Liang Qichao

He was born on February 23, 1873, in Chakeng Village, Xiongzi Township, Xinhui County, Guangdong; in his Autobiographical Account at Thirty (Sanshi zishu) he gives the date in the lunar calendar as the twenty-sixth day of the first month of the guiyou year of the Tongzhi reign, and says that his home lay a little over seven li from Yashan, where the West River enters the South China Sea.⁠[1][2][3]

His courtesy name was Zhuoru, with Renfu as a second courtesy name, and his style name was Rengong; his other style names were Zhongguo zhi Xinmin (a new citizen of China), Yinbingshi Zhuren (master of the Ice-Drinker’s Studio), Yinbingzi, Aishike and Ziyouzhai Zhuren.⁠[4][5]

The Liang family had moved to Xinhui at the end of the Ming dynasty and had farmed for ten generations. His grandfather Liang Weiqing (courtesy name Jingquan) passed the lowest examination as a xiucai; in his own account Liang says that his grandfather was a prefectural licentiate who was selected for an education post but did not take it up. His grandmother, née Li, died a month after he was born. His father, Liang Baoying (courtesy name Lianjian), failed the examinations repeatedly and taught in the village, where he was known as Mr. Lianjian; his mother’s family name was Zhao. The Asia Society’s timeline, by contrast, says that he came from a relatively wealthy family of local gentry.⁠[1][2][6]

In his own account he writes that he was born ten years after the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom fell at Jinling, one year after the death of Zeng GuofanZeng GuofanZeng Guofan (1811–1872) was an official, military commander and Neo-Confucian scholar of the late Qing dynasty, the founder and commander of the Xiang (Hunan) Army. He led that army against the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom for more than a decade, then governed the Liangjiang provinces and Zhili and helped to begin the self-strengthening projects that brought Western machinery and technology to China.Open the full entry, and three years after the Franco-Prussian War.⁠[2]

By his own account his grandfather and mother taught him the Four Books and the Classic of Poetry when he was four or five; from six he studied under his father, reading an outline of Chinese history and finishing the Five Classics; at eight he learned composition, and at nine he could write an essay of a thousand characters. His first schoolteacher was Zhang Yixing.⁠[2][1]

At ten he went to the provincial capital for the first time to sit the entry-level examination, and at twelve he became a xiucai (in his own words, at twelve he was examined by the provincial education commissioner and admitted as a government student). The Encyclopedia of World Biography has him passing the first-level examination at eleven and the provincial examination at sixteen.⁠[1][2][7]

By his own account he first encountered the philology of Duan Yucai and Wang Niansun at thirteen, and at fifteen he was studying at the Xuehaitang academy in Guangzhou (founded in the Jiaqing reign by Governor-General Ruan Yuan to teach philology and literary composition to Cantonese students), where he resolved to give up the eight-legged essay. In the same year his mother died giving birth to his fourth brother; he was away at school in the provincial capital and, hurrying home, arrived too late to take part in laying her in the coffin.⁠[2]

In 1889 (the jichou year of the Guangxu reign), aged 17 by Chinese reckoning, he passed the Guangdong provincial examination as a juren, ranked eighth; the examiners were Li Duanfen and Wang Renkan. Li Duanfen thought highly of him and betrothed his cousin Li Huixian to him; her father, Li Chaoyi, had been prefect of Shuntian.⁠[1][2][8]

In early spring 1890, aged 18, he went to Beijing with his father for the metropolitan examination and failed. Passing through Shanghai on the way home, he bought Xu Jiyu’s Yinghuan zhilüe (A Short Account of the Maritime Circuit) and learned for the first time of the five continents and their countries; he also saw a number of Western books translated by the Shanghai arsenal, which he could not afford to buy in full.⁠[1][2]

In the autumn of the same year his fellow student Chen Qianqiu (courtesy name Tongfu) introduced him to Kang Youwei; after a long conversation he decided to leave the Xuehaitang and become Kang’s pupil. By his own account Kang taught him the outlines of the Lu–Wang school of the mind, of history and of Western learning, and he thereupon gave up his old studies. The Asia Society’s timeline has the two men meeting in Beijing in 1890.⁠[1][2][6][3]

In 1891, with the help of Chen Qianqiu and Liang, Kang Youwei opened the Changxing school in the rented Qiu family studio in Changxing Lane, Guangzhou; it later moved to the Yanggao shrine of the Guangzhou prefectural Confucian school and was called the Wanmu Caotang (Thatched Hall among Ten Thousand Trees). His fellow students included Han Wenju, Cao Tai, Mai Menghua, Xu Qin and Ou Qujia, and by 1894 there were more than a hundred students. By his own account it was in this year that he came to know Kang’s younger brother Kang Guangren (courtesy name Youbo).⁠[1][2]

By his own account he was 19 in the xinmao year (1891), and in the tenth lunar month of that year he went to Beijing and married Miss Li.⁠[2]

In 1892 (the renchen year), when he was twenty by Chinese reckoning, his grandfather died.⁠[2]

In 1893 he was invited to lecture in Dongguan, his first public teaching; in the same year he wrote an appeal for donations of books to the Wanmu Caotang book collection, setting out the reasons for founding it.⁠[1][9]

Early in 1894 he went to Beijing and lived at the Xinhui guild hall in Fenfang Liulijie, returning to Guangdong after a little more than half a year. By his own account he spent the year as a sojourner in the capital, making friends among noted men, and was filled with anxiety and anger when war with Japan began in the sixth lunar month.⁠[1][2]

In spring 1895 he left the Wanmu Caotang with Kang Youwei and travelled by way of Shanghai and Tianjin to Beijing for the metropolitan examination of the yiwei year; when their ship reached Dagu, off Tianjin, men from a Japanese warship boarded and searched it on the pretext of checking for munitions. The associate examiner Li Wentian read his paper and passed it to the chief examiner, Grand Secretary Xu Tong, who suppressed it; Kang passed as a jinshi and Liang failed.⁠[1]

In April of that year the court sent 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 to Japan to negotiate peace; the resulting Treaty of Shimonoseki ceded Taiwan and the Penghu Islands and imposed an indemnity of 200 million taels of silver. Liang roused the Guangdong provincial graduates to petition the Censorate against the peace (by his own account he represented 190 Guangdong candidates in a memorial on the state of affairs). More than 1,200 representatives from the provinces met at the Songyun’an in Beijing and drew up a memorial of more than ten thousand characters. By his own account Kang Youwei joined three thousand candidates in a petition asking for reform, and he himself ran errands for it; the scholar Zhang Chi holds that the part played by Kang and Liang in the candidates’ petition was exaggerated in writings by Kang’s disciples such as the Gongche shangshu ji.⁠[1][2][7]

While in Beijing he came to know 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, Chen Chi, Wu Qiao, Yang Rui and others; in a letter to Kang Youwei he praised Tan Sitong’s clear understanding and unequalled force of character, while regretting that he was too devoted to Western learning.⁠[1][10]

In the same year the Qiangxuehui (Society for the Study of National Strengthening, also called the Qiangxue Book Bureau) was founded in Beijing to buy translated books, publish a newspaper and hold lectures; its organ was the Zhongwai jiwen (first called the Wanguo gongbao). By his own account the society opened in the seventh lunar month on Kang Youwei’s initiative, with Liang as its secretary. 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, 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 and Yuan Shikai were among those who gave money. The censor Yang Chongyi impeached the society as a privately formed faction; it was closed, the newspaper was banned, and the books and instruments it had bought were confiscated by the Beijing gendarmerie, together with a map of the world that Liang, after searching Beijing for months, had at last obtained through a friend from Shanghai. By his own account the society was shut down less than three months after it opened; the Encyclopedia of World Biography states that the government banned the society and its publications in 1896.⁠[1][2][7][9]

In March 1896 he left Beijing for Shanghai, where he met the former diplomat 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; the two became friends despite the difference in their ages. In the same year (in the seventh lunar month of the bingshen year, by his own account) the Shiwu Bao (known in English as The Chinese Progress) began publication on Simalu (Fourth Road) in Shanghai; its founders were Wang Kangnian, who was the manager, Liang, Huang Zunxian, Wu Dexiao and Zou Linghan. It appeared three times a month, with leading essays, readers’ contributions and translations from the foreign press; many of the leading essays were Liang’s, and at first he also checked and edited the translation section.⁠[1][2][4]

In the first issue he published “On the Benefit of Newspapers to the Affairs of State,” and in two years he published more than sixty articles in the paper; in this period he also wrote the General Discussion of Reform (Bianfa tongyi, 1896–1897). In 1896 he also published a Bibliography of Western Learning (Xixue shumu biao), which divided books into three classes (Western learning, Western government and miscellaneous) and 28 subclasses. The Asia Society’s timeline states that the phrase “Sick Man of Asia” first appeared in an article by him in a Shanghai newspaper in 1896.⁠[1][11][9][6]

In the winter of 1896 the diplomat Wu Tingfang invited him to accompany a mission abroad as second-class counsellor, and he did not go; nor did he accept Wu Dexiao’s plan to arrange a period of study for him in Hangzhou. By his own account, in the fourth lunar month of the dingyou year (1897) Wang Wenshao, Zhang Zhidong and Sheng XuanhuaiSheng XuanhuaiSheng Xuanhuai (1844–1916) was a Chinese official and industrialist of the late Qing dynasty who for many years served as Li Hongzhang’s chief economic deputy. He ran the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, the telegraph administration, the Huasheng cotton mill, the Hanyang Ironworks and Hanyeping Company, the Railway Corporation and the Imperial Bank of China, and founded Peiyang University and Nanyang Public School. As minister of posts and communications in 1911 he pursued railway nationalization, which set off the Railway Protection Movement; dismissed after the Wuchang Uprising, he went into exile in Japan for a time and died in Shanghai in 1916. His vast personal archive is held by Shanghai Library.Open the full entry jointly recommended him to the throne, and he declined because he did not wish to be at others’ orders.⁠[1][2]

