Tan Sitong

Tan Sitong was born in Beijing on March 10, 1865; his family’s native place was Liuyang in Hunan.⁠[1][2][3][4]

His courtesy name was Fusheng and his literary name Zhuangfei. His father, Tan Jixun (courtesy name Jingfu), was a jinshi graduate of 1860; his mother was Xu Wuyuan.⁠[1][5][4]

In the spring of 1876 diphtheria broke out in Beijing. Xia Guanghong’s article in Shuwu says that his mother, Madame Xu, his eldest brother, Tan Siyi, and his second sister, Tan Sishu, caught it and died one after another; he caught it too, lay unconscious for three days and nights, and at twelve revived, so that his father gave him the courtesy name Fusheng. Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, edited by Arthur W. Hummel, puts his mother’s death in his twelfth year, and Jenne writes that his mother, a brother and a sister died in a diphtheria outbreak when he was twelve.⁠[6][1][3]

Peng Xiaoling, in a 2019 Hunan Daily article, writes instead that he contracted diphtheria at eleven, lay as if dead for three days and came back to life, and was named Fusheng (“revived”) for this reason.⁠[4]

Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period says that after his mother’s death he was allegedly maltreated by his stepmother; Jenne writes that his relationship with his father’s new wife was tense and that there are stories that she was cruel and abused him.⁠[1][3]

Peng Xiaoling writes in the Jiefang Daily that in 1877, aged twelve, he went with his father, Tan Jixun, newly promoted to the Gong-Qin-Jie circuit, to the family’s native Liuyang to repair his mother’s grave, travelling by ship from Tianjin by way of Yantai to Shanghai, then up the Yangtze, across Dongting Lake and up the Xiang River to Changsha and overland to Liuyang, passing through Shanghai without staying; her 2019 Hunan Daily article says instead that he returned to Liuyang with his father to repair his mother’s grave at thirteen.⁠[7][4]

When at twelve he first returned from Beijing to Liuyang with his father he met Tang Caichang, a fellow native of Liuyang two years his junior, and the two became sworn friends.⁠[2]

In Liuyang he studied under the scholar Ouyang Zhonghu, together with Tang Caichang, and later under Tu Qixian and Liu Renxi; a 2018 Hunan Daily article says it was under Ouyang’s influence that he joined the reformers.⁠[4][5]

He read widely, showed promise as an essayist and was fond of swordsmanship; Peng Xiaoling writes that he had an exceptional memory, wrote poetry well, was devoted to the sword and the qin, admired ancient knights-errant such as Jing Ke and Nie Zheng, and gave himself the private sobriquet “a sword’s courage and a qin’s heart.” Jenne writes that in the civil service examinations he never rose beyond the county-level xiucai degree.⁠[1][2][3]

An article in Tuanjie Bao says that his father, Tan Jixun, then serving in the Board of Revenue, was recommended to Zuo ZongtangZuo ZongtangZuo Zongtang (1812–1885) was a statesman and military commander of the late Qing dynasty. Holding only the provincial degree, he joined the staff of the governor of Hunan, raised the Chu Army against the Taiping Rebellion and served as governor of Zhejiang and governor-general of Fujian and Zhejiang, of Shaanxi and Gansu and of Liangjiang, rising to grand secretary and grand councillor; from 1875 he directed the campaign in Xinjiang that defeated Yakub Beg, after which Xinjiang was made a province.Open the full entry by Tan Zhonglin, governor of Shaanxi, was appointed in 1877 to the Gong-Qin-Jie circuit in Gansu, took up the post at Qinzhou in 1878, became Gansu provincial judge on the first day of the third month of the ninth year of Guangxu (1883) and Gansu financial commissioner in 1884; Tan Sitong first came to Gansu in 1878 and left in 1889, came five times in all and spent about eleven years there.⁠[8]

He travelled in eastern and southern Gansu, Lanzhou and the Hexi corridor; in 1884 he lived with his father in the financial commissioner’s yamen in Lanzhou, often enjoying its Qiyuan garden and writing couplets for its pavilions; in 1888 he went to Pingliang, climbed Mount Kongtong and visited Liuhu lake. Poems he wrote in Gansu include “Kongtong at Pingliang,” “On the Road from Liuhu at Pingliang to Jingzhou,” “On the Road through the Long Mountains” and “Autumn in the Qiyuan Garden of the Gansu Financial Commissioner’s Yamen,” and on leaving he wrote “Farewell to Lanzhou”; the article says in one place that he returned to Hunan in the summer of 1888 and in another that he left Gansu in 1889.⁠[8]

Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period says that as a young man he spent several years in Xinjiang as a minor military officer under the governor Liu Jintang; Jenne writes that in 1884, when Xinjiang had just become a province, he was a junior officer on the staff of its first governor, Liu Jintang. He then spent about ten years travelling through many provinces, studying local administration and visiting historic sites.⁠[1][3]

