The China Collectors by Karl E. Meyer

Author:Karl E. Meyer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2015-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Threads of Heaven

On January 1, 1912, the revolutionary leader and Christian convert Sun Yat-sen returned from foreign exile to be inaugurated in Nanking as the first provisional president of the Chinese Republic. On February 12, the new empress dowager, Longyu (the Guangxu emperor’s widow), signed the abdication papers that brought the Great Qing Empire to a close. In the presence of the six-year-old Puyi, with tears streaming down her face, she read the edict that swept away two thousand years of imperial rule. Under the terms of the agreement, the Xuantong emperor Puyi was allowed to remain among his relatives, eunuchs, and the imperial treasures in the Forbidden City on an allowance of four million silver yuan annually for household expenses.

Peking’s diplomatic community now faced a period of adjustment. A new American president, William Howard Taft, successor to Theodore Roosevelt and also a Republican, appointed William James Calhoun, an Illinois lawyer, to succeed Rockhill as envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary to China. Calhoun arrived in 1909 with his wife, Lucy Monroe. By his own admission, he unpacked “without knowing a single thing about the country . . . [with] no impressions for or against it,” but left in 1913 “with the heart strings pulling a great deal.” Until that time Peking had been deemed a difficult and isolated posting, but tourists had begun to appear and the American Legation played host to a procession of distinguished visitors. And by November 1908, according to a Russian diplomat, Dmitrii Abrikosov, the capital had become: “[A] perpetual merry-go-round of parties. Every Legation tried to eclipse the others: a ballet in the Russian Legation, where the charming daughter of the Minister was a comet surrounded by stars; a musical at the French Legation, where the beautiful wife of the French Minister danced the bolero to the music of Ravel; a fancy dress ball in the French bank with everyone under the influence of champagne, exotic costumes, Chinese lanterns in the garden, and romance in the air.”

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