Qing Empire

A debt he owed them

Drafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)formation

Nurhaci's clan ruled a valley so small that its length did not exceed twelve miles, a stockade in the hills below the Long White Mountains where the Jurchen — the Niuche, as Chinese writers of the day called the scattered descendants of the Jin dynasty the Mongols had broken three centuries earlier — lived under Ming tolerance rather than Ming rule. It was, Boulger writes, well adapted to be the cradle of a race of conquerors, on much the same pattern as the valley that had cradled the Mongols themselves, only smaller and closer to the Chinese frontier.

The murder that made him

In 1583 a rival chief named Nikan induced the Chinese commander in Liaodong to help him attack a neighbour — a neighbour who happened to be married to Nurhaci's cousin. Nurhaci's grandfather and father marched to the man's defence, and the Chinese, unable to take the defended town by force, resorted to treachery instead: they lured a large part of the garrison outside the walls under a pretence of negotiation and massacred them. Nurhaci's grandfather and father were among the dead.

Vengeance became, in Boulger's phrase, the principal object of Nurhaci's life, and to the murder of his kinsmen must be attributed the origin of the danger that would eventually cost the Ming their throne. He spent three years manoeuvring to get Nikan into his power, by force or through the Chinese authorities who had made Nikan chief of all the Jurchen districts specifically to check Nurhaci's own rising influence. In 1586 the Chinese, tired of propping up a client who could not defend himself, handed Nikan over. Nurhaci killed him at once.

Building something that would outlast a feud

With his father's murder avenged, Nurhaci turned to the wider ambition Nikan had been reaching for before him: uniting the scattered Jurchen clans into a single confederacy. He built a walled capital, drew up a simple code of laws suited to his people, drilled a small standing army, and — while doing all of this — kept faith with the Chinese border officials, accepting their titles and gifts and giving them no pretext to intervene against him a second time. In 1591 he annexed the Yalu river district in a sudden, nearly unresisted stroke, and the ease of that success told every neighbouring chief what kind of ambition they were now dealing with. Seven of them combined against him, bringing thirty thousand Jurchen and Mongol troops into the field to undo what a border feud had started and a single-minded vendetta had built into something much larger than a feud.

Not yet an empire

Nurhaci beat the coalition, absorbed most of what remained of it, and spent the next quarter-century doing the same to whoever was left. He declared his own dynasty in 1616 — the year his descendants would use, ever afterward, to date the House that eventually ruled China, though in 1616 it ruled nothing south of the Great Wall and would not for another twenty-eight years. What it already had, by then, was everything a conquest would later need: a standing army, a functioning administration, a capital, and a founder for whom the debt owed to the Ming had never once, in thirty years, been allowed to go unpaid.

A jade seal

Drafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)expansion

Nurhaci's one real defeat came at the very end of his life, when a Chinese general named Yuan Chonghuan held the fortress of Ningyuan against him with European cannon the Manchus had no answer for. It was the first and only time in his career that Nurhaci had to call off an assault and raise a siege, and he retired to his capital sick with disappointed pride and died there in September 1626, not quite sixty-eight. His son Hong Taiji inherited a confederacy still without a single Chinese province to its name.

Organising for the long war

Hong Taiji's first contribution was structural rather than territorial: he divided the Manchu population into the Eight Banners, hereditary military corps each with its own leader, flag and trumpeter, converting a coalition of clan followings into something closer to a standing national army. Chinese deserters who came over to his side were organised the same way, under their own banner, though Boulger is careful to note the arrangement was one of military convenience rather than any claim to equal national standing.

Campaign followed campaign through the 1630s — into Chahar Mongol territory, into Shanxi, wherever Ming defences proved weakest — and each one Hong Taiji fought less for outright conquest than for plunder, prestige and the steady attrition of Ming authority beyond the fortress line at Ningyuan and Shanhaiguan, which continued to hold against him as it had against his father.

