Li Yuanhong

He was born on October 19, 1864, at Huangpi in Hubei (today Huangpi District of Wuhan), north of Hankou; his courtesy name was Songqing. 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 gives the Wade-Giles romanization of his name as Li Yüan-hung, and English-language records such as the diplomatic papers published by the U.S. Department of State spell it Li Yuan-hung.⁠[1][2][3][4][5][6]

Yu Shicun writes that he was born into poverty: his father, Li Chaoxiang, went to Tianjin to enlist in the army to make a living, leaving him and his elder sister without secure food or clothing, until at the age of thirteen their father brought them to Tianjin and life became somewhat more settled. Ma Yong likewise writes that he was born in Hubei and later went north with his father and settled in Tianjin.⁠[4][7]

In 1879 he began formal schooling at a private school in Tianjin.⁠[2]

Yu Shicun writes that in 1883, at nineteen, he sat the entrance examination of the Beiyang Naval Academy at Tianjin in order to win a scholarship, and that the educator Yan Fu and the naval commander Sa Zhenbing were among his teachers. Ma Yong also dates his entry into the academy to 1883 and writes that he formally joined the Beiyang Fleet the following year; Sakamoto Hideyuki’s doctoral dissertation likewise has him entering in 1883 the Tianjin Naval Academy founded by Li Hongzhang, the Governor-General of Zhili.⁠[4][7][3]

The biography on the BYU Library website, by contrast, has him entering the Tianjin Naval Academy as a cadet in 1884 and graduating five years later with a degree in marine engineering.⁠[2]

The biographical note accompanying Yu Shicun’s article gives 1888 as the year he entered naval service.⁠[4]

Before the First Sino-Japanese War broke out, Li Hongzhang, as Commissioner for the Northern Ports, asked the provinces for reinforcements, and only his elder brother, Li Hanzhang, Governor-General of Guangdong and Guangxi, sent three warships north, the Guangjia, the Guangyi and the Guangbing; Li Yuanhong was the Guangjia’s chief engineer. The biography on the BYU Library website says he became chief engineer of the cruiser Guangjia, then at Shanghai, shortly before the war; Yu Shicun writes that when war broke out he went north with the fleet to reinforce it.⁠[8][2][4]

The naval battle began on the afternoon of September 17, 1894. A 2014 article in the People’s Political Consultative Daily writes that the Guangjia had fallen behind before the fleets engaged and that, as the engineer in charge of driving the ship, he was very frightened, but that he then handled the Guangjia calmly, firing in concert with the Dingyuan, the Laiyuan and the Jingyuan and badly damaging the Japanese ships Hiei and Akagi; the article adds that the Guangjia was hit by fewer shells than any other ship in the battle, only one.⁠[8]

The People’s Political Consultative Daily article writes that during the battle the Guangjia’s captain, Wu Jingrong, hurriedly ordered him to follow in the retreat; the Guangjia hugged the shore and ran aground on rocks near Sanshan Island in Dalian Bay. On the morning of the 23rd the Japanese ships Naniwa and Akitsushima found the Guangjia; Wu Jingrong ordered the ship destroyed and escaped in a small boat, leaving his men behind, and Li Yuanhong and others also got away in a boat and, pursued by the Japanese ships, jumped into the sea.⁠[8]

The article writes that he had never learned to swim and had fortunately bought a life jacket at his own expense before the war, that he drifted for more than ten hours before the waves washed him ashore, and that eight of the thirteen men with him drowned or were captured. The biography on the BYU Library website, by contrast, writes that at the beginning of the war the Guangjia ran aground on a reef on its way to Port Arthur and was later sunk by Japanese gunfire, and that, unable to swim, he stayed afloat in his life belt for three hours before reaching land; Yu Shicun also writes that he survived his leap into the sea because he was wearing a life jacket.⁠[8][2][4]

The People’s Political Consultative Daily article writes that when he reached the naval base at Port Arthur (Lüshun), the navy office was rounding up the Guangjia sailors who had saved themselves by jumping into the sea; unaware of this, he gave himself up and was held for several months on a charge of desertion, then acquitted and released for lack of evidence. The article writes that some of the Guangjia’s crew later recalled having run the ship onto the shoal on purpose, so that it would not have to go back and no one would have evidence to accuse them of fleeing the battle, and adds that another reason the Guangjia’s officers and men escaped severe punishment was that they were reinforcements from the south rather than men of the Beiyang Fleet. The biography on the BYU Library website writes that after reaching land he made his way to Port Arthur and spent the rest of the war there.⁠[8][2]

Ma Yong writes that in 1895 he left the Beiyang service in which he had spent ten years and went south to serve Zhang Zhidong. The biography on the BYU Library website writes that he left the navy and served as a military engineer under Zhang Zhidong, the Governor-General of Liangjiang.⁠[7][2]

Liu Wenxiang writes that he spoke fluent English and that, when Zhang Zhidong was acting Governor-General of Liangjiang, he was appointed English interpreter to the Self-Strengthening Army; after Zhang returned to his post as Governor-General of Huguang, he also had Li help with the affairs of the four textile bureaus, the Hanyang Iron Works and the arsenal.⁠[9]

