Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China Read Free

was born in 1876 in the county of Lulong, about a hundred miles east of Peking, and just south of the Great Wall, where the vast North China plain runs up against the mountains.  He was the eldest of four sons of a country schoolteacher.
     
    He was handsome and had a powerful presence, which struck all who met him.  Several blind fortune-tellers who felt his face predicted he would rise to a powerful position.
     
    He was a gifted calligrapher, a talent held in high esteem, and in 1908 a warlord named Wang Huai-qing, who was visiting Lulong, noticed the fine calligraphy on a plaque over the gate of the main temple and asked to meet the man who had done it.  General Wang took to the thirty two-year-old Xue and invited him to become his aide de -camp.
     
    He proved extremely efficient, and was soon promoted to quartermaster. This involved extensive traveling, and he started to acquire food shops of his own around Lulong and on the other side of the Great Wall, in Manchuria. His rapid rise was boosted when he helped General Wang to suppress an uprising in Inner Mongolia.  In almost no time he had amassed a fortune, and he designed and built for himself an eighty-one-room mansion at Lulong.
     
    In the decade after the end of the empire, no government established authority over the bulk of the country.
     
    Powerful warlords were soon fighting for control of the central government in Peking.  Xue's faction, headed by a warlord called Wu Pei-fu, dominated the nominal government in Peking in the early 1920s.  In 1911 Xue became inspector general of the Metropolitan Police and joint head of the Public Works Department in Peking.  He commanded twenty regions on both sides of the Great Wall, and more than 10,000 mounted police and infantry.  The police job gave him power; the public works post gave him patronage.
     
    Allegiances were fickle.  In May 1923 General Xue's faction decided to get rid of the president, Li Yuan-hong, whom it had installed in office only a year earlier.  In league with a general called Feng Yu-xiang, a Christian warlord, who entered legend by baptizing his troops en masse with a firehose, Xue mobilized his 10,000 men and surrounded the main government buildings in Peking, demanding the back pay which the bankrupt government owed his men.  His real aim was to humiliate President Li and force him out of office.  Li refused to resign, so Xue ordered his men to cut off the water and electricity to the presidential palace.  After a few days, conditions inside the building became unbearable, and on the night of 13 June President Li abandoned his malodorous residence and fled the capital for the port city of  Tianjin, seventy miles to the southeast.
     
    In China the authority of an office lay not only in its holder but in the official seals.  No document was valid, even if it had the president's signature on it, unless it carried his seal.  Knowing that no one could take over the presidency without them, President Li left the seals with one of his concubines, who was convalescing in a hospital in Peking run by French missionaries.
     
    As President Li was nearing Tianjin his train was stopped by armed police, who told him to hand over the seals.  At first he refused to say where he had hidden them, but after several hours he relented.  At three in the morning General Xue went to the French hospital to collect the seals from the concubine.  When he appeared by her bedside, the concubine at first refused even to look at him:  "How can I hand over the president's seals to a mere policeman?"  she said haughtily.  But General Xue, resplendent in his full uniform, looked so intimidating that she soon meekly placed the seals in his hands.
     
    Over the next four months, Xue used his police to make sure that the man his faction wanted to see as president, Tsao Kun, would win what was billed as one of China's first elections.  The 804 members of parliament had to be bribed.  Xue and General Feng