An accident with a seal

It was an accident of recovered property, more than any battle, that gave Hong Taiji his opening to claim the Chinese throne outright. The jade seal of the fallen Yuan dynasty, lost in the Mongolian wilds when the Mongols were expelled from China two and a half centuries earlier, had been found by a shepherd, passed from hand to hand among Mongol chiefs, and eventually reached Hong Taiji. Its arrival was treated, among the Mongol clans, as something close to a sign: forty-nine separate chiefs hastened to pay him allegiance once it became known he held it, and — as though ratifying their own submission — they demanded that the King of Korea do the same. Korea's king tried refusing even to open the letters informing him of the new arrangement; a Manchu army settled the question of his independence at the point of the sword.

Emperor of China, on paper

At the close of the 1635 campaign, encouraged by this cascade of submissions he had done comparatively little fighting to earn, Hong Taiji assumed for the first time the style of Emperor of China. It was a claim with almost nothing behind it yet in Chinese territory — Ningyuan and Shanhaiguan still barred the road to Beijing, and would go on barring it for another nine years — but it converted the House Nurhaci had founded from a frontier confederacy into a rival court, waiting only for the Ming to hand it the opening its own arms had not yet been able to force.

To Pekin

Drafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)expansion

The Ming did not fall to the Manchus. They fell first to Li Zicheng, a rebel of, in Boulger's phrase, most ignoble origin whose principal object appeared to be plunder, and whose army took Beijing after only a few days' attack in 1644. The last Ming emperor was dead, and for a brief moment Li Zicheng looked like the master of China.

A general with a choice of evils

One force alone stood between Li Zicheng and total control: the veteran army of Wu Sangui, holding the fortresses of Ningyuan and Shanhaiguan on the Manchu border under orders to defend against the very enemy he was about to invite in. Recalled too late to save the capital, Wu Sangui learned of Beijing's fall and the emperor's death while still completing his march south. Li Zicheng sent him lavish offers of support; Wu Sangui rejected all of them. He judged — correctly, as it turned out, though not in the way he intended — that asking Manchu help to punish a rebel was the lesser of two evils compared with becoming a rebel's partner in ruling what remained of the empire.

The invitation

The Manchus had watched Wu Sangui's fortresses for decades without finding a way past them. His letter asking their court to send an army against Li Zicheng handed them, without a fight, the Great Wall and the two fortresses that had blocked every previous attempt at conquest. The request was granted before the ink of his letter had properly dried, and the cry went up through Manchu camps that had waited generations for exactly this: "To Pekin!"

Yungping and Chingting

Wu Sangui moved first, without waiting for his new allies to arrive, and destroyed a force Li Zicheng had sent to negotiate rather than fight — twenty thousand rebels left on the field. Li Zicheng himself then marched out with sixty thousand men, the pick of his army, taking Wu Sangui's own father as a hostage. At Yungping, Li's larger force nearly surrounded Wu Sangui's army entirely before a Manchu contingent arrived and turned an apparent Li Zicheng victory into a rout; thirty thousand of his best men fell, and Li escaped with a few hundred horsemen. When Wu Sangui reached Beijing's walls in pursuit, he found his father's head displayed on the ramparts — Li's answer to his refusal, and the point past which any reconciliation between the two men became impossible.

Li Zicheng fled Beijing with as much plunder as he could carry, was overtaken and lost another ten thousand men at the bridge of Likao, and made one final stand near Chingting with an army swollen to two hundred thousand by the arrival of eighty thousand fresh Manchu troops and Chinese levies flocking to what now looked like the winning side. Li lost forty thousand men in a single night's fighting and fled west; his own troops eventually refused to make a further stand for him, and he was run down and killed by a local militia while foraging for food with a handful of followers, his head carried in triumph to the nearest official.

What the invitation actually bought

Wu Sangui had asked for help chastising a rebel. What he received was a new dynasty on the throne he had helped clear. The Manchus who entered Beijing as his allies in 1644 did not leave it, and the fortresses that had kept them out of China for three decades — the ones his own letter had opened — became, from that year forward, simply the road into the capital rather than the wall around it.

Twice forty thousand men

Drafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)peak

The general who had let the Manchus into China in 1644 spent the next quarter-century as one of the dynasty's own great satraps, ruling the south-west with an authority Boulger describes as independent of Manchu control in everything but name. He kept a large standing army, held vast revenues in his own hands, and by the time the young Kangxi came to the throne, Wu Sangui's independence had begun to look, to the court that owed him its capital, less like loyalty than like a threat the dynasty had never actually disarmed.

