[ad_1]
Sun Yat-sen andTongmenghuiThe revolutionaries of the National Liberation Association and the Liberation Society sacrificed heroically in exchange for the first republic in Asia. The picture shows the oil painting of the founding of the Alliance. (Image source: Public domain)
Entering 1911, no one in power in Beijing thought that they were almost doomed. I saw the diaries left by those who held great power at that time, including their memories and letters. No one thought about the big changes before October 10th.Qing DynastyIt’s almost done, from top to bottom. Their diaries record meals and gifts all day long, which seems to be a prosperous “prosperous age”. The streets are full of entertainment, the business in the alleys is very good, and the business in the bathhouses is very good, just like what the British Jazz Lord Barkes said in “The Queen Mother and Me” published in Hong Kong in 2011 and has been dusty for 68 years. This was China a hundred years ago. Ba Kesi tells us about the private lives of princes, ministers and generals in the last decade of the late Qing Dynasty. Due to the lack of circumstantial evidence, his memoirs cannot be treated completely as trustworthy history, but they cannot be treated as complete gossip. There is trustworthy history in gossip, and there is gossip in trustworthy history. History is so complicated. The private lives of princes and ministers are highly confidential. Only those like Sir Barkes who enter the core of their lives can see their real lives. The late Qing Dynasty was of course a corrupt era. When such an era was eliminated, everyone would applaud and no one would feel sorry for it. Therefore, the derailment of the Qing Dynasty was an expected thing, but it was not expected by those in power.
“Comets appear, dynasties change”
History is not a straight line, it never goes straight forward, but is unpredictable and full of variables. It has many surprises. You originally wanted to walk into this room, but accidentally tripped over a small stone and fell into the next room. The revolution that took place a hundred years ago was a revolution that changed history. In comparison, very few people died because the various forces involved all had a relative bottom line of human nature. This was unprecedented in Chinese history. The Revolution of 1911 was In this sense it can be seen as a peaceful transformation.
In the preface to “A Hundred Years of Revolution of 1911: Private Records of Those Who Witnessed It”, I talked about “mysterious omens”. Before the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, many mysterious omens appeared. For example, common people said that a comet would appear in the sky. Comet appears, dynasty changes. The Chinese people are really rich in imagination. Yu Dafu, a young man from Fuyang, Zhejiang, got up in the middle of the night every day and followed his adults to the banks of the Fuchun River to watch the comet. The appearance of a comet meant that the world was going to war and dynasties were about to change. He said that he had woken up many times in a row without seeing it, but someone did. There was a man named Guo Tingyi, who later became a famous historian. When he was a boy, he lived in Xixian County, Henan Province, and he saw a comet. Another person, political scientist Sa Mengwu, was in primary school in Fuzhou and saw the comet falling with his own eyes; Ding Ling, who was only 9 years old at the time, also saw it in Changde, Hunan. There are also other old people, middle-aged people, and young people, who are officials, students, and gentry. They have recorded in their diaries the sighting of comets in three different places. Taken together, it can be proved that comets in that era The decline has had a significant impact on public sentiment.
This kind of imagination exists everywhere. In fact, this kind of imagination started not in 1911, but in 1908. Emperor Guangxu and Empress Dowager Cixi passed away within one day. At that time, Chinese court officials, local gentry and ordinary scholars all wrote down their inner shock in their diaries. How could China lose two leaders overnight? Although there was no television or Internet at that time, the news still flew from Beijing to Guangzhou as if it had wings. This was so terrible that the whole country fell into great sorrow. What to do next? Choosing a new monarch was something Cixi had already arranged before her death. In 1908, the Empress Dowager Cixi arranged for her successor, a 3-year-old little Puyi who was still nursing, 24 hours before her death. Puyi was very unwilling and crying, and the one who was most unwilling was Puyi’s mother. Puyi’s father, Zaifeng, was only 26 years old. Carrying his son into the palace was like a frightening journey on ice. It was terrible.
Being a king is a dangerous profession, and the Chinese people enjoy it endlessly. Over the past two thousand years, countless lives have been sacrificed for this high-risk profession. When Puyi ascended the throne, 3-year-old children were expected to cry, so there was a scene like this: the little emperor cried loudly and bitterly at the moment he ascended the throne in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, refused to sit on it, and could not be persuaded no matter how hard he tried, shouting “I want to Go home, I want to go home.” His father held him down, and a man standing in front of him came forward and said, “The emperor’s dragon body cannot be damaged. It is not good for the dragon body to keep crying like this. Can you let him Aren’t you crying?” The ministers below were kneeling all over the floor, but the emperor kept crying, so before the ceremony was completed, the eunuch carried him away. When he was carrying him, he said: “It’s over, it’s over, go back.” In China. To people’s ears, these are very unlucky words. These words have entered the diaries of some of the parties involved, and also entered some of the later memories of the parties involved. Cross-corroboration shows that they are basically reliable. This matter spread to the people, and everyone was talking about it. The Qing Dynasty was coming to an end and was going home. As soon as the reign name of “Xuantong” was announced, the words “Xuan” and “End” were very close, and “Tong” was very close to “Jie”. From 1908 to 1911, in just two or three years, there were rumors everywhere that the Qing Dynasty was coming to an end. .
