Yuan Shih-kai's origin, without being precisely obscure, is unimportant.
He came of a Honanese family who were nothing more distinguished than
farmers possessing a certain amount of land, but not too much of the
world's possessions. The boy probably ran wild in the field at an age
when the sons of high officials and literati were already pale and
anaemic from over-much study. To some such cause the man undoubtedly
owed his powerful physique, his remarkable appetite, his general
roughness. Native biographers state that as a youth he failed to pass
his _hsiu-tsai_ examinations--the lowest civil service degree--because
he had spent too much time in riding and boxing and fencing. An uncle in
official life early took charge of him; and when this relative died the
young man displayed filial piety in accompanying the corpse back to the
family graves and in otherwise manifesting grief. Through official
connections a place was subsequently found for him in that public
department under the Manchus which may be called the military
intendancy, and it was through this branch of the civil service that he
rose to power. Properly speaking Yuan Shih-kai was never an
army-officer; he was a military official--his highest rank later on
being that of military judge, or better, Judicial Commissioner.

Yuan Shih-kai first emerges into public view in 1882 when, as a sequel
to the opening of Korea through the action of foreign Powers in forcing
the then Hermit kingdom to sign commercial treaties, China began
dispatching troops to Seoul. Yuan Shih-kai, with two other officers,
commanding in all some 3,000 men, arrived from Shantung, where he had
been in the train of a certain General Wu Chang-ching, and now encamped
in the Korean capital nominally to preserve order, but in reality, to
enforce the claims of the suzerain power. For the Peking Government had
never retreated from the position that Korea had been a vassal state