A summons Wu Sangui would not obey

In 1671 Kangxi invited Wu Sangui to Beijing — a reasonable enough request, since he had not visited the capital in years and his professions of loyalty had come only informally, by deputy. Wu Sangui's own son lived at court as a hostage for his father's good conduct, married into the imperial family himself, and — aware of the intrigues building against his father — sent a private warning advising him not to come. It was an act of filial devotion that, in Boulger's judgement, showed very little understanding of the politics involved: Wu Sangui took the advice, declined the summons on the grounds of his age, and sent his son the formal powers to perform the act of allegiance by proxy instead.

Kangxi was not a ruler to be satisfied with a proxy. When two trusted officials arrived to press the point in person, Wu Sangui received them with every courtesy until they raised the actual purpose of their visit, and then dropped all pretence at once: "Do they think at the court that I am so blind as not to see the motive in this order of summons? I shall, indeed, present myself there, if you continue to press me, but it will be at the head of twice forty thousand men." He cut off the queue that marked Manchu subjection, discarded the Manchu calendar, and declared open rebellion.

A conspiracy that failed in Beijing

While the father raised the south-west, the son ran a parallel plot inside the capital itself: a planned massacre of the imperial family and chief officers of state, timed for the New Year's festival, built around a secretly sworn body of enslaved Chinese eager to buy their freedom by striking first. The scheme very nearly worked. On its eve, one of the conspirators - a slave named Matsi, anxious to save the life of the Manchu master he served - warned his owner, who carried the information straight to Kangxi. The son and most of his fellow plotters were arrested, tried and executed before the plan could be carried out, leaving Kangxi to face the father's rebellion without also having to survive the son's.

A common blaze of insurrection

Kangxi moved carefully rather than rashly, ordering the disbandment of the native armies that Wu Sangui and other Chinese commanders in the south still held under their own control — an edict aimed at every regional viceroy alike, which had the effect of forcing every one of them to declare a side. Wu Sangui's example proved infectious: from Fujian and Guangdong to the borders of Tibet and Burma, the whole south rose in what Boulger calls one common blaze of insurrection against the Manchus, and for a time the danger to the dynasty Wu Sangui had helped install was as real as any it had faced since 1644. Kangxi held his ground, wore the rebellion down province by province over the years that followed, and by the time it collapsed for good the throne he kept was, for the first time since his grandfather's generation had ridden through Shanhaiguan, entirely and irreversibly his own.

The pinnacle

Drafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)peak

Qianlong came to the throne in October 1735, sixty years after his grandfather Kangxi had broken Wu Sangui's rebellion and secured the dynasty his own grandfather Nurhaci had never lived to see rule an inch of China. By the time Qianlong abdicated in 1796 — a year early, by his own choice, so that his reign would not run longer in the record than Kangxi's — the empire he handed to his son controlled, in Boulger's words, territory stretching "from Siam to Siberia and from Nepaul to Corea." No military feat remained for the loftiest ambition to accomplish. It was, as Boulger puts it flatly, the pinnacle of Manchu power.

An ambassador who would not kneel

The clearest single measure of how that power was regarded abroad arrived in 1793, in the person of Lord Macartney, the first British ambassador granted audience with a Qing emperor. Every European envoy before him had performed the kowtow — three kneelings and nine prostrations — as the price of admission to the imperial presence. Macartney refused, and managed the refusal with enough tact that Qianlong himself took no offence, rising from his own seat at a banquet to pour Macartney a glass of wine with his own hand. The Board of Rites was considerably less forgiving, declaring that dispensing with the ceremony had sullied the lustre of a long and glorious reign and that nothing but future humiliation could be expected from so proud and unbending a nation.

The embassy failed at everything it had actually been sent to accomplish — no resident minister, no new ports, no change to the terms on which Britain traded at Canton. But the audience itself, granted without the ceremony that had subordinated every earlier European visitor, was read on both sides as proof of something else: that the court granting it could afford, at its own height, to be generous about a formality that a weaker court could not have survived conceding.

