言：English · 時長：37:28
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The first of January, 1912.

Nanjing. At night, a new name for

the country was read aloud.

The Republic of China.

A provisional president was sworn in.

This was Asia's first republic — before it,

no country in Asia had tried a

system without an emperor.

But that day was a beginning,

not an ending. Because there was still

a court in Beijing.

The emperor was still in the Forbidden

City, the reign title was still in

use, and the Beiyang army was still

in someone's hands. So the question is:

how did a dynasty come to nothing?

Was it beaten down by somebody?

The answer this episode argues is a

surprising one: it was not beaten down.

It reformed itself — new policies, a new

army, centralising power, collecting taxes — and step

by step, it dismantled its own foundations.

To talk about 1911, we have to

start earlier. Start with the mess.

There was a saying in late-Qing officialdom:

three years as an honest prefect,

and a hundred thousand taels of silver.

What it described was not one corrupt

man. It was an entire way of

operating: official salaries were low, and what

actually kept people alive were the extra

fees and customary levies.

Those above were supported by those below,

and those below scraped it off the

people. Layer after layer, everyone lived this

way. This is not a question of

anyone's morality. It is a structure:

when the salary cannot support life,

money has to come from somewhere other

than the salary.

If that was true of the civil

service, the military side could not be

counted on either. The Qing's standing forces

were the Eight Banners and the Green

Standard Army. They could fight when the

dynasty was founded; by the late Qing

they were something else entirely.

There were men on the rolls and

none in the barracks — officers drawing pay

for empty ranks was an open secret.

After long years of peace, the blades

had rusted. An army had forgotten how

to fight. What remained was one use

only: to exist on paper.

In 1894, the First Sino-Japanese War.

The Beiyang Fleet, thirty years of self-strengthening

poured into it, was destroyed outright.

Defeated by Japan — the shock of that

at the time is hard to imagine

now. Not defeated by a Western power,

but by a neighbour that had been

forced open in the same way,

decades earlier. The next year, the Treaty

of Shimonoseki: an indemnity of two hundred

million taels, ports opened, and Taiwan ceded.

Thirty years of buying ships, building factories

and drilling troops — one war, back to

the starting point. The real consequence was

not the size of the indemnity.

It was that a great many people

arrived at the same sentence at the

same time: buying ships without changing the

system may simply not be enough.

Some tried to change it from inside.

Not by rebellion — from the top.

In 1898, the Guangxu emperor issued edicts for

a new policy: abolish the eight-legged essay,

open schools, train a new army,

cut redundant posts. One hundred and three

days. What it touched was not just

regulations. It was the positions of a

great many people — conservative grandees were dismissed,

transferred, threatened. Then Cixi staged a coup,

and every reform was rescinded.

Tan Sitong and five others were executed

at Caishikou in Beijing.

Tan left words behind, and he left

a choice behind as well: he could

have left. The first attempt at saving

itself was cut short like that.

A greater humiliation was still to come.

In 1900, the Boxers entered Beijing and the

Eight-Nation Alliance came. Cixi took the emperor

with her and fled to Xi'an.

In 1901, the Boxer Protocol was signed.

An indemnity of four hundred and fifty

million taels — the figure was set that

way, one tael for every person in

the country. With interest, roughly nine hundred

and eighty million taels, payable over thirty-nine

years. The figures come from the text

of the protocol itself, and became the

heaviest fixed charge on late-Qing finances.

From then on, the court was called

the court of the foreigners.

Where would the money come from?

Not from the treasury — the treasury was

empty. It was apportioned down to every

village: provinces took their share, then added

their own charges, and it landed on

land, on salt, on goods.

The second attempt came earlier.

It was called self-strengthening.

The self-strengtheners' proposal, in eight words:

Chinese learning for the essence, Western learning

for use. Buy machines, build factories,

make guns and cannon, open mines,

found a language college, send students abroad.

What was learned was technique.

The system was not to be touched.

The war of 1894 proved that learning

only the surface is not enough.

Technique cannot save a rotted system.

That sentence was not added afterwards by

historians — a great many people at the

time worked it out themselves.

After 1900, the court had been hurt badly

enough to really act.

From 1901, the New Policies began: train a

new army, encourage industry, restructure the administration,

establish a ministry of education, send commissioners

abroad to observe. In 1905, a thousand years

of the examination system was abolished

it is hard to overstate this:

the road by which a literate man

moved upward had been changed.

