A City of Trees and Yellow Roofs
When French Catholic bishop Alphonse Favier stood atop Beijing’s walls in the late 19th century, he described the imperial capital as resembling “egg yolks scattered through spinach.” The metaphor captured the visual paradox of China’s ancient seat of power—endless green canopies punctuated by the golden-glazed tiles of palace roofs. Until 1860, this elevated perspective had been forbidden to foreigners (and most Chinese) until Qing dynasty concessions following the Second Opium War reluctantly opened the ramparts to outsiders.
The view from Beijing’s walls revealed more than urban topography; it exposed the rigid spatial hierarchy of imperial China. Three concentric walls—the Forbidden City for the emperor and eunuchs, the Imperial City for nobility, and the Inner City for the banner armies—radiated outward like ripples of power. As American visitor Katharine Carl observed in 1903, customs flowed from this center “like blood from the heart through a thousand arteries to the extremities of the empire.” Beyond lay the chaotic Outer City of commerce, where Mongol camels and northern ponies navigated unpaved alleys behind the dignified wooden gates of siheyuan courtyard homes.
The Empress Dowager’s Gilded Cage
Katharine Carl’s 1903 journey to paint Empress Dowager Cixi’s portrait for the St. Louis World’s Fair unveiled the theatricality of late imperial power. Transported by six-bearer palanquins through the Summer Palace’s labyrinthine courtyards, Carl trembled when confronted by the 67-year-old regent in pearl-encrusted robes and jeweled nail guards. “My heart quaked!” she confessed as 85 clocks simultaneously struck eleven—the auspicious hour to begin the portrait.
Cixi’s forty-year reign embodied contradictions that would define China’s turbulent modernization. The same woman who crushed her nephew the Guangxu Emperor’s 1898 reform movement also later implemented comparable reforms herself. Her initial support for the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion in 1900 gave way to pragmatic Westernization, including adopting photography and automobiles. When Carl completed her portrait, Cixi delayed returning to the Forbidden City—still reeling from the humiliating foreign occupation during the Boxer crisis—until winter cold forced her from the Summer Palace.
The Boxer Crisis: Siege and Sacrilege
The 1900 Boxer uprising began as peasant desperation in drought-stricken Shandong before metastasizing into an anti-Christian pogrom blessed by Cixi. Foreign legations in Beijing became islands under siege, their inhabitants melting heirlooms for bullets and repurposing evening gowns as bandages. The dramatic 55-day standoff, punctuated by Japanese Colonel Shiba’s heroism and the improvised use of an antique cannon, became global front-page news.
When the Eight-Nation Alliance relief force finally breached Beijing on August 14, the aftermath revealed imperial China’s fragility. German troops paraded through the Meridian Gate where only the Son of Heaven had once walked. French novelist Pierre Loti described soldiers rolling on the emperor’s bed, while British journalist Henry Savage Landor photographed mutilated eunuchs and stacked heads—all under the dispassionate gaze of Chinese onlookers whose “faces betrayed hatred and contempt.” The subsequent Boxer Protocol’s punitive indemnities (payable until 1940) and permanent foreign garrisons marked China’s nadir of sovereignty.
Reform or Revolution?
The post-Boxer decade witnessed paradoxical transformations. The Qing implemented sweeping administrative reforms—abolishing the Confucian examination system in 1905, establishing Western-style ministries, and promising constitutional government by 1917. Yet these very modernizations accelerated the dynasty’s demise by creating institutional alternatives to imperial rule.
Intellectuals like Liang Qichao, who had witnessed Chicago’s libraries and received financial advice from J.P. Morgan, argued China needed cultural revolution before democracy. His observations comparing American efficiency with Chinese “strolling like scattered ducks” reflected growing nationalist anxiety. Meanwhile, revolutionaries like Sun Yat-sen—educated in Hawaii and inspired by global anti-colonial movements—organized from exile. The 1911 Wuchang Uprising, accidentally triggered by a bomb in a Russian concession, became the spark that toppled two millennia of imperial rule.
The New Republic’s False Dawn
The Republic’s birth in 1912 witnessed both idealism and foreboding. Sun Yat-sen’s self-abnegation—voluntarily surrendering the presidency to militarist Yuan Shikai to prevent partition—echoed Washingtonian virtue. The 1913 parliamentary elections, where Western-educated legislators averaged under forty years old, suggested democratic potential.
Yet the assassination of Song Jiaoren, leader of the victorious Nationalist Party, exposed the republic’s fragility. As Shanghai’s foreign press debated whether China was experiencing its “French Revolution moment,” Yuan Shikai consolidated dictatorship. By November 1913, he had dissolved parliament and outlawed the Nationalists, while foreign powers delayed diplomatic recognition until extracting commercial concessions. American businessman B. Atwood Robinson’s prediction that China would soon demand “phonographs, electric lights, and automobiles” seemed more plausible than democratic governance.
Legacies in Brick and Memory
The physical and psychological scars of this transitional era endure. Beijing’s grid layout still follows imperial contours, while the Forbidden City—once desecrated by foreign troops—now hosts daily queues of tourists. Shanghai’s Bund, where colonial banks once financed China’s modernization, stands as a monument to semi-colonial humiliation and cosmopolitan aspiration.
More profoundly, the early 20th century bequeathed unresolved tensions between authority and participation, tradition and modernity. As Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald noted during the Qing funeral rites in 1913, China’s spring awakening carried both melancholy for lost glory and hope that “new shoots might blossom into flowers making China the brightest civilization in the East.” The child emperor Puyi, playing unaware in his shrinking palace compound, embodied this paradox—a nation simultaneously emerging from and clinging to its imperial past.