On 13 November 1908 Tzu Hsi struggled from her bed and named Pu Yi (pronounced ‘poo yee’), the infant son of her nephew Prince Chun II, as crown prince. Simultaneously, the 38-year-old Emperor Kuang-hsu was struck down by a sudden illness just as he was hoping to regain his throne. Confined to bed in the lethal care of the Dowager’s eunuchs, he joined his ancestors the following day. Although it was said he died of natural causes, Morrison suspected he had been poisoned on the orders of his malevolent aunt to prevent him from resuming his interrupted rule. Others blamed Yuan Shi-kai on the grounds that if Kuang-hsu had assumed the throne again one of his first acts would have been to execute Yuan for betraying the reform movement in 1898.
At 3 pm that same day – 14 November – Tzu Hsi turned her face west and expired. According to legend, her last words were, ‘Never again allow any woman to hold the supreme power in the state. It is against the house-law of our dynasty and should be strictly forbidden. Be careful not to permit eunuchs to meddle in government matters.’3
Morrison arrived back in Peking the following day feeling ‘mighty sick’ at having missed this huge news story. He threw himself into his work ‘trying to retrieve my blunder’. Prince Chun, he reported, would now rule as regent until his three-year-old son turned 18, while Kuang-hsu’s widow, Empress Lung-yu, who was Tzu Hsi’s niece, became the new Dowager Empress. One of Prince Chun’s first acts was to punish Yuan Shi-kai for his role in betraying Kuang-hsu.
On 4 January 1909 Morrison was handed a copy of an imperial decree that stripped Yuan of all power on the grounds that he was suffering a foot infection which made it difficult to walk. As it was ‘hardly possible for him to discharge his duties adequately’, he was ordered to resign his offices at once and return ‘to his native place to treat and to convalesce from the ailment’.4
Yuan’s fall from grace was loudly applauded among the membership of the Chinese Empire Reform Association in Sydney. ‘His behaviour towards the cause of reform proved him to be a renegade,’ Ping Nam, the association’s president, said. ‘His duplicity showed him to be a reformer only on certain lines, namely personal gain and aggrandisement.’
Ping was devastated by the emperor’s sudden demise and strongly suspected he had been poisoned.5 It wasn’t until 2008 that scientists confirmed that the Emperor had indeed been killed by arsenic after finding lethal levels of the poison in his hair, stomach and burial clothes. The identity of the person who administered the fatal dose remains unknown, although Kang Youwei always believed Yuan Shi-kai was responsible. Donald told his biographer that Kang said during a meeting at his hideout at Penang, ‘I know that he paid a doctor $55,000 to poison the Emperor.’6
The Australian Chinese were delighted when Prince Chun appointed China’s first consul-general to Australia. The man chosen for the post was Liang Lan-shun, who had attended meetings between Tse Tsan Tai and the scholar-reformers in Hong Kong. His arrival at Perth in the SS Mongolia on 16 March 1909 on his way to Melbourne was described in the Sydney Morning Herald as ‘a diplomatic event of some significance. It shows for one thing that the name of Australia is being recognised in China as standing for great potentialities.’ The paper saw Liang as ‘an accomplished and able man to stand between us and the uncomplimentary legends that must be afloat concerning us in the Flowery Land’.7
Liang Lan-shun told a reporter that trade between the two countries ‘should attain much greater dimensions than it has up to the present’.
We have now a Government in power which is liberal and which is doing great work in moulding the Empire into one progressive whole. With our new Emperor and our new Government, China is forging ahead steadily, but much has to be done. We are building railways and opening up large districts. We are, in fact, rejuvenating the nation.8
Asked whether there was any truth in the belief that the Chinese coveted the wide open spaces of northern Australia, Liang replied that China had plenty of wide open spaces of her own in Manchuria and Mongolia. ‘Some of our cities are certainly overcrowded, but this is being remedied, and people are being encouraged to improve other parts of the Empire,’ he said. ‘China has to take her internal arrangements into consideration before she seeks for outside affairs. To my mind, there is no surplus population in the Empire, and there is no need for us to have designs on Northern Australia.’