Liu Zhengchu writes in a 2026 Hunan Daily article that in 1878 (the fourth year of Guangxu) Tan Jixun set out from Liuyang and, travelling from late spring to late autumn, reached Lanzhou, with the thirteen-year-old Tan Sitong in his company, and that with his father’s promotion the whole family moved to Lanzhou. At Qingfengpu on the Liuyang River he saw off his second brother, Tan Sixiang, who was leaving for Gansu, and wrote a sequence of seven-character poems for the occasion; at eighteen he wrote in Lanzhou “Wanghaichao: Inscribed on My Own Portrait,” the only ci poem of his life.⁠[9]

In the spring of 1889 he went to Beijing to sit that year’s examination in Shuntian prefecture and, on his father’s instruction, became a pupil of Liu Renxi, a scholar from Liuyang then serving in the Board of Works. Liu was an accomplished qin player who owned three famous instruments named Jinsheng, Huangzhong and Feihong and wrote a book on the qin; finding Tan well versed in music, he taught him the instrument, and master and pupil, with friends, held a concert with xun, chi, xiao, pipes and qin at the Liuyang guild hall in Beijing.⁠[2]

His second elder brother, Tan Sixiang, crossed to Taiwan to join their relative by marriage Tang Jingsong (Xia Guanghong gives Tang’s post as intendant of the Taiwan circuit, Peng Xiaoling in the Jiefang Daily as financial commissioner of Taiwan); Peng writes that Tan Sixiang died of illness on the fifth day of the fifth month of 1889 (June 3) at the Penghu Academy in Anping county, Tainan prefecture.⁠[6][7]

Peng Xiaoling writes that Tan Sitong, then in Beijing, gave up the Shuntian examination and set out south for Shanghai with his nephew Tan Chuanjian, intending to go to Taiwan for the coffin; on reaching Shanghai he received a telegram from Tang Jingsong saying that the coffin had already been sent to Shanghai, and he received it there. Xia Guanghong writes instead that he had reached Lanzhou in the spring of 1889, learned early in the fifth month of his brother’s death in Taiwan and hurried south with his nephew Tan Chuanjian to meet the coffin in Shanghai and bring it back to Liuyang. In the second month of the following year he buried his brother at Lengshuijing, Guankou, outside the town of Liuyang.⁠[7][6]

In the summer of 1893 he passed through Shanghai again on his way to the Shuntian examination in Beijing, and after the autumn examination, called back by his father to Wuchang in Hubei, passed through it once more; on these journeys he found the Chinese Scientific Book Depot that the Englishman John Fryer had opened on Sanma Road (now Hankou Road), met Fryer and bought many Western scientific books. Fryer, engaged in 1868 by the translation office of the Jiangnan Arsenal, spent 28 years translating there and produced 129 translations in his lifetime.⁠[7]

Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period says that by 1894 he was studying the new learning and showing an aptitude for mathematics, and that he founded a society for Western learning in his native place, which the book treats as the beginning of the reform movement in Hunan.⁠[1]

In 1895 Liuyang suffered a severe drought and the academies’ public funds were all diverted to relief. He helped Ouyang Zhonghu with the relief work in Liuyang for nearly a month; he drafted twelve proposals on famine relief and six regulations for protecting the gold mines, argued for opening mines and for relief through public works, set up an official coal bureau and opened coal mines with Tang Caichang, Li Zongjun and others, and in Hubei solicited donations, raised funds and bought grain for Liuyang. On the tenth day of the twelfth month, his father having written ordering him back to Hubei to accompany Wang Zhichun on a mission to Russia, he left Liuyang for Hubei.⁠[6]

Xia Guanghong writes that in the eighth month of 1895 his proposal to turn the Nantai Academy in Liuyang into a mathematics school was opposed by Chen Changjiang, a Liuyang native then magistrate of Yidu county in Hubei, and that he hurried back from Wuchang to Liuyang to confer; since the academies’ funds had gone to famine relief, he, Ouyang Zhonghu, Tang Caichang, Tu Ruhe and others gathered ten like-minded men, each of whom gave fifty strings of cash, and first set up a small Liuyang Mathematics Society in the Kuiwen Pavilion of the Liuyang Confucian temple, for which he drew up the charter. Xia calls it the first natural-science society in modern Chinese history and says it opened the reform movement in Hunan. Peng Xiaoling’s 2019 article says that he worked to turn the society into a mathematics school while helping with famine relief, and that the school was finally set up in the Kuiwen Pavilion in February 1897.⁠[6][4]

In the sixth month of 1895 he and Tang Caichang returned to Liuyang one after the other to establish the mathematics school and the Qunmeng Society, and he often went to the Tang household to learn the qin from Tang’s father, a skilled player.⁠[2]