New schools were founded, students sent abroad;

a new-model army was trained on Western

lines, with Western drill and Western rifles.

All three were done.

One thing was not: the political system

was left untouched. The surface was changed.

The root was still the old one.

Later on, even a constitution was put

on the table. The trigger was somebody

else's war: the Russo-Japanese War of 1904,

which Japan won. A small constitutional country

defeating a large autocracy was a comparison

quoted endlessly at home.

There was a wave of demand inside

the country: Yuan Shikai, Zhang Zhidong and

other senior officials petitioned jointly for a

constitution, and the press pressed as well.

In 1906, the court announced preparatory constitutionalism.

In 1908, the Outline of an Imperial Constitution

was promulgated: imperial power sacred and inviolable,

with a preparatory period of nine years.

In 1909, provincial consultative assemblies were set up

the delegates were elected, many of them

gentry and merchants, constitutionalists, and for the

first time they had a place to

speak. Nine years was asked for.

Others could not wait nine years.

Once the assemblies opened, people learned two

things: how to put forward a motion,

and how to act together.

A list laid the whole question of

sincerity open. On 8 May 1911, the Qing's first

cabinet was formed. Thirteen men.

Nine were Manchu and only four were

Han; of the nine Manchus, seven were

from the imperial clan.

The list appears in the cabinet regulations

and the edicts of appointment, and the

clan branches can be verified.

The army, the navy and the treasury

military power and financial power — were all

in the hands of imperial kinsmen.

Contemporaries called it the imperial-clan cabinet.

This broke the ordinary rule of constitutional

monarchy: in such a system, members of

the royal house do not sit in

the cabinet. The constitutionalists were stunned.

Zhang Jian, Tang Hualong, Tan Yankai and

others petitioned jointly, saying an imperial-clan cabinet

was incompatible with constitutional monarchy.

The court ignored them. Trying to pull power

in, they pushed their allies away.

The last straw came the next day.

On 9 May 1911, an edict: the main railway

trunk lines were to be nationalised.

The Sichuan-Hankou and Guangzhou-Hankou lines were taken

into state ownership. The problem was not

the word nationalisation. It was how it

was done. The Sichuan share capital was

around fourteen million taels — the figure appears

in People's Daily and in the Institute

of Modern History of the Chinese Academy

of Social Sciences — and much of it

came from a rent levy: collected with

the land tax at three percent,

so that farmers across Sichuan held a

share. The government would exchange it for

state bonds, not cash.

And three million taels of the shortfall

which included some two and a half

million taels lost when Shanghai money shops

collapsed in the rubber crash — was not

recognised. In the same month, the minister

of posts and communications, Sheng Xuanhuai,

borrowed six million pounds from a four-power

banking consortium of Britain, America, Germany and

France, secured on Hunan and Hubei transit

dues and the salt tax.

In June, the Sichuan Railway Protection League

was founded, with hundreds of thousands of

members. On 7 September, the Chengdu massacre:

the Sichuan governor-general Zhao Erfeng ordered troops

to fire, and more than thirty petitioners

died. On 25 September, Rongxian declared independence

half a month before Wuchang.

By this point, the merchants' money and

the farmers' rent shares had been taken

too.

At this point one thing can be

made clear: why did the New Policies

and the new army end up dismantling

the dynasty itself? First: the new army

was organised on new lines — literate,

structured, armed, and able to read the

new newspapers. The court gave them organisation and

weapons, but not a sense of belonging.

The first shot at Wuchang was fired

by the engineering battalion of the Hubei

new army. An army with guns and

organisation became the group best placed to

overthrow the court. Second: the constitutionalists were

the ones who most wanted the dynasty

preserved. Once the imperial-clan cabinet appeared,

the literati turned to revolution — assembly delegates,

school-founding gentry, railway investors, all turning around

together. Liang Qichao had a line that

has been quoted ever since: the present

government is a great factory for manufacturing

revolutionaries. It wanted to strengthen itself.

Instead it armed its opponents.

So now: who set it in motion.

The first person to speak of is

Sun Yat-sen. In 1894, he founded the Revive

China Society in Honolulu — he was twenty-eight,

and a letter he had sent to

Li Hongzhang had gone unanswered.

