The last Qing summer

Hankou, on the Yangtze, 9 October 1911. The Qing dynasty is 267 years old and, for the first time in a century, reforming faster than its enemies can organize: provincial assemblies seated in 1909, a national assembly in 1910, a cabinet in 1911, a modern New Army drilled by German methods. Inside that army the revolutionaries have been recruiting for years, and in a safe house in Hankou's Russian concession their local leadership keeps the proof: membership rolls, seals and flags, beside the bombs. That afternoon a careless spark sets off an explosion. Russian concession police seize the lists; the viceroy begins arrests at dusk. The exposed soldiers across the river in Wuchang, facing execution by list, mutiny the next morning rather than wait. Within seven weeks, fifteen provinces secede. Within four months, the last emperor abdicates, and two thousand years of imperial China end because of a workshop accident.

In the timeline recorded here, the afternoon stays boring. Sun Wu mixes his chemicals by the window as ours did. The cigarette that history handed to a comrade at the wrong moment is smoked in the courtyard instead. The bombs get packed, the lists stay in their box, and the rising stays where risings live, in the future tense. The date the plotters actually intended, weeks away, arrives and slips as such dates had slipped a dozen times since spring. The police net tightens in Hunan, a courier defects in Changsha, and the leadership scatters the lists and postpones again. The dynasty does not know it has been saved. It goes on doing the only thing that was saving it: reforming, grudgingly, at a gallop.