Had China possessed a man with the administrative and military talents of George Washington, a genuine republic might have developed from beneath the tutelage of a strong military ruler. Sun Yat-sen, because of his Southern birth, his thoroughly revolutionary tenets, and his impatience with the jobbery of petty politics, was not prepared for the presidential office in Peking. He might have headed a revolutionary government elsewhere in China but not a carry-over administration in Peking. Yüan misjudged his own opportunities and went back to the ritual of the Empire in an endeavor to place himself on a widely coveted throne. In December, 1915, after a circus of plebiscites and constitutional councils had been provided, the constitutional monarchy was proclaimed. In the same month Yüan performed the ancient ceremonials of the Imperial Sacrifice to Heaven, clad in the traditional gowns of the emperor. On Christmas Day, 1915, the province of Yünnan--in the extreme southwest of China--revolted against Yüan. The revolt spread, and in March, 1916, Yüan renounced the throne. His dream had come to a dismal end; he died on June 6, 1916. In the same month Vice-President Li Yüan-hung--the imperial officer whose political career began when he was dragged from beneath his bed in 1911--assumed the title of president. The National Assembly was convoked. The Provisional Constitution was put into effect again. And, as a sign of the times, the provincial military commanders took the new title _tuchün_ in place of the older version _tutu_. _The Phantom Republic in Peking_ When the Manchu Empire fell in 1911-1912, it left the military power to Yüan Shih-k'ai, who cloaked it with the Republic which he appropriated. When Yüan died, control of the armies passed to the provincial military commandants whom he had installed as a prime feature of his "strong man" regime. With the passing of the Empire, civilian bureaucracy fell into disuse yet retained just enough cohesion to serve the purposes of Yüan, so far as they were to be served by government. After Yüan's death, the governments in the provinces followed the flow of power--to the provincial commanders. The Indian summer of the parliamentary Republic was founded upon its toleration of the army system which Yüan had left standing in its fragments. The weight of power was now to go into these fragments and not into the Republic, which fell heir merely to Yüan's naive and almost contemptuously conceived "constitutional" show.