In his long Letter to Ouyang Zhonghu, some ten thousand characters, he called for reforming the examinations to train men of talent, opening a parliament so that the views of those below could reach the top, and reforming the bureaucracy to reduce its layers, and proposed that the training of talent be tried first on a small scale in one county, by setting up a mathematics school in Liuyang.⁠[6]

Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period says that Kang YouweiKang YouweiKang Youwei (1858–1927) was a Chinese scholar, political reformer and calligrapher of the late Qing and early Republican periods and a principal promoter of the Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898. After the reform was reversed he spent more than a decade in exile, founded the Baohuanghui (Chinese Empire Reform Association) and argued for constitutional monarchy; in later life he campaigned to make Confucianism the state religion. His works include The Forged Classics, Confucius as a Reformer and the Datong shu (The Great Commonwealth).Open the full entry organised the Qiangxuehui (Society for the Study of National Strengthening) in Beijing and Shanghai in 1895; by the time Tan Sitong reached Beijing, Kang had left for Guangdong, and Tan met Liang QichaoLiang QichaoLiang Qichao (1873–1929) was a thinker, politician, journalist and scholar of the late Qing and early Republic, a disciple of Kang Youwei and a participant in the Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898. After the reform failed he spent 14 years in exile in Japan, where he ran the journals Qingyi Bao and Xinmin Congbao; returning in 1912, he helped to found the Progressive Party, served the Beijing government as minister of justice and minister of finance, and in 1915–1916 opposed Yuan Shikai’s attempt to make himself emperor. After leaving politics at the end of 1917 he devoted himself to writing and teaching, was a tutor at the Tsinghua Academy of Chinese Learning and director of the Beijing Library, and left the collected works known as the Yinbingshi heji.Open the full entry, the society’s chief secretary, and came under the influence of Kang’s writings.⁠[1]

In the second month of 1896 he left Wuchang and reached Shanghai in the middle or later part of the month; Peng Xiaoling’s 2019 article says that in the spring of that year he accompanied his nephew Tan Chuanzan to Beijing for the examinations at his father’s behest. Hung-yok Ip’s article says that in Beijing his friendship with the reformist scholar Wu Tieqiao (1866–1897) taught him to appreciate Buddhism.⁠[7][4][10]

On the 24th day of the second month of the 22nd year of Guangxu (April 6, 1896) he met Song Shu at the Shanghai Polytechnic; after an imperial audience he was reassigned as an expectant prefect in Jiangsu, left Beijing for the south on the 18th day of the sixth month, stopped briefly in Shanghai and reached Jiangning (Nanjing) on the 29th. Passing through Shanghai he called on Fryer again, but Fryer had left for 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; he obtained Fryer’s translation of a book on healing the body through the mind, which Peng Xiaoling believes helped him to bring Buddhism and the principles of the Book of Changes together.⁠[7]

On the 23rd day of the seventh month of 1896 he wrote in Nanjing a long letter to Ouyang Zhonghu, titled Record of a Northern Study Tour, which, Xia Guanghong writes, already contains many of the basic ideas of the Renxue.⁠[6]

Wang Kailin writes in the Hunan Daily that he and Liang Qichao met in Beijing in 1895, and that Liang wrote to Kang Youwei praising his clear-sighted talent and matchless drive, unequalled by anyone Liang had met, while regretting that he was too devoted to Western learning.⁠[11]

In 1896, at his father’s request, he went to Nanjing as an expectant prefect; the Palace Museum’s entry says that between August 1896 and November 1897 he purchased the rank of expectant prefect in Jiangsu.⁠[1][12]

In Nanjing he studied Buddhism under the guidance of Yang Wenhui (1837–1911), whom Hung-yok Ip calls one of the most prominent lay Buddhists of modern China. Ip cites an 1896 letter to Ouyang Zhonghu in which he says he had taken a serious vow to recite mantras and believed himself on the verge of developing supersensory power.⁠[1][10]

While an expectant prefect in Nanjing, and until he took his family back to Hunan in the first month of 1898, he travelled repeatedly between Nanjing and Shanghai; in Shanghai he stayed at the Changfa inn on the north side of the Yangjingbang in the British concession, and on the 14th day of the eighth month of 1896 (September 20) Sun Baoxuan gave a dinner at the Western restaurant Yipinxiang for him, Liang Qichao, Wang Kangnian, Song Shu and others.⁠[7]

On the 26th day of the second month of the 23rd year of Guangxu (March 28, 1897) he saw his father off in Shanghai on his journey north for an imperial audience; on May 2 he, Wang Kangnian, Liang Qichao and others founded the Shanghai Anti-Footbinding Society; in May he was in Shanghai again to settle a contract dispute between the Hunan Mining Bureau and Dematte of the French firm Huali; and at the end of the ninth month (October) of that year he came from Nanjing to Shanghai with Zhang Tongdian and met Kang Youwei, whom he had long admired.⁠[7]

Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period says that in 1897 he was recalled to Hunan to help Governor Chen Baozhen (1831–1900) carry out reforms; the provincial director of education, Xu Renzhu (1863–1900), also promoted the new learning, and in July 1897 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 became acting provincial judge of Hunan; the Shiwu Xuetang (School of Current Affairs) was opened in Changsha with Liang Qichao as chief lecturer. The book also says that the newspaper Xiangxue xinbao, first issued on April 22, 1897, was edited by Tan Sitong, and Jenne likewise writes that he edited Hunan’s first newspaper, the Xiangxue xinbao.⁠[1][3]

A 2018 Hunan Daily article says that from 1897, with the support of Chen Baozhen and others, he pursued reform in Hunan, helped found the Shiwu Xuetang and the Southern Study Society, ran the newspaper Xiang bao and promoted mining, railways and reform propaganda, making Hunan, in the article’s words, the most vigorous province in the country; Peng Xiaoling writes that he served as supervisor of the Shiwu Xuetang.⁠[5][4]

Wang Kailin writes that when Liang Qichao came to Changsha by invitation in the winter of 1897, Tan Sitong introduced him to Tang Caichang, and that in the three months until the spring of 1898 the two were together day and night: Liang called him the friend with whom he was most in tune in teaching, and besides teaching their students they campaigned together against the binding of women’s feet, advocated the new policies and wrote for the Xiang bao. Tang Caichang gave Liang a chrysanthemum-stone inkstone from Liuyang, for which Tan Sitong composed an inscription, carved by Jiang Biao, declaring himself witness to the stone-firm friendship between Liang and Tang.⁠[11]

The Palace Museum’s entry says that early in 1898 he threw all his energy into the reform movement in Hunan, proposed the Southern Study Society and in the third month also started the Xiang bao to promote reform, drawing attacks from die-hards. Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period says he was at the same time chairman of the Southern Study Society, and lists among the results of the Hunan reforms the introduction of steamships, a modernized police system, the development of industries and projected railways.⁠[12][1]

In the spring of 1898 (the intercalary third month) he returned to Liuyang and with Li Zongjun, Tang Caichang and Ouyang Ligeng founded the Qunmeng Society, a body for lectures and political discussion, for which he wrote a preface.⁠[6]

On June 11, 1898, the Guangxu Emperor issued his first reform decree; the same day Xu Zhijing recommended Kang Youwei, Tan Sitong, Liang Qichao, Huang Zunxian and others to the throne. On June 16 Kang had an audience with the Emperor, and Tan and Liang were summoned from Hunan.⁠[1][5]

On the third day of the fourth month he left Liuyang for Changsha; it was the fifteenth anniversary of his marriage to Li Run, and he wrote poems for her, among them “Farewell to My Wife on Going North in 1898.” Around the 25th day of the sixth month (August 12) he travelled from Nanjing to Shanghai to take a ship north.⁠[6][7]

He reached Beijing in early September and on September 5 was appointed a secretary of the Grand Council with the fourth rank, together with Yang Rui (1857–1898, of Sichuan), Lin Xu (1875–1898, of Fujian) and Liu Guangdi (1859–1898, of Sichuan); the four, known as the “four ministers of the Grand Council,” took part in the new policies.⁠[1][5]

In Beijing he lodged temporarily at the Liuyang guild hall in Beibanjie Hutong, naming his room, the northern suite of the five-bay west building, the Mangcangcang Studio; the north building of the inner courtyard was where late-Qing reformers held meetings. Liu Yang, vice-chairman of the Beijing History, Geography and Folklore Society, says that many of his poems, essays and letters were written there.⁠[13]

Peng Xiaoling writes that, busy as a secretary of the Grand Council, he wrote to Li Run that the court was resolved on reform, that much could be done for the country and that he was therefore working all the harder and allowing himself no ease, and that he urged her to regard glory as a dream and death and disgrace as ordinary things.⁠[2]

Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period says that the Empress Dowager had resolved to force the Emperor’s abdication; on September 14 the Emperor sent a note to Kang Youwei and the four secretaries of the Grand Council asking them to save him.⁠[1]

Ma Yong writes in China Reading Weekly that 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 had an audience with the Guangxu Emperor at the Summer Palace on September 17 and had been ordered to take formal leave on the 20th; on the night of September 18 Tan Sitong went alone to Yuan’s lodging at the Fahua Temple in Baofang Hutong, at the northern end of Wangfujing Street. Chen Yutong also places the meeting on the night of the third day of the eighth lunar month (September 18). Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period places it at midnight on the 17th.⁠[14][15][1]

