Dogs and Monkeys
December 1911.
The Empire was dying.
From street peddlers to the high officials who frequented the Forbidden City, everyone knew it.
"But as a member of the imperial family, how can I simply stand by and watch the Empire collapse!"
Prince Gong, Puwei, was a hardliner who shouted that he could absolutely, under no circumstances, surrender—that a republic was unthinkable.
"The revolutionary rabble must be crushed in a single stroke!"
"Wisely said, Your Highness."
"Which brings me to this—how many troops do we have left?"
To his question, Zaitao, Prince Duan of the Imperial Guards and Minister of the Imperial Guard Army, answered with resolute conviction.
"I have no idea?"
"?"
And that, right there, is why the Empire was dying.
A neatly parted pompadour and a severe, unyielding countenance.
Duan Qirui, commander of the 1st Army of the Central Army of the Beiyang New Army, muttered as he walked out of the Forbidden City.
"A pack of fools."
The man called a pillar of the imperial house was lost in fantasy, still convinced it was the seventeenth century, and the commander of the Imperial Guard didn't even know how many soldiers remained under his command.
Some still clung to their old loyalties, but Duan Qirui had long since set down every expectation, every hope, every ounce of devotion he'd ever held for the Qing dynasty.
He no longer worked for the Qing.
He worked only for the Beiyang New Army he belonged to—for the survival of the Beiyang New Army and nothing else.
"Is His Excellency in?"
"He is, sir."
"Tell him I've arrived."
"Yes, Commander."
A short while later, when the guard opened the door, Duan Qirui removed his formal cap, stepped inside, and delivered a razor-sharp salute.
"Ah, it's you."
An old man whose hair and beard had gone snow-white, looking every inch the kindly grandfather.
Beneath that impression, however, any number of venomous snakes might well have been coiled.
"Premier Yuan Shikai, Your Excellency. I trust you are in good health?"
"Heh heh, good health, my foot. You saw me this very morning. Sit down, sit."
At the faint ring of a bell, the attendant waiting at all times hurried in and set out tea and refreshments.
Yuan Shikai took the highest seat of honor, while Duan Qirui settled onto the long sofa beside it.
The coffee, the pastries—even the furniture itself—were all the finest French imports, each piece bearing a master craftsman's touch down to the last stitch.
The two men took a sip of coffee and began to talk.
"So. What brings you to visit twice in a single day?"
"Your Excellency. How long do you intend to leave that filth inside the Forbidden City alone?"
"Goodness, such harsh talk again. A man ought to speak of pleasant things if he wants his face to look kind."
"If you would only give the order, Your Excellency, we would cut down that filth in the Forbidden City with a single blade and lay the throne at your feet."
"Honestly, you. ...Who ever said I cared about some throne? A dragon guarding a finished sky—what use have I for that?"
"Your Excellency—"
Yuan Shikai waved him off as if to say that was enough, then raised a new subject.
"Now then. How go things with the republican faction?"
"They are holding a line at the Red Cliffs, though for the moment a temporary ceasefire has been agreed. This Sun Yat-sen—strangely naive, for a man plotting rebellion. Having taken Jiangxia and pushed on to Hanyang, even retaking the Hanyang Arsenal, this rest is an enormous boon for us."
"Hm."
At a snap of Yuan Shikai's fingers, the attendants returned and laid a map across the table.
"Where do we stand now?"
"Jingzhou, Nanjing, Shanghai, Yizhou, Guangdong and Guangxi, Huizhou, Yunnan, Bingzhou, and Guanzhong have all fallen."
"So roughly everything south of the Yangtze belongs to the revolutionaries. ...Truly, what a thing history is."
Was this not like the old Three Kingdoms all over again?
Wei belonged to the Beiyang Army; Shu and Wu belonged to the revolutionaries.
"The one mercy, in our case, is that our rear has been secured."
"Had it been years ago I wouldn't know, but at my age I'd assumed the man had simply lost his mind. Remarkable, truly."
Zhao Erxun, Viceroy of the Three Eastern Provinces.
The aging Zhao Erxun had served as Vice Minister of the Army two years prior, and with each passing month his mind had grown steadily more unhinged. Yuan Shikai, knowing this full well, had shipped him off to the Northeast under the pretext of a rest cure.
