Subscribe to the YouTube channel and get one month of free access to the paid tools on sylogs.com. Log in, write "Subscribed on YouTube" in the reader comment box, and the access is yours. On 1 January 1912, in Nanjing, the Republic of China was founded — the first republic in Asia. At that same moment another court still sat in Beijing. Two thousand years of empire turned a corner that day. But this is not a story about who won. It starts with a harder question: how did the Qing train itself out of existence? Start with the mess. An old saying ran: three years as a prefect, a hundred thousand taels of silver. Salaries were small; fees and customary dues piled on top. Those above lived off those below, and those below scraped it off the people. The army was no better: the Eight Banners and the Green Standard had gone slack two centuries after entering China; officers drew pay for men who did not exist and soldiers ran small trades on the side. The two legs of any state — money and force — were both unsteady. Then came one attempt at saving itself after another, and one failure after another. In 1894 the Beiyang Fleet was wiped out by Japan, a country that had once been the pupil; the Treaty of Shimonoseki imposed an indemnity of 200 million taels and ceded Taiwan and the Penghu islands. Thirty years of self-strengthening ended in one war. In 1898 the Hundred Days of Reform was cut short at 103 days; Tan Sitong and five others were executed at Caishikou. In 1900 the Eight-Nation Alliance took Beijing and Cixi fled to Xi'an; the 1901 Boxer Protocol imposed 450 million taels at four percent over 39 years — about 980 million with interest, secured on the customs and the salt tax. From then on the court was called the foreigners' court, and the payments were spread down to every village. After 1901 came the New Policies: the thousand-year examination system abolished in 1905, new schools opened, students sent abroad, a new army planned at thirty-six divisions. Yet when preparatory constitutionalism was announced in 1906, the Outline of an Imperially Sanctioned Constitution declared the monarch's power sacred and put a parliament nine years away. On 8 May 1911 the court formed a cabinet: thirteen men, nine of them Manchu, seven from the imperial clan. People called it the royal cabinet — and the constitutionalists, the very people who most wanted to preserve the dynasty, lost hope. The next day the railways were declared state-owned: the Sichuan-Hankou line had been built on private subscription worth about 14 million taels, with a shortfall of three million the court would not recognise, and it borrowed six million pounds from a four-power banking consortium. Tens of thousands petitioned in Sichuan, and more than thirty were shot dead in Chengdu. That was the last straw. Here is the mechanism this episode sets out to make plain. The new armies had guns and organisation, but their ideas were new. The constitutionalists were pushed away, and the educated turned toward revolution. A saying of those years put it bluntly: the present government is a workshop for manufacturing revolutionaries. It meant to strengthen itself; it armed its opponent instead. Then, who actually struck the blow? Sun Yat-sen, born in Guangdong in 1866, founded the Revive China Society in Honolulu in 1894 and the United League in Tokyo in 1905, and set out the Three Principles of the People. Revered on both sides of the strait as the forerunner of the revolution, he was not the first — he was the one who lasted: a dozen uprisings and more, funded by overseas Chinese, defeated and rising again. But his real face has more than one side. In 1914 in Tokyo he formed the Chinese Revolutionary Party, whose members swore an oath to follow Mr Sun and gave fingerprints, with a pledge that spoke of accepting the severest punishment; Huang Xing objected and refused to join, and the two went separate ways. In 1907 he left Japan taking the remaining funds, and Zhang Taiyan and others started a movement against him, alleging misuse of money; looked into afterwards, no evidence was found — his brother Sun Mei had spent the family fortune on the cause — and the talk died down. His first wife was Lu Muzhen; he later married Soong Ching-ling, and the age gap and the leaving of a first wife were talked about at the time. He also argued for government by party, and in 1921 the Guangzhou government elected him Extraordinary President, a term and a legality questioned even then. These were the arguments of his own day, set beside the praise given to the forerunner. And the revolution was never one man. Huang Xing, of the China Revival Society, kept directing the fight at Huanghuagang with fingers shot away and held the front at Yangxia; Song Jiaoren pushed the parliamentary road and argued for a party cabinet; Zhang Taiyan wrote the refutation of Kang Youwei on revolution and fought a long public debate with Liang Qichao; Zou Rong wrote The Revolutionary Army as a teenager; Chen Tianhua wrote A Bell to Warn the World and Sudden Awakening and then drowned himself to wake the country; Qiu Jin ran a women's paper, founded schools and trained with weapons, and was executed at Shaoxing in 1907, leaving the line "autumn wind, autumn rain, enough to break a person's heart". On the night of 10 October 1911, in Wuchang, the first shot was fired by a soldier of the new army, and the governor-general fled through a hole knocked in the wall. Within a single night the city changed hands — no great general, common soldiers started it. Sun Yat-sen was in America and read about it in the newspapers; Li Yuanhong was dragged out from under a bed and became military governor. Within two months fifteen provinces had left the Qing, some by bloodshed, some by negotiation. On 1 January 1912, in Nanjing, the Republic of China was formally born. The sites are still there: the tomb of the seventy-two martyrs at Huanghuagang in Guangzhou, the Red House at Wuchang (Museum of the 1911 Revolution), the presidential palace in Nanjing (now a museum of modern Chinese history) and the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum. The tombs are still there; the people are a century gone. Other episodes of Shenzhou Dadi, and the full transcripts, are on sylogs.com.