Zhang Zhidong

Zhang Zhidong was born on September 2, 1837. 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 gives his birthplace as Xingyi in Guizhou province, and the Encyclopedia of World Biography as northern China near Peking; a 2023 article on the Chinese Social Sciences Net and a 2026 report in the Guiyang Daily place his birth at Liudongqiao in Guiyang, where the Guancheng and Nanming rivers meet on today’s Bo’ai Road in Nanming district.⁠[1][2][3][4]

His ancestral home was Nanpi in Zhili (now Nanpi county, Hebei). A 2018 report by Hebei News Network relates that the family’s forebears moved from Shanxi to Botou in the Xuande reign of the Ming dynasty and that one branch settled in Nanpi, where it became known as the Dongmen (East Gate) Zhang.⁠[5][6]

Britannica and the Encyclopedia of World Biography both describe a family of scholar-officials that had served the government for generations. The Chinese Social Sciences Net article relates that his grandfather had worked as a copyist for the Siku quanshu project in the capital and had been given by Ji Xiaolan a Song-dynasty inkstone patterned like bamboo joints.⁠[1][2][3]

His father, Zhang Ying (1793–1856), a native of Nanpi, went to Guizhou as an official in the Daoguang reign and served as magistrate of Guizhu county and prefect of Xingyi, among other posts.⁠[4]

The Palace Museum’s entry gives his courtesy names as Xiaoda and Xiangtao, his literary name as Hugong and the name he took in old age as Baobing laoren; the Chinese Social Sciences Net article gives Xiaoda as his courtesy name and Xiangtao, Xiangyan, Hugong and Wujing jushi as literary names, with Baobing in old age. From his ancestral county he was also called Zhang Nanpi.⁠[5][3][6]

His great-grandfather, Zhang Yixiong, was a district magistrate in Zhejiang, and his grandfather, Zhang Tingchen, a district magistrate in Fujian; his father, Zhang Ying, courtesy name Youfu and literary name Chuntan, passed the provincial examination in 1813 and served as an intendant in Guizhou.⁠[7]

The Chinese Social Sciences Net article says he began his schooling at four under He Yangyuan, a tutor at the Xingyi prefectural school, and had finished the Four Books and Five Classics by nine; the Guiyang Daily says he entered school at four and finished them at eight.⁠[3][4]

A 2020 article in the People’s Daily Overseas Edition relates that as prefect of Xingyi his father donated silver to rebuild the local academy, spent heavily on books and on hiring good teachers, and had Zhang Zhidong, Zhang Zhiyuan, Zhang Zhiqing and other sons and nephews studying with him at Xingyi learn alongside the prefectural students, forbidding them the habits of idle rich youths.⁠[8]

In 1848 the Banshan (Half-Hill) Pavilion on the Zhaodi embankment at Anlong, built at his father’s initiative, was completed, and his father gave a banquet there; the eleven-year-old Zhang composed on the spot an account of the pavilion of more than 700 characters. The next year his first collection of poems and essays, Tianxiangge shi’er ling kecao, was printed in Guiyang.⁠[3][4]

After the Mid-Autumn Festival of 1849 the twelve-year-old Zhang set out for his ancestral county of Nanpi to sit the county examination; the Chinese Social Sciences Net article says that when the results were posted he stood first among the 15 candidates admitted and became a xiucai (licentiate), while Hebei News Network dates his xiucai degree to 1850. Britannica says he passed the first level of the civil service examinations at 13.⁠[3][6][1]

In 1852 he took first place (jieyuan) in the provincial examination of Shuntian prefecture, becoming a juren.⁠[3][6]

In 1863, at 26, Zhang passed the metropolitan examination in third place (tanhua) and was appointed a compiler of the Hanlin Academy, the start of his official career. The Guiyang Daily notes that Li Duanfen of Guiyang passed the jinshi examination in the same list.⁠[6][2][4]

In the palace examination his emphasis on current problems and his unconventional style of writing were frowned upon by some examiners but praised by Baoyun; when the papers went to the two empresses dowager for final judgment, he was ranked tanhua, third in the first group of three.⁠[7]

In an article for the Guangming Daily, Feng Tianyu lists his early offices as compiler of the Hanlin Academy, education commissioner of Hubei, education commissioner of Sichuan and sub-chancellor of the Grand Secretariat. Britannica describes him as a scholar and educational director from 1862 to 1882.⁠[9][1]

