一九一二年一月一日。南京。夜晚，宣布了國家新名字。中華民國
《神州大地》系列 總第 16 集：「1912 年 1 月 1 日，中國第一場選舉由 31 歲的年輕人贏得。兩天後他就去世了 | Ep.16 (Shorts)」是本集影片的完整圖文轉錄，可逐字閱讀，也可前往影片頁觀看對應畫面。
1912 年 1 月 1 日。
南京。夜晚，一個新的國家名稱被宣讀出來。
中華民國。
臨時總統就職宣誓。
這是亞洲第一個共和國 —— 在它之前,
亞洲沒有任何國家嘗試過一個
沒有皇帝的制度。
但那一天是開始,
不是結束。因為北京還有一個宮廷。
皇帝仍然在紫禁城，
年號仍然在使用，
北洋軍隊仍然掌握在某人的手中。 因此問題是:
一個王朝如何一蹶不振?
是被某人壓倒了嗎?
本節的答案是一個令人驚訝的答案：不是被壓倒了。
它改造自己 — 新政策、新軍隊、集中權力、徵稅 — 並一步一步地拆散了自己的根基。
要談論到一九一一年，我們就得
從前面說起。從亂局說起。
清末官場有句話:
三年做個清官，一百萬兩銀子。
它描述的不是一個貪污的
人。 它是一種完全不同的運作方式：官員薪水很低，真正使人活下來的是額外的費用和習俗性徵稅。
那些在上面的被那些在下的支持著，
而那些在下的則是從民眾身上撥撥口粮。層層堆疊，大家都這樣生活著。這不是任何人的道德問題。 它是一種結構：
當薪水無法支撐生活時，
金錢就必須從別的地方取得，
而不是從薪水中。
如果這對於文官機關是如此，
軍方也不能依靠。清朝的常備軍是八旗和綠營。
他們可以在帝國成立時就打仗，
但他們不能維持長期戰爭。
在晚清時期
他們已經是另外一回事了。
有士兵的名單上
卻沒有在軍營裡 — 官兵領取薪水
但沒有實際的人員，官兵領取薪水
但沒有實際的人員，是個公開的秘密。
長期的和平歲月後，刀劍已經生鏽了
一支軍隊已經忘記了如何戰鬥
唯一的用途，只有存在於紙上。
在 1894 年，第一次中日戰爭。
北洋艦隊，三十年的自強運動
的精力都投入其中，結果全軍覆沒。
被日本打敗了 — 這時的震撼
難以想像現在。不是被西方國家打敗的
而是被一個在同樣的方式被迫開放的
鄰國打敗的。 下一年，日清條約：清朝賠償二百萬兩，開放港口，割讓台灣。三十年來買船建廠、練兵備戰，終於一戰回到原點。真正的結果不是賠償的數額。
當時有很多人
都在同一個時候到達同一個結論：
買船而不改變系統可能根本不夠用。
有些人試圖從內部改變它
不是通過叛亂——從頂層做起。
一九零八年，光緒皇帝頒佈了
一項新政：廢除八股文、
開放學校、培養新軍、
裁減冗員。百餘天。它觸及的
並非只是規章。它觸及了
許多人的位子——保守派大員被免職、
調動、威脅。 然後慈禧進行政變，
所有的改革都被撤銷了。
陳天祥和五個人被處死於北京的菜市口。
陳留下了遺言，並且他還留下了一個選擇：他可以選擇離開。第一次試圖拯救它的努力就這樣被切斷了。
更大的屈辱還在等待著它。
1900年，拳匪入京，八國聯軍來到。慈禧帶著皇帝逃往西安。
1901年，拳匪條約簽署。
賠償金額四百五十萬兩銀子 —— 這個數字是如此設定的，
每一國民一個兩兩。 與此同時，約九百八十萬兩銀子
用三十九年付清。這些數字
來自於條約本身的內文，
也成為清末財政上最重大的固定負擔。
從此之後，清廷被稱為
洋務院。錢從哪裡來呢？
並非從財政部支出 — 財政部的財政部門
已經空虛了。將它分配到每一個村莊：各省分別拿到份額，再加上自己的徵稅，最後落在土地、鹽、商品上。
第二次嘗試發生得更早。
它被稱為自強運動。
自強派的建議，八個字的內容如下：
學中國的精華，學西洋的用途。購買機器，建立工廠，
製造槍砲和炮台，開採礦藏，
創辦語文學院，派遣留學生出國。
學來的只是技巧。
既不許改造制度。
1894年的戰爭證明，只學習表面的東西是不夠的。
技術無法拯救一個腐朽的體系。
那句話不是歷史學家之後加上的 — 當時許多人自己都想通了。
到 1900 年後，宮廷受到了足夠的傷害，真的行動了起來。
從 1901 年起，新政開始實施：培養新軍隊、鼓勵工業、重新架構行政機構、成立教育部、派遣觀察員出國。在 1905 年，千年的考試制度被廢除
這是多麼了不起的變化！
一個文盲的男人爬上去的道路已經被改變了。
新學校成立，學生被送往海外;
一支新型的軍隊在西方模式下接受訓練，
採用西方的操練和西方的步槍。
三者均已完成。
有一件事沒有被做到：政治體制仍未被改變。
表面上已經有所改變了。
但根基仍然是舊的那一種。
後來甚至還有了憲法的草案。
觸發這場變革的，是別人的戰爭：
1904年的俄日戰爭，日本勝利了。
一個小小的憲政國家，擊敗了
一個大而強盛的專制國家，這種對比
在家鄉被無窮無盡地引用。
內部有了對憲法的需求浪潮：袁世凱、張之洞等高級官員聯名要求制定憲法，
甚至媒體也跟著施壓。
1906年，法院宣佈了憲政準備工作。
一九零八年，頒佈《帝國憲法大綱》：皇權神聖不可侵犯，
預備期九年。
一九零九年，各省咨議局設立，
議員選舉，多數是紳商、
憲政派人士，第一次擁有發言的機會。 九年才被問到。
其他人卻無法等待九年。
當第一次會議開會時，人們學到兩件事情：如何提出議案，
以及如何團結起來。
一份名單把誠意的問題全部披露了出來。 1911年5月8日，清廷組成了第一個內閣。十三人。
九人是滿洲人，僅四人是漢族人； 九阿哥中七個都是
從皇族中選擇的。
這個名單出現在內閣規則
和任命詔書中，也可以確認家族支系。
軍隊、海軍和財政部 —— 這些軍事權力和財政權力
都掌握在皇族親屬的手中。
當時人們稱它為皇族內閣。
這破壞了憲法君主制的普通規則：在這樣一個體制下，皇室成員不會坐在內閣中。憲法派人們震驚不已。
張建、唐化隆、譚延闓等人共同上奏，說皇族內閣與憲法君主制相容不可行。
