Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/72

 was, for instance, one division of Northern troops under a General Nieh which, although the fact has never been properly chronicled, fought with the utmost gallantry against the international armies around Tientsin, advancing against entrenched positions until it was almost entirely destroyed. There were also some well-trained troops at Nanking and Hankow, and above all there was Yuan Shih-kai's picked division in Shantung.

It was this division which was the germ of the modern Chinese army. When the fugitive Empress Dowager Tsu Hsi and the Emperor Kwang Hsu returned to Peking from far-off Hsianfu in 1902, and sanctioned Yuan Shih-kai's scheme for a National Army, events marched so rapidly—for Asia at least—that by 1905 Yuan Shih-kai as viceroy of the metropolitan province of Chihli and chief of the Army Board was able to hold army manœuvres in which 100,000 well-trained men participated.

At the time this created a great sensation: it was felt by all far-seeing men that Yuan Shih-kai was deliberately raising a force to take the place of the Eight Banners, or Manchu army-corps, which had been the means of effecting the Manchu conquest of China in the seventeenth century and whose organization—