Yuan Keqi

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), where they took their lunch after classes, and that Mr. Fansun sometimes came to see them, examined them on their lessons and urged them on.⁠[1]

In 1913 he and his elder brothers 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, the fifth son, and 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 sixth, accompanied Yan Xiu on a journey through the countries of Europe, and the three then attended Cheltenham College in England.⁠[1][2]

Wang Birong writes in her book Bainian Yuanjia (Guangxi Normal University Press, 2013), a history of the descendants of Yuan Shikai and Lady Yang, that the three brothers spent only a short year and three months at the school and could not yet communicate freely in English; they lived with the headmaster and had someone to tutor them in English, kept one another company and so were not lonely, and although they took no formal diploma from the school they achieved their purpose of travelling and seeing the world. The headmaster at the time was the Reverend Reginald Waterfield (1867–1967), who held the post from 1899 to 1919.⁠[1]

Wang Birong contacted Cheltenham College and obtained from the school a photograph of the three brothers watching a football match with English schoolmates; she writes that the three look somewhat melancholy in it, perhaps because it was the first time they had been far from home and from the large Yuan household, in entirely unfamiliar surroundings and an unfamiliar country.⁠[1]

He recalled that on the day his father died (the sixth day of the fifth lunar month of the fifth year of the Republic) Yuan Shikai called 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, into the inner room, and that he and the others in the outer room heard their father say that he had been wrong in this matter and that Yuan Keding must not be taken in by those few men again; half an hour later Yuan Shikai died.⁠[3]

Yu Ge, in a 2024 article on the riddle of Yuan Shikai’s last words, writes that the most widely circulated version of those words is that someone had ruined him, and that on Yuan Keqi’s recollection Yuan Keding becomes a victim and the remark has nothing to do with him.⁠[3]

Zhang Boju relates that after Yuan Shikai’s death his principal wife, Lady Yu, lived at Huanshang village in Zhangde, and that one year he went with Yuan Shikai’s fourth to eighth sons to congratulate her on her birthday; they were received in the rear hall and greeted her with family rites, in a plain, countrified manner.⁠[1]

In another note Zhang Boju relates that one year, when he and these brothers rode together to Huanshang for Lady Yu’s birthday, the talk during the ride turned to which historical figure Yuan Shikai could be compared to: his fourth brother, Yuan KeduanYuan KeduanYuan Keduan (died 1951) was the fourth son of Yuan Shikai; a skilled calligrapher, he was a counselor in the Dayuanshuai Fu (generalissimo’s headquarters) of Zhang Zuolin and a nominal director of the Kailuan Kuangwuju (Kailuan mining administration).Open the full entry, named Cao Cao and Wang Mang, his fifth brother, Yuan Kequan, said Huan Wen, and that settled the discussion.⁠[1]

Nicholas L. Chan’s 2019 paper states that Yuan Shikai had 17 sons and 15 daughters and never spared expense on their education.⁠[1]

His wife, Sun Yongxi, was the fifth daughter of Sun Baoqi. Sun Baoqi, courtesy name Muhan, was born in 1867, the son of Sun Yijing, a vice-minister of the Board of Revenue; at 26 he became a secretary of the Board of Punishments, was appointed minister to France in July 1902 and minister to Germany in April 1907, became governor of Shandong in 1909, and under the Republic served as foreign minister and as acting premier. He had two wives and four concubines and fathered 16 daughters and 8 sons, two of the sons and two of the daughters dying young.⁠[4][5]

Of Sun Yongxi’s sisters, the eldest, Sun Yonghui, married Sheng Enyi, the fourth son of Sheng Xuanhuai; the second, Sun Yongzhi, married Zailun, a duke and the fifth son of Yikuang, Prince Qing, which Jiang Ming calls the first Manchu–Han marriage made by imperial sanction; the third, Sun Yongzhao, married Wang Yangyi, a grandson of the grand councillor Wang Wenshao; the fourth, Sun Yonglü, married Zhizhen, the second son of Baoxi, president of the Board of Rites; and the seventh, Sun Yongfan, married Zhang Zhiyi, the youngest son of Zhang Peilun, as his second wife, the only one of the Sun daughters to do so, and became the stepmother of Eileen Chang.⁠[4]

His nephew Yuan Jiacheng, the second son of Yuan Shikai’s tenth son, 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, mentioned this marriage in a 2016 interview when speaking of the Twenty-One Demands, and said that Sun Baoqi, then foreign minister, was no match for the Japanese in negotiation, so that Yuan Shikai had to replace him with Lu Zhengxiang.⁠[5]

His fifth brother, Yuan Kequan, often exchanged poems with his brothers; one of these poems was exchanged with Yuan Keqi.⁠[1]