Subscribe to our YouTube channel and get 1 month of premium tools on sylogs.com free. Leave "Subscribed to YouTube" in the reader comments on the site to claim it. In the autumn of the third year of the Xuantong era, in Huanshang village outside the city of Zhangde in Henan, a middle-aged man in a straw hat sat fishing by a pond. Now and then a fish broke the surface, and he lifted his rod almost lazily. Whether the fish took the hook seemed to matter very little to him. At that same moment, thousands of miles away, the guns had already gone off in Wuchang. Inside the Forbidden City in Beijing, the Prince Regent Zaifeng paced like a man standing on hot coals. The imperial army could not beat the revolutionaries. And the one general in all of China who could beat them had been driven back to this very pond three years earlier, by the court's own people. Now they had no choice but to ask him to come back. Everyone thought Yuan Shikai was finished. But of all the jokes history loves, this one is its favorite: it lets a man fall all the way to the bottom first, then lifts him back to the very top of power, and it does the lifting with the hands of his enemies. Wind the clock back to 1909. That year the Prince Regent Zaifeng stripped Yuan Shikai of his posts and sent him home, using a foot ailment as the excuse. On the surface it was sick leave. In reality it was the removal of a rival, and Zaifeng had his reasons. The Guangxu emperor had died, and it was widely said that Yuan had sold out the reformers back in 1898. The Prince Regent wanted revenge for his brother, and he also feared the Beiyang New Army in Yuan's hands. One edict, and Yuan handed over every appointment, went back to Zhangde, and built the Garden for Nourishing Longevity in Huanshang village. From then on he fished, composed poems, received guests, every inch the retired country gentleman. Yet his back courtyard was never short of visitors in official caps. No matter who commanded the six Beiyang divisions, in private they still called him Gongbao. Yuan's retirement was not stepping ashore. It was moving his fishing rod to a steadier spot. He watched that water and waited not for a fish but for the game of empire to walk itself to the square he needed. So here is the question. When Wuchang rose in revolt, why was the court's first instinct not to send someone else, but to knock on Yuan Shikai's door? Because nearly every commander who could actually fight came out of the Xiaozhang training program, and Xiaozhang men answered to Yuan alone. Yinchang led troops south, but front-line commanders like Feng Guozhang and Duan Qirui obeyed in words and dragged their feet in deed. Orders could not get out of the Beiyang circle. On one side, the Prince Regent pounded his table in the palace. On the other, the sound of rebel guns came closer. This was a war the Qing could not win, and a war nobody was willing to really fight for them. On October 14, 1911, the court issued an edict appointing Yuan Shikai Viceroy of Huguang and commander of the southern campaign. Yuan replied that his foot ailment was not healed and refused to come out. Could he truly not walk? Or was he waiting for a higher price? On November 1, Prince Qing Yikuang resigned as Prime Minister of the cabinet, and the court issued another edict. Yuan Shikai would become Prime Minister and form a government. From sent home to recover, to second only to one man and above ten thousand others, took less than a month. What did he trade for it? Not a victory of his own, but a string of revolutionary victories. Not the court's trust, but the court's fear. Not guns, but the absence of any alternative. The point, plainly. Yuan Shikai's comeback was, at bottom, the result of the Qing court losing control of its own army. Power was not seized by him. It was handed to him by his old master, because no one else could hold that army down. This is the foundation of everything that follows: where the guns are, there is the throne. Yet the first thing Yuan did with that burden was not to put down the rebellion. It was an order neither side could understand. Surround Wuchang, and do not attack. Why? A man who says he is here to save the dynasty, why would he refuse to win? November 1911. The Beiyang army took Hanyang, and its guns pointed straight at Wuchang. One more push and the revolutionary provisional capital was finished. But Yuan Shikai gave the order to stop. Besiege, do not assault. The move was exactly like a fisherman holding the bait at the fish's lips and refusing to reel in. What he wanted was never to land the fish dead. He wanted the fish unable to leave this water. This was Yuan's calculation, and historians call it feeding the enemy to make yourself indispensable. He held two cards. In the north, the Beiyang army, the Qing court's last teeth. In the south, the revolutionaries, apparently winning battle after battle, but in truth divided, short of food, short of pay. Yuan was in no hurry to help either side win. He wanted both sides unable to do without him. To the court he said the revolutionaries are strong and no army but mine will do, using the fire in the south to burn away the court's