The Last Empress

by Hannah Pakula

  At the end of 1894, Sun returned to Hawaii, where he tried to enroll people in the Revive China Society, but his efforts yielded minimal results. In six months he was able to attract only 120 members at an initiation fee of $5.00 each and raised a mere $700 more by selling “revolutionary bonds,” to be redeemed when the Manchus were no longer in power. As China expert Jonathan Spence put it, $1,300 “seems an absurdly tiny base from which to launch a rebellion.” While in Hawaii, however, Sun received a letter from Charlie, telling him that China was losing the war against Japan and that things were going very badly for the Manchus. The time, according to Soong, was ripe for revolution, and Sun should come home at once. On the strength of Charlie’s letter, Sun headed back to China.

  The first attempt that Sun and his fellow rebels made at overthrowing the Manchus was in the city of Canton, where they opened an office in the guise of an agricultural association, while secretly purchasing pistols, rifles, and dynamite in Hong Kong. Unfortunately, one of the arms shipments was discovered at customs, and their headquarters were raided. More than seventy men were arrested, and three were executed. Execution for rebels was not always a quick beheading; the Chinese, who made an art out of torture, had developed several long, carefully drawn-out ways of killing, one of which involved fastening the victim to a cross and peeling off strips of his skin. He was left hanging there until death released him.

  Sun managed to escape this ghastly fate. With the government offering a reward of 10,000 taels* for his capture, he fled to Kobe, Japan. Fortunately for Charlie, his name was not connected by the police with the uprising. But from then on, he lived with the knowledge that he and his family might have to leave Shanghai at a moment’s notice.

  In Kobe, Sun cut off his queue, let the hair on his head grow, cultivated a mustache, and bought a Japanese suit. But since the Manchu government was known for punishing not only criminals but their families, Sun’s widowed mother, his wife, and their three young children fled to Hawaii. Sun followed them there and prepared to assume the life of a traveling revolutionary in disguise. Before he left Honolulu, however, he ran into an old friend.

  “The vehicle in which I was driving was stopped by a man, apparently a Japanese, looking very trim in European dress and with a moustache of respectable dimensions, who proffered his hand, raised his hat, and smiled affably,” wrote James Cantlie, “… and it was some time before we recognized it was Sun minus his cue [queue] and Chinese dress. A cordial greeting ensued and a visit to us in London was arranged.”

  Sun traveled to Europe via the United States. Starting in San Francisco, he enjoyed what he called “a sort of triumphal journey through America”— a triumph mitigated by reports that the Chinese minister in Washington was trying to have him kidnapped and returned to China. “I well knew the fate that would befall me—” he said, “first having my ankles crushed in a vice and broken by a hammer, my eyelids cut off, and finally, be chopped to small fragments, so that none could claim my mortal remains. For the old Chinese code does not err on the side of mercy to political agitators.”

  In September of 1896, Sun sailed for England, where he spent most of his time in the library of Dr. Cantlie’s London home reading books on politics, diplomacy, and military matters. The Cantlie house was on Portland Place, as was the Chinese Legation. The Chinese government had asked the British to extradite Sun as a political criminal, but the British, having no extradition treaty with China, had refused. One Sunday morning on his way to church, Sun was stopped by a Chinese gentleman who started a conversation with him and led him into the Chinese Legation. He was cordially welcomed and shown around, but on the third floor a door was closed and locked behind him. He was told that he would be detained until the legation received money from Peking to send him back to China. Meanwhile, he was kept prisoner on the third floor.

  “While I was in the Chinese Legation in London, I prayed constantly,” he wrote a friend. “For six or seven days I prayed without ceasing.” At the end of the seventh day, Sun convinced one of the legation’s English servants that the emperor of China wanted to kill him because he was a Christian “striving to secure good government for China.” That day he managed to get a note addressed to Dr. Cantlie to the servant, who gave it to his wife, who herself wrote a letter. At 11:30 that evening, the doorbell rang at Dr. Cantlie’s house. When he answered, there was no one there, but a note had been pushed under the door: “There is a friend of yours imprisoned in the Chinese Legation here since last Sunday; they intend sending him out to China.… It is very sad for the poor young man, and unless something is done at once he will be taken away and no one will know it. I dare not sign my name, but this is the truth, so believe what I say. Whatever you do must be done at once, or it will be too late.”

  The doctor went to the head of the local police and from there to Scotland Yard. “Scotland Yard said it was none of their business, and that I had done my duty when I reported the matter to them, and that I ought to go home and keep quiet.… It was not until I got in touch with a member of the clerical staff at the Foreign Office… that the matter was taken up and dealt with.” Even then, the “matter” bogged down in government red tape. Only when a reporter from The Globe got wind of the story and interviewed Cantlie did the Chinese admit that they were holding Sun prisoner. By that time, Sun’s case had also progressed through channels to the prime minister, who said that the legation had infringed upon British law. The following Friday, Sun was turned over to men from the Foreign Office and moved in with the Cantlies. The day after his release, the money for shipping him home arrived at the Chinese Legation.

