Subscribe to our YouTube channel and get 1 month of premium tools on sylogs.com free. Leave "Subscribed to YouTube" in the site comments to claim it. Last time we left a string inside Wuchang, tight enough for one pair of hands to snap. Neither Sun Yat-sen nor Huang Xing held it, but a man nobody had arranged for. Evening, October 10, 1911: the Eighth Engineering Battalion. The governor-general had the roster and was arresting men by name; that morning he beheaded three outside his own yamen. Men named on it lay on brick beds, eyes open. Who fired first is disputed, and it matters less than what followed. Xiong Bingkun led a few dozen men to Chu Wang Tai and its several thousand rifles: whoever got there first held the city. Ruicheng was gone - out through a hole in his own wall onto a Qing warship. First shot to a fallen capital: less than twelve hours. The New Army the court spent ten years and tens of millions of taels building dug its grave. So who runs the city? The revolutionaries called in the Hubei Provincial Assembly - long gowns and measured speech, in a room with young officers with gunpowder on their hands. Only one name passed: Li Yuanhong, a day earlier an official of the Qing. This part has long been written evasively, so we state it plainly: Li Yuanhong did not want the post. Revolutionaries pointed pistols at him and forced him to take it; he once refused food in protest. Not an acclamation. Coercion. Why insist on a Qing general? He could hold the men down, be shown to the foreign consuls at Hankou, and it saved fighting. His outfit: rank finial, insignia patch, court necklace - while his soldiers wore Western-cut uniforms. The Iron-Blood Eighteen Star Flag: eighteen stars for the eighteen provinces inside the passes - not the northeast, not Mongolia, not Xinjiang, not Tibet. Anti-Manchuism written across its face. After the north-south talks the Republic switched to the Five-Colored Flag: five peoples, one republic. Ask any flag who it left out. By the end of November more than fourteen provinces had declared independence - and in many the men in charge were not Tongmenghui men but New Army officers and gentry. In late October Huang Xing came up the Yangtze from Shanghai, his Huanghuagang finger still healing, and took the seal of wartime commander. The Battle of Yangxia ran more than forty days. Hankou fell on November 1 and Feng Guozhang burned it; Hanyang fell on November 27. They lost nearly every engagement and yet won, because what they bought was time: Beiyang's best units pinned there while the south declared, one province after another. A gap in time, paid for in blood. But the victory was not clean. On October 11 and 12 the Qing bannermen in the city - mostly soldiers' families, old people, women, children - were hunted. This was a massacre, and we use that word because we have to: civilians with no weapons, men with guns, no military necessity between. Li Lianfang, there at the time, recorded close to two hundred killed; some put it higher; whether Han killed by mistake are included is disputed. On October 13 the Military Government forbade the killing - it knew it had lost control. Esherick, in Reform and Revolution in China: it came very close to being a massacre. We tell this because a question landed on Wuchang in 1911: can an act in the name of restoration exempt itself from what it does to people who cannot fight back? It cannot. To measure a revolution, look at how it treated those who could not defeat it. The game opened with soldiers gambling their lives; by November the next move was not theirs. Li Yuanhong sat there with a gun at his head, leaving the Republic a dangerous inheritance: power out of a gun muzzle. In Hunan, under forty days after independence, Jiao Dafeng was killed by soldiers the constitutionalists incited. After 1911 the most concrete power in China fell to military men. The man who mattered most in the four months that followed was still "recovering" at Zhangde - nursing his bad foot, reading telegrams from Beijing. How he gathered this scattered game into his pocket is the next one. The Red Building still stands below Snake Hill; Hankou's burned streets were rebuilt long ago. Those forty-odd days were compressed into one sentence: the 1911 Revolution succeeded. Tell only the success and you cannot tell what it opened. 1911 is not a fairy tale - a victory bought with ordinary lives. Full script and sources on sylogs.com.