The Sydney Morning Herald welcomed the opportunities to increase trade between the two nations, and then created another ‘uncomplimentary legend’ by adding, ‘it must be confessed that the Chinaman is unpopular in Australia. We not only do not welcome him as an immigrant, but we take special pains to prevent him reaching our shores.’9
On 20 April 1910 Halley’s Comet made its appearance in the heavens, arousing intense excitement among the Chinese, who took it to portend a grave national crisis. To allay Chinese fears, the Christian Literature Society issued posters reproducing the comet as depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry. The posters and literature giving details of the astronomical phenomenon were given to the Wai-we-pu, schools and newspapers.10
On 18 May, Planet Earth actually passed through the comet’s fiery tail, creating a sales opportunity for entrepreneurs who sold anti-comet gasmasks, anti-comet umbrellas and even anti-comet pills – not in China but to the gullible in Western capitals.
Despite Bill Donald’s objections to children, Mary had fallen pregnant in late 1908 and their only child, a daughter christened Muriel Mary, was born in Hong Kong on 22 July 1909. Donald celebrated with one of his friends from Sydney, an American impresario named Hugh Ward who was visiting the colony with his theatrical troupe.
Donald invited Ward to accompany him to the opening of a new port at Hankow on the north bank of the Yangtze. ‘We were royally entertained,’ Ward says, ‘and met the Chinese Commander-in-Chief and the Admiral of the Fleet.’11
Despite his exalted status, Donald was restless. Hong Kong was simply too colonial, too British, too claustrophobic. It was time to move on. With Gordon Bennett’s blessing, he packed his bags and took Mary and Muriel up the China coast to Shanghai.
The steamer anchored at the Woosung bar in early 1911 and the family proceeded the 25 kilometres up the Whangpoo by tugboat to the Customs jetty. The river was packed with fast tea clippers, slow-moving ferries and junks with huge eyes painted on their bows. Sampans poled by semi-naked coolies slid past foreign gunboats bobbing at anchor in midstream. Closer inshore were the hulks of two ancient sailing vessels that had been converted into storehouses for imported opium.12
The building boom that would give The Bund its distinctive European character was just getting under way. The tallest buildings were still no more than four or five storeys high, solid, provincial structures with columns and porticos that contrasted vividly with the Chinese-styled hongs of yesteryear.
At the southern end of The Bund13 was the brand new premises of the Shanghai Club, where members downed chota pegs14 and pink gins at a bar stretching 110-feet seven-inches along one wall of the clubhouse.15 At one end of the Long Bar – proudly but wrongly claimed to be ‘the longest in the world’ – the high-powered taipans who ran the Shanghai business world held court, while the pecking order moved progressively down the bar to the most newly arrived griffin barely discernible in the deeper recesses of the saloon through a haze of blue smoke.
The British satirist Jay Denby defined a griffin as ‘a person who has not had time to have his constitution destroyed by the climate, his stomach ruined by the food and his good temper utterly spoiled by Chinese servants’. Shanghailanders, he said, affected to despise the griffin, but he could see that they had ‘a sneaking regard for one as yet so free from the awful disabilities under which they themselves suffer’.16
The Donald family was transported along The Bund in a couple of rickshaws, with baggage coolies following behind. They passed the exclusively white ‘public’ gardens17 opposite the cast-iron fence and little apron of lawn fronting
the British Consulate and crossed Garden Bridge to the Astor House Hotel on the northern bank of Soochow Creek. The hotel had just re-opened after being extensively rebuilt and was billed as ‘the Waldorf-Astoria of the East’.
One of Donald’s friends, the British diplomat Berkeley Gage – known as ‘Through a Glass Berkeley’ on account of his love of malt whisky – once memorably described Shanghai as the place ‘where East and West met on the worst possible terms’. As he took in the five-storey hotel standing in gardens that stretched down to the waterfront, Donald’s first impressions were much more favourable.
