A New Army mutiny in Wuchang ended two millennia of empire
The 1911 Revolution—also called Xinhai after the year’s sexagenary label—toppled China’s Qing dynasty and opened the Republic. The flashpoint was the 10 October Wuchang Uprising by New Army units; provinces then peeled away in a cascade of revolts.
The Qing's troubles ran back seventy years. Defeat in the First Opium War in 1842 met a court unwilling to share power with local officials; after the Second Opium War in 1860 the Self-Strengthening Movement imported Western ships and guns, and the Taiping, Nian and other rebellions forced the throne to lean on armies raised by provincial officials. Losing to Japan in 1895 was the deepest humiliation, and the court created the New Army under Yuan Shikai. In 1898 the Guangxu Emperor backed Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao in the Hundred Days' Reform, until Empress Dowager Cixi's coup put him under house arrest until his death in 1908 and sent the reformers into exile. The Boxer attacks she encouraged brought foreign troops into Beijing in 1900.
Ethnic grievance fed the revolutionaries. The Manchu rulers had put their own people first, reserving key military and civil posts, and thinkers such as Gu Yanwu and Wang Fuzhi had long urged restoring the Ming. Sun Yat-sen wrote that China had been fully conquered twice, under the Yuan and the Qing, and early propaganda leaned on accounts of the massacres at Yangzhou and Jiading.
After Wuchang, the court named Yuan prime minister on 1 November 1911 and he opened talks with the rebels. In Nanjing, a provisional government declared the Republic of China, with Sun, head of the Tongmenghui, as president. A short North–South civil war ended in a bargain: Sun stepped aside for Yuan once the six-year-old Xuantong Emperor abdicated on 12 February 1912, and Yuan took office on 10 March.
The settlement did not hold. Yuan crowned himself emperor in December 1915, gave up the throne in March 1916 amid fierce resistance and died that June, leaving decades of warlord division. Both Beijing and Taipei claim the revolution's legacy, and 10 October is still Taiwan's National Day.
Source: 1911 Revolution
