Huang Zunxian

Huang Zunxian was born on April 27, 1848, in Jiaying prefecture, Guangdong, under the Qing dynasty (now Meizhou, Guangdong); Li Fang’s article instead gives his birthplace as Jiaying in Meizhou and glosses it as present-day Jiaoling, Guangdong.⁠[1][2][3]

His courtesy name was Gongdu, and he styled himself Master of the Hut Within the Human Realm (Renjinglu zhuren).⁠[2][4][5]

He came from a Hakka family, which Su Wenbo’s article describes as a Hakka family of scholars; BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry’s article says that he came from a wealthy merchant family and that his father once served in the ministry of finance.⁠[6][7][1]

His birthplace, the Dezanlou, stands in the Panguifang quarter of Meicheng next to his former residence, the Rongludi, and his study, the Renjinglu; by May 2021 the Dezanlou had been listed as a cultural relic protection unit of Meizhou city.⁠[8]

Li Fang’s article says that his great-great-grandfather Huang Run, born into poverty, made a living writing cattle-sale contracts for others; when foreign silver dollars had just begun to circulate in the markets of Guangdong, Huang Run could tell genuine coins from false by differences in their color and ring, so he set up a table in the market to assay and exchange silver dollars and within a few years became rich. Although he himself had given up scholarship for trade, Huang Run did not have his son take over the business but had him devote himself to study. Huang Run was also a pawnbroker; his grandfather Huang Yongzhong had been a county student and his father Huang Mingfeng a student of the Imperial Academy, and under their influence Huang Run held on to the value of learning and sought marriage ties with scholarly families.⁠[3][9]

His father, Huang Hongzao (courtesy name Yanbin, literary name Yinong), passed the provincial examination in 1855, in the Xianfeng reign, held office in Guizhou, Guangxi and elsewhere, and was acting prefect of Si’en prefecture in Guangxi from 1889 to 1891.⁠[2][3]

Li Fang’s article says that he entered a private school at the age of four; at ten, when the teacher set the line from Du Fu about seeing all the lesser mountains from the summit as a theme for verse, he answered with a couplet saying that the whole world was small, let alone the hills before one’s eyes, which astonished the teacher, and his great-grandmother, who had taught him herself, declared that the boy had great ambitions and doted on him all the more. His first contact with poetry came through the folk songs sung by this great-grandmother, Lady Li De.⁠[3][9]

The same article says that when he was eighteen, only a few days after his wedding, forces of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom took Jiaying; the Huang family fled, and its fortunes declined thereafter.⁠[3]

At about twenty-two or twenty-three he twice sat the provincial examination in Guangzhou without success, and after the examinations he made a detour to visit Hong Kong; he failed the examinations several times before obtaining his provincial degree.⁠[3][1]

In 1873 he became a senior licentiate (gongsheng); in 1874 he went to Beijing to fulfill the requirements of that degree, and in 1875 he remained in the north, traveling to Tianjin and Chefoo (Yantai), where he met the diplomat Zhang Yinhuan. An article of the Meizhou municipal discipline inspection commission instead dates to 1876, the second year of the Guangxu reign, a journey with his father to Yantai in Shandong, on which he met Zhang Yinhuan, Li HongzhangLi HongzhangLi Hongzhang (1823–1901) was a Chinese statesman, military commander and diplomat of the late Qing dynasty, the founder and commander of the Huai Army and one of the principal promoters of the Self-Strengthening Movement. From 1870 he served for many years as governor-general of Zhili and superintendent of trade for the northern ports, sponsored modern enterprises such as the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, the Kaiping mines, railways, telegraphs and the Beiyang Fleet, and signed treaties including the Treaty of Shimonoseki and the Boxer Protocol for the Qing government; judgments of him, in his lifetime and since, have been sharply divided.Open the full entry and other officials of the Self-Strengthening Movement.⁠[2][8]

Li Fang’s article says that at twenty-seven he again failed an examination in the capital and, since his father then held office in Beijing, stayed on to attend him and became close to several officials from Guangdong serving in the capital.⁠[3]

In 1876 he obtained the provincial degree (juren) at the provincial examination held in Beijing; Li Fang’s article says that he was placed below the first hundred and was listed, with the honorary fifth rank, as eligible for selection as a county magistrate.⁠[2][1][3]

