Yuan Kejiu

Phillips Academy’s student record of Yuan Kejiu gives his date of birth as February 10, 1905, enters his father as Yuan Shi Kai, the Chinese president from 1912 to 1916, and his mother as Mrs. Shih Kai Yuan; the record’s field “From” gives Tianjin, Chili (Zhili).⁠[1]

Wang Birong’s book on the family history of the descendants of Yuan Shikai’s fifth consort, Lady Yang, an excerpt of which China News Service published in 2013, writes that Yuan Kejiu was born in 1903 and was Yuan Shikai’s ninth son and the third son of Lady Yang.⁠[2]

Bai Junhe, the husband of one of his nieces, lists in an oral account the four sons borne by Yuan Shikai’s fifth consort, Lady Yang: in his numbering of Yuan Shikai’s fifteen sons, the sixth, 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, the eighth, Yuan KezhenYuan KezhenYuan Kezhen was the eighth son of Yuan Shikai. His wife, Zhou Ruizhu, was a daughter of Zhou Fu, who served as governor and governor-general of several provinces in the last years of the Qing dynasty. Bai Junhe, the husband of one of his nieces, says in an oral account that his mother was Lady Yang, Yuan Shikai’s fifth consort, that he helped his sixth brother, Yuan Kehuan, in industry, and that he died relatively early.Open the full entry, the ninth, Yuan Kejiu, and the eleventh, 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.⁠[3]

A 2019 paper by Nicholas L. Chan 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.⁠[4]

Wang Birong’s book quotes the recollection of Yuan Shikai’s daughter Yuan Jingxue in My Father Yuan Shikai that her father sometimes plainly arranged his children’s marriages with his own political interests in mind, and that in betrothing his ninth son, Kejiu, to a daughter of Li Yuanhong he undoubtedly had political aims, given the relations between the two men.⁠[2]

Wang Birong writes that on October 6, 1913, Yuan Shikai was elected formal President of the Republic, while Li Yuanhong was Vice President and military governor of Hubei, and that at the end of that year Li Yuanhong moved his household from Hubei to Beijing; Li Yuanhong and his wife, Wu Jingjun, had two sons and two daughters: the elder daughter, Li Shaofen, the elder son, Li Shaoji, the younger daughter, Li Shaofang, and the younger son, Li Shaoye.⁠[2]

Li Shaofen recalled in A Brief Account of Li Yuanhong that in the spring of 1914 Yuan Shikai invited her family to his home, called out his sons and daughters to meet her father and proposed that the two families exchange children in marriage; Li Yuanhong said he would give one first and asked which Yuan wanted, Yuan said it did not matter so long as she was a daughter of the Li family, and Li Yuanhong then promised his second daughter, Li Shaofang, to Yuan’s ninth son, Yuan Kejiu. Wang Birong writes that Yuan Kejiu was then eleven and Li Shaofang eight, and that a president and vice president becoming in-laws was without precedent or sequel in the history of the Republic.⁠[2]

Wang Birong writes that Li Yuanhong’s wife, Wu Jingjun, was at first unhappy with the match, and gives the main reason in the words of Ding Zhongjiang’s Historical Tales of the Beiyang Warlords: Yuan Kejiu was the son of Lady Yang, a secondary consort, whereas the Li daughter was the child of a principal wife. Wang Birong goes on to write that of Yuan Shikai’s thirty-two children only his eldest son, 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, was born to his principal wife, that Yuan Keding already had a wife and a concubine, so that a daughter married to him could only be a concubine, and that once Wu Jingjun considered this she gave her consent.⁠[2]

Wang Birong writes that Li Yuanhong was well pleased with his future son-in-law, who, though young, was already courteous and had a broad face and large ears, and that at the engagement Li Yuanhong gave him a top hat and a formal suit, while the Yuan family gave their future daughter-in-law several pieces of gold jewelry.⁠[2]

Wang Birong writes that the match is generally seen as Yuan Shikai’s way of winning the support of Vice President Li Yuanhong, but that from another angle it may also have suited Li Yuanhong, newly arrived in Beijing and unfamiliar with the city, since a family tie with the Yuans in a capital full of Beiyang men greatly increased his family’s safety.⁠[2]

