Sheng Xuanhuai

Sheng Xuanhuai was born on November 4, 1844 (the 24th year of the Daoguang reign of the Qing dynasty) in Wujin County, Changzhou Prefecture, Jiangsu (now Changzhou, Jiangsu).⁠[1][2][3]

His courtesy name was Xingsun, with Youxu as a further courtesy name (the Changzhou City Gazetteer writes it Youxun); his sobriquets were Ciyi and Bulou, his studio name Yuzhai, and in later life he styled himself Zhisou.⁠[4][5][6][7]

He came from a family of officials. His grandfather Sheng Long was a provincial graduate (juren) of 1810 and served as department magistrate of Haining, Zhejiang. His father Sheng Kang rose to salt intendant at Wuchang, Hubei, was an expectant circuit intendant for Zhejiang and held the honorary rank of vice-minister; on Sheng Kang’s degree, Wang Liangxian’s article in Global People calls him a juren of the late Qing, while Tianjin University’s 130th-anniversary website calls him a metropolitan graduate (jinshi) of 1844. The Sheng Xuanhuai papers held by Shanghai Library also include records produced by Sheng Kang.⁠[8][9][3]

In 1866 (the fifth year of the Tongzhi reign) Sheng passed the county-level examination (xiucai), but he never passed the provincial examination for the juren degree and then gave up the examination route. Accounts of how often he failed differ: Han Baozhi says several times, Wang Liangxian three times and Tianjin University’s 130th-anniversary website twice.⁠[4][8][3][7]

In April 1870, on the recommendation of Yang Zonglian, a man from his home area who had long known the Sheng family, Sheng joined the staff of Li Hongzhang, then governor-general of Huguang, as a secretary at Li’s field headquarters and assistant in its military affairs office; Li valued him and recommended him for the rank of circuit intendant. Li had at that time been ordered to lead troops to Shaanxi against the Hui uprising in the northwest.⁠[4][8][7]

That year Sheng passed up the chance to serve under Shen Baozhen, the imperial commissioner for the navy yard, and instead joined Li Hongzhang’s staff to handle famine relief; he went on to become Li’s chief economic deputy, and China Merchants Group’s account calls him an able hand in Li’s modernizing enterprises.⁠[10][1][6]

The biography in the Draft History of the Qing, quoted by Yi Huili, says that Sheng raised funds for famine relief in many provinces and grew ever more devoted to water conservancy, his regulation of the Xiaoqing River being especially beneficial. In a note Yi cites the Xingshu, the account of his life, which dates the start of his relief work to the great flood in the capital region in 1871, and concludes that the Draft History’s placing of the flood in the Xianfeng reign is an error for the Tongzhi reign.⁠[5]

In 1871, at the age of 27, Sheng was sent by Li Hongzhang to Japan on a tour of inspection.⁠[4]

In the summer of 1872 Sheng, then 28, drafted the steamship regulations (Lunchuan zhangcheng) on Li Hongzhang’s orders and from then on took part in planning the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company; when the company was founded in 1873 he was appointed its associate director (huiban).⁠[6][8]

In 1880 Sheng became director of the telegraph administration. He set up the Imperial Telegraph Administration, which by 1893 had laid more than 14,000 miles (22,500 km) of line; a 2026 pictorial retrospective on Jiao Tong University’s 130 years credits him with founding China’s first telegraph bureau.⁠[8][1][11]

Sheng kept copies of all the telegrams sent and received by the telegraph bureau, so that parts of his papers are even more complete than the official archives.⁠[9]

Before Peiyang University, Sheng founded or planned the Tianjin Telegraph School (1880), the Shanghai Telegraph School (1882), the Yantai Mining School (1888, never completed), the Lanzhou Telegraph School (1890), the navigation school of the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company (1892) and the Beiyang Medical School (1893).⁠[4]

China Merchants Group’s account lists Sheng as the third and sixth head in the company’s history. A picture caption on the page gives his term as director-general (duban) as 1884–1902, while the text says that his real control of the company began with his appointment as director-general in 1885 and lasted until Yuan ShikaiYuan ShikaiYuan Shikai (1859–1916) was a Chinese army leader and reformist minister of the late Qing dynasty and the first president of the Republic of China, from 1912 to 1916. The modern army he trained at Xiaozhan, Tianjin, grew into the Beiyang Army; in 1915–1916 he proclaimed a monarchy with himself as emperor, cancelled it in March 1916 and died on June 6 of that year.Open the full entry pushed him out in 1902, eighteen years in all, or nineteen years spanning two centuries when his second term of 1909–1910 is counted. On taking office in 1885 he issued ten articles on personnel and ten articles on finance; the account judges that these documents had a negative effect in helping him take full control of the company and weaken the rights of ordinary shareholders, while their rules redeploying the foreign staff, valuing assets and clearing debts had a positive effect in keeping the company from falling under foreign control and in promoting its operations.⁠[6]