The same article says that Ding Richang, governor of Fujian, invited him to join his staff, and that Li Hongzhang, after a conversation with him, called him a man of commanding talent. To He Ruzhang, a Hanlin reader versed in foreign affairs, he said that China would have to change by following Western methods; whether the change would come as self-strengthening, as in Japan, under compulsion, as in Egypt, under foreign control, as in India, or through partition, as in Poland, he could not say, but change it must.⁠[3][5]

Early in 1877 he was appointed counselor of the legation in Tokyo under the minister He Ruzhang (1838–1891) and reached Tokyo late that year; Britannica instead says that he went to Japan in 1876 as counselor to his fellow townsman He Ruzhang, the newly appointed ambassador to Japan.⁠[2][1]

Li Fang’s article says that in 1877 He Ruzhang led the first Chinese legation to Japan by steamer from Shanghai to Nagasaki; Du Weidong’s article says that Huang arrived at Kobe in November 1877, aged twenty-nine, as the Qing dynasty’s first counselor in Japan.⁠[3][5]

Richard John Lynn’s article says that he served the Qing legation in Tokyo as counselor and secretary from 1877 to 1882, and that in its first year in Japan the legation was housed in the Gekkaiin, a sub-temple within the precincts of Zōjōji.⁠[10]

Li Fang’s article says that on the legation’s first day in office Ryukyuan ministers came to call on it in tears, saying that Japan was obstructing the kingdom’s tribute missions and seeking to abolish it as a domain. Du Weidong’s article says that soon after he took up his post Japan moved to annex the Ryukyu kingdom, a tributary of China; that he memorialized the court with proposals, warning that if the Ryukyus were lost the coast of Fujian would be the first to suffer within a few years; and that Li Hongzhang and the Zongli Yamen nevertheless rebuked the legation for alarmism likely to provoke an incident and even considered recalling the minister He Ruzhang to break the deadlock. In 1879 Japan occupied part of the Ryukyu Islands.⁠[5][2][3]

In 1880 he proposed that the court station a resident in Korea, either to supervise Korean officials or at least to conduct Korea’s foreign relations; Li Hongzhang disapproved, fearing entanglement in disputes. Huang then advised Korea to stay close to China while cultivating friendly relations with Japan and the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry, proposals that conservatives in Korea fiercely attacked.⁠[2]

Li Fang’s article says that he and He Ruzhang discussed petitioning the Zongli Yamen to forestall Japan by turning Korea into Chinese commanderies, and when this was not taken up asked that an official be sent to direct Korea’s foreign affairs; the Japanese learned of this, printed it in their newspapers and praised his foresight as far beyond Li Hongzhang’s. Lynn writes that during the Sino-Japanese negotiations over the Ryukyus and Korea his official duties as a diplomat often brought him into unpleasant situations, and that the negotiations were frustrating and, from the Chinese point of view, ultimately disastrous.⁠[3][10]

Lynn writes that in Japan he had first-hand access to kanbun, brush talk and the culture of Chinese characters; Itō Hirobumi, Enomoto Takeaki and Ōyama Iwao often sought his advice on their kanshi and became in a sense his disciples in poetry; and Ishikawa Kōsai (1833–1918) strongly shaped his view of the kanshi canon and became a close friend, his Nihon bunshō kihan carrying a preface by Huang dated spring 1879.⁠[10]

Ōkōchi Teruna (1848–1882), former lord of the Takasaki domain, seems to have come to know the Chinese at the legation early in 1878 and became close to Huang; his residence, the Keirinsō, stood in Imado-machi, Asakusa, on the west bank of the Sumida River. For the Meiji meika shisen (Anthology of Famous Masters of the Meiji Era), edited by Shiroi Kunitsuna and published in Tokyo by Seietsu Shobō in 1880, Huang wrote the second preface at the editor’s request, dated the sixth month of the sixth year of Guangxu and signed Huang Zunxian, Gongdu, of Lingnan.⁠[10]

Li Fang’s article says that while in Japan he traveled alone through Honshu and Hokkaido, staying half a month each at Enoshima near Kamakura and at Atami in Izu, collected information on customs and local lore and read more than two hundred books; it adds that at thirty-two he met the reformist thinker Wang Tao in Japan. Wang Tao, who visited Japan in 1879, recorded the esteem in which Japanese scholars held He Ruzhang and Huang.⁠[3][2]