  The publicity surrounding Sun’s kidnapping gave him wide name recognition in the English-speaking world, as did the substantial price on his head. But he himself spent the next two years wandering around Europe with little money, passing his days in great libraries, studying the books of famous revolutionaries. It was during this time, we are told, that he formulated his Three Principles of the People Doctrine, which established the foundation for his future thinking and writing. Basing his work on the words of Lincoln that Charlie Soong had quoted to him, the former doctor evolved his tripartite doctrine of Nationalism (“government of the people”), Democracy (“by the people”), and Socialism (“for the people”). Unlike previous would-be revolutionaries, he tried to explain these principles in words simple enough for any Chinese to understand. Called by one author “the most famous formula in modern China,” Sun’s Three Principles—national union, political power, and economic entitlement—would be achieved in a three-stage Chinese revolution: first, military conquest; second, political tutelage in self-government; and third, constitutional government.

  In the spring of 1898, Sun returned to Shanghai, where he lived in the Soong house, disguised by his beard and Western suit. Recognized by a group of revolutionaries at a meeting one day, he immediately left for Japan, where the law protected him from extradition. “The five years between 1895 and 1900,” he later wrote, “constituted the most difficult period of my entire revolutionary career.” After an aborted second attempt at revolution in 1900, however, Sun began to notice a change in the attitude of the Chinese: “After my first failure, the entire country regarded me either as a bandit or as a rebel.… After the failure in 1900, not only the people stopped cursing me, but the progressive elements expressed sympathy with me.… The prestige of the Manchu government was altogether lost, and the poverty of the country had increased. As the sense of patriotism was gradually aroused throughout the country, the revolutionary movement in China became more and more popular.”

  There were actually ten failed attempts at revolution. Sun took part personally in some of these uprisings, but as the Chinese government convinced other Asian nations to banish him, he spent more and more time traveling in Europe and the United States, gathering overseas Chinese adherents to his cause and raising money for arms. On these trips he carried a minimum of luggage and lived in fourth-rate hotels. When a reporter offered to walk
him home one night, citing the £100,000 price on his head, he refused: “If they had killed me some years ago,” he said, “it would have been a pity for the cause; I was indispensable then. Now my life does not matter.… There are plenty of Chinamen to take my place.”

  In 1905, another coup, this one in the province of Hunan, failed, and its two leaders fled to Japan. Sun met them there, and the three agreed to call a joint meeting of dissident Chinese in Tokyo, the refuge of choice for revolutionaries on the run from the Manchus. Out of the meeting came a new organization, called the Revolutionary Alliance, with Sun Yat-sen as president. “As soon as the Revolutionary Alliance was formed, in which the best of the younger generation of China was represented,” Sun wrote, “I realized that the success of the great revolutionary work might come in my lifetime.… In less than a year after the Revolutionary Alliance was formed, its membership had increased to over ten thousand and its branches were established in all provinces. Henceforth the progress of the revolutionary movement was so rapid that it was beyond anyone’s expectations.”

  It is one of the ironies of history that when the revolution against the Manchus finally succeeded—on the eleventh try—Sun Yat-sen was not in China but in Denver, Colorado, in the middle of his third overseas tour in search of money. One morning he woke up to astonishing headlines: “Wu-chang* occupied by revolutionists.” The body of the story explained that a group of Chinese army officers had been planning a rebellion when one of their homemade bombs accidentally detonated, bringing the police to their headquarters. With their barracks surrounded and the city gates closed to prevent their escape, soldiers from the artillery and engineering corps, who were secretly friendly to the rebels, mutinied and burned the yamen of the governor-general. He fled, and by the next day, four battalions of renegade soldiers had taken control of the city. With Sun out of the country, they decided to ask Colonel Li Yuan-hung of the Chinese army to act as their temporary leader. After being pulled out from under a bed where he had hidden, assuming the soldiers had come to his house to kill him, Li issued a proclamation announcing the overthrow of the Ch’ing Dynasty, and on October 12, 1911, the revolutionaries put a republican government into place. Their astonishing success was followed by the secession of one province after another—thirteen within the first month—declaring themselves no longer subjects of the Manchus.

  FROM COLORADO, Sun headed to the East Coast, traveling in his usual lowkey manner, avoiding publicity. Passing through Saint Louis, he saw another newspaper, which said that the revolution had broken out under his orders and, if it was successful, he would be the first president of the republic. Realizing the importance of foreign support for the infant Chinese Republic, he headed for Washington to see the secretary of state. The secretary refused to see him. When he got to London, he received an official invitation* to return to China to assume the presidency of the republic. “Yes,” he said, “for the time being, if no-one else can be found better in the meantime.” As in the United States, however, he was unsuccessful in interesting the British government in providing financial support for his cause. In Marseilles he boarded a boat bound for China, having by now, according to one report, been around the world three times.

  When Sun reached Singapore on Christmas Eve 1911, there was a crowd gathered to welcome him, and for the first time in sixteen years, he did not have to assume an alias to land in Hong Kong. One week later, on New Year’s Day 1912, he was inaugurated president at Nanking. Charlie Soong was there with daughter Ching-ling to congratulate him and hear him issue a proclamation announcing the new Chinese Republic. Meanwhile, however, the government in Peking continued to function as it had before the revolution, and a new National Assembly, created six years earlier by imperial edict, had named Yuan Shih-kai, a military leader and one of the most ambitious men in the imperial government, China’s premier.

