A Man of Science and Engineering in Troubled Times Wandering in the Late Qing Dynasty

Chapter 680 Show
After finishing their trip to Japan, they took a ship to Shanghai.

Cai Yuanpei, Li Shizeng and others organized students from Datong, Fudan, St. John's and other universities to welcome them at the dock.

Plank said: "It's great that I don't have to get off the ship to attend the press conference. Every time I get off the ship, I just want to sleep in the bed on land."

Cai Yuanpei shook hands with them one by one. It happened that he had spent a few years in Europe and could speak French and German.

"It is an honor to come to this distant and mysterious country," said Einstein.

Planck couldn't wait to taste the rumored Chinese delicacies.

Cai Yuanpei prepared two cars and went to Huizhong Hotel.

The restaurant prepared a large table of Chinese food. Cai Yuanpei said, "Some time ago, a chef left Prince Gong's Mansion and was recruited to this restaurant. The chefs in the mansion are even better than the chefs in the palace."

Planck was delighted: "I have been practicing using chopsticks on the ship, and it finally comes in handy!"

"As long as you like it!" Cai Yuanpei said with a smile, and then asked, "How do you two professors plan to pay for the speech?"

Einstein said: "We have already discussed this matter with Mr. Li Yu. Everything will be borne by his foundation."

Cai Yuanpei was relieved and thanked Li Yu: "Thanks to my talented brother."

Li Yu is much more generous than Japan's Nagaoka Hantaro, after all, he is rich.

After giving speeches at several universities in Shanghai and Nanjing, I took them to Suzhou and Hangzhou for a tour before continuing north.

During the process, he gave a speech at Nankai University and then arrived in Beijing.

Professors from Peking University and Tsinghua University came to welcome these world-famous Nobel Prize winners.

After the speech, as usual, I took them to climb the Great Wall, visit the Summer Palace and the half-open Forbidden City.

It was a coincidence that Puyi's wedding happened to be happening recently. The Forbidden City was very lively. All the old people in Beijing came out, as if the dead Qing Dynasty had come back to life. The old people thought in a trance that the Qing Dynasty was thriving again.

Einstein asked curiously, "It seems that this emperor is only respected in the capital?"

Li Yu laughed and said, "There are still many men from the upper three banners living in the capital. In their hearts, they only recognize the emperor, not the Republic of China."

Planck was touched: "Your country's politics is a bit like the chaotic physics community today, with new and old theories clashing with each other, and the old theories are almost being crushed."

Einstein said, "I have learned a little about your country's previous dynasty during my trip. When the empress was in power, the expenses were very high. Now that there is an emperor in the palace, I guess it will cost a lot to get married too?"

Li Yu spread his hands: "I don't know about this kind of thing."

Hu Shi, who was accompanying him, suddenly said, "Not long ago, I went to the Forbidden City and talked with several ministers of the small court. They told me that the budget has increased from 36 yuan to 40 yuan."

The Emperor Tongzhi spent 1000 million taels of silver on his wedding, the Emperor Guangxu spent almost 500 million taels, and even Empress Dowager Cixi spent 500 million taels on her birthday. In comparison, it was indeed quite shabby.

Cai Yuanpei smiled and said, "The price was raised to 40 because the eunuchs of the young emperor thought it was not profitable and rejected it. The Imperial Household Department of the Forbidden City had no choice but to raise it to 40."

Li Yu asked: "They can't come up with 40, right?"

"Of course they can't," Cai Yuanpei said. "The newly appointed Minister of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, Shao Ying, approached the Beiyang government specifically for this purpose, hoping to allocate 40 yuan from the annual fees owed in the past few years. But the Beiyang government had no money and refused. Who knew that the small court would use a shady trick to sell 40 boxes of palace cultural relics to foreign merchants."

"Oh my god!" Li Yu spat, "How dare they?"

Cai Yuanpei said: "Fortunately, the matter did not come to fruition, because other officials of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and several eunuchs felt that if Shaoying was the only one to handle the sale of cultural relics, he would not know how much money he could make, so they reported the news to the newspaper. Once the report was published, the whole country cursed it, and the small court was under pressure and did not dare to think of selling cultural relics. But they changed it to mortgage, mortgaging more than 40 boxes of cultural relics to HSBC in exchange for yuan.

"The mortgage is also like throwing meat buns at a dog, so the Beiyang government had no choice but to squeeze out some money from its teeth and give it to the small court."

Li Yu was speechless: "There are too many cultural relics in the Forbidden City. It is too dangerous in the hands of these people."

