Kang Youwei

Kang Youwei was born on March 19, 1858, in Nanhai county, Guangdong province; the Encyclopedia of World Biography places his birth near Canton (Guangzhou).⁠[1][2]

His original name was Kang Zuyi, his courtesy name Guangxia and his literary name Changsu, later changed to Gengsheng; after his native place he was respectfully known as Kang Nanhai or Master Nanhai.⁠[3][4][5]

The Kangs were a locally prominent family that had produced scholars and officials for generations and handed down Neo-Confucian learning: his great-great-grandfather Kang Hui had served as provincial administration commissioner of Guangxi, and his father, Kang Dachu, reached the rank of expectant county magistrate in Jiangxi.⁠[3][6]

The family home, the Yanxiang Laowu, stands in what is now Sucun, Danzao town, Nanhai District, Foshan; a typical green-brick house three bays wide with two side corridors and wok-handle gables, it was first built in the mid-Qing period and has been repaired several times, and Kang spent his childhood and youth there.⁠[7][8]

Song Zhiming’s article says that his father died when he was ten and that he then studied at Lianzhou under his grandfather Kang Zanxiu; the Encyclopedia of Religion describes the grandfather as a Neo-Confucian scholar who directed his education.⁠[3][6]

He had an orthodox schooling from childhood with the civil service examinations in view, read widely in the classics, histories, philosophers and literary collections, and also came upon works of world geography such as the Yinghuan zhilüe and a map of the globe.⁠[3]

He passed the first-level examinations but failed the provincial examination in 1876.⁠[2]

After that failure he became a pupil of the Guangdong scholar Zhu Ciqi and studied with him for about three years; Song Zhiming’s article gives his age on entering Zhu’s school as eighteen.⁠[2][3]

Zhu opposed fragmented textual scholarship and the eight-legged essay, favored practical learning and a synthesis of Han and Song scholarship, and taught him to seek truth in the words of Confucius himself rather than in later commentaries; under his guidance Kang read Song–Ming Neo-Confucian works, classical studies, philology and history, among them the collected works of Qian Xinmei, the Nian’er shi zhaji, the Rizhi lu and the Kunxue jiwen.⁠[3][2]

Zhu once set him an essay on the historiography of the History of the Five Dynasties, and his answer ran to more than twenty pages, which Song Zhiming calls his first essay.⁠[3]

The Encyclopedia of Religion relates that shortly before he was twenty, after his grandfather’s sudden death and the start of his apprenticeship with a Confucian teacher, he fell into spiritual restlessness, rejected the conventional Confucian education he had received and withdrew from society for a time.⁠[6]

The Encyclopedia of World Biography’s account is that late in 1878, feeling that pedantic learning was stifling his mind, he ended his studies with Zhu and shut himself away in meditation, so that his friends thought he had gone mad; he then had a mystical experience of unity with heaven, earth and all things, saw himself as a sage, laughed for joy and then wept over human suffering, and concluded that he was destined to set the world in order.⁠[2]

He then widened his reading to government organization, political geography, Mahayana Buddhism, philosophical Daoism and Western learning; 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 his teacher instilled in him the Confucian ideal of service to society and that the study of Buddhism gave him a sense of its spirit of compassion.⁠[2][6][1]

In 1879 he visited Hong Kong for the first time; seeing the fine Western houses, clean roads and strict police patrols, he concluded that Westerners had an effective system of government and could not be dismissed as barbarians.⁠[9][2]

After his return he reread the Illustrated Treatise on the Maritime Kingdoms and A Short Account of the Maritime Circuit, bought world maps and gathered Western books, which laid the foundation of his knowledge of the West.⁠[9]

In 1879 he devoted himself to study at the Sanhu Academy at Baiyundong on Xiqiao Mountain; an article in the Pearl River Times says that there he resolved the doubts of his student years and began to look out at the societies of East and West.⁠[10]

In 1882 he toured the foreign concessions of Shanghai, was struck by their cleanliness and order, and in the same year began to study the West through the limited literature then available in Chinese.⁠[2]

The translations and periodicals he studied on his own included the Xiguo jinshi huibian, Huanyou diqiu xinlu, Wanguo gongbao, Zuozhi chuyan, Zixi cudong and Gezhi huibian; Song Zhiming holds that an essay on primordial chaos in the Gezhi huibian made him one of the earliest adherents of evolutionary ideas in China.⁠[3]

Song Zhiming’s article adds that, by his own account, overwork brought on neurasthenia with headaches that nearly killed him.⁠[3]

In 1883 he tried to abolish foot-binding in his village, his first venture in social reform.⁠[1]

Song Zhiming’s article says that from 1884 he began writing the Renlei gongli (later retitled Datong shu), the Zhutian jiang and the Neiwai pian.⁠[3]

The Encyclopedia of World Biography dates the basic ideas of the Datong shu to as early as 1885; Britannica’s article says that in the 1880s he formed his basic ideas about historical progress, social equality, world government and the nature of the universe.⁠[2][1]

Zhang Xiang’s article, by contrast, writes that Kang began to expound the meaning of Confucius’s great unity around the time of the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895.⁠[11]

In 1888, as a scholar without office, he went to Beijing and submitted a memorial asking for reform, which was not accepted.⁠[4][1]

Luke S. K. Kwong regards the draft memorial as a routine exercise in moral rhetoric and holds that 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 refused to forward it because of its offensive language; Young-tsu Wong holds that its importance lay in a bold request to replace the traditional Chinese state with one on the Western model, and that Weng in refusing was plainly referring to its contents.⁠[12]

He then turned to winning over the educated class and rousing the public; between 1888 and 1898 he addressed seven memorials to the Guangxu Emperor.⁠[1][13][14]

After the memorial failed he decided to teach in Guangzhou, at first in the Yunqu Study, an old house left by his great-grandfather Kang Shipeng (courtesy name Yunqu); Chen Qianqiu was his first disciple, and 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 came to study under him soon afterwards.⁠[4]

In the spring of 1891, on the suggestion of Chen Qianqiu and Liang Qichao, he rented the Qiu family library in Changxing Li and opened a school there, first called the Changxing School, and in March of that year wrote the Changxing xueji as its rules; the library had been proposed by members of the Qiu lineage in 1804 and completed in 1808 as a place where the lineage’s sons could study and lodge during the examinations.⁠[4][13]

In 1892 the school moved to the Kuang ancestral hall on Weibian Street, where it had more than 40 students with Chen Qianqiu as head student; in 1893 it moved again to the Yanggao Shrine of the Guangzhou prefectural school, where he formally named it Wanmu Caotang and wrote its signboard himself.⁠[4]

On the year of its opening, Britannica’s article has him open a school in Guangzhou in 1890, while the Encyclopedia of World Biography and chiculture give 1891.⁠[1][2][13]

The school taught four fields—moral philosophy, evidential scholarship, statecraft and letters—with equal weight on Chinese and Western learning, as well as mathematics, music and military drill; he lectured for four or five hours a day, usually without textbooks, held a students’ speech meeting every fortnight, personally corrected the workbooks that students handed in twice a month, and donated his own books and urged students to give theirs to form a library.⁠[4][2]

Its best-known students were Chen Qianqiu, Liang Qichao, Mai Menghua and Xu Qin, and Liang served as head student helping to manage the others; there were some 20 students around the end of 1891 and later more than 100, and the Xinkuaibao article says that at its height, around 1897, Kang’s disciples numbered as many as a thousand.⁠[4]

When The Forged Classics and Confucius as a Reformer were compiled, the students of the school divided up the work of searching the sources.⁠[4]

Between 1887 and 1900 Ho Kai and Woo Lai-woon (Hu Liyuan) of Hong Kong co-wrote a series of political commentaries arguing for reform, which Kang studied closely with his students.⁠[9]

In 1891 he wrote The Forged Classics. Britannica’s article sums up its argument as being that the Confucian Classics used as the basis of the state cult had been tampered with in the Han period; the Encyclopedia of World Biography puts it that he judged the orthodox classics to be largely forgeries of the reign of Wang Mang (AD 8–23) and favored the New Text versions, orthodox under the Former Han, because they could be made to support reform.⁠[1][2]

The Encyclopedia of World Biography dates the insight on which his mature philosophy rested to the years between 1888 and 1890.⁠[2]

In 1893 he passed the provincial examination and became a juren.⁠[2]

Gan Chunsong, drawing on Kang’s Wo shi, relates that in July 1894 Yu Lianyuan and others memorialized the throne, arguing that Kang’s literary name Changsu meant that he thought himself greater than the uncrowned king, Confucius, and that The Forged Classics deluded the world and deceived the people; they asked that the book be destroyed and left the punishment of its author to the Emperor, and the Guangxu Emperor agreed to its destruction.⁠[15]

Li Hanzhang, then governor-general of Guangdong and Guangxi, defended him, holding that the book was meant to honor the sage even though it went so far as to doubt the classics, and that it had not been widely circulated but was used mainly to teach his own students.⁠[15]

In April 1895 the Treaty of Shimonoseki ended the Sino-Japanese War; Kang, then in Beijing for the metropolitan examination, drafted a petition with Liang Qichao and mobilized provincial graduates to sign a demand that the court reject the peace terms and carry out sweeping reforms, an action later known as the Gongche shangshu, the candidates’ petition.⁠[2][1][13]

Accounts of the number of signatories differ: Britannica’s article speaks of hundreds of provincial graduates, the Encyclopedia of World Biography of nearly 1,300, and chiculture cites Kang’s own poetry collection for about 3,000 graduates of 18 provinces.⁠[1][2][13]

The petition was not accepted by the court; chiculture relates that on the following day the American diplomat Charles Denby obtained a draft, which was copied and circulated across the country under the name of the Public Vehicle Petition.⁠[13][2]

In the same year he passed the metropolitan examination and was appointed a secretary in the Board of Works, at the age of 37 by the Encyclopedia of World Biography’s reckoning.⁠[2][14]