法院無視了他們的奏章。 Trying to pull power
in, they pushed their allies away.
The last straw came the next day.
On 9 May 1911, an edict: the main railway
trunk lines were to be nationalised.
The Sichuan-Hankou and Guangzhou-Hankou lines were taken
into state ownership. The problem was not
the word nationalisation. It was how it
was done. The Sichuan share capital was
around fourteen million taels — the figure appears
in People''s Daily and in the Institute
of Modern History of the Chinese Academy
of Social Sciences — and much of it
came from a rent levy: collected with
the land tax at three percent,
so that farmers across Sichuan held a
share. The government would exchange it for
state bonds, not cash.
And three million taels of the shortfall
which included some two and a half
million taels lost when Shanghai money shops
collapsed in the rubber crash — was not
recognised. In the same month, the minister
of posts and communications, Sheng Xuanhuai,
borrowed six million pounds from a four-power
banking consortium of Britain, America, Germany and
France, secured on Hunan and Hubei transit
dues and the salt tax.
In June, the Sichuan Railway Protection League
was founded, with hundreds of thousands of
members. On 7 September, the Chengdu massacre:
the Sichuan governor-general Zhao Erfeng ordered troops
to fire, and more than thirty petitioners
died. On 25 September, Rongxian declared independence
half a month before Wuchang.
By this point, the merchants'' money and
the farmers'' rent shares had been taken
too.
At this point one thing can be
made clear: why did the New Policies
and the new army end up dismantling
the dynasty itself? First: the new army
was organised on new lines — literate,
structured, armed, and able to read the
new newspapers. The court gave them organisation and
weapons, but not a sense of belonging.
The first shot at Wuchang was fired
by the engineering battalion of the Hubei
new army. An army with guns and
organisation became the group best placed to
overthrow the court. Second: the constitutionalists were
the ones who most wanted the dynasty
preserved. Once the imperial-clan cabinet appeared,
the literati turned to revolution — assembly delegates,
school-founding gentry, railway investors, all turning around
together. Liang Qichao had a line that
has been quoted ever since: the present
government is a great factory for manufacturing
revolutionaries. It wanted to strengthen itself.