Einstein was very interested in the wall behind the Baohedian Hall. He said, "Behind the wall is the residence of the imperial families who ruled China during the Ming and Qing dynasties? I really want to go and take a look."

Hu Shi said: "There is actually nothing to see. Many places are inaccessible. There are eunuchs following us all the time, which is very annoying."

Li Yuze asked casually: "Dr. Hu, what did you talk about when you went to the palace to see the little emperor?"

"What can it be?" Hu Shi said speechlessly, "It was the little emperor who summoned me, but now the newspapers are all over the place saying that I want to flatter the little court."

Cai Yuanpei laughed and said, "Dr. Hu was quite surprised when he received the call from Emperor Xuantong."

Hu Shih said: "I didn't know there were telephones in the Forbidden City at the time. When I picked up the phone, the person on the other end said, 'Are you Dr. Hu? Great, guess who I am?'

“I thought at the time that although not many people in Beijing had telephones, I couldn’t guess their identities one by one.

"Not long after, the voice on the other end said, 'Don't guess, I'll tell you, I'm Xuantong!'

“I was stunned at the time, so I asked the emperor why he called me.

"The Emperor Xuantong said, 'I heard everything you said, but I don't know what you look like. Come to the palace when you have time and let me take a look.'

"I thought it was a prank, so I called the emperor's teacher Johnston to ask, and then I found out it was true."

Li Yu asked, "What does Dr. Hu think of the little emperor?"

Hu Shi said: "Not bad, at least he didn't put on airs. After entering the palace, he didn't ask me to kneel, I just bowed, and the emperor called me 'sir'. There were several new books on his desk. Emperor Xuantong also approved of vernacular Chinese and asked about studying abroad.

"By the way, he also said to me, 'We have done many wrong things. To this point, we have to waste a lot of money of the Republic of China. I feel very uneasy. I wanted to live independently, so I wanted to set up a royal property liquidation office. But many people opposed this, because once I became independent, many people would have no one to rely on.'"

Cai Yuanpei said: "It seems that Emperor Xuantong was not completely useless, and the evils committed by the Qing Dynasty had little to do with him."

Hu Shi said: "I must admit that I was deeply moved by this little thing. It was me who was sitting in front of the last emperor, the last representative of the great monarchs of all dynasties." Hu Shi was indeed very moved by being summoned by Puyi and wrote a poem for it:

"The kernel that can't be bitten open or pounded,
You can't contain the little business in the core.

Hundred-foot palace walls, thousand-year-old etiquette,
You can’t lock a young man’s heart!”

Einstein said: "I heard that in your country, as long as you give a small gift money, you can attend the wedding?"

Li Yu said: "Ordinary families can do it, but who knows about the abdication of the Qing emperor?"

Cai Yuanpei said casually: "It doesn't hurt to take a look. There are hundreds of foreign guests from various countries visiting Dongjiaominxiang today."

This kind of thing is rare to come by, and it is probably the last wedding ever held in the Forbidden City.

Li Yu, Einstein, Planck and his party found the team of envoys from various countries and followed them in.

The guard of honor was indeed quite spectacular. It began with a military band sent by the Beiyang government, followed by a pair of envoys wearing dragon robes and patched jackets: Prince Qing Zaizhen and Prince Zheng Zhaoxu; then came the infantry cavalry, the police cavalry, and the security cavalry; behind them were 72 sets of dragon and phoenix flags and umbrellas, phoenix carriages, four yellow pavilions, and thirty pairs of palace lanterns.

Pretty spectacular anyway.

However, the former part of the Forbidden City now belongs to the Nationalist Government, and they cannot enter the harem through the central axis of the Forbidden City. But the Beiyang government still showed them special favor and allowed them to enter the palace through the Donghua Gate.

Many prominent figures of the Beiyang government attended the wedding and gave generous gifts. Former presidents Li Yuanhong and Xu Shichang, as well as Zhang Zuolin, Wu Peifu, Zhang Xun, and Cao Kun all donated generously.

Even Shanghai's richest man, Sir Victor Sassoon, sent many gifts.

The first to come to congratulate were the old ministers and representatives sent by the Beiyang government. Of course, the old ministers knelt three times and kowtowed nine times, while the people of the Beiyang government wore Western suits and simply bowed.

The one who stood out the most was Yinchang, who was also working for the Beiyang government. He was wearing a Western-style suit, and after bowing, he ran to the front and said, "That was the representative of the Republic of China just now. Now I, your servant, would like to pay my respects to the Emperor myself!" He kowtowed several times.