He then sent the Emperor two further memorials proposing governmental, educational and economic reforms; when the court did not take them up he turned to organization and propaganda.⁠[2]

In 1895 he and his associates founded the Qiangxuehui (Society for the Study of National Strengthening) in Beijing and published newspapers; the Encyclopedia of World Biography dates its organization to August, chiculture to November.⁠[2][13][1]

The society had the support of officials including 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 and Yuan ShikaiYuan ShikaiYuan Shikai (1859–1916) was a Chinese army leader and reformist minister of the late Qing dynasty and the first president of the Republic of China, from 1912 to 1916. The modern army he trained at Xiaozhan, Tianjin, grew into the Beiyang Army; in 1915–1916 he proclaimed a monarchy with himself as emperor, cancelled it in March 1916 and died on June 6 of that year.Open the full entry; chiculture calls it the reformers’ first political organization, and Britannica’s article a model for later Chinese political parties.⁠[2][13][1]

Luke S. K. Kwong points out that Kang took part only in the first stage of the Beijing society and had left for the south before its second stage.⁠[12]

On January 12, 1896, he brought out in Shanghai the first issue of the Qiangxue bao, the organ of the society’s Shanghai branch, which was distributed free.⁠[13]

The society alarmed conservative officials and was banned early in 1896.⁠[2][1]

On June 3, 1895 (the 11th day of the fifth month of Guangxu 21), his third memorial to the Qing emperor was forwarded to the throne by the Censorate. Kong Xiangji quotes Kang’s chronological autobiography as saying that of the memorials submitted by officials the Emperor kept nine, ranking Hu Yufen’s first and Kang’s second.⁠[16]

In the autumn of 1895 (the autumn of Guangxu 21) Zhang Zhidong and Kang began their dealings in Nanjing: Zhang was then acting governor-general of Liangjiang because of the First Sino-Japanese War and opposed the peace negotiations of 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 others, while Kang had first made his name with the candidates’ petition and his memorials to the Guangxu Emperor; the go-between was Zhang’s aide Liang Dingfen, and Huang Shaoji also took part in what followed.⁠[17]

Zhang then supported Kang in founding the Shanghai branch of the Qiangxuehui and the Qiangxue bao. Mao Haijian holds that the two men differed widely in scholarship and politics, and that Kang’s insistence on his own views while running the Qiangxue bao led to a break with Zhang’s circle.⁠[17]

After Germany sent troops to seize Jiaozhou Bay on November 14, 1897, Kang submitted to the court a memorial later known as his fifth letter to the Qing emperor, which did not reach the Guangxu Emperor; he also drafted for the censor Yang Shenxiu a memorial advocating an alliance with Britain and Japan.⁠[18][1]

In January 1898 the Guangxu Emperor ordered him to set out his reform proposals in detail, and he wrote the Memorial on Coping with the Overall Situation in Reply to an Imperial Proclamation, whose dozen or so political initiatives became the framework of the Hundred Days’ Reform; chiculture writes that the memorial was passed to the Emperor by his tutor Weng Tonghe, who presented seven of Kang’s memorials in all.⁠[2][13][19]

Scholars differ on who brought him to the Emperor’s attention: Luke S. K. Kwong, drawing on Zhang Yinhuan’s unpublished diary, notes that in the first half of 1894 Kang frequently called at the Beijing residence of his fellow Nanhai native Zhang Yinhuan, whose protégé he was, and argues that Zhang was more instrumental than Weng Tonghe; Young-tsu Wong maintains that it was Weng who eventually recommended Kang to the Emperor, and that Zhang probably made a recommendation too but Weng carried the greater prestige.⁠[12]

He wrote two short books for the Emperor, one on Peter the Great of Russia and one on Japan’s Meiji Restoration; the latter covered the Japanese reforms from 1868 to 1890, with emphasis on constitutional change.⁠[2][19]

Among the sayings of Kang listed by The Beijing News is one to the effect that a country that can change will be preserved and one that cannot will perish, that complete change brings strength and small change still ends in ruin; chiculture’s description of his memorial of early 1898 gives its gist as being that China had to change to survive and that only sweeping change would make it strong.⁠[14][19]

Confucius as a Reformer argued that Confucius had addressed the problems of his own day, favored change and presented reform in the guise of antiquity, and that human progress was inevitable; Britannica’s article and the Encyclopedia of World Biography date the book to 1897, chiculture says it was written in 1892 and published in 1898, and Mao Haijian says that in 1898 he published it together with the Chunqiu Dongshi xue, setting out in full his thesis of Confucius as an institutional reformer.⁠[1][13][20][2]

In the spring of 1898 he published the Riben shumu zhi (Bibliography of Japanese Books) in Shanghai; Mao Haijian, following the research of Wang Baoping, points out that the work was copied by Kang and his disciples from the general catalogue of the Tokyo book publishers’ association.⁠[20]

He finally came to the attention of the Guangxu Emperor, and in January 1898 he met with a group of high government officials.⁠[21]

Du Weidong, writing in the Guangming Daily, holds that many of the reform edicts issued by the Guangxu Emperor during the Hundred Days’ Reform derived directly from Kang’s study of Japan’s political reforms, which was itself strongly influenced by Huang ZunxianHuang ZunxianHuang Zunxian (1848–1905) was a late-Qing poet, diplomat and reformer who served as counselor of the Chinese legation in Japan, consul-general in San Francisco, counselor of the legation in London and consul-general in Singapore. He wrote the Riben guozhi (Treatises on Japan) and the Riben zashishi (Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects from Japan), and his collected poems, which brought colloquial language and new subjects into Chinese verse, made him a leading figure of the revolution in poetry; in 1897–1898 he took part in the reforms in Hunan, and after the coup of 1898 he was dismissed and returned home.Open the full entry’s Treatise on Japan.⁠[22]

On April 12, 1898, he founded the Baoguohui (Society to Preserve the Nation) in Beijing, with the aims of preserving the nation, the race and the Confucian teaching, in order to build support for reform.⁠[13][2][1]

He argued at this time that only institutional reform could save China, and urged that channels be opened for public opinion, that assemblies be convened and that popular sovereignty and the separation of the powers of the state be accepted.⁠[1]

On June 11, 1898, the Guangxu Emperor issued the Imperial Edict on National Affairs, proclaiming a policy of reform and self-strengthening; the Encyclopedia of World Biography dates the edict June 12.⁠[19][23][2]

Court custom barred Kang from approaching the Emperor directly; on June 16 the Guangxu Emperor received him at the Renshoudian in the Summer Palace, the only meeting between the two.⁠[19][12]

There are two accounts of its length: Kang’s own statement is that it lasted two and a half hours; Luke S. K. Kwong cites a note written by Zhang Yuanji in 1930 that Kang came out after a mere ten-odd minutes, an account that Young-tsu Wong rejects, adding that the exact length can never be determined. Kwong also notes that a memorial by Xu Zhijing recommended Zhang Yuanji and named Kang, Liang Qichao, 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 others as well, of whom Kang and Zhang Yuanji were the first to be received.⁠[12]

In the 103 days from June 11 the court issued a series of new measures: merging overlapping offices and abolishing sinecures, allowing officials and commoners to petition the throne directly, reorganizing the army with modern drill, creating central bureaus for railways and mines and for agriculture, industry and commerce, replacing the eight-legged essay in the examinations with essays on current affairs, founding the Imperial University of Peking and modern schools in the provinces, setting up translation bureaus, and permitting private newspapers and learned societies.⁠[19][1]

One chiculture account calls Kang the key planner of the reform, who submitted 36 memorials to the Guangxu Emperor, and counts 111 edicts issued by the Emperor during the reform.⁠[24]

How many memorials he submitted in 1898 is disputed: Young-tsu Wong puts the number at over 70 and notes that Tang Zhijun’s collection of 1981 contains fifty, whereas Luke S. K. Kwong considers the count uncertain and regards Kang’s memorials and drafts of 1898 as largely apocryphal.⁠[12]

Judgments of his role in the reform differ as well: the Encyclopedia of World Biography sees the Emperor as heavily influenced by him; Luke S. K. Kwong sees him as remaining on the periphery of the imperial power structure, a view that Young-tsu Wong sums up, and disputes, as making him more onlooker than prime mover; Wong sees him as a central advisory figure and cites a letter of Kang Guangren explaining that he could not leave Beijing because he was helping his elder brother, who was busy compiling materials for the Emperor.⁠[2][12]

Weng Tonghe was removed from office soon after the reform began: chiculture writes that he was dismissed by the faction of the Empress Dowager Cixi, whereas Luke S. K. Kwong and Young-tsu Wong both hold that it was the Guangxu Emperor, not Cixi, who dismissed him, and Wong further regards Kang as the major factor in Weng’s sudden removal.⁠[19][12]

In August 1898 Tang Caichang wrote to his former teacher that Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao were under attack from the whole country.⁠[19]

An imperial edict issued after the coup states that because he was known for discussing current affairs the Emperor had appointed him to serve as a secretary in the Zongli Yamen and soon afterwards ordered him to Shanghai to run the official gazette bureau, and accuses him of having lingered in the capital and stirred up a plot; Fu Guoyong writes that on the forty-sixth day of the Hundred Days’ Reform the Emperor ordered the Shiwu Bao to be made an official paper under Kang’s supervision.⁠[25][26]

On September 18, 1898, Kang went to the Japanese legation and begged Itō Hirobumi, who was then visiting Beijing, to persuade the Empress Dowager Cixi to support the reform; Takii Kazuhiro writes that Itō’s response left Kang unable to hide his disappointment and that he said the marquis held China in great contempt.⁠[27]

On September 20 the Guangxu Emperor received Itō; the next day the Empress Dowager staged her coup.⁠[28]

On September 21, 1898, the Empress Dowager Cixi staged a coup and resumed control, confined the Guangxu Emperor on Yingtai, an island in Zhongnanhai, and annulled the reforms; on September 28 Tan Sitong and five other reformers were executed, among them Kang’s younger brother Kang Guangren, and scores were arrested.⁠[23][1][2][12][29]

