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Updated: May 24, 2025
Yuan Shih-kai, with two other officers, commanding in all some 3,000 men, arrived from Shantung, where he had been in the train of a certain General Wu Chang-ching, and now encamped in the Korean capital nominally to preserve order, but in reality, to enforce the claims of the suzerain power.
Extraordinary rumours circulated endlessly among the common people that there would be great trouble on the occasion of the Dragon Festival, the 5th June; and what actually took place was perhaps more than a coincidence. Early on the 6th June an electric thrill ran through Peking Yuan Shih-kai was dead!
The practical result was that after a period of extreme tension between China and Japan which was expected to lead to war, that political genius, the late Prince Ito, managed to calm things down and arrange workable modus vivendi. Yuan Shih-kai, who had gone to Tientsin to report in person to Li Hung Chang, returned to Seoul triumphantly in October, 1885, as Imperial Resident.
In those five years, despite all financial embarrassments, North China raised and equipped six excellent Divisions of field- troops 75,000 men all looking to Yuan Shih-kai as their sole master.
Here, then, was the triumph of the constitutional cause, and Yuan Shih-kai and most of the moderate progressive Chinese would have been well satisfied with it if it had contented the revolutionaries of the south.
Almost with a gasp of incredulity China at last realized that Yuan Shih-kai had been seduced to the point of openly attempting to make himself Emperor. From those August days of 1915 until the 6th June of the succeeding year, when Fate had her own grim revenge, Peking was given up to one of the most amazing episodes that has ever been chronicled in the dramatic history of the capital.
This person, who is known to have been gravely implicated in many assassinations, and who was the instrument used in 1912 by Yuan Shih-kai to persuade the Manchu Imperial Family to abdicate, had in a brief four years accumulated a vast fortune by the manipulations he had indulged in as Director-General of The Bank of Communications, an institution which, because it disposed of all the railway receipts, was always in funds even when the Central Treasury itself was empty.
For a week and more a desperate struggle went on behind the scenes in the Presidential Palace, since Yuan Shih-kai was too astute a man not to understand that a most perilous situation was being rapidly created and that if things went wrong he would be the chief victim.
Being saturated with the doleful diplomacy of Korea, and seeing in these proposals a mere trap, Yuan Shih-kai, as we have shown, had drawn back in apparent alarm.
"According to international law has any one a right to interfere with the internal affairs of any foreign country?" "State the advantages of constructing railways in Shantung." "Of what importance is the study of chemistry to the agriculturist?" While Yuan Shih-kai was Governor of Shantung he induced Dr.
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