Ma Yong writes that Tan showed a draft alleging that Ronglu was plotting to depose and kill the Emperor and asking Yuan to bring his troops swiftly to Beijing, send half of them to surround the Summer Palace, and execute Ronglu; Tan said that disposing of the Empress Dowager was his own affair and needed no help from Yuan, claimed to have hired dozens of strong men and to have telegraphed Hunan to summon able commanders, and said that the Emperor’s vermilion edict was with Lin Xu, producing only a copy that Yang Rui had made for him; Yuan pointed out that it said nothing about killing Ronglu or surrounding the Summer Palace. Tan said that if Yuan refused he would die before him, and that since ancient times reform had never succeeded without bloodshed.⁠[14]

Ma Yong writes that after the meeting Tan went straight to 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’s residence at the Jinding Temple near the Donghua Gate, where Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao were waiting for news.⁠[14]

An article by Chen Yutong in the Beijing Daily quotes Kang Youwei’s self-compiled chronology, which says that Kang asked Tan to go to Yuan’s lodging and persuade him to rise for the Emperor, went into the city himself to wait for news at the Jinding Temple, and learned that Yuan could not raise troops; Chen holds that the meeting took place at the Fahua Temple in Baofang Hutong, that the Fayuan Temple had nothing to do with Tan or Yuan, and criticises Li Ao’s novel Beijing Fayuan Temple as a distortion of history.⁠[15]

Jenne writes that Yuan later recorded that he listened to Tan partly because he believed Tan had brought a pistol; the Academy of Chinese Studies feature says that Yuan feigned support and wasted no time in revealing the plan to Ronglu, and calls the reformers’ trust in Yuan naive.⁠[3][16]

Ma Yong, by contrast, holds that the story of Yuan as the betrayer of the reform is rumour, not history: he writes that early on September 21 Ronglu came to see Yuan, who had returned to Tianjin, and Yuan gave him a fairly truthful account of Tan’s night visit and his own view of it, while that evening a telegram from Beijing already announced the Empress Dowager’s resumption of power and the arrest of Kang Youwei and his brother Kang Guangren; how the coup actually came about, he writes, is another question.⁠[14]

The Academy of Chinese Studies feature says that on September 19 the Empress Dowager suddenly left the Summer Palace for the Forbidden City and on September 21 launched a coup, imprisoned the Guangxu Emperor on Yingtai in Zhongnanhai, rescinded the reform, ordered the arrest of the reformers and proclaimed herself regent again; the 2018 Hunan Daily article says instead that she hurried back from the Summer Palace to the Forbidden City in the early hours of September 21, imprisoned the Emperor on Yingtai, issued the edict resuming her regency and then ordered the arrest of Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Tan Sitong and others. Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period says that Kang escaped to Tianjin and Hong Kong and that Liang fled to Japan.⁠[16][5][1]

He refused to flee and waited at his lodging to be arrested; meanwhile he tried in vain, with the help of professional boxers, to rescue the Emperor and declined his Japanese friends’ urging to take refuge in Japan. A 2018 Hunan Daily article records him telling Japanese friends that reform in every country had been achieved only through bloodshed, that no one in China had yet been heard of shedding blood for reform, which was why the country did not prosper, and that if there was to be such bloodshed, let it begin with him. The 2025 Hunan Daily article gives these words as addressed to those who urged him to leave, and the Academy of Chinese Studies feature likewise gives his answer to those urging him to escape as: no reform is ever accomplished without bloodshed.⁠[1][5][16][2]

Wang Kailin writes that when Liang Qichao urged him to stay at the Japanese consulate and flee abroad with him, he declared that without those who leave there is no way to plan for the future, and without those who die there is no way to rouse those who come after.⁠[11]

He was arrested at the Liuyang guild hall. Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period and Jenne both date his arrest to September 25, Jenne writing that imperial guards stormed through the courtyard gates that morning; Wang Bin, in the Guangming Daily, dates his arrest at the guild hall to September 21.⁠[1][3][13][17]

He was held in the prison of the Board of Punishments, where he wrote a poem on the wall of his cell, “Written on the Prison Wall,” whose four lines allude to the Han-dynasty figures Zhang Jian and Du Gen and end with the image of laughing at heaven with drawn sword, the courage of those who leave and those who stay alike standing like the Kunlun mountains.⁠[4][5]

On September 28, 1898, he was executed at the Caishikou execution ground outside Xuanwu Gate in Beijing, together with Yang Rui, Lin Xu, Liu Guangdi, Kang Guangren (Kang Youwei’s younger brother, who died aged 32 sui) and Yang Shenxiu (1849–1898, of Wenxi in Shanxi, jinshi of 1889 and a censor); the six are known as the “Six Gentlemen of 1898.”⁠[1][5][2]