The Encyclopedia of World Biography relates that Kang, forewarned by the Emperor, had left Beijing the day before the coup; he travelled by way of Tianjin to Shanghai and from there, with British help, reached Hong Kong in a British gunboat.⁠[2][9]

After the coup the authorities ransacked Zhang Yinhuan’s house, and Zhang himself was arrested and narrowly escaped summary execution; Young-tsu Wong holds that the authorities had jumped to the conclusion that Kang was hiding there and that Zhang’s indictment did not connect his punishment with Kang.⁠[12]

Whether the reformers had planned to use force before the coup is also disputed: Bi Yongnian’s account has Kang present when Tan Sitong met Yuan Shikai, which Luke S. K. Kwong notes is contrary to received wisdom and in need of source analysis, while treating Kang’s recourse to a military solution as a last-ditch maneuver; Young-tsu Wong holds that a letter written by Liang Qichao in 1908 is crystal-clear about the secret plot of 1898, while Kwong finds that letter vague to the point of ambiguity. Zhang Yongle writes that Kang was convinced that Yuan Shikai had betrayed the emperor’s party in 1898 and always thought ill of him.⁠[12][18]

After the failure of the reform Wanmu Caotang was closed and sealed by the authorities.⁠[4]

On September 4, 1985, Yang Tianshi argued in the Guangming Daily, on the basis of Bi Yongnian’s Guimou zhiji, which he had found in the archives of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that Kang had indeed plotted to surround the Summer Palace and had been ready not only to seize the Empress Dowager but also to kill her.⁠[25]

Shortly after the coup Li Hongzhang and Itō Hirobumi met at a banquet in Beijing; when Kang was mentioned, Li said that he had stirred up the people to the point of public outrage and asked Itō to help arrest him.⁠[28]

This was his second visit to Hong Kong; the Hong Kong businessman Ho Tung received him, lodged him in his mansion and brought his family to Hong Kong to join him, for which the grateful Kang called him a knight.⁠[9]

While in Hong Kong he gave an interview to the English-language newspaper the China Mail, in which he sharply criticized the Empress Dowager Cixi and restated his reform ideas and his loyalty to the Guangxu Emperor.⁠[9]

On October 19, 1898, he left Hong Kong for Japan aboard the Japanese steamer Kawachi Maru; the Japanese Miyazaki Tōten had come to Hong Kong to escort him, and Liang Qichao likewise escaped to Japan with Japanese help.⁠[9][30]

In the winter of 1898 he wrote his autobiography Wo shi (My History, also known as the Chronological Autobiography of Kang Nanhai), which ends with 1898; he later asked Yung WingYung WingYung Wing (1828–1912) was a Chinese educator and diplomat of the late Qing period who graduated from Yale University in 1854 and is described as the first Chinese student to graduate from an American university. He proposed and led the Chinese Educational Mission, which brought 120 Chinese boys to study in the United States from 1872 to 1881, served as the Qing associate minister to the United States, Spain and Peru, and wrote the memoir My Life in China and America (1909).Open the full entry to translate it into English and pressed him about it in several letters.⁠[20][31][32][33]

He was unable to persuade Japan or Britain to intervene on the Emperor’s behalf; the Encyclopedia of World Biography says that for the next fourteen years he lived as a fugitive and exile with a price on his head.⁠[1][2]

In April 1899 he left Japan for Canada; two telegrams of April 15 and April 19 printed in the volume Kang Youwei Overseas: The Americas both state that he was not permitted to enter 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.⁠[34][33]

The same volume records his arrival in Britain on May 31, 1899, and states that the date of May 19 given in Kang’s own supplementary account of his British travels is a slip; Zhang Ronghua’s review faults the volume for offering no documentary evidence for this.⁠[33]

On July 20, 1899, he formally inaugurated the Baohuanghui in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada; the University of Victoria Libraries’ record names Li Fuji (Lee Folk Gay) as co-founder, and the Baohuanghui Scholarship article considers that its first home was probably the third floor of a shop owned by the founding member Li Fuji.⁠[35][5]

The Beijing News article gives the body’s Chinese name as Baojiu Da Qing Guangxu Huangdi Hui (Society to Protect the Guangxu Emperor of the Great Qing), also called a company of that name, and its English name was the Chinese Empire Reform Association; Britannica’s article calls it the China Reform Association (Zhongguo Weixinhui), popularly known as the Save the Emperor Association.⁠[14][5][1]

Edgar Wickberg writes that the Victoria body was the association’s first branch in North America and that a second followed at once in Vancouver, at a time when Victoria had about 5,000 Chinese residents and Vancouver about 3,000; the association later had branches among the Chinese of Japan, Southeast Asia, Latin America, Canada and the United States.⁠[36][2]

Kang Youwei Overseas: The Americas reproduces a photograph of him speaking in the legislative chamber of British Columbia, a photograph of the mounted policeman responsible for his safety in Canada, and a photograph of the bronze star badge made for the association’s members.⁠[33]

As to its size, the Beijing News article says that it later had more than a million members, and Zhang Ronghua’s review says that soon after its founding it was being called the largest international party.⁠[14][33]

In October 1899 he returned to Hong Kong, his third visit (Zhang Renfeng’s article has him come back by way of Britain); chiculture writes that he came back from Canada by way of Japan on learning that his mother was ill and stayed on Hollywood Road, and that his daughter Kang Tongbi also lived in Hong Kong for a time.⁠[34][9]

In 1899 the Empress Dowager Cixi engineered the naming of an heir apparent, and in January 1900 Pujun, son of Prince Duan (Zaiyi), was proclaimed heir; at the end of 1899 Khoo Seok Wan (1874–1941), a provincial graduate settled in Singapore who had founded the newspaper Tiannan xinbao in 1898, invited Kang to move from Hong Kong to Singapore and had Ho Tung deliver 1,000 dollars to him (2,000 by another account).⁠[34][37]

Travelling with Liang Tiejun, Tang Juedun and his nephew Kang Tongfu, Kang left Hong Kong on January 26, 1900 (another article by Zhang Renfeng gives the lunar date, the 29th day of the twelfth month of the jihai year) and reached Singapore on February 1 (the second day of the first month of Guangxu 26), lodging on the third floor of Khoo’s house, the Keyunlu; he moved to the Hengchun Garden on February 24, to the Lin residence on March 26 and to the Zhang residence on April 7.⁠[34][37]

In the spring and summer of 1900 he wrote a poem on 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’s remarriage and gave Khoo a copy; on the Guangxu Emperor’s thirtieth birthday in July he prayed for the Emperor’s safety with Liang Erxu and Tang Rui, while Khoo organized a celebration across the town. Hearing from Huang Naichang that Khoo was trying out guns every day, he wrote a poem on it and showed it to Huang; Zhang Renfeng notes that it does not appear in the several editions of his collected poems.⁠[37][34]

The Renditions author note relates that in 1900 he and Liang Qichao organized two insurrections against the Empress Dowager Cixi, both of which failed; Britannica’s article relates that the revolts the reformers instigated that year in Anhui and Hubei to restore the Emperor also failed.⁠[38][1]

As to funds, he wrote to his mother on June 2, 1900, that Khoo had agreed to hand over 100,000 and to lend another 100,000, so that a great effort could be mounted, and to Xu Qin on the same day that Khoo would give a further 50,000 for arms.⁠[34]

Key Ray Chong writes that in 1900, on the recommendation of two reformist leaders, the Reverend Ng Poon Chew and Dr. Tom She Bin, Kang hired the American Homer Lea as a secret agent to lead an armed revolt in south and central China. Roger R. Thompson writes that Kang turned to Lea for guns and troops, that in a letter of June 27, 1900, to Tan Zhangxiao he said firearms were in short supply and set the rising for August 9, and that in the end no guns were obtained and no troops trained; in a letter of July 5, 1901, he wrote that Lea did not understand the internal situation, that his plan was not feasible and that the effort had cost several thousand dollars.⁠[39][32]

In August 1900 the Independence Army rising planned by Tang Caichang and others in the Yangzi region was suppressed by Qing officials; Zhang Renfeng’s article relates that Tang was arrested at Hankou by Zhang Zhidong on the 27th day of the seventh lunar month and put to death the next day with more than twenty others, and that Yung Wing fled to Hong Kong after Zhang Zhidong ordered his arrest.⁠[32][34][37]

Zhang Zhidong repeatedly telegraphed Luo Fenglu, the Qing minister in Britain, and Luo Zhongyao, the consul-general in Singapore, in 1900 to press Khoo to break with Kang: on November 22, 1900, Khoo announced in the press that he was withdrawing from public affairs; in March 1901 Zhang telegraphed Tao Mo, the newly appointed governor-general of Guangdong and Guangxi, to have Kang, Khoo and Lim Boon Keng watched; in June 1901 Khoo gave 20,000 taels to famine relief in Fujian; and on October 22, 1901, he published an essay, On Kang Youwei, announcing a break. Zhang Renfeng argues that these public statements were the result of pressure from the Qing government and that the friendship was not in fact broken off.⁠[37]

After the invasion by the eight allied powers, the British governor (whom Zhang Renfeng’s article calls Alexander) had him taken on July 26, 1900, to an island in the Strait of Malacca, and on August 9 sent a ship to bring him to Penang, where he lived in the government house until he left for India on December 17, 1901; another article by Zhang Renfeng gives the date of his departure from Penang as December 7.⁠[34][37]

After the failure of the risings he devoted himself to scholarship in Penang, writing the Chunqiu xuebi dayi weiyan kao, his commentary on the Doctrine of the Mean and the Mengzi wei, and began work on the Datong shu.⁠[34][37]

On April 5, 1901, he wrote from Penang to his eldest daughter, Kang Tongwei, that he had long since resolved to go to Europe but was held back by lack of money.⁠[37]

At the end of 1901 Liang Qichao published in the Qingyi bao his Biography of Master Kang of Nanhai, in which he called Kang a philosopher of the evolutionist school.⁠[20]

