On November 1, 1911, the Qing court dissolved the cabinet of imperial princes that it had formed in the spring and appointed Yuan Shikai as prime minister, at a moment when the revolt that began at Wuchang on October 10 had spread across much of the country. The cabinet had been created in May, and it had been attacked at once for being made up almost entirely of Manchu nobles, and the promise of a constitutional monarchy had lost what little credit it had. The plan failed. The court turned to the one man it thought could still raise an army.
Yuan had built the Beiyang Army, the best trained force in the country, and he had been the most powerful official of the late dynasty until the regent removed him in 1909, soon after the death of the empress dowager. He had gone back to his home in Henan and waited. The court had left his officers in place, and the troops it sent against the rebels at Wuchang would not fight well for anyone else, and so the summons went out. He took his time and set his terms before he accepted.
Once in office he held both the government and the army, and he opened talks with the revolutionaries while he pressed the court to accept a constitutional monarchy, and when that came to nothing he turned to the idea of a republic with himself at its head. He forced the abdication of the child emperor in February 1912 and took the presidency of the new republic, first in Nanjing and then in Beijing. The dynasty ended. The terms gave the imperial family a large allowance and let it keep the Forbidden City for a time.
His career shows how a state can fall through the ambition of the man it calls to rescue it. He made himself president for life in 1913 and emperor in 1915, and the second step brought revolts in several provinces and he gave it up within months, and he died in 1916. The army he had built broke into the factions that fought one another for the next decade. The warning went unheeded.