中國第一場選舉由 31 歲的年輕人贏得。 两天後他就死了 | Ep.16

中國第一場選舉，得票最多的31歲青年，兩天後就死了 | Ep.16

這是神州大地系列節目的其中一集。下面是這集的 完整插畫版節目單 。你可以逐字逐句的看，或者點擊視頻頁面，跟著圖片看。

他剛剛當選，死在當天。1913年3月20日。晚上十點四十五分。

淞滬區（舊稱浙江）上海。 上海站是上海至南京鐵路的一站。該站大樓四年前由英國人設計，四層樓高，耗資三十九萬九千銀元，當時是中國最現代化的火車站之一。

今晚南京的快速列車正在售票。 一名男子剛走出火車站的會議廳候客室內。

他剛與來送別他的人握手。

他仍在說話。三十一歲，身著長袍，背著幾乎空無一物的行李，像是在去附近的商店買東西一樣。然後是一聲槍響。

子彈從他背後的右側進入，斜著往下插入他的腹部，且不遠離他的心臟。他被送往上海南京鐵路醫院（當時稱為羅霸子路，今稱五金路），兩名德國醫生進行手術超過一小時，取出子彈後發現子彈已經被毒化。他撐了17個小時。

三月廿二日早上四點四十八分，他就不在了。

他叫宋家良。當年，他剛剛領導他的黨派在這個國家的歷史上第一次贏得全國選舉。

而這就是問題的核心。一個剛剛贏得勝利的人，為什麼會在去上班的路上死去?誰需要他死去?

而誰會把十種較便宜的方法拿來阻止他，卻選擇最昂貴的、最響亮的、無法隱藏的那一個？而那個細節卻再也放不開：他越往上爬，另一個人就越往下跌。後者姓

孫。這不是孤立的槍擊事件。這是權力交替失敗的場景。

我們要做的就是把那個場景拼回來，寸步不離。 我們不會點名誰是誰。

我們把判斷權留給你們。 到目前為止，幾乎所有事情都發生在北京城內。

從這個片段開始，鏡頭就跟著一位男人。 他到哪裡，我們就跟到哪裡。

他的名字叫宋繼垣。 號字叫敦初。 他署名他的文章「漁翁。 要了解那一劫,我們必須回到他開始的地方: 湖南的桃源。

1882年4月5日,他出生在湖南湘潭的向塍村,在袁河畔的一個學者家庭裡。

六歲進入私塾,十七歲進入桃源的張江書院。

1901年,十九歲,他考中了秀才,成為一名合格的文人。

那個時代的考試題目很簡單：考取省試、會試，一步一步升遷，做官做到老。

他沒有遵循這條路。1902年，他到武昌參加了武昌市第一中學校長進學考，考得第一名。

他在武昌遇見了一群男人，終於在自己心中解決了一個問題：這個朝代不能救這個國家。1903年八月， 他在長沙遇見黃興。

兩人一見如故。1903年11月4日，他和黃興、劉奎一、陳天華和張石照在一起籌劃了一個組織。

1904年二月，華興會在長沙西園正式成立。

黃興出任會長，宋教仁則年僅二十二歲出任副會長。

華興會做了什麼事?起義。他们計劃在慈禧太后七十歲生日時，在五個地方同時起義：長沙、岳州、衡州、保靖和常德。

宋嘉倫的任務是長德欄。 沒有成功。 消息泄露了。

湖南的省長下令清查全城。 你必須聽聽接下來的故事，因為之後它變成了一個名字。 當時宋嘉倫在桃園家中，根本不知道什麼事發生了。 一個童年玩伴跑了好幾里地去把消息傳給他。

