The guiding spirit of the movement, Sun Yat-sen, is a native of Kuangtung, where he was born, not very far from Canton, in 1866.  After some early education in Honolulu, he became a student at the College of Medicine, Kongkong, where he took his diploma in 1892.  But his chief aim in life soon became a political one, and he determined to get rid of the Manchus.  He organized a Young China party in Canton, and in 1895 made an attempt to seize the city.  The plot failed, and fifteen out of the sixteen conspirators were arrested and executed; Sun Yat-sen alone escaped.  A year later, he was in London, preparing himself for further efforts by the study of Western forms of government, a very large reward being offered by the Chinese Government for his body, dead or alive.  During his stay there he was decoyed into the Chinese Legation, and imprisoned in an upper room, from which he would have been hurried away to China, probably as a lunatic, to share the fate of his fifteen fellow-conspirators, but for the assistance of a woman who had been told off to wait upon him.  To her he confided a note addressed to Dr Cantlie, a personal friend of long standing, under whom he had studied medicine in Hongkong; and she handed this to her husband, employed as waiter in the Legation, by whom it was safely delivered.  He thus managed to communicate with the outer world; Lord Salisbury intervened, and he was released after a fortnight’s detention.

Well might Sun Yat-sen now say—­

     “They little thought that day of pain
     That one day I should come again.”

More a revolutionary than ever, he soon set to work to collect funds which flowed in freely from Chinese sources in all quarters of the world.  At last, in September 1911, the train was fired, beginning with the province of Ss{u}ch`uan, and within an incredibly short space of time, half China was ablaze.  By the middle of October the Manchus were beginning to feel that a great crisis was at hand, and the Regent was driven to recall Yuean Shih-k`ai, whom he had summarily dismissed from office two years before, on the conventional plea that Yuean was suffering from a bad leg, but really out of revenge for his treachery to the late Emperor, which had brought about the latter’s arrest and practical deposition by the old Empress Dowager in 1898.

To this summons Yuean slily replied that he could not possibly leave home just then, as his leg was not yet well enough for him to be able to travel, meaning, of course, to gain time, and be in a position to dictate his own terms.  On the 30th October, when it was already too late, the baby Emperor, reigning under the year-title Hsuean T`ung (wide control), published the following edict:—­