  It was clear that the North and South were locked in stalemate. The North did not want Sun Yat-sen as its president. Not only was he from the South, but his revolutionary credentials sat poorly with the monarchists remaining in Peking, and he had no practical experience in governing. It looked as if China could be headed for civil war until on January 15, two weeks after he had taken office, Sun wired Yuan to offer him the presidency. His offer was dependent on three conditions: abdication of the child emperor; Yuan’s agreement to break with the Manchus; and Yuan’s acceptance of the republic.

  A month later, Sun tendered his resignation as president in favor of Yuan, whom he called “a good and talented man” and “a most loyal servant of the State,” going so far as to assert that the “abdication of the… Emperor and the union of the North and South” were “largely due” to Yuan’s efforts. On February 14, 1913, Yuan was elected president of the fledgling Chinese Republic. The next day, in accordance with an old rite of ancestral worship—the practice of informing the dead about current events—Sun led a procession to the Ming Tombs outside Nanking, where he formally addressed the founder of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), castigating the Manchus* in lively prose and informing the former emperor of the success of the revolution.

  It was not until six weeks later, however, that Sun was actually able to turn the presidency over to Yuan. The delay was caused by a disagreement over the seat of government. Yuan wanted to remain in Peking; the revolutionaries pressed him to move to Nanking, the seat of their government. After a major riot in Peking, which some people suspected was instigated by Yuan to prove that he was needed in the North, the southerners gave in and the capital was located in Peking.

  Sun himself, however, remained a figure of reverence throughout China. Wherever he went, he was treated with enormous affection and asked to address the large crowds gathered in his honor. An effective orator, he could keep an audience enthralled for as long as three and four hours. The high point of his popularity came in August 1913, when he visited Peking at the invitation of Yuan. Housed like an honored guest of state, Sun spent many hours in conference with Yuan, whom he had never before met. Yuan not only treated Sun well but appeared to agree with all of the little doctor’s republican ideas and ideals, so much so that Sun emerged from their conferences pledging “to devote my best and every effort to aid him in the great and noble work he has undertaken.”

  Sun’s rosy outlook was at least partially colored by the fact that during their time together, President Yuan had given him carte blanche to pursue a $3 billion, ten-year plan that Sun had devised to construct 75,000 miles of railways around the country. Yuan appointed Sun director for construction of all railways in China and gave him a monthly stipend of 30,000 Chinese dollars, along with a train with sleeping cars, two dining cars, and the dowager empress’s reception car with its gold-embroidered blue velvet rug and yellow silk curtains.† One is tempted to think that Yuan, who was having problems creating a workable constitutional government out of the detritus of some two thousand years of monarchy, figured that this was a good way to keep the figurehead of republicanism happy, occupied, and out of his way.

  This sort of reasoning would never have occurred to Sun, who headed for northern China with a large group of aides, both male and female, and camp followers. Among these was May-ling’s eldest sister, Ai-ling, who had graduated from Wesleyan in 1909 at the age of twenty-one and was serving as Sun’s private secretary. She was not the only member of the Soong family on Sun’s railway committee. At Sun’s insistence, her father had been made treasurer of the railway development group. Up until this time, Sun’s relationship with Charlie and his family had always been hidden from the public; now, for the first time, the Soongs were openly identified with the famous revolutionary.

  Oddly enough, it was just about this time of public association that their private relationship nearly ended. The first person to perceive the danger was an Australian journalist, William Henry Donald, a China expert who had been traveling with Sun and advising him. Many years later, Donald confided to another friend that he could never write his memoirs because he would “have to deb
unk Sun Yat-sen. Sun was not only an impractical visionary,” Donald said, “but the worst of it was that the old boy could not keep his hands off women.” One day on the train, Donald and Sun were in consultation. As usual, Ai-ling was there taking notes. As soon as she left, Sun informed Donald that he wanted to marry her.

  “Ai-ling’s Charlie Soong’s daughter,” Donald said. “Charlie has been your best friend. Without him, you’d have been in the soup many a time. And as for Ai-ling and the rest of the children, you’ve been their uncle. They’ve been almost like your children.”

  “I know it, I know it,” Sun replied. “But I want to marry her just the same.” He asked Donald to accompany him to the Soong home that evening, where he planned to discuss the marriage with Charlie. Charlie reacted, as predicted by Donald, with fury, when Sun told Charlie what he wanted.

  The color drained from his [Charlie’s] cheeks, and he looked haggardly at the man by whose side he had stood for nearly twenty years. After a while, he said:

  “Yat-sen, I am a Christian man. All the time, I thought you were, too. I did not bring up my children to live in the sort of looseness you propose.* I will not accustom myself to people who trifle with marriage. We are a Christian family and, Lord willing, we will go on that way. I want you to go, and I never want you to come back. My door is closed to you forever.”