新聞。 他急急忙忙地離開了，河邊並沒有任何一艘船。士兵們正逐漸逼近。然後，從芦苇丛中，一艘小船划了出来。

一位老渔民划船将他带到對岸。 他保住了生命。為了記住那個陌生人，他給自己一個筆名：渔民。

十年之間，他發表在報紙上的每一篇文章都帶著這兩個字頭。

數以萬計的人讀過《漁夫》。幾乎沒有任何人知道，兩個字之下，是一個老漁夫所救的生命。

1904年12月，他來到日本。先是在東京的 Hosei 大學，後來是進入早稻田的預備班。注意一下他在日本學習的東西。不是炸彈。

不是暗殺。不是如何建立一個單位。

他研究選舉是如何進行的、議會是如何開會的、內閣是如何組成的、政黨是如何運作的。那些年他翻譯了十數本書：《日本憲法》、《英國體制概要》、《美國體制大綱》、《俄羅斯體制概要》、《各國警察制度》。

In an age when every young man was discussing how to overthrow a dynasty, this man was copying out, page by page, the rules of procedure of other countries. In 1907 he did something else that had nothing to do with revolution and unexpectedly served the country.

He slipped back into Manchuria to stir up a rising and failed.

But while he was there he wrote a book, The Jiandao Question, arguing point by point that this stretch of land had been Chinese since the Zhou and Qin. Later, when the Qing government negotiated with Japan, they stood on that book and held their ground.

A revolutionary under imperial arrest warrant rescued the imperial government once.

That was not strange in those years, because young men then knew the difference: the dynasty is the dynasty, the country is the country. In 1911 he came home and became chief writer at Minli Bao in Shanghai. When the Xinhai Revolution broke out, he drafted the Provisional Constitution of

Ezhou, seven chapters, sixty articles. The first document of a constitutional nature in Chinese history came from the hand of a man not yet thirty.

So far, the man's record is simple. He read. He ran a newspaper.

He wrote institutions. He had no troops, no money, no territory.

He held exactly one thing: a real belief that rules could be made to work. And that is precisely where everything that follows begins.

Now the camera comes back to Shanghai. Between December 1912 and March 1913, this country held its first national election.

First, some numbers, because these numbers carry more weight than any adjective.

Registered voters nationwide: over forty-two million, nine hundred and thirty thousand.

The population was then estimated at over four hundred and six million.

That means one Chinese in ten cast a vote. On this land, it was the first time anyone had ever spoken by ballot. You had to qualify first.

Under the electoral law: male; twenty-one for the House of Representatives, twenty-five for the Senate; paying two yuan or more in direct taxes, or owning property worth five hundred yuan or more; and a primary-school education or above. In other words,

the one in ten who qualified was usually literate, had something behind him, and lived not too far from the county seat. This was not universal suffrage.

But in China in 1913, it was an overturning of heaven and earth.

Then the results. Five hundred and ninety-six seats in the House, two hundred and seventy-four in the Senate, eight hundred and seventy in both houses together.

The Nationalist Party took two hundred and sixty-nine plus one hundred and twenty-three, three hundred and ninety-two in all, forty-five point one percent.

Its three opponents, the Republican Party with one hundred and seventy-five, the Unity Party with twenty-four, the Democratic Party with twenty-four, came to two hundred and twenty-three between them, not sixty percent of the Nationalist total. Who won that fight?

Song Jiaoren. On August 25, 1912, the Revolutionary Alliance joined with several smaller parties and reorganised as the Nationalist Party.

Sun Yatsen became chairman; Song Jiaoren a director, and soon after, appointed acting chairman by Sun Yatsen. In plain words: Sun Yatsen was the name of this party. Song Jiaoren was its hands.

During the campaign he travelled Hunan, Hubei, Anhui, Shanghai and Zhejiang, speaking all the way. The papers gave it a name: the Song Jiaoren whirlwind.

In his speeches he said it flatly: for the present, a sound government must be organised at once; for a government to be sound, there must be a party cabinet; and the Nationalist Party now stands in that position.

On February 13, 1913, he came down the river from Hankou and reached Shanghai on the fifteenth, moving into number twenty-one, Tongfu Road, the house of Huang Xing.

On February 19 he spoke at the Nationalist Party's Shanghai communications office, on the constitution.

