Lea was a dwarf and an amateur strategist whose main military accomplishment had been teaching the goosestep to Chinese laundrymen in Los Angeles.37 Morrison and Donald must have feared the worst. Fortunately, Lea did not remain in Sun’s employ for long but the damage had been done to Sun’s reputation and Donald began to question his sanity.38
Since mid-December, republican delegates in Nanking had been squabbling over the leadership issue, with one faction favouring Huang Hsing and another Li Yuan-hung. Sun’s arrival seemed providential: he would be the perfect compromise candidate. On 29 December, delegates from 16 of the 17 provinces represented in Nanking elected him provisional president of the Chinese Republic.39
Li Yuan-hung disliked Sun Yat-sen, claiming he had nothing to do with the overthrow of the monarchy and that his reputation was largely founded on fiction. ‘The Revolution was finished when he reached China,’ he said.40 Sun had no illusions about his position: he knew his appointment as president was a matter of convenience and merely a temporary measure. The republican leaders had taken heed of Morrison’s advice that Yuan Shi-kai was the only man who could persuade the foreign powers to recognise the republic. They assured him that Yuan would be offered the presidency once things had settled down. Indeed, Sun was as anxious as anybody to avoid armed conflict between the Northern and Southern arms of the revolution. He notified Yuan Shi-kai that he could take over as president if he declared allegiance to the republic. But there was a problem. ‘Now the question is, will Yuan Shi-kai accept this appointment?’ Morrison wrote to Braham on 29 December. ‘He said that he and his ancestors have served the Manchu dynasty faithfully, and he could not go down to the future as a usurper. But suppose the Manchus themselves should desire his appointment?’
Two days later Morrison met Yuan Shi-kai’s aide Tsai Ting-kan and outlined a plan under which the Manchu themselves would support Yuan’s appointment, thus ensuring the abdication of the Emperor. Tsai passed the scheme to Yuan and reported back that he would not only act on it but would be ‘tickled to death’ to do so. Like Bill Donald, Morrison had crossed the line and was now an active participant in the events shaping China’s destiny.
Meanwhile, the Double Tenth Revolution had created uproar in Australia’s Chinese communities. The editors of the royalist Tung Wah Times in Sydney, who favoured retaining the monarchy under the child Emperor Pu Yi, at first minim- ised the extent of the uprising and predicted it would fail like all of the other attempts. In Melbourne, the republican Chinese Times rejoiced that the Ching Dynasty was fast approaching its end and that the Han race would soon rule China once again.41
As events moved towards a dramatic climax, Tsai Ting-kan suggested George Morrison should be styled ‘The Australian Hero of the Chinese Reform Movement’. The Australian reporter just smiled.
On 1 January 1912 Sun Yat-sen left his house behind a white picket fence at 63 Route Vallon,1 Frenchtown, and took the train to Nanking with his political confreres. ‘Oh! Such a rag-tag and bobtail lot!’ said Arthur Pope, who watched their departure from North Station. ‘It is impossible to recognise a cabinet of scallywags, like the one put up by Dr Sun Yat-sen.’2
At 11 o’clock that night Sun was sworn in as provisional president of the Republic of China. He took the oath in a ceremony of considerable pomp:
I will faithfully obey the wishes of the citizens, be loyal to the nation and perform my duty in the interest of the public, until the downfall of the despotic government . . . then I shall relinquish the office of provisional president. I hereby swear this before the citizens.
At the same time the Ching Dynasty issued an imperial proclamation accepting the creation of the republic. Commemorative vases, kettles and teapots flooded the market stalls and the republican battle flag – a white sun in a blue sky on a red background – fluttered from flagpoles and buildings. After the ceremony, the new president telegraphed Yuan Shi-kai to confirm his promise to stand down once Yuan announced his support for the republic. It was now Yuan’s task to secure the abdication of the Ching Dynasty.3
Bill Donald attended the Nanking ceremony, filed his story to the New York Herald and then returned to Shanghai. Twenty-four hours later he received an urgent plea from Sun Yat-sen. He was being pressured to publish a manifesto. Would Donald write it? Despite his reservations about Sun, the Australian needed no persuading. The republicans needed to explain their aims to the Chinese people and the wider world. Sitting down at his battered typewriter, he started to type.