The same account says that the company’s capital grew from just over 2 million taels in 1885 to over 20 million taels in 1902 and judges that, taken as a whole, his contribution to it was the main one, while setting out the negative view: that he seized what he could and encroached on the interests of the merchant shareholders, made huge investments outside the company that weakened it, and paid large bonuses to the Qing court that carved up its profits. It adds that he used the company’s resources to start a series of other modern enterprises in coal and iron mining, textiles, railways and banking.⁠[6]

A note by Yi Huili says that from August 1885 to August 1887 H. B. Morse served, by Li Hongzhang’s appointment, as adviser to the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company and answered directly to Sheng, then circuit intendant of Deng-Lai-Qing. She also writes that Sheng’s official career led from customs intendant all the way to minister of posts and communications.⁠[5]

Yuan Weipeng’s study writes that as early as the 23rd day of the 11th month of the 15th year of the Guangxu reign (lunar calendar, as are the dates below), Sheng’s report on plans for iron mining already showed his intention of surveying and working the Liguo iron and coal deposits at Xuzhou, Jiangsu; in a telegram of the 29th day of that month to the Admiralty and to Li Hongzhang, 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 said that coal and iron close to Hubei were preferable. On the 26th day of the 2nd month of the 16th year Zhang telegraphed the Admiralty that Sheng’s proposal, made in Shanghai, to open the Liguo mine at Xuzhou should be deferred, and Sheng had to give up the idea of smelting Liguo ore.⁠[12]

The study adds that Sheng’s nephew Sheng Chunyi, then working under Zhang Zhidong, wrote to him that Bai Naifu planned to build an ironworks at Wuhan and that Zhang rather agreed. On the 7th day of the 4th month of the 16th year Sheng sent Zhang five telegrams in a row (one is lost), arguing in the second for a site at Daye; on the 8th day Zhang formally announced that he was giving up Daye and would build near the provincial capital, Wuchang; only in the 7th month of that year did he finally decide on a site at the foot of Guishan (also called Dabieshan) in Hanyang. On the 16th day of the 10th month of the same year Sheng, through Li Hongzhang, still telegraphed Zhang urging him to build on the riverbank at Daye. Yuan argues that the main reason Zhang changed the site was the sharpening conflict between him and Li Hongzhang, Sheng and their associates, and that the siting of the Hanyang works was the focus of the political struggle between the two sides.⁠[12]

In 1892 Sheng became customs intendant at Tianjin, and in this post he worked out a plan for a new-style school with C. D. Tenney, then the American vice-consul at Tianjin and English tutor in Li Hongzhang’s family.⁠[8][4][3]

In 1893 the Shanghai Cotton Cloth Mill, which Li Hongzhang had spent ten years planning and which had been open for little more than two years, was almost destroyed by fire; Sheng was put in charge of the aftermath, raised 2 million taels of capital in under two months and renamed the reopened mill the Huasheng Spinning and Weaving Mill. Reorganized under his direction as the Huasheng Spinning and Weaving Company, it became the first successful cotton mill in China.⁠[8][1]

In September 1895 Sheng, then customs intendant at Tianjin, submitted through Wang Wenshao, governor-general of Zhili, a memorial on founding a school of Western learning; on October 2 the Guangxu Emperor endorsed it in vermilion with words directing the responsible office to take note, formally approving the school, and Peiyang University (Beiyang Daxuetang), the predecessor of Tianjin University, was founded with Sheng as its first superintendent (duban). A 2025 Xinhua report calls it the earliest-founded institution of higher education in China’s modern history.⁠[13][4]

Peiyang organized its teaching by discipline, with four departments—law, engineering, mining and machinery—and its early campus was the Bowen Academy at Liangjiayuan, outside the Daying Gate of Tianjin. One of Sheng’s personal seals bears the words “seek truth from facts” (shishi qiushi) in seal script, and the motto he gave Peiyang University was the same four characters.⁠[13][10]

When Peiyang first enrolled students in 1895, more than a thousand candidates sat the examination in Hong Kong alone and only a dozen or so were admitted. Sheng engaged the American scholar C. D. Tenney as the school’s dean (zong jiaoxi), and when it was proposed that the first 60 students be switched to studying French, German and Japanese, he flatly refused.⁠[3]