He spoke about how executive, legislative and judicial power should be separated, and how authority should be divided between the centre and the provinces. Notice what he did not speak about. He did not speak about Sun Yatsen's five-power constitution.

He set aside the scheme his own comrade had invented. At the same moment, one more thing is worth recording.

On February 10, at the very point when the election was being won and the cabinet was about to be formed, Sun Yatsen boarded the Yamashiro Maru for Japan to study industry.

He did not discuss with Song Jiaoren how any of this should be handled.

This is nobody's fault. It is a fact: at that moment, the two men at the centre of this party were no longer thinking about the same thing. So what was Song Jiaoren thinking? Something very concrete.

He wanted a responsible cabinet system: the cabinet answers to parliament; the president's power is restrained by the cabinet and the assembly. What he wanted was not to be president. It was to form a cabinet, to put the leader of the majority party into the premiership,

parliament behind him, the president in front. Someone will ask: wouldn't he have done better to be president himself?

Under the Provisional Constitution, the presidency was an empty seat. Real power sat with the premier. So in Beijing that year, the office that mattered was not president.

It was premier. And the premier had to be produced by the majority party in parliament. The majority party was the Nationalist Party. The man who actually ran the Nationalist Party was Song Jiaoren.

That piece of arithmetic, all of China could do. The newspapers were already calling him the future premier.

Why was the premiership so important? Look back at the year before.

On March 11, 1912, the Provisional Constitution was promulgated, days before Yuan Shikai was to take office, changing the presidential system into a cabinet system. From that day, the real power of this country was written in black and white into the premier's hands.

And that cabinet never found its feet. From the founding of the republic to September 1912, in less than half a year, the premiership changed hands three times: Tang Shaoyi, Lu Zhengxiang, Zhao Bingjun.

Tang Shaoyi lasted a little over two months, quarrelled with Yuan Shikai, and walked out. In other words: up to the spring of 1913, nobody had yet sat firmly in the premier's chair.

And the first man with a real chance of sitting firmly in it was Song Jiaoren, who had got there by votes. In Song Jiaoren's calculation, this is what a republic means.

He wanted to move power into institutions, peacefully, by ballot. What did he want: the power of the cabinet.

Who stood in his way: the real power in the president's office.

What means did he use: votes, seats, newspapers, all of it out in the open. The price: once the cabinet was formed, the president would have to give up real power.

So who was the man in the presidential office? Camera, follow him to Beijing.

In the spring of 1913, Yuan Shikai from. How far did the case get?

had plenty of ways. To make the formation of a cabinet Wu Shiying died in prison on April 24.

fall through, he did not need to Ying Guixin died on a train in lift a hand. He only needed not January 1914. Zhao Bingjun died in Tianjin in to nod. In name the cabinet is formed by the majority party in parliament.

February 1914, officially of a stroke, and by But the choice of premier and the list of ministers all have to pass common rumour of poison.

the president. He drags his feet, Hong Shuzu ran, and ran until he was caught in 1918; in April 1919, in Beijing, does not nod, and there is no cabinet. He had a second step: he was strangled for having procured a cut the money. The Nationalist Party's operating

killing. Four men: three never stood in funds, the members' allowances, all of it a court, one stood on the gallows.

could be blocked. He did not even And the one sentence that mattered, need to dissolve the party.

who gave the order, was never written Letting it go hungry for a while into any official conclusion.

would have been enough. And one step further: to go north, This republic had just declared that it would do things by law, and its Song Jiaoren had to take a train, had to enter Beijing, had to deal first great case stuck right here.

with the presidential office. Every step of it was inside the government's line of sight.

One telegram from Yuan Shikai and he would never have reached the capital.

So here is the peculiar thing about this case. Yuan Shikai had motive, had power, and had slow, legal methods.

Assassination was the worst of them all. He knew better than anyone what follows an assassination: the whole country boils over, the south moves at once, and he has lit a fire at his own door. Nobody who means to hold power for the long run picks the road

that costs the most and pays back the least. Which forces a more important question. If the man who ordered it need not have been Yuan Shikai, then whose office decided that Song Jiaoren must not reach Beijing?