In 1897 the twenty-third issue of the Shiwu Bao reprinted 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 essay “In Refutation of Han Yu” (Pi Han); Zhang Zhidong was displeased, ordered Tu Renshou to write a rebuttal and put pressure on Wang Kangnian. In the spring of that year Zhang Taiyan resigned and returned to Hangzhou after coming to blows with disciples of Kang Youwei. Huang Zunxian proposed that the paper be managed by a board of directors; the differences among the founders deepened, and Wang Kangnian believed that Liang was joining with Huang Zunxian to push him out. In 1898, on the memorial of the censor Song Bolu, the Guangxu Emperor approved making the Shiwu Bao an official paper; Wang Kangnian refused to hand it over and renamed it the Changyan Bao, which ceased after ten issues.⁠[1]

In November 1897 he left Shanghai for Changsha, where, on Huang Zunxian’s recommendation, the governor of Hunan, Chen Baozhen, and others had engaged him as chief instructor in Chinese at the Shiwu Xuetang (School of Current Affairs); by his own account this was in the tenth lunar month of the dingyou year. With him went Li Weige, the chief instructor in Western languages, and Han Wenju, Ye Juemai, Ou Qujia and others. Huang Zunxian, then acting provincial judge of Hunan, gave a dinner to welcome him, at which Jiang Dejun, director of the Jiangnan Arsenal, and Xiong Xiling, the school’s general superintendent, were present.⁠[1][2][10][11]

The school was in Xiaodong Street, Changsha, and had some forty students, among them Li Binghuan, Lin Gui and Cai E. He taught from the Mencius and the Gongyang Commentary on the Spring and Autumn Annals, lectured four hours a day, and at night wrote comments on the students’ notebooks that sometimes ran to ten thousand characters.⁠[1][10]

The diary of the classical scholar Pi Xirui records their dealings: on the fourth day of the eleventh lunar month Pi visited Mount Yuelu with friends and talked with Liang at the meal; on the twenty-ninth Liang gave him his Principles for Reading the Spring and Autumn Annals; and on the first day of the twelfth month Pi went to the school to hear him lecture on the Mencius. On the twenty-third day of the first lunar month of 1898 Yang Du came to the school to debate with him. He and Tan Sitong both wrote for the Xiang Bao, called for an end to the binding of women’s feet, and had to contend with the constant abuse of the conservatives Ye Dehui, Su Yu and others; that winter Tan Sitong introduced him to Tang Caichang.⁠[10]

Conservatives led by Ye Dehui, together with Wang Xianqian, head of the Yuelu Academy, attacked the school for spreading strange doctrines and petitioned for it to be put in order and for Liang to be expelled; Xiong Xiling was later removed as head of the school, and Han Wenju and others were removed as assistant instructors.⁠[1]

On the thirtieth day of the first lunar month of 1898 he fell ill with malaria; when Pi Xirui visited him he was collecting signatures to urge the provincial governors-general and governors to memorialize for a ban on footbinding. In the middle of the second lunar month he left Hunan for Shanghai. By his own account he was so ill that spring that he nearly died; he was treated in Shanghai and went to Beijing after recovering.⁠[10][2][1]

In 1898 Kang Youwei founded the Baoguohui (Society for Protecting the Nation) in Beijing; Liang returned to the capital, spoke at its meetings, and organized more than a hundred provincial graduates to petition for the abolition of the eight-legged examination essay.⁠[1]

The edict fixing the policy of the state was issued on June 11. On July 3 he was received in audience by the Guangxu Emperor, given the sixth official rank and put in charge of a translation bureau; by his own account he was recommended by Xu Zhijing in the fourth lunar month and again by the Zongli Yamen, was summoned to audience, and was ordered to run the translation bureau of the Imperial University. Zhang Chi holds that the post was not a high one for a man of his reputation at the Shiwu Bao, and that, his Mandarin being poor, his audience and communication with the emperor, two years his senior, did not go smoothly.⁠[1][2]

During the Hundred Days’ Reform he drafted, on behalf of the Zongli Yamen, the regulations of the Imperial University; the university they planned included primary, secondary and teacher-training schools, with a compilation bureau, a library, a museum and an instrument room attached, and the structure of its courses came from the detailed course regulations of the Shiwu Xuetang of a year earlier.⁠[11]

After China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War the writings of Kang Youwei and Liang reached the emperor and helped to bring about the Hundred Days’ Reform in the summer of 1898; the proposals included modern schools, an overhaul of the two-thousand-year-old civil service examination system and a reorganization of much of the government.⁠[3]

On September 21 the Empress Dowager Cixi returned from the Summer Palace to the Forbidden City and announced that she was resuming the regency; the Guangxu Emperor was confined on Yingtai, and the reform ended after 103 days. Cixi ordered the arrest of Kang Youwei, Liang and other reformers. That day Liang conferred with Tan Sitong at the Liuyang guild hall on how to rescue the emperor, met the British missionary Timothy Richard and 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, and then burst into the Japanese legation, where the counsellor Hayashi Gonsuke was talking with Itō Hirobumi, then visiting China; he hoped the Japanese would step in to save the emperor and Kang Youwei, and at the urging and with the arrangements of Hayashi and Itō he gave up the thought of dying. In his Record of the Coup of 1898 (Wuxu zhengbian ji) he writes that Tan Sitong refused to go to Japan; on the evening of the 21st the two parted for the last time and Liang went back alone to the legation. On September 28 Tan Sitong, Kang Guangren, Yang Shenxiu, Lin Xu, Yang Rui and Liu Guangdi were beheaded at Caishikou in Beijing.⁠[1][3]

He crossed to Japan on the Japanese warship Ōshima, arriving in the ninth lunar month. Leaving Beijing in haste, he did not take with him a chrysanthemum-stone inkstone from Liuyang that Tang Caichang had given him, with an inscription composed by Tan Sitong and cut by Jiang Biao, and it was never seen again.⁠[2][10]

The Japanese government welcomed him in Tokyo and gave him the means to give voice to the growing community of Chinese dissidents living overseas. After arriving he took the name Yoshida Shin, out of admiration for the Japanese reform thinker Yoshida Shōin; Xu Qin, Mai Menghua, Tang Juedun and Cai E, his student from the Shiwu Xuetang, joined him one after another.⁠[6][12][8]

By his own account he planned the Qingyi Bao (The China Discussion) with members of the Yokohama merchant community in the tenth lunar month of the wuxu year. The Qingyi Bao was published in Yokohama every ten days with money from Chinese merchants in Japan, among them Feng Jingru and Feng Zishan; it declared its purpose to be upholding disinterested opinion and developing the people’s intelligence, soon sold more than three thousand copies and had 38 sales agencies. It ran to one hundred issues and ceased in December 1901 after a fire at its offices.⁠[2][12][4][6]

By his own account he lived in Tokyo for about a year, learned to read Japanese books a little, and found his thinking transformed. In May 1899, at the invitation of Anesaki Masaharu, he attended the spring meeting of the Philosophical Society of Japan and read a paper on religious reform in China; there he met Katō Hiroyuki, Shigeno Yasutsugu, Inoue Enryō and Miyake Yonekichi. On June 11, 1899, the Qingyi Bao carried an article on libraries as a great instrument of cultural progress, the first time the word for “library” (tushuguan) appeared in the headline of a Chinese-language periodical.⁠[2][13][9]

In 1899 he opened the Datong Higher School in Tokyo with himself as principal and the Japanese Kashiwabara Buntarō as manager, on 3,000 yuan given by Chinese merchants of Yokohama. Its students were Lin Gui, Qin Lishan, Fan Yuanlian, Cai E, Zhou Hongye, Tang Caizhi and some ten others, with seven students from the Datong School in Yokohama, including Feng Ziyou and Zheng Guanyi. As to when it opened, his own account gives the seventh lunar month of the jihai year, and the historian Yang Tianshi gives October 1899.⁠[12][2][10]

In the summer and autumn of 1899 he reached a preliminary agreement with Sun Yat-sen on cooperation between their two camps, under which Sun would be president and Liang vice-president of a joint body; he went to Hong Kong and proposed that Chen Shaobai and Xu Qin draft its constitution. In that year he and fellow disciples of Kang Youwei, among them Han Wenju and Ou Qujia, swore an oath together at the Kinkirō inn on Enoshima near Kamakura, where Ou Qujia took the lead in calling for revolution. In November he joined Sun Yat-sen, Chen Shaobai, Shen Xiangyun, Miyazaki Torazō, Hirayama Shū and others at the Kōyōkan in Tokyo for a farewell dinner for Tang Caichang, Lin Gui and others who were returning to China.⁠[14]

The Baohuanghui (Chinese Empire Reform Association) was founded in Canada in July 1899; rules and a notice printed in the Tung Wah News of Sydney on October 28 of that year announced that Kang Youwei had been appointed by imperial decree president of the overseas Society to Protect the Emperor of the Great Qing and Liang its vice-president.⁠[15]