The Hanyang Ironworks had been in production for less than a year when the war with Japan broke out, after which the Qing court had no money to spare for it and it faced bankruptcy. After the war, with Li Hongzhang out of power, Sheng turned to Zhang Zhidong; in 1896 (the 22nd year of the Guangxu reign) Zhang obtained approval for Sheng, who had experience of government-supervised, merchant-managed enterprises, to take the works over. Sheng became its general manager (zongli), the ironworks and its mines were added to his holdings, and he was also put in charge of preparing the Lu–Han railway. Wang Liangxian calls the ironworks the mess left by Zhang Zhidong, governor-general of Huguang.⁠[14][8][12][1][3]

The Pingxiang coal mine was a very large investment, including a planned Pingxiang–Zhuzhou railway to carry the coal; Sheng decided that the ironworks’ blast furnaces were unsuitable and new plant had to be bought, so he sent Li Weige, general manager of the works, abroad to study and order new machinery. A 2014 Guangming Daily article judges that for at least seven or eight years after the takeover the so-called share capital came from Sheng himself or institutions he controlled, and that the amounts seem not to have been large. In 1898 (the 24th year of the Guangxu reign) Sheng also took charge of the Pingxiang mine, and in the 2nd month of 1899 the mine borrowed 4 million marks from the German firm Carlowitz & Co., pledging the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company’s property in the Yangjingbang area of Shanghai.⁠[14][8][7]

In 1896 Sheng was transferred to Shanghai, where, as an expectant fourth-rank metropolitan official, he directed the affairs of the Railway Corporation, was granted the right to send memorials directly to the throne and was given the title of vice-director of the Court of Imperial Sacrifices. The first memorial he submitted with that right was a memorial on a grand plan for self-strengthening, which held that training troops, managing finance and cultivating talent were the way to national strength and that cultivating talent was the most urgent task.⁠[4][11]

In October 1896 Sheng memorialized for the founding of Nanyang Public School to train people for commerce, administration and law, and the Guangxu Emperor approved; the school was founded that year at Xujiahui, Shanghai. Because money was short he raised funds from the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company and the China Telegraph Administration, which he directed, and ran the school as a half-merchant, half-official undertaking. In 1897 he advertised for students in the Shenbao and admitted 30 to the school’s Normal Institute; the school formally opened on April 8, 1897, the date that became Jiao Tong University’s anniversary, and in June 1898 the present Xuhui campus was chosen as its permanent site. Nanyang Public School is the predecessor of Shanghai Jiao Tong University.⁠[11]

Sheng memorialized the Guangxu Emperor in 1896 proposing Nanyang Public School, and the emperor endorsed it with the single word “noted”; the original memorial is kept in the Palace Museum and a high-quality replica is displayed in the university history museum on Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Xuhui campus. A 2026 article in The Paper holds that Sheng knew that changing the fortunes of a poor and weak country required training practical, technically skilled people, and that the maxim that self-strengthening begins with building up talent, and building up talent begins with founding schools, has underlain the university’s century of teaching.⁠[15][11]

The Changzhou City Gazetteer dates the founding of Nanyang Public School to 1897 (the 23rd year of the Guangxu reign) and says the school had four divisions—the Normal Institute and the upper, middle and outer schools—of which the outer school was China’s first new-style primary school and the Normal Institute the country’s earliest institution for training advanced scholars; Shao Lizi and Huang Yanpei both graduated from the Normal Institute.⁠[7]

The Railway Corporation was formally established in Shanghai in January 1897, with Sheng, as an expectant fourth-rank metropolitan official, as its director-general; Encyclopædia 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 dates his control of the newly formed imperial railway administration to 1896.⁠[8][1]

In May 1897 Sheng opened in Shanghai the Imperial Bank of China (Zhongguo Tongshang Yinhang), China’s first government-sponsored modern-style bank, and from then on the centre of his activities moved from Tianjin to Shanghai. Tianjin University’s English profile and a 2026 article in The Paper both credit him with China’s first modern bank.⁠[8][16][11]

The enterprises under him spanned heavy industry, light industry, transport and finance, and contemporaries said that besides controlling the nation’s telegraphs he alone held the power over shipping, banking, railways, coal mining and textiles—“sixteen luminous pearls scooped up in one hand,” as the saying went.⁠[8]

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 wrote in his memoir My Life in China and America that he had proposed a national bank in Beijing with a government appropriation of 10 million taels; when 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, president of the Board of Revenue, was about to memorialize for its approval, Sheng, as head of the Chinese Telegraph Company, telegraphed asking him to suspend the matter for a couple of weeks until he reached Beijing, and Weng, an intimate friend and fellow provincial of Sheng, agreed. Yung wrote that, as he heard it, Sheng came to Beijing with 300,000 taels as presents for two or three princes and got away with the 10 million taels by setting up a bank to manage his own projects.⁠[17]

