Hundred Days' Reform

To understand why the old quad stays so uneasy, you have to wind the clock back to the dying days of the 19th century.

You see, back then, the university was born as the Imperial University of Peking, chartered in 1898 during the Hundred Days Reform.

The Guangzhou emperor wanted to pull China into the modern world, lending thousands of years of Confucian scholarship with modern Western mathematics and science.

You know when you try a new food and suddenly it's like, wait, how did I not know about this? It's Ryan Seacrest here.

This caused Chinese people to reexamine the Westernization Movement, which emphasized imports of modern goods and weapons.

People pushed for institutional reforms through the Hundred Days' Reform in 1898 and attempted to establish constitutional rule at the end of the late Qing dynasty.

In 1904, in order to vie for an advantage in China, a war between Russia and Japan broke out in northeast China.

The Qing dynasty declared neutrality over the battle fought on her own soil, which enraged the populace and intellectuals.