The collapse of the Qing dynasty in the fall of 1911 might reasonably
have been expected to lead to the demise of the Jingshi daxuetang, given
how closely the university was linked to the old regime. When the Xuan-
tong emperor abdicated the throne on February 12, 1912, much of the
Jingshi daxuetang's raison d'être was lost. There was no longer an im-
perial state for its graduates to serve, and the applicability of the partic-
ular blend of Western and Chinese learning that characterized the uni-
versity's curriculum under the monarchy was thrown into doubt by the
victory of the republican ideal. Nevertheless, the collapse of the dynasty
in no way eliminated China's fundamental international and domestic
challenges or the need for an educated citizenry. Given that China was
moving in a democratic direction and that the nation's citizens were
therefore to play an ever more active role in the shaping of their own des-
tiny, the importance of an educated populace became that much more
obvious. As a result, as Douglas Reynolds has observed about a number
of other institutional products of the late-Qing reforms, the Jingshi da-
xuetang survived the collapse of the old political order and went on to
play a critically important role in the society that followed. ¹

But the university's passage through the profound and far reaching
transformation brought forth by the collapse of the socio-political and
intellectual order of late imperial China was anything but smooth. An in-
stitution such as the Jingshi daxuetang, so fundamentally entangled in
the Qing imperial state's effort to redefine and maintain control over

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