IX

KUANG HSU--AS EMPEROR AND REFORMER

AS a man, there are few characters in Chinese history that are
more interesting than Kuang Hsu. He had all the caprices of
genius with their corresponding weakness and strength. He could
wield a pen with the vigour of a Caesar, threaten his greatest
viceroys, dismiss his leading conservative officials, introduce
the most sweeping and far-reaching reforms that have ever been
thought of by the Chinese people, and then run from a woman as
though the very devil was after him.

He has been variously rated as a genius, an imbecile and a fool.
Let us grant that he was not brilliant. Let us rate him as an
imbecile, and then let us try to account for his having brought
into the palace every ingenious toy and every wonderful and
useful invention and discovery of the past twenty or thirty years
with the exception of the X-rays and liquid air. Let us try to
explain why it was that an imbecile would purchase every book
that had been printed in the Chinese language, concerning foreign
subjects of learning, up to the time when he was dethroned. Let
us tell why it was that an imbecile would study all those foreign
books without help, without an assistant, without a teacher, for
three years, from the time he bought them in 1895 till 1898,
before he began issuing the most remarkable series of edicts that
have ever come from the pen of an Oriental monarch in the same
length of time. And let us explain how it was that an imbecile