In the fourth month of 1867 (Tongzhi 6) Zhang sat the selection examination for examiners at the Baohe Hall; in the sixth month he was appointed deputy examiner of the Zhejiang provincial examination, and on the first day of the eighth month he was named education commissioner of Hubei. As education commissioner he founded the Jingxin Academy, modelled broadly on Ruan Yuan’s Gujing Jingshe and Xuehaitang academies, which examined students in classical exegesis and literary composition, at first in four subjects: interpretation of the classics, historical essays, poetry and rhapsody, and miscellaneous writing.⁠[10][11]

During his term in Hubei he served for nearly a year in the same city as Li HongzhangLi HongzhangLi Hongzhang (1823–1901) was a Chinese statesman, military commander and diplomat of the late Qing dynasty, the founder and commander of the Huai Army and one of the principal promoters of the Self-Strengthening Movement. From 1870 he served for many years as governor-general of Zhili and superintendent of trade for the northern ports, sponsored modern enterprises such as the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, the Kaiping mines, railways, telegraphs and the Beiyang Fleet, and signed treaties including the Treaty of Shimonoseki and the Boxer Protocol for the Qing government; judgments of him, in his lifetime and since, have been sharply divided.Open the full entry; Liu Qingfeng writes that the earliest direct contact between the two so far known dates from 1869 (Tongzhi 8).⁠[10]

In the tenth month of 1870 (Tongzhi 9) his term in Hubei ended and he returned to the capital, where he lived on Nanheng Street and began friendships with Pan Zuyin, Wang Yirong, Wu Dacheng, Chen Baochen and others, joined the literary gatherings at the Longshu Temple led by Pan Zuyin, and in 1871 (Tongzhi 10) joined them in giving a banquet for the noted Hunan scholar Wang Kaiyun.⁠[10]

In the sixth month of 1873 (Tongzhi 12) he was appointed deputy examiner of the Sichuan provincial examination, and in the tenth month of that year education commissioner of Sichuan. There he rectified abuses in the examinations, founded the Zunjing Academy in Chengdu, set up a printing office to issue the classics and the dynastic histories, and wrote for the students a handbook on study and composition, the Youxuan yu. In 1875 (Guangxu 1) his bibliographical guide Shumu dawen was first printed at the newly founded Zunjing Academy; the next year it was printed together with the Youxuan yu, and for more than twenty years the two were required reading for the academy’s students. His term in Sichuan ended in 1877 (Guangxu 3), and he returned to the capital.⁠[12][7][10]

In his early career Zhang was a leading member of the Qingliu, a group of outspoken critics among the officials. In the early Guangxu reign he and Zhang Peilun, both serving in Beijing, led critical opinion at court, and the two were known together as the Two Zhangs.⁠[8][13][14]

In 2012 Wang Guizhen published in facsimile 68 letters from Zhang to Zhang Peilun that he had collected over many years, all written in the fourth and fifth years of the Guangxu reign (1878–1879).⁠[13]

In 1879 he defended Empress Dowager Cixi’s choice of the Guangxu Emperor.⁠[2]

The Encyclopedia of World Biography writes that in foreign affairs he became a leader of the “war party,” which hated the foreigners and preferred war to appearing weak before the imperialist powers, and that his belligerent memorials significantly affected the shaping of China’s foreign policy in the Ili crisis with Russia in 1879–1880 and in the conflict with France over Vietnam in 1884–1885.⁠[2]

In 1878 (Guangxu 4) he drafted for Huang Tifang, a senior official of the Supervectorate of Imperial Instruction, a memorial on relieving the people in a time of deep disaster, setting out three proposals: emergency relief, measures that address the root causes, and prevention; in the same year he wrote a congratulatory poem for the eightieth birthday of Li Hongzhang’s mother. In the second month of 1879 (Guangxu 5) he was appointed director of studies of the Imperial Academy (Guozijian), a post that gave him the right to submit memorials.⁠[10]

In the fifth month of 1879, drawing on what he had learned as education commissioner of Sichuan, he memorialized for a fresh review of the Dongxiang case, in which Sun Dingyang, magistrate of Dongxiang county in Sichuan, had imposed irregular levies that provoked popular anger and then asked for troops to suppress the protest, which led to indiscriminate killing; he also impeached Wen Ge, the former acting governor-general of Sichuan.⁠[10]

