Sun was angered when Yang, who had access to funds through a wealthy Hong Kong businessman, was elected the society’s first leader ‘because of his control of the movement’s finances’. From the outset, Yang was committed to a republican form of government in the new China, whereas Sun was prepared to accept a Chinese emperor after the Manchu had been thrown out.
Despite this fundamental ideological difference, the group wasted no time in planning its first insurrection.30 In the first two weeks of March 1895, Sun met secretly in Hong Kong with Yang, Tse and a wealthy new recruit to the Hsing-Chung hui named Huang Yung-shang. They concocted an extraordinary plot for a coalition of 3000 Triad members, bandits and mercenaries hired by the Hsing-Chung hui to make Canton the flashpoint of a widespread anti-Ching rebellion. Two Hong Kong newspaper editors, Thomas Reid of the China Mail and Chesney Duncan of the Hong Kong Telegraph, were persuaded by an intermediary, Dr Ho Kai, one of Sun Yat-sen’s former teachers, to publish articles calling for reform of the Ching regime and pointing out the advantages to international trade if it were deposed in favour of a democratic Chinese government.
Reid, an Aberdonian with a well-developed faculty for making money,31 had no compunction in rattling the Ching authorities. On 12 March, he hinted at the existence of the Canton plot – then in its most embryonic form – in discussing the unrest permeating the Cantonese provinces following the defeat in the Sino-Japanese War.
‘When the rising does come, it will be on the part of a large section of the population in the provinces south of the Yangtze, although it may include the people of that locality,’ Reid wrote in an editorial. ‘Quietly, the inhabitants of South China have been fairly well organised, and all that is needed to kindle the flame of popular revolt is a leader of outstanding merit.’32
He outlined the benefits to the treaty ports and the free port of Hong Kong that might accrue if the ‘Reform Party’ (as the Hsing-Chung hui was euphemistically called) succeeded in creating ‘a constitutional upheaval to rid their country of the iniquitous system of misrule which has shut out China from Western influence, Western trade and Western civilisation’.33
Tse Tsan Tai’s unfavourable impression of Sun Yat-sen was confirmed on 5 May. ‘Sun Yat-sen appears to be a rash and reckless fellow,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘He would risk his life to make a name for himself.’ And a few weeks later on 23 June: ‘Sun has got “revolution” on the brain, and is so “occupied” at times that he speaks and acts strangely! He will grow crazy yet. I for one could not trust him with the responsibility of the leadership of the Movement.’
While Yang Chu-yun and Tse Tsan Tai took care of the financial aspects of the rising, Sun Yat-sen and his confederate Lu Hao-tung headed up the Pearl River. ‘Many lawless and desperate men had made their way from Hong Kong and other parts of China to Canton,’ The Times later reported. ‘For at least a month, Sun guided the movement from within the yamen of the fantai, or treasurer, of the province without his knowledge.’34
The Canton rising was due to begin at the city’s arsenal on 26 October 1895 – a festival day – during a visit by the viceroy of Canton, Tan Chung-lin.35 The gates at one of the arsenal’s entrances would be closed on the visitor and he would be held captive while his yamen, or office, and the city’s military headquarters were seized. It was hoped the revolt would paralyse the two Cantonese provinces of Kwangtung and Kwangsi and trigger spontaneous revolts throughout the empire.
‘There may be a few excesses at the outset,’ Thomas Reid observed on 24 October, ‘but that is probably inevitable, and it will be the duty of the Foreigners on the spot to guide the new impulse into the right channel. It will be a grievous mistake if Great Britain or any other Foreign Powers interfere to thrust China back into the arms of the gang of incompetents who at present rule …’36
With so much advance publicity, it was also inevitable that word of the coup would leak out to Ching officials. When a ferry carrying some 500 coolies who had been promised HK$10 a month by Yang Chu-yun to join the revolt docked at Canton, the police pounced. A search of the ship revealed a large quantity of arms and ammunition hidden in barrels labelled ‘Portland cement’. Most of the coolies escaped in the ensuing melee but some 50 arrests were made, including Lu Hao-tung, who was tried and executed. Imperial troops scoured the city looking for Sun Yat-sen, who escaped over the city walls at the end of a rope. With a price on his head, he made his way to the Portuguese colony of Macao and thence to Hong Kong.