Finally, it was the foreign envoys. Surprisingly, Johnston and Liang Dunyan drafted an English speech for Puyi, and Puyi recited it to everyone:
"I am honored to be here today and to see distinguished guests from all over the world. Thank you all for coming and I wish you all good health and all the best."

By the way, Puyi's English is quite good.

This time, he finally got to see the harem. Einstein said happily, "It's really quite impressive. I haven't seen the weddings of the German Emperor or the British King, but at least I got to see the wedding of the Chinese Emperor."

Li Yu, however, did not take it seriously at all: "It is a relic of the old times, and it wasted hundreds of thousands of silver dollars. It was simply an ugly show."

Li Yu was more worried about the dozens of boxes of cultural relics that the small court had mortgaged.

He secretly asked the Beiyang officials, and they only raised 10 yuan for the small court, but the expenses were obviously not so small, so the small court still secretly mortgaged a lot of cultural relics to HSBC Bank.

These things have been completely lost in history.

The British took away a lot of cultural relics from China. There is no telling how many there are in the British Museum's warehouse. There are so many that they simply don't have the manpower to maintain them. In later times, they would only be maintained once every ten years or so, and that was basically just to count the number.

I remember some brainless anti-China people on the Internet who, when watching some short videos of the British Museum's China exhibition, actually shouted in the comment section "Thanks for the protection, if it stayed, it would only be destroyed" and so on, and there were also many likes on the comments that were shoved to the front row. It was so stupid that I don't want to say anything.

Robbers burned down your house and only took away a few things they thought were valuable. Is that what you call protection?
Li Yu planned to take time to pay to redeem those things, but according to the attitude of HSBC, they estimated the value of them at 40 when they received them, and if they sold them again, the price would have to be at least doubled.

Cleaning up the mess for the remnants of the Qing dynasty is really a headache.

These "lords" of the upper three banners only know how to spend money and cannot create any social value. The Prince Zheng who was at the front of the honor guard today was also a spendthrift who sold off his ancestral property. He sold the Prince Zheng's Palace directly to a foreign church. In his later years, he squandered all his property and even dug up his own ancestral tomb to steal treasures. When the police received the report and caught him, they were stunned and had to let him go in the end.

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In the more than a month that followed, Li Yu gave speeches at various universities with Einstein, Planck and others, and went to more cities such as Wuhan, Changsha, Guangzhou, Xiamen, etc.

Einstein had a very good impression of China and could not stop praising it: "It is such a simple land, and all the people there are just as simple!"

Planck said: "I didn't expect that your country's universities, although seemingly with ordinary equipment, attach so much importance to science. This potential will be enormous."

"Because many years ago, China's education sector understood how important science is. The pain of falling behind in science is too profound," Li Yu said. "If you pay a little attention, you will find that most Chinese students studying abroad choose science and engineering, and of course some choose politics and law."

Planck praised: "Very promising."

Both lectures were packed with people, except that one was talking about quantum theory and the other about relativity, which happen to be two irreconcilable cutting-edge theories.

Fortunately, Planck was relatively low-key and only talked about some routine content, without involving too much of the probability stuff that Sommerfeld and Bohr talked about.

When the two left China, Li Yu transferred $30,000 to each of their accounts. Einstein laughed and said, "It's like winning the Nobel Prize again!"

Li Yu asked Einstein: "I heard that you are going to Palestine on your return trip?"

Einstein nodded and said, "Mr. Weizmann has arranged it."

Li Yu said: "I wish you a safe journey."

This was Einstein's only visit to Palestine, and he went to the Jewish holiest site in Jerusalem, the Wailing Wall.

Although he recognized his Jewish ancestry, he did not appreciate Judaism more after seeing the Wailing Wall. He wrote in his diary: "My stupid tribal companions were praying, facing the wall, swaying back and forth. These poor people have a past but no future."

When asked if he would return to Palestine to live, Einstein said: "If I return, I will become a 'decoration' and there will be no peace and privacy. My heart says I should stay, but my reason does not agree."

Li Yu also gave Planck a set of Chinese versions of Star Wars, Alien, and the traditional Four Books and Five Classics, each signed with a brush. He bought these thread-bound books specifically with Chinese characteristics.

Planck certainly couldn't understand the Chinese content, so he just kept it as a collection and couldn't put it down.

Li Yu said: "Those irregular books were printed in a hurry and had rough edges, so you had to trim them yourself, but many Chinese literati really liked the feeling of doing it yourself."

"Yes, I like them very much! They are more collectible than hardcover books!" Planck said happily.