Hundred Days' Reform

For about a hundred days in the summer of 1898, from 11 June to late September, the young Guangxu Emperor of Qing China issued a stream of edicts meant to overhaul the empire's government, schools, economy and army. Inspired by reformers such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, the programme was cut short by a palace coup that returned Empress Dowager Cixi to power. Its failure persuaded many Chinese that the dynasty could not reform itself.

Since the Opium Wars the Qing dynasty had pursued the Self-Strengthening Movement, buying Western weapons and building arsenals and shipyards such as the Jiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai. The effort concentrated on hardware rather than institutions. Its limits were exposed in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, when China was beaten by Meiji Japan, a country that had reformed far more deeply. The Treaty of Shimonoseki forced China to give up Taiwan and the Liaodong Peninsula, recognise Korean independence and pay a heavy indemnity, and European powers pressed for further concessions.

Thinkers including Kang Youwei, his student Liang Qichao and Tan Sitong argued that new guns and ships were not enough and that China needed to change how it was governed, educated and organised. They looked to Japan's Meiji constitutional reforms as a model and spread their ideas through memorials to the throne, study societies and essays. Some officials, alarmed by the national crisis, allowed them access to the emperor, who embraced their agenda.

Over roughly one hundred days the throne decreed changes to the civil service examinations, the structure of government, the army, agriculture, industry and education, and moved towards elements of constitutional rule. Some measures took effect, most lastingly the founding of the Imperial University of Peking, the forerunner of Peking University. Most, however, ran into fierce resistance from Manchu princes, grand councillors and provincial governors, who saw threats to their posts and feared growing foreign influence at court. The emperor's habit of bypassing the Grand Council deepened their hostility.

As tension grew between Guangxu and his aunt, Empress Dowager Cixi, some reformers plotted against her. According to later accounts, Tan Sitong asked the general Yuan Shikai to kill the official Ronglu and march on Beijing, but Yuan revealed the plan to Ronglu. Backed by conservatives and the army, Cixi took control of the government in a coup on 21 September 1898 (some accounts give 22 September). Guangxu spent the rest of his life under house arrest, until his death in 1908.

Most of the reforms were undone. Six leading reformers, remembered as the Six Gentlemen of Wuxu, among them Tan Sitong, who refused to flee, and Kang Youwei's brother, were executed. Kang and Liang escaped to Japan, where they founded the Protect the Emperor Society and campaigned, without success, for a constitutional monarchy. Historians differ on how to judge the episode: the traditional view sees idealistic reformers crushed by a self-interested court, while some later writers blame Kang's own overreach and the conservatives' fear of foreign plots.

Ironically, after the Boxer Rebellion and the foreign intervention that followed, Cixi herself backed a wider programme of late Qing reforms from 1901, including the abolition of the imperial examinations in 1905. These changes came too late. Growing numbers of Chinese concluded that only revolution could save the country, a mood that fed into the Xinhai Revolution of 1911.

Our 1880 and 1900 maps show the Qing Empire in the decades of foreign pressure that drove the reform movement.