Mao Haijian says that the two years he spent in Penang and Darjeeling were the most unhurried of his life, in which he annotated the classics at large and wrote his commentaries on the Liyun, the Mencius, the Spring and Autumn Annals and the Analects, and the Datong shu.⁠[20]

The Encyclopedia of World Biography relates that he completed the Datong shu in 1902 while living in India but did not publish it, fearing that the public was not ready for its radical ideas; a note written by Liang Qichao on Kang’s poem on finishing the book says that he wrote it out as a book while taking refuge in India in the xinchou and renyin years (1901–1902).⁠[2][11]

In 1902 he wrote an essay arguing that the West took competition for progress and had all but abandoned the virtue of yielding; in the same year his Letter in Reply to the Chinese Merchants of North and South America, on Why China Can Adopt Only Constitutional Monarchy and Not Revolution, listed the European states that had adopted constitutional monarchy and pointed to the bloodshed of the French Revolution. Zhang Xiang writes that by 1902 he already foresaw that the Qing court could not halt the change in men’s minds and that the scholar-officials were turning toward revolution.⁠[20][40]

Other accounts place him elsewhere in these years: Edgar Wickberg’s article counts 1902 as one of his three visits to Canada, and the Beijing News article has him in Victoria in the winter of 1902, deciding to found a commercial company that would invest worldwide and use its profits for the association’s cause.⁠[36][14]

Britannica’s article relates that he emerged from his retreat in 1903 and that he and his colleagues founded an international business firm and set up schools and newspapers to help and unite the overseas Chinese; these activities in the United States, Mexico, Japan and Southeast Asia brought them into sharp competition with the Chinese revolutionists.⁠[1]

In 1904 he left India and began his travels in Europe; the Renditions author note calls the years 1904–1909 the period of his most extensive Western travels, in which he visited twenty European countries and North America.⁠[20][18][38]

In Britain he visited the University of CambridgeUniversity of CambridgeThe University of Cambridge is a university in Cambridge, England, United Kingdom. It gives 1209 as its founding date, is made up of Schools, Faculties, Departments and autonomous Colleges, and is a member of the Russell Group.Open the full entry, the University of OxfordUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university in Oxford, England, where teaching existed in some form by 1096; it describes itself as the oldest university in the English-speaking world and is organised as a federal system of the university and dozens of self-governing colleges.Open the full entry and the natural history museum, where the statues of Darwin and Huxley met him at the entrance; he wrote that he was delighted by them as at meeting old friends, and that although he had not read a word of Western books for more than twenty years, the principles he had worked out for himself already tallied with theirs.⁠[20]

On May 16 he entered Germany by train from Switzerland, alighted at Konstanz, went boating on Lake Constance, and then travelled into Bavaria to Munich; in this year he wrote his Travels in Germany and the essay Wuzhi jiuguo lun (Saving the Country through Material Development).⁠[18][37]

At Potsdam he saw the armillary sphere, sextant and other astronomical instruments made by Guo Shoujing in the Yuan dynasty, which Germany had carried off from China in 1900; he wept at the sight and wrote a long poem.⁠[18]

In his Travels in Belgium of 1904 he argued that establishing this kind of monarchy in Europe spared a country the disaster of revolutionary struggles for the throne and the usurpation of power by a minister; his travel accounts of Italy, England and France discussed, respectively, Europe’s geography and the competition among its states, England’s course of winning popular rights and a constitution while its hereditary monarchy remained and no revolution took place, and the cruelty of the French Revolution.⁠[40]

Britannica’s article holds that his time in Europe and his study of Western history led him to reject revolutionary violence and to propose instead the rebuilding of China through science, technology and industry.⁠[1]

In his supplementary Travels in Germany of 1907 he said that he had been to Berlin nine times, had reached the four corners of the German federation and had repeatedly passed through dozens of its cities; his daughter Kang Tongbi counted eleven occasions on which he passed through Berlin.⁠[18]

Under November 1904, Kang Youwei Overseas: The Americas records his letter to the Canadian prime minister, an interview he gave to an Ottawa newspaper and his speeches in Vancouver and elsewhere.⁠[33]

Edgar Wickberg counts this as his third visit to Canada; by then the association had twelve Canadian branches and a claimed 7,000 members, a figure Wickberg doubts, noting that the whole Chinese population of Canada was only about 28,000 in 1911, while also mentioning another estimate that some 35 percent of Canada’s Chinese joined the association shortly after its founding.⁠[36]

The association established a Chinese Patriotic School in both Victoria and Vancouver, the latter being that city’s first Chinese school, and in Vancouver it sponsored the Yat Sun Bo (Daily News), founded with the encouragement of Liang Qichao, who visited Vancouver in 1903. Its support came mainly from older, prosperous Chinese merchants who had lived in North America for years.⁠[36]

A company formed by the association to promote investment in western China collapsed after many shares had been sold in Canada, amid accusations that funds had been mishandled; after about 1905 rival political groups emerged, and by 1911 the Yat Sun Bo had ceased publication and the association was past its peak.⁠[36]

Baohuanghui Scholarship has reconstructed his itinerary of 1905 from local newspapers and correspondence: he left Los Angeles by train on May 8 (a correction of the dates given by Jung-pang Lo) and stopped for speeches and meetings in Kansas City, St. Louis and Chicago; on May 19 in St. Louis he addressed the convention of the American Baptist Missionary Union, his first public speech on Chinese exclusion; on May 24–25 he made a side trip to Zion City, IllinoisIllinoisIllinois is a state of the United States that borders Lake Michigan and the states of Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri and Iowa; its capital is Springfield and its largest city is Chicago. It was admitted to the Union on December 3, 1818, as the 21st state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 12,812,508.Open the full entry, with fourteen Chinese from Chicago; and on June 8 he arrived in Washington.⁠[41]

On June 13, 1905, the acting secretary of state, Francis B. Loomis, wrote to William Loeb that the so-called Chinese reformer had written asking to see him and the President, and that the Chinese minister had informed him that the man was an impostor.⁠[42]

On June 16 he met President Theodore RooseveltTheodore RooseveltTheodore Roosevelt (1858–1919) was an American Republican politician, writer, naturalist, and soldier who served as the 26th President of the United States from 1901 to 1909 and received the 1906 Nobel Peace Prize for mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War.Open the full entry in Washington; Baohuanghui Scholarship cites a first-hand account by Tom Leung, a leader of the association’s Los Angeles chapter, in the New York newspaper Zhongguo Weixin Bao, which says that Leung himself, Yung Wing and Zhou Guoxian were also present, notes that the meeting does not appear in the President’s desk calendar, and quotes the Pittsburgh Dispatch of June 19 as saying that Kang described to an audience his meeting with the President and Acting Secretary of State Loomis and the pledges the President had made.⁠[41]

Key Ray Chong writes that Kang and Homer Lea had an audience with the President together and explained the reformers’ cause and their activities in the United States, and that the President listened sympathetically but promised nothing; Kang Youwei Overseas: The Americas, drawing on United States government archives, records two audiences with the President in that year.⁠[39][33]

Roger R. Thompson writes that in 1905 Kang, accompanied by Homer Lea, paid high-profile visits to Washington, New York, Philadelphia and other American cities with large Chinese populations; earlier, between 1903 and 1905, Lea and Richard Falkenberg had competed for the endorsement of Liang Qichao and Kang to direct the training of young Chinese in American cities, a dispute that led to investigations by the United States government.⁠[32]

Kang Youwei Overseas: The Americas has him leave for Mexico in November 1905, though Zhang Ronghua’s review points out that its dates for these days contradict one another; Zhang Yongle writes that in 1906 he went to Torreón in Mexico to deal in real estate and opened a bank, the Huamo Bank (Chinese–Mexican Bank), which took deposits from the Chinese in Mexico and invested in real estate and transport.⁠[33][18]

The Beijing News article says that he invested his own money in real estate at Torreón and made a net profit of more than 100,000 silver dollars on resale, which the article puts at about one million United States dollars in present-day money; that autumn the association’s company founded the Chinese–Mexican Commercial Bank there, in 1907 he personally appointed its president, its real-estate sales manager and other managers, and in the same year the bank built an eight-mile tramway in the east of the town.⁠[14]

Key Ray Chong writes that Kang, over Homer Lea’s objections, invested nearly $800,000 of party funds in Mexican business enterprises, and that the two drifted apart between 1905 and 1908 as a result; Chong also writes that the funds were placed in a street railway company in Veracruz under his daughter’s name, which led to trouble with the Mexican authorities.⁠[39]

The association was later renamed the Diguo Xianzheng Hui (Imperial Constitutional Association): Britannica’s article has it renamed the Constitutional Party in 1907; Zhang Ronghua’s review points out that Kang Youwei Overseas: The Americas gives no fewer than five dates for the change (September 1, 1906, and January 1, February 3, March 16 and March 23, 1907); the Renditions author note dates the successor body, the Society for Constitutional Government, to 1903; and Edgar Wickberg writes that the association in Canada changed its name to the Constitutional Party after the overthrow of the Qing in 1912.⁠[1][33][38][36]

In 1906 he wrote a study of the historical development of the Germanic peoples and, under the pen name Mingyi, published an essay on the history of the French Revolution in nos. 85 and 87 of the Xinmin congbao.⁠[18][40]

In 1907 Kang, then 49, gave lectures in the American West, where a 17-year-old overseas Chinese girl in the audience, He Zhanli, became devoted to him; she later became his third wife.⁠[14]

In the same year Chen Huanzhang prepared to found a Changjiaohui (society for the promotion of the teaching) and hoped that Kang would head it, but Kang at the time considered party-building the priority.⁠[11]

In April 1908 Kang came to Los Angeles to solicit support and patched up his differences with Homer Lea, though they were never again as close as before.⁠[39]

In the latter part of 1908 Homer Lea and his associate Boothe proposed to bring Kang and other exiles to Los Angeles to form an advisory board with American investors; Key Ray Chong writes that about half of a further million dollars pledged by Chinese in the United States had already been collected by Kang.⁠[39]