In 1880 (Guangxu 6) Li Hongzao initiated the building of a shrine to the former worthies of the capital region, most of them men of Zhili, and all its planning was directed by Zhang.⁠[10]

In 1881, the seventh year of the Guangxu reign, Zhang left the post of sub-chancellor of the Grand Secretariat to become governor of Shanxi; Britannica dates the appointment to the end of 1881, the Encyclopedia of World Biography to 1882. In his memorial of thanks he wrote that he would not forget his plans for ordering the whole realm, words that were then repeated as a joke.⁠[14][9][1][2]

Feng Tianyu sees the Shanxi governorship as the beginning of his move from the Qingliu to the Self-Strengthening (yangwu) camp; at this time he put forward ideas of combining substance with application and of understanding principles in order to use them.⁠[9]

When the Sino-French War broke out in 1883 he was still in Shanxi. As early as September 1883 he sent two full-time agents from Shanxi, He Jianyang of Rong county in Guangxi and Chen Zhan’ao of Haiyang (now Chao’an) in Guangdong, to gather intelligence in Guangdong, Guangxi and Hong Kong, and asked Li Xianyi, a brevet brigade general posted to Tianjin to buy arms, to report at all times on the Sino-French negotiations over Vietnam; before submitting his three memorials of November 30 he also had officials from Guangdong and Guangxi serving in Shanxi travel south to learn about the officials there and about French and Vietnamese affairs.⁠[14]

In the spring of 1884 his cousin Zhang Zhiwan and his ally Yan Jingming became grand councillors, and on their recommendation the empress dowager decided to receive him. An edict of April 12 summoned him to the capital for an audience (the article gives the date of this edict as April 25 in another place); after questioning him on the strategy against France, Cixi, in the name of the Guangxu Emperor, made him acting governor-general of Guangdong and Guangxi with charge of the war against France on the Guangdong, Guangxi and Yunnan fronts (Chen Xiaoping’s article dates the appointment May 22 in one place and May 20 in another). He arrived in Guangzhou and took up the post on July 8.⁠[14][1]

During the war he argued hard for fighting on, brought the veteran general Feng Zicai back into service and memorialized for Tang Jingsong to lead troops into Vietnam to join Liu Yongfu’s Black Flag Army against the French, who were defeated on the Guangxi border.⁠[9]

After he took office his intelligence network extended to the front-line areas of Vietnam, Yunnan, Guangxi, western Guangdong, Fujian and Taiwan; Chen Xiaoping writes that he paid even closer attention to Hong Kong.⁠[14]

At Canton he founded a modern arsenal and a military academy in 1887 and set up China’s first modern mint in 1889.⁠[2]

He established the Guangya Academy; a stone inscription of his memorial on its founding is kept in the headmaster’s building (Shanzhang lou) of today’s Guangya Middle School in Guangdong.⁠[4][15]

While Zhang Peilun was in exile at Zhangjiakou, Zhang Zhidong sent him money, Duan inkstones, fur clothing and local produce such as Hainan incense, Guangdong tangerine honey wine, lychees and longans from Guangzhou, and Zhang Peilun sent back mushrooms in thanks.⁠[13]

In 1889, the fifteenth year of the Guangxu reign, he was transferred from Guangdong and Guangxi to be governor-general of Hubei and Hunan (Huguang), with his seat at Wuchang. Britannica says he held the post for 18 years, including three on missions to Nanjing and Beijing; the Encyclopedia of World Biography says he served 18 years at Wuchang apart from two spells as acting governor-general at Nanking, in 1894–1896 and 1902–1903.⁠[16][1][2]

He proposed a railway from Hankou to a point near Beijing, and the court approved it and put him in charge of its construction; Britannica says the line was completed in 1906 after long delays, and the Encyclopedia of World Biography dates his efforts for the Peking–Hankow Railway to 1889–1906. Feng Tianyu calls it the Lu–Han railway and describes the Beijing–Hankou line as China’s first north–south trunk railway.⁠[1][2][9][16]

He founded the Hanyang Iron Works in Hubei. A photo story of the Academy of Chinese Studies in Hong Kong says that construction began in 1891 and the plant became operational in 1894, the first government-operated steel industry of early modern China and the largest of its kind in Asia; the Encyclopedia of World Biography says the iron foundry he opened in 1890 grew into the Han-Yeh-P’ing iron and steel works; Feng Tianyu calls the works the first modern integrated iron and steel enterprise in China and in Asia.⁠[17][2][16]

