So far, the strongest move in the rebellion was the declaration of Foreign Minister Wu Ting Fang that if Britain joined the three monarchical powers in loaning Yuan money, a trade boycott would be instituted in the southern and central provinces against foreign trade, of which Britain held the largest share. This won Hongkong, and Hongkong was able to hold British diplomacy on Downing Street, London, and indirectly on Legation Street, Peking. It was a master move, as brilliantly effective as Napoleon’s Berlin Decree of November 21, 1806, blockading British commerce, and only for it the rebellion would have been swamped by four of the six nations arming and provisioning Yuan, the Manchu and the north. Whatever comes in the next few years, this cry surely is forever in the heart of Lincoln’s and Washington’s America: “Long live the republican idea of distributed wealth and distributed liberty in good old China, America’s yellow brother across the narrowing purple Pacific.” On Christmas day, 1911, the steamship _Cleveland_, from New York and San Francisco, with five hundred American world tourists, arrived at Hongkong. The republican army immediately invited them to Canton to see their barracks at the Five Hundred Genii Temple and elsewhere, the resolution saying: “as America was the first country to become a republic.” Auspiciously on December 26th, Sun Yat Sen arrived at Shanghai, two war-ships escorting his launch up the river from the Wusung bar. He immediately took an automobile at the bund wharf and proceeded to Wu’s residence, where conferences were held, and Nanking decided on as the provisional capital of the fighting republic. The republican Chinese were delighted that the Americans had eleven war-ships at Shanghai.