Donald’s writing tended to be verbose but he wanted this document to be simplicity itself: in clear, crisp, unambiguous language, it had to crystallise the aspirations of every Chinese idealist for a better, fairer, more equal way of life. ‘We will remodel our laws,’ he wrote, ‘revise our civil, criminal and commercial and mining codes, reform our finances; abolish restrictions to trade and commerce, and ensure religious toleration.’ Donald spent most of the night drafting the manifesto with, it is said, the aid of a bottle of bourbon – quite possibly true, because despite his later denials it seems he had tasted Kentucky mountain dew and found that he liked it. In the morning, he cabled the manifesto to Nanking and on 5 January it went out under the signature of Provisional President Sun Yat-sen.
All that remained was the formal reading of the last rites over the supine form of the Ching Dynasty. On 10 January, Morrison got the scoop of the revolution when he predicted the abdication of the Manchu after Yuan Shi-kai supplied him with a copy of an edict in the name of the Dowager Empress ending the dynasty’s rule. Morrison showed it to Sir John Jordan, who exclaimed that Britain ‘cared not a damn whether there was a republic or a monarchy’.4
Six days later extremists in the Revolutionary Party tried to assassinate Yuan Shi-kai as he travelled to the Winter Palace to make arrangements with the Dowager Empress for her exodus. Four party members were stationed along the route and at 11.15 am, as Yuan returned from his audience, they threw bombs at his carriage. At least two bombs exploded, killing 12 guards.
Morrison had just escorted his young New Zealand-born secretary Jennie Robin to the gate of his house to watch Yuan pass by. As the carriage reached the corner, ‘there was a loud explosion and a burst of smoke,’ Morrison wrote. ‘At once I knew a bomb had been thrown. A riderless horse dashed past, other men riding after it, and then after a moment of suspense the carriage was seen coming round the corner. It paced quickly past giving us a glimpse of Yuan seated. Nothing had happened to him, thank God.’5
Three of the bomb throwers were apprehended at the scene and admitted they were revolutionaries whose intention was to kill Yuan Shi-kai ‘for continuing hostilities against his fellow-countrymen’. All three were strangled by the official executioner in the iron collar of the official Manchu garroting machine.6 Yuan accused Dr Wu and his Shanghai colleagues of masterminding the attempt on his life. He retired for several weeks to his Peking residence, the Temple of Worthies, to await the royal summons.
On 12 February the Dowager Empress and the boy Emperor Pu Yi, the Son of Heaven, ascended their thrones in the Yang-hsin Hall, the ceremonial inner sanctum of the Forbidden City, for the final act in the abdication drama. In the presence of Yuan Shi-kai and his cabinet, Her Majesty read the abdication edict with tears streaming down her face, while her courtiers wailed and prostrated themselves on the floor:
Yuan Shi-kai, having been elected Prime Minister some time ago by the Political Consultative Council, is able at this time of change to unite the north and the south. Let him then, with the full power so to do, organise a provisional republican government … that peace may be assured to the people and that the complete integrity of the territories of the five races – Han, Manchu, Mongol, Muslim and Tibetan – is at the same time maintained in a great state under the title of the Republic of China.
The Ching Dynasty had been swept away and the great republican vision had become a reality. It was a unique situation: two A
ustralians had helped to topple a 2000-year-old empire and replace it with what would become the world’s biggest and most diverse republic.
On 10 March Sun Yat-sen handed over the reins of power to Yuan Shi-kai, the world’s most unlikely democrat. It came as no surprise to discover he had inherited a fragile, bankrupt government. The revolution had been starved of funds because the revenues of the British-run Chinese Maritime Customs Service were being handed over to British banks to repay previous British loans to the Manchu.7 ‘The Chinese Republic is a very young baby,’ Yuan said. ‘It must be nursed and kept from taking strong meat or potent medicines like those prescribed by foreign doctors.’8
Yuan was speaking figuratively but there was one ‘foreign doctor’ he urgently wanted to recruit into his team to guide the Chinese Government through the political minefields abroad: Dr George Morrison.