Yu Shicun writes that after the war Zhang Zhidong formed the Southern New Army and Li joined him, within a few months helping to build seven Western-style forts, eight ammunition rooms, six main powder magazines, four covered passages and other works, and that Zhang Zhidong wrote out for him in his own hand the four characters zhi yong shen chen (wise, brave, deep and steady); amid the complexities of officialdom he showed a tolerant and steady temperament that earned him the nickname Li Pusa (Li the Bodhisattva), which sounds like ni pusa, a clay bodhisattva. Yu Shicun also writes that the officer Zhang Biao, who had married one of Zhang Zhidong’s maids and was known as the maid’s husband, ranked above him, and that Li thereafter became the officer Zhang Zhidong most admired; Ma Yong writes that the officers Zhang Zhidong trusted most, promoted fastest and gave the most authority were Zhang Biao and Li Yuanhong.⁠[4][7]

In 1897, 1899 and 1902 he was sent to Japan to observe military modernization; Liu Wenxiang writes that he made three study trips to Japan in the late Qing and that his daily life was thoroughly Westernized, with Western food and Western dress.⁠[2][9]

The biography on the BYU Library website writes that in 1906 he was given command of the newly formed 21st Mixed Brigade at Hankou, and Yu Shicun likewise writes that he became a brigade commander in the army reorganization of 1906. Sakamoto Hideyuki’s dissertation, by contrast, dates his appointment as brigade commander in the Hubei New Army to 1908; the reference article on the CPC News website calls him commander of the 21st Mixed Brigade of the Hubei New Army.⁠[2][4][3][10]

Sakamoto Hideyuki writes that as brigade commander he received a monthly salary of 500 taels of silver (about 18.65 kilograms), a large sum, and that the figure agrees with the recollection of his eldest daughter, Li ShaofenLi ShaofenLi Shaofen was the eldest daughter of Li Yuanhong and his wife, Wu Jingjun. She studied in the United States and earned a master’s degree in education at Columbia University. She wrote A Brief Account of Li Yuanhong, a memoir of her father published in 1980 in No. 11 of Tianjin wenshi ziliao xuanji (Selected Historical Materials of Tianjin), which recounts how Yuan Shikai and her father arranged a betrothal between their families in 1914.Open the full entry; a note in the dissertation cites a 2001 article by Shi Duqiao that gives a brigade commander’s monthly pay as 300 taels and suggests that the 500 taels probably included allowances such as pay as a school superintendent. Sakamoto Hideyuki also writes that his investment in property began in 1903 and that he went on buying rental housing and tenant farmland until, by the time he became president in 1916, he was one of the largest landowners in Hubei.⁠[3]

Yu Shicun writes that the following year Zhang Zhidong was recalled to Beijing and that Li Yuanhong became the leader whom the Southern New Army would truly follow; he mentions the view that of the two great Han Chinese official networks of the late Qing, 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 was the heir of Li Hongzhang’s and Li Yuanhong the heir of Zhang Zhidong’s.⁠[4]

In 1910 he found that members of revolutionary societies had infiltrated his brigade and broke up a secret revolutionary society among the officers, but the revolutionary movement continued to grow.⁠[2]

Sakamoto Hideyuki writes that in April 1911 he joined the Hubei Railway Association as a representative of the military and took part in the Railway Protection Movement. Ma Yong writes that when the revolutionaries in the Hubei New Army were planning an uprising in the spring of 1911 they made him an important target to win over, his rather moderate and mild temperament having long since caught their eye, and that after the imperial-clan cabinet and the railway nationalization policy were announced he felt that some of the court’s measures went too far and sympathized by instinct with the Railway Protection Movement, though on the whole he disliked violence and revolution and was still more opposed to making the court the target of revolution. In Ma Yong’s view his loyalty to the existing order is not in doubt.⁠[3][7]

When the uprising broke out he was a divisional commander in the army stationed in Wuhan. Britannica writes that the uprising had been planned for a later date, so that no recognized leaders were on hand, and that, as the only figure of stature who had not fled the area, he was forced by his troops to become head of the new government, though he had had no previous association with the revolutionaries. Ma Yong writes that he was then forty-seven, four years younger than Zhang Biao, and that when insurgent officers and soldiers found him and asked him to lead the revolution he killed the envoy with his own hand and refused, which Ma Yong regards as entirely normal for a senior Qing commander.⁠[1][7]

Yu Shicun writes that, at a loss, he hid in the home of a subordinate, Liu Wenji; the revolutionaries who tracked him there called out that the day’s action was the fruit of his own teaching, that they would never harm him, and that he should come out at once and take charge, and one revolutionary, Zhu Jilie, even threatened to kill himself to force his hand.⁠[4]

The biography on the BYU Library website writes that none of the revolutionaries’ own leaders were present, that Li hid, and that the provincial revolutionary council named him head of the new provisional revolutionary government because he was the senior officer present; introducing it with “As the story goes,” it adds that he was discovered hiding under his bed and threatened with death unless he joined the revolutionary forces as leader. Yu Shicun, on the other hand, writes that the talk of him as chuangxia dudu, the governor from under the bed, and the story that he kept begging the insurgents not to harm him when they arrived, have no basis in fact.⁠[2][4]

