government sued for peace after six months of uninterrupted Japanese victories. Yuan Shikai's ascendancy (1901–1908) Li Hongzhang died in 1901 and was replaced by Yuan Shikai, who took on Li's appointment as Viceroy of Zhili and as Minister of Beiyang (北洋通商大臣). Yuan had been given command of the brigade-sized New Created Army in 1895, which had 7,000 soldiers at the time and would expand to 20,000 by 1902. By the autumn of 1905 the Beiyang Army consisted of six divisions of 10,000 men each. It was organized into infantry, artillery, cavalry, and auxiliary troops, as well as maintenance and engineering. A seventh division was established in 1907 at Jiangsu. The Army's training instructors were mostly Japanese and Germans. Yuan Shikai oversaw the reform of Qing military institutions after 1901 as the government tried to create a national army. He founded the Baoding Military Academy, which allowed him to expand the Beiyang Army, along with several other military schools and officer training academies. With the creation of the Commission for Army Reorganisation in December 1903, the Beiyang Army became the model on which the military forces of other provinces should be standardized. Although some units were based in the three northeastern provinces in Manchuria, the main base of the Beiyang Army was at Baoding, near Tianjin. In the early 1900s, a department for military administration was also created for the Beiyang divisions to manage logistics, which was divided into several branches. It was the opinion of foreign observers that the Beiyang Army was the largest, best equipped and best trained military force in China at the time. The Beiyang Army under Qing control (1909–1910) The Empress Dowager Cixi died on 15 November 1908 and named the three-year-old Puyi as the new emperor. The new regent and father of Puyi, Prince Chun (醇親王), had Yuan Shikai dismissed the next year. Yuan bided his time in retirement, carefully maintaining his network of personal contacts in the Beiyang Army. At the time of the 1911 Revolution, command of the Beiyang Army was supposedly in the hands of the Qing minister Yinchang. In reality, Yuan Shikai still had the ability to manipulate it due to the loyalties of its officers to him personally. Four divisions were located in Zhili, the 3rd Division being in northeast China and the 5th Division in Shandong. Almost all the officers were ethnically Chinese, many of whom were returned students