What good would a man of that temperament do in Beijing anyway? Far better to park him somewhere with clean air and good water.
And then the rebellion had broken out.
And the spark that lit it—the Railway Protection Movement—had, of all places, erupted in Sichuan, and the Governor of Sichuan happened to be Zhao Erfeng.
The name said it all: Zhao Erfeng was Zhao Erxun's own younger brother.
Zhao Erfeng had called in the Central Army and turned Sichuan into a sea of blood, and the rebels who rose successfully in Wuchang, right next door, wheeled their army straight around, seized the Governor of Sichuan, and cut off his head.
"I'd assumed the man would simply go mad, but it seems shock can sometimes harden the spirit rather than break it."
"That, and the officers under him reacted remarkably quickly."
Duan Qirui recalled several names he'd seen in the telegrams.
"Didn't Zhao Erxun request that a colonel named Zhang Zuolin be appointed acting division commander of the Fengtian territorial division, and that medals be awarded to a lieutenant colonel named Lee Tae-oh? He puts extraordinary trust in his own soldiers."
"If they have loyalty enough, there's no reason not to grant such a request."
Hardly a Central Army posting—just a regional division commander's chair at best.
- Tap, tap, tap.
- Your Excellency, may I have a moment?
"Come in."
"Forgive the intrusion."
"Never mind that."
An officer bowed his head, entered the room, handed over a telegram, and quickly withdrew.
"What is it?"
"...Heh heh. How delightful."
Yuan Shikai passed the telegram to Duan Qirui once he had finished reading it.
Duan Qirui took it and read aloud in a low voice.
The bandits of the south chatter ceaselessly, throwing all under heaven into disorder and humiliating the Imperial House—so my blood boils as a soldier that I cannot sleep.
How could the Empire be handed over to rootless rabble? Though this humble servant commands a small army at the frontier, his heart gazes only toward Your Excellency's hand.
The Three Eastern Provinces are not the same as the interior of the continent. Our troops are already garrisoned and maintain order, and our devotion to protecting His Majesty the Emperor and the Imperial House runs deep.
Tens of thousands of strong soldiers stand ready. Command us to suppress the rebels, and we shall hurl this loyal, valorous force of the Northeast southward in a single bound to wither the rebellion at its root; command us to hold, and wherever it may be, we shall rush there and see Your Excellency's order done.
For the Imperial House and the Court, we pledge our utmost loyalty in defense of the nation.
Zhang Zuolin, Acting Martial Law Commander of Fengtian, and thirty-three fellow officers.
Duan Qirui wet his mouth with a sip of coffee, then spoke again.
"He appears to be one of the protect-the-emperor faction."
"...Hm."
"Judging by the telegram, he's a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary who'd cry 'Long live the Emperor' living and 'Long live the Emperor' dying."
"Is that so? He doesn't strike me that way."
"Might you enlighten me as to why?"
"Simple. In the telegram that man sent—where anywhere does he say he'll follow the imperial mandate?"
"...Now that you mention it, there's no mention of following the imperial mandate at all."
Whether Zhang Zuolin himself had composed the telegram, or someone beneath him had, the contents sounded altogether different to Yuan Shikai—a man seasoned by decades of court politics under the Empress Dowager Cixi in the Forbidden City.
Whoever wrote it had deliberately separated the imperial house from Yuan Shikai.
While loudly proclaiming his devotion to the Emperor and the Imperial House, the man simultaneously promised to carry out everything Yuan Shikai desired.
Either very clever, or an opportunist with his eye on an escape hatch.
Either way, an entertaining fellow.
"Of course, I could be wrong. I've grown old enough that my judgment may have dulled."
"Not at all, Your Excellency! You are the hope of our Beiyang New Army!"
"A worn-out old frame waiting only for the day it retires? Come now."
Yuan Shikai rested his chin on his hand, mulling something over, then spoke.
"Arrange a meeting with Sun Yat-sen."
"A meeting to discuss the ceasefire agreement, sir?"
"Well—tell him we should sit down and discuss this and that."
"!"
Duan Qirui nodded firmly.
"I shall follow your orders, Your Excellency."
"Good. See to it."
"Then I shall take my leave."
