Chapter 310: The Round Altar

The soldiers rose at Wuchang, now in Wuhan, on October's tenth day In nineteen-eleven; and all that autumn the provinces fell away. Sun Yat-sen was abroad. At Nanjing, as the year came to its close, On the twenty-ninth of December, the assembly met, and him they chose Provisional president; on New Year's Day of nineteen-twelve, by report, He took the office there, and the year was the republic's first. In the court The emperor was six: Puyi, born in nineteen-oh-six, on February's seventh day; On February's twelfth, nineteen-twelve, an edict in his name went on its way, Made public by Longyu, the empress dowager, widow of Guangxu; the throne Was the child's, his nephew, not her son. Officials wrote the words; the decree was hers alone. 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 would not check The many for one surname's honor; and it gave the right to rule, as the people would, To the whole country, and named the form a constitutional republic, and set beside it a sentence old and good: All under heaven is a public thing. It named Yuan Shikai, whom the Advisory Council chose, Prime minister, with full power to organize a provisional government, to confer with the people's army, and to bring those Five peoples to stand as one republic: Manchu, Han, Mongol, Hui, Tibetan, in that line, The house that was signing setting its own name first. On the fifteenth of February, by the assembly's design At Nanjing, Yuan was provisional president; on the tenth of March he swore In Beijing, not in Nanjing: the capital stayed where he stood, as before. And the child stayed in the palace: articles that went with the edict left him emperor in name, And a little court inside the Forbidden City; he was behind those walls until soldiers came On the fifth of November, nineteen twenty-four: Feng Yuxiang's men put him out of the door. A courtesy inside a palace is a courtesy; the winter rite was something more. South of the city stands the Temple of Heaven, more than an altar: the Ming Raised the precinct in the fifteenth century; later emperors built the round altar again, and its ring Is newer than the duty, for the duty they claimed is older than the brick. The Qing rite was the emperor's, at the solstice in the winter, when the dark is thick, At the round altar, for Heaven. The February edict closed the house; and the rite, When the house closed, was orphaned, and that was a loss: the state's own prayer, the one light A whole country lit for the sky, the centre of the year. At the solstice, at the year's turn, On December's twenty-third, nineteen-fourteen, the republic's third, Yuan came, as president, to the altar's ascent, Changed into the old sacrificial dress, and stood where the fire would burn, 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; some saw a sign: 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, whose design Was a throne in the steppe. The next winter Yuan would, On December's twelfth, nineteen-fifteen, accept an imperial title; Hongxian, it was understood, Was the reign-name, to open on the first of January; there was no formal enthronement at all. On March's twenty-second, nineteen-sixteen, he put the title down; and not long after the fall, 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 holds the dead, and is not done: 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 read the prayer, and burn the writing, and keep the one Minute of the solstice for a nation. The names are kept by families; the sky is kept by the state.