Let us take this apart into four layers. Each layer has its people.

Each layer does only its own piece. Each piece looks proper on its own.

Put the four together and you have one complete chain. First layer: Beijing, the cabinet. In March 1913 the premier was Zhao Bingjun. In his Ministry of the Interior there was a secretary named Hong Shuzu, a man who travelled constantly between

Beijing and Shanghai. Second layer: the Shanghai underworld. Hong Shuzu knew a man named Ying Guixin, also called Ying Kuicheng.

In Shanghai this man had enormous reach. He came out of the secret societies, and yet carried the official title of Jiangsu inspector. Money, contacts, and a talent for dirty work. Third layer: the platform.

Ying Guixin found a man, Wu Shiying. On the night of March 20, this man lay in wait near the ticket barrier at Shanghai station. And then the case was solved with astonishing speed.

A dozen hours after the shooting there was still no lead. The police of the Shanghai International Settlement posted a reward of ten thousand yuan.

The Shanghai-Nanjing railway administration put up five thousand. The military governor of Jiangsu, Cheng Dequan, telegraphed the province to hunt the killers and set a deadline.

On March 24, the fourth day after the shooting, Wu Shiying was arrested in Ying Guixin's house. The case was first heard at the Mixed Court in the International Settlement, then handed over to the Chinese side.

At the preliminary hearing Wu Shiying confessed clearly: Ying Guixin told him to do it. But when the trial proper opened, he took it back.

Then the police searched Ying Guixin's house and found a batch of telegrams.

Those telegrams are the hardest thing in this whole case. Let me read a few of them to you.

March 13, Hong Shuzu to Ying Guixin: destroy Song, and the rank of merit is your reward. Translated: ruin him, and I will repay you with a decoration. March 14, Ying Guixin replies: the bandit chief of Liangshan is stirring up trouble everywhere, the danger is real, urgent orders

have been issued to hunt him down. He calls Song Jiaoren the bandit chief of Liangshan. He calls murder a hunt.

March 19, Hong Shuzu telegraphs again: proceed at once. March 21, Ying Guixin reports: the bandit chief is destroyed, our men not one wounded, rest assured. By then Song Jiaoren had been lying in hospital for nearly a day. Hong Shuzu later explained that

what he wanted was to destroy Song's reputation, not the man, and that the decoration was an empty promise. Ying Guixin plainly did not read it that way. A deputy handed a vague instruction to a man with great reach and plans of his own. That is where the ambiguity grew

Let us put the conclusion first. Measured with four rules, Yuan Shikai is the least likely man to have ordered Song Jiaoren killed. This is not excusing him. Quite the opposite: what Yuan Shikai did later, this film hides nothing of.

He dissolved the Nationalist Party. He tore up the constitution.

He made himself emperor. All of that is his. But as far as this one shot is concerned, putting the account on his head is the least defensible entry in the ledger. Why? Four measures.

Let me show you them one at a time. Before we measure, one thing has to be added: where did Yuan Shikai's position come from in the first place? On February 12, 1912, the Qing emperor issued the edict of abdication.

The sentence in its first half, the ruling power is hereby made public to the whole nation and the state shall be a republican constitutional one, is the one everybody quotes.

But the sentence that actually decided the next four years is the one that follows, and here it is in the original words: Yuan Shikai, having previously been elected prime minister by the Advisory Council, and this being a time when the old gives place to the new,

there must be a way to unify north and south; let Yuan Shikai therefore, with full powers, organise the provisional republican government and consult with the revolutionary army on the manner of unification.

Listen to that sentence carefully. On the day the Qing emperor stepped down, the full power to organise the provisional republican government was already written in black and white to Yuan Shikai.

His position was not seized from Song Jiaoren. It was handed to him by that edict. Hold on to that layer, or the four measures will not measure straight. Measure one: motive.

Whose position grew worse because Song Jiaoren was about to form a cabinet?

