Now Nicky embraced his own vision of Asian empire along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Willy sent him a letter with a sketch entitled ‘Against the Yellow Peril’. ‘I’ll certainly do all in my power to keep Europe quiet and guard the rear of Russia,’ Willy wrote to Nicky in April 1895, ‘so nobody shall hamper your action towards the Far East. For that is clearly the great task of the future for Russia to cultivate the Asian Continent and defend Europe from the inroads of the Great Yellow race.’
Nicky, backed by Willy, forced Japan to surrender some of its gains, and bribed China to grant concessions to France and Germany – and Port Arthur to Russia. After consulting Tibetan and Mongolian mystics, the tsar planned to seize Manchuria and Korea, with Queen Min keen for Russian backing in order to escape Japanese dominance. Embittered at losing their Chinese prizes, the Japanese were determined on vengeance, launching Operation Foxhunt. Min was the fox.
At dawn in October 1895, fifty assassins broke into the Gyeongbokgung Palace. They secured the king, then hunted for Min: her femininity provoked their special fury. They found her hiding among her ladies-in-waiting. The women were killed. The
In Beijing, Emperor Guangxu invited Cixi back into power. ‘We should comprehensively adopt western ways,’ he decided, and create a constitutional monarchy. Yet he and his ministers also feared female power and ordered Cixi’s murder. Instead she swept them aside, beheaded the reformers and imprisoned Guangxu. Manchu misrule now inspired a Cantonese medical student to overthrow the dynasty.
‘We mustn’t miss the opportunity of a lifetime,’ declared Sun Yat-sen, aged twenty-nine, who loathed the Manchus and believed that he should be the revolutionary leader of a free Chinese republic. Son of a tailor and porter, the young Christian doctor helped found the Revive China Society, backed by a Shanghai businessman called Charlie Song, a former Christian preacher, one of whose daughters would one day marry Sun. Their rebellion ended in disaster. Cixi had captured rebels beheaded.
Single-minded, obsessional and politically as remorseless as he was supple, Dr Sun escaped to join his wealthy brother in Hawaii – where another female potentate, a remarkable queen, was fighting for its independence against the other new Pacific power: America.
QUEEN LILI‘UOKALANI AND TEDDY ROOSEVELT: THE ABUNDANCE AND INGENUITY OF AMERICA
A singer-songwriter, a ukele player, an amorous enthusiast and Hawaiian patriot, Lili’uokalani was fifty-five when she succeeded her jovial brother Kala¯kaua as queen, but she had long dominated Hawaii as regent. Lili’uokalani, unhappily married to an American merchant’s son with whom she lived at a pillared mansion Washington Place, was a cousin of the Conqueror’s dynasty, a long-serving courtier to the kings and a rich landowner. She wrote her best song ‘
Lili’uokalani was determined to halt American expansion and defeat the American sugar barons. In 1887, their Annexation Club, backed by a settler militia, the Honolulu Rifles, forced Lili’uokalani and her brother to accept the so-called Bayonet Constitution that further weakened the monarchy and granted the vote to all whites but only some Hawaiians – and no Asians.
Yet America, like Japan, was projecting its new naval power across the Pacific. In 1867, it took advantage of its Guano Act* to annex the Hawaiian island of Midway, while the queen’s brother, King Kala¯kaua, also granted Pearl Harbor to America. Now in Washington, DC, a new assistant secretary of the navy watched, and planned to join the Pacific carve-up.
Teddy Roosevelt, the boy who had watched Lincoln’s cortège from his window, was a weak asthmatic who had been home-schooled. Aspiring to be a scientist, he filled his room at home with stuffed creatures, nicknamed the Roosevelt Museum of Natural History by his siblings. Recovering his health, he learned to box at Harvard, emerging as an eccentric with the maniacal energy that is often the antidote to depression. After the death of his father, this irrepressible, pugnacious dynamo with round spectacles, rasping voice and ‘castanet-like snapping teeth’ entered ‘the arena’: ‘I intended,’ he said, ‘to be one of the governing class.’
