The revolutionaries managed to call together representatives of their party and of the troops to a National Convention at Nanking. They were seriously handicapped by the absence of Sun Yat-sen, who now hastened back to China from London. Few of the members of the revolutionary group--heretofore forced to operate as a secret society--were well enough known to have the prestige needed to form a new government. Huang Hsing, Sun's chief military follower, sought to manage in the interim, but not until the arrival of Sun Yat-sen in Shanghai on December 24, 1911, was there a prospect of consolidation. Five days later the National Convention elected him president of the Provisional Government of the United Provinces. On January 1, 1912, he took office; with the adoption of the Gregorian calendar now in use, this date became the first day of the Year I of the Chinese Republic. With the presidency there was created a cabinet, whose ministers did not yet hold any specific portfolios. The portions of the country under revolutionary control were ruled for the time being by a temporary system which combined the military and civilian governments in each province. Meanwhile, the Empire was still the internationally recognized government of China and continued to function in Peking. Thoroughly frightened, the imperial court saw no alternative to calling into its service the one man who could be expected to master the situation--Yüan Shih-k'ai, who had ruthlessly terminated the experiment of the Hundred Days in 1898 and whipped up the first effective modern army of the Empire. Yüan, who had fallen into disfavor as a result of court machinations a few years before, waited his time, receiving offers from both sides. Finally he went to Peking, on October 27, 1911. The negotiations which ensued over the establishment of a new government and the pacification of the country brought into the spotlight two of the outstanding personalities of modern China--men whose characters were to mold the institutions in a highly plastic society and whose influences were to last beyond their deaths. Sun Yat-sen, a Cantonese with many overseas connections, stood outside the old-style elite--a constitutionalist and an idealist. Yüan was a soldier and diplomat from the North, narrow in outlook, altogether a tradition-bound official despite his up-to-date military ideas--an opportunist and a realist in politics. Rarely have two leaders represented such opposite extremes.