Yuan Shikai's did. Under the Provisional Constitution, real power sits with the premier; once Song Jiaoren formed his cabinet, the president would have to hand that power over. This is true, and there is no need to argue it for him. So on the first measure Yuan

Shikai stands: he had motive. But notice: motive is not an order.

What this column proves is only that he did not want Song Jiaoren in office. It does not prove that he struck. Measure two: means.

Here Yuan Shikai collapses completely. To make sure Song Jiaoren could not form a cabinet, did he need a gun? Not at all.

The choice of premier and the list of ministers all had to pass the president. He only had to withhold his nod, and there would be no cabinet, and Song's trip north would have been for nothing, and he would have gone back to Shanghai. Here was a road

that cost almost nothing and had a fair chance of success. And he had a second step: cut the money. The party's funds, the members' allowances, all of it could be blocked. He did not even need to dissolve the party.

Let it starve for a while; that would have been enough. Why would a man holding that many legal, cheap and quiet options choose the one the whole country would see, the one that traces straight back to him? And one harder sentence: Yuan Shikai

was not a man who built his career on assassination. What he used all his life was armies, silver, office and treaties. Assassination was neither his habit nor a means he had no way around.

Measure three: timing. To go north, Song Jiaoren had to take a train.

Which train, what hour he arrived, which barrier he walked through, all of it was inside the government's view.

One telegram from Yuan Shikai and he would not have left Shanghai.

And the fact is: he left. What this column means is that whoever you want to charge, someone had to do the stopping, and the Beijing end did not do it.

Measure four: gain. What did Yuan Shikai get when Song Jiaoren died?

A moment of safety, and the curses of the whole country. The south moved at once; four months later the Second Revolution broke out, and he was forced to use a war to solve a problem he could have solved by not nodding.

More than that: with Song Jiaoren dead, what Yuan Shikai lost was an opponent he could negotiate with under rules.

What he got in exchange was a set of enemies he could only deal with by gun. However you add it up, this account loses.

Put the four measures side by side and it is clear. Motive: he had it.

Means: he did not need it. Timing: he did not stop him. Gain: he lost the most.

So this film says it plainly: Yuan Shikai is the least likely man to have ordered the assassination of Song Jiaoren. Then who is the most likely?

This film names no one. But one thing has to be put on the table, and it is documented: in the spring of 1913, the voice inside the Nationalist Party was changing hands.

The party's real power was in Song Jiaoren's hands. The votes in parliament were won by his own travelling.

The papers were already calling him the future premier. And in his speeches he talked about separation of powers, and never once mentioned the five-power constitution his own comrade had invented. On February 10, with the cabinet about to be formed, Sun Yatsen

took the Yamashiro Maru to Japan and did not discuss any of it with Song Jiaoren. These are facts, not guesses.

Later writers have used these facts to point suspicion toward the party's own end.

That is one school of opinion among later writers. It is not this film's conclusion. This film's conclusion is a single sentence: Yuan Shikai is the least likely.

As for whose name goes in that last cell, this film leaves it to you. What follows is inference, not record.

If there had been one plain-clothes policeman on that platform that night.

If he had been willing to let two attendants walk ahead of him.

If the Shanghai newspapers had printed the rumour that someone meant him harm one day earlier. Then that shot might have missed. Every one of those ifs really existed at the time.

Not one of them was impossible. History did not go that way, and we cannot say the outcome would certainly have been different.

But we can say this: that road did exist. This is inference, not record.

Now read the chain once more, backwards. At both ends, the people who could have prevented it were absent.

At Yuan Shikai's end, a single telegram could have stopped him, and he did not send it. At Song Jiaoren's end, two more men, a later train, three days' delay, any of it would have worked, and he did none of it. Neither end was guarded.

That is why someone in the middle could act. Now let us turn the clock back to the night of March 20 and walk those seventeen hours, hour by hour.

That night he had just shaken hands with the people seeing him off.

He was still talking. After the shot he did not fall down. He could still speak, and he told the people around him that he had been hit. Yu Youren ran out of the station, stopped a car in the road, and got him to the Shanghai-Nanjing Railway Hospital on Laobazi Road.

