元洪

Although there were many careful plans and excellent plots, the final successful move of the Xinhai Revolution came from an unexpected angle. (As one of our senior professors used to say, life is not always predictable.)

Wuchang Uprising was, in essence, an accident. (The original plan was an uprising on 9 October, which was abandoned because of an accidental bomb explosion early in that morning. The event in the next evening actually began as a trivial quarrelling between two junior military officers.) At that very moment, none of the famous leaders was physically around. Nonetheless, mutineers needed a visible high-ranking officer to be their figurehead.

And they chose Li Yuanhong (黎元洪).

Li was at that moment a senior military officer in Hankou (漢口). He was well respected. Just a year before the Uprising, he discovered some subversive activities in his army, but he simply dismissed these people rather than arresting them. An additional edge of Li was most people in the army believed he knew English - which would be useful in dealing with foreign concerns.

By the way, Li was actually hiding at the home of his friend (alas, a woman) when the rebellion army found him and invited him (by gunpoint) to be their leader.