In 1908 the emperor died at 38. The Empress Dowager died the next day. Coincidence? · 神州大地 · 第一季

November 14, 1908. Evening. Zhongnanhai, Beijing.
On an island ringed by water,
in a hall called Hanyuan, an emperor
who had been held there for ten
years died. He was thirty-eight.
The next afternoon, the woman who had
kept him there died too.
The two deaths came less than a
day apart. An emperor who reigned thirty-four
years but held real power for none
of his last ten, and a dowager
empress who had held it for him
for forty-seven years — dead in the same
city, less than a day apart.
That fact alone left a question that
is still unsettled. This episode is about
how a court goes about replacing its
top man — and why, in the end,
it could not.
Start with where he lived.
Inside Zhongnanhai there is a stretch of
water called the South Lake, and in
the middle of it an island called
Yingtai. In the Ming it was called
Nantai; it was renamed Yingtai under the
Shunzhi emperor. Its main hall is Hanyuan
Hall — and that is where Guangxu spent
his last ten years.
One thing needs to be clear:
this was not imprisonment in a legal
sense. He was still the emperor.
The rites — sacrifice to Heaven, to the
ancestors, the promulgation of the calendar
were still nominally his.
In court documents he was still "the Sovereign. "
But everything that actually governed ran the
other way: memorials went to the empress
dowager first; appointments and dismissals were decided
by her; money moved through her hands.
What the emperor saw were mostly papers
already decided, waiting for his formality.
How did he pass his days?
Yingtai is surrounded by water, with a
single bridge in and out.
When the lake froze in winter,
eunuchs crossed on the ice to deliver
things. He read and wrote in Hanyuan
Hall, and each morning put down a
few lines of exercise — the habit Qing
princes were raised with.
The medical records kept by the Imperial
Hospital list his complaints: insomnia, ringing in
the ears, back pain, poor appetite,
and a long-standing condition that never healed.
The prescriptions changed, one after another,
for ten years. People at the time
had a phrase for it: "an emperor
in name, a bird in a cage. "
He had a second residence: Yulantang,
inside the Summer Palace.
The Summer Palace stands in Haidian.
It began as the Garden of Clear
Ripples under Qianlong, was burned by the
Anglo-French forces in 1860, and was rebuilt after 1888
nominally with naval funds — and renamed Yiheyuan.
In her later years Cixi spent more
days here than in the palace:
she lived in Leshou Hall and heard
business in Renshou Hall.
Guangxu came here too.
After the 1898 coup, he was kept
in Yulantang. It is recorded that the
rear gate of Yulantang leading outward was
bricked up, and the passage to the
adjacent Yiyun Lodge was cut off
which doors he entered and left by
were all arranged for him.
The Summer Palace is open to visitors
today, and that bricked-up doorway is still
there. It is the first thing in
this episode you can still go and
see with your own eyes.
An emperor kept under guard — why not
simply depose him and put in someone
else? The court actually tried.
The date was early 1900.
On the 24th day of the 12th
month, Guangxu 25 — January 24, 1900 — Cixi issued an
edict in the emperor's name making Pu
Jun, son of Prince Duan (Zaiyi),
the " First Prince" (da age). "
" First Prince" is how an imperial son
is addressed. A boy of fifteen was
brought into the palace and placed beside
the emperor to study.
It is also recorded that the court
drafted a new reign name, " Baoqing, "
and intended to retire Guangxu as emperor
emeritus — they had even settled on the
new era name. But establishing an heir
was too large a thing to do
quietly. The Zongli Yamen later had to
explain to the foreign legations in Beijing
that the court had no intention of
deposing anyone. A replacement planned for a
full year, with a new reign name
already drafted, never went through.
The key is hidden in the title.
What they installed was not a "crown
prince. " It was a " First Prince. "
The man handling it was Grand Secretary
Ronglu. He put it this way:
Pu Jun was "heir to the reigning
sovereign, and also adopted to continue the
line of Muzong. " The boy was nominally
made a son of the reigning emperor,
while also carrying the succession of the
late Tongzhi emperor. Why the detour?
Because changing the title changes the nature
of the act. Installing a "crown prince"
concedes that the present emperor is to
step aside. Installing a " First Prince" to
continue Tongzhi's line says instead: this supplies
a descendant to a previous emperor
and Guangxu's title stays intact.
