Despite the hesitancy of the Times stylists, a full-scale revolution was in progress. The minister of war’s attempts at suppression having failed, the government had little choice but to appeal to China’s most effective and fearsome commander, Yuan Shi-kai, to retrieve the situation. Since his banishment from the Ching Court for betraying his emperor, Yuan had bided his time with numerous wives and concubines at his home, the Garden for Cultivating Longevity at Tientsin. Considering the dire state of affairs in the Forbidden City, he was not surprised to receive an urgent summons from the regent, Prince Chun, informing him that he had been appointed viceroy of Hunan and Hupeh, with orders to suppress the rebellion in Wuhan.
While Yuan was deciding whether to obey this command, the revolutionaries approached him with an even more enticing proposal: they would, they said, make him president of the Chinese Republic if the revolution succeeded. Once again, a benevolent fate had placed Yuan in a pivotal position. He thanked the rebels for their offer and went back to his garden.14
On 17 October Morrison wrote, ‘The Government is scared out of its wits but is acting with considerable resolution. But I cannot meet anyone, Chinese or foreign associates of the Chinese, who will not tell me the same thing privately – that they wish for the success of the revolution.’
Seven days later financial panic threatened to engulf the capital. ‘The Treasury has less than one million taels, and it is certain that it will not be able to pay the official salaries,’ he wrote. ‘Failure will increase the panic. Chinese are leaving in large numbers, or sending away their families, because they fear Manchu reprisals. Manchus are leaving because they fear the future. Treasure of all kinds is being sent out of Peking to places of safety.’
Braham responded, ‘Your telegrams have been excellent and are exciting much comment. You must feel like old times again writing the telegrams that are “the” news of the day.’
Morrison interviewed the Japanese military attaché, General Shuzo Aoki, who told him, ‘This revolution is the end of the dynasty. Every hour the power of Yuan Shi-kai is increasing. He will end up with dictatorial powers.’ Indeed, Yuan had given Prince Chun a list of demands. He would come out of retirement, he said, if the government made him supreme commander of the armed forces, with adequate funds and supplies to crush the rebellion. Furthermore, the existing cabinet of princes must be replaced with a more representative body and a national assembly set up within a year. Finally, the revolutionaries must be pardoned after he had suppressed their rebellion.
With more army units joining the revolution almost daily, Prince Chun agreed to make Yuan imperial commissioner in charge of the army and navy. Yuan rejected the offer and stayed at home. To demonstrate his power, he ordered General Tuan Chi-jui to recapture Hankow from the revolutionaries. As the Chinese city burned and the population fled in panic, the rebels retreated across the river to Wuchang and Hanyang, leaving behind many casualties. On Yuan’s orders the foreign concessions were left untouched.15
At the same time the Ching Court received a demand from the 20th Division in North China that a constitutional mon- archy should be set up within a year.16 Faced with the prospect of a large armed force descending on Peking, the government surrendered. Prince Chun announced on 1 November that Yuan Shi-kai had been appointed prime minister in place of the wily and corrupt Prince Ching.
The following day the revolution spread to Shanghai. Everard Fraser received a letter from the ‘Military Government of the Chinese people’ announcing it was taking over the Chinese districts to preserve order and restore the confidence of the business community. Right on cue, the Chinese police force in Chapei mutinied and the police station was burned down. The taotai sought sanctuary in the International Settlement.
Bands of revolutionaries wearing white badges stormed into Kiangnan on the Whangpoo and seized the arsenal and the dockyards. ‘The people who attacked Kiangnan were not soldiers but men of the labouring class armed with rifles,’ The Times’ Shanghai correspondent O. M. Green, the John Bullish editor of the North-China Daily News, reported.17 White flags fluttered from the houses of Chapei and Chinese police wore white armbands bearing the words ‘restoration of the Han people’. The revolution had finally reached the masses.