Instead it armed its opponents.
So now: who set it in motion.
The first person to speak of is
Sun Yat-sen. In 1894, he founded the Revive
China Society in Honolulu — he was twenty-eight,
and a letter he had sent to
Li Hongzhang had gone unanswered.
In 1905 in Tokyo, the Revive China Society
merged with the China Revival Society and
the Restoration Society to form the Revolutionary
Alliance, and he was elected its director,
advocating the Three Principles of the People:
nationalism, democracy, and the people''s livelihood.
Whichever side writes this history, both honour
him as the forerunner of the revolution.
But to be precise: he was not
the first to call for the overthrow
of the Qing, and he was not
the only one. He was the one
who lasted. Others scattered after one failure;
he failed more than ten times and
kept going.
In the six years after the Alliance
was founded, it launched a dozen or
more uprisings. Guangzhou, Huizhou, Chaozhou, Huanggang,
Qinvhu, Fangcheng, Zhennanguan, Qinlian, Hekou — the names
Guangzhou and Huizhou recur again and again
in Qing memorials. Failure after failure.
Some risings scattered within days; some were
broken up before they could assemble.
Where did the money come from?
It came from overseas Chinese — miners and
shopkeepers in Southeast Asia, restaurant owners and
laundrymen in America, subscribing, holding charity sales,
sometimes selling their property.
That is also why he could rise
again after every defeat.
In this circle, failure was the norm
and scattering was the reasonable response.
He simply did not stop.
That he did not stop was itself
his greatest asset.
But the revolutionary camp was not a
single block either. In 1914, after the failure
of the Second Revolution, Sun Yat-sen formed
a new party in Tokyo — the Chinese
Revolutionary Party — setting aside the Nationalist Party.
Its rules required new members to swear
an oath to follow Mr.
Sun, with wording such as "if my
heart should waver, may I suffer the
utmost penalty"; and they had to give
a fingerprint. The party''s second figure,
Huang Xing, opposed this — Huang was the
founder of the China Revival Society and
the commander at Huanghuagang and at the
battle of Hankou and Hanyang.
He refused to join, and his reasons
are in his letters to Sun and
to comrades: swearing a fingerprint oath of
personal loyalty was a reversal for a
democratic revolution, and an insult to his
comrades. Sun did not yield.
On 30 June 1914, Huang Xing left for America.
The two went their separate ways.
Scholars of early Republican politics, Yang Tianshi
among them, generally regard this as a
low point in Sun''s career — because by
the time of the National Protection War,
the anti-Yuan force that actually took the
stage was not his party but the
circle around Liang Qichao and Cai E.
A man who advocated republicanism also walked
the road of centralising power.
That is one of the most telling
internal wounds of 1911.
Money was never a settled question among
the revolutionaries. In 1907, when Sun left Japan,
Japanese friends and merchants gave him gifts
amounting to more than twenty thousand yen.
He left only two thousand for the
newspaper Minbao and took the rest for
actual risings in Chaozhou and Huizhou.
This exploded in Tokyo.
Zhang Taiyan — and Zhang Ji and Liu
Shipei with him — launched a movement against
Sun, putting up notices accusing him of
having secretly taken Japanese money and of
misusing public funds. What the later inquiry
found is recorded in the Alliance''s internal
investigation and in Sun''s own statement of
accounts: his mother and his brother were
not living comfortably, which did not look
like someone who had embezzled a fortune;
he produced a list of receipts and
payments, saying he had spent nothing public
beyond board, lodging and travel.
His brother Sun Mei had given away
his whole property for the revolution and
gone bankrupt. In the end, no evidence
was produced for the embezzlement charge,
and the talk died down.
What this episode really shows is something
else: even comrades questioned one another.
For an organisation living on donations,
financial transparency was a problem from the
very beginning.
Having said all that, one more thing
should be said: he was an ordinary
man too. His marriages and relationships have
been recorded repeatedly, both then and since:
his first wife Lu Muzhen, from an
arranged marriage in his home village;
a marriage to Otsuki Kaoru during his
years in Japan, and a daughter from
it; and his marriage to Soong Ching-ling
in 1915. He was forty-nine that year and
she was twenty-two. The difference in age,
and the setting aside of his first
wife, were discussed at the time
the Soong family objected at first,
and some comrades thought it unfair to
Lu Muzhen. On the other hand,
his speaking ability and personal magnetism really
were his greatest capital in raising money
and mobilising support; that too is consistent
in the accounts of his contemporaries.