What outlasted the pinnacle

Boulger is explicit about how briefly the height lasted. With Qianlong's death the stern qualities that had sustained a widely extended empire departed Chinese history along with him, and the vigour that had built for a century and a half over three long reigns gave way, in his account, to a decline as consistent and as rapid as the rise had been. The generation that inherited Qianlong's empire had, in Boulger's own judgement, only to retain what he had won. It would not manage even that.

Three days

Drafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)contraction

Opium had been banned in China for decades before Commissioner Lin arrived at Canton, and banned to no visible effect: the Kiaqing emperor's own edicts against it had failed to stop either the smoking or the steady outflow of Chinese silver that paid for the trade. By the 1830s the court's patience with half-measures had run out, and Lin Zexu was sent south with the authority, and the reputation for courage and capacity, to finally settle the question.

An edict of remarkable power

Lin made his formal entry into Canton on the 10th of March, 1839, and within a week produced an edict Boulger admits was written with real literary power and, he allows, "breathing the noblest moral sentiments" — addressed to the foreign merchants in terms of pure superiority, commanding them to listen and obey "with trembling." He forbade any foreigner to leave Canton until the matter was settled, and made unmistakably clear, within days of his arrival, that what he wanted was not a negotiated compromise but the complete humiliation of the trade and the people running it.

His most consequential proclamation demanded the surrender, within three days, of every chest of opium held by foreign merchants at Canton. After a brief standoff, and mostly through individual decisions rather than any collective vote of the merchant community, more than a thousand chests were handed over to be destroyed. Captain Elliot, the British superintendent of trade, responded by ordering British ships to assemble at Hong Kong and prepare to resist any further aggression by force — the moment, Boulger notes, at which a collision that had been building for years finally became unavoidable.

Two governments that could not understand each other

Neither side found the other's position remotely legible. The Chinese mandarins could not conceive of the foreigners as anything other than traders who existed on Chinese sufferance; Elliot spoke, and expected to be treated, as the representative of a power as proud as the Emperor of China himself. When an apparent attempt was made to seize the merchant Mr. Dent under cover of an invitation, the Canton settlement found itself surrounded by an armed crowd of soldiers and coolies, and for a moment the British community feared a massacre. The London government's own position, meanwhile, had already been made plain in advance: it would not defend the opium trade as such, and would raise no objection if the Chinese government chose to seize and destroy it. What London would not tolerate was the detention of British subjects and the closure of British trade generally — a distinction the Chinese authorities, focused entirely on the one commodity they had banned, never fully registered.

What three days of defiance cost

Lin's edict was meant to end a trade the court had spent decades failing to suppress by half-measures. It ended instead with a war fought over terms Lin himself had never set: not whether opium would be sold, but whether a foreign power's subjects and shipping could be detained, confined and threatened by a government that regarded them as beneath the ordinary courtesies of diplomacy. China had the moral argument. It did not have the navy, and the treaty that followed the war would be written by the side that did.

A disappointed candidate

Drafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)contraction

Hong Xiuquan was the son of a small farmer near the North River, a district associated with the Hakka minority whose exclusion from the ordinary privileges of Chinese life extended, in practice if not in law, to the civil service examinations that were every ambitious commoner's one route upward. His friends claimed he placed high in each of the periodic examinations he sat; Boulger is skeptical of the claim, but the outcome is not in doubt — Hong failed to obtain his degree, was shut out of the public service, and carried the injury of it, sharpened rather than dulled by his own friends' flattery, for the rest of his life. Denied the chance to serve the government, he found, with what Boulger calls a shrewd and revengeful astuteness, that he could instead become its enemy.

An uncertain origin, a rapid spread

Where the movement's specific ideology came from is a question Boulger declines to settle outright — there was a tradition, which he treats with open reservation, that it had been conceived inside a Buddhist monastery whose members had old scores to settle with the government, and had gone looking through the provinces for the most disaffected ground they could find to plant it in. Whatever its origin, no province offered more fertile conditions than Guangxi, and by the summer of 1850 the rebels there had grown strong enough to besiege the town of Wuzhou with a force rumour placed as high as fifty thousand men. The Guangxi governor was too afraid of the consequences to even report the scale of the crisis to Beijing.

