Книга только для ознакомления
.
We shall soon see that Yuan cared no more for the "confidential
instructions" of the Empress Dowager, when his statesmanship was
involved, than for the orders of the Emperor. His business was to
govern and protect the people of his province, and thanks to his
wise statesmanship and strong character "there was not only no
foreigner killed during the troubled season of anxiety and
flight" of 1900, and "comparatively little of the suffering
elsewhere so common."
And now we come to another plot which indicates the character of
Yuan and two other great viceroys, Chang Chih-tung, now Grand
Secretary, and Liu Kun-yi, Viceroy of the Yangtse-kiang
provinces. It is a well-known fact that during the Boxer
rebellion the Empress Dowager was so influenced by the promises
of the Boxers to drive out all the foreigners that she sent out
some very unwise edicts that they should be massacred in the
provinces. Yuan and his two confreres secretly stipulated that if
the foreign men of war would keep away from the ports of their
provinces they would maintain peace and protect the foreigners no
matter what orders came from the throne. So that when these
confidential instructions came from the palace to massacre the
foreigners, in order to gain time they pretended to believe that
no such orders could have come from the throne. They must be
forgeries of the Boxers. They therefore refused to believe them
until they had sent their own special messenger all the way to
Peking to get the edict from the hands of Her Majesty and bring
it to them in their provinces
|
