Xinhai Revolution

Some revolutions build a new form of government on an old idea of sovereignty; the Xinhai Revolution ended the idea itself. It closed more than two thousand years of imperial rule in China, not merely one dynasty's hold on the throne.

The revolt began on 10 October 1911, when Qing army units stationed in Wuhan mutinied and seized the city, a date the Republic of China and, later, Taiwan still mark as their national day. The uprising spread rapidly across China's provinces through the following weeks, and within months the Qing court had lost the ability to hold the country by force. The last Qing emperor, a child, abdicated in February 1912, and the Republic of China was proclaimed the same year under Sun Yat-sen, ending the dynastic system that had organised Chinese government since antiquity.

The republic the revolution founded did not settle China's politics; competing warlords, a civil war and a foreign invasion followed over the next four decades before the Chinese Communist Party's 1949 victory established the government that holds the country today, which this atlas dates as China's own founding year for exactly that reason: 1911 ended an era, but it did not yet produce the government presently in place. The Xinhai Revolution's significance lies less in the state it built than in the one it made unimaginable to rebuild: no restoration of the imperial system has been attempted since.