For Empress Longyu and the Little Emperor Puyi, in the early February 1912, there was no longer a good piece of land in the Qing Dynasty.
First, on October 10 last year, a gunshot rang out in Wuchang City, igniting the powder keg of the Xinhai Revolution, and in the blink of an eye, all provinces across the country responded. In the south was Sun Yat-sen's Provisional Government in Nanjing, facing off the Qing court across the Yangtze River; in the north, there was Yuan Shikai's small station new army, which staged the momentum of "forcing the palace".
From October 10, 1911 to February 12, 1912, in just 3 months and 2 days, the Qing Dynasty, which entered the customs for 268 years, was declared to be overthrown, which can really be said to be a country of rapid decline.
So, why did Longyu and Puyi sit in Beijing and wait for the fall of the country, instead of retreating to the ancestral land of Guanwai Longxing, to rebuild and continue the regime of the Eight Banners of Manchuria?
In fact, the Manchu Qing ruling elite in the early days of entering the customs did formulate a set of life-extension plans to prevent the failure of the Central Plains rule and retreat to the guanwai as a regional regime.
This scheme was modeled on the Mongols, who had been fighting the Ming Dynasty for 276 years.
After Zhu Yuanzhang sent Xu Da to seize the capital of Yuan and expel Emperor Yuanshun, the Yuan Empire did not perish, and the main force of the Mongols was still preserved. In the eyes of the Mongols, they only lost the territory of the Central Plains and Jiangnan, the northern steppe was still in their hands, and the Yuan Shun Emperor only changed to the steppe as emperor.
In the Ming Dynasty, the Mongols were a sharp sword hanging in the north of the Ming Empire, and the Mongol cavalry invaded the border of the Great Wall from time to time, and even captured the town of Zhu Qi of Ming Yingzong in the Battle of Tumu Fort, almost destroying the Ming regime. During the Jiajing period, the Mongol cavalry also broke into the hinterland of the Central Plains, plundered around Beijing, and then fled.
The rulers of the Qing Dynasty saw the successful experience of the Mongols and thus considered the strategic retreat of the Eight Banners of Manchuria.
This retreat route was the area outside the Manchu Customs before the Qing army entered the customs.
To this end, in the name of "protecting the ancestral zhaozhi xingwang and safeguarding the interests of the Shanshan Zhuhe River", the Manchu Qing officials implemented a policy of banning the areas outside guanwai, and strictly prohibited the Han people in Guanxi from developing land and settling down outside Guanwai. At the same time, in the territory of today's Liaoning Province, a "wicker edge" combining earthen embankments and willow trees was built as a dividing line separating the inside and outside of the pass. For the inland Han people who had unofficial "breaking through the pass", the Eight Banners garrison distributed on the edge of the wicker had the right to arrest and kill on the spot.
Since the signing of the Treaty of Nebuchu between Kangxi and Tsarist Russia, the situation on the border has tended to be stable, and Guanwai has been calm for a long time as the rear area of the Manchu Qing Dynasty and its own reserve. However, with the increasing number of forces involved in Guanwai in the last years of the Qing Dynasty, the calm outside Guanwai was gradually broken.
During the Xianfeng period, the eight flags high-level also regarded Guanwai as a safe place. Faced with the anglo-French coalition approaching Beijing, Xianfeng chose to retreat to the Chengde Summer Resort, relying on the fact that it was located in the hinterland of the Manchu and Mongolian forces, which was the deep-rooted rule of the Qing Dynasty.
However, by the year of Gengzi, when the Eight-Nation Alliance attacked Beijing, the direction of Cixi's escape had been changed from the Chengde Summer Resort in Xianfeng to Guanzhong in the northwest.
The main reason for this change was that at this time, Guanwai had long been the sphere of influence of Tsarist Russia and Japan. When Cixi ran outside the Guan, didn't she fall directly into the pockets of the Eight-Nation Alliance?
This situation has not changed until 1912, when Longyu and Puyi were in their hands. It is no longer realistic to let the remnants of the Manchu Qing retreat to the northeast to establish political power.