Two German doctors operated for more than an hour and took out the bullet.

It had entered from the right side of the back, drove slanting into the abdomen, and stopped close to the heart.

Before it went in, the bullet had been poisoned, or so the Shanghai papers said at the time.

After the operation the pain was unbearable. He vomited continuously. There was blood in his urine. On the morning of the twenty-first, men like Zhang Jian and Zhang Binglin came. The doctors operated a second time. He knew he could not hold

on. He said to Yu Youren, who stayed at his side, that there were three things he wanted his comrades to do. First: the books I have deposited in Nanjing, Beijing and Tokyo, give them all to the Nanjing Library.

Second: my family has always been poor, and my old mother is still living; I ask my old friends to look after her. Third: comrades, go on fighting to save the country, and do not set down your duty because of me.

Then he asked Huang Xing to write for him, and sent his last telegram to Yuan Shikai. I will read you the whole of it, without changing a word. To President Yuan in Beijing.

Tonight I was to take the Shanghai-Nanjing train to the capital to pay my respects. At ten forty-five, at the station, a villain suddenly fired on me from behind. The bullet entered above the waist and passed into the lower abdomen, and death is certain.

I have reflected: since I first received instruction, I have kept myself clean.

Though I have not succeeded in avoiding fault, I have never made a private enemy of any man.

The Qing government was bad, and I rose to reform it; I also honoured human decency and held to public right, and I have not dared to keep the smallest thought of power or profit.

Now the foundations of the state are not yet firm and the people's welfare not yet increased. To let go so suddenly, I die with regret remaining.

I beg that the President, with an open heart and public justice, will do his utmost to guarantee the rights of the people, so that the nation may obtain a constitution firm and unshakable.

Then the day of my death is as the year of my life. These words are spoken on the edge of death; I pray they will be accepted. Song Jiaoren. Stop at these two lines. A man who has just been shot and is waiting to die, and the first defence he offers for

himself is: I have never made a private enemy of any man. The second: I have not dared to keep the smallest thought of power or profit. More than a hundred years later, these are the two hardest lines in this case to answer.

The last thing a man who has just been assassinated leaves his country is a request that the president guarantee civil rights and settle a constitution.

At four forty-eight in the morning of March 22, Song Jiaoren died, tears in his eyes. He was thirty-one.

Among the comrades who had watched all night, Chen Qimei wept aloud.

Huang Xing, crying as he worked, washed his body. He lay on his side in white bedding, the upper body bare, a bruise on the right side of his abdomen where the dressing had been taken off. Tan Renfeng later wrote that in Japan someone had once told

Song Jiaoren's fortune and said he would be a peaceful chief minister for thirty years. The stars were no guide, the way of heaven too dark to question; after he was struck, only seventeen hours passed and he was dead.

The man who three months later should have been sitting in the premier's chair: from the bullet to the last breath, seventeen hours. On the afternoon of March 23, the body was moved from the hospital in Zhabei to the Hunan Guild Hall.

At the head of the procession, a formation of the five-coloured flag, then a military band.

His portrait was placed in a bower of flowers. The coffin of nanmu wood rode on a flower-decked double-horse carriage.

Behind came the naval band, wreaths from every quarter, troops with shouldered rifles, then one thousand five hundred Nationalist Party members, white gauze in hand, many of them weeping all the way.

And at the end, over two hundred cars of guests. The citizens who came to see him off kept gathering.

The procession ran from Zhabei into the old city, more than ten li long.

On April 13, Shanghai held a memorial service. Over twenty thousand people came.

The hall was hung with elegiac couplets. Among those who came were old men of the Revolutionary Alliance, and also constitutionalists who were not of the Nationalist Party's road. The heaviest couplet of all, the one by Tang Hualong, was hung

at that time. Sun Yatsen's couplet read: to guard the rights of the people, who is not one who survives you; to shed blood for a constitution, you are truly the first.