He was thirty-three at his death (the Hunan Daily articles of 2018 and 2025, the Hunan provincial government portal, Jenne); the Palace Museum’s entry gives thirty-four.⁠[5][18][3][12][2]

Peng Xiaoling writes that when his turn came he stepped forward and cried out that he had the will to kill the traitors but not the strength to turn back fate, that he was dying in a worthy cause, and how glad he was; Jenne writes instead that he wrote these words while awaiting execution.⁠[4][3]

At midnight that day the elderly steward of the Liuyang guild hall, Liu Fengchi, and his son came in the dark, rolled his body in a reed mat and carried it back to the guild hall.⁠[4]

After the coup Chen Baozhen, Xu Zhijing and others were dismissed or imprisoned; Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period links the conservatives’ subsequent dominance to the Boxer Uprising of 1900.⁠[1]

Wang Bin writes in the Guangming Daily that his body was placed in its coffin at the Liuyang guild hall and that a mourning hall was set up in the Mangcangcang Studio.⁠[17]

A year later his body was finally brought back to Liuyang. His tomb is built into a hillside, with a bluestone railing in front and a mound covered with small flat round stones; the tombstone is inscribed as the tomb of Tan Fusheng, Grand Master for Thorough Counsel of the former Qing, and stone tigers, stone horses and a pair of ornamental columns stand in front of it.⁠[4]

After the founding of the Republic of China, Liu Renxi, then head of the civil affairs department of Hunan, petitioned the Beiyang government to honour Tan Sitong and build a memorial shrine; the Liuyang magistrate’s office allotted the vacant ground of the jail warden’s office for it, and with money raised by Li Run, who sold some land and jewellery, and by the Tan clan, the shrine was completed in the autumn of 1913. Also called the Tan Sitong Martyr Memorial Hall, it stands on Caichang Road, its lintel inscribed in large characters as the special shrine of the martyr Tan.⁠[4][2]

On the year of the shrine, Peng Xiaoling, in a 2019 Hunan Daily article, writes that it was completed in the autumn of 1913, while Tang Yusi and Zhu Yuwen, in a 2024 Hunan Daily article, write that the Tan Sitong Martyr Shrine was built in the county town of Liuyang in 1904; they add that a statue of Tan stands in the front hall of the memorial hall, also called the special shrine of the martyr Tan, on Caichang Road in the city.⁠[4][19]

His father, Tan Jixun, served among other posts as provincial judge and financial commissioner of Gansu; Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period gives his tenure as governor of Hubei as 1890–1898, while the Tuanjie Bao article dates his promotion to governor of Hubei to 1889. The Tuanjie Bao article says that Tan Jixun died on the twelfth day of the ninth month of the 27th year of Guangxu (October 23, 1901) at the age of seventy-eight.⁠[1][8]

His wife was Li Run; Jenne writes that he married at nineteen and that their young son died less than a year after his birth.⁠[2][3]

Huang Yukang writes in Wenshi Shiyi that when Tan Sitong, Liang Qichao and others founded an anti-footbinding society in Shanghai in the fifth month of 1897 (the twenty-third year of Guangxu), Li Run led the unbound-footed maidservants of the household into the streets to promote unbound feet; that, influenced by Tan Sitong, she and Huang Jinyu, the wife of Kang Guangren, founded the Chinese Women’s Study Society, the first women’s organization of modern Shanghai; and that the next year, with the support of colleagues, they set up the society’s school, the first girls’ school run by Chinese. Liu Zhengchu writes that when Tan Sitong launched a Chinese women’s association, Li Run became one of its directors and took on much of its practical work.⁠[20][21]

After Tan Sitong’s death Li Run took the sobriquet Yusheng, meaning that she lived on for the moment in grief and humiliation; she moved out of their former bedroom, lived as a widow, cared for the elders and raised her nephews and nieces, and worked to build the Tan Sitong Martyr Shrine and spread his ideas. Because Tan Sitong had no son, Tan Jixun made Tan Chuanwei, the son of his second son Tan Sixiang, Tan Sitong’s heir under a dual-succession arrangement, and entrusted Tan Sixiang’s two daughters to Li Run to bring up and marry.⁠[20][21]

In 1912 Li Run gave part of the family property and campaigned for public and private funds to found, with Liu Songfu and others, the first girls’ school in Liuyang, of which she was honorary principal; Liu Zhengchu names the school as the Liuyang Girls’ Normal School. Seeing the abandonment and drowning of infants at the time, she gave money of her own and moved many others to donate unused ancestral-sacrifice property, and a foundling bureau with written rules was set up. For her sixtieth birthday in 1925 Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao jointly sent a horizontal plaque inscribed with four large characters calling her a woman of perfect virtue, which hung in the hall of the Dafudi house; the original plaque was burned during the Cultural Revolution. Liu Zhengchu writes that she died at the Dafudi house in 1925 at the age of sixty, and that the Dafudi on Beizhengnan Road in Liuyang was the home of Tan Sitong and Li Run; Huang Yukang writes that she died of illness shortly after her sixtieth birthday.⁠[20][21]

