First of all, this series maximizes the creative team's respect for history. None of us have experienced the Qing Dynasty, but we can see the historical authenticity in the main characters of this series (including the fact that the historical characters look like the actors in the series, such as Li Hongzhang and Yuan Shikai), rather than over-dramatizing them.
Secondly, the series tries its best to do what Dr. Sun didn't do: educate the general public about democracy (or what he called "political training"). After watching the series, I had an immersive feeling and understood Dr. Sun's ideas in general.
Lastly, the series leaves behind a lot of research questions that are worth pondering over, such as:
1. Who actually sabotaged the road to the republic? Was it the conservatives (fake constitutionalists) consisting of Cixi and others, or the real constitutionalists like Emperor Guangxu and Tan Sitong. My personal figure is a utilitarian like Kang Youwei. Although he also advocated constitutional monarchy, it seems that he was more willing to arrogantly display his talent and compete with the conservatives, but he overestimated his ability. In a way, Kang Youwei was naive, and I think it was his recklessness that undermined the original constitutional monarchy and victimized those young people in the Hundred Days of the Past, leaving room for dictatorship enthusiasts like Yuan Shikai to flourish, to this day.
2. Does the road to revolution necessitate bloodshed and sacrifice? Sun Yat-sen's revolutions were accompanied by a large number of casualties, back to the Sino-Japanese War, which can also be regarded as a derivative of Li Hongzhang's revolution, and was also characterized by a large number of deaths and injuries. Unfortunately, none of their revolutions ended up with the desired results. Were those sacrifices worth it? In particular, the assassination of Xu Xilin, who died in vain, also failed to shake the original system. When Dr SUN Yat-sen and WONG Hing (aka Huang Xing) were arguing about leadership, I think it was an argument about efficiency and fairness. Setting up a leader whom everyone respected and obeying the leader might be able to solve a lot of problems efficiently, but would the things decided by such a leader be fair to everyone? So what Huang Xing is advocating is the need to trade time for efficiency, and the success of a revolution needs to be hard to see immediately, but if we all want fairness, we have to need patience.
Suddenly I remembered what Li Hongzhang said: A generation can only do what a generation should do. Qu Hongji had analyzed the key point for the survival of the Qing government, and I think it happens to be the best answer for the road of revolution towards republic: To popularize the concept of constitutionalism\democracy among all people.
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