From Morrison’s point of view, the timing couldn’t have been better. Bessie’s nagging and jealousy had driven him into what he described as ‘a fiery rage’. On 28 February he had finally snapped. ‘Before it was delightful having you here,’ he told her, ‘now you are a regular damned nuisance!’ ‘What a virago!’ he wrote in his diary. ‘It will be an immense burden lifted from my shoulders when Bessie departs for other clients.’ His former love was now ‘a champion sponger’ and, worst of all, ‘She was unclean in mouth and body. I could not get her to wash!’9
Morrison was now 50 and, according to his middle son Alastair, had had ‘hundreds of lovers’.10 It seemed he would never find the woman of his dreams. J. K. Ohl hosted a ball and pointedly snubbed him. ‘I am a social failure,’ he moaned. His ostracism might well have had something to do with his opinion of Ohl: in his diary, the American’s name appears on a list of reporters ‘who may write well and will write to order but have no standing and no personality’. Also on the list – unfairly, as we shall see – was a 41-year-old Australian journalist, Major Albert Wearne of Liverpool, New South Wales. Wearne had been wounded in the Boer War while serving with the New South Wales Mounted Rifles (and later won the Military Cross in World War I). He had come to China to work for the North-China Daily News and had since been appointed to run Reuters’ Peking bureau.11
In early April, there was a complete reversal of fortune in Morrison’s romantic life when he realised he had fallen in love with his 23-year-old secretary Jennie Robin. ‘I long to take her in my arms and tell her I love her,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘But there is an awful disparity in our ages.’ Then he asked himself, ‘I wonder does she care for me?’
One spring morning, as they walked along a section of the Great Wall, he plucked up the courage to declare his love. To his relief, it was reciprocated. The joy of it sent him into raptures: ‘My God, how I do love her – better than anything on this earth.’ She was ‘a refined, pure-minded English girl, highly educated . . . secretive and trustworthy . . . sings prettily and plays nicely . . . one of the best mimics I have ever known’.
Morrison made plans to leave The Times – it had never paid him well and he was fed up with the day-to-day grind of reporting Chinese politics. He and Jennie would get married and live on the sale of his library. It contained 20,000 books, 4000 pamphlets and 2000 maps and engravings, and would fetch £40,000. ‘I am tired of the incessant strain,’ he said, ‘the late hours, the irregular work, the difficulty of sifting truth from falsehood, the difficulty of understanding Chinese springs of action. I want to settle down quietly in a country village in Australia.’12
When Donald visited Peking the following month, Morrison arranged for him to meet Sir John Jordan. He also suggested the younger man might replace him as the Times Peking correspondent. Donald was deeply touched. ‘Now, Doctor, when you were flattering enough to mention this subject to me I did not say much,’ he wrote on 25 May. ‘You know that I would but indifferently follow in your footsteps. However, I appreciate to the bottom of my heart the kindly feeling embodied in your suggestion and I will not forget it.’13
Then Yuan Shi-kai approached Morrison through his confidential secretary Tsai Ting-kan with the offer of a five-year contract, all travelling expenses, a £250 annual housing allowance and a salary of no less than £3500, almost triple his Times pay. The offer changed Morrison’s mind about leaving Peking. He would now be able to offer his young wife-to-be a good life in the Chinese capital as the well-paid political adviser to the Chinese Government. Jennie was sent ahead to London to stay with her family in Surrey while she prepared for the wedding. Morrison would join her there in August after his appointment had been announced.
Meanwhile, Bill Donald had developed serious misgivings about Sun Yat-sen. The Australian’s typewriter fairly crackled with anger as he listed Sun’s shortcomings in a letter to Morrison on 4 July. Things were in ‘as great a muddle as they could possibly get this side of open anarchy’, he said. Although Sun assured him he was out of politics for good, Donald doubted it: when his Chinese followers came to see him, they addressed him as ‘President’ and virtually prostrated themselves in the despised kowtow. ‘He, I am convinced, has come to imagine himself to be the Moses of China who is destined to lead the hordes into the promised land,’ Donald wrote.
A few days earlier Sun had produced a large map of China showing his plans for a new Chinese rail network. The map took in Tibet and Mongolia and the western extremities of China. From time to time, Sun had taken his brush and a stick of ink and filled in every province and dependency with as many lines as he could cram in. There were double lines to indicate trunk lines sweeping round the coast from Shanghai to Canton, then leading across precipitous mountains to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.