In his paper on the siting of the Hanyang works, Yuan Weipeng writes that on the eighth day of the fourth month of 1890 (Guangxu 16) Zhang telegraphed Sheng XuanhuaiSheng XuanhuaiSheng Xuanhuai (1844–1916) was a Chinese official and industrialist of the late Qing dynasty who for many years served as Li Hongzhang’s chief economic deputy. He ran the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, the telegraph administration, the Huasheng cotton mill, the Hanyang Ironworks and Hanyeping Company, the Railway Corporation and the Imperial Bank of China, and founded Peiyang University and Nanyang Public School. As minister of posts and communications in 1911 he pursued railway nationalization, which set off the Railway Protection Movement; dismissed after the Wuchang Uprising, he went into exile in Japan for a time and died in Shanghai in 1916. His vast personal archive is held by Shanghai Library.Open the full entry that he had decided against Daye and would build the works near the provincial capital Wuchang, and that only in the seventh month of that year did he finally fix the site at the foot of Turtle Hill (also called Dabie Hill) in Hanyang.⁠[18]

Britannica writes that the works suffered heavy losses because he had ordered equipment without knowing what ore was available and had sited the plant far from coal, and that the debacle exposed him to ridicule.⁠[1]

A 2014 article in the Guangming Daily relates that the First Sino-Japanese War broke out less than a year after the Hanyang works began production, that the court then had no money left to support it, and that its steel could not be sold and it ran out of funds; in 1896, the twenty-second year of the Guangxu reign, Zhang obtained imperial approval for Sheng Xuanhuai to take it over. Britannica writes that in 1896 Sheng added the Hanyang ironworks and its associated mines to his business empire. In 1908 the Hanyang works, the Daye iron mine and the Pingxiang coal mine were merged and reorganized as the Hanyeping Coal and Iron Company.⁠[19][20]

He also founded the Hubei gun and cannon works (Hubei qiangpaochang); Feng Tianyu writes that the Hubei ordnance works (Hubei binggongchang) he built was the largest arms factory of the late Qing and early Republican years.⁠[8][9][16]

He also set up bureaus for cotton weaving, cotton spinning, silk reeling and hemp; Feng Tianyu describes these four bureaus as the largest textile mills in central China. Britannica and the Encyclopedia of World Biography also list a mint, tanneries, tile and silk factories and paper, cotton and woollen mills that he founded in his territories; the Encyclopedia of World Biography says these enterprises caused the area around Wuchang to be known as the “Chicago of China.”⁠[9][16][1][2]

In 1893, the nineteenth year of the Guangxu reign, Li Hongzao wrote to Zhang Peilun that the iron works, the weaving bureau and the other undertakings Zhang Zhidong had set up would surely end beyond control, and that he was anxious on Zhang’s behalf.⁠[13]

Between Turtle Hill and He Hill in Hanyang he created a cluster of modern industrial enterprises, including the Hanyang Iron Works, an arsenal, a gunpowder works and a needle and nail factory, from which came the rails and guns famous as “Hanyang-made.”⁠[21]

Wang Penghui writes that in 1890 (Guangxu 16) Zhang founded the Lianghu Academy in Hubei, prescribing six fields of study (classics, history, Neo-Confucian philosophy, literature, mathematics and statecraft) but in practice teaching only the first four, in order to train scholars on the principle of Chinese learning for substance and Western learning for function; Wu Zengfeng and Han Chunying date the founding to 1892 and write that he invited Liang Dingfen to teach history there.⁠[22][23]

In the same year he reorganized the Jingxin Academy, which he had founded as education commissioner of Hubei, seeking out men of letters and scholars from across the country to direct its teaching; on the thirteenth day of the first month the scholar Tan Xian received a letter from Qin Minshu passing on Zhang’s telegram inviting him to lecture at the academy, reached Hankou on the sixteenth day of the second month and on the eighteenth called on Zhang, his former examiner.⁠[11]

In 1893 he founded the Ziqiang (Self-Strengthening) Institute in Wuhan, the predecessor of Wuhan University; Feng Tianyu calls the school he founded in 1893, from which Wuhan University descends, the Fangyan (Languages) School. He also founded the Hubei School of Agriculture, the predecessor of Huazhong Agricultural University.⁠[8][16]