The Renxue (A Study of Benevolence), in two juan, is his principal work; Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period says it was written in 1896–1898 and printed in December 1898; Peng Xiaoling’s article in the Jiefang Daily says it was written from the autumn of 1896 to the spring of 1897 and that he discussed each part with Liang Qichao as he finished it; Hung-yok Ip’s article dates it 1896–97 in its citations.⁠[1][7][10]

Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period says that the book is an ingenious combination of Confucian, Buddhist and Christian ideas with what he had learned of Western science, and that, as its preface states, its purpose was to break the net of fame, self-interest and traditionalism and to lay aside all thought of emperor-worship and blind respect for antiquity. 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 says he emphasised the people’s rights and independence and relied more heavily on Buddhism than Kang Youwei did.⁠[1][22]

Hung-yok Ip writes that he held that Buddhism subsumes all religions, all philosophies and all classics; that he described the ether as the basic and eternal element of the universe and the gravitational force that made things cohere, and said that ether is what Confucius calls ren; and that, drawing on Huayan and Mahayana thought, he invoked the saying that one is all and all is one and the notion of the unity of the three ages, and, influenced by the Mind-only school, divided consciousness into eight categories and used that school’s theory of the four wisdoms.⁠[10]

Ip writes that the Buddhist modernizer Taixu admired the Renxue, and she argues that Tan’s invocation of interconnectivity prefigured the work of Thich Nhat Hanh, Sulak Sivaraksa and A. T. Ariyaratne. The Hunan provincial government portal calls the Renxue an important work in the history of modern Chinese thought, acclaimed as the “Declaration of the Rights of Man” of late-nineteenth-century China, and the 2025 Hunan Daily article calls it the first philosophical work of the reform party.⁠[10][18][2]

At a reading seminar of young scholars of modern Chinese history at Fudan University on June 18, 2021, devoted to rereading the Renxue, Wu Yangxiang called it one of the two extraordinary books of modern Chinese history, the other being Kang Youwei’s Datong shu, and Zhang Weixin described Tan Sitong as a thinker who all his life pursued “daily renewal.”⁠[23]

The earliest collection of his writings, the Donghai qianmingshi sanshi yiqian jiuxue, was printed about 1897 in four volumes; the Wuxu liu junzi yiji (Posthumous Works of the Six Gentlemen of 1898), published in 1917, includes his Liaotianyige wen (two juan), Mangcangcangzhai shi (two juan) and Jiwai wen (one juan); the Tan Liuyang quanji, published in 1925, contains five works with a chronological biography appended.⁠[1]

Chan Sin-wai’s English translation, An Exposition of Benevolence: The Jen-hsüeh of T’an Ssu-t’ung, was published by the Chinese University Press in Hong Kong in 1984 (xvi + 374 pages) as no. 6 of the Institute of Chinese Studies monograph series.⁠[24]

The Renxue first appeared in two versions: the one Tang Caichang published in the Yadong shibao in Shanghai and the one Liang Qichao published in the Qingyi bao in Yokohama, Japan; Tang Zhijun conjectured that the Yadong shibao text was closer to the original. The second issue of the Qingyi bao carried Liang’s preface to his edition of the book; its serialization in the Qingyi bao broke off from the fourteenth issue, resumed briefly for three issues from the forty-fourth, broke off again, and the rest was printed all at once in the hundredth issue. Hazama Naoki explains the interruption by changes in Liang’s own thinking, Kang Youwei’s control of the Qingyi bao and changes in its editorial staff; the editors of the collated edition, Zhang Weixin and Zhang Yuliang, revised this view, holding that the interruption resulted essentially from Kang Youwei and his followers who clung to royalism interfering in or controlling the paper’s editorial work.⁠[23][25]

The separate edition printed by the Guominbao Society in Tokyo in October 1901 opens with Liang Qichao’s biography of Tan Sitong, which, Zheng Lingfeng writes, removes the reverence for Kang Youwei found in the version in Liang’s account of the 1898 coup. In March 2021 the Zhejiang Ancient Books Publishing House published a 300-page collated edition of the Renxue, collated by Zhang Yuliang with an introduction by Zhang Weixin, which takes the Yadong shibao text as its base.⁠[23][25]

Peng Xiaoling writes that at Jiangxia in Hubei he acquired the Jiaoyu qin, said to have belonged to Wen Tianxiang, wrote an account of it, and had a white silk case made for it on which he wrote an inscription; after his death the qin, with his Seven Stars sword and other belongings, was stored by Li Run in the loft of the Dafudi house in Liuyang, and later a member of a Tan household, out of fear, wrapped the qin and buried it in the vegetable plot behind his house.⁠[2]