In 1905 in Tokyo, the Revive China Society

merged with the China Revival Society and

the Restoration Society to form the Revolutionary

Alliance, and he was elected its director,

advocating the Three Principles of the People:

nationalism, democracy, and the people's livelihood.

Whichever side writes this history, both honour

him as the forerunner of the revolution.

But to be precise: he was not

the first to call for the overthrow

of the Qing, and he was not

the only one. He was the one

who lasted. Others scattered after one failure;

he failed more than ten times and

kept going.

In the six years after the Alliance

was founded, it launched a dozen or

more uprisings. Guangzhou, Huizhou, Chaozhou, Huanggang,

Qinvhu, Fangcheng, Zhennanguan, Qinlian, Hekou — the names

Guangzhou and Huizhou recur again and again

in Qing memorials. Failure after failure.

Some risings scattered within days; some were

broken up before they could assemble.

Where did the money come from?

It came from overseas Chinese — miners and

shopkeepers in Southeast Asia, restaurant owners and

laundrymen in America, subscribing, holding charity sales,

sometimes selling their property.

That is also why he could rise

again after every defeat.

In this circle, failure was the norm

and scattering was the reasonable response.

He simply did not stop.

That he did not stop was itself

his greatest asset.

But the revolutionary camp was not a

single block either. In 1914, after the failure

of the Second Revolution, Sun Yat-sen formed

a new party in Tokyo — the Chinese

Revolutionary Party — setting aside the Nationalist Party.

Its rules required new members to swear

an oath to follow Mr.

Sun, with wording such as "if my

heart should waver, may I suffer the

utmost penalty"; and they had to give

a fingerprint. The party's second figure,

Huang Xing, opposed this — Huang was the

founder of the China Revival Society and

the commander at Huanghuagang and at the

battle of Hankou and Hanyang.

He refused to join, and his reasons

are in his letters to Sun and

to comrades: swearing a fingerprint oath of

personal loyalty was a reversal for a

democratic revolution, and an insult to his

comrades. Sun did not yield.

On 30 June 1914, Huang Xing left for America.

The two went their separate ways.

Scholars of early Republican politics, Yang Tianshi

among them, generally regard this as a

low point in Sun's career — because by

the time of the National Protection War,

the anti-Yuan force that actually took the

stage was not his party but the

circle around Liang Qichao and Cai E.

A man who advocated republicanism also walked

the road of centralising power.

That is one of the most telling

internal wounds of 1911.

Money was never a settled question among

the revolutionaries. In 1907, when Sun left Japan,

Japanese friends and merchants gave him gifts

amounting to more than twenty thousand yen.

He left only two thousand for the

newspaper Minbao and took the rest for

actual risings in Chaozhou and Huizhou.

This exploded in Tokyo.

Zhang Taiyan — and Zhang Ji and Liu

Shipei with him — launched a movement against

Sun, putting up notices accusing him of

having secretly taken Japanese money and of

misusing public funds. What the later inquiry

found is recorded in the Alliance's internal

investigation and in Sun's own statement of

accounts: his mother and his brother were

not living comfortably, which did not look

like someone who had embezzled a fortune;

he produced a list of receipts and

payments, saying he had spent nothing public

beyond board, lodging and travel.

His brother Sun Mei had given away

his whole property for the revolution and

gone bankrupt. In the end, no evidence

was produced for the embezzlement charge,

and the talk died down.

What this episode really shows is something

else: even comrades questioned one another.

For an organisation living on donations,

financial transparency was a problem from the

very beginning.

Having said all that, one more thing

should be said: he was an ordinary

man too. His marriages and relationships have

been recorded repeatedly, both then and since:

his first wife Lu Muzhen, from an

arranged marriage in his home village;

a marriage to Otsuki Kaoru during his

years in Japan, and a daughter from

it; and his marriage to Soong Ching-ling

in 1915. He was forty-nine that year and

she was twenty-two. The difference in age,

and the setting aside of his first

wife, were discussed at the time

the Soong family objected at first,

and some comrades thought it unfair to

Lu Muzhen. On the other hand,

his speaking ability and personal magnetism really

were his greatest capital in raising money

and mobilising support; that too is consistent

in the accounts of his contemporaries.

Also from his contemporaries: the description of

him as not constant in his affections.

Beyond his achievements and his failures,

he had a private life as well.

None of this changes who he was

but put together, it is what makes

a person.