After the death of the Guangxu Emperor, Key Ray Chong writes, Yung Wing took the view that Kang had maliciously accused Yuan Shikai of fatally poisoning the Emperor, and wrote him off as a partner; under pressure from Yung and Allen, Lea and Boothe agreed in January 1909 to drop Kang, Boothe conceding in a letter of January 25 that he had been “unquestionably impulsive, unwise and untactful in some matters.”⁠[39]

The preface of his Jinzhubi jiuguo lun (Saving the Country with a Gold-Standard Currency) is dated the winter of 1908, and the work was published in 1911.⁠[33]

In the winter of 1909 he returned to Penang; in May 1910 and early in 1911 he twice visited Singapore and was reunited with Khoo Seok Wan, a meeting both men recorded in verse, and in the summer of 1910 he wrote a preface for Khoo’s collected poems.⁠[37]

On May 5, 1911, a Mexican made a street speech at Torreón attacking the Chinese; before dawn on May 13 an anti-government force of 4,500 men surrounded the town, which was held by only 800 soldiers, and it soon fell; the Beijing News article states that 303 Chinese are said to have died in the riot.⁠[14]

On June 7, 1911, after travelling with He Zhanli from Singapore by way of Hong Kong, where he visited his mother, he arrived in Japan, was reunited at Suma with Liang Qichao after eight years apart, and shared Liang’s house, the Shuangtao Yuan, with Liang’s family.⁠[14]

The Beijing News article notes that Liang’s wife, Li Huixian, was then 42 and He Zhanli only 21, yet by the rules of master and disciple Li had to treat He as her teacher’s wife; after moving out of the Shuangtao Yuan he eventually settled in a lakeside house called the Changlan Yuan, where he lived with He Zhanli, their two-year-old son Kang Tongning, a translator-secretary, two cooks and an elderly maidservant brought from Hong Kong, and a 16-year-old Japanese maid, Tsuruko, who later became his fourth wife.⁠[14]

In this year his Wuxu zougao (Draft Memorials of 1898) was published, most of whose memorials had already appeared in the newspapers Zhixin bao and Qingyi bao in 1898–1899, and the four-volume Poems of Master Nanhai, in Liang Qichao’s handwriting, was printed in Japan.⁠[33][11]

The Beijing News article also mentions that in the spring of 1911 the 18-year-old Mao Zedong posted an essay at his school in Changsha imagining Sun Yat-sen as president, Kang Youwei as prime minister and Liang Qichao as foreign minister.⁠[14]

After the Revolution of 1911 broke out he wrote ten essays On Saving the Country and sent them to Shanghai, where no one dared print them; he telegraphed the Empress Dowager Longyu and the regent Zaifeng, denouncing the revolution and pledging his loyalty to the Qing house.⁠[14]

He also wrote On the Republican Form of Government, arguing that China was unsuited to an American-style republic and suited only to a constitutional system of a republic with a titular monarch. Zhang Xiang writes that, drawing on a British writer’s description of Britain as a disguised republic, he developed an argument for the republic with a titular monarch, distinguished a republican kingdom from a constitutional monarchy, and deliberately rendered the full name of Britain as the Republican Kingdom of Great Britain so as to include the word republic.⁠[14][40]

Six days before the lunar New Year he learned from the newspapers in Japan that the Qing emperor had abdicated; calling himself a loyal minister of the Great Qing, he kept his queue until 1917.⁠[14]

In June 1912 he wrote that the republic had now been accomplished, sweeping away the abuses of several thousand years of autocracy in China and doing more than overturning a single dynasty, with the five peoples joined on one track and men’s minds tending the same way; at the same time he warned that China had never practiced republican government and that its people did not understand it.⁠[43]

The Encyclopedia of World Biography relates that although he regarded republicanism as the ideal form of government, he opposed it in 1912 because he thought China and human nature unprepared for that ideal.⁠[2]

On July 30, 1912, he wrote to Chen Huanzhang urging that the moment be seized to found a Confucian association, which he envisaged later being reorganized as a political party; on October 7 the Kongjiaohui (Confucian Association) was founded, with Kang as president and Chen Huanzhang as general secretary by Zhang Xiang’s account.⁠[44][11]

In this year he also wrote a study of the political parties of Austria, and in the winter he put forward a proposal to abolish the provinces.⁠[18]

In 1913 the first issue of the journal Buren (Compassion) carried the Preface to the Confucian Association; Parts One and Two of the Datong shu were serialized in issues 1–8 of Buren that year, the only portions made public in his lifetime.⁠[11][3][2]

In April 1913 he wrote a proposal that Confucianism be made the state religion and Confucius be associated with Heaven in sacrifice, arguing that freedom of religion should go hand in hand with a Confucian state religion; on August 15 Chen Huanzhang, Yan Fu, Liang Qichao, Wang Shitong and others petitioned the National Assembly in the name of the Confucian Association to establish Confucianism as the state religion in the constitution.⁠[44][11]

In the same year he drew up a Draft Constitution for the Republic of China modelled in part on the German constitution and published the essay Zhonghua jiuguo lun (On Saving China); Zhang Yongle writes that he now placed his hopes of resolving the national crisis in Yuan Shikai, the leader of the Beiyang group.⁠[18][20]

In 1913 his mother, née Lao, died in Hong Kong; Zhang Xiang writes that he returned to China in October 1913 for her funeral, ending the exile that had begun in October 1898. Britannica’s article and the Encyclopedia of Religion likewise date his return to 1913, whereas Britannica’s summary page and the Renditions author note give 1914.⁠[45][40][1][6][46][38]

He had a seal cut whose legend says that after a hundred days of reform he spent sixteen years in exile, circled the earth three times, travelled through four continents, passed through thirty-one countries and journeyed 600,000 li; the Renditions author note says that in sixteen years of exile he visited more than forty countries on five continents.⁠[40][38]

Zhang Yongle writes that after his return he made a large profit dealing in land in Shanghai.⁠[18]

After his return he settled in Shanghai.⁠[38]

On February 7, 1914, Yuan Shikai ordered the restoration of the Confucian rites, but he did not support making Confucianism the state religion.⁠[44]

When Yuan Shikai moved to make himself emperor, Kang joined the campaign against him; criticizing the Chouanhui (Peace Planning Society) and Yuan’s self-made monarchy, he wrote that if a man could save the country and make it rich and strong, he might do so as president of a republic or equally under a monarchy.⁠[1][43]

In the summer of 1916 a Daoist priest from Maoshan called on him in Shanghai with an invitation, and he went to Maoshan in Jiangsu, where he stayed at the Qianyuan Temple for nearly a year.⁠[45]

In September 1916 Chen Huanzhang and others again petitioned both houses of the National Assembly to make Confucianism the state religion, and Kang wrote in support to President Li YuanhongLi YuanhongLi Yuanhong (1864–1928) was a naval engineer officer and a commander of the Hubei New Army in the late Qing who became military governor of the Hubei Military Government after the Wuchang Uprising of 1911, served as vice president in the early Republic and was twice President of the Republic of China, in 1916–1917 and 1922–1923; in his last years he lived in Tianjin and invested in industry, and he died there in 1928 and was buried at Wuchang in 1935.Open the full entry and Premier Duan Qirui, to members of the Assembly and to the minister of education, Fan Yuanlian; in the same year Zhang Xun, Ni Sichong and other provincial military and civil governors issued a joint telegram calling for Confucianism to be made the state religion.⁠[44]

During the First World War he opposed China’s entry into the war on the side of the Allies on the ground that Germany was very strong; Zhang Yongle writes that in 1917 he plotted a restoration with Zhang Xun, and that Germany had promised Zhang recognition if the Qing were restored and stayed neutral in the European war.⁠[18]

On May 14, 1917, the constitutional convention adopted an amendment whose text provided only that the people were free to honor Confucius and to profess a religion, without making Confucianism the state religion.⁠[44]

Ma Yong’s article relates that on June 27 Kang arrived in Tianjin with Shen Zengzhi and Wang Naizheng and then went on with them to Beijing, where the others were lodged at the Fahua Temple and Kang alone stayed in Zhang Xun’s residence; on June 30 he drew up the imperial edicts needed for the restoration, one of which stated that Li Yuanhong had memorialized asking for the restoration and created him a duke of the first class, which Ma Yong points out was untrue.⁠[43]

On July 1 Zhang Xun restored Puyi to the throne in Beijing, and one of the edicts then issued named Xu Shichang and Kang Youwei president and vice-president of the Bideyuan (Privy Council).⁠[43]

On July 12 fighting began and the restoration collapsed, having lasted only twelve days; Zhang Xun was escorted to the Dutch legation, and Kang took refuge in the American legation. chiculture writes that Liang Qichao, with the premier Duan Qirui, foiled the restoration and that it ended Kang’s political career.⁠[43][45][13]

Britannica’s article explains his part in the restoration as consistent with his long-held support for constitutional monarchy as a bridge to a democratic republic; Zou Xiaozhan counts it among the things that beset the Confucian religion movement with difficulties, noting that on August 1, 1917, Chen Duxiu published in New Youth an essay, Restoration and the Veneration of Confucius, which held the Confucian religion and the republic to be wholly incompatible.⁠[1][44]

After the failure of the restoration and his sixtieth birthday, Kang again accepted an invitation to Maoshan and lived there in retirement; his stele inscription on the burial of his mother is dated the sixth day of the ninth month of the dingsi year, the 2,468th year of Confucius (1917), and is kept at the Yuanfu Palace on Maoshan, where in the fourth month of 1918 he also wrote the two characters zhong miao for a stone carving. His student Long Zehou was also active at Maoshan and joined him in asking the magistrate of Jurong to post a notice protecting the mountain’s forests; Kang was also on friendly terms with Zhao Jingpei of Jurong, who planted tea on Fushan there, the beginning of a tea farm.⁠[45]