Shanghai Library staff found 40 letters and four manuscripts from Zhang Yuanji to Sheng in the library’s Sheng Xuanhuai papers. In 1899 Yu Shimei, a member of Li Hongzhang’s staff, wrote a letter on a slip bearing Zhang’s name, conveying Li’s wish that Sheng find Zhang a post; in the third month of that year Sheng, through He Sikun, president of Nanyang Public School, engaged Zhang as chief editor and acting head of the school’s translation bureau.⁠[18]

Sheng took part in a number of major diplomatic undertakings. In 1900, under the impact of the Boxer movement in the north, he acted as a representative of southern gentry and merchant society, bringing Zhang Zhidong and the other governors-general and governors of the southern provinces together with the foreign consuls to sign the Southeast Mutual Protection Regulations, and so brought the arrangement about.⁠[5][10][7]

In 1901 an edict reached Sheng, then vice-director of the Imperial Clan Court, appointing him, at nearly sixty, associate commissioner for commerce, to negotiate the treaties of commerce and navigation and revise the import tariff in consultation with Liu Kunyi and Zhang Zhidong. Yi Huili quotes Albert Feuerwerker’s comment on Sheng’s handling of the commercial treaty negotiations of 1899–1910.⁠[10][5]

Tianjin University’s 130th-anniversary website writes that in the course of his modernizing work Sheng rose from the fourth to the first rank, was appointed vice-director of the Court of Imperial Sacrifices and vice-president of the Court of Judicature, among other posts, and later received the title of Grand Guardian of the Heir Apparent (taizi taibao); the title of the Xingshu, the account of his life compiled after his death by his son Sheng Tongyi and others, gives instead the title of Junior Guardian of the Heir Apparent (taizi shaobao).⁠[3][19]

After Li Hongzhang’s death in 1901, Yuan Shikai became governor-general of Zhili and superintendent of trade for the northern ports in 1902 and began to contest control of the modern enterprises with Sheng; Wang Liangxian calls Yuan the greatest rival of Sheng’s life. The Changzhou City Gazetteer writes that Yuan seized the chance of Sheng’s resignation and return to Changzhou for his father’s funeral to send men to take over the telegraph administration and the steamship company by force. On the 17th day of the 12th lunar month of the 28th year of the Guangxu reign Yuan was appointed commissioner for telegraphs, and in the first month of the 29th year the court removed Sheng as director-general of the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company and made Yuan’s confidant Yang Shiqi its manager; China Merchants Group’s account dates Sheng’s ouster from the company by Yuan to 1902. In the end the Railway Corporation was abolished and Sheng lost all his influence in the telegraph administration.⁠[8][6][7][20]

Sheng held shares in the Wenming Book Company, one of China’s earliest publishing houses, founded in 1902 by Lian Quan and others; he also had friends buy books for him in Japan, among them Dan Tao, then a student there, and the lists he drew up included rare old editions but were mostly practical works on hygiene, education, law and finance, a thousand volumes in all.⁠[10]

The 2014 Guangming Daily article says that the Hanyeping Company was formed in 1908 (the 34th year of the Guangxu reign) by merging the Hanyang Ironworks, the Daye iron mine and the Pingxiang coal mine; it aimed to raise 20 million yuan in shares and, though it fell short, raised about 10 million within a year. Sheng’s own report stated that from the 5th month of the 22nd year to the 8th month of the 33rd year of the Guangxu reign the ironworks had used over 10.2 million taels of merchant capital and the coal mine and transport over 7.4 million taels, drawn from share capital, merchant interest and advance payments for ore, pig iron and rails; the article notes that it is unclear how these figures balance. Yi Huili lists the Hanyeping Coal and Iron Company among the enterprises he headed as director-general, manager or chairman of the board.⁠[14][5]

In 1909–1910 Sheng again served concurrently as chairman of the China Merchants board, but this time, owing to changed circumstances among other reasons, he achieved little. China Merchants Group’s account says he held the post as minister of posts and communications; Zhang Shi’s article says he was appointed vice-president of the Board of Posts and Communications in 1908 and became its president only on January 6, 1911.⁠[6][20]

In August 1909 Sheng was elected chairman of the first board of directors of the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company and president of the Red Cross Society of China.⁠[7]