Feng Tianyu writes that from the 1890s Hubei became one of the country’s main centres of new-style education, that the origins of Wuhan University, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan University of Science and Technology and the Hubei Provincial Library can all be traced to his educational initiatives, and that he thereby won a reputation at court and in the country as an expert on schooling. He also sent large numbers of students abroad. Britannica writes that schools, newspapers and translation bureaus were set up in Hubei and students were sent to study abroad, and that in 1908 the province supported 475 students in Japan and 103 in Western countries.⁠[16][9][1]

In Hubei he set up an experimental school system with a teachers’ college and primary, technical and high schools.⁠[2]

On November 29, 1893, he submitted to the Guangxu Emperor a supplementary memorial reporting the founding of the Ziqiang Institute, which received the vermilion rescript “noted by the relevant office” on December 27. The institute had four departments: foreign languages, natural sciences, mathematics and commerce; only the language department enrolled resident students, while the other three examined students monthly.⁠[24]

In 1896 he reformed the institute, moving mathematics to the Lianghu Academy, turning natural sciences and commerce into general courses and expanding languages into four sections, English, French, German and Russian, to which Japanese was added in 1898. In October 1902 he renamed the institute the Fangyan (Languages) School and later moved it to Dongchangkou in Wuchang. The school closed in March 1911; in 1913 the National Wuchang Higher Normal School was prepared on its foundation and opened on November 2, and after further growth it became National Wuhan University in 1928.⁠[24]

From 1894 to 1896 he was acting governor-general of Liangjiang at Nanjing.⁠[2][9]

China’s defeat by Japan in 1895 exposed the weakness of the earlier reforms, and he then turned his attention to education.⁠[1]

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 writes in his memoir My Life in China and America that in the winter of 1894 he wrote to Tsai Sik Yung, his former legation interpreter and secretary and then secretary to Zhang, proposing two plans: a loan of $15,000,000 to be raised in London to buy three or four ready-built ironclads and raise a foreign force of 5,000 men to attack Japan in the rear from the Pacific coast, and the mortgaging of Formosa (Taiwan) to some Western power for $400,000,000 to organize a national army and navy to carry on the war. Zhang approved the first plan and cabled him to go to London; the loan was arranged less than a month after he reached London but fell through when Sir Robert Hart, the inspector-general of customs, and Li Hongzhang refused to have the customs revenue pledged for it.⁠[25]

Arriving in Shanghai early in the summer of 1895, Yung Wing went not to Wuchang but to Nanjing, where Zhang was quartered, and proposed hiring foreign advisers for foreign affairs, the army, the navy and the treasury; he writes that Zhang had “a cold, supercilious air” and gave no opinion on any of the proposals. Before leaving Nanjing for Wuchang, Zhang appointed him “Secretary of Foreign Affairs for Kiang Nan,” a post paying about $150 a month that Yung called practically a sinecure; when Liu Kunyi returned as governor-general, Zhang did not invite him to Wuchang, and he resigned after three months under Liu. In the book Yung compares Zhang with Zeng GuofanZeng GuofanZeng Guofan (1811–1872) was an official, military commander and Neo-Confucian scholar of the late Qing dynasty, the founder and commander of the Xiang (Hunan) Army. He led that army against the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom for more than a decade, then governed the Liangjiang provinces and Zhili and helped to begin the self-strengthening projects that brought Western machinery and technology to China.Open the full entry, saying he did not find in Zhang the attraction that had drawn him to Zeng.⁠[25]

In 1895 he gave 5,000 taels of silver to join the Qiangxuehui (Society for the Study of Self-Strengthening) and later became a founder of its Shanghai branch; Zhang Chi writes in Biographical Literature that Zhang, Weng TongheWeng TongheWeng Tonghe (1830–1904) was an official, calligrapher and diarist of the late Qing dynasty, tutor to two emperors, Tongzhi and Guangxu, and at various times president of the Board of Revenue, Grand Councillor and Associate Grand Secretary. He was dismissed soon after the Hundred Days’ Reform began in 1898 and stripped of his ranks after the coup that ended it; the diary he kept for nearly half a century is counted among the four great diaries of the late Qing.Open the full entry and other senior Qing officials, as well as the Beiyang commander 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, all gave money in support of the society.⁠[9][26]