retreat. To the revolutionaries he said I can help you force the Qing to abdicate, but the presidency must go to a man who can get things done, using the knife in the north to cut the price in the south. Look inside Beiyang itself. Feng Guozhang wanted to fight, desperate to take Wuchang in one surge and win undying glory. Duan Qirui took his orders from Yuan, and when Yuan said stop, he stopped. One army, two states of mind, and the one who obeyed ended up holding the largest chip. Did Yuan truly want to save the Qing? If he did, why not drive west after the great victory at Hanyang? If he wanted to preserve the dynasty, why, even as he negotiated, quietly transfer the loyalty of his Beiyang commanders from the Great Qing to Gongbao Yuan? The answer is written in the move he made in December. North-south peace talks. December 1911, Shanghai. Tang Shaoyi for the north, Wu Tingfang for the south, sat down at the same table. What were they discussing? Abdication. A republic. And what should be done with the six-year-old still sitting on the dragon throne. But the real price was not on that table. It was in Yuan Shikai's hands. The south said if the Qing emperor steps down, Yuan Shikai can have the presidency. Yuan, through Tang Shaoyi, gently kicked the ball of forcing the throne back into the Forbidden City. To the court: agree, or I cannot win. To the revolutionaries: yield, or I cannot move. To himself: the more deadlocked they are, the more irreplaceable I become. The point, plainly. The so-called north-south peace talks were a three-way game, and Yuan Shikai was the only player holding both the guns and a seat at the table. The court thought it had hired him to crush the rebellion. The revolutionaries thought they had pulled him over to their side. Neither saw that he was a true ally of neither. He was doing exactly one thing: making himself the only door out. This is inference, not record. Had Yuan Shikai actually been loyal to the Qing and simply flattened Wuchang in one campaign, history would have taken another road, a long north-south split, with the Qing perhaps surviving and the republic arriving far later. He did not take that road because he could not, but because he would not. Win, and he is merely a loyal servant. Refuse to win and make both sides beg him, and he is the man destiny chose. While those two tables, north and south, were still calculating, the south moved first. January 1, 1912. Sun Yatsen was inaugurated in Nanjing as Provisional President of the Republic of China. The two-thousand-year imperial system had not yet formally ended, but the legal lineage of a republic had already been set up in that southern city. The basis for his inauguration was the Outline of the Provisional Government of the Republic of China, passed the previous December, which stated in black and white that the state would adopt a presidential system. Sun Yatsen wanted that presidency for one reason: to hold real power, to be the final word. That presidential system was tailored by Sun Yatsen for Sun Yatsen. As for why it was later switched to a cabinet system, that is the next episode's drama. That single change sowed the seeds of the Republic's first constitutional fight. Suddenly one China held two rival regimes. In the south, a newborn republic with an elected president. In the north, a six-year-old emperor still on the dragon throne, and Yuan Shikai with the Beiyang army in his fist. Who represented China? The guns were with Yuan. The legal mandate was with Sun. Neither could swallow the other, and neither could go around the other. The south had a president. The north held the guns. What Yuan wanted was never to help one side win. It was to become the man neither side could go around. And at precisely that moment, two bombs came flying at him. One from revolutionaries who wanted him dead, and one from the imperial clan's own diehards, who had sworn to defend the Qing to the end. Yuan Shikai thought he was the one playing the game. But on this board, someone wanted to flip the table over. January 16, 1912, outside Donghuamen in Beijing. Yuan's carriage was passing slowly when a condensed milk tin hiding a bomb on the roadside went off. Not one, but several in a row. Flames, screaming horses, the shouts of his guards, all tangled together. Yuan's horse bolted. He was thrown from the carriage, rolled in the dirt, and lived. Several guards and passers-by took the blast for him and were killed or wounded on the spot. Who were the assassins? The northern assassination squad of the Beijing-Tianjin Revolutionary Alliance, a group of young revolutionaries. They did not trust Yuan Shikai. They feared a republic in name and a dictatorship in fact. Rather than wait for him to negotiate his way into power, they would remove the greatest obstacle first. How fate mocks. The men who tried to kill Yuan Shikai were revolutionaries, and the man the revolutionaries failed to kill was the one who would personally carry the Qing to its grave. The bombs did not change the outcome. They only added a layer of blood to it. Deep inside the Forbidden City, another group was also thinking about bombs, except what they wanted to