Part 32

"Do you fire off crackers?"

"Yes, in the matter of firecrackers, we celebrate very much the same as you do."

"And do you settle up all your debts as we do here?"

"I am afraid we do not. That is not a part of our New Year celebration."

"Our Prince is going to take on two more concubines this New Year," he volunteered.

"Ah, indeed, I thought he had three concubines already."

"So he does, but he is entitled to five."

"I should think it would make trouble in a family for one man to have so many women," I ventured.

He waved his hand in that peculiar way the Chinese have of saying, don't mention it, as he answered:

"That is a difficult matter to discuss. Naturally if this woman sees the Prince talking to that one, this one is going to eat vinegar," which gives us a glimpse of some of the domestic difficulties in Chinese high life. However it is a fact worth remembering that the Manchu prince does not receive his full stipend from the government until he has five concubines, each of whom is the mother of a son.

The leading princes of the new regime are Ching, Su, and Pu-lun. Prince Ching has been the leader of the Manchus ever since the downfall of Prince Kung. He has held almost every office it was in the power of the Empress Dowager to give, "though disliked by the Emperor." He was made president of the Tsung-li Yamen in 1884, and from that time until the present has never been degraded, or in any way lost the imperial favour. He is small in stature, has none of the elements of the great man that characterized Li Hung-chang and Chang Chih-tung, or Prince Kung, but he has always been characterized by that diplomacy which has kept him one of the most useful officials in close connection with the Empress Dowager. It is to his credit moreover that the legations were preserved from the Boxers in the siege of 1900.

Prince Su is the only one of the eight hereditary princes who holds any office that brings him into intimate contact with the foreigners. During the Boxer siege he gave his palace for the use of the native Christians, and at the close was made collector of the customs duties (octoroi) at the city gates. Never had there been any one in charge of this post who turned in as large proportion of the total collections as he. This excited the jealousy of the other officials, and they said to each other: "If Prince Su is allowed to hold this position for any length of time there will never be anything in it for any one else." They therefore sought for a ground of accusation, and they found it, in the eyes of the conservatives, in the fact that he rode in a foreign carriage, built himself a house after the foreign style of architecture, furnished it with foreign furniture, employed an Englishman to teach his boys, and as we have seen opened a school for the women and girls of his family. He therefore lost his position, but it is to the credit of Prince Chun, the new Regent, and his progressive policy, that Prince Su has been made chief of the naval department, of which Prince Ching is only an adviser.

The most important person among either princes or officials that has been connected with the new regime is Yuan Shih-kai. He was born in the province of Honan, that province south of the Yellow River which is almost annually flooded by that great muddy stream which is called "China's Sorrow." As a boy he was a diligent student of the Chinese classics and of such foreign books as had been translated into the Chinese language, but he has never studied a foreign tongue nor visited a foreign country. Here then rests the first element of his greatness--that without any knowledge of foreign language, foreign law, foreign literature, science of government, or the history of progress and of civilization, he has occupied the highest and most responsible positions in the gift of the 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 unstatesman-like 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."