Ma Yong writes that on the afternoon of October 11 some members of the Hubei Provincial Assembly met in urgent session at the assembly with the insurgent leaders and the gentry, merchants and notables of Wuchang in the hope of forming a new government quickly; the constitutionalist leader Tang Hualong had all but agreed to begin organizing it when, at the critical moment, a hint from his relative by marriage Hu Ruilin held him back, and the candidate Hu Ruilin and Tang Hualong hinted at in the meeting was in fact Li Yuanhong. The reference article on the CPC News website writes that, since the uprising’s original leaders had been arrested, killed, wounded or had gone into hiding, leaving it leaderless, the insurgents made him military governor of the military government and chose Tang Hualong, chairman of the Hubei Provincial Assembly and leader of the constitutionalists, as chief counsellor; expecting the revolution to fail, he declined to take up the post, and only five days later, seeing that the Qing cause was lost, took the oath of office. Sakamoto Hideyuki writes that he is generally regarded as the man who, compelled by the revolutionary army, declared independence from the Qing in the name of the military governor of Hubei of the Military Government of the Republic of China.⁠[7][10][3]

Yu Shicun writes that on October 13 he finally agreed to serve as military governor, had his queue cut off at the revolutionaries’ urging, rubbed his shaven head and joked that he now looked rather like the Maitreya Buddha, and declared that from then on he was one of the military government and would live or die with them. Britannica writes that his enthusiasm for his new position increased as the success of the revolution became assured.⁠[4][1]

Yu Shicun writes that the Governor-General of Huguang, Ruicheng, despaired on hearing that the rebels were led by Li Yuanhong; when the court sent Sa Zhenbing with a fleet to suppress the rising, Li wrote privately to his former teacher, appealing to him as a man of courage and sincerity and a descendant of the Yellow Emperor not to serve as a Manchu slave against his own compatriots, and Sa Zhenbing, after long reflection, left his command.⁠[4]

Liu Wenxiang writes that during the fighting for Hankou and Hanyang, because the military governor’s office inside Wuchang was within range of the Qing guns across the river, he withdrew for a time to Baotong Temple and directed the revolutionary forces from there.⁠[9]

The reference article on the CPC News website writes that, despite repeated struggles, the revolutionaries were unable to reverse the control of the Hubei Military Government by former officials and constitutionalists headed by him.⁠[10]

Drawing on Li Shaofen’s A Brief Account of Li Yuanhong, Sakamoto Hideyuki writes that after the uprising broke out he first sent his family to a place sixty li from Wuchang and then, once the Qing counteroffensive began in earnest, to the foreign concessions of Shanghai, where, fearing arrest and execution by the Qing as a traitor’s family, they used his wife’s surname, Wu, instead of Li.⁠[3]

Shortly after Sun Yat-sen took office as Provisional President on January 1, 1912, he named Li Yuanhong Provisional Vice-President of the Nanjing Provisional Government; Britannica writes that Sun Yat-sen was elected president of the republic on December 29, 1911, and Li vice president, a post he continued to hold when Sun resigned in favour of Yuan Shikai.⁠[11][1]

Yu Shicun writes that he was elected vice president while keeping the military governorship of Hubei. The biography on the BYU Library website writes that when the government moved to Beijing he remained at Hankou as military governor of Hubei, and that after Sun Yat-sen resigned the presidency to make way for Yuan Shikai he was elected vice president of the republic but still declined to move to Beijing. Drawing on Li Shaofen’s recollection, Sakamoto Hideyuki writes that after the Nanjing Provisional Government was established he brought his family back to Wuhan, lodging them first in the British concession at Hankou and only half a year later bringing them to him at Wuchang.⁠[12][2][3]

Yu Shicun writes that in August 1912 he and Yuan Shikai conspired to lure and kill Zhang Zhenwu, deputy head of the military affairs department of the Hubei Military Government, and Fang Wei, head of the Hubei officers’ corps; Huang Xing sent a telegram demanding an explanation, and Li replied listing Zhang Zhenwu’s crimes and saying that one should safeguard the integrity of the Republic rather than an individual’s guarantee of immunity. Yu Shicun writes that in the eyes of the public he was thereafter transformed from a bodhisattva into a butcher.⁠[12]

In March 1913 Song Jiaoren was assassinated, and the Second Revolution that Sun Yat-sen then launched failed, sending the revolutionaries into exile. Feng Tianyu writes that Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing sent emissaries urging Li at least to stay neutral, but that he held fast to the principle that without Yuan there would be chaos and declared his utmost support for Yuan Shikai; when Yuan ordered a campaign against Sun and Huang on the charge of undermining the republic, Li at once declared that, holding a soldier’s post and entrusted by the nation, he knew only obedience to orders and the defence of the republic’s good name, whatever the cost to his life.⁠[12][13]

Feng Tianyu writes that on May 20, 1913, while Rong Jingfang, a leading member of the Gaijin Tuan (Improvement Society), was hosting a dinner at Rushouli in Hankou, Li’s detectives broke in and arrested several brigade and regiment commanders at the table; several more secret offices of the society were then uncovered and dozens of people arrested. Li ordered more than twenty of them executed in secret and issued warrants for the society’s leaders, among them Ji Yulin and Xiong Bingkun.⁠[13]