The map was ‘nothing but a grotesque Chinese puzzle’, Donald said. ‘Sun sat down on the floor to explain things to me, and as he sat there I thought that never could such a scene be drawn to depict the ineptitude of this, the first President of the Chinese Republic. He is mad!
‘Sun is not only as mad as a hatter, but he is madder. He is absolutely unpractical, without common sense and devoid of the most elementary ideas of the subject he professes to be now fathering.’
Donald signed off with a postscript which removed any doubts that he had turned to liquor to deal with the pressures of the time. ‘Now I’ll go and get drunk under old Glory, and see stars and stripes,’ he scribbled in a bold hand, ‘for this is the 4th [of July] and I’ll jubilate because the Lord so worked it that we are not responsible for Americans!’14
Donald’s drinking career seems to have been short-lived; friends recalled him throughout the 1920s and ’30s as a committed teetotaller. In later life his drinking completely slipped his mind. ‘I never imbibe,’ he wrote to a friend in 1945, just a year before his death, ‘so do not understand the effects.’15
Morrison’s appointment as political adviser to Yuan Shi-kai was greeted with enormous enthusiasm in the United States. ‘Here is a unique man in a unique job, and his success or failure may affect the whole future of the Far East, and, incidentally, of the other nations of the world,’ James M. Macpherson wrote in the New York Times.16
While Morrison was travelling to London, Yuan Shi-kai laid a clever trap to remove his opponent, who, he believed, was still a political threat. He invited Sun Yat-sen to Peking where rooms were made available for him at the Wai-wu-pu building and a meeting arranged with the Dowager Empress. Having flattered his ego, Yuan then offered him the post of ‘Director for the Construction of All Railways in China’. The grandiose title (plus a salary of $30,000 Chinese a month) was irresistible: proclaiming the new president a great man whose opinions ‘embodied very largely my own views’, Sun gleefully accepted.
Commandeering Tzu Hsi’s personal rail carriages, he em- barked on an inspection tour of the existing rail system with Bill Donald acting as adviser. The entourage included Sun’s wife Nee Lu and his personal secretary, Charlie Soong’s eldest daughter, Ayling. It was Sun’s secret ambition to divorce his wife
and marry the beautiful, much younger Ayling.
Pride of place in his luxurious Pullman coach was given to ‘The Map’ which, Sun explained to Donald, would be shown to reporters as proof of his commitment to railway-building. To Donald, this was sheer madness – it would expose Sun as a hopeless dreamer and embarrass the young republic. When reporters from Western newspapers and news agencies filed on board the train at the big railway junction of Fengtai, Sun discovered to his consternation that ‘The Map’ had mysteriously disappeared. One newsman asked Sun whether he was a Socialist. He turned inquiringly to Donald, ‘Am I?’ The Australian answered, ‘You are everything that is required as a Nationalist.’ Donald then contrived a security alert so that he could throw the pressmen off the train. Once Sun was tootling through the countryside again, ‘The Map’ magically reappeared.
Despite Sun’s apparent aversion to politics, Donald learned from his Shanghai revolutionary friends that the Tungmeng hui was secretly preparing to put him up against Yuan Shi-kai for the presidency in China’s first democratic elections to be held under the new constitution. ‘While Sun Yat-sen gives it out to the world that he is done with politics and is devoting his energies to the development of the natural resources, he is conspiring here with his bottle-washer coterie to become the President,’ he wrote to Morrison from Shanghai on 4 August.17
Donald claimed he bore no animus towards Sun – ‘I must hasten to add, we are good friends’ – but in his opinion Sun was a ‘pseudo-patriot’, ‘a pitiful, uneducated, incapable charlatan’, ‘an imposter’ and a ‘willing instrument in the hands of a crowd of wirepullers’. Sun and Huang Hsing had tried to persuade Wen Tsung-yao to dissolve the Revolutionary Party and join the Tungmeng hui in founding a new political entity. Wen sought Donald’s advice and was warned to ‘give the Tungmeng hui a wide berth’. Since then, Donald had been working in the background to undermine the Tungmeng hui’s credibility in order to support Yuan Shi-kai, whom he regarded as China’s best hope of stability.
Shanghai Fury Page 17