So “Tuibei Tu” written by people in the Tang Dynasty and “Shaobing Song” written by Liu Bowen in the Ming Dynasty became popular. Folks say that the end of the Qing Dynasty has been predicted in “Tuibei Tu” and “Shaobing Song”, and it is written very clearly, “Holding a steel sword of ninety-nine, kill all the barbarians before stopping.” They explain that the word “hundred” above the word “hundred” is minus one. The word “go” is “white”, so we can understand: The people of Weichuang heard about the revolution, and the revolutionaries all wore white helmets and white armor, and they had to pay tribute to Chongzhen, the last emperor of the Ming Dynasty. This is how the rumor of white helmets and white armor came about. In fact, what is more symbolic than white helmets and white armor is that the flags adopted by all provinces and cities after the independence uprising in that era were not unified. There were the Blue Sky and White Sun Flag, the Eighteen Stars flag, five-color flag, Bagua flag, etc., but the most popular flag when the provinces were restored in 1911 was the white flag. Some people write the Chinese character “中” on the white flag, or write the Chinese character “汉”. For example, Chengdu draws 18 more circles outside the character “汉”, which is more like a piece of white cloth. Why White Flag? It’s because “Shaobing Song” has predicted it a long time ago. Why did Li Yuanhong come out to be a revolutionary after the Wuchang Uprising? Some people also found a poem from “Song of Shaobing”, “Six people don’t know each other, but the mountains and rivers meet each other”. They think this is the word “Li” of Li Yuanhong. Based on the newspaper records at that time, as well as the diaries and memories of many people, it can be confirmed that the “Shaobing Song” and “Tui Bei Tu” of that era were indeed the most popular reading materials and a source of support for the Chinese people when they changed dynasties.
Comet appears, dynasty changes. (Image source: Adobe stock)
A rain crushes a dynasty
Why did the Qing Dynasty derail? The first factor comes from these mysterious omens. Behind them are changes in people’s hearts and minds. Of course, the first reason that directly affected the derailment of the Qing Dynasty was rain. It rained constantly, and it rained all summer. It rained not only in the summer of the year of Xinhai, but also in the summer of 1910, the year before Xinhai, and in 1909. There have been heavy rains year after year, and Hubei and Hunan have been hit by floods. To exaggerate, it could be said that a single rain crushed a dynasty.
Due to rain-related disasters, the grain harvest was not good, the price of rice rose sharply, and rice-grabbing trends appeared everywhere. The biggest rice grabbing wave occurred in Changsha, Hunan in April 1910. There were more than four million hungry people in the Yangtze River Basin. If only the Yangtze River Basin had problems, the Yellow River Basin, the Pearl River Basin and the Heilongjiang River Basin would be safe, and the Qing Dynasty would still be impregnable. But God had to go against the Aisin Gioro family, and when the Yangtze River Basin flooded During the disaster, rowing was allowed in Nanjing and Wuhan in the summer of 1911. At the same time, the governor of Shandong was worried about the lack of food in Shandong, and even the three eastern provinces were affected by rain. The land of plenty, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces also experienced food crises at this time. When Xu Zhimo was a boy studying in Fuzhong, Hangzhou, he went to see a movie one day and found so many people gathered around. It turned out that someone was robbing the rice store because the price of rice was too high and he couldn’t afford it. He didn’t finish watching the movie, so he sadly returned to the school dormitory and wrote down in detail what he saw and heard that day. This is what a young student saw with his own eyes and wrote in his private diary. It is very credible.
The food crisis can be said to be the first major reason for the derailment of the Qing Dynasty. Gu Hongming, a conservative who opposed the Revolution of 1911, wrote to Shanghai’s “Zilin Xibao” saying that the new army who participated in the Wuchang Uprising and the revolutionaries who returned from studying abroad It is still relatively civilized and the revolution is controlled, but there are millions of hungry people in the Yangtze River Basin. Once these millions of hungry people are involved in the revolution, the revolution will get out of control. Gu Hongming had already realized the threat of famine to the Qing Dynasty.
At that time, the Qing government branch had little money. Empress Dowager Longyu took out cash from the palace for disaster relief at least three times and gave it to Jiangsu, Sichuan and Hubei. When the revolution broke out, she suppressed the revolution while providing disaster relief, because the hungry people were the biggest obstacle to her regime. threaten.