Feng Tianyu writes that he helped Yuan Shikai encircle the anti-Yuan forces in Jiangxi, readying more than a division for action in Jiangxi and stationing two brigades at Yangxin, Tongshan, Tongcheng and other places in Hubei bordering Jiangxi with orders to attack the enemy on sight, and handed the Hanyang Arsenal over to the Ministry of War of Yuan’s government, so that guns and ammunition flowed north; he sternly rejected those who urged him not to use his arms to help Yuan fight a civil war. The revolutionaries had planned a rising in Wuchang for the evening of June 25, but although fires were set in two or three places in the city there was no response, Li’s troops quickly put it down, and the revolutionaries’ offices in Hankou and Wuchang were destroyed one after another.⁠[13]

Feng Tianyu quotes what he calls the conservative Shanghai paper Shibao to the effect that the military law office of the governor’s headquarters had become a place of bloodshed, with more than twenty people executed there in secret over recent days, nine in ten of them well-known figures from the army, government and schools, and that in the forty-odd days from late July to late August there were arrests and killings every day apart from about ten days of relative calm. Feng Tianyu writes that by early September at least three hundred revolutionaries had been killed by Li Yuanhong and that the prisoners in the military law office’s jail had grown from more than 800 to over 1,000. In his view, after these repeated purges few revolutionaries remained in Hubei or could hold their ground there, so that Hubei saw no great upheaval in the later National Protection and Constitution Protection wars and instead became a forward base for the Beiyang suppression of the Second Revolution.⁠[13]

A note from the Chinese Minister for Foreign Affairs, Sun Pao Ki, to the American chargé d’affaires, E. T. Williams, states that the Assembly held the election of the vice president on October 7, 1913, that the Speaker had informed the minister that the present Provisional Vice President, Li Yuan-hung, had been elected Vice President of the Republic of China, and asks that the American Government be informed. Wang Birong writes that Yuan Shikai was elected formal President of the Republic on October 6, 1913, when Li Yuanhong was Vice President and military governor of Hubei.⁠[14][15]

Feng Tianyu writes that Yuan Shikai presented him with a plaque bearing the words minguo zhushi (pillar of the Republic) in recognition of his efforts against Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing’s Second Revolution, and proposed by turns that he concurrently govern Jiangxi and then Hunan, in an attempt to move him out of Hubei; Feng Tianyu sees this as an old method the Qing court had used against those it distrusted.⁠[13]

Feng Tianyu writes that on December 8 Duan Qirui arrived unexpectedly in Hankou and Li knew he could no longer avoid going north; his staff agreed that his chief of staff, Jin Yongyan, should act as military governor. On the 9th Duan Qirui pressed him in person to set out for the north, and while his train was still on the way, on the 10th, Beijing issued a presidential order appointing Duan Qirui, the Minister of War, acting military governor of Hubei. Wang Birong writes that at the end of 1913 Li Yuanhong moved his household from Hubei to Beijing.⁠[13][15]

Yu Shicun writes that Yuan Shikai, no longer held in check, saw Li as a grave threat and used both inducements and pressure to bring him to the capital, and that from then on Li had title and rank but no troops. The biography on the BYU Library website writes that after the collapse of the Second Revolution in 1913 and of his own political position in Central China he succumbed to Yuan’s armed blandishments and moved to the capital, where he was treated with all the honours and courtesies of the vice presidency but had no real power. Wang Birong writes that many Beiyang ministers paid him no regard, but that in Yuan Shikai’s eyes he was loyal, kind, enlightened and honest in office, and that his opposition to violent revolution coincided with Yuan’s own view.⁠[12][2][15]

Feng Tianyu writes that Yuan Shikai gave him a monthly salary of 10,000 yuan and 20,000 yuan in carriage allowances and lodged him on Yingtai in the Southern Lake, where the Empress Dowager Cixi had once confined the Guangxu Emperor, and that he later moved to the officers’ club in Dongchang Hutong and lived as a man of leisure; in Feng Tianyu’s view he had become Yuan Shikai’s political captive.⁠[13]

Li Shaofen recalled in A Brief Account of Li Yuanhong 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 exchange daughters as daughters-in-law; Li Yuanhong said he would give one first and asked which Yuan wanted, Yuan said it did not matter so long as she was a daughter of the Li family, and Li Yuanhong then promised his second daughter, 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. 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.⁠[15]

Wang Birong writes that Li Yuanhong’s wife, Wu Jingjun, was at first unhappy with the match, the main reason, in the words of Ding Zhongjiang’s Historical Tales of the Beiyang Warlords, being that Yuan Kejiu was the son of Lady Yang, a secondary consort, whereas the Li daughter was the child of a principal wife; but of Yuan Shikai’s thirty-two 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, was born to his principal wife, and Yuan Keding already had a wife and a concubine, so that a daughter married to him could only be a concubine, and once Wu Jingjun considered this she gave her consent.⁠[15]

Wang Birong writes that Li Yuanhong was well pleased with his future son-in-law, who, though young, was already courteous and had a broad face and large ears, and that at the engagement Li Yuanhong gave him a top hat and a formal suit, while the Yuan family gave their future daughter-in-law several pieces of gold jewellery.⁠[15]

Wang Birong 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 her father sometimes plainly arranged his children’s marriages with his own political interests in mind, and that in betrothing his ninth son to a daughter of Li Yuanhong he undoubtedly had political aims, given the relations between the two men. Yu Shicun likewise writes that Yuan Shikai made his ninth son Li’s son-in-law in order to win him over. Wang Birong writes that the match is generally seen as Yuan’s way of securing the vice president’s support, but that from another angle it may also have suited Li Yuanhong, newly arrived in an unfamiliar capital full of Beiyang men, since a family tie with the Yuans greatly increased his family’s safety.⁠[15][12]

