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 ever since the
Ming Dynasty had saved the country from the clutches of Hideyoshi
and his Japanese invaders in the Sixteenth Century. Yuan Shih-kai
had been personally recommended by this General Wu Chang-ching as
a young man of ability and energy to the famous Li Hung Chang, who
as Tientsin Viceroy and High Commissioner for the Northern Seas
was responsible for the conduct of Korean affairs. The future