Yuan Keduan

Zhang Boju relates in his annotated Xu Hongxian jishi shi that in the xinhai year (1911) he and Yuan Shikai’s fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh sons were fellow students at Xinxue Shuyuan (the Xinxue academy). The note adds that they took their midday meal there after classes and that a Mr. Fansun sometimes came to see them, examined them on their lessons and gave them earnest counsel.⁠[1]

A 2008 interview feature on his daughter Yuan Jiati in the magazine Huanqiu Renwu gives the school from which he graduated as Xinhua Shuyuan (the Xinhua academy) in Tianjin.⁠[2]

The Huanqiu Renwu article states that when Yuan Shikai launched the Hongxian monarchy he had a seal cut reading Fourth Imperial Son, likening himself to the Yongzheng emperor of the Qing.⁠[2]

The Huanqiu Renwu article states that when Yuan Shikai died in 1916 he went overnight from Fourth Imperial Son to ordinary commoner, could not accept it, suffered a severe shock and was mentally unbalanced from then on.⁠[2]

After Yuan Shikai’s death the cash he left was divided into 17 shares, one for each son, of 120,000 silver dollars apiece. The Huanqiu Renwu article adds that each of the 15 daughters received 8,000 silver dollars for her dowry, and that the concubines lived with their own children and received no cash, although each of the wives was given some of the gold and silver, agate and jade, silks and furs that Yuan Shikai had owned.⁠[2]

In the same year his fifth brother, Yuan KequanYuan KequanYuan Kequan (1898–1941) was the fifth son of Yuan Shikai and a poet in the classical style; after his father’s death he lived in seclusion in Tianjin, and he left six collections of verse.Open the full entry, addressed a poem to him recalling how in late spring he had gone with him to Yingtai and brought back dozens of cut peonies to set on the table, and how their father died before the flowers had faded; the 2019 paper by Nicholas L. Chan reads the poem as setting the unfaded peonies against their father’s sudden death.⁠[1]

The Huanqiu Renwu article states that he was a counselor in Zhang Zuolin’s Dayuanshuai Fu (generalissimo’s headquarters) but could not even manage to go to work, and that he was afterwards a nominal director of the Kailuan Kuangwuju (Kailuan mining administration), drawing 300 silver dollars a month.⁠[2]

The article states that Yuan Jiati finds it painful to look back when she speaks of her parents and sisters; it writes that, as the son of the president, he acquired from childhood a habit of feasting and free spending, and that in the second half of his life he lived mainly by pawning what he had inherited and his shares.⁠[2]

The article states that he and his wife were both habitual opium smokers, addicted to the drug, and that through unrestrained spending the family later fell into very straitened circumstances.⁠[2]

He died in 1951.⁠[2]

The Huanqiu Renwu article states that his mother, Lady Wu, was Yuan Shikai’s fourth concubine, one of his three Korean concubines, and that she died while Yuan Shikai was governor-general of Zhili.⁠[2]

The Huanqiu Renwu article records that Yuan Shikai formally married one wife and nine concubines and had 17 sons and 15 daughters; Chan’s paper likewise gives 17 sons and 15 daughters. The paper also records that in 1920 Yuan Kequan’s ninth brother Yuan KejiuYuan KejiuYuan Kejiu was the ninth son of Yuan Shikai; Phillips Academy’s record gives his year of birth as 1905 and Wang Birong’s book as 1903. Wang Birong writes that in 1914 his father betrothed him to Li Shaofang, the second daughter of Li Yuanhong, and that they married in 1934. He went to the United States to study in 1920 and attended Phillips Academy from 1921 to 1924; Bai Junhe, the husband of one of his nieces, says that after returning to China he served continuously as a director of Qixin Yanghui Gongsi (the Qixin cement company).Open the full entry, tenth brother Yuan KejianYuan KejianYuan Kejian was the tenth son of Yuan Shikai. He went to the United States to study in 1920; his second son, Yuan Jiacheng, says that he studied at Harvard University and, after returning to China, worked only briefly as an English-language secretary and thereafter lived on the family property. His wife, Lu Yuxiu, was a daughter of Lu Jianzhang, a former military governor of Shaanxi.Open the full entry, eleventh brother Yuan Ke’anYuan Ke’anYuan Ke’an was the eleventh son of Yuan Shikai; he went to the United States to study in 1920 and attended Phillips Academy from 1921 to 1924, whose student record gives his year of birth as 1906 and lists a later career in civil aviation in Taiwan and service as secretary to Claire Lee Chennault.Open the full entry and twelfth brother Yuan KeduYuan KeduYuan Kedu was the twelfth son of Yuan Shikai, born in 1907. In 1920 he went to the United States to study together with several of his elder brothers and a nephew; he attended Williston Junior and then Phillips Academy, which he left in 1925 without completing the course.Open the full entry went to 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 to study, together with Yuan Jiarong, the son of their eldest brother, 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. The Huanqiu Renwu article further records that Yuan Shikai had 22 grandsons and 25 granddaughters, so that his sons, daughters and grandchildren numbered 79 in all.⁠[2][1][1]