By his own account he set out for America in the winter of the jihai year at the invitation of people there (that year merchants in the Americas had set up a China Reform Association), leaving in the eleventh lunar month; when he reached HawaiiHawaiiHawaii is a U.S. state consisting of a group of volcanic islands in the central Pacific Ocean; its capital is Honolulu, on the island of Oʻahu. Hawaii was admitted to the Union on August 21, 1959, as the 50th state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 1,455,271.Open the full entry an epidemic had closed the onward route, and he stayed on the islands for half a year and founded a Hawaiian reform association. He arrived in Honolulu at the end of 1899 carrying a letter of introduction from Sun Yat-sen; to evade the Qing government’s warrant he travelled on a passport lent by a Japanese friend, under the name Kashiwabara Bunjirō, and in the end he was not able to land on the American mainland.⁠[2][14][16]

In April 1900 he wrote to Sun Yat-sen proposing a rising in the name of rescuing the emperor and arguing that the emperor should be made president.⁠[14]

By his own account he was about 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 in the sixth lunar month of the gengzi year when the Boxer crisis broke out and letters and telegrams from China pressed him to return, so he turned back west. On reaching Japan he learned that Beijing had fallen, and in the seventh lunar month he hurried back to Shanghai; the day after he arrived the plot at Hankou failed and Tang Caichang and others were put to death one after another. He stayed ten days in Shanghai, left for Hong Kong, went on to Southeast Asia to see Kang Youwei, and travelled by way of India to Australia. In Yang Tianshi’s account he returned secretly to Shanghai in August 1900 to join the rising of the Independence Army, learned on arrival that Tang Caichang and the others had been arrested, stayed only ten days, and went instead to Singapore to meet Kang Youwei.⁠[2][14]

Tang Caichang was executed in the autumn of 1900 on the orders of Zhang Zhidong, governor-general of Hubei and Hunan; afterwards Liang sent condolences to the Tang family and for a time raised money to support Tang’s relatives.⁠[10]

In October 1900, at the invitation of the Chinese Empire Reform Association in Sydney, he went to Australia with Luo Chang, Kang Youwei’s son-in-law, to promote the founding of branches; by his own account he spent half a year there and travelled round the continent from west to east. He travelled throughout Australia raising support for the Guangxu Emperor.⁠[14][2][17]

The Chinese Empire Reform Association in Australia had been proclaimed in Sydney’s Tung Wah News on January 17, 1900, and arranging his visit was one of its chief activities in its early days; the managers of the Lianyitang also agreed to set aside part of its savings for the purpose. On the evening of December 10, 1900, by then in Sydney, he asked members in person to subscribe further, and pledges afterwards rose to more than 1,800 shares. In a letter to Kang Youwei he said that those in Sydney had at first thought Quong Tart’s party could be won over and had tried with all their might to do so. Of the Sydney merchant Quong Tart, Li Hairong’s study quotes his statement in a lawsuit that he had been the first to set up the association and had left it because its members acted unfairly, and suggests that his special position made him unwilling to acknowledge his part in public.⁠[15]

The historian Antonia Finnane writes that he was much struck by Australia’s egalitarian ethos.⁠[18]

By his own account he was back in Japan in the fourth lunar month of the xinchou year (1901); he returned to Yokohama in May 1901.⁠[2][14]

On February 8, 1902 (the first day of the first month of the twenty-eighth year of Guangxu) he replaced the Qingyi Bao with the Xinmin Congbao (New Citizen Journal) in Yokohama. He took his shares in the form of the manuscripts he supplied and held a third of the company; in 1902 and 1903 his dividends came to more than ten thousand silver dollars. In the same year he and Kang Youwei, in the name of the Baohuanghui, raised capital from overseas Chinese and founded the Guangzhi Book Company.⁠[12][19]

In it he serialized On the New Citizen (Xinmin shuo), about 110,000 characters long, over four years; its first issue of 1902 carried his New Historiography (Xin shixue). Yan Fu, in a letter to Zhang Yuanji, called his writing on historiography an earth-shaking piece, and Huang Zunxian said that the Xinmin Congbao was a hundred times better than the Qingyi Bao.⁠[12][20][16]

In November 1902 he founded the magazine Xin Xiaoshuo (New Fiction), whose first issue carried “On the Relationship between Fiction and the Government of the People” and began the serialization of his own novel The Future of New China, which he abandoned after five chapters; the novel is set in 1962. He put forward in turn the slogans of a revolution in prose, a revolution in poetry and a revolution in fiction.⁠[12][21][20]

In the spring of 1902 Kang Youwei published a criticism of his talk of revolution and wrote him a letter denouncing him for breaking faith and threatening to break with him; Liang sent two telegrams expressing repentance. In the summer and autumn of that year he wrote to Huang Zunxian proposing a journal to be called the Guoxue Bao (Journal of National Learning). In the eleventh lunar month he wrote his Autobiographical Account at Thirty, in which he says that less than two-tenths of his projected General History of China had been written.⁠[14][13][2]

In February 1903, at the invitation of the Baohuanghui in the Americas, he began a visit to Canada and the United States that lasted ten months; he was back in Yokohama in December. In the United States he criss-crossed the country, spoke with 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 and with J. P. MorganJ. P. MorganJ. P. Morgan (John Pierpont Morgan, 1837–1913) was an American financier and art collector who headed the banking house J.P. Morgan & Co., organized the reorganization of major railroads and large industrial consolidations, and played a role in American fiscal and financial crises.Open the full entry, examined the Chinatowns of San Francisco and New York, and visited the Boston Public Library, the Library of CongressLibrary of CongressThe Library of Congress is the library of the United States Congress. Founded in 1800 and housed on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., it answers reference requests from Congress, the public and other federal agencies.Open the full entry and the library of the University of Chicago.⁠[14][22][9]

He wrote up what he had seen as Travels in the New World (Xin dalu youji), published as a special supplement to the Xinmin Congbao; the book describes the advantages of open-shelf lending in libraries. In it he wrote that the Chinese community of San Francisco was the most disorderly society he had ever seen, and concluded that the Chinese of his day could only be governed autocratically and that to adopt a democratic system then would be national suicide. Back in Yokohama he publicly took leave of the republican ideal he had held and again stood with Kang Youwei for constitutional monarchy.⁠[9][22][14][7]

In September 1903 Sun Yat-sen returned to Honolulu and published in the Longxing Bao a letter to his fellow provincials declaring that revolution and protecting the emperor were two separate roads; in a letter to Huang Zongyang he accused Liang of using the name of protecting the emperor while in fact preaching revolution. With this the cooperation between the two camps broke down.⁠[14]

In 1904 he published a History of China’s National Debt (Zhongguo guozhai shi), which Li Weiguang calls the first history of China’s foreign debt; in the same year he continued “On the General Trend of Changes in Chinese Scholarly Thought” with the part on recent centuries.⁠[23][20]

In 1905, when the Qing court sent five ministers abroad to study constitutional government, Xiong Xiling was sent to Japan to ask him to draft their reports, and he wrote five; the scholar Xia Xiaohong later found his original drafts in the Peking University Library. Wang Kailin, writing in the Xiangjiang Weekly of the Hunan Daily, regards Tao Juyin’s statement that the reports were written by Yang Du as a mistaken story.⁠[10]

After 1905, as Chinese students abroad turned increasingly to revolution, his influence declined. In 1906 he published “On Enlightened Despotism” (Kaiming zhuanzhi lun). The Xinmin Congbao continued until 1907.⁠[7][14][21]

In 1907 Lin Hsien-tang of the Wufeng Lin family of Taiwan, then 26, met him in Japan; Lin spoke only Hoklo, and the two conversed in writing. When Lin asked what course Taiwan should take, Liang advised him to follow the methods of the Irish in their struggle with Britain and not to resort to armed revolt, and said that China would be unable to help Taiwan for thirty years. At the end of the conversation Lin invited him to visit Taiwan.⁠[24]

His eldest daughter, Liang Sishun, who was fluent in Japanese, acted as his assistant, secretary and Japanese interpreter during the exile. In 1910 and 1911 he published essays criticizing the Qing government’s draft budget for the third year of Xuantong and setting out five points to be observed in drawing up the budget for the fourth.⁠[25][23]

In 1910–1911 he came to call for the overthrow of the Manchu rulers.⁠[7]

On October 17, 1907, he founded the Zhengwenshe (Political Information Society) in Tokyo with Jiang Zhiyou, Xu Fosu and others, to support the Qing government’s preparation for constitutional government and to push the constitutional movement inside China forward in a relatively discreet and safe way; at the same time Kang Youwei reorganized the Chinese Empire Reform Association. Before this, he and Yang Du had disagreed more and more over the organization of a political party and had finally parted ways; in June 1907 the Society for the Study of Constitutional Government, launched by Yang Du, Xiong Fanyu and others, was formally established.⁠[26]

He arrived in Taiwan on March 28, 1911, and spent about two weeks in Taipei and in Taichung, Lin Hsien-tang’s home district, about five days of it in Taipei. His main purpose was to observe Japanese rule in Taiwan, and he had drawn up beforehand a list of matters to study, among them economic growth, the government opium monopoly, agricultural technology, colonial immigration policy and census methods. In Taipei he visited many government institutions, and he wrote poems mourning the city walls of Taipei, which had been pulled down.⁠[24]

On April 1, under close watch by the Japanese police, he spoke for about an hour to more than a hundred local men of letters, ending by reciting a new poem of thanks for the hospitality of the Taiwanese. In Taichung the Oak Tree Poetry Society, which met in the Lin family garden, gave a party of welcome attended by some thirty poets and guests. He wrote about eighty poems during the visit. In a letter home he said that he was very disappointed in the Japanese, and enclosed three poems on Japanese oppression, one of them about the state-run sugar factory forcing peasants to sell their land at half the market price. Before leaving he said to Lin Hsien-tang and his relatives that literature was not enough and that they should study politics, economics and modern philosophy, and he gave them a list of 170 books to read.⁠[24]

