On the evening of this day, Yuan Shikai talked to his two sons at home, the eldest son Yuan Keding, and the second son Yuan Kewen about talking about his yellow robe.

Yuan Keding said: "Father, you once said to me when you were in Zhangde, there are many people and many things, one person says one thing is good, and that person says bad. This man says it should be done, and the other man says it should be done. When you decide what to do, maybe the cucumber dishes are cold. If you want me to say, our China is so big and there are so many people, listening to everyone's nonsense, nothing can be done, someone has to have the final say, and it is better to have an emperor. ”

After Yuan Keding finished speaking, he carefully checked his father's expression and figured out Yuan Shikai's thoughts.

"What do people say?" Yuan Shikai asked quietly.

Seeing that his father didn't blame, Yuan Keding became bolder. "People around me say that there are a thousand people in the family, and there is one person in charge. What is right and what is wrong. What the principal said was what it was. If the principal says it is right, it is right, and if the principal says it is wrong, it is wrong. ”

"Big brother, you can't say that, right is right, wrong is wrong. Whoever says what is right cannot become wrong, and what is wrong cannot become right. The country belongs to everyone, and it is necessary to listen to everyone. Father, they finally ousted the emperor from power, and the eldest brother could not say anything to destroy the republic. "It's Yuan Kewen, the second son of Yuan, who spoke.

His biological mother is the princess of North Korea, that is, Yuan Shikai's third aunt. Yuan Kewen, whether it is his appearance or talent, seems to have inherited it from his biological mother.

A table of talents, suave, versatile, known as one of the four sons of the Republic of China.

Because his aunt couldn't give birth, he was taken as a son by an aunt.

is good at communicating, attaches great importance to righteousness, and Yuan Keding, the eldest brother who is particularly scheming, does not look like a pair of fellow brothers.

Yuan Shikai actually likes his second son very much, but he always makes a very strict appearance in front of his children, Yuan Kewen is not only afraid of this father on weekdays, but also afraid of his eldest brother.

When Yuan Shikai was the governor of Zhili, there was such an incident:

Once, Yuan Kewen was sent by his father Yuan Shikai to Nanjing on business.

Yuan Kewen is good at having fun outside, and he always wanders around the fishing alleys of Nanjing when he has free time. After going back and forth, I got acquainted with a particularly beautiful girl. The two of them can talk very well, and their tempers are also very similar, they fell in love at first sight, and privately made a marriage contract that one party would not marry her, and the other party would not marry him.

The two of them are entangled and inseparable, but Yuan Kewen went to Nanjing to run errands, and he had to go back to his father after finishing his errands. When the two of them left, the girl gave Yuan Kewen a photo as a souvenir, and Yuan Keding was like a treasure.

The Yuan family is still the old rule, children who come back from outside should kowtow to their parents when they return home. Yuan Kewen misses the girl who is privately engaged to him for life, and takes out the girl's photo whenever he is free.

Maybe he was careless, and when he kowtowed to his father to say goodbye, why was it so coincidental that he dropped the girl's photo in front of his father.

Yuan Shikai picked up the photo curiously, and when he saw that it was a girl, he immediately sank his face and asked sharply: "What is this?" What's going on? ”

Yuan Shikai is very strict with his children on weekdays, not only is he not allowed to smoke big cigarettes and enter casinos and brothels, but he is also absolutely not allowed to interact with men and women at will.

Yuan Kewen was not married at that time, and at that time, marriage was about the orders of his parents and the words of the matchmaker, not something he could order. The frightened Yuan Kewen's head was blank, and he made up the story blindly.

said that he saw that this woman was good-looking, and he was looking for his father, and the photo was shown to his father to see if he could match it. He thought it would be enough to get through this scene, but he didn't expect it to come true.

When Yuan Shikai heard this, he turned his anger into joy. When I put the photo in front of me, the girl was really beautiful, and she said yes. I can't wait to marry back home right away. Fu Dianqing, a family member who specially did this kind of thing for him, quickly went to marry him with money.

The girl had a marriage contract with Yuan Gongzi, and she was overjoyed to see that the Yuan family came to marry so quickly, and she was rehired. The scenery came to Tianjin from Nanjing, but on the night of the candles in the cave room, the beautiful young man became a bad old man. At this time, in addition to his wife, Yuan Shikai already had five aunts, and this girl became Yuan Shikai's sixth aunt.

What kind of grievances the girl will have, and how she will face her former sweetheart, now in terms of Yuan Kewen, who should be her son's generation, people can imagine.

It is an absolutely patriarchal society, and women can only accept everything, who will take into account the feelings of a weak woman. Yuan Kewen is a very attentive person, the so-called seeing one and loving the other, soon had a new love.

People will change, and people's feelings will also change, it is this sixth aunt who gave birth to five children with Yuan Shikai. Among Yuan Shikai's wives and concubines, he has the most births.

On ordinary days, when Yuan Kewen was talking to his father and eldest brother, he rarely interjected.

Today, I may have listened to my eldest brother's words, what he said was really ugly, it was simply a fallacy and heresy, nonsense, and I couldn't help but interject.

Yuan Keding never looked down on his younger brother, and always thought that this was a swinger who didn't do his job. Yuan Keding was very unhappy when he was lectured by his younger brother, but he was not good at attacking in front of his father, so he glared at Yuan Kewen viciously with his eyes.

