In the final weeks of January 1912, General Yuan Shikai brokered delicate negotiations between the crumbling Qing court in Beijing and Sun Yat-sen's provisional republican government in Nanjing, working out the terms under which the boy emperor Puyi would abdicate. The talks, concluding in February, would end more than two thousand years of dynastic rule in China.
Six-year-old Emperor Puyi sat on the Dragon Throne largely unaware that his empire was dissolving around him. Real power had shifted to Yuan Shikai, the ambitious general who commanded China's most modern army and who saw in the revolution both a threat and an opportunity.
Through late January negotiations, Yuan extracted guarantees of favorable treatment for the imperial family and, more importantly for himself, assurances that he would become president of the new republic rather than Sun Yat-sen, who had already stepped aside to preserve national unity. Telegrams flew between Beijing and Nanjing as terms were finalized.
The abdication edict issued weeks later ended the Qing dynasty and the entire imperial system dating back to the Qin dynasty in 221 BC. Yet the republic born from these negotiations proved fragile, sliding within years into warlordism, foreshadowing decades of upheaval before the Communist victory in 1949.