Neither reform nor restraint

The rebels' own proclamations claimed to speak for the Chinese people against Manchu usurpers — "the present dynasty are only Manchus, people of a small nation... why then are troops causelessly sent against us?" — but their conduct in the field matched no such claim to legitimacy. They plundered and massacred without regard to age or sex wherever they went, sparing only those women who could be put to use, and an imperial force ambushed near Canton was wiped out to the last man in a single engagement. When the main body finally settled on a single leader and gave him the royal title of Tianwang, the Heavenly King, the movement's political weight increased overnight — it could no longer be dismissed, by Beijing or by anyone else, as a matter of banditry that would burn itself out.

What a failed examination produced

A man excluded from the ordinary machinery of Chinese advancement had found the one avenue still open to him, and used it on a scale the examiners who turned him away could never have imagined answering for. The rebellion Hong Xiuquan's disappointment set loose would take the Qing dynasty the better part of fifteen years, several provincial armies, and eventually a foreign-led mercenary corps to put down.

The Wangs of Soochow

Drafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)contraction

Charles Gordon took command of the Ever Victorious Army on the 24th of March, 1863, inheriting a force more likely, by Boulger's estimate, to disobey its new English commander than to follow him. Two previous leaders, Ward and Burgevine, had already come and gone, the war against the Taiping had dragged on inconclusively for two years, and the five regiments of foreign-officered, Chinese-manned troops under Gordon's nominal control were, in the wrong hands, as capable of carving out a private dominion for themselves as of fighting for the government that paid them. Unlike his predecessors, Boulger notes pointedly, Gordon wanted nothing for himself.

A campaign that began well

Gordon moved fast. Three days after reaching his headquarters at Songjiang he was back in Shanghai buying ammunition; within a week his relief force had broken the Taiping siege of Changshu by seizing an unoccupied walled town, mounting guns on its ramparts, and shelling the rebel stockades until they broke — the garrison's ex-rebel commander and his Chinese and French defenders relieved without further loss. It was, in Boulger's judgement, a demonstration to every wavering Taiping leader that abandoning a hopeless cause and rallying to the government carried no automatic death sentence with it, which mattered enormously for what came next at Suzhou.

Soochow surrenders

The siege of Suzhou turned, in the end, less on Gordon's guns than on a negotiation. Several of the city's Taiping commanders — the Wangs, as their titles styled them — favoured coming to terms with the Qing forces besieging them; only one, Mow Wang, wanted to fight to the last, and he was murdered by his own colleagues to clear the way for surrender. Gordon personally negotiated the terms with one of the surviving Wangs, Lar Wang, and pressed on both his Chinese counterparts, General Ching and Li Hung Chang, the absolute necessity of treating the surrendered rebel chiefs leniently and honourably. Both men agreed with everything Gordon said. General Ching even swore a personal oath of brotherhood with Lar Wang to seal it.

What the oath was worth

Li Hung Chang had no intention of keeping either man's word. The surrendered Wangs represented exactly the kind of able, experienced rebel commander he had no wish to see absorbed into government service, and with Gordon's own force withdrawn to Kunshan after a pay dispute, the moment to be rid of them arrived unwatched. They were invited to an entertainment aboard the governor's boat; Gordon's own lieutenant later found nine headless bodies on the far side of a creek near the governor's quarters. Li Hung Chang did not deny responsibility when the question was put to him afterward: "I accept myself the full and sole responsibility for what has been done. But also tell Gordon that this is China, not Europe... Therefore what was done was inevitable."

Gordon, by Boulger's account, was prepared to become the murdered men's avenger with his own hand, and was only prevented by circumstance from getting the opportunity. He refused to serve any longer alongside men who had broken faith so completely, and the breach very nearly ended his command of the Ever Victorious Army altogether — over a promise the dynasty's own generals had never regarded as binding on them in the first place.

In truth the benevolence

Drafted from Boulger, The History of China (1898)contraction

Port Arthur and Weihaiwei fell to Japanese forces in what Boulger calls ignominious surrender, and by January 1895 the war had made plain what neither side had been fully prepared to believe when it began: a state the Qing court had never regarded as a serious military rival had beaten it decisively on land and sea both. On paper China's navy had looked formidable. In practice, after the fall of its strongest fortress, no foreign observer believed it capable of contesting the peace terms Japan intended to impose.