The Manchu authorities insisted the British hand him over for trial and execution but he was allowed to flee to Japan where he changed his appearance. ‘I cut off my queue, which had been growing all my life,’ he says. ‘For some days I had not shaved my head, and I allowed the hair to grow on my upper lip. Then I went out to a clothier’s and bought a suit of modern Japanese garments. When I was fully dressed I looked in the mirror, and was astonished – and a good deal reassured – by the transformation.’37
After lying low for several months Sun left Japan for Honolulu to reinvigorate the Hawaiian branch of the Hsing-Chung hui. Leaving his wife and daughters in the care of his brother, he then travelled to San Francisco where he tapped ‘overseas Chinese’ for donations. He also posed for a newspaper photograph, a foolish act that disclosed his new appearance to the Chinese authorities. When he boarded the Liverpool-bound SS Majestic in New York on 23 September 1896, news of his departure was cabled ahead to the Chinese Legation in London.
When Sun Yat-sen arrived at Liverpool on 1 October, a private detective from Slater’s Detective Agency picked up his trail and followed him to London. Dr James Cantlie, who had returned to London from Hong Kong, had arranged lodgings for him at Gray’s Inn Place. Over the next few days, Sun saw the sights from the top of a London double-decker bus and visited Cantlie’s house at 46 Devonshire Street, Marylebone, just around the corner from the Chinese Legation. There, he bounced the Cantlies’ baby son Kenneth on his knee.38 The agency reported all his movements to the Chinese minister to London, Kung Chao-yuan, and his 63-year-old counsellor, Sir Halliday Macartney, former scourge of the Taiping.39
On 11 October Sun Yat-sen entered the Chinese Legation, an impressive six-storey building in Portland Place, without any idea that he was about to become an international celebrity. He was probably on a spying mission, although he later claimed two Chinese men had hustled him inside as he passed the building. What is not disputed is that they took him upstairs and locked him in a room at the top of the legation. ‘Immediately I got into the room, a gentleman with a white beard, an Englishman, came in,’ Sun said in an interview with The Times. ‘I think they call him Macartney. He said, “Here is China for you.” I did not quite understand what he meant.’40
Macartney meant that the legation was Chinese territory and that Sun was therefore at the mercy of the Chinese minister. Sun protested that it would be legally impossible to send him back to China because no extradition treaty existed with Britain. ‘Oh, we are not going to do that,’ one of his captors told him. ‘We are going to tie you up and block your mouth and carry you at night on board some ship.’ He added, ‘If we cannot smuggle you away, we can kill you here because this is China.’41
Sun tried to alert Dr Cantlie to his plight. ‘I attempted to throw a note from the window to the next house,’ he said. ‘It appears it was picked up by one of the men at the embassy and the next day the window was screwed up.’ The man who picked up the note was George Cole, the legation’s English porter. He informed the housekeeper, a Mrs Howe, about Sun’s efforts to get a message to Dr Cantlie. At 11.30 pm on 17 October, the physician was roused from his bed by the ringing of his doorbell. No one was there but a letter 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, where it is certain they will hang him,’ the note said. ‘It is very sad for the poor man, and unless som
ething 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. His name is, I believe, Sin Yin Sen.’42
The author was Mrs Howe. ‘Had this humble woman failed in her purpose,’ Cantlie says, ‘the regeneration of China would have been thrown back indefinitely.’ He notified the Foreign Office that a Chinese doctor of his acquaintance was imprisoned in the Chinese Legation and gave the story to the Globe newspaper.43 Little notes telling Sun that moves were being made to secure his freedom and a copy of the Globe carrying the story of his kidnapping were secreted among the coals taken up to his fireplace. Meanwhile, Scotland Yard detectives kept watch to ensure no attempt was made to smuggle him out of the premises.
At 3.30 pm on 23 October the Foreign Office summoned Sir Halliday Macartney to Whitehall where he was handed a statement from the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, ‘requesting’ the Chinese minister to release Sun Yat-sen. Macartney returned to Portland Place and later that afternoon Sun was taken down into the basement and released through a side door to avoid a crowd of reporters, well-wishers and demonstrators outside the Portland Place entrance.
