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That tireless hatcher of conspiracies Dr Sun Yat-sen, now forty-four, determined ‘to expel the Tatar barbarians [Manchus], revive China, establish a republic and distribute land equally’, watched this from his exile. He had travelled for a decade, seeking backers and ideologies to help win him power in China. At one point the government trapped him in the London embassy, and he was about to be sent home for beheading when a press outcry forced his release. He had launched at least seven failed revolutions and, on 10 October 1911, he was in the USA planning his next when soldiers in Wuhan mutinied. The regent sent Cixi’s long-serving general Yuan Shikai, appointed prime minister, to crush them, but rebellion spread quickly. Sun rushed home.

In December, revolutionary delegates in Nanjing elected Sun Yat-sen as provisional president of the first Chinese Republic. Arriving in Shanghai, Sun set up headquarters in the mansion of Charlie Song, whose daughters Qingling and Meiling were still studying in America, but the eldest, the twenty-three-year-old Ailing, charmed the new president, who was married with several concubines, all of whom he treated appallingly. Ailing did not reciprocate. And Sun was powerless: he was not the only president of China.

In Beijing, General Yuan Shikai was offered the leadership by the revolutionaries if he deposed the monarchy. On 12 February 1912, he orchestrated Puyi’s abdication – the end of 250 years of Manchus and two millennia of emperors – and, as Sun resigned, became president.^* Yuan, born into the gentry, lived in a traditional Chinese household with a wife and nine concubines with bound feet, while for his health he drank human milk, delivered by wet nurses. Now this conservative paladin, who disdained Dr Sun as a cosmopolitan amateur, embraced power and its trappings, being escorted around by a corps of giant bodyguards in uniforms trimmed with leopard-skin. A mix of agitators, generals and gangsters seized power. In Shanghai, elegant fulcrum of capitalism and fashion, the criminal Green Gang bestrode business and politics: a revolutionary, Chen Qimei, linked to the gangsters, captured Shanghai for Sun. When Sun was challenged by a former supporter, Chen ordered a henchman to assassinate him. The assassin was a follower of Sun named Chiang Kai-shek, son of a poor family who had been educated in Japan. Chiang would become the ruler of China.

In China’s first real elections, forty million voted and Sun’s nationalist KMT party won the most seats in a national assembly that now sat in Beijing. Both sides, allied to the criminal gangs, tried to kill each other. Yuan survived one attempt and hired the Green Gang to kill Sun. In March 1913, he murdered Sun’s nominee for premier and dismissed the assembly.

Sun fled to Japan, accompanied by Charlie Song, joined by his daughters, who became the leader’s secretaries. Sun fell in love with Ailing, but when she married someone her own age, he moved on to his new assistant, the middle sister, Qingling, fresh from Wellesley College, Massachusetts: ‘I just can’t get Qingling out of my head,’ he confessed. ‘I have encountered love for the first time.’ Qingling flirted, warning him she might marry President Yuan and ‘be an empress’. Sun appealed to her father, who stated pointedly, ‘We’re a Christian family; no daughter will become anybody’s concubine, king, emperor or president.’ But Qingling, aged twenty-one, started an affair with the fifty-year-old Sun, her ‘Big Busy Man’. They eloped to Tokyo and married.

Sun’s return looked unlikely as President Yuan dismissed parliament and declared himself emperor.

A FAMILY WEDDING: THREE EMPERORS AND THREE PASHAS

Yet Yuan was not dictator for long. When he died of uraemia, the Central Country splintered into pieces, ruled by three weak governments while real power rested with the warlords and gangsters, led by a man who was a cross between the two. Zhang Zuolin, who called himself the Mukden Tiger, had started as a skinny brigand, nicknamed Pimple, but now he dominated northern China with his own army of 300,000. Taking control of Beijing, he toyed with restoring the Manchu. But they were irrelevant now.^*

Yet in Europe the dynasties remained central. In May 1913, the kaiser, babbling about the imminence of war, hosted his cousins Tsar Nicholas II and King-Emperor George V, at the 1,000-guest wedding in Berlin of his only daughter, Viktoria Luise, to Prince Ernst August of Hanover, first cousin to the British and Russian monarchs.