An old statesman's wound

Li Hung Chang, the only Chinese statesman with the standing and diplomatic skill to negotiate a peace worth having, reached Shimonoseki on the 20th of March, 1895, as China's plenipotentiary. Four days later, returning from a conference with the Japanese negotiator Count Ito, he was shot in the cheek by a would-be assassin. The wound was not serious, but the outrage produced a wave of sympathy in Japan that worked entirely in China's favour: the Emperor sent his own physician, the Empress prepared the dressings with her own hands, and Li Hung Chang, never a man to waste a diplomatic opening, answered with a line calculated to keep the sympathy flowing — "In truth the benevolence of Her Majesty the Empress of Japan is profound as the sea." Japan granted an armistice and softened several of its harshest original terms as a direct consequence.

The terms

The Treaty of Shimonoseki, signed on the 17th of April, cost China Formosa and the Pescadores, the Liaodong peninsula and the fortress of Port Arthur, an indemnity of two hundred million taels payable in eight instalments, and new commercial concessions opening China's rivers and lakes to Japanese shipping — while formally guaranteeing, in its first article, the complete independence of Korea from Chinese suzerainty. Given the scale of Japan's victory, Boulger judges the terms severe but not excessive. What made them unsustainable was not their weight on China but their effect on the wider balance of power in the region.

A triumph reversed by everyone but the victor's actual enemy

Russia could not tolerate a Japanese foothold on the Manchurian mainland commanding the approach to Beijing, and moved with a speed and coordination Boulger calls unprecedented in the East: the loose Franco-Russian understanding was converted into a formal alliance, Germany's cooperation secured alongside it, and within weeks of the treaty's signing Japan found herself confronted by all three powers demanding, in polite language that left no real room for refusal, the surrender of her claim to Port Arthur and the Liaodong peninsula. Japan gave way, exchanging the peninsula for a further six million pounds of indemnity.

What the rescuer charged for the rescue

Li Hung Chang travelled to Moscow the following year as China's envoy to the Tsar's coronation, and while there signed a secret convention settling Russia's own price for having forced Japan out of Liaodong: control of the very peninsula Russia had just finished rescuing from Japanese hands, Port Arthur and Dalian included. China had paid an indemnity to recover territory from one power only to hand its actual control to another that had never fired a shot in the war at all — a transaction Boulger declines to characterise in the terms it deserved, on the grounds that the events were still too recent for the judgement to be written without a charge of partisanship, but that he clearly expected history to make in his place.

The outbreak at Wuchang

Drafted from Kent, The Passing of the Manchus (1912)end

An explosion in a rented house in the Russian concession at Hankou, on the afternoon of the 9th of October, 1911, betrayed a revolutionary bomb factory that had no business drawing attention to itself yet. The raid that followed turned up finished bombs, bomb-making materials, revolutionary pamphlets, white sleeve badges, maps of Wuchang, plans for attacking the city gates, and — worst of all for the conspirators — what looked like a full membership roll. Two of the ringleaders escaped arrest, one of them with half his face blown off by the blast; thirty others were seized, and three were executed outside the Viceroy's residence before dawn the next day.

A rising forced before it was ready

The revolutionary plan had never been complete, and everyone involved knew it. But with a membership list already in government hands, delay meant being hunted down piecemeal, and Liu Kung — one of the two leaders still at large — spent the following night persuading soldiers of the New Army's own ranks that rising immediately was their only real chance of survival. The attack began around eight o'clock that evening, ahead of the midnight the plotters had originally set, when a troop of army engineers turned on their own camp outside the city. Within half an hour the barracks had fallen; most of the other regiments proved half-hearted in their loyalty once they recognised an organised movement rather than an isolated mutiny, and threw in with it rather than against it.

The Viceroy's flight

Viceroy Jui Cheng, a Manchu who understood better than almost anyone what the loss of Wuchang would mean for the dynasty he served, judged the situation hopeless almost as soon as the attack began and fled with his family to a gunboat on the river rather than attempt to hold his own residence. It was, on the evidence of what happened next, the choice that saved his life: revolutionary artillery had already taken Serpent Hill, which commands the whole city, and the yamen he abandoned was overrun, looted and partly burned within hours by soldiers in no mood to spare any Manchu they found.

