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Updated: June 25, 2025
As Kuang Hsu grew to boyhood he heard that out in this great wonderful world, which he had never seen except with the eyes of a child, there was a method of sending messages to distant cities and provinces with the rapidity of a flash of lightning.
It was between November 1, 1897, and April 16, 1898, that Germany, Russia, France and England wrested from the weak hands of the Emperor Kuang Hsu the four best ports in the Chinese empire, leaving China without a place to rendezvous a fleet.
In the past the gentry had a profitable and easily accessible market for their produce in the neighbouring capital; now the capital was far away, entailing long-distance transport at heavy risk with little profit. The dissatisfied circles of the gentry in the north-east and in the south incited Prince Kuang to rebellion.
When he heard that the foreigners had a method of talking to a distance of ten, twenty, fifty or five hundred miles, he did not say like the old farmer is reported to have said, "It caint be trew, because my son John kin holler as loud as any man in all this country, an' he caint be heerd mor'n two miles." Kuang Hsu believed it, and at once ordered that a telephone be secured for him.
There was an eclipse of the sun on New Year's day of 1898 which foreboded calamity to the Emperor. During the summer of this year he began his great reform, and in September the Empress Dowager took control of the affairs of state and Kuang Hsu was put in prison, never again to occupy the throne.
We call attention to the fact that according to the fourth of these edicts the death of the Emperor is put at from 5 to 7 P. M on the evening of the 14th of November, while that of the Empress Dowager is from 1 to 3 P. M. of the same day at least two hours earlier, and that in her last edict she is made to speak of the death of Kuang Hsu.
And if Kang Yu-wei had been as great a statesman as he was reformer, Kuang Hsu might never have been deposed. The crisis came during the summer of 1898. I had taken my family to the seashore to spend our summer vacation. A young Chinese scholar a Hanlin who had been studying in the university for some years, and with whom I was translating a work on psychology, had gone with me.
I saw similar launches in the lake at the Summer Palace, and was told that in the play days of his boyhood, Kuang Hsu would have these launches hitched to the imperial barges and take the ladies of the court for pleasure trips about the lake in the cool of the summer evenings, as the Empress Dowager did her foreign visitors in later times.
The Empress Dowager, however, wanted the honour of this move to reflect upon herself, and hoped to be able to bring it to a successful issue during her lifetime. There was strenuous opposition, and this most vigorous in the party in which she had placed herself when she dethroned Kuang Hsu.
We would not lead any one to believe that Kuang Hsu was an ideal child. He was not. If we may credit the reports that came from the palace in those days, he had a temper of his own. If he were denied anything he wanted, he would lie down on his baby back on the dirty ground and kick and scream and literally "raise the dust" until he got it.
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