On the ground floor he found a spacious lobby with cane and leather easy chairs, a barroom and buffet, a large billiard room and a reading room containing the latest newspapers and magazines. On the first floor there was a magnificent two-storey dining room beneath an arched glass ceiling. From the second floor up, there were 211 bedrooms and seven suites.18
Around the block on Astor Road, a colony of journalists occupied rooms in the slightly older northern section of the hotel where rooms could be rented for as little as US$60 a month. Its first long-term guest Edwin Pickwoad was dead but the North-China Daily News was still in his family. His widow Janet had sold the paper to their son-in-law, Henry Morriss, a real estate tycoon who was married to their daughter Una. Morriss, a British Catholic of Jewish descent, built a large house in Frenchtown for his wife and three sons, Harry, Gordon and Hayley,19 and kept a stable of racehorses, which he named after American Indians. He was known among the turf fraternity as ‘Mohawk’ Morriss.
For many years the North-China Daily News had enjoyed a virtual monopoly of Shanghai’s advertising market, while presenting a stolidly imperial point of view in its editorial columns. Since 1906, it had been edited by Thurburn Montague Bell, nephew of the great Times manager Moberly Bell and a distinguished war correspondent for that newspaper. Its predominance in the affairs of the foreign concessions so annoyed another long-term Astor House guest, Thomas Millard of the New York Times, that he was in the process of founding the China Press, which would give the city its first American-style paper.20
Millard’s business partners in the venture were Wu Ting-fang, a former Chinese minister to the United States (who was also a secret member of the revolutionary faction), and Charles R. Crane, a Chicago manufacturer.21 Editorial offices were acquired close to The Bund, and Millard travelled to the United States to purchase type and mechanical equipment.22 The paper’s star recruit was Carl Crow, a 28-year-old graduate of his old college, the Missouri University’s School of Journalism. Crow, who had like Bill Donald started his working life as a printer’s apprentice, was a fine writer and sub-editor whose name would later become synonymous with the Shanghai advertising industry of which he was a founding member.
To counteract the threat of the new journal, Mohawk Morriss dispensed with Montague Bell’s services and imported Owen M. Green, a rabid 34-year-old right-winger from England, with a brief to defend Britain’s rights under the unequal treaties.23 Millard took the opposing, pro-Chinese view. As he explained to Carl Crow, the China Press would pioneer the novel concept of treating Chinese news with the same respect as news from the United States, Britain or anywhere else.24
Bill Donald enjoyed his nightly discussions with Millard in the hotel’s spacious lobby, especially stories about his proprietor Gordon Bennett whom the dapper 42-year-old American knew well. He had been a drama critic on Broadway when Bennett sent him off to war. He had covered the Boxer Uprising in 1900 for the New York Herald and had returned to China four years later for the Russo-Japanese War.
It was an opportune time for the launch of a newspaper with a pro-Chinese stance. The Chinese land-owning and merchant classes had forced the Ching Government to cancel several railway contracts with foreigners and had taken over the rights to build those lines themselves. At the same time, the country was taking its first tentative steps towards a constitutional monarchy with the setting up by imperial decree of assemblies in all provinces. Prince Chun had promised that a partially elected National Assembly, the Tsuehen Yeun, would be convened in Peking in 1910 but that was a step too far for the conservatives, who insisted it should be delayed until 1916. As a sign of the new militancy, a delegation of provincial assemblymen descended on Peking with a petition calling for the assembly’s immediate convocation. ‘That the authorities realise that something must be done to meet the changing conditions is evident from the concession already made in the direction of representative government,’ Donald reported in the Adelaide Advertiser, ‘but they do not go far enough to satisfy the modernists, who want an elective Parliament without delay.’25
The Hong Kong Revolutionary Party had supplied Donald with a contact in Shanghai, an American-educated Methodist minister named Charlie Soong. Donald visited him at his print shop on Shantung Road, where Bibles came out the front door and revolutionary pamphlets out the back.
Charlie Soong had been born Han Chiao-shun on the island of Hainan off the South China coast in 1861. As a youth, he had spent eight years in the United States, where he studied theology at Vanderbilt University. Returning to China as a Methodist preacher, he changed direction in 1896 with the founding of Commercial Press, which published Bibles, religious tracts and later Western-style textbooks.26
By 1911, Charlie Soong’s Methodist work ethic had made him a rich man and his wife, Ni Guizhen, whom he called ‘Mamie’, had borne him three daughters – Ayling, Chingling and Mayling[1] – and three sons – Tse-ven (T. V.), Tse-liang (T. L.) and Tse-an (T. A.) – all of whom would become indelibly linked with the Revolution. Charlie built a huge American-style house at Hongkew and sent all six children one after another to be educated in the United States.