After the Wuchang Uprising of October 1911 he proposed from Japan a plan to gain control of the Imperial Guard in the capital, to make use of Wu Luzhen of the Sixth Division, to drive out Yikuang and Zaifeng, and then to demand of the court an edict of self-reproach, the early opening of a parliament and constitutional government. On November 9 he reached Dalian, intending to go to Beijing and make contact with Zhang Shaozeng of the Twentieth Division and Lan Tianwei of the Second Mixed Brigade; three days later Xiong Xiling urgently telegraphed him to turn back, because Wu Luzhen had been assassinated and because Tang Juedun and Luo Yinggong warned that Lan Tianwei and others might act against him.⁠[27]

On November 16 the court ordered Yuan Shikai to form a cabinet, in which Liang was named as vice-minister of justice. In these months he put forward the idea of a republic with a titular monarch (xujun gonghe), wrote Problems in the Building of a New China (Xin Zhongguo jianshe wenti), and sent Sheng Xianjue to Jiangsu and Shanghai to promote it, without effective response.⁠[27]

On February 15, 1912, Yuan Shikai became provisional president, and on the 23rd Liang sent a telegram of congratulation. In April he wrote A Discussion of the Fundamental Policy for Founding the State, arguing for support of Yuan in building a strong government, and in June A Discussion of Financial Questions, published by the Society for the Discussion of Republican Construction. On May 27 his former student Cai E, military governor of Yunnan, sent a circular telegram to the provincial governors asking that he return, and Zhang Ji and Liu Kuiyi telegraphed the next day with the same request; on June 17 Vice-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 telegraphed Yuan Shikai that Liang was a man of ability; and on July 3 the Mongol princes petitioned that he be called home to assist in affairs of state. After attempts to merge with the Republican Party and the United Republican Party had failed, the Society for the Discussion of Republican Construction and the National Association resolved to merge into a third party, the Democratic Party (Minzhudang), with him as its head (zongli); the Democratic Party was formally founded in Shanghai on October 27.⁠[27]

For the date on which he sailed from Kobe, the newspaper Dagong Bao gives September 30, 1912, while the chronological biography compiled by Ding Wenjiang and Zhao Fengtian says that the exact day is not known and must have been the 28th or 29th. He reached Tianjin at 6 a.m. on October 8; Yuan Shikai had sent Fan Yuanlian and Yang Du ahead to Tianjin to prepare a welcome. Huang Xing, who had gone to Tianjin with Yang Du and Zhang Jian and waited three days for him, left for the south that same day, and the two did not meet.⁠[27]

On October 9 Yuan Shikai sent Liang Shiyi to Tianjin to press him to come to Beijing, with the offer of a post as secretary in the presidential office; he did not go at once. On October 13 Wang Chonghui of the Kuomintang wrote inviting him to join the party, and he politely declined. He went to Beijing on October 20, and the next morning Yuan Shikai received him and the two talked for about four hours; Yuan had the Xianliang Temple made ready as his residence in the capital. In twelve days in Beijing he attended nineteen gatherings, among them meetings of the Democratic, Republican, Unity and Kuomintang parties and of alumni and native-place associations, the press, the university, chambers of commerce, a Buddhist association and others. On November 1 he returned to Tianjin and founded the magazine Yongyan.⁠[27]

Yuan Shikai gave him 3,000 yuan a month towards the cost of his journal; in a letter home he wrote that his travel and household expenses were heavy and that he could hardly refuse it. Yongyan was a fortnightly whose first issue was printed in ten thousand copies; in a family letter of December 18, 1912, he reckoned that at a sale of twenty thousand it would leave a surplus of fifty to sixty thousand yuan a year.⁠[27][19]

In February 1913 he announced that he had joined the Republican Party. In the same year the Democratic, Republican and other parties merged, with Yuan Shikai’s support, into the Progressive Party (Jinbudang), which Liang helped Yuan to form; once it was founded he and Tang Hualong were its leading figures, so that people of the time spoke of “Tang and Liang” together. For the date of the merger Gao Xiangyu’s study gives May 1913 and Hao Xingyan’s gives April 1913 (a merger of the Democratic, Republican and Citizens’ parties), while the recollections of Hua Jueming give February 29, 1913, for a merger of the Republican, Democratic and Unity parties. As a founder of the Progressive Party he at first sided with President Yuan Shikai against Sun Yat-sen. In that year he drafted the Progressive Party’s proposed constitution for the Republic, under which new taxes and changes of tax rates were to be fixed by law and public loans and similar commitments submitted to parliament.⁠[27][28][3][23]

In 1913 Xiong Xiling formed a cabinet and Liang became minister of justice; Li Weiguang writes that Xiong reportedly pressed for him to be minister of finance, but Yuan Shikai objected. In September the cabinet issued its Declaration of the Government’s General Policy. Sun Hongyi of the Progressive Party thought him too accommodating to Yuan Shikai, and Sun and his followers Peng Jieshi, Xiao Jinrong, Mou Lin and others went so far as to condemn the Xiong–Liang cabinet publicly. In February 1914 he resigned as minister of justice.⁠[23][27][28][5]

In February 1914 he became director-general of the Currency Bureau, which sat in Tianjin; on taking office he ordered Wu Dingchang, head of the central mint, to compile a history of the mint, and in that month he published essays on the reasons for the currency regulations and on putting the debased paper currency in order by means of public bonds. Unable to carry his currency reform through, he resigned in December, and the bureau was afterwards abolished.⁠[23]

In 1914 he lodged at Tsinghua School to write, and gave a lecture there urging the students, in the words of the commentaries on the hexagrams Qian and Kun in the Book of Changes, to be true gentlemen; the Tsinghua motto, Ziqiang buxi, houde zaiwu (to strengthen oneself without cease and to bear all things with great virtue), comes from this lecture. In the same year the main building of his house in Tianjin was completed, a two-storey Italian-style house of brick and timber.⁠[29][30]

In February 1915 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, Yuan Shikai’s eldest son, invited him through Yang Du to dinner at his private residence, where Yang Du sounded him out on a change to constitutional monarchy; Liang answered that he concerned himself only with the form of government and not with the form of state, and soon afterwards found a pretext to leave Beijing. In that year he published in the magazine Da Zhonghua an essay on why the study of public finance had not developed in China, with a sketch of ancient Chinese fiscal thought.⁠[10][23]

In 1915 Yang Du wrote an essay arguing that only a constitutional monarchy could save the country and avoid a bloody revolution, and in August the Chou’anhui (Peace Planning Society) was announced. On August 24, the day after the society published its founding manifesto, Cai E took the evening train from Beijing to Tianjin to exchange views on the situation with Liang and others. In Tianjin Liang published “How Strange, This So-Called Question of the Form of State” (Yi zai suowei guoti wenti zhe), openly opposing the restoration of a monarchy.⁠[10][28]

At the end of November 1915 Cai E left Beijing in disguise and came to Tianjin, ostensibly for medical treatment, to meet Liang in secret; the two agreed that if they succeeded they would take no position and go back to their studies, and that if they failed they would die rather than flee to the foreign concessions or abroad. Cai then made his way by Nagasaki, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Guangxi back to Yunnan and joined his former subordinates of the Yunnan army in Kunming, and the National Protection Movement in the end succeeded. Liang organized resistance to Yuan’s attempt to make himself emperor.⁠[10][5][3]

In the campaign against Yuan he relied mainly on the forces of the south-western provinces and worked with members of the Kuomintang, with whom he later fell out again over the abolition of the Military Affairs Council. On June 29, 1916, he telegraphed Liu Xianshi in Guizhou that whichever side he joined hands with, he was used and nothing good came of it.⁠[28]

In June 1916 Li Yuanhong succeeded to the presidency with Duan Qirui as premier. Cai E, on whom Liang had relied, grew worse and went abroad for treatment, and Liang turned his hopes to Duan Qirui. On September 1 he founded the Association of Comrades for Constitutional Research, which early that month merged with Tang Hualong’s group to form the Constitution Research Association, known as the Research Clique. Cai E died in November, aged 34; in December Liang launched in Shanghai the plan for a Songpo Library in his memory, and he wrote “Looking Back on the National Protection Campaign” (Huguo zhi yi huigu tan).⁠[28][9][10]

On November 25, 1915, his essay “The Question of the Form of State and the Warning of the Five Powers” appeared in the newspaper Shishi xinbao. Around January 10, 1916, he wrote to Cai E that there was no freedom of speech where he was, that every influential newspaper had been bought, and the foreign papers too, the Reuters telegrams being the most odious of all.⁠[31]

Early in March 1916, at the invitation of Lu Rongting, he went south to Guangxi to urge Lu to rise against Yuan Shikai, writing on the way an essay on the secret telegrams with which the Yuan government had forged the will of the people. Passing through Hong Kong on March 12, he met the Japanese consul-general in Hong Kong, Imai, and passed on Yunnan’s request for Japanese aid of 10,000 rifles, 40 machine guns and a number of mountain guns, suggesting that Japan ship the arms after the Guangxi army had taken Qinzhou and Lianzhou in Guangdong.⁠[32][31]

Liang later said that when he left Guangdong for Shanghai in May 1916, Cen Chunxuan had given him 6,000 yuan from the money Cen had borrowed from Kuhara Fusanosuke, and that in the end he did not use it.⁠[32]

