Exercise 3: Puyi's Continued Residence as Evidence of an Incomplete Transition — Possible Solution ================================================================================================================== This exercise asks you to use a specific real fact - Puyi living in the Forbidden City until 1924 - as evidence about the nature of the 1912 transition, not just restate that it happened. WHAT THE FORMAL ABDICATION DATE SUGGESTS ON ITS OWN Taken alone, the 12 February 1912 abdication edict looks like a clean, decisive break: one day the Qing dynasty ruled China, the next day it did not, and the Republic of China had already been declared over a month earlier. A date this precise invites reading the transition as sudden and complete. WHAT PUYI'S CONTINUED RESIDENCE ACTUALLY SHOWS The Articles of Favourable Treatment let Puyi keep his imperial title, receive protocol treatment as a foreign monarch, and continue living in the northern Forbidden City and the Summer Palace - and he genuinely did so for another twelve years, only expelled in 1924 by the warlord Feng Yuxiang. A deposed monarch who keeps his title and his palace for over a decade is not a fully removed monarch in any practical sense; he is a monarch whose formal removal outran the actual, physical dismantling of the old order around him. WHY THIS MATTERS FOR READING THE REVOLUTION AS A WHOLE If the old imperial court could remain physically installed inside its own former capital for twelve years after its own legal end, that is real, concrete evidence that the new republic's own authority was not yet strong or complete enough to fully displace what it had formally replaced - a gap between legal transition and actual political control that matches this chapter's own broader point about the republic inheriting none of the Qing's own real centralized authority. ANSWER: Puyi's twelve years inside the Forbidden City show that the formal 12 February 1912 abdication date marks a legal transition, not a complete practical one - the new republic's own authority was not yet strong enough to physically displace the old imperial court it had formally replaced, a concrete illustration of the same institutional gap that lets Yuan Shikai's presidency, and then outright warlordism, follow so quickly afterward. WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER ------------------------------ It uses the specific residence timeline as direct evidence for a claim about incomplete authority, rather than treating the abdication date alone as proof the transition was finished, and connects that gap forward to the chapter's own closing point about the republic's real structural weakness.