Shanghai’s provisional government ordered men to cut off their queues. Police armed with scissors enforced the order. ‘Many a poor innocent farmer, who had never heard of the revolution, found himself rudely nabbed and clipped as he came into the market,’ one eye witness was quoted as saying. Even more liberating, the wall surrounding Nantao was torn down brick by brick and its slums exposed to daylight.18
On 11 November The Times carried startling allegations that the troops of the Manchu commander, General Chang Hsun – who had once served as the groom, or mafoo, to the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi and was therefore known as ‘the Mafoo General’ – had run amok in Nanking and massacred Chinese men, women and children. Students who had cut off their queues were butchered on sight and anyone wearing a white badge or even white clothing – such as the white raiment worn in mourning – was in danger of decapitation. People had fled south along the Nanking–Shanghai railway line in desperate efforts to get away from the marauding soldiers. The North-China Daily News, whose editor had filed the story to London, appealed to the powers to protest against the massacre.19
Five days later The Times reported that Everard Fraser, on the instructions of Sir John Jordan, had given permission to the revolutionaries to transport troops and ammunition by railway to Nanking to stop the killing. The revolutionaries had put a price of $5000 on General Chang’s head and promised revenge.20
Morrison was furious when he discovered that Green’s source for these two sensational stories was Charles R. Maguire, an inebriated contractor whom he described as ‘the champion liar of Nanking’.21 Morrison remonstrated with Green, who admitted he was in the wrong. There had been no massacre in Nanking: the killings had been in Hankow. ‘I expressed regret that he had not seen his way to correct the false stories he had been the chief means of disseminating,’ Morrison wrote to Braham. ‘Of course I know he did so in good faith, but he had taken no adequate steps to have them verified.’22
Meanwhile, it was a fact that the railway authorities had withdrawn their staff and telegraphic equipment from Nanking down the line to the river port of Chinkiang. The evacuation was carried out under the surly gaze of a strong imperial detachment, which was waiting at the station to attack the revolutionaries. General Chang placed 35 guns on the city walls to cover any revolutionary advance from the north. Nanking, the key strategic city of the Yangtze, was completely cut off. If it fell to the revolution, further resistance by imperial forces would be futile.23
On 13 November Li Yuan-hung sent a notice to the consular body at Hankow stating that at the request of the revolutionary armies he was acting temporarily as the representative of the ‘Central Government of the Republic’ at Wuchang. He added that all treaties and loan agreements concluded by the Ching Government prior to the outbreak of the revolution would be honoured.24
Donald’s associates Wu Ting-fang and Wen Tsung-yao were nominated by the Revolutionary Party in Shanghai to run foreign affairs. The party’s domestic program was clearly defined as provincial self-government, with central military control at Wuchang, although the eventual capital would probably be Nanking. The unequivocal choice for president was Sun Yat-sen, who was still incommunicado abroad.25
On 14 November George Morrison watched Yuan Shi-kai arrive in Peking by special train from Tientsin protected by ‘wild-looking halberdiers carrying long two-handled swords’. Yuan formed a new central government of ten Han and one Manchu with the aim of creating a constitutional monarchy. Morrison was pleased about his intervention as a counterweight to some of the Yangtze republicans whom he regarded as hot-headed. He was also in good spirits for another reason: he was having an affair.
Throwing caution to
the wind, he had fallen for a girl named Bessie, an Australian visitor who dyed her hair and flirted with the diplomatic young bucks. ‘So bright, attractive, winning, kind and sympathetic,’ he told his diary, ‘so sweet to look upon, so exquisitely formed, so natural . . . all day in a haze that fair image was ever before me, that beautiful voice ringing in my ear.’ The following day he asked himself, ‘What have I done to deserve such happiness and how horribly I will suffer when such happiness is taken from me.’
On 16 November Morrison discussed the civil war with Captain Tsai Ting-kan, a member of the Navy Board who was acting as Yuan Shi-kai’s representative in talks with the revolutionaries at Wuchang. Tsai had known General Li Yuan-hung in a previous life when Li had served as third engineer in a torpedo boat in the flotilla of which Tsai was commander. Morrison suspected Tsai had thrown his lot in with the revolutionaries. ‘While defending constitutional monarchy in theory, he is as strongly anti-Manchu as the men with whom he was sent to parley,’ he noted.26
Several days later Tsai informed Morrison that Yuan Shi-kai wanted to meet him. He drove in a carriage to Yuan’s residence, where he found that the general, always stout, had become quite rotund during his retirement. He was ‘very cordial and complimentary’, however. Speaking in a harsh bronchial whisper, Yuan said: ‘If there were more pressure, perhaps the Court would leave for Jehol.’ Morrison left the meeting convinced that the court was planning to leave Peking and that Yuan was conspiring to achieve that end. If they fled to the imperial hunting lodge at Jehol, 200 kilometres north of the capital, it would be only a matter of time before the Peking government collapsed.