In the 7th lunar month of 1910 (the second year of the Xuantong reign) the court ordered Sheng to take up his post as vice-president of the Board of Posts and Communications and to assist the Board of Revenue with currency affairs.⁠[20]

On January 6, 1911 (the 6th day of the 12th month of the second year of the Xuantong reign) Sheng was appointed president of the Board of Posts and Communications; when the court reorganized its government that year and the “royal cabinet” was formed, he stayed on as minister of posts and communications and was also a minister of state. He tried to bring under national control the local railway projects initiated by gentry and merchant groups in the provinces. Encyclopædia Britannica writes that provincial interests saw the move as a conspiracy by high officials to sell out China to the foreign imperialist powers, that rioting began in the western province of Sichuan and spread throughout the country, and that the revolt in the central Chinese city of Wuhan on October 10, 1911 set off events that brought down his plan and the dynasty and ended 2,000 years of imperial rule. Chuzo Ichiko’s paper writes that Sheng succeeded Tang Shaoyi (T’ang Shao-i) as minister of posts and communications and that he had drafted the directive for the nationalization of trunk railways that the government issued on May 9, 1911.⁠[1][21][20][3]

Wang Liangxian writes that because Sheng handed the Sichuan–Hankou and Canton–Hankou railways, which had already been entrusted to private companies, to the foreign powers to build, he triggered the 1911 Revolution. Yi Huili writes that the Draft History of the Qing places Sheng and Ruicheng together in a chapter of their own and that its closing assessment, saying the nationalization proposal originated with Sheng, names him the chief culprit; she quotes Zuo Shunsheng’s remark that people regard only his railway nationalization policy as the fuse of the revolution, and the Japanese scholar Nakamura Tadashi’s remark that Sheng was the only great Han official at the centre of the Qing government who shared the court’s fate to the end.⁠[8][5]

Hu Sijing wrote in his Guowen beicheng that after losing the profits of the railways Sheng was frustrated for years, and that after Yuan Shikai’s dismissal, when Zaize was contending for power with the Cantonese faction, Sheng bribed Zaize with 600,000 taels and was appointed president of the Board of Posts and Communications; Zhang Shi judges that there seems to be no firm evidence of such a bribe. Liu Tizhi remarked that Prince Zaize, in employing President Sheng of Wujin, took in both his wealth and his talent. Zhang Shi also writes that for the birthday of Prince Yikuang, Sheng prepared 20,000 yen in Japanese gold coins and sent Tao Xiang to deliver them to the prince in a private audience, and that Yikuang’s reply survives.⁠[20]

Chuzo Ichiko writes that on October 26, 1911 the government dismissed Sheng as minister of posts and communications. The Spectator of October 28, 1911 wrote that The Times correspondent saw the edict issued on the Tuesday dismissing “the Minister of Railways, Sheng,” who had been impeached in the National Assembly the day before, as showing the weakness and trepidation of the throne; the paper added that his downfall coincided with Yuan Shikai’s rise to power. Tan Xufeng’s review writes that after the Wuchang Uprising the revolutionaries denounced Sheng and he came under fierce attack within the Qing government as well, with calls in the National Assembly for his execution as the only way to win back the people and end the unrest; soon afterwards the court issued an edict dismissing him at once, never to be employed again.⁠[21][22][19]

After his dismissal Sheng fled under the protection of troops sent by foreign legations, by way of Tianjin to Qingdao and Dalian, and then into exile in Japan; on December 31, 1911 he sailed for Japan. His property was quickly sealed after Suzhou went over to the revolution.⁠[8][19][7]

A photograph accompanying Peng Xiaofei’s article shows Sheng with his sons Sheng Enyi and Sheng Zhongyi during his exile in Japan in 1912.⁠[23]

Soon after the Republic was founded Sheng returned home unharmed and recovered the property the revolutionaries had confiscated; in 1912 the China International Famine Relief organization invited him back to run relief work, and he gave strong support to the Red Cross in aiding refugees in Nanjing, established ties with the leaders then governing Jiangsu and launched another appeal for relief and recovery. In October 1912 he returned to Shanghai. Tan Xufeng’s review sees behind this the Nanjing Provisional Government’s urgent need for Sheng as an intermediary in borrowing from Japan, and says that Sun Yat-sen, Yuan Shikai, Cheng Dequan and even, later, Zhang Xun all relied on him to some degree.⁠[19][7]

Sheng corresponded with Sun Yat-sen in 1912. Wang Liangxian writes that he later gave money to help Sun Yat-sen, but that his old path of rising to high office through great undertakings was closed to him for good.⁠[5][8]