On July 1, 1917, Zhang Xun restored Puyi to the throne in Beijing; Liang supported Duan Qirui, who took an oath at Machang near Tianjin to put the restoration down, and it collapsed on the 12th.⁠[23][4]

After the restoration failed Liang was appointed minister of finance in Duan Qirui’s government by an order of July 17 and took office on the 19th, serving also as director-general of the Salt Administration. He drew up a financial plan, banking regulations and other papers, and proposed to reform the currency by means of the deferred Boxer indemnity payments and a Japanese currency loan; the deficit for the sixth year of the Republic was more than 60 million yuan, and the yearly service of foreign debt, more than 70 million, was about a third of the budget. He issued an order allowing the refined salt of the Jiuda company to be sold at five ports along the Yangtze.⁠[23][5][29]

In an order of October 3, 1917, Sun Yat-sen named him and Tang Hualong as the chief plotters behind Duan Qirui’s dissolution of parliament. The Research Clique had supported the dissolution and the calling of a provisional senate; when that body opened in November 1917 they found that control of the elections had passed to the Anfu Clique.⁠[28]

After four months in office he asked on November 18 to resign as minister of finance, and the resignation was accepted on the 30th. The reasons included a revenue that fell short of expenditure, Duan Qirui’s policy of war in the south-west, which used up what money there was, and the high-handedness of the militarists; in his letter of resignation he said that carrying out his plans was too hard, and Gao Ruiquan’s article quotes him as saying that his mind and energy could not serve two ends and that to set foot in politics would mean neglecting his writing. After this he no longer held high office or took part in party politics, though Huang Zhan holds that he never cut himself off from politics entirely; scholars usually take the end of 1917 as the line dividing his life into a period of politics and a period of scholarship.⁠[23][33][20][29]

In 1918 he fell ill and coughed blood; in a letter to a friend he said that Western doctors had diagnosed pleurisy with a touch of pneumonia, that some ten days of medicine from Japanese doctors had done no more than keep it from getting worse, and that after five days of the prescriptions of his friend Tang Tianru, a practitioner of Chinese medicine, he was eight- or nine-tenths recovered. In the same year he formed the Songshe society in Shanghai to buy books in advance for the Songpo Library.⁠[34][9]

At the end of 1918, after a year of planning, he set out from Shanghai for Europe; before leaving he talked through the night with Zhang Dongsun and said that he meant to give up his former political activity and turn to the world of thought. With him went Jiang Baili, Ding Wenjiang, Zhang Junmai, Xu Xinliu and others. He said repeatedly that he was travelling in a purely private capacity, and explained to family and friends that about 60,000 yuan of the cost came from public funds and about 40,000 from gifts by old friends.⁠[29][35][33]

He went first to London, where he visited the House of Commons and, in letters to his eldest daughter, complained of the weather, the food and the shortage of coal; then to Paris, where he observed the peace conference, and he toured the old battlefields of France and the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine. He also visited Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany. In the prologue to his Impressions of Travels in Europe (Ouyou xinying lu) he says that he visited more than twenty famous cities and, London apart, stayed in none of them for more than a week.⁠[33][35][29]

The Encyclopedia of World Biography describes him as travelling to Paris as a member of China’s unofficial delegation; the Asia Society’s timeline calls him China’s envoy to the Paris Peace Conference and says that he spread news of the betrayal back home, sparking the outbreak of the May Fourth Incident.⁠[7][6]

He declared that although he had come as a private observer he would not decline an ordinary citizen’s duty in anything that might wipe out the nation’s humiliation and recover its rights, which put pressure on China’s chief delegate, Lu Zhengxiang. From October 11 he shut himself up to write with Jiang Baili, Zhang Junmai, Xu Xinliu and others at Bellevue, south-west of Paris, resolved not to go into the city for three months; in a letter to his eldest daughter of November 5 he said that in the second half of October he had been seriously ill with a cold and had taken half a month to recover.⁠[35]

He returned to China in March 1920. Impressions of Travels in Europe was serialized in the Shanghai newspaper Shishi xinbao from March 2 to July 18, and in the Beijing Chen Bao from March 6 to August 17; it records remarks made to him by Westerners, among them an American journalist, to the effect that Western civilization was bankrupt. The book was never finished; an abridged text was included in the first collection of his recent writings published by Zhonghua Book Company in December 1922.⁠[35][29]

After his return from Europe he resolved to stay out of politics and devote himself to education. He took over the China College (Zhongguo Gongxue), with a proposal from the start to turn it into a university; at the same time he organized the Gongxueshe (Society for Common Learning) and the Jiangxueshe (Lecture Society), and renamed the magazine Jiefang yu gaizao (Emancipation and Reconstruction) as Gaizao (Reconstruction).⁠[11][4][29]

Gao Ruiquan regards his collation and commentary on the Mohist Canon (Mojing jiaoshi) and Intellectual Trends in the Qing Period (Qingdai xueshu gailun) as his two most important writings of 1920. He had begun a General History of China (later enlarged into a History of Chinese Culture) several times from 1901, and up to 1922 each attempt was left unfinished.⁠[33][20]

In 1921, at the invitation of the Tsinghua School, he lectured to its students on a Short History of National Learning (Guoxue xiaoshi), more than fifty times in a row; he also lectured at Nankai University. The Encyclopedia of World Biography states that he became a professor of history at Nankai University in 1920.⁠[29][36][7]

In 1922 he gave more than twenty lectures on a tour of Beijing, Jinan, Nanjing, Shanghai, Nantong, Wuchang and Changsha; that year he became a lecturer at Tsinghua and completed his Methods for the Study of Chinese History. During the Zhili–Fengtian War he published his proposals for settling the situation, in substance a show of support for Wu Peifu, and his friend Chen Shutong and others agreed among themselves to stop him from going back into politics. That year he revisited the old site of the Shiwu Academy in Changsha, found the place where he had taught twenty-six years before, and wrote the inscription “Former site of the Shiwu Academy.”⁠[36][29][10]

While teaching at Southeast University in Nanjing he made time each week to hear Ouyang Jingwu lecture on Buddhism at the Buddhist academy. Worn out by overwork, he was found to have a heart condition; his doctors forbade him wine, tea and tobacco, and reading, writing and lecturing as well, orders that he plainly did not keep. In 1923 he gave the lecture “Two Great Roads for the Study of National Learning” to the National Learning Society of Southeast University, arguing that the study should follow two paths, the learning of texts and the learning of virtue.⁠[29]

In December 1922 the board of the Songpo Library was formed and elected him its director. On June 20, 1923, the Kuaixue Hall in Beihai, Beijing, was chosen as its site, and he drafted the appeal for donations and its rules himself; President Li Yuanhong made over this garden in Beihai to him for the library and a shrine to Cai E. The library was founded at the Kuaixue Hall on November 4 of that year: the hall was its first branch, mainly for Chinese books, and the former school for the imperial clan’s right wing in Xiaoshihu Hutong, Xidan, was the second, mainly for foreign books. For nearly two years it was not open to the public, opening only after Beihai became a public park on October 1, 1925. It was a private library; he went from place to place borrowing and advancing money to keep it going and sold his calligraphy to raise funds for it. Zhou Chuanru, who had studied under him, recalled that he charged eight yuan for one large character and that selling calligraphy in this way brought him two or three thousand yuan a month.⁠[9][37]

In 1923 he tried to found a College of Culture, which came to nothing for want of money; early that year, asked by Tsinghua students which scholars might serve as tutors in national learning, he replied that there was no one to choose. While ill he read the works of Tao Yuanming and in three days wrote a chronological biography of the poet; in October he initiated a commemoration of the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Dai Zhen (Dai Dongyuan), for which he wrote a biography of Dai in a day and a night and an essay on Dai’s philosophy in 34 hours without a break. He also took part that year in the gatherings of the Crescent Moon Society.⁠[29]

In 1924 Rabindranath Tagore visited China, and on April 26 a ceremony of welcome was held at the Jingxin Studio in Beihai, attended by more than forty people, among them Jiang Baili, Xiong Xiling and Hu Shih, after which Xu Zhimo took Tagore to see the first branch of the Songpo Library. In that year a pale-grey two-storey study was built beside the main building of his house in Tianjin and named the Yinbingshi (Ice-Drinker’s Studio), with a study on the ground floor and a bedroom and reception room above.⁠[37][30]

At the celebration of Tagore’s birthday Liang gave him the Chinese name Zhu Zhendan, and that evening members of the Crescent Moon Society performed Tagore’s play Chitra.⁠[38]

In September 1920 he, Cai Yuanpei, Wang Daxie and others formally founded the Jiangxueshe (Lecture Association), which was to invite one internationally known scholar a year to lecture in China; Bertrand Russell was the first scholar it engaged, and he reached Beijing on October 31 of that year. In a letter to Zhang Dongsun, Liang wrote that the government would contribute 20,000 yuan a year for three years and that more than 10,000 yuan had already been raised in smaller donations. Between 1919 and 1924, with the association’s support, five eminent scholars came to lecture in China: John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, Paul Monroe, Hans Driesch and Rabindranath Tagore.⁠[39]