Besides overthrowing the Qing, he had a

design: what to do afterwards.

Two concepts were his own.

One is the five-power constitution: adding examination

and control to the executive, legislative and

judicial powers. The second is the separation

of powers and functions.

Power is split in two: the people

hold four powers — election, recall, initiative and

referendum — called political power; the government holds

five, called governing power.

Together it means the people have authority

and the government has capacity.

The idea appears in outline in a

1906 speech and is set out systematically

in the 1924 lectures on democracy.

Did it leave institutional traces?

Yes: the 1947 constitution adopted a five-yuan

structure. The design survived.

Assessments differ — some value it as a

Chinese-designed constitutional scheme, others criticise the fivefold

division as unclear in practice.

This film states it and leaves the

judgement to the viewer.

One more thing is worth noticing:

his party kept changing.

From the Revive China Society to the

Revolutionary Alliance, a small body became a

united front. In 1912, with the Republic founded,

the Alliance became the Nationalist Party,

taking the path of parliamentary competition,

and this time it was Song Jiaoren

who led it. In 1914, after the failure

of the Second Revolution, Sun formed the

Chinese Revolutionary Party and drew power back

to the party leader personally.

In 1919, it was renamed the Kuomintang.

In 1924, it was reorganised in Guangzhou:

Soviet advisers brought in, communists allowed to

join as individuals, and a party machine

built on the principle of governing through

the party. The line of swing is

clear: from a parliamentary party to a

centralised party. The parliamentary path Song Jiaoren

advocated in 1912 was overridden twice, in 1914 and

in 1924. This film states the sequence and

does not say which one ought to

have won.

Even the title of head of state

was disputed. In 1921, the Guangzhou military government

elected him "extraordinary president".

The word extraordinary describes the post itself:

an expedient created for the emergency of

the constitution-protection period. And because it was

an expedient for an emergency, its term

and its legality were questioned.

Among those who questioned it was Chen

Jiongming — inside the same revolutionary camp,

objecting precisely to whether "extraordinary" could be

used that way. His principle of governing

through the party was also read by

contemporaries as placing a leader's power above

the ordinary track of constitutional government.

These were the arguments of people at

the time — not criticism added later,

but things said in the newspapers and

correspondence of the day.

This film sets them beside the assessment

of him as the forerunner of the

revolution, without verdict, and without any reference

to any present-day system.

Having dealt with Sun Yat-sen, there is

a second question to answer.

Why did the people who most wanted

to preserve the Qing end up leaving

too? They were the constitutionalists: Zhang Jian,

Tang Hualong, Tan Yankai, Tang Shouqian,

Liang Qichao. What they wanted was not

revolution; they wanted a parliament.

They invested in railways, ran schools and

newspapers, sat in the provincial assemblies

no one wanted the country to fall

into chaos more than they did.

They gave the court nine years.

Once the imperial-clan cabinet appeared, the hope

collapsed entirely: thirteen men, nine Manchu,

seven of the imperial clan, military and

financial power all in the hands of

kinsmen. The next day, the railways were

nationalised. The money they had put in

was taken as well.

So the constitutionalists turned.

When the shots were fired at Wuchang

in October, many of the first to

respond were the chairmen and members of

the provincial assemblies. Liang Qichao's line,

compressed to a few words: the government,

a factory for manufacturing revolutionaries.

The ones who wanted to preserve it

left in the end.

That is one man.

There was a whole group.

The first is Huang Xing.

In 1904 he founded the China Revival Society

in Changsha. At Huanghuagang he led the

attack on the governor-general's yamen with two

fingers of his right hand shot away,

and kept directing to the end.

In the battle of Hankou and Hanyang

after the Wuchang rising — forty-odd days

he was the front-line commander in chief;

those forty days bought time for the

southern provinces. In the accounts of his

contemporaries he is described as loyal,

brave, and uninterested in power: he was

named with Sun as Sun-Huang, but never

contested position with him; and when the

two parted in 1914 he chose to step

aside rather than fight.

In one sentence: he was Sun's other

half.

There was one man who believed in

parliament to the end.

Song Jiaoren. After the Wuchang rising he

took part in organising the provisional government

in Nanjing; when the Alliance was reorganised

into the Nationalist Party, he was the

one who actually ran it, turning it

into a party that would compete for

votes. He argued for a party cabinet:

the majority party in parliament forms the

government, and responsibility lies with the cabinet

rather than with a president personally.