protect was not a republic, but the dragon throne. They called themselves the Royalist Party, the Zongshedang. Its core figure, Liangbi, was one of the few Qing nobles who actually understood soldiering and dared to take responsibility. Alongside him were younger royals like Zaize and Puwei. They hated the peace talks, hated abdication, and hated Yuan Shikai most of all. In their eyes he was the traitor looting the house while it burned, forcing a widow and an orphan to hand over the country. So could the Royalist Party stop the abdication? Liangbi was genuinely a hard bone. He went everywhere, trying to rally Manchu and Mongol nobles and purge the pro-Yuan faction, and he dragged the abdication out again and again. But he forgot one thing. In times like these the most dangerous enemy is often not across from you, but on the side you call your own, because someone very much wanted him dead. January 26, 1912, Hongluochang, Beijing. A young man threw a bomb at Liangbi's carriage. That blast scattered the Royalist Party, and blew open the Qing court's last line of defense. The young man's name was Peng Jiazhen. And behind him lay a silence that no one wanted to break. Peng Jiazhen's bombing of Liangbi was the strangest blast of the Xinhai year. It killed the man defending the Qing, and helped the man trying to force the Qing out. January 26, 1912. Liangbi was returning home. As his carriage reached Hongluochang, Peng Jiazhen stepped forward and threw. Liangbi's leg was blown off. Three days later, on January 29, he died of his wounds. Peng Jiazhen died on the spot. One bomb bought one nobleman's life, and bought a dynasty's life. The moment Liangbi died, the Royalist Party collapsed. Men like Zaize and Puwei, who had been shouting defend the Qing to the death the night before, scattered like birds by morning. What they feared was not the revolution. It was the next bomb, and whether it had their name on it. This is inference, not record. Had Liangbi lived, the Royalist Party might well have held out several more months. The abdication edict might have been delayed again and again. The north-south standoff might have sunk into far deeper mud. His death pulled out the hardest nail for Yuan Shikai. Immediately after, telegrams from Beiyang commanders rained down on the court, one after another. On January 26, Duan Qirui led more than forty officers, some say forty-seven, in a joint telegram to the cabinet stating flatly that the military situation changes by the minute, and if no decision is made there will be a military remonstrance. Put plainly: if the throne does not step down, the army will offer its advice, and who those rifles would be pointing at needs no explanation. On February 4, Duan sent a second telegram, this time signed by nine men, in harder language. He would lead the entire army to carry through the republic. This was no longer advice. It was an ultimatum. The first telegram asked. The second one pressed. And behind both stood the silent Beiyang army, a hammer ready to fall. Empress Dowager Longyu held the six-year-old Puyi and wept in the Hall of Heavenly Purity. It was not that she did not want to save her ancestors' throne. It was that she had no men, no guns, and no money left to save it with. Every general who could fight was either Yuan Shikai's man or already gone. On one side, the crying of a widow and an orphan inside the Forbidden City. On the other, remonstrance telegrams flying into Beiyang headquarters like snow. This forcing of the throne spilled barely a few drops of blood, and was colder than any blade. February 12, 1912. The day arrived after all. In the name of the Xuantong emperor, Empress Dowager Longyu promulgated the Edict of Abdication. More than two thousand years of imperial rule ended, formally, on that single sheet of paper. The line in the edict that later generations have chewed over and over, the ruling power is hereby made public to the whole nation and the state shall be a republican constitutional one, is generally attributed to Zhang Jian as its drafter. That sentence took the Mandate of Heaven out of the Aisin Gioro family's hands and handed it over, properly and legally, to someone else. The Articles of Favourable Treatment settled the same day dressed this exit up as a dignified farewell. The emperor's title would not be abolished. Four million yuan a year would be paid, four million taels in the original draft, later changed to silver dollars. And he might live on in the palace for the time being. A dynasty ended without rivers of blood, and yet the cold of it is hard to describe. The brush went down, and two thousand years of imperial rule were over. Yuan Shikai won the throne by calculation. But this bloodless edict did not end the game of power. After the abdication, a more hidden war was only beginning. Its battlefield was a sheet of constitutional paper. The man who picked up the pen and altered that paper was none other than Sun Yatsen, the first to cry republic. And the key figure in it was named Song Jiaoren. Next episode, the first of the Republic's undercurrents. The Death of Song Jiaoren: The Republic Rewritten. Full script and sources on sylogs.com.