Wang Birong writes that Yuan Shikai died two years after the engagement and that the engagement was not called off. Li Shaofang, clever from childhood but frail and often ill, grew very unhappy with the match as she grew up, was low in spirits all day and left the preparatory course of Nankai University after one year; her elder sister, Li Shaofen, then studying in the United States, urged her to go there to study for a change of scene, but she had no interest in going.⁠[2]

Wang Birong writes that Li Shaofang asked her father whether the engagement could be broken off and that Li Yuanhong flatly refused; on the Yuan side, Yuan Shikai had never allowed his children to go back on an engagement while he lived, and the family went on insisting that the promise be kept. She writes that Li Shaofang, who had already suffered from nervous debility, then sank into depression and mental disorder.⁠[2]

Chan’s paper records that in 1920 he went to the United States to study, together with his 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, his eleventh brother Yuan Ke’an, 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 Keding, and that 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; the paper reads the poem 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.⁠[4]

Bai Junhe says that Lady Yang sent each of her four sons to school in England or the United States when they were very young; the excerpt of his account printed in Wenzhai Bao in 2023 says that of Yuan Shikai’s sons only these four all studied abroad, came into contact with Western thought and culture, and on their return achieved something in reviving Chinese industry.⁠[3][5]

Phillips Academy’s record states that he had been taught by a private tutor before entering, that he attended from September 13, 1921, to June 13, 1924, as a member of the class of 1925, that he was in the Classical Department in his first two years and in the Scientific Department in his third, and that he lived in Churchill 3 in his first year, Taylor 2 in his second and Taylor 4 in his third.⁠[1]

The record’s field “Graduated” reads “Left, course incomplete 1925,” and his guardian is entered as Professor Everett Skillings of Middlebury, VermontVermontVermont is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital is Montpelier and its largest city is Burlington. It joined the Union on March 4, 1791, as the 14th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 643,077.Open the full entry. The record’s narrative text names as his brothers Thomas of the class of 1928 and Henry of the class of 1925, that is, Yuan Kedu and Yuan Ke’an.⁠[1][6][7]

Wang Birong writes that in 1930, when Li Shaofang was twenty-four, the Yuan family pressed for the wedding; the elder Li son, Li Shaoji, asked Li Yuanhong’s secretary, Liu Zhongxiu, to let the Yuans know that she was in a daze all day and did not seem well, and to ask whether they still wished to go ahead. The Yuan family replied that the two families had been friends for two generations, that it would be wrong to go back on what the fathers had agreed, that an illness could be treated over time, and that after the wedding the ninth son’s company would make her well.⁠[2]

Wang Birong writes that although Yuan Kejiu had studied in the United States for ten years, at heart he held to the traditional view that marriage was arranged by parents and matchmakers, and that he said to Li Shaofen that he had agreed to marry her sister for his father’s sake, sacrificing himself. Wang Birong considers that by insisting on the marriage the Yuan family spared the Li family’s face, since for a woman’s engagement to be broken off was then a great disgrace, but that it was a personal tragedy for Yuan Kejiu and a family tragedy as well.⁠[2]

Phillips Academy’s record gives his address in 1932 as the “Tientsin Cement Factory.”⁠[1]

Wang Birong writes that Yuan Kejiu and Li Shaofang were married in 1934 and that soon afterwards Li Shaofang was sent to the Xiangshan psychiatric sanatorium in Beijing.⁠[2]

Wang Birong writes that Li Shaofang died of illness on April 15, 1945.⁠[2]

Yuan Jiacheng, the second son of Yuan Kejian, said in a 2011 interview that when the homes of the Yuan family were ransacked during the Cultural Revolution no one was spared, the Red Guards smashing belongings, beating people, making them kneel and humiliating them, and that his ninth uncle tried to hang himself and was saved by the woman he calls his ninth aunt. In a 2016 interview with the history channel of ifeng.com Yuan Jiacheng named his ninth uncle as Yuan Kejiu.⁠[8][9]