Cixi wanted him replaced, but did not
want to carry the two words "deposed
emperor. " This was a problem she had
to work around.
On January 27, 1900 — three days after the edict
a group in Shanghai stood up.
The leader was Jing Yuanshan, director of
the Shanghai Telegraph Office.
He joined with 1,231 others in a
public telegram asking the emperor to "attend
to government despite illness, and abandon all
thought of abdication. " The list of signatories
included Zhang Binglin, Cai Yuanpei, Huang Yanpei
and Tang Caichang. This was not a
few men sending up a memorial.
It was a public telegram — the fastest,
most public channel available then, the equivalent
of an open letter.
A single telegram sent from Shanghai could
be reprinted by newspapers across the country.
One Shanghai official, with more than a
thousand names behind him, publicly opposing the
court's intention to change emperors.
And then? Then nothing.
After the telegram, Cixi ordered Jing Yuanshan's
arrest. He left Shanghai and eventually made
his way to Macao.
The replacement itself did not end there
either. Zaiyi and his son Pu Jun
were later named by the foreign powers
as among the instigators of the 1900
crisis and exiled to Xinjiang.
The title of " First Prince" was not
formally abolished until 1901. The 1,231 names did
not change any decision made that day.
In this episode, they are the only
group who spoke publicly on behalf of
the man who was being held.
That same year something larger happened.
In the summer of 1900 the Boxers
entered Beijing. They burned churches and killed
converts, tore up railway track and cut
telegraph poles. The court's position changed almost
daily: first suppress them, then support them.
On June 21 the court declared war on
the foreign powers in the emperor's name.
On August 14 the Eight-Nation Alliance fought its
way into Beijing. Before dawn the next
day, Cixi left the palace through the
Gate of Divine Prowess, taking Guangxu,
the empress and a few eunuchs and
maids. She took off her Manchu robes,
put on a blue cotton jacket,
and dressed her hair in a Han
style — disguised as an old woman from
the countryside. She was gone more than
a year. They went west: Juyong Pass,
Xuanhua, Datong, Taiyuan, and finally Xi'an.
Over seventy days, more than two thousand
li. There were no imperial kitchens on
the road; they ate coarse grain.
At Huailai in Hebei a local person
brought out a bowl of mung-bean porridge,
and someone in the party wrote the
scene down. In September 1901 the treaty was
signed. In January 1902 she returned to Beijing.
The emperor went out with her.
The emperor came back with her.
On the day she left the palace,
she did not take Consort Zhen.
Zhen was of the Tatara clan,
of the Manchu Bordered Red Banner,
born in 1876. In 1889, at thirteen, she entered
the palace together with her elder sister,
and was later given the rank of
Consort Zhen. She could write and paint,
and was bolder than most consorts
when the palace said a camera would
steal a person's soul, she insisted on
being photographed. In 1894 she was demoted for
selling offices. A man named Lu Boyang
had bought his way into the post
of Shanghai daotai; another, Yu Ming,
who could barely read, obtained a salt
administration post in Sichuan.
When the case was investigated, it reached
Consort Zhen and the eunuchs around her.
After 1898 she was confined in the Beisansuo,
north of the Palace of Tranquil Longevity.
The door was locked from the outside
and food was passed in through a
window opening. Two years later, on that
morning, Cixi was about to leave.
It is recorded that she had Consort
Zhen brought out, and that in the
end Zhen was pushed into the well
behind the Palace of Tranquil Longevity.
She was twenty-four. There are two accounts.
One says Zhen asked that the emperor
be left in Beijing to handle the
situation, which angered Cixi.
The other says Cixi simply gave the
order, on the ground that she could
not be taken along.
Both are recorded; this episode does not
choose between them. After reaching Xi'an,
Cixi issued an edict saying Zhen had
drowned herself "to preserve her honor, "
and posthumously raised her to Noble Consort
Zhen. In 1913 her coffin was moved to
the consorts' tombs beside the Chongling mausoleum.
The well visitors walk past in the
Palace Museum today is called the Well
of Consort Zhen.
To talk about Cixi's forty-seven years,
one man cannot be passed over:
the eunuch Li Lianying.
He was born in 1848 in Dacheng county,
Hejian prefecture, in Zhili, into a poor
family; his father dealt in hides.
He was castrated at six, first entered
the household of Prince Zheng, and came
into the Forbidden City in 1856.
