Читать книгу China's Revolution, 1911-1912: A Historical and Political Record of the Civil War онлайн

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Now, the man whose carelessness in making the bomb caused the premature explosion in the Russian Concession and forced the Revolutionary party to make their coup before they were ready was one Sun Wu, an expert bomb-maker. He bears the marks of the explosion to this day. Sun Wu was taken away immediately by his friends and concealed until he was well enough to join his comrades. One of his comrades was the aforementioned Liu King, who later became Inspector-General of the Republican Government of Hupeh. Liu King's wife was the woman who had undertaken to throw the bomb with which the Revolution was to be started. The story is a most fascinating one, and nothing better can be done at the moment than to reproduce the story as told to a newspaper man long after the great war had seemed to be fairly well settled in favour of the Republicans. Liu's personal appearance proclaims him an extremist, said the report. He is a young man, about thirty, with unusual eagerness in his eyes, wears foreign civilian clothes and gold-rimmed spectacles, has a moustache but, of course, no queue. He comes from a family of scholars among the gentry of Siangyang, in North Hupeh. If he had not gone to Japan, he would probably have been a scholar of the old Chinese type and an official, also of the old type, with a boughten office. In fact, it was whispered that many thousands of taels which he used in the Revolutionary cause were given him by relatives in the expectation that he would buy a taotaiship (magistracy).