The same article calls him the first person in modern times to rate the Dream of the Red Chamber highly, records that, speaking with his Japanese friend Ishikawa Ei, he called it the finest novel since the creation of the world, and says that he punctuated a copy himself and gave it to Japanese friends, so that the complete novel was introduced to Japan for the first time; it also names him and Zhu Shunshui, of the late Ming and early Qing, as the two Chinese scholars who went to Japan and had the greatest influence there.⁠[3]

Cheng Yu-yu writes that he was not fluent in spoken Japanese and that his Japanese friends could not speak Chinese, so they conversed through brush talk; in a note to one of the Riben zashishi poems he wrote of brush conversations that lasted half a day.⁠[11]

In Japan he wrote the Riben zashishi (Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects from Japan) in two juan; it was first printed in 1879 by the Zongli Yamen (Su Wenbo’s article gives the edition as Tongwen Guan, 1879) and reprinted by the author in 1885. Ying-ho Chiang writes that the first edition (1879) contained 154 poems and that the final edition, published in 1898, contained 200; Li Fang’s article likewise gives the number of poems as two hundred. Cheng Yu-yu writes instead that Wang Tao published the first edition in 1880. Lynn writes that the collection grew out of his experiences in Japan in 1877–1882, combining detailed description and powerful narrative rich in moral perspective and socio-political insight, and that he revised both of its two poems on the Japanese tradition of kanshi between the first edition (1879) and the second (1890).⁠[2][7][10][3][12][11]

Lynn writes that Huang buried the first draft of the collection in the rear garden of Ōkōchi Teruna’s residence and celebrated the occasion, and that Ōkōchi later erected a stone monument with an inscription in his own calligraphy dated September 1879. Li Fang’s article, which calls the Japanese friend Minamoto Terukoe, quotes Huang as wishing for a patch of pure ground in which to bury the manuscript and says that the nine-character inscription naming the stone as the tomb of the first draft of the poems was written by Huang himself; it adds that the friend was buried after his death at Heirinji, north of Tokyo, and that his son, following his father’s wish, moved the poem mound to Heirinji as well.⁠[10][3]

In 1880 he began compiling a history of Japan, the future Riben guozhi; Lynn writes that Ishikawa Kōsai helped him select materials.⁠[2][10]

In 1882 he was appointed consul-general in San Francisco, which interrupted his work on the history of Japan. Li Fang’s article says that he was transferred to San Francisco at thirty-five, arrived in the United States on February 12, and that in March the United States Congress passed a bill restricting Chinese immigration; he issued passports to Chinese returning home as proof of their right to come back to the United States.⁠[2][13][3]

Li Fang’s article says that the Chinese laborers in San Francisco were poor and often crowded dozens to a room, and that a local law on cubic air space punished landlords who broke it with fines of up to 500 dollars and tenants with fines of up to 50 dollars or imprisonment. After inspecting the laborers’ lodgings, Huang visited an American jail where Chinese laborers were held, found dozens confined in a single cell, had his attendants measure the cell, and demanded that the Americans give the prisoners the same treatment under the air-space rule. Du Weidong’s article says that he went to a jail holding many Chinese laborers and, pursuing the matter tirelessly as far as the Attorney General of the United States, forced the authorities to give way, so that the laborers’ rights gained a measure of protection.⁠[5][3]

He wrote the long poem Zhuke pian (Expulsion of the Immigrants) in response to the Chinese Exclusion Act, a poem that Li Fang’s article says depicts the American movement to exclude Chinese laborers; his poem Jishi (A Record of Events) describes a United States presidential election. Disillusioned by the treatment of the Chinese immigrants and by the rising violence against his compatriots, he returned to China in 1885. When he left his post in San Francisco, the Chinese of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association in Victoria, British Columbia (now in Canada), presented him with a ten-thousand-people umbrella and plaques praising his good governance, together with generous gifts.⁠[13][3][8]