On the night of April 26, 1916, on his deathbed, Sheng entrusted the running of his household to Gu Yongquan and Sheng Yulin and gave his last instructions to them, to his wife Zhuang Dehua and to the five branches of the family—his third son Sheng Tongyi, fourth son Sheng Enyi, fifth son Sheng Zhongyi, seventh son Sheng Shengyi and eldest grandson Sheng Yuchang: his will, he said, had long been drawn up but was incomplete, and the income of the family property should be divided into ten parts, five reserved for charity and five shared among the five branches; he also asked for a council whose members should be chosen from old friends of long standing known for their integrity. He died in Shanghai the next day, April 27, 1916, aged 71. By the time of his death his memorials had been compiled in 23 volumes. Tan Xufeng writes that in the end he turned all his assets, including his shares in Hanyeping, the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company and other enterprises, into the endowment of his charitable estate.⁠[1][5][19][23]

He Qiliang’s article “Spectacular Death: Sheng Xuanhuai’s Funeral Procession in 1917,” published in Twentieth-Century China, vol. 41, no. 2 (April 2016), pp. 135–68, studies Sheng’s extravagant funeral procession in Shanghai in November 1917, which was a mile long and drew over a million spectators. The abstract says that the colonial authorities, the bereaved family, businessmen and lower-class spectators used various tactics to manipulate the spectacle for political control, commercial gain and visual pleasure, and the author argues that the spectacle helped bind together otherwise segregated people, restructuring interpersonal relationships in Shanghai.⁠[24]

A 2024 Wenhui Daily article by a former Party secretary of Shanghai Library and director of its Institute of Historical Documents records the account given by Gu Tinglong: Sheng settled in Shanghai in his later years and his papers were kept in the Sheng family ancestral hall; in 1943, when the hall was demolished to make way for a road, his descendants gave most of the papers to the Hezhong Library through Zhang Yuanji, a friend of Sheng in his lifetime. A 2016 Knews report instead says that in the late 1930s the descendants gave most of the papers to the Shanghai Hezhong Library founded by Zhang Yuanji and others, and that after 1949 the Hezhong Library was merged into Shanghai Library.⁠[25][9]

The 2024 Wenhui Daily article quotes Gu Tinglong as saying that in 1976 the papers were moved to Shanghai Library on Nanjing West Road so that they could be organized, and that university teachers including Chen Xulu, Wang Xi and Xia Dongyuan were invited there that year. The 2015 Wenhui Daily report says that Shanghai Library set up a team to process the Sheng Xuanhuai papers in 1996 and, after nine years’ work, completed the cataloguing at the end of 2005; in August 2008 the metadata and full-text databases were completed, covering 157,564 items and 787,000 digital images. On the full-text scanning, Knews gives December 2006 to August 2008 and the 2024 Wenhui Daily article September 2006 to August 2008.⁠[25][10][9]

Knews writes that in March 2007 Shanghai set up a committee for publishing and compiling the Sheng Xuanhuai papers and the Shanghai Sheng Xuanhuai Archives Research Centre, with 26 historians appointed as special research fellows of the centre; in 2008 Shanghai Library held a free public exhibition of the papers, showing 156 choice items selected from more than 160,000. The report says that the papers Sheng collected over the 26,106 days of his life that are held by Shanghai Library alone amount to 178,633 items and more than 100 million characters, 6.8 items a day, and that he kept every telegram, letter, memorial draft and account book, down to banquet menus.⁠[9]

In December 2008 Shanghai Library signed an agreement with the National Qing History Compilation Committee to compile the Selected Archives of Sheng Xuanhuai, which after six years’ work appeared in 100 volumes from Shanghai Classics Publishing House in June 2014 and won a second prize in the Shanghai Book Awards (2013–2015) (2024 Wenhui Daily article). The 2015 Wenhui Daily report says the set, part of the archive series of the national Qing history project and edited by Wu Jianzhong, director of Shanghai Library, comprises 17 volumes on charity, 19 on famine relief, 17 on railways, 16 on the telegraph, 16 on pawnshops and native banks and 15 on culture and education, and was formally launched on May 27, 2015; it adds that the papers contain at least 16,000 items on famine relief, nearly half of them closely tied to Sheng.⁠[25][10]

When Shanghai Library processed the papers, Feng Jinniu led the group rescuing and organizing them; the new library building set aside a room for a historical-documents conservation team of more than ten technicians, trained as apprentices under masters, which repaired damaged genealogies and items from the papers. The Sheng Xuanhuai Archives metadata database won a third prize for scientific progress from the Shanghai Municipal Administration of Culture, Radio, Film and Television.⁠[25]