On June 16, 1920, he buried his mother at Maoshan, holding several days of prayers for the occasion; in the following years he had the remains of other relatives, among them his third wife, He Zhanli, and Kang Guangren, whom the Yangtse Evening Post website’s article calls his cousin, brought there for burial.⁠[45]

The inscription at the Jiaoshi Mingqin rock at the foot of Dingjiashan in Hangzhou is signed by Kang Youwei in the third month of the gengshen year, that is, 1920; the hillside also bears the two characters qian yan in his hand.⁠[47]

On August 4, 1921, at the opening of the fourth exhibition of the Tianma Society, he saw Liu Haisu’s oil paintings, among them Sunset at Leifeng Pagoda, and the two took to each other at once; Liu thereafter often went to Kang’s house on Yuyuan Road to hear him teach, and Kang instructed him in calligraphy, poetry and the writing of colophons.⁠[48][49]

In 1922 his first wife, Zhang Yunzhu, died; in a letter to Khoo Seok Wan dated July 24, 1922 (the first day of the sixth month of the renxu year), the last known letter from him to Khoo, he mentioned his daughter Kang Tongbi and son-in-law Luo Chang and asked Khoo to pass the news of the death to old friends in Singapore, Penang, Rangoon and elsewhere. In October of the same year he wrote a preface for Khoo’s Xiaohongsheng shichao.⁠[37]

In 1922, when Cao Kun held power and a constitution was being drafted, he advised that the unit of self-government be placed below the province and that China not imitate the United States with a federation of self-governing provinces; Britannica’s article relates that, fearing a divided country, he opposed the government set up in the south by Sun Yat-sen.⁠[18][1]

In 1923 he gave a series of lectures in Kaifeng, Jinan and Xi’an; Mao Haijian observes that his tone had by then changed from his earlier years and that he now spoke of natural selection and competition as evils.⁠[20]

The Encyclopedia of World Biography relates that as late as 1923 he was still seeking support among warlords such as Wu Peifu for reviving the Qing dynasty and making Confucianism the state religion.⁠[2]

In 1923 he moved to the shore of Huiquan Bay in Qingdao, where he bought a house that had been the official residence of a member of the German governor’s staff during the German occupation and named it Tianyou Yuan; the year of purchase is given as 1923 by the articles in the newspaper of the People’s Political Consultative Conference and in the China Reading Weekly, and as 1924 by the column in The Beijing News, while a poem of his is entitled On Receiving the Former German Governor’s Building in the Sixth Month of the Jiazi Year, the jiazi year being 1924.⁠[50][51][52]

The Beijing News column says that he is said to have first come to Qingdao in 1917, that the three-storey German-style house was built in 1899, that the house was small but the garden large and the sea only a hundred paces or so away, and that he spoke of his pleasure in listening to the waves from his bed; the China Reading Weekly article says that Puyi wrote for him the three characters Tianyou Tang, which he hung in his study, and that he styled himself Tianyou Huaren.⁠[52][51]

A recollection quoted in the Qingdao Morning Post article says that on coming to Qingdao in 1923 he first stayed in a friend’s home, taking a cold bath every day, and that he later bought a house and moved his family to Qingdao, where his children attended a primary school run by the British.⁠[53]

He was at this time president of the general Confucian Association and was popularly called Sage Kang; he wrote many poems in Qingdao, some of which, carved in stone, are now part of the sights of Laoshan.⁠[50]

In the spring of 1924 he chose a burial site for himself on Zao’ershan at Licun in Qingdao, buying 5.6 mu of hill land from Liu Xiqiu of Nanzhuang, Licun, for 60 silver dollars.⁠[54]

In the autumn of 1925, while visiting Zhifu (now Yantai) in Shandong with members of his family, he made the acquaintance of Li Ziming, president of the Chinese merchants’ association of Dalian, who invited him to lecture there.⁠[50]

On September 18 he crossed by sea from Qingdao to Dalian with three attendants and put up at the Yamato Hotel; on September 19 he gave a lecture under the title Diantong, and on the same day several hundred pieces of his calligraphy went on show in the city, selling out within two days of an exhibition planned to last a week; the merchants’ association gave a banquet for him at the Taihualou restaurant and arranged a press reception.⁠[50]

On September 20 he went by invitation to the Confucian temple at Jinzhou to sacrifice to Confucius and afterwards visited the Xiangshui Temple on Daheishan, leaving a poem that is now carved there; back in Qingdao he wrote a scroll for each director of the merchants’ association and sent them as gifts.⁠[50]

A year before his death he completed his last book, The Heavens (Zhutian jiang), in which astronomy is blended with his metaphysical reflections.⁠[1]

A book extract carried by China News Service relates that on March 8, 1927, Kang celebrated his seventieth birthday in Shanghai, where relatives, friends and disciples gathered at his home, the Youcunlu, and Liang Qichao sent a birthday couplet; on the day before the banquet Puyi sent a plaque in his own hand and a jade ruyi sceptre, and Kang, putting on the court dress of the former dynasty, bowed toward the emperor in thanks and wrote a memorial of gratitude, of which about a thousand copies were printed and handed to the guests.⁠[55]

The Northern Expedition forces were then approaching Shanghai and he wished to move his family to safety; the extract says in one place that he took ship from Shanghai for Qingdao on March 18 and in another that he arrived in Qingdao on the 21st.⁠[55]

Kang Youwei died at his home in Qingdao on March 31, 1927 (the 28th day of the second lunar month); the opening line of Britannica’s article on him gives the date of death as March 21, 1927.⁠[46][2][56][54][1]

Of the circumstances, the book extract carried by China News Service relates that on March 29 he attended a dinner of fellow Cantonese at the Yingji restaurant, a Cantonese house on Zhongshan Road, was seized with severe abdominal pain after drinking a glass of orange juice and vomited through the night, and that of the two doctors called, one, a Japanese, diagnosed food poisoning; on the 30th he felt that the poison had cleared, talked freely and in the evening watched the stars, and soon afterwards cried out alone that all was over; at 2 a.m. on the 31st he said that there was no longer a foot of ground for him in China but that he could not die in a foreign land, and he died at about 5 a.m., bleeding, as the extract puts it, from the seven orifices of the head. Elsewhere the extract places the dinner on the evening of the 30th.⁠[55]

The account of Kang Tongbi recorded in the Qingdao Morning Post article is that he drank a glass of orange juice at a well-known Cantonese restaurant in Qingdao, had abdominal pains after returning home and died on the third day.⁠[53]

Soon after his death his disciples asked Puyi to grant him the posthumous title Renzhong, which was refused; a proposal to bury him beside the tomb of the Guangxu Emperor at the Western Qing Tombs was also dropped for lack of funds.⁠[55]

The family disagreed on whether he should be buried in Qingdao or taken back to Nanhai in Guangdong, and the coffin was placed for the time being on Zao’ershan at Licun (also called Xiang’ershan, a name the book extract carried by China News Service regards as a mistake), the site he had chosen in his lifetime; the Licang district item carried by Qilu Net says that on the first day of the third lunar month of 1927 he was laid in the vault built on Zao’ershan. The book extract carried by China News Service says that he had settled on the site after a geomancer spent three days surveying it in the rain; at the burial the slope was too steep for the two-horse hearse, so that the coffin was carried up the hill by men, and his children, in mourning dress and straw sandals, threw the sandals away afterwards and walked home barefoot.⁠[53][54][55][49]

On April 17, 1927, Liang Qichao gathered Kang’s disciples for a public memorial service at the Jifu Xianzhe Shrine in the south of Beijing.⁠[55]

The original tombstone, of black granite and 2.22 meters high, was inscribed on the front Tomb of Master Kang of Nanhai and on the back with an epitaph, both composed and written by his disciple Lü Zhenwen, and the China Reading Weekly article dates it to 1929. In 1941 flash floods from Laoshan nearly washed the tombstone away and left the coffin exposed.⁠[54][51][49]

Zhang Cangjiang writes that at 5 p.m. on October 20, 1943, Kang’s coffin was formally buried on Xiang’ershan in a public ceremony presided over by Jiang Kanghu and attended by more than three thousand people, and that one of Kang’s sons had sent two telegrams from Shanghai opposing the public burial; the item carried by Qilu Net dates the formal burial ceremony to October 19, 1943.⁠[49][54]

In 1956, by the Qingdao Morning Post’s account, Kang Tongbi came to Qingdao to visit the grave, accompanied throughout by Zhang Jingfu of the municipal cultural relics commission; Zhang Cangjiang places this journey to Qingdao in April 1957 and writes that Kang Tongbi found the grave of her ninth sister, Kang Tongyan, still in place.⁠[53][49]

In 1956 Kang Tongbi proposed a commemoration of the centenary of Kang Youwei’s birth for the following year; Li Jishen suggested instead a family memorial rite for a hundred or so people combined with the sixtieth anniversary of the 1898 reform and a small exhibition, and in the end a commemorative meeting was held in 1958, with an exhibition of documents and historical objects.⁠[49]

In August 1966, during the Cultural Revolution, Kang’s tomb was destroyed as one of the Four Olds and the vault was dug open by students; the item carried by Qilu Net says that the bones were burned and the skull was paraded through the main street of Licun in a tipper truck.⁠[54]

The skull and the tombstone were taken to the Qingdao Municipal Museum, where the skull was shown in an exhibition; the item carried by Qilu Net says that it was Wang Jiqin, an associate researcher at the museum, who proposed taking the skull in as an exhibit, and that after the exhibition the skull and other remains were put away in a wooden box. The Qingdao Morning Post article says that the tombstone was set beside the canteen on a base of bricks and used as a table, and that both skull and stone were afterwards kept in the museum.⁠[53][54]

The new tomb was built on the southern slope of Fushan, north of the village of Damaidao in Qingdao. The date of the rebuilding is given in several ways: the Qingdao Evening News article says that the municipal government began rebuilding Kang’s tomb in 1980; the item carried by Qilu Net says that on May 20, 1984, the Shandong provincial and Qingdao municipal governments, with the family’s consent, rebuilt the tomb; and the China Reading Weekly article says that the new tomb was built by the Qingdao municipal government in 1985.⁠[56][54][51]