The food crisis has also brought about a financial crisis, which is always a fatal threat in modern society. When the rice crisis occurred, the Qing Dynasty might still be saved, but when the financial crisis occurred, it was really hopeless. The financial crisis first appeared in Beijing after October 12, 1911. The news of the Wuchang Mutiny reached Beijing on October 11th. Between the 11th and 12th, the cabinet did not meet, and the princes and ministers did not make a decision. It was not until 5 a.m. on October 12th that they made a decision. : Send troops to suppress, send Yinchang to go. Yinchang once studied in Germany and studied military affairs. He was sent to Germany as an envoy of the Qing Dynasty. He was best at singing Peking Opera, but this time he gave up and stayed in Beijing for three full days before slowly setting off. In fact, he was working to re-appoint Yuan Shikai. When he boarded the train on the evening of the 15th, the imperial court had issued an edict to re-appoint Yuan Shikai as the governor of Huguang the day before.
Before Yinchang set off, Sheng Xuanhuai, the postal minister in charge of the railways, came and told them that when they attacked Wuhan, as long as they saved the Hanyang Iron Works, they would be rewarded with 100,000 yuan. When Shanda people got off the train, they said to Yinchang through the train window: “Don’t forget this matter.” Yinchang said: “Don’t worry, Shanda people, just prepare the ocean.” This sentence was heard by all foreign reporters. Well, their understanding was: It turned out that the imperial court was not ready to send troops south and pay them. The next day, reporters from Japan, Britain and other countries published the news one after another, and it spread everywhere. At that time, the national treasury still had two million yuan, but on the 13th, half a million military pay was allocated.
However, as soon as this news came out, the people thought that the Qing Dynasty had no money, which meant that the money they deposited in the bank was no longer safe. Everyone went to the bank to withdraw money. The most enthusiastic one was the Prime Minister and Prince Qing Yikuang, and his family took out the money. Huge deposits of at least several million taels were deposited directly into HSBC Bank in the UK. In only two days, several banks in Beijing have closed. In the past, you could give banknotes and banknotes, but now no one wants them. As long as you find the ocean, I would rather carry a heavier weight on your back, but you can buy rice with ease. It’s getting more expensive. They write in their diaries every day: The price of rice has soared again today, and there is not so much rice to sell to you in the store, and it is useless for the police to come out to maintain it.
The next financial crisis occurred in Shanghai. The once prosperous Shili Foreign Market ran out of cash overnight. They called for help from foreigners. Foreign banks used to be very good to the Bank of China, but now it is not good because they do not trust the Bank of China. . Several large private banks in Shanghai have closed their doors, with notices posted on their doors saying “Operations suspended due to cash shortage.” From south to north, financial crises of varying degrees have occurred in cities of all sizes across the country, and even in the three most stable northeastern provinces such as Fengtian, Yingkou, and Dalian.
Rumors eventually turned into facts
At the same time as the financial crisis, there was a wave of refugees. They exchanged money for travel expenses. People from Beijing fled to Tianjin. There were concessions in Tianjin, which made the concessions overcrowded. A person with status like Yan Fu couldn’t even rent a house after he fled to Tianjin. In the end, he had to live in a small hotel because he had good relations with foreigners. The foreigners said, “You can come to Yantai and I will borrow a house.” The house is for you.” Tianjin is fully occupied and housing prices have risen sharply. Some Beijingers cannot stay in Tianjin and live in two places in Beijing, one is the Embassy District of Dongjiaomin Lane and the other is the Liuguo Hotel. Another trend is to flee to Shanghai. People from all over the country are fleeing to Shanghai. House prices in Shanghai are also extremely expensive, and rice is also extremely expensive. When the concessions in Shanghai and Tianjin are overcrowded, it further aggravates the financial situation in these places. crisis. Behind the financial crisis and the flight was people’s panic. Rumors were everywhere across the country. The derailment of the Qing Dynasty could be said to be because of rain, or it could be said to be because of rumors. Many of the news published in newspapers every day were false. News of the victory of the revolutionaries was circulated unimpeded in newspapers in the south, while several newspaper offices that reported the victory of the Qing troops were smashed.
Many people’s diaries at that time contained different rumors every day, but after a few days, the rumors all turned into facts. For example, if I wrote “Taiyuan fell” today and “Xi’an fell” tomorrow, they would become facts a week later.