In 1885 his mother died and he returned home for the mourning period, during which he continued writing his history of Japan; Li Fang’s article says that when his term in the United States ended he returned home to visit his family, and that, since the ministers at court who valued him had just lost power and he disdained to curry favor with superiors, he was for a time without a post in Beijing and that at thirty-nine he was ordered by Zhang ZhidongZhang ZhidongZhang Zhidong (1837–1909) was an official, scholar and educator of the late Qing dynasty and one of the leading figures of the Self-Strengthening movement. He served as governor of Shanxi and as governor-general of Guangdong and Guangxi and of Hubei and Hunan, founded iron and steel, arms and textile enterprises and modern schools in Hubei, wrote the Quanxue pian (Exhortation to Learning) in 1898, and in his last years was a grand councillor and grand secretary in Beijing.Open the full entry, governor-general of Guangdong and Guangxi, to inspect the islands of the South Seas.⁠[2][3]

In 1887 he completed the Riben guozhi (Treatises on Japan) in forty juan. Du Weidong’s article says that the work runs to more than 500,000 characters and concentrates on the transformation of Japan’s institutions after the Meiji Restoration. His younger brother Huang Zunkai later said that Huang wrote it to hold up Japan as a mirror and guide his countrymen toward what they should adopt, but that only after the First Sino-Japanese War did people come to know it, and that although it was then widely read, it was too late.⁠[2][5][8]

Hummel’s work says that the Riben guozhi was printed in 1890 and reprinted in 1898 and later years; Lynn gives the first edition as Guangzhou, Fuwenzhai, 1890, reprinted in Shanghai in 1898, while Su Wenbo and Ying-ho Chiang give the date of publication as 1895. Li Fang’s article says that the book came out after the First Sino-Japanese War had begun and that someone, recommending it to Zhang Zhidong, regretted that had it been read earlier it could have saved the Qing dynasty 200 million taels of silver, the indemnity paid to Japan under the Treaty of Shimonoseki.⁠[2][10][7][3][12]

In 1889 he went to Beijing and was appointed counselor of the legation in London (second-class counselor, in Li Fang’s article) under the minister Xue Fucheng; he arrived in London in the spring of 1890.⁠[2][3]

A year later, in 1891, he was sent to Singapore as consul-general and served there for three years; Du Weidong’s article dates the transfer to November 1891, when he was forty-three, while Li Fang’s article says that he served four years in Singapore.⁠[2][5][3]

Du Weidong’s article says that, by arguing the case repeatedly, he persuaded the Qing government to abolish the ban on overseas travel that had been in force for nearly two hundred years.⁠[5]

When he left his post in Singapore in 1894, the twentieth year of the Guangxu reign, the Chinese of the South Seas presented him with a specially made ten-thousand-people umbrella and four plaques praising his good governance, and composed an address in his honor.⁠[8]

In 1894 Zhang Zhidong obtained the court’s consent to recall him; within a few months he settled a number of cases involving Chinese Christians and foreigners, received the rank of circuit intendant, and was then summoned to Beijing and granted an audience by the Guangxu Emperor.⁠[2]

Du Weidong’s article says that he called on Zhang Zhidong in Nanjing, who showed little interest in his ideas and gave him only the missionary cases that other officials shunned, and that he cleared the cases that had accumulated for years in the Jiangnan region without indemnities, apologies, or the implication of gentry or common people. Li Fang’s article says that he was reputedly proud and disdainful of the powerful, that at his audience with Zhang Zhidong he sat with head high and one foot on his knee, wagging his head as he talked loudly, and that this displeased Zhang, so that he was never given an important post.⁠[5][3]

Du Weidong’s article says that he was received by the Guangxu Emperor in the Hall of Benevolence and Longevity at the Summer Palace, in the ninth month of the following year by the article’s account, and that when the Emperor asked why Western government surpassed China’s he answered that the West had grown strong through reform.⁠[5]