His wife was a daughter of He Zhongjin, a Tianjin salt merchant. In the Huanqiu Renwu interview Yuan Jiati calls He Zhongjin the most prominent of Tianjin’s great salt merchants, says that her mother’s family let out several thousand tile-roofed houses in Tianjin alone and that the match between the two families was much envied, and says that all the Yuan children’s marriages were arranged, nearly all of them with descendants of Qing princes and warlords, and that her parents’ marriage, too, was brought about by her grandfather.⁠[2]

The Huanqiu Renwu article states that his daughter Yuan Jiati was born in 1924 in a compound at Dayingmen in Tianjin, where most of Yuan Shikai’s concubines and their descendants lived before 1949. The article says that the compound had six large buildings.⁠[2]

Yuan Jiati says that many books give him two sons and one daughter but that she in fact had two elder sisters as well. She says that her two sisters were also victims of marriages arranged under the old code of conduct, were mistreated after their marriages and died wretchedly, and that for this reason she feels no nostalgia at all for the old society.⁠[2]

She says that her father was very much afraid of her grandfather, that the brothers used to pay their respects to Yuan Shikai every day, and that when they angered him they were sometimes beaten with a whip or a stick. She adds that Yuan Shikai sometimes kept his sons to eat with him when they came to pay their respects, and that once, it is said, the second son, Yuan KewenYuan KewenYuan Kewen (1890–1931), art name Hanyun, was the second son of Yuan Shikai, known as a poet, calligrapher and collector of Song and Yuan printed books, old coins and stamps, and as an amateur performer of Peking opera and Kunqu. He remonstrated in verse when his father prepared to take the throne; the physicist Luke Chia-Liu Yuan was his son.Open the full entry, who had already eaten his fill, was handed a hot steamed bun by his father; not daring to refuse it, he slipped it into his sleeve, and it burned off a layer of his skin.⁠[2]

His nephew Luke Chia-Liu YuanLuke Chia-Liu YuanLuke Chia-Liu Yuan (1912–2003) was a Chinese-born American experimental physicist and the husband of the physicist Chien-Shiung Wu; he worked mainly at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he was a senior physicist. He was elected an academician of Academia Sinica in 1959 and chaired the steering committee of Taiwan’s Synchrotron Radiation Research Center from 1983 to 2002.Open the full entry, the son of his second brother Yuan Kewen, was a high-energy physicist.⁠[2]

The Huanqiu Renwu article describes his handwriting as archaic, firm and plain, with a style of its own; Chan’s paper names him, together with his sixth brother Yuan KehuanYuan KehuanYuan Kehuan was the sixth son of Yuan Shikai; he went to Europe in 1913 and attended Cheltenham College in England. His son-in-law Bai Junhe says in an oral account that he entered industry in North China in 1926, served as assistant manager and then general manager of Qixin Yanghui Gongsi (the Qixin cement company), and died in 1956.Open the full entry and his thirteenth brother Yuan Kexiang, among the sons of Yuan Shikai who were skilled calligraphers. The same passage of the paper describes the eldest son, Yuan Keding, as widely learned, proficient in German, English and Latin, and skilled in calligraphy and painting.⁠[2][1]

Yuan Kequan’s collections contain ten poems exchanged with him, whose titles address him as Fourth Brother Chengzhai; the paper considers that the two were close in age and could be called close friends. The paper states that while their father was alive the whole family lived in Zhongnanhai and that many of the brothers’ poems were written over banquets; one of the poems Yuan Kequan presented to him was written at a second gathering at the Jingxin Studio on the north shore of Beihai, built under the Qianlong emperor as a study for imperial princes, which under Yuan Shikai served the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for banquets and housed a school for the family’s sons, and the paper reads it as Yuan Kequan lamenting his abandoned studies in England and his lost ideals.⁠[1]

Zhang Boju relates that he once rode with Yuan Shikai’s fourth to eighth sons to Huanshang village in Zhangde for the birthday of Yuan Shikai’s principal wife, Lady Yu; when the talk on the way turned to which historical figure their father resembled, Yuan Keduan named Cao Cao and Wang Mang, Yuan Kequan said he could be compared to Huan Wen, and the company settled on that. The note adds that after Yuan Shikai’s death Lady Yu lived at Huanshang village, that they were received in the rear hall and paid their respects with family rites, and that the occasion had a simple, rustic air. Nicholas L. Chan’s paper judges that, though they were Yuan Shikai’s sons, Yuan Keduan and the others were fair in their verdict on their father, seeing both his fame and his infamy.⁠[1]

