was due to the disunity among the different regions of India. The Xinhai Revolution led to the abdication of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of a Republic under Sun Yat-sen in 1912. Some advocated that a Han be installed as Emperor, either the descendant of Confucius, who was the Duke Yansheng, which Kang briefly endorsed before dropping the idea and returning to the idea of a Qing monarch, or the Ming dynasty Imperial family descendant, the Marquis of Extended Grace. Kang remained an advocate of constitutional monarchy and launched a failed coup d'état in 1917. General Zhang Xun and his queue-wearing soldiers occupied Beijing, declaring a restoration of Emperor Puyi on July1. The incident was a major miscalculation. The nation was highly anti-monarchist. Kang became suspicious of Zhang's insincere constitutionalism and feared he was merely using the restoration to become the power behind the throne. He abandoned his mission and fled to the American legation. On July 12, Duan Qirui easily occupied the city. Kang's reputation serves as an important barometer for the political attitudes of his time. In the span of less than twenty years, he went from being regarded as an iconoclastic radical to an anachronistic pariah. Chinese-British biographer Jung Chang gave Kang Youwei unfavorable criticism due to his role in spreading numerous vilifying stories about the Empress Dowager. Among those stories including accusation Cixi of murdering Empress Dowager Ci'an, driving her own son to death, and massively appropriating naval funds. Chang asserted that Kang Youwei was a "master propagandist" who also harbored an intention to become an emperor by claiming as the reincarnation of Confucius, although he later abandoned that plan. Datong Shu Kang's best-known and probably most controversial work is Datong Shu (大同書). The title of the book derives from the name of a utopian society imagined by Confucius, but it literally means "The Book of Great Unity". The ideas of this book appeared in his lecture notes from 1884. Encouraged by his students, he worked on this book for the next two decades, but it was not until his exile in India that he finished the first draft. The first two chapters of the book were published in Japan in the 1900s, but the book was not published in its entirety until 1935, about seven years after his death. Kang proposed a utopian future world free of political boundaries and democratically ruled by one