Sun was overcome with gratitude. ‘If anything were needed to convince me of the generous public spirit which pervades Great Britain, and the love of justice which distinguishes its people, the recent acts of the last few days have conclusively done so,’ he wrote to The Times from Cantlie’s home. ‘Knowing and feeling more keenly than ever what a constitutional Government and an enlightened people mean, I am prompted still more actively to pursue the cause of advancement, education and civilisation in my own well-beloved but oppressed country.’44
Sun repaired to the Reading Room of the British Museum – the very place where Karl Marx had written Das Kapital – and began to study the principles of democracy and think about how they might be applied in the country whose rulers wanted him dead.
George Morrison returned to China in the spring of 1897 as Peking correspondent of The Times after the newspaper’s manager, the insightful, chain-smoking Moberly Bell, read his book, An Australian in China, and realised he had tremendous potential as a journalist. Morrison quickly established a formidable reputation through a series of scoops, including the revelation that the Russians intended to make Port Arthur the Chinese terminus of the Chinese Eastern Railway (later renamed the South Manchurian Railway by the Japanese), thus looping much of Manchuria on to the Russian Empire.
According to Russia’s negotiator in the railway deal, Prince Esper Oukhtomsky, the crafty diplomat Li Hung-chang had accepted a bribe of three million roubles (US$1.9 million at the time) to be paid in three stages following the signing of the ‘Mutual Defense Treaty’ by China and Russia on 3 June 1896. Li’s Faustian pact with the foreign devil stipulated that the first million roubles would be paid when the emperor announced approval of the Chinese Eastern Railway; the second when the contract to decide the route and build the railway was decided; the third when the railway was finished.
Li believed every man had his price. When George Morrison called at his Peking home soon after his arrival in the capital, he ‘had the impudence to ask me if a money payment would induce me to write to The Times advocating a doubling of the import dues without compensation’.1
Following his narrow escape in London, Sun Yat-sen lived in exile in Europe, North America and Japan. As Yang Chu-yun and most of his Hsing-Chung hui colleagues had been forced to flee Hong Kong after the failure of the Canton coup, Tse Tsan Tai, whose role had remained undetected, was now the most senior revolutionary figure in the colony. Putting violence aside for the time being, he made overtures to Kang Youwei and Liang Chi-chao, the leading figures in a reform movement that was attempting to change the empire by peaceful means.
Kang Youwei, a brilliant 43-year-old Cantonese scholar, was stout and strong, with piercing black eyes. He was styled ‘Kang Fu-tzu’ (the New Confucius), although the Chinese literati denounced his use of Confucianism – hitherto a bulwark of the status quo – to promote reform. Appalled by Manchu inhumanity to its citizens, Kang sent a series of lively memorials about conditions in the Middle Kingdom to the young Emperor, Kuang-hsu, in which he urged a gradualist solution to China’s ills through Confucian transformation from the top. Three of Kang’s most ardent followers were his younger brother, Kang Guangren, and two brilliant scholars, Tan Sitong and Liang Chi-chao.
Kang Youwei had studied Japan’s great leap forward in a single generation following a brief civil war in 1868, which had placed the Meiji Emperor on the Chrysanthemum Throne.2 Progressive young statesmen, known collectively as the Genro, then took control of the 15-year-old emperor’s domains and set about creating a new Japanese state capable of competing with Western countries on equal economic and military terms.
The Meiji Restoration reached its high point in 1890 with the opening of a new legislature, the Imperial Diet, in which members could help decide the great national issues. In just 30 years Japan had transformed herself from a feudal state ruled by a medieval shogunate into a constitutional monarchy. Kang firmly believed that China should take her first steps along the Japanese path.
