The fall of Imperial China

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The fall of Imperial China
China is an extensive land with one of the
worlds oldest civilisations. The achievements of
the the various imperial families and their
subjects provide the worlds oldest and richest
culture. China became a vast empire, the Middle
Kingdom of the world, enjoying great respect from
her barbarian neighbours.
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The dry north and the Great Wall
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The wet south at Guilin
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The rivers provide fish.
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The land provides rice for 20 of the worlds
population.
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The emperors enjoyed beautiful palaces like the
Forbidden City
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The Temple of Heaven
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The grandest of tombs
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Relief from the heat in the Summer Palace
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Beautiful silk in the imperial colour which only
the emperors could wear
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Exquisite porcelain, the envy of the western
barbarians
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Spectacular pagodas
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By the end of the 19th century however the empire
was in terminal decline. It was torn by internal
rebellion, corruption, inefficiency, opium abuse
and a stultifying conservatism which frustrated
all attempts at reform and regeneration. To make
matters worse the long despised foreign devils,
making full use of their technological advances,
humiliated the Chinese in a series of aggressive
wars lead by the British in the first Opium War
and the first of the unequal treaties that
followed.
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• By the end of the century China was seething
  with discontent. Corrupt officials, downtrodden
  peasants, arrogant foreigners and seemingly
  useless armies (China lost a war and Taiwan to
  the Japanese). All contributed to a country ripe
  for revolutionary upheaval. The Manchus were
  losing the mandate of heaven and the Ching
  Dynasty was held together only by the ferocious
  will and the cunning autocracy of the Dowager
  Empress. When the last emperor the eight year old
  Pu Yee succeeded it was only a matter of time.
• At the time however no one realised what a
  terrible century awaited China revolution, war
  lords, civil war, Japanese invasion, starvation
  and social upheaval on a scale rarely witnessed.
  All these difficulties ensued until a communist
  republic was set up in 1949 which established
  once more a strong, united and centralised
  government.

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By the end of the 19th century Chinas culture
was old and her infrastructure, wonderfully
effective a thousand years before, was inadequate
for her 20th century population.
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Chinas cities like Hangzhou seen here, were
medieval.
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Her taxes on trade were crippling.
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Her industries were basic
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Chinas justice system barbaric by Western
standards.
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Her education system respected but antiquated
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Her peasants downtrodden.
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But nevertheless inventive
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Attempts were made at reform like the sending of
these boys overseas for their education.
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Attempts were made to reform the army
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But with little success. The 1894 defeat at the
hands of the newly modernised Japan was a
humiliation.
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Agitation against the foreigners and their threat
to Chinese culture as well as Chinese territory
exploded in the Boxer Rebellion of
1900. Missionaries were a favourite target of the
boxers. Foreign diplomats withstood a 55 day
siege in Beijing before they were rescued and the
relieving forces took a terrible revenge,
executing boxers, pillaging Beijing and making
China pay for all of it in yet another unequal
treaty. Only America treated China reasonably,
defending her against the worst demands of the
Europeans and Japanese and using her share of the
reparations to provide scholarships for Chinese
boys to American schools and colleges.
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Missionaries were a favourite target.
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These survived 55 days in Beijing
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A multi-national force defeated the Boxers
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The reprisals were bloody.
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Life quickly returned to normal, for this British
family in Shanghai
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The missionaries came in greater numbers to save
and educate the Chinese
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They brought new skills to China
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The Chinese learned to get on with the foreign
devils
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Kings College Hong Kong
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Some were rich.
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others were poor
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Or, in the middle
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It was often Western educated Chinese or those
who lived in Europe or America who lead
opposition to the Manchu Dynasty they saw its
overthrow as the only way to make China a strong,
modern, just nation, able to shake off its
weakness and backwardness. The most famous of
these revolutionaries was Sun Yat Sen. He was
educated in Hawaii, and as a doctor in Hong Kong
but he was more interested in politics than
medicine and was forced to flee abroad. He formed
the Dare to Dies a revolutionary group but many
of his efforts failed. His main achievement was
to form the Peoples Nationl Party or Guo Min
Dang which aimed to give the people a strong
democratic country, with work for all and an end
to foreign domination. It was the first nation
wide party in China and flourished after the 1911
Revolution.
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Sun Yat Sen in Western clothes
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Seen here with British officials in Hong Kong
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Trying to find soldiers was always a problem
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Shortly after Pu Yee came to the throne as a boy
emperor, revolution broke out
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Officials tried to suppress it
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Their best general Yuan Shi Kai refused to
suppress the rebels, preferring to live as a
Daoist monk for a short while, and the emperor
abdicated to retire to the Forbidden City. The
Double Ten Revolution of 1911 was successful. Sun
Yat Sen was declared first president of the new
Chinese Republic in1912.