So long as the Emperor devoted himself to the creation of new offices he found little active opposition on the part of the conservatives, while the reformers did everything in their power to encourage him. The extent of the movement it is not easy to estimate. It opened up the intensely anti-foreign province of Hupeh, and transformed it into a section where railroads were to be built connecting the north with the south. It opened up the great mining province of Shansi and the lumber regions of Manchuria. It started railroads which are now lines of trade for the whole empire. When he issued the fifth edict substituting Western science for the literary essay in the great examinations, letters and telegrams began to pour in upon us at the Peking University from all parts of the empire, asking us to reserve room for the senders in the school. Their tuition was enclosed in their letters, and among those who came were the grandson of the Emperor's tutor, graduates of various degrees, men of rank, and the sons of wealthy gentlemen who had not yet obtained degrees. Numerous requests came to our graduates to teach English in official families, one being employed to teach the grandson of Li Hung-chang, and another the sons of a relative of the royal family. But when his reforms led the Emperor to dispense with useless offices, as in his twenty-first, twenty-fourth and twenty-sixth edicts, for the purpose of retrenchment, and to dismiss recalcitrant officials for disobedience to his commands, a howl arose which was heard throughout the empire. The six members of the Board of Rites dismissed in edict twenty-three, with certain sympathizers to give them face, went to the Empress Dowager at the Summer Palace, represented to her that the boy whom she had placed upon the throne was steering the ship of state to certain destruction, and begged that she would come and once more take the helm. She listened to them with the attention and deference for which she has always been famed, and then dismissed them without any intimation as to what her course would be. When the Emperor heard what they were doing, he sent a courier post-haste to call Yuan Shih-kai for an interview at the palace. When Yuan came, he ordered him to return to Tien-tsin, dispose of his superior officer, the Governor-General Jung Lu, and bring the army corps of 12,500 troops of which he was in charge to Peking, surround the Summer Palace, preventing any one from going in or coming out, thus making the Empress Dowager a prisoner, and allowing him to go on with his work of reform.