His birth name was Li Yingtai;
in the palace he was called Li
Jinxi; the name " Lianying" was given him
by Cixi. His real rise came in 1869.
That year the chief eunuch beside Cixi,
An Dehai, left the palace on imperial
business and traveled south.
In Shandong he was arrested by Governor
Ding Baozhen and executed on the spot.
With An Dehai gone, Li Lianying took
his place. From then on he stayed
at Cixi's side for nearly forty years,
until she died.
Cixi did one thing that broke the
rules: she gave Li Lianying the rank
and peacock feather of a second-grade official.
Qing eunuchs had a ceiling on rank,
and after the Yongzheng emperor an iron
tablet expressly forbade eunuchs from involving themselves
in government. Giving a eunuch second-grade insignia
broke the precedent. What was he like
day to day? The contemporary record runs
in two directions. On one side:
cautious and careful, often speaking up for
palace servants, and sometimes putting in a
good word for the neglected emperor
in the palace he was called "respectful
and prudent. " It is said that even
after being granted the second-grade insignia he
did not dare wear it.
On the other side, he took money.
Officials competed to cultivate him, and a
good number of houses stood in his
name. Two things are remembered more clearly.
One comes from the flight in 1900:
a member of the party recalled that
the night was cold and bedding short,
and Li Lianying took his own bedding
to the emperor and sat up all
night wrapped in his clothes.
The other is from the hairdressing room.
The empress dowager did not want to
see a single fallen hair.
According to a late-Qing palace maid,
when Li Lianying combed her hair he
slipped the fallen strands into his sleeve
so she would not see them.
That a eunuch could reach such a
position is itself a mirror of that
court. After Cixi died in 1908 he observed
a hundred days of mourning and left
the palace. He died of illness in
March 1911 and was buried at Enjizhuang,
the eunuchs' cemetery outside Fucheng Gate in
Beijing. There is also a widely told
story about his grave: that it was
opened in 1966 and only a skull was
found. But those who took part in
the clearing recall that the grave already
had a robbers' hole and the remains
were decayed and incomplete — the matter is
still unsettled.
Now, how a day of Cixi's went.
She rose early — before daylight — washed,
had her hair dressed, then went to
court and received people.
There were two main meals a day:
the morning meal around six or seven,
the evening meal around midday.
A meal laid out a hundred or
more dishes, on several tables pushed together,
with eunuchs announcing each dish.
The rule was "no more than three
spoonfuls of any dish" — three mouthfuls and
it was taken away.
The real problem came after: most of
that food was there to be looked
at. The afternoon was her time for
amusement. She loved opera.
In the palace there was the Changyin
Pavilion; in the Summer Palace, the Dehe
Garden theatre — both three-storey stages.
Leading actors such as Tan Xinpei were
called in to perform; a good performance
brought reward, a mistake brought punishment.
She also loved being photographed.
In 1903 the two daughters of Yu Geng
entered the palace, and their brother Xunling
became the palace photographer.
Among the photographs that survive is one
of her dressed as Guanyin, with eunuchs
beside her as guardian figures.
She kept dogs — the Summer Palace had
a dedicated kennel. She smoked water tobacco
from a silver pipe.
She kept long nails in nail guards,
tended daily. These days were lived on
top of a court that was coming
apart.
To replace a ruler, to hold on
to power, to keep an army,
to run new policies — all of it
takes money. So where did the money
come from in those years?
The largest single item was the Boxer
indemnity. Fixed by the Boxer Protocol of
1901: 450 million haiguan taels, at four
percent annual interest, to be repaid over
thirty-nine years. Principal and interest together came
to about 982 million taels.
It was not paid in one sum.
It was paid every year — principal plus
interest came to more than twenty-one million
taels a year. Secured on what?
The treaty pledged China's maritime customs,
the native customs, and the salt tax.
And who handled the money?
Five banks — Hongkong and Shanghai, Deutsch-Asiatische,
Russo-Chinese, Banque de l' Indochine, and Yokohama Specie
together with Citibank, formed a commission to
administer it.
Where did twenty-one million taels a year
come from? It was apportioned among the
provinces, and the provinces apportioned it further
down. The written names of the levies:
land tax, the grain-commuted tax, grain surcharge,
deed tax, salt surcharge, the likin transit
tax, the consolidated tax.