Soong introduced Donald to Ayling, a spirited 20-year-old who was assisting her father in his revolutionary activities. Ayling had always been a bit of a rebel: she was credited with being the first Chinese girl to ride a bicycle in Shanghai (although it’s difficult to see how such a claim could be substantiated). Her political education began in 1904 when she was travelling from Shanghai to Wesleyan College for Women at Macon, Georgia. She had been detained for three weeks by immigration officials at San Francisco under the Chinese Exclusion Act and was permitted to enter the country only after the intervention of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Church.
Two years later she was introduced to President Theodore Roosevelt by one of her influential relatives. ‘Why should a Chinese girl be kept out of a country if it is so free?’ she demanded, speaking English with a pronounced Southern accent. ‘We would never treat visitors to China like that. America is supposed to be the Land of Liberty!’ Roosevelt was taken by surprise and found himself apologising for one of his favourite laws. He would have been even more surprised had he known about the activities of Ayling’s father in Shanghai.
Charlie Soong had met his fellow Christian Sun Yat-sen in 1894 just as the doctor was planning his first coup at the Canton arsenal. When Sun moved to Japan and formed the Tungmeng hui, Soong had become one of his chief financial backers.27
The first thing Donald and Soong discussed was the latest disaster to befall the revolutionary movement. In April, Sun had launched yet another coup – his tenth since 1895 – and once again the target had been Canton. Like all of his other attempts, success depended on the initial attack triggering risings in other cities and setting off mutinies in the armed forces. This time, Huang Hsing, Sun’s chief lieutenant, led one hundred revolutionaries in an attack on the residence of the viceroy of Canton, Chang Ming-chi, with the intention of holding him hostage.
One revolutionary carried grenades in a box concealed beneath biblical tracts, possibly printed by Charlie Soong. The coup was foiled when imperial troops were rushed to the viceroy’s compound to reinforce the guard. Most of the revolutionaries were killed in the fighting; one of Huang’s fingers was blown off by a bullet but he escaped.28
Fearin
g the revolution had finally broken out, panic-stricken members of the Cantonese gentry transferred large parts of their fortune to Shanghai banks. ‘The flight of wealthy Cantonese has already caused something like a “boom” in house property in Hong Kong,’ The Times reported, ‘and has called down the wrath of the Viceroy Chang Ming-chi on timorous officials.’29
Only 72 of the 86 bodies found at the scene of the battle could be identified, mainly those of young Chinese radicals who had returned from Japan. The martyrs, as they were called, were buried together at Yellow Flower Mound in the city’s northern suburbs. Their grave became a place of veneration for generations of republicans.30
Donald told Charlie Soong the latest failure simply illustrated the revolutionaries’ lack of cohesion and planning. Even if the coup had succeeded and the Manchu had been deposed, how would Sun have responded to the challenge of running the country? ‘You people have dodged the matter of government,’ Donald said. ‘You must have men trained and capable who will fill it with democracy.’31
Soong nodded glumly. The movement had a long way to go before it would be able to seize power, let alone unite the country. Yet for all its flaws and the windiness of its ideology, the revolution was a lot closer than either of them would have believed possible.
Despite Shanghai’s global reputation as an entrepot, it lagged behind Hong Kong in some basic respects. Even in the International Settlement (which had now expanded from its original plot to 5583 acres), there were no paved streets, no fly screens, no electric fans and sanitation was poor: flush toilets were considered ‘unhealthy’, so night-soil carts made their rounds at dawn.
At the same time, a municipal cart picked up the bodies of Chinese refugees who had died of starvation, disease or the cold during the night. Malarial mosquitoes bred in every available patch of stagnant water, even laying their eggs in the fire buckets in the corridors of the British Supreme Court.32
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