Yuan Kewen didn't pay attention to his eldest brother's expression, felt that he was still unfinished, and continued: "Our father is the first interim president of the Republic of China, and the height is unbearable, and everyone's eyes are staring!" The eldest brother should be careful when he speaks outside, the so-called speaker has no intention, the listener has a heart, and it will not affect the prestige of his father. ”

The more Yuan Keding listened, the more angry he became, but he couldn't find anything to reprimand his younger brother, "Provisional President!" Why do you like the word temporary? ”

"Was my father the interim president in the first place?" Yuan Kewen was not convinced.

"You! You ......" Yuan Keding pointed at Yuan Kewen, and was about to say something, but was stopped by Yuan Shikai,

"Kewen is right when he says that when you speak outside, you have to pay attention to the impact. What others say, that's someone else's business, and you can't talk nonsense about it. Now, don't you see? If you have nothing to do, you can't let people with ulterior motives take advantage of the loopholes. Especially Keding, you are the boss of this family. ”

Hearing his father say this, Yuan Keding hurriedly nodded yes.

The Tang cabinet collapsed, and the cabinet could not do without, and Yuan Shikai nominated Lu Zhengxiang to succeed Tang Shaoyi as the prime minister of the cabinet.

So there are his considerations for doing this, and the main reasons should be at least the following:

First, he did not belong to Yuan Shikai's Beiyang faction, nor did he belong to the League and any party, and was called the "transcendent cabinet", which was easily accepted by all parties.

Second, when he returned from abroad, the so-called distant monks would recite scriptures.

Third, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, of which he is the head of the cabinet, is the successor in the first order.

Fourth, although he has only been in office for a short period of time as foreign minister, the results he has achieved have attracted attention.

Fifth, the most important thing is that compared with Tang Shaoyi, Lu Zhengxiang is much more obedient.

Lu Zhengxiang, whose name is Zixin, is a native of Shanghai, originally from Taicang, Jiangsu. After graduating from the Cantonese Dialect Museum and the Tongwen Museum, he worked as a translator at the embassy in Russia with Xu Jingcheng, the Qing Dynasty's minister in Russia, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, and has been serving in the diplomatic circles since then, becoming the first generation of professional diplomats in China. After the end of World War I, he led a delegation to France on behalf of the Republic of China to attend the Paris Peace Conference.

In 1884, when he was thirteen years old, he entered the Cantonese Dialect Museum, a new government-run school in Shanghai sponsored by the Prime Minister's Yamen. In 1893, he was assigned to serve as a translator at the Chinese Embassy in Russia. In 1906, Lu Zhengxiang was promoted to Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the People's Republic of China to the Netherlands. After the Xinhai Revolution in 1912, at the request of President Yuan Shikai, he returned to China from the post of ambassador to Russia to serve as Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Lu Zhengxiang's appointment as the first foreign minister was also the beginning of the modernization of China's diplomatic system and management. With the experience accumulated during his many years of working in Europe, he set out to get rid of the stereotypes and bad habits left over from the Qing Dynasty officialdom and introduce a more scientific management system. For example, the Organic Law of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was formulated in accordance with the model of the diplomatic institutions of Western capitalist countries, and the "Official System of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs" was formulated accordingly, with a general director and a deputy director, and one department, four departments and one office responsible for daily affairs, namely, the General Affairs Department, the Foreign Affairs Department, the Trade Department, the Communications Department, the General Administration Department, and the Counselor's Office.

One of the first things he did when he took office was to have the General Affairs Office unblock the sewer in front of the diplomatic service. It turned out that the sewer in front of the gate here was clogged, and every rainy day, the water in front of the gate was very deep, and every diplomat had to be carried into the yamen by the yamen's errands.

The yamen was changed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Lu Zhengxiang thought that the water at the door would hinder the image of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China, so he first cleared the blockage to give the façade a new atmosphere. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is a place where people come and go, and the accumulation of water in front of the door has become a major problem for the personnel of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and foreign personnel. The silt was cleared, and after the rain there was no stagnant water, it became a great thing and was praised for it.

The second thing is to remove all the members of the ministry from their posts and appoint them after he has inspected them. He adhered to the principle of preferring shortage to excess, and the newly formed Ministry of Foreign Affairs was short of 150 personnel, and Yuan Shikai's nephew was also among the people who were laid off.

There is more than a chef surnamed in the ministry, who was once favored by Cixi, and Li Hongzhang was also afraid of him back then. That time, Li Hongzhang considered entertaining foreign guests with a Western banquet, but the chef surnamed Yu did not do it, so Li Hongzhang had no choice but to give up. The chef surnamed Yu also asked the then General Minister of Foreign Affairs. Li exerted pressure to appoint his son as secretary to the ministry.

After the founding of the Republic of China, Chef Yu thought that Chief Lu would not buy his account, and he was not in a hurry at first, but he panicked when he found that the new foreign minister really acted very differently from the old man of the former Qing Dynasty. He brought dozens of hams to Foreign Minister Lu's house, but was told to leave with the ham quickly.

The departure of Chef Yu from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs not only made insiders happy in China, but even newspapers in Spain and other countries were published as news, and were regarded as the vane of the reform of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.