Yu Shicun writes that he declared that if Yuan Shikai had ambitions to change the form of the state he would follow the nation in opposing it to the death, and that he resisted passively by offering his resignation.⁠[12]

On the death of Yuan Shikai in June 1916 he succeeded him as president; Yu Shicun writes that he became President of the Republic of China on June 7, 1916, with the support of Duan Qirui. With Li as president and Duan Qirui as premier, the period that followed was marked by disputes between the presidential palace he headed and the State Council headed by Duan.⁠[1][12][16]

He restored the Provisional Constitution and the National Assembly, which, after Duan Qirui was made premier, elected Feng Guozhang vice president; not belonging to the Beiyang clique, he lacked strength of his own and allied with Feng Guozhang to limit Duan Qirui’s power. The Academy of Chinese Studies page writes that the powers too took sides, Japan grooming Duan Qirui while Britain and the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry supported Li and Feng. The biography on the BYU Library website writes that the presidency had been drained of all power by Duan Qirui, who became premier, and that, having no independent power base, Li could not resist him; he did not oppose the idea of war against Germany but disliked Duan’s method of achieving consensus in parliament through bribery.⁠[17][2]

Yu Shicun writes that half a year later he appointed Cai Yuanpei president of Peking University, after which Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao, Hu Shi and others gathered there.⁠[12]

Japan pressed Duan Qirui’s government to declare war on Germany, and Duan pressed Li and the National Assembly to approve China’s entry into the war, summoning the provincial military governors to Beijing in a veiled threat of force. The biography on the BYU Library website writes that in March 1917 Li refused to sign the government’s announcement that it would sever ties with Germany unless the National Assembly also agreed, and that this led to a declaration of war without the approval of the President and the National Assembly, a power struggle between the Assembly and the Beiyang military clique, a small-scale civil war and the temporary restoration of the Qing dynasty, ending in Duan’s eventual triumph and Li’s retirement. Yu Shicun writes that in 1917 Duan Qirui went behind Li’s back to sign a military loan with Japan, that its disclosure in the press caused a public outcry, and that Li seized the occasion to dismiss Duan; the dismissal came in May 1917.⁠[17][2][12]

Duan Qirui retaliated by having the military governors under him declare independence, setting up a general staff office of the independent provinces in Tianjin and preparing to march on Beijing; Yu Shicun writes that Xu Shuzheng joined with the Beiyang military governors in preparing to set up a provisional government in Tianjin, overthrow Li and restore Duan Qirui to power.⁠[17][12]

In June 1917, as the palace–cabinet dispute escalated and the situation turned against him, he summoned Zhang Xun, the military governor of Anhui, to Beijing to mediate; Yu Shicun writes that, lacking any armed force of his own, he invited Zhang Xun to mediate, only for Zhang to turn and restore Puyi to the throne.⁠[18][17][12]

In the early morning of July 1, 1917, Zhang Xun and a party of loyalists including Kang Youwei restored Puyi to the throne; caught off guard, Li hurriedly took refuge in the Japanese legation and telegraphed Vice President Feng Guozhang asking him to act as president. Yu Shicun writes that he telegraphed Feng Guozhang in Nanjing asking him to exercise the president’s powers there and recalled Duan Qirui as premier to put down Zhang Xun.⁠[18][12]

On July 12, 1917, the defeated Zhang Xun took refuge in the Dutch legation and Puyi abdicated once again; after the restoration failed, Li took the blame and resigned, and Feng Guozhang succeeded him as president. Yu Shicun writes that Duan Qirui came in person to escort him back to the presidential palace but that he firmly declined to serve as president again. Britannica writes that his first term ended with the brief restoration of July 1917.⁠[18][12][1]

From 1917 to 1922 he gave up all political activity and lived quietly in Tianjin.⁠[2]

In 1922 he was prevailed upon to resume the presidency, to help broker a peace agreement between the northern and southern warlord factions. A telegram sent from Beijing on June 5, 1922, by the American Minister in China, Schurman, states that Li would resume the presidency if Wu Peifu and Cao Kun agreed to disband their troops and abolish the post of military governor everywhere, and that the Minister of Communications, Kao En-hung, was leaving that morning for Baoding (Paotingfu) to present these conditions.⁠[1][2][19]

Schurman’s telegram of 11 a.m. on June 11 states that Li had just arrived in Beijing, and his telegram of the next day states that Li took up the duties of president, on a temporary basis, at the presidential palace on June 11 but for the present was living in a private residence, and that a mandate of the same day appointed W. W. Yen acting premier.⁠[6][20]

The biography on the BYU Library website writes that he received assurances from the principal parties that private armies and the military government system would be abolished, but that he still held office in name only; Britannica writes that his efforts to reunify the country by negotiation rather than by military force were unsuccessful.⁠[2][1]

A telegram sent by Schurman from Beijing on June 7, 1923, states that the entire cabinet had resigned the previous afternoon and that the premier had left for Tianjin with his family; the official reason given was presidential encroachment on the rights and privileges of a responsible government, but behind all other reasons, the telegram says, lay a plan by Cao Kun’s followers to force Li out of the presidency and put Cao Kun in his place.⁠[21]