In the 1913 National Assembly elections the

Nationalist Party won a majority of seats

the first nationwide parliamentary election in China.

What followed is beyond this episode's scope.

His ideal did not get through.

But that path was tried once,

and the fact that it was tried

is worth remembering.

Besides guns, the pens came in too.

Zhang Taiyan. In 1903 he wrote Refuting Kang

Youwei's Views on Revolution, naming Kang directly

and rejecting his monarchist argument; in the

same year the Subao case broke and

he was imprisoned for three years.

After his release he went to Japan

and edited Minbao, and for several years

fought a war of articles with Liang

Qichao's New People's Miscellany over whether there

should be a revolution at all

the largest public debate of the late

Qing. He wrote against the monarchists.

He also wrote against comrades: he was

one of those who launched the 1907

movement against Sun. One article, copied and

recopied as it was then, was worth

a detachment of troops.

A younger generation wrote with their lives.

Zou Rong's The Revolutionary Army appeared in 1903;

its author was nineteen.

The book calls out "long live the

Chinese Republic", and it was printed as

a pamphlet and reprinted endlessly.

Two years later he died in prison,

aged twenty. In the same year,

Chen Tianhua's Alarm Bell and Sudden Awakening

were published. He wrote in the plainest

language: how the powers are carving the

country up, how China is being destroyed.

These two pamphlets circulated very widely in

the new army. In December 1905, after the

controversy over the Japanese regulations on Chinese

students, Chen Tianhua left a last letter

and drowned himself in the sea at

Omori, aged thirty. He used his death

to persuade: fearing that his compatriots would

not listen, or would forget, he threw

himself into the sea as a reminder

to you all. They did not live

to see it — they did not live

to see the day of the republic.

Among them there were women too.

Qiu Jin. She came from an official

family, married, had two children, then went

to study in Japan; she returned to

publish a women's journal, promote women's education,

and run the Datong School in Shaoxing.

In July 1907, implicated in Xu Xilin's Anqing

rising, she was arrested by Qing authorities.

On 15 July she was executed at Xuantingkou

in Shaoxing, aged thirty-one.

The most widely repeated line is what

she wrote before her execution: "autumn wind,

autumn rain, fill one with melancholy"

the phrase appears in Qing case records

and in many later accounts, though scholars

still discuss its original source.

She did not live to 1911.

But she was one link in this

chain.

One more thing needs saying: the revolutionaries

were not one society, they were many.

The main ones: the Revive China Society,

founded in Honolulu in 1894; the China Revival

Society in Changsha and the Restoration Society

in Shanghai, both in 1904; in Hubei,

the Reading Society and the Science Study

Institute, each with its own members and

its own ground. In August 1905 in Tokyo

these bodies combined into the Chinese Revolutionary

Alliance, with Sun Yat-sen as director and

Huang Xing as general manager.

This was a real merger: scattered forces

at last had a centre.

But it must also be said:

numbers alone do not win.

For six years after the merger,

the uprisings still numbered a dozen-odd,

and still every one failed.

The real difference was that someone led

someone who kept raising money, kept reorganising,

and kept going on to the next

attempt.

To close the line of uprisings, the failures

come first. From the large rising of

miners and sworn brotherhoods at Pingxiang,

Liuyang and Liling in 1906, to the rising

of the Guangzhou new army in 1910,

to the last one — the Guangzhou rising

of 27 April 1911. From Ping-Liu-Li to Huanghuagang,

every one had the same ending.

At Guangzhou, Huang Xing led some hundred

men into the governor-general's yamen; the governor-general

fled, the attackers were surrounded by naval

forces, and by nightfall it was over.

Afterwards Pan Dawei collected seventy-two bodies and

buried them at Red Flower Ridge,

renamed Huanghuagang — hence the customary seventy-two martyrs.

Fourteen more names were later established and

inscribed on the reverse of the memorial

arch, giving eighty-six names that can be

verified. Among the dead was Lin Juemin,

twenty-four, a student in Japan, wounded at

the yamen and taken alive.

The night before the rising he wrote

two letters, one to his father and

one to his wife Chen Yiying.

That one letter — " I enlarge the love

I have for you, to help all

people love those they love" — still brings

tears a hundred years later.

And then that night.