On April 27, 2016 an exhibition of oil paintings by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University physicist Chen Yixin, marking the centenary of Sheng’s death and the 110th anniversary of Li Shutong’s going to Japan to study oil painting, opened at the Zhengdong Library on Tianjin University’s new campus; Professor Chen gave one of his two portraits of Sheng to Tianjin University and the other to Shanghai Jiao Tong University. After the war with Japan Sheng had held that self-strengthening must begin with training talent and founding schools.⁠[26]

Sheng’s former residence in Changzhou is now the Sheng Xuanhuai Memorial Hall, which has a bronze statue of him. Sheng’s great-grandson Sheng Chengmao and the professors Ouyang Qi and Chi Zihua wrote the texts of the three volumes of a picture book on Sheng Xuanhuai in China’s modernization. On November 2, 2024 an academic event marking the 180th anniversary of his birth was held in Changzhou, with invitations issued by the Changzhou Sheng Xuanhuai Research Society.⁠[2]

Sheng’s wife was Zhuang Dehua. The five branches of the family he named on his deathbed were those of his third son Sheng Tongyi, fourth son Sheng Enyi, fifth son Sheng Zhongyi, seventh son Sheng Shengyi and eldest grandson Sheng Yuchang. His nephew Sheng Chunyi worked under Zhang Zhidong around 1889–1890. After his death his son Sheng Tongyi and others compiled the Xingshu, a formal account of his life written in the voice of his sons; Tan Xufeng regards it as long the most important document for the study of Sheng’s early years and notes that Zhu Hu’s new book starts from a reinterpretation of it. Yi Huili writes that his great-grandson Sheng Chenghong holds part of his private manuscripts; his great-grandson Sheng Chengmao co-wrote a picture book about him (see above).⁠[12][5][19][2][23]

Wang Liangxian writes that Sheng’s personal wealth was unmatched in his day and that his children mostly married into powerful families, forming a network centred on the Sheng family that reached from senior officials in the capital to the rich families of the Jiangnan region; a descendant recalled it as a household like the one in Dream of the Red Chamber.⁠[8]

His great-grandson Sheng Pinru (James Shing), a grandson of his fourth son Sheng Enyi, moved to Hong Kong with his family at the age of two and became an executive director of Asia Television; he was diagnosed with liver cancer in June 2025 and died at Hong Kong Sanatorium & Hospital on August 18, 2025, aged 48.⁠[27]

Tan Xufeng’s review of Zhu Hu’s book on Sheng’s forty years of modern enterprise and famine relief in the late Qing (Renmin University of China Press, August 2021) says that Sheng turned his relief work into a route to advancement and repeatedly came safely through danger; during the great drought in north China in the early Guangxu years, relief work in Hejian gave Sheng, whose modernizing ventures had stalled, a rare chance to recover: he came to know a group of gentry engaged in the Hejian relief, gained many reliable collaborators, and went on to drive the rapid construction of China’s telegraph network, reversing his decline in modern enterprise.⁠[19]

As China’s first president of the Red Cross, Sheng is still remembered for his charitable work, and he is also described as the founder of the Red Cross Society of China. His Yuzhai charitable estate was funded by part of the income from his shares in the Hanyeping Company and was run by a board whose members included members of the Sheng family, Hanyeping staff and prominent figures, and its relief gradually widened from the local townships to the whole country.⁠[10][2]

Every document Sheng signed usually went through three or more drafts—drafted by a clerk, copied fair and revised, then revised again—before it was sent: the clerk first drafted it from his dictation, it was copied out and sent after he had read and revised it, and the draft was put away and kept; incoming letters were stamped at once with the month’s red seal and filed after he had read them; and even in old age, when he lay ill, he never neglected so small a matter as drafting a letter or telegram. Li Hongzhang once praised him as shrewd and steady, thoughtful and thorough. At Li’s request he also personally designed a menu combining Chinese and Western dishes for a banquet for foreigners and, before giving it to Li, changed one Chinese dish on the draft, braised winter bamboo shoots, to duck kidneys.⁠[10]

On the eve of the war with Japan, when large numbers of Japanese disguised as students and merchants were active in China, Zheng Guanying wrote to Sheng urging their immediate arrest; Sheng’s reply was calm and restrained, saying that the matter should be handled under international law by Wu Tingfang, then legal adviser, and Robert Hart, inspector-general of the Chinese Maritime Customs.⁠[10]