On May 7, 1923, his eldest son, Liang SichengLiang SichengLiang Sicheng (1901–1972) was a Chinese architect, architectural historian and architectural educator, the eldest son of Liang Qichao and the husband of Lin Huiyin. With Lin Huiyin and others he carried out extensive field surveys and studies of China’s historic buildings, pioneered architectural education at Northeastern University and Tsinghua University, and after 1949 led the design of the national emblem of the People’s Republic of China and of the Monument to the People’s Heroes, while putting forward plans for preserving the old city of Beijing.Open the full entry, and his second son, Liang SiyongLiang SiyongLiang Siyong (1904–1954) was a Chinese archaeologist and the second son of Liang Qichao. From 1930 he took part in and directed excavations for the Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica at Angangxi in Heilongjiang, Chengziya in Shandong and Yinxu at Anyang in Henan, discovered the three-layer stratigraphy at Hougang and gave the Longshan culture its name; he was elected to the first class of academicians of Academia Sinica in 1948 and from 1950 was deputy director of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.Open the full entry, on their way by motorcycle to a National Humiliation Day rally of Beijing students at Tiananmen, were knocked down by the car of Jin Yongyan, vice-minister of the army in the Beiyang government; the accident made headlines in the newspapers of the day. During the year Liang Sicheng spent recovering from his injuries, he studied the Chinese classics intensively under his father’s supervision.⁠[40]

His wife, Li Huixian, died in July 1924; his granddaughter Wu Liming writes that her death brought great grief to the whole family.⁠[41]

On August 24, 1924, when Liang was 51, his ninth child and youngest son, Liang Sili, was born; Liang’s pet name for him was Lao Baibi (Old Baby).⁠[42][25]

In February 1925 Wu Mi, a leader of the Xueheng group, became preparatory director of the Tsinghua Academy of Chinese Learning; he had already settled on Wang Guowei and Liang Qichao. The academy’s first term opened on September 9, and at the students’ request Liang gave an additional talk, “The State of the Old Academies,” at the tea party held in the Gongzi Hall.⁠[29]

He moved into No. 2 of the North Compound at Tsinghua and taught Confucian philosophy and historical method, lectured on the history of Chinese culture in the college division, and at the same time lectured at Yenching University on the authenticity and dating of ancient books; in a letter to his daughter Liang Sishun he said that he spent four days a week at Tsinghua and the other three in the city at the Songpo Library. His salary at the academy was about four to five hundred silver dollars a month. In 1925 he published “The Independence of Learning and the Second Stage of Tsinghua’s Work,” on the relation between Tsinghua’s new college division and research academy and the independence of Chinese scholarship; in the same year his annotated edition of The Peach Blossom Fan appeared, as did his Notes on Essential Books and How to Read Them.⁠[29][19][4][20]

In April 1925 the Library Association of China was founded; he was elected chairman of its board of directors and in his address at the founding set it two tasks, to build a Chinese library science and to train library staff, and in his foreword to the association’s quarterly he again expressed the wish to build a Chinese library science. At the end of that year the China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture and the Ministry of Education agreed to run the National Metropolitan Library (Jingshi Tushuguan) jointly and chose him as its director; on taking up the post in December he wrote to Li Siguang and Yuan Tongli about plans for buying books and proposed devising a Chinese decimal classification. In March 1926, the Beiyang government being unable to meet its share, the foundation set up the Beijing Library on its own, again with him as director; it was housed in the Qingxiao Tower and other buildings in Beihai and opened in 1926.⁠[9][37]

The ministry’s share of the Metropolitan Library’s funds never arrived. He borrowed and advanced money from many quarters, at one point taking a bank loan at heavy interest (given as one fen six li) and handing over to the Tongyi Trust Company the life-insurance policy he had been paying into for more than ten years as security for a cash loan to meet the library’s expenses; the cost of receiving foreign visitors was for a time deducted from his own salary. Liu Mengni’s article states that, by an incomplete count, he advanced more than ten thousand yuan in all.⁠[9][37]

In a letter to Xu Jingxian of December 6, 1925, he said that he had lately received repeated threatening letters declaring that if he gave any more public lectures in Beijing he would be met with force.⁠[43]

He was also director of the Judicial Training Institute (Sifa Chucaiguan) and a trustee of Beijing Normal University, where he gave a course on the history of Chinese culture that drew one or two thousand listeners at the start and later about a hundred; at Tsinghua he had sixteen students to supervise at the same time. In the summer vacation of 1926 he invited Zhang Junmai to the Kuaixue Hall to lecture to his students on the Song philosophers.⁠[29]

In November 1925 he sent a reprint of the Song-dynasty building manual Yingzao fashi to Liang Sicheng and Lin HuiyinLin HuiyinLin Huiyin (1904–1955) was a Chinese architect, poet and writer, the wife and longtime collaborator of Liang Sicheng. With Liang Sicheng and others she surveyed China’s historic buildings in the field, helped found the architecture departments of Northeastern University and Tsinghua University, took part in designing the national emblem of the People’s Republic of China and the Monument to the People’s Heroes, and was a poet of the Crescent Moon group.Open the full entry, then studying in the United States, inscribing it with words to the effect that a masterpiece of a thousand years before was a glory of their people’s culture, and that he was sending the copy to Sicheng and Huiyin for them to treasure always.⁠[44]

In 1926 he was admitted to the Peking Union Medical College Hospital. As he later wrote, he had been passing blood for more than a year, and the hospital made three examinations, by cystoscope, by injecting a drug to observe secretion and by X-ray; the X-ray showed a black spot on the right kidney, which the doctors judged to be a tumour, and he too thought that only cutting it out would cure him. The hospital removed his right kidney, the operation being performed by the professor of surgery Liu Ruiheng; the bleeding did not stop afterwards.⁠[45][46][47]

The operation caused wide controversy; members of the public and his own family held the hospital guilty of rashness, and his brother Liang Qixun reproached it for carelessness. Early in June 1926 Liang published in the Chen Bao “My Illness and the Peking Union Medical College Hospital,” saying that ten days after the operation his spirits were back to normal, that it was unjust to call the doctors rash, and that science should not be fundamentally doubted merely because it was still in its infancy.⁠[45][48][46][47]

In private he spoke differently. In family letters of September 1926 he wrote that the illness was at bottom a medical and not a surgical one, and that the operation need not have been performed. He related in a letter that on September 14 he had shown a recurrence of the bleeding to Wu Lien-teh, who said that the illness must on no account be neglected and that the kidney that was removed had shown no sign of disease; Liang judged that the operation had been a rash mistake on the hospital’s part. On August 22 of that year he had written to his daughter Liang Lingxian that after taking the prescriptions of Tang Tianru, the practitioner of Chinese medicine, the colour and smell of his urine had returned to normal.⁠[45][34]

Later accounts differ on whether the wrong kidney was removed. Wilma Fairbank, an American friend of Liang Sicheng, wrote that the theatre nurse marked the wrong side of the patient with iodine and that the surgeon, Dr. Liu, operated without checking the X-ray hanging beside the table, so that the healthy kidney was taken out. An article by Zheng Liangen in the magazine Tongzhou gongjin (2007, no. 1) states that the nurse marked the right kidney where the left should have been marked, that the healthy right kidney was removed, and that the hospital, on discovering this, treated the matter as a top secret. An article in the newspaper Kepu shibao in 2020 argues instead that by Liang’s own account the lesion was in the right kidney, that a kidney is not removed through an incision in the abdomen, and that the real problem lay in the diagnosis. An article by Wu Qiong in the Beijing News in 2026 treats the story that the surgeon Liu Ruiheng mistakenly cut out the healthy left kidney as a rumour, and notes that Pi Guoli has tried to show that the rumours of a serious surgical error in the right-kidney operation are true, while judging that the reliability of Pi’s material is open to question and lacks cross-checking.⁠[45][48][46]

After the operation the amount of blood he passed varied with how hard he worked; his doctors could only tell him to rest, and he was given a blood transfusion every two or three months. A year after the operation he went back to the hospital for examination, and its answer was that his kidney function had been completely restored.⁠[29][34]

In October 1926 he officiated at the wedding of Xu Zhimo and Lu Xiaoman. In a letter written the next day to Liang Sicheng, Lin Huiyin, Liang Sizhong and the others, he said that the day before he had done something he very much did not want to do, officiating at Xu Zhimo’s wedding, and that he had delivered an admonitory address in the hall, lecturing so severely that the couple and every guest turned pale, a wedding perhaps unheard of in any age or country. He said that he had written the letter specially because of what he had felt the day before, and in it he criticized Xu Zhimo’s choice of partner.⁠[49]

On January 26, 1927, he wrote to his children that he planned to compile a Great Dictionary of Chinese Books, which he expected to finish in a year, and an Index to Chinese Books, expected to take five. He organized staff to search sources and write cards, led students of the Tsinghua academy in the compilation, and sent the library a written account of progress in the middle of each month, and in June he wrote to Hu Shih about his hopes for the dictionary. Because of his health the work was never completed.⁠[9]

In a family letter of May 4, 1927, he wrote that, with the country in turmoil and his old age to think of, he had changed silver dollars into 5,000 U.S. dollars and sent them to Canada for his eldest daughter, Liang Sishun, and her husband, Zhou Xizhe, then consul in Canada, to buy long-term bonds, the interest to pay for the schooling of his second daughter, Liang Sizhuang, and others. In May and June, exhausted by marking students’ papers and shaken by the suicide of Wang Guowei, he passed blood for about forty days and improved again on a paste prescribed by Tang Tianru. On June 2 Wang Guowei drowned himself in Kunming Lake at the Summer Palace.⁠[19][34][36]