10 October 1911. Wuchang. What happened that night is,

told plainly, very short: soldiers of the

eighth engineering battalion of the Hubei new

army moved first, because word of a

register of names had leaked in the

barracks. Who fired the first shot is

recorded differently in different sources — the common

account is a soldier of the eighth

engineering battalion, but accounts differ as to

the individual. What can be said is

that the shooting was done by soldiers,

not by generals. The governor-general of Huguang,

Ruicheng, escaped through a hole in the

back wall of his yamen and boarded

a gunboat on the river.

Overnight, Wuchang changed hands.

By the following morning the flag over

the city had changed.

No senior commander was present to direct

it. It was common soldiers who started

it.

Within that night there was a contrast

between two men, more neatly turned than

any script. The first: Sun Yat-sen in

America. When the Wuchang rising happened,

he was in the United States raising

money for uprisings. In mid-October he read

the news from Wuchang in a newspaper

not by telegram, but in the paper.

He wrote about this himself later.

Which is to say: he was not

there. The rising that toppled the Qing

was launched without its originator present.

The second: Li Yuanhong.

He was the commander of the twenty-first

mixed brigade of the Hubei new army,

and he was not with his unit

on the night of the rising.

The next day he was found by

soldiers and made military governor of the

Hubei military government. The most widespread story

is that he was found at home,

or under a bed, and refused at

first; the details differ across memoirs and

the original source cannot be verified

what is certain is that he was

unwilling at first and agreed later.

And there is something better: a few

days earlier the soldiers had privately called

him " Bodhisattva Li", because he treated men

leniently and did not punish them lightly.

The men who had called him a

bodhisattva days before were, days later,

pressing the seal into the same man's

hands. The jokes history tells are neater

than any script.

After Wuchang, the provinces responded like dominoes.

In the two months after Wuchang:

on 22 October, Changsha and Xi'an; on 29 October,

Taiyuan; on 30 October, Kunming; on 31 October,

Nanchang;on 3 November, Shanghai; on the 5th,

Jiangsu; on the 7th, Anhui; on the

8th, Fuzhou; on the 9th, Guangdong;

on the 13th, Shandong; on the 22nd,

Chongqing; on the 27th, Chengdu.

Within two months, fifteen provinces had declared

themselves separated from the Qing.

Some of it with blood — there was

street fighting in Taiyuan and Xi'an;

some of it almost without — Cheng Dequan,

the governor of Jiangsu, was made military

governor after knocking a few tiles off

the roof of his yamen with a

bamboo pole, and that counted as revolution.

The Qing's map came apart piece by

piece.

Back to the first day.

1 January 1912. Nanjing. Sun Yat-sen was sworn in

as provisional president of the Republic of

China, took the oath, changed the calendar,

and fixed the name of the state:

the Republic of China.

This was Asia's first republic without an

emperor — before it, no country in Asia

had tried such a system.

Two thousand years of imperial rule turned

a corner on that day.

Turned a corner, not finished: the emperor

in the north was still on the

throne and the reign title still in

use. The abdication came forty-one days later.

This history is not only in books.

You can still go and see.

In Guangzhou, the tomb of the seventy-two

martyrs at Huanghuagang, in Huanghuagang Park — open,

and you can pay respects; the memorial

arch there carries the eighty-six names established

later. In Wuhan, the Red House in

Wuchang — the former Hubei military government,

today the Xinhai Revolution Memorial Hall of

Wuchang — open to visitors, with the meeting

hall of those days still there.

In Nanjing, the Presidential Palace, today the

Museum of Modern Chinese History — open;

Sun's office from those years is preserved

in the grounds. Outside Nanjing, on Zijin

Mountain, the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum — open,

and where he was finally laid to

rest. The tombs are still there.

The people have been gone a hundred

years.

But it was not over.

On 1 January 1912, the Qing court in the north

was still there: the emperor still in

the Forbidden City, and Yuan Shikai still

holding the six Beiyang divisions — the most

completely trained force in the country.

The south had a republic; the north

had an army. The new government had

a name; the old court had troops.

So who would finish it?

Fight it out, or talk it out?

Who would take the last step?

And how was the emperor's abdication edict

written? In the next episode, we take

up Yuan Shikai — his return to power,

the north-south negotiations, the pressure on the

court, and the abdication edict of 12 February 1912.

The full script and sources for this

film are at sylogs.com.

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Source: sylogs.com