Yuan Jiacheng 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 asked Luke Chia-Liu Yuan to help have him transferred back to Tianjin from Inner Mongolia, where he had been sent down, and that he also applied to the authorities himself, but neither effort succeeded. Bai Junhe, by contrast, says that 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 first came back to China, visiting family in Tianjin, in 1973.⁠[8][3]

Bai Junhe says in his account that Yuan Kejiu, the ninth son, came back from study in the United States as a young man and was a director of Qixin Yanghui Gongsi (the Qixin cement company) throughout, and that he did something toward reviving Chinese industry; the Wenzhai Bao excerpt of his account says the same, though it prints the company’s name with a different first character.⁠[3][5]

Bai Junhe says that after Yuan Kehuan, the sixth son, returned from England, he took up the path of developing and reviving Chinese industry with the support of his three younger brothers, the eighth, ninth and eleventh sons. Yuan Jiacheng said in the 2016 interview that his sixth uncle and his ninth uncle, Yuan Kejiu, later ran industrial enterprises such as Qixin Yanghui Gongsi and other cement companies, and that they were very able.⁠[3][9]

Bai Junhe says that some history books give Lady Yang’s home as Yangliuqing in Tianjin but that, as far as he knows, she came from Yixingfu in Tianjin; Yuan Jiacheng said in the 2016 interview that she came from Yixingfu in Tianjin and was of fairly humble origin. The Wenzhai Bao excerpt says that her family were ordinary local people who grew and sold flowers.⁠[3][9][5]

Bai Junhe says that Lady Yang had a good head and something of a modern outlook but confined herself to the household and kept out of politics; that she owed Yuan Shikai’s trust largely to her thrifty and impartial management; and that Yuan Shikai gave her charge of coordinating and managing the households of the sixth to ninth consorts. Yuan Jiacheng says that she was good with money, that Yuan Shikai later put the household’s finances in her hands, and that her descendants were all good with money too.⁠[3][9]

Bai Junhe says he heard from the Yuan family that before her death Lady Yang left word that Yuan Shikai had gone to the very top in politics, becoming president of the Republic and then emperor, and had found it lonely and very hard there, and that she wished her sons not to go into politics; the Wenzhai Bao excerpt says that she enjoined her sons not to take the path of politics again but to build up their own industrial undertakings.⁠[3][5]

Bai Junhe says that before the Cultural Revolution he saw many sets of albums with a large number of photographs of Lady Yang in the home of his father-in-law, Yuan Kehuan, and that in August 1966 the Red Guards burned them.⁠[3]

Wang Birong writes that Yuan Kejiu met Li Xi at the Guomin Hotel in Tianjin; she likens Li Xi to Chen Bailu, the character in Sunrise, and calls her a well-known socialite of the hotel. She relays the words of several of Yuan Kejiu’s nieces that the two got on very well while they lived together and that he did whatever Li Xi asked and doted on her; Wang Birong writes that Li Xi later left him and soon afterwards fell into hardship and mental distress, and then died of illness.⁠[2]

Wang Birong writes that Yuan Kejiu later lived with Zhang Yali, a teacher who came to the Yuan household to teach dancing and who was very good to him; as they never formally married, the younger generation called her jiu yi (ninth aunt). Wang Birong writes that in the end the two settled into an ordinary married life.⁠[2]

Wang Birong writes that forms of address in the Yuan family followed a strict order: the third generation called their own mothers niang, their uncles’ principal wives shen and formal concubines mama, so that Yuan Kehuan’s concubine, Lady Sun, was mama, Yuan Kezhen’s concubine, Lady Bian, was da mama (elder mama) and Yuan Kejiu’s concubine, Li Xi, was xiao mama (little mama); after the founding of the People’s Republic the fourth generation of the family called Zhang Yali jiu nainai (ninth grandmother).⁠[2]

Wang Birong writes that of Lady Yang’s four sons Yuan Kejiu lived the longest, reaching the age of seventy-three, and that he had no children.⁠[2]

Phillips Academy’s record, Bai Junhe’s account and the interview with Yuan Jiacheng all write the last character of his given name in one form and Chan’s paper and Wang Birong’s book in another; Wang Birong gives his courtesy name as Zhuhou; in the school’s record his English name is William Ke Chiu Yuan.⁠[1][3][9][4][2]