Until he became seriously ill in June 1927 he remained director of three libraries: the Songpo Library in the Kuaixue Hall in Beihai, the Beijing Library in the Qingxiao Tower, and the Metropolitan Library in the Juren Hall in Zhonghai. A talk he gave to the academy’s students on an outing to Beihai in the early summer of that year was written down as the Record of a Talk at Beihai; he lectured at the Judicial Training Institute on the Lu–Wang school and the cultivation of the young; and he wrote The Authenticity and Dating of Ancient Books and Confucian Philosophy and began collecting material on the lyrics of Xin Qiji.⁠[37][11][29][36][4]

During the Northern Expedition many people hoped that he would form a party; around May 1927 he struggled with the question and decided in the end to express his political views by writing books. He firmly opposed the wish of his third son, Liang Sizhong, to come home and risk himself in the Northern Expedition army. In a family letter of October 29 he sketched what he called a pre-party movement (dangqian yundong), with a secret nominal headquarters to keep various groups in touch. Wang Fan-sen writes that when the situation grew critical he was alarmed, planned for a time to go away and leave the school, supported Sun Chuanfang in resisting the party army from the south, and remained in political contact with Jiang Baili, Ding Wenjiang, Zhang Junmai and others.⁠[29][50][36]

On July 1, 1927, he wrote to Liang Qixun about the presents to be given to relatives when his eldest son, Liang Sicheng, and Lin Huiyin performed the rite of presentation at the ancestral shrine; he also raised the money for the couple to travel in Europe after their marriage.⁠[50]

In 1928 he gave up teaching and all his public duties, and in mid-June, worn out, he resigned his posts at the Tsinghua academy and the Beiping Library. On September 10 he began a chronological biography of Xin Qiji. On September 27 he entered the Peking Union Medical College Hospital, and while there asked Chu Wanfeng to collect material on Xin Qiji, obtaining the gazetteer of Xinzhou prefecture and several other works. In a letter of October 5 he wrote that this time he had been badly taken in by the hospital, which had attended only to his haemorrhoids without regard to the body as a whole and had given him two cups of purgative oil a day, ruining his appetite, and that he had caught a chill with fever on the way back to Tianjin. In Tianjin he went on with the biography, which breaks off at the sixth year of the Qingyuan reign of Emperor Ningzong of Song, when Xin Qiji was sixty-one. As to when he stopped, Huang Zhan’s article says that on October 12 his strength gave out and he took to his bed for good, while the Yishi Bao memorial issue says that he laid down his brush about October 28 because his hand shook. On November 28 he was again moved to the Peking Union Medical College Hospital. In December his students at the academy sent a joint letter of sympathy urging him to rest.⁠[29][51][43][34]

On March 21, 1928, his eldest son, Liang Sicheng, married Lin Huiyin, the daughter of Lin Changmin, in Canada; the couple then travelled in Europe on a route that Liang had carefully planned for them, but a telegram about his grave illness made them cut the journey short, and in August 1928 they returned to China by train across Siberia.⁠[44][52][40]

He died at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital in Beijing on the afternoon of January 19, 1929. For the hour, a newspaper report of the time quoted in Pi Guoli’s book gives 2 p.m. on January 19, while the text of the book itself prints 2:15 p.m. on January 11. 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 his age as 55, while Yang Hailiang’s article gives 56; Tang Renze, writing in the China Culture Daily, gives the date of death as January 29, 1929, and his age as 57.⁠[34][43][36][3][51]

As to the cause of death, the historian Pi Guoli writes that the hospital’s last examinations found spots at the apex of his lungs and large numbers of bacteria it calls monaili jun in his sputum and blood, and that he died of persistent fever from the infection; the Asia Society’s timeline says that he died of cancer. He had asked for a Buddhist funeral.⁠[34][6][21]

On February 17, 1929, a public memorial service was held by people of all circles in Beiping and the association of Guangdong natives in the city at the Guanghui Temple in Laoqianggen; some five hundred people came, and the halls of the temple were hung with about three thousand memorial couplets and elegies. On March 4 the Tianjin newspaper Yishi Bao published a spring supplement, the Mr. Liang Rengong Memorial Issue, with a masthead in Hu Shih’s hand; it printed the memorial couplets sent by Qian Xuantong, Jiang Menglin, Hu Shih, Wang Shizhen and Yan Xishan, and its section on the Beiping memorial service carried an elegiac poem by Sun Baoqi. Hu Shih said that his couplet pointed to Liang’s aspiration to be a new citizen of China, and Zhang Taiyan also sent a couplet. The issue recorded that his family and friends had decided to bury his coffin in mid-May on the eastern slope by the Temple of the Reclining Buddha in the Western Hills, beside the grave of his wife.⁠[43][4]

After his death Ding Wenjiang, Lin Zaiping and Huang Qiuyue were entrusted with putting his papers in order; Ding Wenjiang compiled the first draft of a chronological biography, and Lin Zhijun edited the collected works, the Yinbingshi heji. He left 38 unpublished works. In accordance with his last wishes all his books went to the National Library of Peiping, to which most of his collection of rubbings of inscriptions and model calligraphy was also given. In August 1929, as he had proposed in his lifetime, the Metropolitan Library (renamed the National Library of Peiping in July 1928) and the Beijing Library were merged under the name National Library of Peiping, the forerunner of today’s National Library of China; the Songpo Library was merged into it in 1949.⁠[43][9][4][37]

He had nine children, three of whom, Liang Sicheng, Liang Siyong and Liang Sili, were academicians, so that the family was praised as having three academicians in one household.⁠[25]

His second wife, Wang Guiquan, had been Li Huixian’s maid; in 1903, with Li Huixian’s consent, she became his concubine, and she later bore him six children. In the Cultural Revolution the family’s property was confiscated and its house in Shoupa Hutong in Beijing was occupied; at 85 she still had to go out every day to sweep the street, and she had advanced cancer of the bowel. She died in 1968 in a small, dark room, separated from her children, and died alone. Liang Sili said that the greatest sorrow of his life was that his mother had been persecuted to death in the Cultural Revolution and that, his own movements being restricted, he had not been able to collect her ashes.⁠[53][54]

His eldest daughter, Liang Sishun (1893–1966), courtesy name Lingxian, married her father’s student Zhou Xizhe in 1915 and was beaten to death during the Cultural Revolution; she compiled the anthology Yihengguan cixuan and also wrote Guixiu cihua, a work on women’s lyric poetry. He gave each of his children a pet name: Liang Sishun was Da Baobei (big treasure), his second daughter Liang Sizhuang was Xiao Baobei (little treasure), and his third daughter Liang Siyi was called Sima Yi. Liang Sishun once wrote offering to bear part of the household expenses; in a letter to her he said that whenever her mother had been ill she alone had nursed her, and that through the last half year and more she had not undressed at night until she saw her mother to the end.⁠[55][25][53]

His eldest son, Liang Sicheng (1901–1972), was born in Tokyo on April 20, 1901. He went to the United States in 1924 and in 1924–1927 took bachelor’s and master’s degrees in the architecture department and graduate school of the University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania, commonly called Penn, is a private research university and Ivy League member in Philadelphia. It traces its origins to a 1740 charity-school project; Benjamin Franklin proposed his academy in 1749, classes began in 1751, and a 1791 merger established the institution under its present name. Penn has 12 schools, with undergraduate education concentrated in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing and Wharton. Enrollment totaled 29,384 in fall 2025, and the fiscal 2025 endowment was $24.81 billion. As of October 2026, J. Larry Jameson was president, with his term scheduled to end on June 30, 2027.Open the full entry; he was head of the department of architecture of Northeastern University in Shenyang and a professor there in 1928–1931, and head of the research division of the Society for Research in Chinese Architecture in 1931–1946. After the victory over Japan in 1945 he founded the department of architecture at Tsinghua University, which he headed from 1946 to 1972. In 1946–1947 he was an adjunct professor at Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Its predecessor, the Collegiate School, received a charter in 1701. Trustees chose New Haven in 1716; the institution became Yale College in 1718 and Yale University in 1887. Yale provides undergraduate, graduate and professional education and has 14 undergraduate residential colleges. As of October 2026, its president was Maurie McInnis, who took office in July 2024. In 2026, Yale expanded aid for incoming undergraduates and celebrated its 325th anniversary.Open the full entry and a consulting architect on the design of the United NationsUnited NationsThe United Nations is an international organization founded in 1945 under the Charter of the United Nations. It has 193 Member States, and its headquarters are in New York City.Open the full entry headquarters, and received a doctorate of letters from Princeton UniversityPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry. He was elected an academician of Academia Sinica in 1948 and was later elected a member of the Division of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; he died in Beijing on January 9, 1972.⁠[56][53][57]

His second son, Liang Siyong (1904–1954), studied archaeology and anthropology at 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 in the United States, graduated in 1930 and returned to China, took part in 1931 in the excavations at Xiaotun and Hougang in Anyang, Henan, and was one of the founders of modern field archaeology in China. He was elected to the first class of academicians of Academia Sinica in 1948, was appointed deputy director of the Institute of Archaeology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in August 1950, and died at only 49.⁠[53][57][58]

