Court Life in China, Isaac Taylor Headland [an ebook reader .txt] 📗

empire, has steered the ship of state on a straight course between the shoals of conservatism on the one hand and radical reform on the other until he has brought her near to the harbour of a safe progressive policy.

He has always been what the Chinese call the tu-ti or pupil of Li Hung-chang, and it may be that it was from him he learned his statecraft. Certain it is that he always basked in the favour of the great Viceroy, and it may be that he had more or less influence with him in his earlier appointments, for he rose rapidly and in spite of all other officials.

On his return from Korea he was made a judge. He was then put in charge of the army of the metropolitan province, and with the assistance of German officers he succeeded in drilling 12,500 troops after the European fashion.

It was about this time that the Emperor conceived the plan of instituting and carrying out one of the most stupendous reforms that has ever been undertaken in human government—that of transforming four thousand years of conservatism of four hundred millions of people in the short space of a few months.

Given: A people who cannot make a nail, to build a railroad.

Given: A people who dare not plow a deep furrow for fear of disturbing the spirits of the place, to open gold, silver, iron and coal mines.

Given: A people who in 4,000 years did not have the genius to develop a decent high school, to open a university in the capital of every province.

These are three of the score or more of equally difficult problems that the Emperor undertook to solve in twice as many days. In order to the solution of these problems there was organized in Peking a Reform Party of hot-headed, radical young scholars not one of whom has ever turned out to be a statesman. They were brilliant young men, many of them, but they so lost their heads in their enthusiasm for reform that they forgot that their government was in the hands of the same old conservative leaders under whom it had been for forty centuries.

They introduced into the palace as the private adviser of the Emperor, Kang Yu-wei, as we have already shown, to whom was thus offered one of the greatest opportunities that was ever given to a human being—that of being the leader in this great reform. He was hailed as a young Confucius, but his popularity was short-lived, for he so lacked all statesmanship as to allow the young Emperor to issue twenty-seven edicts, disposing of twenty-seven difficult problems such as I have given above in about twice that many days, and it is this hot-headed and unstatesmanlike young “Confucius” who now calls Yuan Shih-kai an opportunist and a traitor because he did not enter into the following plot.

After the Emperor had dismissed two conservative vice-presidents of a Board, two governors of provinces, and a half dozen other useless conservative leaders, they plotted to overthrow him by appealing to the ambition of the Empress Dowager and induce her to dethrone him and again assume the reins of government. They argued that “he was her adopted son, it was she who had placed him on the throne, and she was therefore responsible for his mistakes.” They complimented her on “the wisdom which she had manifested, and the statesmanship she had exhibited” during the thirty years and more of her regency. To all which she listened with a greedy ear, but still she made no move.

During this time were the Emperor and his young “Confucius” idle? By no means. They had hatched a counterplot, and had decided that what they could not do by moral suasion and statesmanship they would do by force, and so they sent an order to Yuan Shih-kai, who as we have said had drilled and was in charge of 12,500 of the best troops in the empire, urging him to “hasten to the capital at once, place the Empress Dowager under guard in the Summer Palace so that she may not be allowed to interfere in the affairs of the government, and protect him in his reform measures.”

The Emperor knew that nothing could be done without the command of the army which was largely in the hands of a great conservative friend of the Empress Dowager (Jung Lu) the father-in-law of the present Regent. Yuan was in charge of an army corps of 12,500 troops, but for him to have taken them even at the command of the Emperor, without informing his superior officer, would have meant the loss of his head at once. The first thing then for him to do was to take this order to Jung Lu. Yuan was in favour of reform, though he may not have approved of the Emperor’s methods. Jung Lu hastened to Prince Ching and they two sped to the Empress Dowager in the Summer Palace where they laid the whole matter before her. She hurried to Peking, boldly faced and denounced the Emperor, took from him his seal of state, and confined him a prisoner in the Winter Palace. Kang Yu-wei, the young “Confucius,” fled, but the Empress Dowager seized his brother and five other patriotic young reformers, and ordered them beheaded on the public execution grounds in Peking.

Naturally the Empress Dowager approved of the “wise and statesmanlike methods” of Yuan in thus protecting instead of imprisoning her, and thus placing the reins of government once more in her hands, and she appointed him Junior Vice-President of the Board of Works, and when she was compelled to remove the Governor of Shantung who had organized the Boxer Society, she appointed Yuan Acting Governor in his stead. “Yuan,” says Arthur H. Smith, was “a man of a wholly different stripe” from the one removed, and “if left to himself he would speedily have exterminated the whole Boxer brood, but being hampered by ‘confidential instructions’ from the palace, he could do little but issue poetical proclamations, and revile his subordinates for failure to do their duty.”