Also from his contemporaries: the description of
him as not constant in his affections.
Beyond his achievements and his failures,
he had a private life as well.
None of this changes who he was
but put together, it is what makes
a person.
Besides overthrowing the Qing, he had a
design: what to do afterwards.
Two concepts were his own.
One is the five-power constitution: adding examination
and control to the executive, legislative and
judicial powers. The second is the separation
of powers and functions.
Power is split in two: the people
hold four powers — election, recall, initiative and
referendum — called political power; the government holds
five, called governing power.
Together it means the people have authority
and the government has capacity.
The idea appears in outline in a
1906 speech and is set out systematically
in the 1924 lectures on democracy.
Did it leave institutional traces?
Yes: the 1947 constitution adopted a five-yuan
structure. The design survived.
Assessments differ — some value it as a
Chinese-designed constitutional scheme, others criticise the fivefold
division as unclear in practice.
This film states it and leaves the
judgement to the viewer.
One more thing is worth noticing:
his party kept changing.
From the Revive China Society to the
Revolutionary Alliance, a small body became a
united front. In 1912, with the Republic founded,
the Alliance became the Nationalist Party,
taking the path of parliamentary competition,
and this time it was Song Jiaoren
who led it. In 1914, after the failure
of the Second Revolution, Sun formed the
Chinese Revolutionary Party and drew power back
to the party leader personally.
In 1919, it was renamed the Kuomintang.
In 1924, it was reorganised in Guangzhou:
Soviet advisers brought in, communists allowed to
join as individuals, and a party machine
built on the principle of governing through
the party. The line of swing is
clear: from a parliamentary party to a
centralised party. The parliamentary path Song Jiaoren
advocated in 1912 was overridden twice, in 1914 and
in 1924. This film states the sequence and
does not say which one ought to
have won.
Even the title of head of state
was disputed. In 1921, the Guangzhou military government
elected him "extraordinary president".
The word extraordinary describes the post itself:
an expedient created for the emergency of
the constitution-protection period. And because it was
an expedient for an emergency, its term
and its legality were questioned.
Among those who questioned it was Chen
Jiongming — inside the same revolutionary camp,
objecting precisely to whether "extraordinary" could be
used that way. His principle of governing
through the party was also read by
contemporaries as placing a leader''s power above
the ordinary track of constitutional government.
These were the arguments of people at
the time — not criticism added later,
but things said in the newspapers and
correspondence of the day.
This film sets them beside the assessment
of him as the forerunner of the
revolution, without verdict, and without any reference
to any present-day system.
Having dealt with Sun Yat-sen, there is
a second question to answer.
Why did the people who most wanted
to preserve the Qing end up leaving
too? They were the constitutionalists: Zhang Jian,
Tang Hualong, Tan Yankai, Tang Shouqian,
Liang Qichao. What they wanted was not
revolution; they wanted a parliament.
They invested in railways, ran schools and
newspapers, sat in the provincial assemblies
no one wanted the country to fall
into chaos more than they did.
They gave the court nine years.
Once the imperial-clan cabinet appeared, the hope
collapsed entirely: thirteen men, nine Manchu,
seven of the imperial clan, military and
financial power all in the hands of
kinsmen. The next day, the railways were
nationalised. The money they had put in
was taken as well.
So the constitutionalists turned.
When the shots were fired at Wuchang
in October, many of the first to
respond were the chairmen and members of
the provincial assemblies. Liang Qichao''s line,
compressed to a few words: the government,
a factory for manufacturing revolutionaries.
The ones who wanted to preserve it
left in the end.
That is one man.
There was a whole group.
The first is Huang Xing.
In 1904 he founded the China Revival Society
in Changsha. At Huanghuagang he led the
attack on the governor-general''s yamen with two
fingers of his right hand shot away,
and kept directing to the end.
In the battle of Hankou and Hanyang
after the Wuchang rising — forty-odd days
he was the front-line commander in chief;
those forty days bought time for the
southern provinces. In the accounts of his
contemporaries he is described as loyal,
brave, and uninterested in power: he was
named with Sun as Sun-Huang, but never
contested position with him; and when the
two parted in 1914 he chose to step
aside rather than fight.
In one sentence: he was Sun''s other
half.
There was one man who believed in
parliament to the end.
Song Jiaoren. After the Wuchang rising he
took part in organising the provisional government
in Nanjing; when the Alliance was reorganised
into the Nationalist Party, he was the
one who actually ran it, turning it
into a party that would compete for
votes. He argued for a party cabinet:
the majority party in parliament forms the
government, and responsibility lies with the cabinet
rather than with a president personally.