The 2008 Huanqiu Renwu interview with his daughter Yuan Jiati says that his mother, Lady Wu, had originally been a maid who came to the Yuan household in the bridal retinue of Lady Kim, a younger sister of a Korean royal consort; Lady Kim had expected to become the principal wife, but she and both of her maids were taken by Yuan Shikai as concubines.⁠[2]

The article says that the three women, all Korean, had married into an unfamiliar feudal household, could not speak the language and did not know Chinese feudal etiquette, and suffered every kind of humiliation and torment in the Yuan family.⁠[2]

The article says that Yuan Shikai liked women with bound feet and that, of his wife and concubines, only these three had unbound feet; already grown when they came, they could no longer have their feet bound and had to imitate bound feet by walking on the small stilts used by female roles in Peking opera, to please him. The article says that Lady Wu, who died while Yuan Shikai was governor-general of Zhili, was comparatively fortunate and suffered less; the other two did not give up the stilts until Yuan Shikai died, by which time they could hardly walk.⁠[2]

The article adds that the jealous principal wife often beat or berated them when Yuan Shikai was away, and even abused them.⁠[2]

The 2008 Huanqiu Renwu interview describes Yuan Jiati as the eldest of Yuan Shikai’s grandchildren then living. At the age of four she was adopted by her childless second aunt and went with her to Wuxi; the aunt’s husband had studied in the United States and was one of the first Chinese industrialists to take up the idea of saving the country through industry; he ran a silk factory in Wuxi and was the richest man in the town. In her aunt’s house she began to learn English and something of business, and she later won a place at the Zhongxi Girls’ High School in Shanghai.⁠[2][2]

She says that the house they lived in is now a museum in Wuxi, and that it held only her uncle, her aunt and herself but 37 servants; a nanny, a bodyguard and a driver took her to school, the car, its curtains drawn, driving right into the grounds, and until junior middle school she did not know how to buy anything herself. She says that what she dreaded most at school was history lessons, since whenever Yuan Shikai was mentioned she wished she could disappear. The article says that her years in Wuxi were the happiest time of her life.⁠[2]

The article says that when she was 17 her aunt went abroad and she was sent back to the family in Tianjin, which would not let her attend university because the universities were co-educational and instead engaged a tutor, with whom she studied classical Chinese for four years. She says that her parents and uncles did not work and that the household still kept several dozen cooks, servants and maids. Before long she married Mr. Ding, the owner of the Yuanfeng hardware firm and a well-known figure among Tianjin’s national businessmen; she says that her husband founded three enterprises and that they also had a trading firm.⁠[2]

The article says that after the public–private joint ownership of 1956 the family’s privileges were abolished, and that in the Cultural Revolution her whole family was sent to the countryside for reform; she had three sons and a daughter, the daughter had already been sent to a production team in the Qilian Mountains in Gansu, and she and her husband went with their three sons to Wangzhuangzi at Dasi in the western outskirts of Tianjin. There she took up smoking to keep off the mosquitoes; she later proposed to the village that it start a small hardware workshop and set up the area’s first zinc-plating works, with herself as accountant and her husband as director; she says that in the works’ first year the value of a village work point rose from 15 fen to 85 fen. The family spent eight full years in the countryside.⁠[2]

The article says that in 1973 her cousin Luke Chia-Liu Yuan returned to China at the invitation of Premier Zhou Enlai and that, on Zhou’s instruction, the third generation of Yuan Shikai’s descendants gradually regained their freedom; she returned to Tianjin in 1978. She says that the money for her cousin’s passage abroad and his metal trunk had been sent by her and her second aunt.⁠[2][2]

The article says that early in 1987, at the age of 63, she went to Shenzhen, where she took part in building what was then the largest holiday resort in China, worked for six years and made more than 700,000 yuan from original shares; back in Tianjin she opened a Western restaurant, the Suyishi, on the advice of Luke Chia-Liu Yuan and Chien-Shiung WuChien-Shiung WuChien-Shiung Wu (1912–1997) was a Chinese-born American experimental physicist who spent most of her career at Columbia University and worked on the Manhattan Project. Her cobalt-60 beta-decay experiment of 1956–1957, carried out with collaborators, provided the first experimental proof that parity is not conserved in weak interactions.Open the full entry, which by 2008 had been running for 15 years in a four-storey English-style house in the Wudadao (Five Avenues) district, described by the article as the Yuan family’s only property in mainland China at the time. The opening of the article says instead that she went into business at the age of 69.⁠[2][2]

The article says that she served for 24 years as a member of a political consultative conference in Tianjin and has sponsored more than 20 children in Ji County, Tianjin, each group through primary school, at 5,000 yuan per child a year; at the time of the 2008 interview she was 84 and still ran the restaurant. She says that her cousin lived in her house for seven years late in life and left her no inheritance, saying that it would only have done her harm, and that after his death Luke Chia-Liu Yuan gave the entire life savings of himself and his wife to China.⁠[2][2]