At 1:25 p.m. on June 13 he left Beijing for Tianjin, accompanied by the Vice Minister of War. That afternoon the dean of the diplomatic corps received a letter from him saying that, finding he could not freely perform the duties of his office, he was going to Tianjin, and asking that the diplomatic body be informed.⁠[22][23]

Schurman’s telegram of June 14 states that Li was held at Tianjin central station for about twelve hours while negotiations went on, during which he confirmed his resignation, instructed the cabinet to call an election and telephoned one of his wives, who was in the French hospital facing the American legation, asking her to hand over the presidential seals in her charge, which until then she had refused to give up; he was then allowed to proceed to Tianjin East station and went to his house in the foreign concession.⁠[23]

Schurman’s telegram of July 13 states that Li claimed that before leaving Beijing on June 13 he had issued mandates, though they had not been published, accepting the resignations of all cabinet members except Li Ken-yuan, Minister of Agriculture and Commerce, whom he had appointed premier concurrently and who had countersigned them, and that the diplomatic body had so far taken no note of this claim; the telegram speaks of a situation with no president, no premier and attenuated, paralysed organs of government themselves of questionable validity. Britannica writes that he was compelled to resign in June of the year after his return to office.⁠[24][1]

Liu Wenxiang writes that from 1923, in the last five years of his life, he largely kept out of politics, and that in November 1923 he sailed from Shanghai to Japan to recuperate, returning to Tianjin in May 1924 and living there thereafter. The biography on the BYU Library website likewise writes that he went to Japan for medical treatment and returned to China in 1924 to live in retirement in Tianjin.⁠[9][2]

Liu Wenxiang writes that his main properties in Tianjin were two, one on Shengmao Road in the British concession and the other, the Rong’an Villa, on Weilian Road in the German concession, and that he invested no less than three million yuan in banking, mining, timber, textiles, food, machinery, securities and insurance, the Zhongxing Coal Mining Company being one of the family’s important holdings; Liu Wenxiang calls him in his last years one of the most successful and best-known industrialists in China at the time. In his later years he suffered for a long time from diabetes and hypertension, and the upheavals of the period also hurt his investments.⁠[9]

Yu Shicun writes that after leaving politics he went into industry, where he was already influential at the time, and that much of his money ended up in education and social causes; throughout his life he gave money for schooling and founded several schools, and he long wished to found a Jianghan University in Wuchang, a wish still unfulfilled at his death. Wang Birong likewise writes that he valued his children’s education, was keen on education and repeatedly helped students.⁠[12][15]

Yu Shicun writes that while living in Tianjin he often took his family to the cinema; returning home after one film they found that his wife’s diamond ring had been stolen and that the thief had left a note saying he wished to borrow it and would leave it at the right-hand corner of the gate the next evening, at which Li laughed and said that letting everyone share the food had long been his principle, so why should everyone not share a diamond ring as well.⁠[12]

Yu Shicun writes that when Sun Yat-sen died in 1925 Li was deeply grieved, set up a mourning hall in his private residence and offered sacrifices in person.⁠[12]

Liu Wenxiang writes that on May 25, 1928, he suddenly collapsed while watching horse racing and then grew worse, and that, knowing he had little time left, he dictated a will on June 1 and had it telegraphed to the nation. The will had ten points, all on affairs of state: among them, a national convention to be called promptly to settle the political disputes, land reclamation and the revival of industry, an insistence that the fundamental spirit, morality and rites on which the nation had stood for thousands of years deserved more attention than material civilization, and an early settlement of political direction and educational aims. The opening of the will, as excerpted by Yu Shicun, says that he had met with the times and taken part in founding the Republic, that his virtue was slight for so high a position, that in the seventeen years since the people’s hardships had only grown, but that happily North and South now shared the same aims, and urges his comrades to encourage one another.⁠[9][12]

He died in Tianjin on June 3, 1928. Liu Wenxiang writes that he died of his illness at his residence at the age of 65; Yu Shicun writes that he died of a cerebral haemorrhage two days after making his will, at the age of 64.⁠[1][9][12][4]

Liu Wenxiang writes that on the very day of his death Zhang Zuolin left Beijing and withdrew beyond the Great Wall, that the Huanggutun incident occurred the next day, and that after Yan Xishan’s troops took over Tianjin on June 12 the Nanjing government declared unification complete on June 15. On learning of Li’s death, he writes, the Nanjing side at once issued a National Government order drafted by Tan Yankai and Yu Youren that praised him for helping to found the republic in the Wuchang Uprising of 1911 and for refusing on principle to yield to inducements and threats when Yuan Shikai usurped the imperial title, and directed the Ministry of the Interior to prepare funeral rites befitting the state’s honours for a founding hero.⁠[9]

