Li Shaofen

Sakamoto Hideyuki’s doctoral dissertation (Chiba University, academic year 2021) draws on Li Shaofen’s A Brief Account of Li Yuanhong to describe the situation of the family of Li Yuanhong, then a senior Qing army officer, during the Wuchang Uprising: when the uprising broke out, Li Yuanhong sent his family to a place 60 li from Wuchang, and when the Qing forces began a full counteroffensive he moved them on to the foreign concessions in Shanghai, where, fearing arrest and execution by the Qing as a traitor’s family, they went by her mother’s surname, Wu, rather than Li. After the Nanjing Provisional Government was established he brought the family back to Wuhan, lodging them first in the British concession in Hankou, and only half a year later did they rejoin him in Wuchang.⁠[1]

Wang Birong’s book on the family history of the descendants of Yuan Shikai’s fifth consort, Lady Yang, an excerpt of which China News Service published in 2013, writes that on October 6, 1913, Yuan Shikai was elected formal President of the Republic, with Li Yuanhong as Vice President and military governor of Hubei, and that at the end of that year Li Yuanhong moved his whole household from Hubei to Beijing.⁠[2]

In A Brief Account of Li Yuanhong, Li Shaofen recalled that in the spring of 1914 Yuan Shikai invited her family to his home, called out his sons and daughters to meet her father and proposed that the two families make an exchange, each giving the other a daughter as a daughter-in-law; her father said he would give one first and asked which one Yuan wanted, Yuan replied that it did not matter so long as she was a daughter of the Li family, and her father then promised her younger sister Li Shaofang to Yuan Shikai’s ninth son, Yuan KejiuYuan KejiuYuan Kejiu was the ninth son of Yuan Shikai; Phillips Academy’s record gives his year of birth as 1905 and Wang Birong’s book as 1903. Wang Birong writes that in 1914 his father betrothed him to Li Shaofang, the second daughter of Li Yuanhong, and that they married in 1934. He went to the United States to study in 1920 and attended Phillips Academy from 1921 to 1924; Bai Junhe, the husband of one of his nieces, says that after returning to China he served continuously as a director of Qixin Yanghui Gongsi (the Qixin cement company).Open the full entry.⁠[2]

Wang Birong writes that Yuan Kejiu was then eleven and Li Shaofang eight, and that a president and a vice president becoming in-laws was without precedent or sequel in the history of the Republic; she also quotes the recollection of Yuan Shikai’s daughter Yuan JingxueYuan JingxueYuan Jingxue was the third daughter of Yuan Shikai. In the 1960s she wrote the memoir My Father Yuan Shikai, published in Wenshi ziliao xuanji (Selected Historical Materials), which discusses her father’s habit of taking tonics, his poetry and his children’s marriages; her recollections also tell how she discovered that her eldest brother, Yuan Keding, had been forging the newspaper Shuntian Shibao.Open the full entry in My Father Yuan Shikai that in betrothing his ninth son to a daughter of Li Yuanhong he undoubtedly had political aims, given the relations between the two men.⁠[2]

Wang Birong writes that Li Shaofen’s mother, Wu Jingjun, was at first unhappy with the match and, following Ding Zhongjiang’s Historical Tales of the Beiyang Warlords, gives the main reason as Yuan Kejiu’s being the son of a concubine while the Li daughter was the child of a principal wife; she goes on to write that of Yuan Shikai’s children only his eldest son, Yuan KedingYuan KedingYuan Keding, courtesy name Yuntai, was the eldest son of Yuan Shikai; fluent in German and English, he commanded the Army Model Regiment and in 1915 was a core member of the Chouanhui, the society that campaigned for a constitutional monarchy; he came to be called the “crown prince of Hongxian.” After Yuan Shikai’s death he lived for a time in seclusion; under the Japanese occupation he disavowed in print a statement supporting the “New Order in East Asia” that had been published over his name without his consent, and he spent his last years in the household of his cousin Zhang Boju, dying at the end of the 1950s.Open the full entry, had been born to his principal wife, that Yuan Keding already had a wife and a concubine, and that once Wu Jingjun saw this she consented to the match.⁠[2]

Wang Birong writes that Yuan Shikai died two years after the betrothal and that the engagement was not called off; as Li Shaofang grew up she became very unhappy with the match and left the preparatory course of Nankai University after a year, by which time Li Shaofen had gone to study in the United States. The book says that she first entered a school it calls the Weisilie Theological Seminary, on the introduction of a man it describes as the head of the U.S. Senate and names in Chinese transcription as Airuisi, and later, on the introduction of Hu Shi’s teacher John Dewey, transferred to Columbia University; she urged her sister to come to the United States to study for a change of scene, but Li Shaofang had no interest in going.⁠[2]

Wang Birong writes that Li Yuanhong set great store by his children’s education and was an active supporter of education, repeatedly helping to fund it; that he was proud of his elder daughter’s master’s degree in education from Columbia University; and that, having learned from her of Western ideas such as the equality of men and women and freedom of social contact, he warmly approved of them and abolished his long-standing rule forbidding his daughters to speak with male guests.⁠[2]

An article by Liu Wenxiang in The Paper in 2016 states that on May 25, 1928, Li Yuanhong collapsed while watching horse racing and that he died of illness at his residence in Tianjin on June 3 of that year, aged 65, and that her mother, Wu Jingjun, also died of illness in Tianjin the following year.⁠[3]

The article states that the Li children, following Li Yuanhong’s wishes, planned to carry their father’s coffin back to Wuchang for burial, and that after their mother’s death she too was to be buried with him; on June 7, 1928, her brothers Li Shaoji and Li Shaoye telegraphed Tan Yankai and Li Liejun about the funeral, writing that their late father and Sun Yat-sen had founded the Republic together, that his funeral would be watched at home and abroad, and that they did not know how to proceed. On April 1, 1933, the coffins of her parents left the Rong’an Villa in Tianjin, reaching Hankou on April 11, after which they rested at Baotong Temple in Wuchang; on November 24, 1935, Li Yuanhong’s coffin was carried from Baotong Temple to Tugongshan, where the coffins of husband and wife were interred together.⁠[3]

Wang Birong writes that Li Shaofang wanted to break off the engagement but her father flatly refused, after which she sank into depression and mental disorder; in 1930, when the Yuan family pressed for the wedding, Li Shaoji asked Li Yuanhong’s secretary, Liu Zhongxiu, to let the Yuans know that she was in a daze all day and did not seem well and to ask whether they still wished to go ahead, but the Yuan family insisted on the marriage. Yuan Kejiu confided to Li Shaofen that he had agreed to marry her sister for his father’s sake, sacrificing himself.⁠[2]

Wang Birong writes that Yuan Kejiu and Li Shaofang were married in 1934, that soon afterwards Li Shaofang was sent to the Xiangshan psychiatric sanatorium in Beijing, and that she died of illness on April 15, 1945.⁠[2]

Sakamoto Hideyuki’s dissertation records that Li Shaofen’s A Brief Account of Li Yuanhong was published in No. 11 of Tianjin wenshi ziliao xuanji (Selected Historical Materials of Tianjin), issued by Tianjin People’s Publishing House in 1980; it states that Li Yuanhong’s monthly salary as a brigade commander was 500 taels of silver and notes that this figure agrees with Li Shaofen’s recollection.⁠[1]

Wang Birong writes that Li Yuanhong and his wife, Wu Jingjun, had two sons and two daughters: the elder daughter, Li Shaofen, the elder son, Li Shaoji, the younger daughter, Li Shaofang, and the younger son, Li Shaoye.⁠[2]