Yi Huili writes that the Yuzhai Cungao (collected papers) in 100 juan appeared in 1939 (a note describes it as an edition from the Sheng family’s own blocks) and was reprinted in 1942 by the Xiugengtang bookshop in Beijing: juan 1–20 are memorials, 21–23 telegraphed memorials and 24–100 telegrams, covering his political activity from 1896 to 1911; his diary of a journey to the east is not part of the 100 juan. Zhonghua Book Company published his unpublished letter drafts in 1960; Shanghai Library began a series from the papers in 1976 and published a number of volumes between 1979 and 2002; the Chinese University of Hong Kong has held a collection of his correspondence and telegram drafts since 1983 and published it in instalments in 1987–1997. Yi Huili’s edited volume on twentieth-century studies of Sheng was published by Jiangsu Ancient Books Publishing House in 2002.⁠[5]

Xia Dongyuan’s extended chronicle of Sheng’s life was published in two volumes by Shanghai Jiao Tong University Press in April 2004; Shanghai Library’s two-volume selection from the Sheng Xuanhuai papers in its collection was published by Shanghai Classics Publishing House in November 2008. These selections and a volume of letters from famous people in the papers are the two compilations published with facsimiles beside the text, the latter reproducing in original colour more than a hundred autograph letters exchanged with or concerning Sheng by over seventy people, including Sun Yat-sen, Li Hongzhang and Zhang Zhidong.⁠[28][29][9]

At great expense he had the Changzhou xianzhe yishu (writings of former worthies of Changzhou) and its sequel cut and printed, 104 volumes in all, most of them rare works by people of Changzhou and its counties from before the Ming dynasty; the Changzhou City Gazetteer judges this a considerable contribution to local culture.⁠[7]

The American historian Albert Feuerwerker’s study China’s Early Industrialization: Sheng Hsuan-huai (1844–1916) and Mandarin Enterprise was published by Harvard University Press in 1958 and as an e-book in 2013.⁠[30]

Tianjin University’s English profile calls him the founder of Peiyang University, says he created eleven “firsts,” among them China’s first modern bank, first telegraph company and first successful cotton mill, and says that Peiyang and Nanyang initiated modern higher education in China. The Changzhou Daily article also lists eleven firsts: the first joint-stock company (the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company), the first telegraph bureau (the China Telegraph Administration), the first inland steam-launch company, the first bank (the Imperial Bank of China), the first trunk railway (the Beijing–Hankou line), the first integrated iron and steel enterprise (the Hanyeping Company), the first higher normal school (Nanyang Public School), the first mineral prospecting company, the first public library and the first modern university (Peiyang University), and adds that he founded the Red Cross Society of China. The Paper’s 2026 article on Jiao Tong University says he is hailed as the father of Chinese industry; Han Baozhi’s article says he is hailed as the father of Chinese industry and of Chinese commerce and is also the father of Chinese higher education, a title the 2016 China Youth Network report also says later generations gave him. The Changzhou Daily article calls him the richest man of the late Qing and says Hu Xueyan was in the end defeated by him; Tan Xufeng’s review likewise says that it was Sheng’s boycott that brought about Hu Xueyan’s ruin.⁠[16][2][11][4][26][19]

Critical judgments include the Draft History of the Qing’s naming him the chief culprit because the nationalization proposal originated with him (Yi Huili); the negative view set out in China Merchants Group’s account, that he encroached on the merchant shareholders’ interests, made huge investments outside the company and paid large bonuses to the court; and the view of provincial interests in 1911 that railway nationalization was a conspiracy by high officials to sell out China to the foreign imperialist powers (Encyclopædia Britannica).⁠[5][6][1]

Zhang Zhidong and Wang Wenshao praised him as versed in the ways of officialdom, in commerce and in foreign affairs.⁠[3]

Sheng owned the Lingering Garden in Suzhou, counted among China’s four great classical gardens and now a World Heritage site. The garden had been Liu Shu’s Hanbi Villa, popularly called the Liu Garden; in 1873 (the 12th year of the Tongzhi reign) Sheng’s father Sheng Kang bought it, repaired and enlarged it, finishing in 1876, and, following the example of the Sui Garden, kept the sound of the old name while changing the character, renaming it the Lingering Garden (Liuyuan). After Sheng Kang’s death the garden passed to Sheng Xuanhuai, under whom its fame grew and it became one of the best-known gardens of the Suzhou region; Yu Yue called it the finest of the famous gardens of Wu. From the 1930s the garden fell into neglect. In 1953 the Suzhou municipal government decided to restore it; in 1961 the State Council placed it in the first group of major national heritage sites, and in December 1997 it was inscribed on the World Heritage List together with the Humble Administrator’s Garden, the Master of the Nets Garden and the Mountain Villa with Embracing Beauty.⁠[2][31]