Apportioned far enough down, it landed on
those who farmed, those who traded,
those who ate salt.
Ordinary people gave these additions a name:
the "foreign levy" — money paid to foreigners,
charged to me. One study counts more
than three hundred popular disturbances over refusal
to pay such levies in China during
the 1900s. A chain ran from a
single treaty in Beijing all the way
to the tax collector at every village
entrance. Whether the court changed its emperor
mattered far less to the people at
that end of the chain than how
much levy they had to pay this
year.
What did it cost to live in
Beijing then? First, how many people were
in the city. In the late Qing,
the Inner and Outer Cities together held
roughly seven to eight hundred thousand.
Bannermen made up a substantial share
they lived on stipends issued by the
court, known as the "iron crop. "
A rickshaw puller could earn a few
dozen copper cash a day; a vernacular
newspaper sold for a few coppers;
a policeman drew a monthly wage in
silver dollars. That was the ledger of
people in the city who had work.
The countryside kept a different ledger.
After 1900, the extra levy a village carried
often equalled several months' grain for a
family. The court's accounts were reckoned in
the halls; the people's were collected at
the village entrance. Same year, same court.
Besides the indemnity, the court had its
own spending. The " New Policies" after 1901
training a new army, opening schools,
building railways, setting up new offices
every item was expenditure.
The plan called for thirty-six divisions of
the new army; what was actually formed
was fourteen divisions and twenty brigades,
about 190,000 men. When money ran short,
it borrowed. In 1910 the court compiled its
first national budget. In April 1911 it borrowed
ten million pounds from the British,
French, German and American banking consortium.
On one side, over twenty million taels
of indemnity every year; on the other,
the cost of soldiering and schooling;
and in between, one foreign loan after
another. This account had not been balanced
by the day the dynasty ended.
Amid all these accounts, one item was
the exception. The Beijing–Zhangjiakou railway,
from Beijing to Zhangjiakou, was begun in 1905
and completed in 1909. Its chief engineer was
Zhan Tianyou. The difficulty was around Badaling.
The mountains were high and the gradient
steep, and trains could not climb it;
the engineers laid a " Y"-shaped switchback
at Qinglongqiao so trains could reverse up
the slope. The Badaling tunnel runs about
1,090 metres. How was it cut?
There was no heavy machinery.
Workers sank vertical shafts from the ridge
down, then drove headings from the shaft
in both directions — one working face became
four — and that is how they got
through more than a kilometre of mountain.
Explosives, shovels and handcarts: muscle.
The steepest stretch exceeded thirty parts per
thousand; an ordinary locomotive could not haul
a train up it, so an extra
engine was coupled ahead — pulling in front,
pushing behind. There is also a much-quoted
line: that a foreigner declared the Chinese
engineer who could build this line had
not yet been born.
The saying is often repeated, but no
original source has been found; it is
given here only as a story.
The key figure is the cost:
the whole line actually cost some 5.72
million taels, averaging about 34,500 taels per
kilometre — among the lowest unit costs of
any railway in China at the time.
Someone worked out the comparison: one year's
Boxer indemnity apportionment, over twenty-one million taels,
would have built roughly four Beijing–
Zhangjiakou lines. The same money, paying a
debt on one side, building a railway
on the other. Two faces of the
same court.
While the court was changing its ruler
and paying its debts, society was changing
too. On September 2, 1905, the court ordered the
examination system abolished. Counting from the Sui
and Tang, thirteen hundred years of examinations
ended that day. Scholars no longer entered
office through the eight-legged essay; they went
to new-style schools. A year earlier,
in 1904, the court had promulgated the " Guimao
school system, " dividing schools nationwide into elementary,
middle and higher. The Imperial University in
the capital stood at the top.
Young people with no school to enter
and no wish to stay home went
to Japan. In 1907 there were about fifteen
thousand Chinese students in Japan.
A person's prospects shifted from "which essay
do I sit" to "which school,
and where to study abroad" — the deepest
and quietest change of that decade.
Why did the court suddenly want a
constitution? The answer lies in someone else's
war. In February 1904 Japan and Russia went
to war in China's northeast.
The fighting was in Liaodong and Fengtian.
The Qing government declared itself "neutral" and
set aside a stretch of its own
territory as a battlefield.
Hundreds of thousands of Chinese became refugees
on their own land.
In May 1905 the Japanese navy destroyed the
Russian fleet in the Strait of Tsushima.