In March 1896 Liang QichaoLiang QichaoLiang Qichao (1873–1929) was a thinker, politician, journalist and scholar of the late Qing and early Republic, a disciple of Kang Youwei and a participant in the Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898. After the reform failed he spent 14 years in exile in Japan, where he ran the journals Qingyi Bao and Xinmin Congbao; returning in 1912, he helped to found the Progressive Party, served the Beijing government as minister of justice and minister of finance, and in 1915–1916 opposed Yuan Shikai’s attempt to make himself emperor. After leaving politics at the end of 1917 he devoted himself to writing and teaching, was a tutor at the Tsinghua Academy of Chinese Learning and director of the Beijing Library, and left the collected works known as the Yinbingshi heji.Open the full entry left Beijing for Shanghai, where he met Huang, who had served as consul and counselor in Japan, the United States and Britain; the two took to each other at once and became friends despite the difference in age. In July 1896 the offices of the Shiwu Bao were established on Simalu (Fourth Avenue) in Shanghai. The Shiwu Bao was financed mainly from the remaining funds of the Shanghai Qiangxuehui and from Huang’s personal contribution, which Li Fang’s article puts at 1,000 yuan given of his own accord as founding capital. The paper’s announcement named five founders, Wang Kangnian, Liang Qichao, Huang Zunxian, Wu Dexiao and Zou Linghan, with Liang Qichao as chief writer and Wang Kangnian as manager.⁠[14][3][15]

Zhang Chi’s article says that Huang and others objected to Wang Kangnian’s monopoly of control and to the deficits caused by his entertaining, and proposed that the paper be run by a board of directors, with Wang resigning as manager to become chairman; Liang first mediated, telling Wang that Huang could be rash in speech and inconsiderate of others’ feelings while acknowledging his hard work in managing the paper, and then supported the proposal. The board was eventually accepted, but Wang believed that Liang had joined with Huang to push him out, and the rift among the founders deepened. Zhang Chi also writes that Liang, who had earlier advocated preserving Confucianism as a religion, gradually gave the idea up after friends such as Yan FuYan FuYan Fu (1854–1921) was a translator, thinker and educator of the late Qing and early Republican period. Trained at the Fuzhou Navy Yard School and the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, he served for many years at the Beiyang Naval Academy in Tianjin; his translations of Thomas Henry Huxley, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and others, above all the Tianyan lun, introduced Western thought to China, and he set out faithfulness, comprehensibility and elegance as the standards of translation. In 1912 he became the first president of Peking University, and in 1915 his name was listed among the founders of the Chouanhui.Open the full entry and Huang urged him that the teaching could not be preserved and need not be.⁠[14]

In 1896 he was named minister to Germany, but the appointment was cancelled owing to alleged objections from Berlin; Du Weidong’s article says that the Emperor had intended to send him as minister to Britain and Germany and that the plan fell through because the host countries were unwilling.⁠[2][5]

In the summer of 1897 he was appointed salt intendant of the Changsha–Baoqing circuit in Hunan and in July of that year became acting judicial commissioner of the province, helping the governor of Hunan, Chen Baozhen, carry out new policies.⁠[14][7][2][1][16][3]

The proposal of progressive gentry in Hunan to found the Shiwu Xuetang (School of Current Affairs) won the support of officials such as Chen Baozhen and Huang and of reformers such as Tan SitongTan SitongTan Sitong (1865–1898) was a Chinese thinker and reformer of the late Qing from Liuyang, Hunan, and the author of the Renxue (A Study of Benevolence). He took part in the reforms in Hunan in 1897–1898 and served as a secretary of the Grand Council during the Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898; after the coup of that year he refused to flee and was arrested and executed, one of the “Six Gentlemen of 1898.”Open the full entry and Tang Caichang; once the school was decided on, Chen put Huang and Xiong Xiling in charge of its preparation and appointed Xiong as its director. When the school urgently needed chief instructors, Huang recommended Liang Qichao as chief instructor in Chinese and Li Weige, a translator at the Shiwu Bao, as chief instructor in Western studies; Wang Kangnian was at first unwilling to release Liang, and Huang, Xiong Xiling, Tan Sitong and others wrote to him in turn, promising that Liang would keep supplying articles to the paper while in Hunan.⁠[14][17]

He helped organize the Nanxuehui (Southern Study Society) and lectured to it, set up a police bureau, published a newspaper and founded schools, the highest of which was the Shiwu Xuetang. Du Weidong’s article says that the society held lectures every seven days, given by Liang Qichao, Tan Sitong and Huang; that he also founded new-style schools and a Baoweiju (Bureau of Protection and Security) run jointly by officials, gentry and merchants with the aim of dividing official power; and that he promoted the abolition of foot-binding. Li Fang’s article lists the institutions he founded with Chen Baozhen and Liang Qichao: the Shiwu Xuetang, the Nanxuehui, the Baoweiju, the Keliguan (school for officials), the Anti-Footbinding Society and the newspapers Xiangxue xinbao and Xiangbao.⁠[2][5][3]

