In early 1912, the Qing Dynasty officially transferred its right to rule to the Republic of China, who named Yuan Shikai as their president in exchange for ending the civil war. Shikai, however, would soon prove just as power-hungry and authoritarian as the imperial system he sought to replace.
The first decade of the 1900s witnessed a final attempt by the Qing Dynasty to reform its outmoded systems of governance and forge a new Chinese nation state. Those attempts eventually failed in the wake of a massive revolution against the last dynasty of China, which succeeded in 1912.
The Meiji Revolution very rapidly changed nearly every aspect of public life in Japan. Such rapid progress led, inevitably, to counter-revolutions among various groups who felt discarded by the march of modernization, including a large body of samurai in the land formerly known as Satsuma Domain.
Tensions between the Bakufu and the freshly-energized Loyalists came to a head when a shogunate army was refused entry to Kyoto – then promptly fired upon. The ensuing Boshin War was largely one-sided, with Loyalists gaining repeated victories due to superior arms, tactics, and numbers.
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