In September the two countries signed the
treaty at Portsmouth, in the United States.
Chinese newspapers and officials at the time
read the war as a single conclusion:
Japan was a constitutional state, Russia an
autocracy, and the small constitutional country had
beaten the large autocratic one.
Whether that conclusion was right is another
matter — but it spread fast.
In July 1905, Yuan Shikai, governor-general of Zhili,
Zhang Zhidong, governor-general of Huguang, and Zhou
Fu, governor-general of Liangjiang, jointly memorialized asking
the court for a constitution.
Six months later the court sent five
ministers abroad to study foreign governments.
A war fought to its end on
someone else's land became the court's answer
to "whom should we learn from. "
On the political system too, the court
moved. In 1905 it sent five ministers abroad
to study constitutions. In 1906 it announced "preparation
for constitutional government. " In 1908 it promulgated the
Outline of the Constitution, setting a nine-year
preparatory period, with a parliament planned for
1917. In 1909 the provinces held elections for
consultative assemblies — the first elections to a
local representative body in Chinese history.
But time was not on the court's
side. It asked for nine years;
others would not wait nine years.
Nine years were set for preparation.
Only three were had.
Back to the city itself.
Leshou Hall in the Summer Palace was
among the first places to be fitted
with electric light. Among the palace women,
Consort Zhen was among the earliest to
take up photography, and left a number
of photographs. The city had vernacular newspapers,
photographic studios, and rickshaws on the streets.
The other side: bannermen lived on the
court's stipends — the "iron crop" — and by
the late Qing those stipends went less
and less far, so that holding office
and mortgaging property existed side by side.
Cixi loved opera. The Dehe Garden theatre
in the Summer Palace, a three-storey stage,
was built for that; performers like Tan
Xinpei were summoned to sing at court.
Electric light, cameras, newspapers, opera stages
the last decade of an old court
was also its liveliest.
Back to that November.
On November 14, 1908, Guangxu died at Hanyuan Hall
on Yingtai, aged thirty-eight, in the thirty-fourth
year of his reign.
The next day, November 15, in the wei
hour, Cixi died at Yiluan Hall in
Zhongnanhai, aged seventy-four. An emperor who wanted
reform but was held for ten years
died on an island ringed by water.
A woman who had held power for
him for forty-seven years died in a
hall not far away.
Less than a day apart.
That coincidence of timing became, over the
century since, the most often told part
of the story.
How did the emperor die?
The question has been discussed for a
century. There are four main accounts;
they are set out here side by
side. First, illness. Guangxu was frail and
sickly for years, and the palace medical
records list a body full of complaints.
This account rests on those case records.
Second, that Cixi killed him.
The reasoning: the two deaths came too
close together, and Cixi did not want
Guangxu to hold power again after she
was gone. Third, that Li Lianying killed
him. This appears in some memoirs.
Fourth, that Yuan Shikai and Yi Kuang
killed him. The reasoning: both had crossed
the emperor in the 1898 coup.
Each of the four has its own
basis and its own sources; none has
complete, direct evidence. All four are set
out here, and no verdict is offered.
The turn came in recent decades.
In 1980 archaeologists cleared the underground palace of
the Chongling mausoleum in the Western Qing
tombs — Guangxu's tomb. His remains were examined
then, and no clear sign of poisoning
was found. After 2003 a research group on
the cause of Guangxu's death took a
different approach. Instead of looking only at
bone, they tested his hair and the
burial garments. In 2008 the group published its
conclusion: arsenic levels in Guangxu's hair and
clothing were abnormally high, consistent with acute
arsenic poisoning. That November the finding was
widely reported. The same question: in 1980 they
looked at bone, in 2008 at hair.
Change the evidence and the answer changes.
This is the scientific method — and also
an attitude toward history: what counts as
settled often depends on what method you
look with.
On the day before she died,
Cixi made one last decision.
She made Puyi, son of Prince Chun
(Zaifeng), emperor. Puyi was three years old.
Zaifeng was made regent, to hold power
for the child emperor.
A woman who had guarded power for
forty-seven years handed the court, at the
end, to a three-year-old and a regent.
Three years later, that court was gone.
But that is the next episode.
This one stops inside those two days.
This city holds another ending, two hundred
and sixty-four years earlier.
On March 19, 1644, Li Zicheng's army entered Beijing.