Only his skull is buried in the new tomb; before it stands a tombstone inscribed by his disciple Liu Haisu, who also composed and wrote out the record on the stele, and behind it six dragon cypresses were planted to stand for the six reformers put to death in 1898, while the old stone thrown down on Zao’ershan now stands beside the new grave.⁠[54][53][49][51]

When the new tomb was completed, his relatives in the United States, Hong Kong and Taiwan did not attend; his daughter-in-law Pang Lian, a member of the Shanghai Research Institute of Culture and History, came to Qingdao for the ceremony by invitation.⁠[53]

The Beijing News article observes that although he advocated the equality of the sexes and monogamy, he himself took six wives one after another, the point on which he has been most criticized.⁠[14]

His first wife, Zhang Yunzhu, courtesy name Miaohua, was buried at Maoshan in Jiangsu; the Yangtse Evening Post website’s article, drawing on a China Jiangsu Net item of March 20, 2014, says that two stone tablets were unearthed during land levelling at Youzhatou village, Xuebu town, Jintan, one of them bearing her name and courtesy name, on the strength of which the site has been provisionally identified as her tomb.⁠[49][45]

His sixth wife, Zhang Guang, he married in Hangzhou. The Dushi kuaibao article, drawing on what her grandson said, describes her as a farmer’s daughter from beside West Lake who was called A-Cui by her family when young and was given the name Zhang Guang by Kang, and says that when the match was proposed he was nearly 60 and she 19 and that she and her mother were at first both against it; after the marriage he began building a villa, Kangzhuang, but died before he had lived in it for long, and Zhang Guang brought up her daughter alone for eighteen years and died before 1949.⁠[47]

Zhang Cangjiang’s memoir mentions Kang Tongbi’s eldest sister, Kang Tongwei, her sixth sister, Kang Tongfu (whose husband was Pan Qixuan, and who is a different person from Kang’s nephew of the same romanized name), her ninth sister, Kang Tongyan, and two younger brothers, one of them Kang Tongning; the Qingdao Morning Post article mentions another daughter, Kang Tonghuan, whose husband, Li Yunguang, was a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the author of an annotated study of Kang Youwei’s family letters.⁠[49][53]

The husband of his eldest daughter, Kang Tongwei, was Mai Zhonghua, who died in Hong Kong in 1956. In Wo shi Kang wrote of her at fifteen as gifted, diligent and retentive and already able to compile books; she edited the Guoyu and compiled from the twenty-four dynastic histories a study of the customs and institutions of various countries. Her sixth daughter, Mai Fengzeng, worked with her husband at the Finnish embassy in Beijing, and both died early in the Cultural Revolution.⁠[49][20]

His second daughter, Kang Tongbi: Zhang Yihe, quoting the biographical register of the Central Research Institute of Culture and History, describes her as a native of Nanhai, Guangdong, born in February 1883, with the courtesy name Wenpei and the literary name Huaman.⁠[57]

In 1903 Kang Tongbi came to Hartford, ConnecticutConnecticutConnecticut is a U.S. state in the New England region. Its capital is Hartford and its largest city is Bridgeport (2010 census). It entered the Union on January 9, 1788, as the 5th state, and had a population of 3,605,944 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, to finish her English education as the guest of Yung Wing, who had remained in Hartford after the Chinese Educational Mission ended in 1881. Like her father, she was a staunch advocate of reform.⁠[58]

The biographical register of the Central Research Institute of Culture and History says that she went to study in the United States when young and attended Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry and a college it calls Jialinfu University, that after returning to China she was vice-president of the International Council of Women and president of the Shandong Morality Society and of the Chinese Women’s Association, and that she sat as a delegate in the council of seven North China provinces convened by Fu Zuoyi and took part in the talks with the People’s Liberation Army on the peaceful handover of Beiping; in July 1951 she was appointed a member of the Central Research Institute of Culture and History, later serving as a deputy to the Beijing Municipal People’s Congress and as a member of the second, third and fourth National Committees of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (from 1953 and 1954 respectively by Zhang Cangjiang’s account), and she died on August 17, 1969, aged 86.⁠[57][49]

Kang Tongbi’s husband, Luo Chang, died on February 6, 1956, and after a memorial service on February 13 was buried in the Anglican cemetery beside the Baiyun Temple; their daughter, Luo Yifeng, who had studied at Yenching University, died in 1975.⁠[49]

Datong: The Chinese Utopia, a chamber opera in three acts commissioned by the Hong Kong Arts Festival, was staged at the Hong Kong City Hall Theatre in March 2015. ChinaFile’s article states that its first act opens in 1901 with Kang Tongbi sailing from Hong Kong to meet her father, that she sings her family’s story to an itinerant missionary, and that at the end she is attended on her Beijing deathbed by her daughter Luo Yifeng.⁠[59][60]

Kang Tongbi’s son Jung-pang Lo (Luo Rongbang) lived for many years in the United States, where he died, and wrote a book on Kang Youwei; the volume he edited, K’ang Yu-wei: A Biography and a Symposium, published in 1967, contains Kang’s chronological autobiography, and Britannica’s article on Kang Youwei is also by him.⁠[53][2][1]

Kang Tongning was He Zhanli’s son. Kang Youwei’s daughter-in-law Pang Lian said that she had never met him and had never been to Qingdao before she was invited to the ceremony for the new tomb.⁠[14][53]

Kang Jinggu, entered in the family genealogy as the tenth daughter, was adopted by Zhang Guang from her sister’s family; born on February 6, 1929, she was written into the Kang genealogy on her adoption, in 1951 married a man who worked at a dental clinic, and had two daughters and a son, and died in Hangzhou on March 23, 2012, at the age of 84.⁠[47]

The book extract carried by China News Service, following an account by Li Keliang, says that in his last instructions to the family Kang did not mention his ninth daughter and, when asked, said that she was going the same way as he was; she died a few days after him.⁠[55]

In April 2012 a granddaughter of Kang Youwei, then 80, went to Maoshan with her husband in search of her grandfather’s calligraphy and her grandmother’s grave; the grave of Kang Youwei’s mother had been destroyed in the Cultural Revolution and its site was hard to find.⁠[45]

The Australian badminton player Gronya SomervilleGronya SomervilleGronya Somerville (born 1995) is an Australian badminton doubles player who has competed at the Olympic Games and at three Commonwealth Games and has won a series of Oceania Championships titles; articles in the South China Morning Post, SBS and other outlets, and her own statements, describe her as a descendant of Kang Youwei.Open the full entry was born in Melbourne. An article in the South China Morning Post calls Kang her great-great grandfather; in it she says that her father was born in Guangzhou and moved to Hong Kong and then to Melbourne, where she was born, and the article states that her mother gave her the family history when she was young. The SBS program page of June 28, 2021, by contrast, describes her as Kang’s great-granddaughter.⁠[61][62]

A China Daily report of May 15, 2015, likewise calls Gronya Somerville Kang Youwei’s great-great-granddaughter; in it she says that she knows Kang was her great-great-grandfather and a very famous figure in China, and that she is proud to be his descendant.⁠[63]

Zhang Guang’s grandson says that Kang was on very good terms with Guo Shilin, the owner of the Guo Villa in Hangzhou, who often lent him the villa, and that soon after marrying Zhang Guang Kang brought her family to live there; after Kang’s death the Kangzhuang on Dingjiashan was sealed by the Northern Expedition army, and Zhang Guang and her daughter went on living in the Guo Villa until her death, so that the daughter was known locally as Miss Kang of the Guo Villa.⁠[64]

He adds that Kang had a farm at Maoshan in Jiangsu which failed and whose land was then let to tenants; after Kang’s death his wives and children took turns going to Maoshan to collect the rent, and in the year that fell to Zhang Guang and her daughter there was a severe drought, so that, unable to resist the pleas of the stricken villagers, she collected nothing; once, having run out of money for the journey and unable to pay for their lodging, mother and daughter were held in the inn’s woodshed until a fellow guest, hearing that they were Kang Youwei’s family, paid their bill and saw them back to the Guo Villa. Zhang Guang later contracted schistosomiasis and died in her forties.⁠[64]

Jung-pang Lo (1912–1981) was a professor of history at the University of California, Davis; the Lo (Jung-pang) Papers on Chinese History in the university library’s Special Collections (D-003) contain his bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral theses, manuscripts on Chinese naval history and Chinese leaders, manuscripts by or on Kang Youwei and part of the Lo family’s genealogical materials.⁠[65]

From an ancient commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals he developed the doctrine of the Three Ages, in which human history advances from an Age of Disorder through an Age of Approaching Peace to an Age of Universal Peace; he held that his own time belonged to the Age of Approaching Peace, to which constitutional monarchy was the appropriate form of government.⁠[2][6]

The Encyclopedia of Religion describes his worldview as centered on ren (humaneness), which saw the cosmos as a selfless and all-embracing whole, while retaining the Confucian belief that the goal of human life is the moral perfection of the individual and of society; he held that his radical reinterpretation of ren applied only to the final Age of Universal Peace and that until then many Confucian values remained valid.⁠[6]

The Datong shu envisages mankind passing through stages of development into a world of great unity, in which the barriers of state, race, religion, class, sex and family are removed, self-governing communities send representatives to a world parliament under a single world government, the family ceases to exist, children are reared by public institutions, property is held in common, the economy is industrialized and laws and courts are no longer needed.⁠[1][2]

Zhang Xiang argues that he refrained from publishing the whole of the Datong shu in his lifetime because doing so helped to protect the image of Confucius as the founder of a religion for the whole world, and thus the Confucian religion movement.⁠[11]