When Yuan was made Governor of Shantung a number of the Boxer leaders called upon him expecting to find in him a sympathizer worthy of his predecessor. They told him of their great powers and possibilities, and of how they were proof against the spears, swords and bullets of their enemies. Yuan listened to them with patience and interest, and invited them to dine with him and other official friends in the near future.

During the dinner the Governor directed the conversation towards the Boxer leaders and their prowess, and led them once more to relate to all his friends their powers of resistance. He fed them well, and after the dinner was over he suggested that they give an exhibition of their wonderful powers to the friends whom he had invited. This they could not well refuse to do after the braggadocio way in which they had talked, and so the Governor lined them up, called forth a number of his best marksmen, and proceeded with the exhibition, and it is unnecessary to add that if the Empress Dowager had invited Yuan to the meeting with the princes when they discussed the advisability of joining the Boxers on account of a belief in their supernatural powers, she might have been spared the humiliation of 1900.

We shall soon see that Yuan cared no more for the “confidential instructions” of the Empress Dowager, when his statesmanship was involved, than for the orders of the Emperor. His business was to govern and protect the people of his province, and thanks to his wise statesmanship and strong character “there was not only no foreigner killed during the troubled season of anxiety and flight” of 1900, and “comparatively little of the suffering elsewhere so common.”

And now we come to another plot which indicates the character of Yuan and two other great viceroys, Chang Chih-tung, now Grand Secretary, and Liu Kun-yi, Viceroy of the Yangtse-kiang provinces. It is a well-known fact that during the Boxer rebellion the Empress Dowager was so influenced by the promises of the Boxers to drive out all the foreigners that she sent out some very unwise edicts that they should be massacred in the provinces. Yuan and his two confreres secretly stipulated that if the foreign men of war would keep away from the ports of their provinces they would maintain peace and protect the foreigners no matter what orders came from the throne. So that when these confidential instructions came from the palace to massacre the foreigners, in order to gain time they pretended to believe that no such orders could have come from the throne. They must be forgeries of the Boxers. They therefore refused to believe them until they had sent their own special messenger all the way to Peking to get the edict from the hands of Her Majesty and bring it to them in their provinces. This messenger was also secretly instructed to find out what the contents of the edict were, and if it was contrary to the desires of the Governor, he was to dilly-dally on the way home until the Boxer trouble was ended or until the foreigners had all been removed from the territory. And it was such conduct as this on the part of three Chinese and one Manchu viceroys that saved China from being divided up among the Powers in 1900, a fact which the Empress Dowager was not slow to understand and reward.

In 1900 Yuan was made Governor of the Shantung province, and the court was compelled to flee to Hsian. It was while the court was thus in hiding that an incident occurred which indicates the fertility of the Empress Dowager and the elasticity of all Chinese social customs. Governor Yuan’s mother died. In a case of this kind customs dictate, and the rules of filial affection demand, that a man shall resign all his official positions and go into mourning for a period of three years. Yuan therefore sent his resignation to the Empress Dowager, while “weeping tears of blood.”

The country was of course in desperate straits and could ill afford to lose, for three years, for a mere sentiment, the services of one of her greatest and most powerful statesmen. However much he may have regretted to give up such a brilliant career which was just well begun, Yuan no doubt expected to do so. What was his surprise therefore to receive from Her Majesty a message of condolence in which she praised his mother in the highest terms for having given the world such a brilliant and able son. Under the circumstances, however, it would be impossible to accept his resignation as his services to the country just at this juncture were indispensable. She would, however, appoint a substitute to go into mourning for him, and this with the knowledge that she had borne a son whose services were so necessary to the safety of the government and the country, would be a sufficient comfort to the spirit of his departed mother, and Yuan was forced to continue in his official position as Governor of the province without the intermission of a single day of mourning. Such is the elasticity and adaptability of the unchanging laws and customs of the Oriental when in the hands of a master—or a mistress—like Her Majesty the Empress Dowager.

One can imagine that in proportion as the Empress Dowager was pleased with the statesmanship manifested by Yuan Shih-kai in unintentionally reseating her upon the throne, in a like proportion the Emperor would be dissatisfied with it as being the cause of his dethronement. This was not, however, against Yuan alone but against the father-in-law of the present Regent and even Prince Ching as well. During the whole ten years, from 1898 until his death, while he was a