His third son, Liang Sizhong (1907–1932), was born in Japan; after graduating from the Tsinghua School he studied in the United States at the Virginia Military Institute and then at West Point; back in China he joined the army, rose to be an artillery colonel in the 19th Route Army and fought at Shanghai in the battle that began on January 28, 1932, and soon afterwards died of illness at only 25. His second daughter, Liang Sizhuang, was born to Li Huixian in Kobe, Japan, on September 4, 1908. She first studied biology abroad and then, combining her own interests with her father’s advice, turned to library science; she took a bachelor of arts degree at McGill UniversityMcGill UniversityMcGill University is a public university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where English is the language of instruction. It was founded with a bequest from the Montreal merchant James McGill and received a royal charter from King George IV in 1821. Its faculty of medicine, established in 1829, was the first in Canada, and the university had 40,531 students in fall 2025.Open the full entry in Canada in 1930 and the next year a bachelor’s degree in library science at the library school of 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. In August 1933 she married Wu Luqiang, a professor of chemistry at Sun Yat-sen University, in the auditorium of Peking Union Medical College in Beiping; he died of typhoid at the end of 1935. After 1952 she was deputy director of the Peking University Library; she was paralysed by a cerebral embolism in April 1981 and died on May 20, 1986, aged 78.⁠[59][25][41][51][60]

His third daughter, Liang Siyi, was active in public life and worked for many years in liaison with foreign friendship organizations. His fourth daughter, Liang Sining, joined the New Fourth Army under her sister’s influence and did propaganda work. The scholar Xie Guozhen was for a time tutor to the family, teaching Liang Sida, Liang Siyi and others.⁠[53][43]

His youngest son, Liang Sili, was little more than four when his father died. After finishing secondary school in 1941 he went to the United States with Liang Siyi, entered Carleton College and then moved to Purdue UniversityPurdue UniversityPurdue University is a public research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States, and Indiana’s land-grant university. Established and named by the Indiana legislature in 1869, it began classes in 1874. Today the Purdue system comprises main campuses in West Lafayette and Indianapolis, regional campuses and an online university.Open the full entry to study engineering, working to support himself; he took his bachelor’s degree at Purdue in 1945 and then a master’s degree and a doctorate at the University of Cincinnati, and in September 1949 sailed home to China, where his mother met him on the quay at Tianjin. He was a specialist in rocket control systems, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a member of the International Academy of Astronautics, and died in Beijing on April 14, 2016, aged 91.⁠[53][57][51][42]

From 1923 until his death in 1929 he wrote continually to the five of his children who were abroad. An annotated collection of his family letters, edited by Tang Zhijun and Tang Renze and containing 241 of his letters, was published by China Renmin University Press in August 2016; Tang Renze writes that these papers were preserved by Liang Qixun and his descendants.⁠[25][51][50]

Among his grandchildren, Liang Congjie, the son of Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin, was a historian and publisher’s editor who in 1993 led the founding of Friends of Nature, the first wholly non-governmental environmental organization in China; Wu Liming, the daughter of Liang Sizhuang, was before her retirement a professor in the department of urban and environmental science at Peking University and in 1999 published a book on Liang Qichao and his children. Wu Liming said in 2009 that the family had reached its fifth generation and that more than thirty people came to each family gathering.⁠[53][25]

His younger brother Liang Qixun (April 16, 1876–1965), courtesy name Zhongce, art name Manshushi Zhuren, was born at Chakeng in Xinhui. He entered the Wanmu Caotang in 1893, went to Shanghai in 1896 as an editor of the Shiwu Bao, entered Aurora College in Shanghai in 1902 and then studied economics at Columbia University; from 1914 he held posts including supervisor at the Bank of China in Beijing and counsellor of the Currency Bureau, and in 1951 he was appointed to the Central Research Institute of Culture and History. He died of illness in Beijing in 1965. His books include an introduction to Chinese verse, a study of the ci lyric and an annotated study of Xin Qiji’s lyrics.⁠[61]

Liang Sizhuang worked for many years in Western-language cataloguing, and her work kept the Western-language cataloguing and reference services of the Peking University Library among the best in China for a long time.⁠[62]

Liang Zaibing, the daughter of Liang Sicheng and Lin Huiyin, was born in Beijing in August 1929, half a year after Liang Qichao’s death; her parents named her Zaibing in memory of the old man of the Ice-Drinker’s Studio, and in 2021, at 92, she published an oral memoir of her father and mother. Liang Congjie, born in 1932, died on October 28, 2010, aged 78; China Development Brief writes that he founded Friends of Nature with three peers in March 1994.⁠[63][64]

Liang Siyong’s daughter, Liang Baiyou, began in 2013, in her eighties, to gather documents, papers and photographs relating to her father, and wrote a book on her father the archaeologist Liang Siyong, 250,000 characters long with 200 illustrations; Liang Sili wrote its preface at the age of 89.⁠[65]

His writings are gathered in the Yinbingshi heji (Collected Works of the Ice-Drinker’s Studio) in 148 juan. His other writings include “On the Age of Transition,” “Tracing the Sources of China’s Weakness,” “An Introductory Essay on Chinese History,” a History of Chinese Scholarship in the Last Three Hundred Years and a method for teaching composition in secondary schools and above, and, on public finance, A Private Proposal for the Reform of China’s Finances, Principles of Finance, Proposals on the Currency and A Fair Discussion of Foreign Loans; Li Weiguang puts his writings on finance and economics at more than 300,000 characters.⁠[5][20][36][23]

His writings on local gazetteers are found in the chapter on gazetteer studies in his survey of Qing scholars’ work on the old learning, in the essay “On Gazetteers,” and in his preface to the Longyou county gazetteer; he never took part in compiling a gazetteer himself, but argued that local histories should be studied as a branch of history.⁠[5]

English translations of his works include History of Chinese Political Thought During the Early Tsin Period (translated by L. T. Chen, 1930) and Intellectual Trends in the Ch’ing Period (translated by Immanuel C. Y. Hsü, Harvard University Press, 1959), as well as Two Self-portraits: Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Hu Shih (Li Yuning and William A. Wycoff, 1992).⁠[8][3]

He also left works of calligraphy, among them pieces in seal and in clerical script, and made copies of the Maming Temple stele and of Wang Xizhi’s Seventeen Letters; he said that nothing expressed individuality so truly as writing characters, and regarded calligraphy as the most beautiful and convenient of recreations.⁠[4][43]

His tomb is in the north garden of the China National Botanical Garden in Beijing; it faces south with hills behind it, enclosed by a low stone wall and planted with pines and cypresses. At the north end is the joint grave of Liang and his wife, with a stele inscribed Xiankao Rengong fujun ji xianbi Li tai furen mu (tomb of our late father Rengong and our late mother Madame Li); the stele, the top of the tomb and the wall behind the altar are carved in yellowish granite. The enclosure is in effect the Liang family graveyard: his brother Liang Qixiong, a scholar of classical literature, is buried on the east side of the path, and Liang Sizhong, Liang Sili and Liang Sizhuang on the west. At the gate stand stone markers designating the tomb a protected cultural site of Beijing municipality and a key protected site of Haidian district.⁠[60]

The Liang Qichao Memorial Hall in Tianjin, at 44 and 46 Minzu Road in Hebei District, consists of his former residence and the Yinbingshi study: the main building of the residence dates from 1914 and has a floor area of 1,121 square metres, and the study from 1924. The memorial hall opened to the public in 2003 as the first museum in Tianjin in the former home of a noted person, and is now a major historical and cultural site protected at the national level.⁠[66][30]

For the 150th anniversary of his birth in 2023, the National Library of China and his native Jiangmen, in Guangdong, jointly held a commemorative forum; the Tsinghua University Art Museum held a memorial exhibition of 114 sets of objects, which opened on November 23 and ran until January 14, 2024; one of his great-grandsons spoke at the opening.⁠[9][4]

The tomb enclosure and its stele pavilion were designed by his eldest son, Liang Sicheng, as the first architectural design of his career after returning from his studies; they lie east of the Temple of the Reclining Buddha in the Fragrant Hills, in the gymnosperm section of the Beijing Botanical Garden.⁠[63]

His home village, Chakeng, is now part of Xinhui District, Jiangmen, Guangdong, and his former residence there is a major historical and cultural site protected at the national level.⁠[67]

The Encyclopædia Britannica article calls him “the foremost intellectual leader of China in the first two decades of the 20th century”; the Encyclopedia of World Biography calls him “one of the most influential popularizers of Western ideas in modern China.”⁠[3][7]

Hu Shih said that he owed Liang a boundless debt, and in his Autobiography at Forty credited him with being the first to put China’s old learning and thought in order with a historian’s eye; Qian Xuantong, in a letter to Chen Duxiu, called him one of those who had lately been creating a new literature, and wrote in his diary on March 4, 1923, that many people abused Liang but that he himself did not; and Zhang Yinlin called his Methods for the Study of Chinese History the foundation stone of historical method in China. Mao Zedong recalled reading the Xinmin Congbao at 16 and reading it again and again.⁠[20][43][19]

Lu Yin writes that he liked to present himself as inconstant in his studies, fluid and changeable, and ready to set the self of today against the self of yesterday. Antonia Finnane, following Xie Xizhang, holds that he was primarily a constitutionalist rather than a monarchist, for whom monarchy or republic would both work with a constitution and neither without one; she writes that in the eyes of the Communists he was a counter-revolutionary and that his family suffered badly during the Mao years. Alex Colville writes in The China Project that his resistance to the 1911 revolution sidelined him in China’s history books until the 1980s.⁠[11][18][21]

Monographs on him in English include Joseph R. Levenson’s Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China (1953) and Hao Chang’s Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890–1907 (1971). Biographies in Chinese include Xie Xizhang’s two-volume biography (Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, 2012) and a biography by Xu Zhiyuan still in progress, of which two parts, on the years 1873–1898 and 1898–1903, have been published under the Dandu imprint of Guangxi Normal University Press.⁠[7][18][16]

Tsinghua School (now Tsinghua University): Official website: https://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]

Nankai University: Official website: https://www.nankai.edu.cn/ (opens in a new window).⁠[68]