The shockwaves from the Grand Council meeting radiated outward from the Forbidden City, unsettling the deep, stagnant waters of the Qing bureaucracy. That evening, in a lavish, private dining room within Prince Chun's opulent mansion, the old guard gathered. They were the ones who had the most to lose from the new order: powerful Manchu nobles of the Imperial Clan, conservative grandees, and men like Grand Councillor Ronglu, who had been cast out of the inner circle of power.
The atmosphere was not one of plotting or conspiracy, but of deep, existential dread. They felt the world shifting beneath their feet, the traditions and privileges that had sustained their families for two hundred years being threatened by a new, terrifyingly efficient regime.
Prince Chun, a man of immense traditional authority as the biological father of the historical Guangxu Emperor, presided over the gathering. His face, usually placid and dignified, was a mask of grim fury.
"A military academy run by a Chinese provincial like Li Hongzhang?" he fumed, slamming his wine cup down on the table so hard that the liquor sloshed onto the fine silk tablecloth. "A unified command structure? This is not a reform. This is a direct assault on the Eight Banners, on the very foundation of Manchu authority in this empire! They seek to replace our warriors with peasant scholars who have read a few barbarian books!"
Grand Councillor Ronglu, his own power now greatly diminished, nodded in fervent agreement. His fear was more intellectual, more philosophical. "And the other decrees… the centralization of the salt and iron monopolies is a vulgar theft from the gentry. But it is the last one that chills my blood." He looked around the table, his eyes wide with a strange, almost superstitious fear. "The standardization of the axles."
The other nobles looked at him, confused.
"It seems a trivial matter, does it not?" Ronglu continued, his voice a low, intense whisper. "But it is not. It is an omen. A symbol. That is the method of a tyrant. It is the work of a Legalist, not a Confucian ruler who governs by virtue of his moral example. It is the ghost of Qin Shi Huang himself, returned to haunt this dynasty." The irony of his words, how terrifyingly close he was to the impossible truth, was completely lost on him. To him, it was a metaphor for a style of rule he found abhorrent.
They all understood the danger. They could not openly oppose the new regency. Prince Gong held the military. Empress Dowager Ci'an held the seal of legitimacy. And the boy Emperor, with his strange and unsettling 'insights,' was seen by many as having the true Mandate of Heaven. To challenge them directly in the court would be political suicide.
"We cannot fight them in the Grand Council," a Manchu duke conceded, his voice heavy with resignation. "They have consolidated their power too quickly."
"Then we will not fight them in the Council," Ronglu said, a cunning, desperate light entering his eyes. "We will fight them in the provinces. We will fight them in the muck and mud of the bureaucracy. A decree from the capital is one thing. Its implementation across a million li of territory is another entirely."
A new, more insidious strategy began to form around the dinner table. It was not a plan for a rebellion, but for a war of a thousand paper cuts, a campaign of passive resistance and bureaucratic sabotage designed to bleed the reforms to death long before they could ever bear fruit.
"Our friends and allies are everywhere," Prince Chun mused, stroking his beard. "Governors, magistrates, local officials who owe their positions to us, and to the Empress Dowager Cixi's former patronage. They will understand the danger."
The plan was simple. They would use their vast network of influence to quietly obstruct the new edicts at every level. When the decrees arrived in the provincial capitals, the official copies would be "misplaced." The instructions would be "misunderstood." Provincial governors would send back memorials to the capital, claiming a lack of funds, a shortage of qualified men, or unforeseen local difficulties that made implementation impossible at this time. They would praise the wisdom of the reforms in public while ensuring, in private, that nothing actually changed.
The edict on standardizing axle widths would be met with claims that the local terrain was unsuitable for the new roads, or that the cost of retrofitting carts would bankrupt the local peasantry and spark unrest. The national resource survey would be bogged down in disputes over land rights and ancestral claims. And the centralization of the salt and iron monopolies would be met with a wall of organized resistance from the local gentry and merchants, who would be quietly encouraged by the conservative faction to see the move as a tyrannical overreach by the central government.
"We will stir up resentment," Ronglu said, a cruel smile on his lips. "We will quietly spread rumors. That the new regency is being controlled by radical, anti-Manchu elements. That Li Hongzhang seeks to create a new army loyal only to himself. That the reverence for the ancestors is being replaced by a worship of foreign machines. We will drown their grand plans in a sea of ink and excuses."
This was their new war. It was a war to be fought not with swords, but with delays. Not with armies, a war to be fought not with armies, but with endless petitions and feigned incompetence. They would not openly defy the Emperor's decree; they would simply smother it with the immense, suffocating weight of the imperial bureaucracy itself. They would prove that the dragon on the throne, for all its fire, could still be entangled and brought down by the countless silken threads of tradition and inertia. They were establishing themselves as the new primary antagonists, the defenders of the old order, ready to fight a long, bitter, and undeclared war against the forces of change.