Tang Hualong, leader of the Democratic Party, wrote: what countryman could bear to tear down the long wall of ten thousand li with his own hands.

Calmly you came, my lord, but drawing the knife and setting down the brush, to whom can one speak.

Yu Youren, under the pen name Sao Xin, wrote a plainer line: I do not weep for a private friendship.

I do not weep for Minli Bao or for the Nationalist Party. I weep for the future of the Republic of China. And then the burial.

Where the coffin should go was discussed. Some proposed sending it back to Hunan, for a leaf to fall at its root. In the end it was settled: he stayed in Shanghai.

He was buried in Zhabei, on ground later called Song Park, later still renamed Zhabei Park, and it is still there today.

In front of the grave stands a square stone tablet, zero point seven five metres on each side, one point two metres high. On the front, two characters: the Fisherman. That is Zhang Binglin's hand.

On the back is an inscription composed by Yu Youren and written by Kang Baozhong. Let me read you the heaviest lines. That the gentleman died, all the world grieves. What the gentleman did, all the world knows.

What more should I record? If I write straight, the straight writer is killed. If I write crooked, the crooked writer is destroyed by heaven.

What does it mean? Write it true, and fear being killed. Write it slanted, and heaven will not forgive it. A man who has just lost his closest friend stands in front of the stone and says: I dare not write, and I cannot not write.

Two lines follow. Cut it into the empty mountain, and wait for an honest historian. Engrave it on the heart and liver, and lay it before heaven and earth. Set this stone in the mountain and wait for an historian who will tell the truth. Those few lines are

the method this episode is made by. We name no one, not because we are avoiding it, but because the sources available today cannot carry a verdict.

So we set the facts out one by one and leave the judgment with you. That is what waiting for an honest historian means. One more thing about that stone tablet is worth telling.

In 1966 the grave was destroyed. Several park workers pushed the tablet into a water pit and covered it with earth.

In 1981 a new grave was completed; the tablet saw daylight again and was set up once more before the grave.

Some people wanted it to disappear. It did not. Less than eight months after Song Jiaoren died, this country became a different thing.

On November 4, 1913, Yuan Shikai ordered the Nationalist Party dissolved and cancelled the credentials of its members of parliament.

After that step, party politics in this country stopped in substance.

Parliament still sat, and the majority party no longer existed. The constitution was still being drafted, and the people drafting it had been driven out.

For more than ten years afterward, nobody again treated forming a cabinet as a political goal. Not because people did not want to, but because it had been tried once, and the price was Song Jiaoren. The premise of party politics is that the other side also keeps

the rules. Once the other side decides to use force, you discover that every advantage you had, the votes, the seats, the newspapers, all of it works inside the assembly, and on a railway platform, none of it is worth anything.

That is the most expensive lesson 1913 left this country. If you go to Shanghai today, there are still two places you can find. One is that station.

The building is still there, the one the British built in 1909.

It is the Shanghai Railway Museum today. In the exhibition hall there is no sound of gunfire, only old timetables.

The other is in the northwest corner of Zhabei Park. Song Jiaoren's grave is still there, and on top of it an eagle with spread wings. On one side, the gunshot in Shanghai, the millions of newspapers, the whole ambition of a peaceful transfer of power. On the other side,

two characters cut on a stone tablet. That age put both of those things into the same stretch of history, and less than a year lay between them. What he wanted was very simple.

Let parliament sit. Let a cabinet be formed. Let the president step back.

The answer Song Jiaoren gave with his life is simpler than anyone's: the moment you win by the rules, the rules become dangerous. This republic had just learned how to vote, and it learned something more important: how dangerous voting can be.

And that lesson it has gone on learning to this day. July 1913. Hukou, in Jiangxi.

Li Liejun fired the first shot there. After the Song case, the first war of this country was opened by a single province. That war lasted a little over a month. And its outcome decided the next dozen years of this country.

Next episode.

▶ Watch this episode (images and maps included): China's First Election Was Won by a 31-Year-Old. Two Days Later He Was Dead | Ep.16