Yuan Kejian

The 2019 paper by Nicholas L. Chan records that in 1920 he went to the United States to study, together with his 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, his 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, his 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 and Yuan Jiarong, the son of his 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.⁠[1]

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, wrote a poem of farewell to them at Wusong, which the paper reads as showing Yuan Kequan, who had once broken off his own studies in England, now ashamed of his advancing years and placing high hopes in his brothers and nephew that they would succeed in their studies and restore the family’s standing.⁠[1]

Yuan Jiacheng said in a 2011 interview that his father studied political economy at Harvard University in the United States and spoke very good English, and that when his father’s mother died he went home for the funeral with one of his younger brothers and stayed in China. In a 2016 interview with the history channel of ifeng.com he again said that his father had studied at Harvard. An article by Zhang Xiong carried in the digest Renmin Wenzhai in 2011 states that Yuan Kejian came home from his studies at Harvard at the age of 21.⁠[2][3][4]

Yuan Jiacheng said that this uncle, who went by the English name Tom Yuan, had studied chemistry and made perfume that could rival French perfume, and was well known for it.⁠[2]

He also said that a classmate of his father’s in America later wrote inviting him back to the United States, and that his mother was in favor of going, but his father, unwilling to leave his homeland, declined.⁠[2]

Of his work after returning, Yuan Jiacheng said in the 2016 interview that his father served for a very short time as an English-language secretary under Song Zheyuan and afterwards no longer wished to work; Zhang Xiong’s article states that apart from a spell as English secretary at the Hebei–Chahar Political Council he never held a job in his life. In the 2011 interview Yuan Jiacheng said that neither his father nor the uncle found work after their return, and that before 1949 the family lived fairly comfortably on the ancestral property.⁠[3][4][2]

His second son, Yuan Jiacheng, was born in Tianjin in 1938; the guest introduction on ifeng.com gives Yuan Jiacheng’s other name as Yuan Jie and calls him a native of Xiangcheng, Henan.⁠[2][3]

Yuan Jiacheng said that he spent his first years of primary schooling at home: during the Japanese occupation his father, so that the children would not learn Japanese, engaged tutors to teach them arithmetic and Chinese at home, and only after the war ended did the children sit examinations and join regular schools.⁠[2]

Yuan Jiacheng said in the 2016 interview that after 1949 his father was even less willing to take work, because any job would have obliged him to denounce his own father, Yuan Shikai, in terms he knew to be untrue. In the 2011 interview Yuan Jiacheng said that when people called Yuan Shikai a traitor his father grew angry and pointed out that Wang Yunsheng’s Sixty Years of China and Japan set out that history clearly, but that people did not read it.⁠[3][2]

Yuan Jiacheng said that after 1949 the family’s fortunes quickly declined; they lived by selling off the ancestral property little by little until it was used up, and by the time he married only one small room was left.⁠[2][3]

Yuan Jiacheng said that both his parents had died by the time he finished high school, and that when the homes of the Yuan family were ransacked during the Cultural Revolution, sparing no one, his own household fared somewhat better because his parents were already dead.⁠[2]

Chan’s paper states that Yuan Shikai had 17 sons and 15 daughters and never spared expense on their education, that the sons all received a traditional education in childhood, and that while their father was alive the whole family lived in Zhongnanhai.⁠[1]

Of Yuan Kejian’s mother, Yuan Jiacheng said in the 2011 interview that his grandmother was Korean: when Yuan Shikai held his post in Korea he three times put down internal uprisings and once beat back a Japanese attack, the grateful Korean king gave him three Korean wives, and his grandmother was the second ru furen (secondary wife). In the 2016 interview he said that his branch of the family descends from Yuan Shikai’s fourth consort, Lady Wu.⁠[2][3]