Kuang-hsu, the 25-year-old Manchu Emperor, was despondent over the disintegration of the Chinese forces in the Sino-Japanese War, while the payment of the vast war indemnity represented one-third of the entire Ching treasury. He was receptive to new ideas. Taking up the vermilion pencil, he issued an edict in July 1895 outlining a program to modernise China through railway building, currency reform and the founding of a national university.3
The aspect of Kuang-hsu’s program that most appealed to Western investors was his plan to build a railway line between Peking and Hankow in order to boost trade and provide jobs. Tenders were submitted and a Belgian consortium was chosen on the grounds that Belgium was a neutral country that had demanded few privileges from China. To the Court’s consternation, it was then revealed that the Belgians were acting on behalf of the unpopular French, victors of the Sino-French War of 1883–84 that had deprived the empire of Annan (Vietnam), while the French were in collusion with the treacherous, grasping Russians.
Meanwhile, Tse Tsan Tai held meetings in Hong Kong with Kang Youwei and his brother Kang Guangren, and corresponded with their chief lieutenant Liang Chi-chao to see whether any common ground could be found between the Hsing-Chung hui and the reform movement. The future Chinese consul to Australia, Liang Lan-shun, attended the first meeting with Kang Guangren at the Bun Fong restaurant in Hong Kong on 21 February 1896. Seven months later Tse met Kang Youwei at the Wai Shing teahouse in Queen’s Road Central. It was agreed in principle at both meetings that a measure of co-operation was desirable but a problem arose the following year when Kang Guangren questioned Sun Yat-sen’s suitability as an ally.
Kang stressed that a peaceful revolution was essential to China’s problems, rather than ‘desperate attempts at reform’. ‘Men like Sun Yat-sen frighten me – they spoil everything,’ he said. ‘My brother has numerous enemies and they would seize any opportunity to bring about his downfall. So you see we must be shrewd. No one must be able to say that ours is an anti-dynastic movement.’4
The reformers were anxious to meet Yang Chu-yun, who was seen as the acceptable face of the revolutionary faction. But Yang was living in exile with other Chinese revolutionaries in Japan. A short time later the emperor summoned Kang Youwei and his confederates to Peking and the opportunity for an alliance between reformers and revolutionaries was momentarily lost.5
The aggressive behaviour of Germany in Shantung and Russia in Manchuria filled the young emperor with shame and anger. At the suggestion of his former tutor Weng Tung-ho – who had been sacked by Kuang-hsu’s formidable aunt Tzu Hsi for being too liberal – he read Kang Youwei’s memorials and was galvanised into action. On 11 June 1898 he signed the first of 38 imperial decrees that would send a torn
ado of change sweeping throughout the empire.
Five days later he invited Kang and his young followers to an audience in the Summer Palace. They spoke for five hours.6 Kang urged Kuang-hsu to shake off the bondage of the Manchu Court and replace his conservative advisers with bright young reformers. Expecting the existing officials to promote change, he said, would be ‘like climbing a tree to catch fish’.
The Emperor duly abolished the cumbersome ‘eight-legged essay’ system of advancement within the mandarinate, converted ancient temples into modern schools and established bureaus to shake up agriculture, commerce and industry. He also appointed Kang Youwei as secretary to the Tsungli Yamen (the Chinese Foreign Office) and made the 33-year-old philosopher Tan Sitong a member of the even more prestigious Grand Council.
Kang preached that China should not only follow Japan’s path to modernity but should also become allied with her militarily. Chinese officers should be trained in Japan and the Chinese fleet reorganised under a Japanese admiral. Kuang-hsu wholeheartedly agreed. ‘No one doubts the sincerity of the young Emperor,’ George Morrison wrote in Reminiscences, his unpublished memoir, ‘no one denies the wise tendency of the reforms. But the pace was too fast.’
Kuang-hsu had become emperor on 25 February 1875 following the death of the Dowager Empress Tzu Hsi’s son. Although she had stepped down as regent when he reached the age of accession, she remained China’s de facto ruler, a sinister figure behind a silk screen with a clique of eunuchs and Manchu bannermen at her beck and call. Tzu Hsi did nothing to restrain the reforming process until the Emperor abolished the stipends of the Manchu ruling caste and ordered the Eight Banners of the Manchu Army to be disbanded in favour of a modern fighting force. In retaliation, she banished Weng Tung-ho from Peking for having launched the emperor on his progressive path.
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