The reason why the Qing Dynasty was derailed was not only because of financial problems, but also because banks were about to close and the treasury was running out of money. This was financial difficulties. A great country in China cannot survive for a day when its treasury is exhausted. Where did the money go? There is no doubt that it fell into private pockets. Many princes, Baylors and ministers had rich families, but the Qing Dynasty’s treasury had no money. At the most difficult time, there were only 200,000 taels of silver in the national treasury. Many departments closed down because they could not pay wages. The Du branch kept trying to find ways to borrow money. The second son-in-law of the eminent Sheng Xuanhuai worked in the Ministry of Justice. When he left Beijing, he could not find travel expenses because the Ministry of Justice had stopped paying wages. After waiting for 45 days, he finally received 200 taels of silver. The price of the ferry ticket increased, and the travel expenses It was not enough, so I pawned 450 taels at a pawn shop in Tianjin and finally went south to Shanghai, but it took a long time. Yuan Shikai later forced Empress Dowager Longyu to spit out her private money, forcing her again and again. Even after receiving the huge sum of money, he still refused to send troops to fight. Why didn’t the Qing Dynasty end in a river of blood? There was no large-scale Civil War between the north and the south, but the fighting was more intense in Wuhan, Nanjing, and Shaanxi? The reason is that Yuan Shikai never intended to take action seriously.
The revolutionary model of tripartite compromise
Sun Yat-sen and Yuan Shikai. (Image source: Public domain composite)
Yuan Shikai had already thought about it. If he was serious about fighting the southern revolutionaries, even if he won, he would still kill one thousand enemies and injure eight hundred himself, and the court would still have to deal with him. The southern revolutionaries, even after Sun Yat-sen established the provisional government in Nanjing, had no money. One of the important reasons why the two sides did not fight was that the north and the south were in financial difficulties and foreign countries were unwilling to borrow money.
From the derailment of the Qing Dynasty, we can see that all parties were relatively restrained. Empress Dowager Longyu, Zaifeng, Yuan Shikai, Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing, in that era, they finally passively found a way to resolve the political crisis. This model is the model of compromise. There has never been an era in Chinese history where compromise was used to resolve major political crises or such major social changes. The passivity of the three parties led to the compromise of the three parties, which allowed the Qing Dynasty to end peacefully and accept the new republican institutional arrangements.
In the end, the Revolution of 1911 did not rely on violence, but compromise between all parties. Many people were very dissatisfied with such passivity. But I think passivity is the normal state, and initiative is a historical accident. There are also passive factors behind initiative. There is nothing wrong with being passive. Queen Mother Takayu may have been passive, but the decisions she made prevented the abnormal deaths of millions of her compatriots. Although Yuan Shikai was a great hero in his lifetime, his choice in the year of 1911 was correct. Just because he became emperor a few years later cannot negate his choice in the year of 1911. Without Yuan Shikai, I don’t know how many innocent lives would have been sacrificed in the Revolution of 1911.
Sun Yat-sen, Huang Xing, Song Jiaoren, and the revolutionaries of the Tongmenghui and Guangfuhui paid huge sacrifices. Although their power was very small and they often went from failure to failure, they used their courage and sacrifice to win the first republic in Asia. When they took control of the Nanjing government, they could have raised their troops to the Northern Expedition and fought Yuan Shikai at all costs, but they did not do so. They were willing to compromise and hand over the Nanjing government and let Yuan Shikai serve as the interim president of the Republic of China. Empress Dowager Longyu announced abdicate. Although none of the three parties is the most satisfied, all three parties can reluctantly accept it, but ordinary Chinese people have sacrificed many lives. The outcome of the revolution is not for one party to win alone. Some people win, but most people fail. After we have experienced decades or hundreds of years, we know that victory is not that great. We would rather not win. Fewer such victories mean fewer sacrifices. So at this moment, looking back at China a hundred years ago, Sun Yat-sen and Huang In a society that has been dominated by officials for thousands of years, people who are willing to give up power and bow down to power are truly unprecedented and unprecedented. In their three-party compromise, all three parties were passive, but by turning passivity into initiative, the Chinese people achieved a small victory.
Today, when we look back at China a hundred years ago, if we want to truly see the true face of history, we should believe in historical facts, return to the origin of history, restore the true face of history, and find our starting point there. Truth is history. life and find our tomorrow in history. Yesterday was our history, today is also our history, and tomorrow will also be our history. Only in history can we find the real future.
Editor in charge: Wen Li
Short URL:
All rights reserved. Reprinting in any form requires permission from this site. It is strictly prohibited to create mirror websites.
[Honorary Members Wanted]Streams can merge into the sea, and small kindnesses can achieve great love. We sincerely recruit 10,000 honorary members from Chinese people all over the world: each honorary member only needs to pay a subscription fee per year and become an honorary member of the “Look at China” website, which can help us break through censorship and blockade and provide services to at least 10,000 mainland Chinese compatriots. Provide independent and true key information to warn them in times of crisis and save them from pandemics and other social crises.