A colonel who did not want the command

The soldiers who had just destroyed the old order in Wuchang needed someone to stop them destroying everything else along with it, and settled on Colonel Li Yuanhong — a forty-seven-year-old Hupei man, trained at the Tientsin Naval College and in Japan, whose real talent had gone unrewarded for years under superiors more skilled at flattering their Manchu patrons than at soldiering. Li refused the command when it was first offered him. His own more liberal sympathies argued for accepting it; his caution argued against gambling his life on a rising that might yet fail. The revolutionaries settled the argument for him: he was told plainly that refusal would mean execution, and accepted under that threat rather than any conviction of his own. He did not look back afterward. Within weeks the reluctant colonel forced into revolutionary command was one of the movement's most valuable assets, and within months, province after province across China had followed Wuchang's example without needing a threat of execution to persuade them.

The Mandate of Heaven

Drafted from Kent, The Passing of the Manchus (1912)end

Yuan Shikai spent two months, on the throne's own commission, negotiating with the representatives of the republican armies that had followed Wuchang's lead across the southern and central provinces. Neither side would yield to the other, trade stayed interrupted, and the fighting dragged on precisely because the one question that mattered — what form the government would take — remained unsettled. By February 1912 the court's own reading of the situation, set down in the edict that ended it, was that the balance had already tipped: the south had declared for a republic first, the northern generals had since pledged their support to the same idea, and "from the preference of the people's hearts, the Will of Heaven can be discerned."

The edict

On the 12th of February, 1912, the Empress Dowager Longyu, regent for the child emperor, issued the decree that closed the dynasty. It did not read like a surrender. "How could We then bear to oppose the will of the millions for the glory of one Family?" it asked, and answered its own question by vesting sovereignty in the people and declaring in favour of "a republican form of constitutional government" — instructing Yuan Shikai, already elected Premier, to organise a provisional republican government in consultation with the southern representatives, uniting north and south and the five peoples of the empire, Manchu, Chinese, Mongol, Muslim and Tibetan, in the one republic that would follow. A companion decree, issued the same day in the young emperor's own name, asked only for the courteous continuation of the treatment the throne had always received, so that the imperial household might live out its retirement "free from responsibilities and cares" while watching the republic it had just authorised come into being.

What ended, in the language it used to end

Kent, writing within months of the abdication, reaches for the phrase Chinese tradition itself supplied: the Ta Ching dynasty — the House of Great Purity — had "exhausted the Mandate of Heaven." He does not soften the verdict on what came before it. Corrupt, unscrupulous and lacking in political discrimination, the dynasty's end had been hastened rather than caused by the folly of its last generation, and Kent allows that its extinction was not undeserved. But he does not leave the judgement there either. "The House of Nurhachi had once been great," he writes — an obscure clan from the shadow of the Long White Mountain that had made itself a conquering race, subjugated Manchuria from the Palisade to the Yalu, imposed its authority on Mongol princes descended in the direct line from Genghis Khan, and seated itself on the Dragon Throne by a combination of statecraft and arms few frontier peoples in history ever managed to repeat.

Two centuries, judged both ways

What followed the conquest, in Kent's own accounting, was neither simple triumph nor simple tyranny. A warrior race skilled in war, the Manchus had the wisdom to recognise that in the arts of peace the Chinese were their masters, and rather than rule as an occupying garrison indefinitely, they governed for more than two centuries largely through Chinese institutions and Chinese officials — well enough, Kent notes, quoting the sinologist Samuel Wells Williams, that the population "has been better governed by the Manchus than under the princes of the Ming Dynasty; there has been more vigour in the administration of government, and less palace favouritism and intrigue in the appointment of officers, more security of life and property ... in a word, the Manchu sway has well developed the industry and resources of the country." But the same conquerors who had learned to rule through Chinese institutions learned, in the generations that followed, to be undone by Chinese luxury as thoroughly as any native dynasty before them — two centuries at the wealthiest court in Asia finishing what the hard lessons of camp and battlefield had first built, and could no longer sustain by the time a colonel's forced conscription into a rebellion in Wuchang put the question of the Mandate of Heaven to the test one last time.