In the 1913 National Assembly elections the
Nationalist Party won a majority of seats
the first nationwide parliamentary election in China.
What followed is beyond this episode''s scope.
His ideal did not get through.
But that path was tried once,
and the fact that it was tried
is worth remembering.
Besides guns, the pens came in too.
Zhang Taiyan. In 1903 he wrote Refuting Kang
Youwei''s Views on Revolution, naming Kang directly
and rejecting his monarchist argument; in the
same year the Subao case broke and
he was imprisoned for three years.
After his release he went to Japan
and edited Minbao, and for several years
fought a war of articles with Liang
Qichao''s New People''s Miscellany over whether there
should be a revolution at all
the largest public debate of the late
Qing. He wrote against the monarchists.
He also wrote against comrades: he was
one of those who launched the 1907
movement against Sun. One article, copied and
recopied as it was then, was worth
a detachment of troops.
A younger generation wrote with their lives.
Zou Rong''s The Revolutionary Army appeared in 1903;
its author was nineteen.
The book calls out "long live the
Chinese Republic", and it was printed as
a pamphlet and reprinted endlessly.
Two years later he died in prison,
aged twenty. In the same year,
Chen Tianhua''s Alarm Bell and Sudden Awakening
were published. He wrote in the plainest
language: how the powers are carving the
country up, how China is being destroyed.
These two pamphlets circulated very widely in
the new army. In December 1905, after the
controversy over the Japanese regulations on Chinese
students, Chen Tianhua left a last letter
and drowned himself in the sea at
Omori, aged thirty. He used his death
to persuade: fearing that his compatriots would
not listen, or would forget, he threw
himself into the sea as a reminder
to you all. They did not live
to see it — they did not live
to see the day of the republic.
Among them there were women too.
Qiu Jin. She came from an official
family, married, had two children, then went
to study in Japan; she returned to
publish a women''s journal, promote women''s education,
and run the Datong School in Shaoxing.
In July 1907, implicated in Xu Xilin''s Anqing
rising, she was arrested by Qing authorities.
On 15 July she was executed at Xuantingkou
in Shaoxing, aged thirty-one.
The most widely repeated line is what
she wrote before her execution: "autumn wind,
autumn rain, fill one with melancholy"
the phrase appears in Qing case records
and in many later accounts, though scholars
still discuss its original source.
She did not live to 1911.
But she was one link in this
chain.
One more thing needs saying: the revolutionaries
were not one society, they were many.
The main ones: the Revive China Society,
founded in Honolulu in 1894; the China Revival
Society in Changsha and the Restoration Society
in Shanghai, both in 1904; in Hubei,
the Reading Society and the Science Study
Institute, each with its own members and
its own ground. In August 1905 in Tokyo
these bodies combined into the Chinese Revolutionary
Alliance, with Sun Yat-sen as director and
Huang Xing as general manager.
This was a real merger: scattered forces
at last had a centre.
But it must also be said:
numbers alone do not win.
For six years after the merger,
the uprisings still numbered a dozen-odd,
and still every one failed.
The real difference was that someone led
someone who kept raising money, kept reorganising,
and kept going on to the next
attempt.
To close the line of uprisings, the failures
come first. From the large rising of
miners and sworn brotherhoods at Pingxiang,
Liuyang and Liling in 1906, to the rising
of the Guangzhou new army in 1910,
to the last one — the Guangzhou rising
of 27 April 1911. From Ping-Liu-Li to Huanghuagang,
every one had the same ending.
At Guangzhou, Huang Xing led some hundred
men into the governor-general''s yamen; the governor-general
fled, the attackers were surrounded by naval
forces, and by nightfall it was over.
Afterwards Pan Dawei collected seventy-two bodies and
buried them at Red Flower Ridge,
renamed Huanghuagang — hence the customary seventy-two martyrs.
Fourteen more names were later established and
inscribed on the reverse of the memorial
arch, giving eighty-six names that can be
verified. Among the dead was Lin Juemin,
twenty-four, a student in Japan, wounded at
the yamen and taken alive.
The night before the rising he wrote
two letters, one to his father and
one to his wife Chen Yiying.
That one letter — " I enlarge the love
I have for you, to help all
people love those they love" — still brings
tears a hundred years later.
And then that night.