On 21 November delegates from 11 of the 22 provinces arrived in Shanghai for the first national convention in China’s history. As Dr Wu pointed out, with a provisional government at Wuchang and a National Assembly at Shanghai, a constitution was urgently needed to sort things out. Delegates declared that troops had been enlisted in sufficient number to overpower Nanking within a week. Donald decided to accompany them up the Yangtze to report the battle. It was the right decision but one that would transform him from journalist into participant.
The revolutionary armies gathered in great numbers at Chinkiang, where they pitched camp and waited. Although it was vital to take Nanking as soon as possible, intense rivalry between two of their leaders had created an impasse. When Donald arrived at Chinkiang station, a tall man with a clipped moustache and an impressively large girth was stalking the platform. This was Roy Scott Anderson, the local Standard Oil manager, who had been born into an American missionary family in Soochow in 1879. According to the New York Times, Anderson ‘took an active part in the first Chinese revolution, serving as a General in the revolutionary army’.27
Anderson had heard that Donald was on his way and wanted to meet him. He told the Australian that the military governor of Chinkiang, General Ling, insisted on being the senior general in the forthcoming battle in order to claim the honour of victory. To this end, he had obstructed the advance of the other Chinese commander, General Hsu Ko-ching.28
Together, Donald and Anderson visited General Ling’s headquarters where they found him drowsy from smoking opium. Donald told Ling he was speaking on behalf of the National Assembly. He then informed him that Nanking was to be the new capital of China and ordered him to resolve his differences with Hsu and permit the advance to go ahead. Ling agreed to do so, but even then Hsu refused to budge. The track between Chinkiang and Nanking had been mined, he said, and his trains would be blown up.
Donald and Anderson decided to call his bluff. Borrowing a locomotive from Arthur Pope, manager of the Shanghai–Nanking Railway, they made the 120-kilometre round trip to Nanking and back without incident.29 Having reconnoitred the area, Donald informed General Hsu that the most vital strategic feature was Purple Mountain which overlooked the walls of Nanking. It was essential, he said, that the slopes of this shrub-covered peak be captured prior to attacking the Ching defences.
General Hsu’s army proceeded by rail to Yao-hua-men on the outskirts of Nanking, pitched camp and waited. As the shadows lengthened and cooking fires glowed in the gathering darkness, Donald visited Hsu’s headquarters and demanded to know the reason for the delay. The general informed him that there were guns on top of Purple Mountain, which would blast his men when they attacked the city walls. For the second time, Donald crossed the line between journalist and participant. Leaving Anderson at the camp the following morning, he climbed Purple Mountain, had tea with some monks at a monastery on the summit, and returned unscathed. There were no guns up there, he told Hsu, and ordered him to get on with it.
On 30 November Donald reported that the revolutionary army had captured Purple Mountain outside the Taiping gate on the east side of the city. The revolutionaries made a combined infantry attack in three columns and rushed the strongly fortified position in the face of heavy fire. Having secured the command of the adjacent hills, they placed their artillery in position with the help of their two European comrades and called on the imperialists to surrender. General Chang and his cohorts fled from the battlefield, abandoning Nanking to its fate.30 The republican force then swarmed into the Tartar city, sacked its buildings and burned many to the ground.