His wife, Lu Yuxiu, was a daughter of Lu Jianzhang, a former military governor of Shaanxi; Yuan Jiacheng called her Lu Jianzhang’s only daughter in the 2011 interview. In the 2016 interview he said that when his parents married, Lu Jianzhang gave more than forty rooms of housing as her dowry, and that his mother’s maid, Xu Wenzhen, came with her into the Yuan family as part of her dowry and later watched over him as he grew up.⁠[3][2]

Yuan Jiacheng said that he had one elder brother and one elder sister, and that his sister later graduated from a forestry college; the ifeng.com interview gives his brother’s name as Yuan Jiaxi.⁠[2][3]

Yuan Jiacheng said in the 2016 interview that when their mother was gravely ill, his brother Yuan Jiaxi used their father’s razor to cut a large piece of flesh from his own left arm to serve as an ingredient in her medicine; their father, who was playing the mandolin at the time, was astonished when the boy came in holding the flesh and quickly bandaged his arm with qili san, a traditional wound powder.⁠[3]

Yuan Jiacheng said that his brother, while in high school, enlisted in the army when China entered the Korean War, later returned to civilian life after a stomach hemorrhage, and was cited for merit for his outstanding work, receiving a medal from Wu De, then the mayor; his employer then recommended him for admission to the Beijing Mining Institute, where, the 2016 interview says, he was admitted in August 1956 and studied on salary. At the institute, which falsified results to meet its targets in the laowei zhi physical fitness tests, he objected, was criticized as a right deviationist and, to prove his loyalty to the organization, set his own left arm alight with gasoline, which left him disabled; he was then treated as mentally ill and forced to leave. The 2016 interview places the burning at an evening study session in 1957 and says that the institute required him to withdraw that autumn.⁠[2][3]

Yuan Jiacheng said that after leaving the institute his brother had no work, lived in poverty and broke down, and in 1962, at only 35, drowned himself in the Hai River; he said that his brother wrote well and painted well.⁠[2][3]

Yuan Jiacheng went to school in Tianjin and did well; Huang Jing, then mayor of Tianjin, once wrote out the words Study Hard for him. He said that when he applied to university he entered Beiyang warlord as his family background and listed, truthfully, his relatives in the United States, Hong Kong and Taiwan under overseas connections, and that he sat the entrance examinations five years running without being admitted, as Zhang Xiong’s article also records. Zhang Xiong’s article states that he then went to work at the Tianjin Mining Machinery Plant, teaching at a workers’ night school at the same time, and was later transferred to support services at the Tianjin Central Obstetrics and Gynecology Hospital; in the 2016 interview Yuan Jiacheng also said that he worked in support services at the Tianjin obstetrics and gynecology hospital.⁠[2][3][4]

In 1970 Yuan Jiacheng was sent down to Shangdu County in Inner Mongolia; Zhang Xiong’s article states that he went there with his wife, to a commune hospital. He spent eight years there in all, including two years of training in radiography at Jining; the Ulanqab League hospital wanted to keep him, but the commune hospital where he worked objected. He said that when 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 came to China to visit family in 1972, his ninth uncle, Yuan Kejiu, asked Luke Chia-Liu Yuan to help get him transferred back to Tianjin, and that he also applied himself, without result; later Jiang Nanxiang, a former president of Tsinghua University, came to Inner Mongolia, learned of their situation and helped them, and he returned to Tianjin. Back in Tianjin he completed evening programs in medicine and in foreign languages with junior-college diplomas, and the guest introduction on ifeng.com says that before retiring he headed the radiology department of a Tianjin hospital. He said that he had not disgraced the family name.⁠[2][3][4]

Yuan Jiacheng said in the 2016 interview that his family had kept the original of the Twenty-One Demands bearing Yuan Shikai’s vermilion annotations, that it was carried off by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution and returned afterwards, and that the family had facsimiles made and gave the original to the Tianjin History Museum. In the 2011 interview his account was that before the Red Guards came, the public security bureau had searched the house first and preserved some cultural relics, and that the original of the Demands signed by his grandfather was taken away at that time.⁠[3][2]