When lightning felled one of two paulownia trees in his family’s garden, a qin maker, following his ideas, made two seven-string qin from the remaining trunk: Bengting, in the Zhongni form, and Canlei, in the Luoxia form. The back of Bengting bears a 23-character inscription signed by Tan Sitong; it is now in the Hunan Museum. The Hunan provincial government portal says that both were made under his supervision in the 16th year of Guangxu (1890) from the trunk of the lightning-struck paulownia in the courtyard of his home, that their interior inscriptions number them the first and second “thunderbolt qin,” and that replicas of both are displayed in his study, the Shijuying Lu, at the former residence. Peng Xiaoling writes that on the night before he left for the north he and Li Run played the two instruments to each other; the portal, drawing on the recollection of a Tan descendant, dates this to the evening of the third day of the sixth month of 1898, the night before he left for Beijing.⁠[2][18]

The Canlei qin in the Palace Museum is in the Luoxia form, 118.8 cm long overall, with black lacquer, mother-of-pearl markers and a paulownia top; on the back, above the dragon pool, are carved the characters of its name, and below them 35 characters in running script, a poem by Tan Sitong with his signature, filled with malachite green and sealed with his seal Zhuangfei in seal script, together with an interior inscription recording that Tan Sitong (Fusheng) of Liuyang supervised the making of this second “thunderbolt qin” in the 16th year of Guangxu (1890). Zheng Minzhong’s description says that the poem appears in Tan’s manuscript Qiuyu nianhua zhi guan congcuo shu, that the qin is one of the instruments he had made from the lightning-struck paulownia, and that Qian Junyi donated it to the Palace Museum in 1952.⁠[26]

Tan Sitong’s former residence in Liuyang, at 101 Beizhengnan Road, dates from the late Ming or early Qing; originally an ancestral hall, it was bought by his forebears and converted into a private courtyard house facing northeast, of brick and timber, with three buildings around two courtyards and 24 rooms in all. The Tan Sitong Memorial Hall faces south and covers 522 square meters, a brick-and-timber shrine complex of two buildings and a pavilion; its permanent exhibition has four sections, on his early resolve and growth, his commitment to reform, his death in the Hundred Days’ Reform and his lasting influence.⁠[18]

The building was originally the ancestral hall of a Zhou family and was bought as a private residence and altered by Tan Sitong’s grandfather, Tan Xueqin, a former clerk of Liuyang county; the former residence was listed as a county-level protected cultural site in 1994, was proclaimed by the State Council on November 20, 1996, as one of the fourth group of major historical and cultural sites protected at the national level, and was named a provincial base for patriotic education in 1998.⁠[27]

Inside the residence stands a bronze statue of him, and his study, the Shijuying Lu, is in the third courtyard; a statue of him also stands in the small square beside the residence.⁠[4][2]

The Liuyang guild hall (Tan Sitong’s former residence) in Beibanjie Hutong, Beijing, was listed as a protected cultural site of Xuanwu District in 1986; Liu Yang of the Beijing History, Geography and Folklore Society says that it had already become a multi-household compound by the 1950s. When a China News Service reporter visited in 2016, an elderly resident said that some twenty-odd households lived there, and another resident said that many of the small rooms in the yard were makeshift extensions.⁠[13]

Wang Bin writes in the Guangming Daily that when Beibanjie Hutong was demolished the Liuyang guild hall was preserved as a protected cultural site and included in the Fayuan Temple historic conservation area; the northern side rooms of the five-bay main building of the second courtyard were the Mangcangcang Studio where Tan lived, he had written for the studio a door couplet proclaiming that though his house lacked a single measure of grain his spirit was a match for ten thousand men, and when Kang Youwei found it too provocative and likely to invite trouble he composed a replacement couplet; he wrote his two-chapter collection Mangcangcang Studio Poems at the guild hall, and the studio’s name board and another door couplet in his hand were still there in the 1950s. After his death Hunanese living in Beijing held a memorial gathering there on the second day of every Chinese New Year until the eve of the full-scale war against Japan.⁠[17]

Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period says that his thought allows him to be regarded as a “new comet” in the intellectual circles of his time; the Hunan provincial government portal says that Liang Qichao praised him as the comet of late-Qing thought. The Academy of Chinese Studies feature calls him the first martyr of the reform movement and notes that his old classmate and hometown friend Tang Caichang later organised the Independence Army to overthrow the Qing and was executed with eleven others after the uprising failed.⁠[1][18][16]

Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period notes that Timothy Richard’s Conversion by the Million (1907) includes a portrait of Tan Sitong.⁠[1]