The Encyclopedia of Religion relates that he coupled the preservation of the faith with the protection of the nation, calling for the revival of Confucianism and its establishment as the state religion, and that he resumed this campaign after his return to China; Britannica’s article says that he called for preserving what was best in China’s traditions and for a reformed Confucian church to give spiritual guidance. One of the sayings listed by The Beijing News asks what use the Chinese have for their knees if they bow neither to Heaven nor to Confucius.⁠[6][1][14]

From his travel writings Zhang Xiang concludes that he attributed Europe’s vitality to the coexistence and competition of many states, itself a product of geography, while insisting on unity within each state; that he did not regard revolution as the motive force of the new age, maintaining that China had been substantially equal since the Qin and Han and had no hereditary aristocracy and therefore no need of revolution; and that he took Britain as the model of a country that realized the political values of the new age without revolution; among the countries of the last thirty or forty years he most admired Germany, and among those of the last two centuries Britain.⁠[40]

Zhang Ronghua’s review quotes his proposal that the name of the state be changed from the Great Qing to Zhonghua (China), and his wish that Zhonghua should be its name for all time to come.⁠[33]

Mao Haijian rejects the common scholarly view that Kang was shaped by Western influence, holding that the democracy he spoke of derived from his doctrine of great unity and the Three Ages and was not popular sovereignty in Rousseau’s sense; on evolution, Mao holds that he may have had a preliminary acquaintance with the theory but little grasp of the essentials of Darwin, Huxley and Spencer, and that the word for evolution in his writings mostly means progress. Yan Fu sent the manuscript of his Tianyan lun to Liang Qichao, who showed it to Kang.⁠[20]

Yu Ying-shih holds that constitutional monarchy is also a form of democracy.⁠[14]

He wrote prolifically on the Chinese Classics, politics and economics, and also left travel accounts and an anthology of poems; he was a famous calligrapher as well, and the Renditions author note calls him a fine poet who identified closely with Du Fu.⁠[1][38]

The complete Datong shu was published by his disciples only in 1935, eight years after his death, in an edition by the Zhonghua Book Company; Laurence G. Thompson’s partial English translation, Ta T’ung Shu: The One-World Philosophy of K’ang Yu-wei, appeared in 1958.⁠[3][11][2]

Mao Haijian spent more than five years annotating Wo shi, the result being his book From 1894 to 1898: An Annotated Reading of Kang Youwei’s Wo shi; he writes that the sources left by Kang and Liang Qichao contain fabrications, that truth and falsehood in Wo shi are hard to tell apart, and that researchers can neither avoid these sources nor take them on trust but must test them item by item.⁠[31][20]

In March 2018 the Commercial Press published Kang Youwei Overseas: The Americas, a supplement to the chronological biography of Master Kang of Nanhai for 1898–1913, edited by Zhang Qizhen and Zhang Qireng; the editors are sons of Zhang Cangjiang, Kang Tongbi’s secretary, and holders of the South Windsor collection of Kang Tongbi’s papers.⁠[33]

A group of Kang’s letters to Khoo Seok Wan is in the keeping of Khoo’s descendant Wang Qingjian; before Zhang Renfeng wrote about them, only Tang Zhijun had published some of them, in 1992.⁠[34]

Among studies in English, both the Encyclopedia of World Biography and the Encyclopedia of Religion list Hsiao Kung-chuan’s A Modern China and a New World: K’ang Yu-wei, Reformer and Utopian, 1858–1927 (University of Washington Press, 1975).⁠[2][6]

On February 6, 2015, Baohuanghui Scholarship described an English-language book in preparation, A Chinese Reformer in Exile: Kang Youwei and the Chinese Empire Reform Association in North America, 1899–1909, by Robert L. Worden and Jane Leung Larson with Zhongping Chen, Chen Xuezhang and Evelyn Hu-DeHart; the description says that the association may have had as many as 37 chapters in Canada and had 15 in Mexico, and that Worden’s Georgetown University dissertation of 1972 has for some forty years been the most reliable source on Kang’s North American travels.⁠[66]

The University of Victoria Libraries’ collection on Victoria’s Chinatown includes a black-and-white photograph entitled Kang Youwei in Canada, digitized in 2012.⁠[5]

His treatise on calligraphy, the Guang yizhou shuangji (Expanded Twin Oars of the Boat of Art), gave a comprehensive account of stele studies, advocated the veneration of steles and argued that the stele style should replace the copybook style, so as to correct the faults that repeated recutting had brought into the copybook tradition; he excelled in running and cursive scripts, drawing above all on the Northern Wei cliff inscription Shimen ming, and sought vigour of momentum over small niceties. Ke Xiaogang writes that the treatise was written in the same years as The Forged Classics and Confucius as a Reformer, and that all these books were banned and destroyed by the Qing court after the failure of the 1898 reform.⁠[67][68]

Britannica’s article says that his work later inspired a modern reappraisal of China’s past, while critics charged him with using Confucius to advance his own aims and with undermining the established order; his views in later life were criticized by partisan writers.⁠[1]

The Encyclopedia of World Biography calls him a brilliant thinker whose reinterpretations of Confucianism secured his lasting fame and whose societies and publications of the 1890s influenced China’s political development; the same article describes him as egotistical and arrogant, seldom acknowledging his intellectual debts to teachers and predecessors, and says that by the time he died most Chinese intellectuals regarded him as a relic of the past.⁠[2]

The Encyclopedia of Religion says that his later writings kept to the interpretation he had reached in the 1890s but that his views never regained their earlier influence; the Renditions author note says that he remained loyal to the Qing dynasty until his death.⁠[6][38]

Kang’s role in the reform of 1898 has long been debated by scholars: after Young-tsu Wong published his article Revisionism Reconsidered: Kang Youwei and the Reform Movement of 1898 in The Journal of Asian Studies, Luke S. K. Kwong wrote to take issue with it and Wong replied, maintaining that archival evidence shows many of the statements in Kang’s chronological autobiography to be truthful, while Kwong points out that more recent scholars have exposed half-truths and inaccuracies in the accounts left by Kang and Liang Qichao.⁠[12]

chiculture writes that Kang later turned conservative and that he and Liang Qichao parted ways. Ma Yong holds that in the restoration of 1917 both Zhang Xun and Kang substituted their own imaginings for the facts, and that Liang Qichao’s foresight far exceeded his teacher’s.⁠[13][43]

Zhang Renfeng argues that the term baohuang (protecting the emperor) should be understood in its historical setting: the reformers hoped for gradual constitutional change under the Guangxu Emperor, which they thought less costly than revolution, and the later vilification of the term is unjust.⁠[34]

Zhang Ronghua’s review notes that Kang expressly declined the title of the Martin Luther of Confucianism that Liang Qichao had conferred on him but gladly accepted that of the Moses of China.⁠[33]

Key Ray Chong writes that Allen, one of those involved in the project of 1908, judged that Kang would never regain the standing of a reliable reformer, on account of his handling of funds.⁠[39]

On June 30, 1949, in On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship, Mao Zedong named Hong Xiuquan, Kang Youwei, Yan Fu and Sun Yat-sen as representatives of those who had looked to the West for truth before the Communist Party of China was born, and wrote that Kang had written the Datong shu but had not found, and could not have found, the road to the great unity; the note to the essay in volume four of Mao’s Selected Works says that after fleeing abroad Kang and Liang organized the Baohuanghui and, standing opposed to the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois revolutionaries represented by Sun Yat-sen, became a reactionary political faction.⁠[69]

Of Wanmu Caotang only the Qiu family library survives, at No. 3 Changxing Li, Zhongshan Fourth Road, Guangzhou, a hall-type building three bays wide and three courtyards deep with a floor area of about 663 square meters; it was listed as a key protected cultural site of Guangzhou after 1983, the lock factory occupying it moved out in 1999 and the last residents in 2004, the main structure was restored to its original appearance in 2006, and in 2012 it was listed as a key protected cultural site of Guangdong province.⁠[4]

His house in Qingdao stands at No. 5 Fushan Branch Road, about 100 meters from the sea, and was known to local people as the Kang family garden; for a time it was shared by several households, and it was later opened as a memorial hall by decision of the Qingdao Municipal People’s Congress and listed as a protected cultural site by Shandong province, and is now the Kang Youwei Former Residence Memorial Hall. The name over the door was written by Liu Haisu in his last years, and the hall displays a statue and photographs of Kang and carved rosewood furniture, which the Beijing News column says is traditionally held to have been a gift from the former Prince Gong.⁠[52][53]

The new tomb on Fushan lies on a hillside near Qingdao University; it covers nearly 1,000 square meters and is surrounded by a stone wall 30 centimeters high to keep out water.⁠[51]

The foundations of the original tomb on Zao’ershan at Licun survive; a park with a planned area of 36 hectares has been laid out on the hill, begun in July 2016 and including a Kang Youwei cultural square among the parts first completed, and the Qingdao Evening News article says that the park was finished at the end of 2017.⁠[54][56]

The Baohuanghui Scholarship blog writes that in Victoria, Canada, the building of 1905 at 1715 Government Street is the one most often cited as the birthplace of the association, and that a stone tablet found inside it, dated 1907, lists the donors to its construction; the building underwent rehabilitation and seismic upgrading from 2006 to 2011, completed in February 2012.⁠[35]

Kang Youwei’s former residence at Sucun in Nanhai was originally called the Yanxiang Laowu; the local government restored it in 1983, a Kang Youwei memorial hall was built nearby in 1986, and in 1996 the site was listed as a major historical and cultural site protected at the national level. The Kang Youwei museum presents his life and holds a large collection of his original calligraphy and letters; in 2023 it was the largest museum devoted to a historical figure in Nanhai District.⁠[7]

On June 26, 2014, work began on the Kang Garden, an extension built around the former residence with a planned area of 400 mu, including a Qing-period Lingnan cultural street, the Qigui Garden, a Wanmu Caotang, the Qishu Hall and a Kang Garden museum, the Qishu Hall being a full-scale reconstruction of the Nanhai Guild Hall in Beijing; it was scheduled for completion in 2016. By December 2023 Nanhai had held the Kang Youwei Cultural Festival nineteen times.⁠[8][10]