Liu Wenxiang writes that his children, following his own wish, planned to take his coffin back to Wuchang for burial, and that on June 7 his sons Li Shaoji and Li Shaoye telegraphed Tan Yankai and Li Liejun that their late father and the late President Sun had founded the republic together and been as close as brothers, that the funeral concerned how China would be seen at home and abroad, and that in their grief they did not know how to proceed. In late June the Ministry of the Interior drew up five funeral measures: a state funeral; 10,000 yuan for its expenses, to be handled by ministry officials together with the family; a delegate of the National Government, at the ministry’s request, to offer sacrifices at the burial; on the day of the burial, flags at half-mast at all government offices and organizations across the country by government order, with troops and bands sent by the local officials as escort; and, when the grave was closed, the special envoy and the official in charge of the funeral to attend in person and a seventeen-gun salute to be fired. In Liu Wenxiang’s view this made his the first state funeral held by the Nanjing National Government for a head of state of the Beiyang era.⁠[9]

Liu Wenxiang writes that from July 16 the family received mourners at the residence in the British concession where his coffin lay, with the funeral procession set for July 19; that day Yan Xishan ordered all offices and organizations in Tianjin to fly their flags at half-mast, and the mayor of Tianjin, Nan Guixin, came in formal dress that morning to offer sacrifices as the National Government’s representative. In the three days of mourning that followed, Chiang Kai-shek, Yan Xishan and Li Zongren each sent representatives with offerings and memorial couplets; Duan Qirui, the former chief executive who had fought him bitterly in the palace–cabinet dispute, came to mourn with a eulogy of his own; and Zhang Taiyan, a veteran of the Revolutionary Alliance who had consistently opposed the Kuomintang’s Northern Expedition and later called himself a remnant subject of the Republic of China, sent a couplet that, Liu Wenxiang writes, praised Li’s part in launching the republican revolution while voicing dissatisfaction and disappointment at the Northern Expedition’s overthrow of the Beiyang government.⁠[9]

Liu Wenxiang writes that he was laid in his coffin in presidential uniform, with a command sword and his decorations and few other grave goods, two of the decorations being now in the Hubei Provincial Museum; on the morning of July 19 the coffin set out in a hearse converted from a former Qing palace carriage brought from Beiping, accompanied by chanting monks, a band and even primary school pupils, and was placed temporarily at the Rong’an Villa. From October 26 to 28 the National Government held a further public memorial gathering at the Hall of the Heavenly Kings in Beihai Park, Beiping.⁠[9]

Liu Wenxiang writes that his wife, Wu Jingjun, died in Tianjin the year after his death and that the family planned to bury her with him.⁠[9]

Liu Wenxiang writes that in the early years of the Republic he had launched a plan for a Wuhan (or Jianghan) University to commemorate the 1911 uprising; the family hoped to build his tomb on the new Luojia Hill campus of Wuhan University, but the university refused, having resolved from its founding never to allow new graves on the new campus, and the family finally chose a small hill called Tugong Shan, south of Zhuodaoquan in Wuchang. On April 1, 1933, the coffins of Li and his wife left the Rong’an Villa in Tianjin; they reached Hankou on April 11, stopping at Liujiamiao station, scene of heavy fighting in the 1911 battles for Hankou and Hanyang, and, after passing through Wuchang, were placed in Baotong Temple at Hongshan.⁠[9]

After his death his two sons, Li Shaoji and Li Shaoye, wrote jointly to Wuhan University offering the school the 100,000 silver dollars their father had left, to fulfil his wish to fund education; the money, originally intended for founding a Jianghan University, went instead to Wuhan University. With it the university built a gymnasium at the foot of Lion Mountain in 1935 and named it after his courtesy name, Songqing, the first building at Wuhan University named after a person.⁠[5][25][9]

The Songqing Gymnasium has a reinforced concrete frame, is 35 metres long, 21.3 metres wide and 15.1 metres high, with a floor area of 2,748 square metres on two levels, and is roofed with peacock-blue glazed tiles. Liu Wenxiang writes that full-scale war with Japan broke out soon after the gymnasium was completed, so that the university’s earlier promise to set up in the building a memorial hall to former President Songqing and an office to keep documents of the 1911 uprising came to nothing; he writes that the gymnasium is now listed as a Major Historical and Cultural Site Protected at the National Level and stands as another memorial to Li Yuanhong in Wuchang.⁠[5][9]

Liu Wenxiang writes that after the coffins had lain at Baotong Temple for more than two years the mausoleum at Tugong Shan was largely complete, and that on November 24, 1935, they were taken from the temple to Tugong Shan for burial; representatives of the National Government and the Five Yuan, of the central ministries and of the province and city, the foreign consuls in Hankou and representatives of all circles in Wuhan attended the public sacrifice and the departure ceremony, and at three o’clock that afternoon the coffins of Li and his wife were lowered into the tomb, whose top was sealed with cement. The tomb grounds covered more than 100 mu, with a stele bearing an inscription by Zhang Taiyan; the works were still not complete when Wuhan was about to fall in 1938.⁠[9]

The biographical note accompanying Yu Shicun’s article writes that he was given a state burial at Tugong Shan, near the southeast gate of today’s Central China Normal University; Liu Wenxiang writes the name of the hill with a different second character.⁠[4][9]

Liu Wenxiang writes that in 1966 the tomb was dug up and destroyed by Red Guards and that the original site was later taken over by other buildings.⁠[9]

Liu Wenxiang writes that after the Cultural Revolution, in 1981, the Wuhan municipal government built a new tomb behind the original site to mark the 70th anniversary of the 1911 Revolution, that it was repaired several times thereafter, and that a major repair and enlargement was carried out on the eve of the revolution’s centenary in 2011.⁠[9]