Su Wenbo’s article says that he proposed to Chen Baozhen a Baoweiju run jointly by officials and gentry, which Chen accepted; in the first month of 1898 he drafted the Regulations of the Hunan Baoweiju, and because the gentry, dissatisfied with the lectures of the Nanxuehui, would in particular not contribute to the funding of the Baoweiju, the opening planned for the intercalary third month of 1898 was postponed to the sixth month.⁠[7]

Early in 1898 the Guangxu Emperor, now resolved on reform, read his Riben guozhi; Du Weidong’s article says that the Emperor had his tutor Weng TongheWeng TongheWeng Tonghe (1830–1904) was an official, calligrapher and diarist of the late Qing dynasty, tutor to two emperors, Tongzhi and Guangxu, and at various times president of the Board of Revenue, Grand Councillor and Associate Grand Secretary. He was dismissed soon after the Hundred Days’ Reform began in 1898 and stripped of his ranks after the coup that ended it; the diary he kept for nearly half a century is counted among the four great diaries of the late Qing.Open the full entry find the book and praised it as particularly detailed on the changes the Japanese had made to their institutions. On June 11 Xu Zhijing memorialized recommending Kang YouweiKang YouweiKang Youwei (1858–1927) was a Chinese scholar, political reformer and calligrapher of the late Qing and early Republican periods and a principal promoter of the Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898. After the reform was reversed he spent more than a decade in exile, founded the Baohuanghui (Chinese Empire Reform Association) and argued for constitutional monarchy; in later life he campaigned to make Confucianism the state religion. His works include The Forged Classics, Confucius as a Reformer and the Datong shu (The Great Commonwealth).Open the full entry, Tan Sitong, Liang Qichao, Huang and others as the Emperor’s advisers, and when that month the Emperor ordered Kang and Zhang Yuanji to prepare for an audience, Huang, Tan Sitong and Liang Qichao were among the reformers also listed for audiences. In June, on Xu Zhijing’s recommendation, Huang was summoned to another audience, and in August he was named minister to Japan, an appointment that Li Fang’s article attributes to his work for the new policies.⁠[2][3][5][16][18]

Illness prevented him from going farther north than Shanghai; Su Wenbo’s article says that the Hundred Days’ Reform took place while he lay seriously ill in Shanghai, and Li Fang’s article that it happened when he reached Shanghai. The Empress Dowager Cixi crushed the reform movement and punished its leaders.⁠[2][7][3]

Li Fang’s article says that owing to the intervention of the British consul-general in Shanghai, the Japanese minister to China and others, the Qing government did not pursue him but allowed him to resign and go home. Du Weidong’s article likewise says that without the mediation of friends and the intervention of the Japanese and British legations he might have shared the fate of the six reformers executed in 1898.⁠[3][5]

Su Wenbo’s article says that after the failure of the reform the Qing government dismissed him and kept him under watch, and Britannica says that he was forced to resign. He went back to his home in Jiaying, where he lived for the rest of his life; Du Weidong’s article dates his journey home, in a small boat, to October 1899.⁠[7][1][2][5]

In retirement he spent his days at the Renjinglu, his study beside the Zhouxi stream on the eastern outskirts of Meizhou, whose name comes from a line of Tao Yuanming about building a hut among men yet hearing no noise of carriages and horses. Li Fang’s article says that after his return he was melancholy and often exchanged poems with Qiu Fengjia, an advocate of new learning.⁠[5][3]

He kept up a correspondence with Liang Qichao, then in exile in Japan. Li Fang’s article says that he admired Liang’s writing greatly, calling Liang a monkey from a cave on Mount Luofu who, after going east to Japan, had become the Monkey King with seventy-two transformations, each stranger than the last. Tang Shan’s article says that Huang judged Liang’s Xinmin Congbao a hundred times better than the Qingyi Bao but attributed Liang’s progress to an improvement in his prose. Sang Bing writes that in the summer or autumn of 1902 Liang wrote to Huang proposing a Guoxue Bao (Journal of National Learning) to nurture national citizens and preserve the national essence; Huang at first applauded the idea and then raised two objections: the project could not be carried out hastily, and a history of Chinese national learning should be written first; and the trouble with China’s old learning lay in arrogance and insularity, not in any inability to preserve it, so the door should first be opened wide to new knowledge and national learning promoted only some years later, Japan having arrived at its own national essence only after drawing on both East and West. Liang’s proposal did not succeed.⁠[19][20][3]

