China had been ruled
by emperors for over 2000 years.
But on this day, October 10, 1911,
it was going to end.
The day
started like any other.
A desire for change
was widely felt,
but a revolution wasn't expected.
There have been various resistance groups
that wanted to overthrow the emperor,
but they had always been scattered.
A few years earlier,
they were united by this man and on October 10,
he was in the United States completely unaware of
what was about to happen
in central China.
Sections of the army,
inspired by his cause,
decided to act on their own.
They took up arms against the local viceroy,
and surprisingly,
they managed to take his residence.
The Viceroy floods and the telegram was sent
across the country saying that their province
was taken.
This inspires
spontaneous acts of mutiny across the Empire.
The Emperor's last days and the end of China's
incredibly long imperial history had begun.
This is the fall of the Qing Dynasty,
with Hindsight.
The Qing Dynasty was founded
in the 17th century
and less than a hundred years later
became the largest and the most prosperous empire
in the world.
During this period,
the ceramic industry reached a new height.
Artistic expression
flourished and the first centuries were stable,
peaceful and prosperous.
But their grandeur slowly demised.
The ruling class was an ethnic minority.
They came from the Manchuria province.
The majority of his subjects were Han Chinese
and the population enjoyed
a rich diversity of indigenous peoples.
But the elites distanced themselves
from their subjects.
They identified themselves
as outsiders
that had conquered the Chinese
and now subjected them to their rule.
This is how they had always ruled successfully.
But in a mid-18th century, the problems began.
Their agricultural technology improved.
New crops were introduced, and as a result,
the population exploded.
But in the mid-19th century, more than 400
million Chinese inhabited the empire.
This led to some of the ruling elites
to move to the countryside
where they subjected their rule
with an iron fist.
These tensions evolved into protests,
and these protests
evolved into the first underground society
to oppose the emperor.
The empire began to crack,
but was stable.
A few decades later,
the imperial powers of Europe
start to trade with the Chinese.
Great Britain tried to set up a trade,
but the emperor refused to negotiate.
They managed to strike a deal on trading opium.
Just a few years later, and all seemed well.
But the Emperor
provoked the British by burning 20,000
of their bales.
And Great Britain declared war.
These were the start of the Opium Wars.
The Chinese
were swiftly defeated.
And after they won
the Brits seized control of Hong Kong.
They took hundreds of millions
of pounds
of silver
to compensate for the opium that they had lost.
And they made the Chinese sign
blatantly unfair trade agreements.
And in the meantime, to their south
France seized South East Asia
and Japan
took Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula,
and the foreign powers
established a sphere of influence
to control China's trade.
It was 1900.
The once mighty and prosperous
Qing dynasty was weak and everybody
sheltered.
The Empress clamped down
hard on anybody propagating reform.
She was conservative and against modernization.
She, as all the emperors
before her, had always done,
positioned herself as an outsider,
a conqueror and party therefor enjoyed
very little loyalty from the ordinary Chinese
Foreign powers
were increasing their influence in the empire,
and they began to crumble from within.
In 1908, Puyi became the new Emperor.
He was only two years old,
and by 1911, at age six,
he would oversee the greatest demise
of this century.
After the Viceroy floods
and Wu Chiang was captured,
the revolutionaries
sent telegrams across the country.
18 provinces immediately joined in revolt.
The leader of this secret society, completely
caught off guard, made his way to China.
He arrived only a month later
when elections were held,
and he was chosen to become the first president
of the Republic of China.
This moment marked the beginning of the People's
Republic of China as we know it today.
The emperor stepped down,
but remained a public figure.
Some were hoping to restore the monarchy
and for short periods they did.
But as the years passed by,
the desire for restoring the monarchy
and rebuilding the dynasty slowly disappeared.
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