It was not yet light.
Zhu Youjian, the last Ming emperor
the Chongzhen emperor — came out of the
Forbidden City and walked onto a mound
of earth to the north.
In the Ming it was called Coal
Hill; today it is Jingshan.
Before the manner of his death,
what sort of emperor he was.
He was among the hardest-working of the
Ming emperors. For seventeen years he rose
before dawn and was still reading memorials
at night; he was frugal, and wore
patched clothes. But he was also suspicious
and hasty: in seventeen years he went
through more than fifty grand secretaries,
had a minister of war executed,
and put to death Yuan Chonghuan,
the commander in Ji and Liao.
At that dawn he had the bells
rung in the palace to summon the
officials to court. The bells rang a
long time. No one came.
He went back to the inner palace,
had Empress Zhou kill herself, and with
his own hand slashed his sixteen-year-old daughter
Princess Changping and killed the young Princess
Zhaoren. Then he and the eunuch Wang
Cheng'en went up Coal Hill, and he
hanged himself from a tree on the
eastern slope. Wang Cheng'en hanged himself from
a tree nearby. According to the Ming
shi, he left words on the front
of his robe to this effect:
I have reigned seventeen years, and my
ministers have failed me; I have no
face to meet my ancestors; I take
off my crown and cover my face
with my hair; let the rebels do
as they will with my body,
only do not harm the people.
After his death the body was hastily
buried in the tomb of Consort Tian.
Only after the Qing entered the Pass
was he reburied, under the name " Siling"
one of the smallest among the thirteen
Ming tombs.
Jingshan is still there, directly across from
the Gate of Divine Prowess of the
Palace Museum. Two stelae stand on the
hill: one reads " Place where Emperor Sizong
of Ming died for his state, "
written by Shen Yinmo in 1930; the other
is the " Stele for the three-hundredth anniversary, "
erected in 1944. The locust tree from which
Chongzhen hanged himself was given a name
by the early Qing: the " Guilty Locust, "
and was chained with an iron chain.
The tree on the hill today was
planted later. Wanchun Pavilion, the highest point
of Jingshan, is the high point of
Beijing's central axis — look south from it
and you see the whole Forbidden City;
look north and you see the Bell
and Drum Towers. In 1644 an emperor hanged
himself on this hill.
In 1908 another emperor died on an island
ringed by water. Two hundred and sixty-four
years, one city, two different endings.
Of the places in this episode,
which can still be visited?
The Chongling mausoleum, where Guangxu ended up,
is in the Western Qing tombs at
Yixian in Hebei. Work began in 1909;
Guangxu was interred in 1913; it was completed
in 1915. It was robbed in 1938, cleared and
opened in 1980, and today you can walk
down into the underground palace.
At Yulantang in the Summer Palace,
the bricked-up rear doorway is still there,
and visitors can walk right up to
it. The Summer Palace was inscribed on
the World Heritage List in 1998.
The Well of Consort Zhen is in
the Palace Museum — the well visitors walk
past. The consorts' tombs beside Chongling are
where Zhen was later reburied.
The Chongling underground palace is open today;
you can go down the stone steps
and see the stone doors and the
vaulted ceiling. The Hall of Mental Cultivation
in the Palace Museum, where Guangxu worked
and lived during the years he held
power, is open to visitors.
Yiluan Hall in Zhongnanhai, where Cixi spent
her last days, was burned by the
Eight-Nation Alliance in 1900 and later rebuilt;
it stands in a government compound and
is not open to the public.
Yingtai, also in Zhongnanhai, is likewise closed
it lies inside the government compound and
can only be seen in old photographs.
Of Enjizhuang, the eunuchs' cemetery, very little
survives; some rubbings of epitaphs remain.
Jingshan is open, and you can climb
it. It is directly across from the
north gate of the Palace Museum.
Back to the main line.
An emperor held for ten years,
and a dowager empress who held power
for forty-seven years, died in the same
city less than a day apart.
It was not that the court never
thought of replacing him.
In 1900 they had even drafted the new
reign name, and still it did not
happen. Why could they not?
The title could not be gotten around;
a successor could not be made to
stand; outsiders would not recognize it;
and the guns were not in their
hands. In the end they handed this
court to a three-year-old and a regent.
Three years later, the court was gone.
That day is the next episode.
The full script of this film is
at sylogs.com.