Su Wenbo’s article says that in a letter of 1902 to Liang he called the police bureau the foundation of all government affairs; Gu Yu’s article says that in letters to Liang in his last years he proposed a form of miscellaneous songs and ballads drawing on both the tanci storytelling ballads and Cantonese love songs.⁠[7][4]

After his return home he made the founding of schools the chief activity of his last years. He set up the Jiaying Education Promotion Council (Jiaying xingxue huiyisuo), serving as its president, and worked to open new-style schools; from 1903, when he began preparing the public Dongshan Higher Primary School, until his death in 1905, he organized schools and presided over the council in person despite his age and frailty. Following his lead, several hundred primary and secondary schools were opened in the towns and villages of the counties of Jiaying.⁠[9]

To provide qualified teachers for the normal school he was about to found, he began with his own family, paying generously to send his cousin’s son Huang Zhijun and his pupil Yang Weizheng to the Kōbun Institute in Japan for a short course in teacher training, so that they could return to teach at the Dongshan normal school; he also paid for relatives including his clansman’s son Huang Kuisun, his cousins Huang Zungeng and Huang Youfu, his fourth son Huang Xuantai (also given as Jiwei) and his eldest grandson Huang Yanyu to study in Japan.⁠[9]

At the end of the Qing the Dongshan Academy was converted at his suggestion into the Dongshan Junior Normal School, and the present Dongshan Middle School therefore counts him as an important figure in its history; Meizhou Middle School likewise regards him as one of its founders.⁠[8]

In a letter to Liang Qichao in 1905 he set out his view of life and death: unlike Liang, he believed that death meant extinction, but as long as a breath remained one had the duties of the living, and while there was no way to escape death, there was a duty not to live in vain.⁠[3]

He died at his home in Jiaying on March 28, 1905; Du Weidong’s article says that he died in low spirits.⁠[1][2][5][3]

In his last days he wrote to his younger brother Huang Zunkai that none of the aims he had cherished all his life had been achieved and that only his poems in the ancient and modern styles could stand on their own, yet they too were of no use, and that he now had little left to hope for.⁠[8]

On May 20, 1905, the Australian Chinese-language newspaper Tung Wah reported his death on page 2, giving his age as 58.⁠[21]

He rejected the archaic conventions that had governed literary forms since the Ming dynasty and held that poetry should reflect social change rather than obey outdated rules; he used the everyday speech of ordinary people and the styles and rhythms of local folk songs, and brought into his poems subjects new to Chinese verse, such as trains, steamboats and Western science, drawn from his years abroad. Britannica calls his use of the vernacular and the folk-ballad style a major breakthrough in Chinese verse.⁠[1]

He believed that literature should reflect current social changes and help raise popular awareness. Li Guohua’s article quotes his line declaring that his hand writes what his mouth speaks and that antiquity cannot fetter him; Du Weidong’s article calls the principle that there must be events beyond the poem and a person within it the core of his theory of poetry.⁠[6][22][5]

Gu Yu’s article says that Liang Qichao, in his Yinbingshi shihua, called him an outstanding figure of the revolution in poetry, and that Hu Shih, in his Chinese Literature of the Past Fifty Years, hailed him as the originator of vernacular writing; in his preface to the Meishui shizhuan he argued that the Hakka dialect descended from the ancient pronunciation of the Central Plains and suited the demands of regulated verse, so that in the literary heyday of the Jiaqing and Daoguang reigns Hakka speakers were commonly able to write poetry; and his own verse aimed at new ideas within the old forms. Liang Qichao also ranked him first among the three great poets of recent times.⁠[4][5]

Li Guohua writes that his four poems Jin bieli (Parting in Modern Times), set to an old yuefu title, deal with the steamship, the telegraph, the mirror and the time difference; Chen Sanli praised them for fitting new subjects to the old form, Qian Zhonglian read them through their allusions, and Xia Xiaohong rates them highly. Gu Yu mentions his Bei Pingrang (Lament for Pyongyang), Donggou xing (Song of the Yalu Battle) and other poems and quotes lines from Shu fen (Writing My Indignation) and Zhuke pian; Du Weidong says that his Ai Lüshun (Lament for Port Arthur), written after the defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, is worthy of the name of a poetic history.⁠[22][4][5]

