1911 Revolution

The 1911 Revolution, also called the Xinhai Revolution, overthrew China's Qing dynasty, the last of the imperial dynasties, and founded the Republic of China. Sparked by an army mutiny at Wuchang in October 1911, it spread rapidly across the southern and central provinces and led to the abdication of the child emperor Puyi in February 1912, ending more than two thousand years of imperial rule.

By the early twentieth century the Qing, a Manchu dynasty ruling since 1644, had been weakened by defeats such as the First Opium War and the First Sino-Japanese War, by the Taiping Rebellion and by foreign intervention after the Boxer Rebellion. Late reforms, including the abolition of the civil service examinations in 1905, new modern armies and a promise of constitutional government, came too slowly for many and raised expectations they could not satisfy. Han Chinese resentment of Manchu rule fed a growing revolutionary movement.

Sun Yat-sen, a doctor educated in Hawaii and Hong Kong, had been organising against the dynasty since the 1890s. In 1905 several groups merged in Tokyo into the Tongmenghui, or Revolutionary Alliance, calling for the expulsion of the Manchus, a republic and land reform. A series of uprisings, the best known in Guangzhou in April 1911, failed, but revolutionary ideas spread among students and in the New Army units.

In 1911 a government plan to nationalise private railway projects and finance them with foreign loans provoked a protest movement, strongest in Sichuan, and troops were moved there from Hubei. In Wuhan, revolutionaries in the New Army were exposed after an accidental bomb explosion, and on 10 October 1911 they rose at Wuchang and took the city. They persuaded a reluctant brigade commander, Li Yuanhong, to head a military government. Within weeks most provinces in the south and centre declared themselves independent of the Qing.

Sun, who was abroad at the time, returned and was elected provisional president by provincial delegates at Nanjing on 29 December. On 1 January 1912 he proclaimed the Republic of China. The Qing court had meanwhile recalled Yuan Shikai, the most powerful military leader in the north, who negotiated with both sides. A bargain was struck: Yuan would secure the emperor's abdication and in return become president. On 12 February 1912 an edict announced the abdication of the six-year-old Puyi, and Sun stood down in Yuan's favour.

The republic soon faltered. Yuan suppressed the new Nationalist Party, which won the 1913 elections, and in 1915 tried to make himself emperor, a scheme abandoned shortly before his death in 1916. China then fragmented into the rule of rival warlords until the Nationalists reunited much of it in 1928. Outer Mongolia and Tibet used the revolution to break away from Chinese control. Both the Nationalists in Taiwan and the Communists on the mainland honour the revolution and Sun Yat-sen as its father.

Our 1900 map shows the Qing dynasty shortly before the revolution, and the 1914 map shows the new Republic of China.