10 October 1911. Wuchang. What happened that night is,
told plainly, very short: soldiers of the
eighth engineering battalion of the Hubei new
army moved first, because word of a
register of names had leaked in the
barracks. Who fired the first shot is
recorded differently in different sources — the common
account is a soldier of the eighth
engineering battalion, but accounts differ as to
the individual. What can be said is
that the shooting was done by soldiers,
not by generals. The governor-general of Huguang,
Ruicheng, escaped through a hole in the
back wall of his yamen and boarded
a gunboat on the river.
Overnight, Wuchang changed hands.
By the following morning the flag over
the city had changed.
No senior commander was present to direct
it. It was common soldiers who started
it.
Within that night there was a contrast
between two men, more neatly turned than
any script. The first: Sun Yat-sen in
America. When the Wuchang rising happened,
he was in the United States raising
money for uprisings. In mid-October he read
the news from Wuchang in a newspaper
not by telegram, but in the paper.
He wrote about this himself later.
Which is to say: he was not
there. The rising that toppled the Qing
was launched without its originator present.
The second: Li Yuanhong.
He was the commander of the twenty-first
mixed brigade of the Hubei new army,
and he was not with his unit
on the night of the rising.
The next day he was found by
soldiers and made military governor of the
Hubei military government. The most widespread story
is that he was found at home,
or under a bed, and refused at
first; the details differ across memoirs and
the original source cannot be verified
what is certain is that he was
unwilling at first and agreed later.
And there is something better: a few
days earlier the soldiers had privately called
him " Bodhisattva Li", because he treated men
leniently and did not punish them lightly.
The men who had called him a
bodhisattva days before were, days later,
pressing the seal into the same man''s
hands. The jokes history tells are neater
than any script.
After Wuchang, the provinces responded like dominoes.
In the two months after Wuchang:
on 22 October, Changsha and Xi''an; on 29 October,
Taiyuan; on 30 October, Kunming; on 31 October,
Nanchang;on 3 November, Shanghai; on the 5th,
Jiangsu; on the 7th, Anhui; on the
8th, Fuzhou; on the 9th, Guangdong;
on the 13th, Shandong; on the 22nd,
Chongqing; on the 27th, Chengdu.
Within two months, fifteen provinces had declared
themselves separated from the Qing.
Some of it with blood — there was
street fighting in Taiyuan and Xi''an;
some of it almost without — Cheng Dequan,
the governor of Jiangsu, was made military
governor after knocking a few tiles off
the roof of his yamen with a
bamboo pole, and that counted as revolution.
The Qing''s map came apart piece by
piece.
Back to the first day.
1 January 1912. Nanjing. Sun Yat-sen was sworn in
as provisional president of the Republic of
China, took the oath, changed the calendar,
and fixed the name of the state:
the Republic of China.
This was Asia''s first republic without an
emperor — before it, no country in Asia
had tried such a system.
Two thousand years of imperial rule turned
a corner on that day.
Turned a corner, not finished: the emperor
in the north was still on the
throne and the reign title still in
use. The abdication came forty-one days later.
This history is not only in books.
You can still go and see.
In Guangzhou, the tomb of the seventy-two
martyrs at Huanghuagang, in Huanghuagang Park — open,
and you can pay respects; the memorial
arch there carries the eighty-six names established
later. In Wuhan, the Red House in
Wuchang — the former Hubei military government,
today the Xinhai Revolution Memorial Hall of
Wuchang — open to visitors, with the meeting
hall of those days still there.
In Nanjing, the Presidential Palace, today the
Museum of Modern Chinese History — open;
Sun''s office from those years is preserved
in the grounds. Outside Nanjing, on Zijin
Mountain, the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum — open,
and where he was finally laid to
rest. The tombs are still there.
The people have been gone a hundred
years.
But it was not over.
On 1 January 1912, the Qing court in the north
was still there: the emperor still in
the Forbidden City, and Yuan Shikai still
holding the six Beiyang divisions — the most
completely trained force in the country.
The south had a republic; the north
had an army. The new government had
a name; the old court had troops.
So who would finish it?
Fight it out, or talk it out?
Who would take the last step?
And how was the emperor''s abdication edict
written? In the next episode, we take
up Yuan Shikai — his return to power,
the north-south negotiations, the pressure on the
court, and the abdication edict of 12 February 1912.
The full script and sources for this
film are at sylogs.com.
▶ 觀看本集影片（含畫面與地圖）：China''s First Election Was Won by a 31-Year-Old. Two Days Later He Was Dead | Ep.16 (Shorts)