According to the Hobart Mercury, it appeared that the revolutionary generals could not make up their minds to attack until a mysterious, unnamed foreigner suggested that a flanking movement might be added to the frontal attack. Once again, Donald had crossed the line. There were reports that he and Anderson had even been seen manoeuvring a republican field gun into position.31
On 4 December Prince Chun abdicated as regent of the Ching Government. The Dowager Empress instructed Yuan Shi-kai to negotiate a peace settlement with the revolutionaries. One of Yuan’s first moves was to invite Morrison to visit Hankow in a complimentary railway carriage in which he was ‘fed and wined with sybaritic luxury’. Looking at the burned buildings and wretched citizens, he concluded that ‘China is indifferent whether Yuan Shi-kai makes himself President or Emperor; the Manchus must go. There seems absolute unanimity about this.’32
By 18 December, Donald was back in Shanghai. From the Palace Hotel on The Bund, he watched Yuan Shi-kai’s peace emissary Tang Shao-yi and his entourage arrive by steamer at one of the Whangpoo jetties. Like his republican hosts, Tang Shao-yi had lopped off his queue as a sign of defiance to the Manchu. At their meeting, Dr Wu Ting-fang proposed a four-point peace plan: the abdication of the Manchu, the establishment of a republic, a generous pension for the Emperor, and relief for aged and poor Manchus. Tang Shao-yi informed him that he was in sympathy with their aims and agreed to hammer out the details of a settlement.
Morrison was reporting the conference first hand and was greatly helped by Bill Donald whom he had first met in Hong Kong. Donald, he noted, ‘knows more about the inside of the revolutionary movement than any other foreigner’.
The American reporter Carl Crow had made the trip to Hankow to report on the revolution for the China Press. He was now covering the political developments in Shanghai and turned to Donald for enlightenment. ‘Donald,’ he said later, ‘was the only foreigner in Shanghai who had the remotest idea of what the revolt in China was all about.’33
The supreme irony of the Double Tenth Revolution was that Sun Yat-sen, who had risked his life for this moment many times, was nowhere to be seen – he was on a fund-raising trip abroad and played no part in the early stages of the revolution. Although telegrams were sent to him at the hotels on his itinerary, he had inadvertently left his codebook behind and was unable to decipher them. One morning over breakfast at Denver, Colorado, he read the news in a local paper.
Sun’s first instinct was to dash back to Shanghai to take control of matters as the senior revolutionary. But on reflection he decided his wisest course would be to visit Washington, London and Paris to seek assurances from ministers that their governments wouldn’t prolong the life of the Ching
Dynasty with an injection of arms and loans. Success in this mission would enhance his reputation as an international figure and enable him to return to China triumphant.
He travelled to Capitol Hill where Frank Knox, the United States secretary of state, refused to see him, even though he had been named in American newspapers as frontrunner for the presidency of the future republic.34 It was much the same story in London. When the Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey declined to meet him, Sun sent assurances of his goodwill towards Britain through a third party, the arms dealer Sir Trevor Dawson of Vickers, Sons & Maxim. Dawson, who hoped to secure large orders from the Chinese armed forces, informed Grey that Britain would receive preferential treatment if Sun’s party came to power and he were appointed president. He would place the navy under the command of British officers and accept British advice on China’s relations with Japan.
The Foreign Office, however, had described Sun in a memorandum to the British cabinet as ‘an armchair politician and windbag’. Grey ordered Dawson to tell him that Britain would remain neutral in the conflict, adding the biting comment that ‘there seemed to be one good man on the side opposed to the revolutionaries, Yuan Shi-kai’.35
Further disappointment awaited in Paris. Although ‘warmly greeted’ by Premier Georges Clemenceau, Sun’s efforts to secure the support of the French Government and a loan from French bankers fell on stony ground. For the time being, he accepted defeat. Before sailing from Marseilles for Hong Kong on 24 November, he cabled the revolutionary leaders in Shanghai and Nanking that either Yuan Shi-kai or Li Yuan-hung would be acceptable to him as presidential candidates.36
Sun arrived in Shanghai via Hong Kong on Christmas Day to great jubilation among his supporters. His reception became more muted when he confessed he had returned home without desperately needed funds for the revolutionary treasury. And it turned to bewilderment when he introduced Homer Lea, a so-called ‘general’ who had been recruited in the United States to train legions of Chinese revolutionaries to defeat the Manchu armies.
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