Lynn writes that Chinese literary history generally regards him as the last great classical Chinese poet. Li Fang’s article says that more than 1,000 of his poems survive and that he spent thirteen years in all in Japan, the United States, Britain and Singapore, introducing novelties such as electric light and the tram into his poetry; Su Wenbo likewise counts thirteen years of diplomatic service. His collected poems, the Renjinglu shicao in eleven juan, were published after his death and have been widely read ever since.⁠[10][3][7][2]

In 2024 Zhang Yingbin reported in the Journal of Jiaying University that he had found Huang’s Fifty Poems of the New Bride (Xin jianiang wushi shou) in the Ningshui zhuzhi of Xingning, which he regards as the earliest printed edition of the New Bride poems, giving a sound textual basis for settling their editions, number, order and readings.⁠[23]

Li Fang’s article says that Liang Qichao wrote that the Riben guozhi made it possible to understand Japan and why it was strong, and China and why it was weak; that Dai Jitao said that, although many Chinese had gone to study in Japan, apart from Huang’s Riben guozhi of thirty years earlier he had seen no book devoted to Japan; that Fu Sinian said that the book was completed before the First Sino-Japanese War and that in the more than fifty years since no book had been found to replace it; and that Zhou Zuoren called its two juan of treatises on learning and four juan on rites and customs works without precedent and still without successor.⁠[3]

Du Weidong holds that many of the reform edicts the Guangxu Emperor issued during the Hundred Days’ Reform derived directly from Kang Youwei’s Riben bianzheng kao (Study of Japan’s Political Reforms), which was itself strongly influenced by the Riben guozhi.⁠[5]

A widely current saying in Meizhou pairs the Liang family of the upper market with the Huang family of the lower market as the two scholarly families of the Hongxingfang and Panguifang quarters, historically the heart of Meizhou’s culture and education; the Huang family of the lower market is Huang Zunxian’s.⁠[24]

The Huang Zunxian Memorial Hall stands in the Panguifang quarter by the Zhouxi stream on the eastern outskirts of Meizhou and consists of three buildings, the Renjinglu, the Enyuandi and the Rongludi; the Renjinglu, his study, combines Western features with the atmosphere of a Chinese garden. Inside is a white marble bust of him, with the words Pioneer of Modern Reform on the wall behind it and his poem Yuan gui (Returning from Afar) below them.⁠[24]

His father, Huang Hongzao, studied hard as a boy and passed the provincial examination at eighteen, the first of the Huang family of Panguifang to enter officialdom through the examinations; his father’s cousin Huang Ji became a metropolitan graduate at thirty-three and was versed in poetry, calligraphy, painting, astronomy and mathematics, and Zhang Zhidong praised him as a talent of the first rank, thoroughly versed in the Wenxuan.⁠[9]

His cousin Huang Zungeng, his sons Huang Boyuan and Huang Zhongyong, his nephew Zhang Yiquan and his clansman’s son Huang Kuisun all studied under him. Huang Zungeng, after returning from study in Japan, served as head of the education bureau in Guangzhou and founded the Meizhou agricultural vocational school and the Meizhou normal school in his home district.⁠[9]

His grandnephew Huang Yantong (1942–2017), an oil painter, was born in Meixian, Guangdong, graduated from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 1965, served on the council of the Guangdong Artists Association and as chairman of the Huizhou Artists Association, and painted a portrait of Huang Zunxian; diagnosed with liver cancer in September 2011, he died in Huizhou on July 11, 2017.⁠[25]

His former residence, the Rongludi, and his study, the Renjinglu, are both listed as national-level cultural relic protection units. The Renjinglu, a two-story garden building of brick and timber built in 1884 to his own design, blends the styles of the gardens of Suzhou and of Japan and includes a pavilion whose walls are made of windows.⁠[8][9]

A junior secondary school on Gouqigang, on the north bank of the Zhouxi, founded in the early 1980s, was named Gongdu Middle School after his courtesy name and renamed Huang Zunxian Memorial Middle School in the early 2000s.⁠[8]