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.⁠[15]

Wang Birong writes that his elder daughter, Li Shaofen, went to study in the United States, entering first a theological college on someone’s introduction and then, on the introduction of Hu Shi’s teacher John Dewey, transferring to Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University, formally Columbia University in the City of New York, is a private research university in New York City and a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1754 by royal charter from King George II as King's College, it is the oldest institution of higher education in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 and adopted the university name and moved to Manhattan's Morningside Heights in 1896. It has 17 schools and four affiliated colleges, with 35,978 students enrolled in fall 2025. Legal scholar Jennifer L. Mnookin became president on July 1, 2026.Open the full entry; Li Yuanhong was proud of her master’s degree in education from Columbia University and, having learned from her of Western ideas of equality between men and women and freedom of social contact, approved of them and abolished his long-standing rule that his daughters were not to speak with male guests.⁠[15]

Wang Birong writes that his younger daughter, Li Shaofang, clever from childhood but frail and often ill, grew very unhappy with her engagement and left the preparatory course of Nankai University after one year; she asked her father whether the engagement could be broken off and Li Yuanhong flatly refused, after which she sank into depression and mental disorder. In 1930, when the Yuan family pressed for the wedding, the elder son, Li Shaoji, asked Li Yuanhong’s secretary, Liu Zhongxiu, to tell the Yuans that she was in a daze all day and to ask whether they still wished to go ahead, and the Yuans insisted; in 1934 Li Shaofang married Yuan Kejiu, was soon sent to a psychiatric sanatorium at Xiangshan in Beijing, and died of illness on April 15, 1945.⁠[15]

Sakamoto Hideyuki writes that the revolutionaries’ choice of him as military governor is usually attributed to his gentle character, while even his part in the Railway Protection Movement is seldom mentioned; in his view Li was in fact an elite officer whose record and skills met Zhang Zhidong’s standards and a man whose economic background gave him interests in common with local notables such as the members of the Hubei Provincial Assembly, which fitted him for negotiating with the foreign envoys at Hankou and appealing to Sa Zhenbing.⁠[3]

Sakamoto Hideyuki writes that during the Second Revolution launched by the Hubei revolutionaries, Li’s faction and the Hubei revolutionaries waged a propaganda war through the newspapers each controlled, and that Zhendan minbao, funded by the Kuomintang’s Hubei branch and the military governor of Jiangxi, Li Liejun, called him the governor who hid under the bed and, because he had fled Wuchang when Hanyang fell, the runaway governor, serializing pieces such as Chuangxia yingxiong zhuan (Lives of the heroes under the bed) and Xin kongchengji chuanqi (A new tale of the empty-fort stratagem). A note in the dissertation states that the paper was founded in Hubei in 1912 and closed in May 1913 and that the journalist who wrote Lives of the heroes under the bed was later arrested and killed. The draft history of the Kuomintang published in Shanghai in 1929 describes him, when the revolutionaries came looking for him, hearing the noise of voices and going into a room to hide under the bed. Sakamoto Hideyuki considers that the insertion of such descriptions, which had no observer present and are of unknown truth, seems to have been meant to present Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary actions as flawless.⁠[3]

Sakamoto Hideyuki writes that an article from a Kuomintang-aligned paper reprinted in Shenbao in 1916 portrayed Li as standing firm and unmoved, whereas a 1961 work by Wu Yuzhang, though it does not mention the bed, presents exactly the image of the governor from under the bed, an image that persisted in later scholarship, including Japanese historiography.⁠[3]

Britannica calls him “the only president of the Republic of China at Beijing who served for two terms.” The biography on the BYU Library website writes that in 1911 he was “neither a revolutionary nor sympathetic to their cause,” says that he became “a passive participant in Beijing politics” and, of his presidency from 1916, says, “Again, he was a figurehead.”⁠[1][2]

Ma Yong, a research fellow at the Institute of Modern History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, holds that he is a political figure seriously demonized by later histories of the Republic and also a key figure in the political history of the Republic; Ma Yong writes that there is no need to be as devoted to him as Zhang Taiyan was, and regards him as moderate and mild in temperament, prudent, honest and kind at heart.⁠[7]

Yu Shicun writes that commentators of the class-struggle era saw the revolutionaries’ choice of him as leader in the Wuchang Uprising as evidence of the compromising and weak character of the bourgeois revolution, while those who believed they stood on the ground of human nature analysed him as an incapable fence-sitter; in his view each reading is right from its own standpoint but seems to have little to do with Li himself, who has been belittled and caricatured beside founders such as Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing. Yu Shicun holds that, though he lacked sublimity and grandeur, his gentleness and affability were a more modern kind of civic rationality, and calls him a Chinese of rich feeling and personal dignity.⁠[12][4]

Joseph W. Esherick, quoted by Yu Shicun, holds that the decision to put Li at the head of the new Hubei military government was perhaps the most consequential choice made in the course of the Wuchang Uprising: it made him an important ally of Yuan Shikai in the Yangtze valley and, more importantly, created a form of rule combining the military elite with supporters among the gentry and officialdom that continued directly into the warlord era.⁠[4]

Feng Tianyu’s essay on his conduct in 1913 is titled Li Yuanhong: A Hanger-on Politician of the Beiyang Regime.⁠[13]