The door opened and closed, and Yuan Shikai, left alone, rose from his seat and approached the window.
A propitious spot commanding a full view of the imperial palace in the Forbidden City and all of Beijing.
"Do one's utmost, they say, and leave the rest to Heaven's will."
He had wondered what would happen if the Emperor lashed out in desperation, or if Zhao Erxun in the Northeast raised a loyalist army to rescue Beijing—and yet the affair was resolving itself like this.
Human affairs were truly impossible to predict.
"And yet—honestly, every age in which a Yuan sat the throne was an age of chaos. Isn't Heaven being a touch too cruel to the Yuen alone?"
Yuan Shu, and the Northern Wei before him—why did Heaven always dangle the mandate before the Yuen clan, granting it and withholding it in the same breath?
"I can do it. If it's me."
Still, I'd make a better emperor than Yuan Shu ever did.
Yuan Shikai at dusk dreamed a dream of imperial robes.
Early December 1911.
"That damned civil war is eating into our Empire's profits as we speak! Do something, anything, right now!"
"C-calm yourself, Your Majesty. I understand what you want, but having swallowed India whole, if we now meddle openly in China's internal affairs, condemnation from around the world is a foregone conclusion."
"What nonsense—how is sending in an army to sweep up those Chinamen grounds for condemnation?"
"Because, as it happens, the German Kaiser is Wilhelm the Second?"
"Argh."
Wilhelm II, Kaiser of the German Empire, was the sort of man so consumed by rivalry with everything Britain did that he hounded reporters daily with rants like: 'Those bastards hog every colony for themselves and expect everyone else to suck their thumbs—absolute garbage, I say!'
Ah, France. How I miss France.
Those people, given a modest crumb, would go 'om nom nom, we shall overlook it this time, sirs!' and scurry off—but what on earth was wrong with that German mutt with English blood in him, throwing tantrums no matter how many crumbs you stuffed in his mouth? He wasn't a three-year-old brat.
That mad pair of withered arms might, if Britain actually intervened in this 'Chinese republican civil war,' genuinely sail battleships into the North Sea and rattle sabers at London.
"Then do something about it yourself. Are you going to just stand there and watch?"
"The Foreign Office is in unofficial contact with both sides, Your Majesty. Kindly have a little patience."
"Bloody hell."
And so, on December 2nd, summoned by Britain's message of 'keep this up and nobody's having fun,' representatives of the Tongmenghui and the Beiyang Army gathered at the British legation in Jiangxia.
"The imperial house shall earnestly establish a parliamentary system on the British model, shall no longer select Manchu nobles or imperial clansmen as Premier, and shall pass a constitution to curtail the Emperor's authority—"
"Screw that."
Would the revolutionaries—who had just taken Nanjing, the de facto capital of everything south of the Yangtze—listen to a compromise like that?
"RAAAGH! And THIS is why they're called traitors!"
"...Ahem. The proceedings have grown heated; I hereby declare a brief recess. Do go get some air, gentlemen."
Thus, under the mediation of the presiding British diplomat, a short recess was declared.
And in a certain room of the legation.
"Mr. Sun Yat-sen. A pleasure."
"General Duan Qirui, is it?"
Sun Yat-sen, head and Director-General of the Tongmenghui, ground out his cigarette and extended a hand.
"The pleasure is mine. Did you come straight down from Beijing?"
"I did. Took the express directly."
"Then I take it you bring an answer from the Premier."
Duan Qirui inclined his head slightly up and down.
"Oh, ohh!"
"In return, His Excellency the Premier requires a firm commitment."
"A firm commitment?"
"A firm commitment that the post of Grand President will be handed over to him."
"Hmm."
Sun Yat-sen stroked his chin, deliberating, then answered without further delay.
"Done! If the Premier becomes Grand President, then both a republic and the founding of a Han nation are achieved in a single stroke—so the seat is his. Let us be about replacing this Manchu dynasty, and quickly!"
"I shall convey it by wire at once."
The North-South Peace Negotiations.
Even the Central Army—the Qing's final hope—had resolved to kill the Qing.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Yuan Shikai says he wants to meet us. What do you think?"
"Then we go, of course."
Late December 1911.
Zhang Zuolin and I received orders to come to Beijing, ostensibly to report on the suppression of the rebellion.