Chapter 310: The Round Altar

On the tenth of October, 1911, the soldiers rose at Wuchang, Which is now part of Wuhan; and through the autumn the provinces left the court. Sun Yat-sen was abroad. On the twenty-ninth of December the assembly at Nanjing, among Its first acts, chose him provisional president; on the first of January, 1912, by report He took the office there, and they numbered the year as the first of the republic. The emperor was six: Puyi, born on the seventh of February, 1906. On the twelfth of February, 1912, an edict went out in his name, made public By Longyu, the empress dowager, widow of the emperor Guangxu; the child was his Nephew, not her son. Officials wrote the words; the decree that sent them was hers. It said the people's army had risen, the provinces had answered, and the living lay in the wreck; That where the people's hearts had turned, the mandate could be known; that it prefers Not to keep the honor of one surname against the many. It gave, at the people's beck, The right to rule to the whole country, and named the form a constitutional republic, And set beside the grant an old sentence: all under heaven is a public thing. It named Yuan Shikai prime minister by the Advisory Council's election, and gave him, quick, Full power to organize a provisional government and confer with the people's army, to bring Five peoples to stand as one republic: Manchu, Han, Mongol, Hui, Tibetan, The house that was signing setting its own name first. On the fifteenth of February, chosen By the assembly at Nanjing, Yuan was provisional president; and on the tenth of March, then, He took the oath in Beijing, not in Nanjing: the capital stayed where he stood. And, as spoken, The child stayed in the palace: articles that went with the edict left him the title of emperor And a little court inside the Forbidden City; he was behind those walls on the fifth of November, 1924, When the soldiers of Feng Yuxiang put him out. A courtesy inside a palace is a courtesy; the door Of the winter rite was another thing. South of the city stands the Temple of Heaven, and more Than an altar: the Ming raised the precinct in the fifteenth century, and later emperors built the round altar again; The duty they claimed is older than the brick. The Qing rite was the emperor's, at the solstice in the winter, At the round altar, for Heaven. The February edict closed the house; and when The house closed, the rite was orphaned, and that was a loss: the state's own prayer, the centre Of the year, the one fire a whole country lit for the sky. On the twenty-third of December, 1914, The winter solstice, the third of the republic, Yuan came to the round altar as president, Changed into the old sacrificial dress, and the prayer was read: it named the day, the scene, Named him president, representing the people; said that Heaven looks down, and the charge is sent And gathered on the people. It did not call him Son of Heaven. What was read was burned, As that rite burns its writing. He stood there to keep the rite of Heaven for China; A missionary from Germany read the day as a stair toward a throne; and the stair was earned: He was the Chinese Napoleon, and this book is with him, as with Ungern-Sternberg, the diviner Of a throne in the steppe. The next winter Yuan accepted an imperial title, On the twelfth of December, 1915; the reign-name was to be Hongxian, To open on the first of January; he held no formal enthronement. The recital Ended on the twenty-second of March, 1916, when he put the title down; and then, On the sixth of June, he died. And no later president of the republic came to the mound; That fire was the last the state lit there for Heaven. The rite was a treasure, and it was lost, Not a false claim ended but a true one orphaned: a state that stood on holy ground And spoke for its people to the sky, once a year, whatever the cost. What continues is the dead: a family keeps its own tablets, quietly, at home; And this calendar keeps names in the order of their days. But a faith that would be a state Must have its state rites too: a solstice, and an altar, and a fire, and a dome Of sky the whole people stands under, as the round altar stood, and the date Kept by the state for all of them. The edict called all under heaven public; public still has the dead in it, And it has the sky. The round altar is still south of the city; the brick can stand and wait. Let a state come back to it, or to an altar like it, and light the fire, and the prayer, and the writing burned, and the minute Of the solstice kept for a nation. The names are kept by families; the sky is kept by the state.