In 1896 he ordered every department and county of Hubei to subscribe to the Shiwu Bao, edited by 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 paper’s manager, Wang Kangnian, had served on his staff for several years before moving to Shanghai. When the paper later reprinted Yan FuYan FuYan Fu (1854–1921) was a translator, thinker and educator of the late Qing and early Republican period. Trained at the Fuzhou Navy Yard School and the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, he served for many years at the Beiyang Naval Academy in Tianjin; his translations of Thomas Henry Huxley, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and others, above all the Tianyan lun, introduced Western thought to China, and he set out faithfulness, comprehensibility and elegance as the standards of translation. In 1912 he became the first president of Peking University, and in 1915 his name was listed among the founders of the Chouanhui.Open the full entry’s essay “Pi Han” (Refuting Han Yu), he at once had his aide Tu Renshou publish a rebuttal in it and pressed Wang Kangnian to correct the paper’s line; Feng Tianyu writes that he also instructed Wang to hold Liang in check.⁠[9][26]

In 1897, at the request of Yan Xiu, he recommended Guo Zhuju, a man versed in mathematics, to the Xuegu Academy in Guizhou.⁠[3]

On January 20, 1896, after Yang Chongyi impeached the Beijing society for forming a faction for private ends, it was banned; Zhang, fearing he would be implicated, at once telegraphed orders to close the Shanghai society.⁠[23]

In the first month of 1896 (Guangxu 22) he left the acting governor-generalship of Liangjiang and returned to his own post as governor-general of Huguang, bringing to Hubei 500 trained men of the former front battalion of the Jiangnan Guards from the Self-Strengthening Army, whom he organized as the Hubei Guards in a front and a rear battalion and an engineer company.⁠[22]

In 1897 (Guangxu 23) the Hubei Military Academy he had set up in Wuhan formally opened; Wu Luzhen became one of its students.⁠[22]

In April 1898 he completed the Quanxue pian, 24 chapters and more than 40,000 characters in an inner and an outer part. Britannica writes that it reaffirmed Confucianism while calling for study abroad, a school system, translation of Western and Japanese books and the use of foreign newspapers.⁠[9][1]

His disciple Huang Shaoji, a reader of the Hanlin Academy, presented the book to the Guangxu Emperor, who read it closely on July 25, judged it balanced and sound and of great benefit to scholarship and to people’s minds, had the Grand Council send a copy to every governor-general, governor and education commissioner with orders to print and promote it widely, and ordered the Zongli Yamen to print 300 copies for distribution. Foreigners in China estimated that no fewer than two million copies were printed.⁠[9][2]

The Encyclopedia of World Biography sums up his position as “Chinese learning for the essential principles (t’i); Western learning for the practical applications (yung)”; Feng Tianyu writes that the phrase zhongti xiyong became widespread through the Quanxue pian.⁠[2][16]

Luo Zhitian writes that when the Quanxue pian appeared in the Xiangbao it was still well before the coup of 1898. In 1898 he also memorialized for changes to the civil service examinations. An English translation of the Quanxue pian was published in 1900 as China’s Only Hope.⁠[15][16][2]

On the twenty-third day of the first month of Guangxu 24 (1898) he sent Yao Xiguang, Zhang Biao, Li YuanhongLi YuanhongLi Yuanhong (1864–1928) was a naval engineer officer and a commander of the Hubei New Army in the late Qing who became military governor of the Hubei Military Government after the Wuchang Uprising of 1911, served as vice president in the early Republic and was twice President of the Republic of China, in 1916–1917 and 1922–1923; in his last years he lived in Tianjin and invested in industry, and he died there in 1928 and was buried at Wuchang in 1935.Open the full entry and others with the Japanese Utsunomiya Tarō to inspect schools in Japan in preparation for a plan to send students there; on the third day of the twelfth month of that year (January 14, 1899) the first group of military students he sent from Hubei for further training in Japan left Shanghai.⁠[22]

Yang Rui had served on Zhang’s staff and was so close to him that he was regarded as Zhang’s informant in the capital. In a telegram to Yang on February 16, 1898, Zhang wrote 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 had a grudge against him and very sinister intentions, and asked that everything said and done at his office be kept secret and not told to Kang.⁠[27][28]

During the Hundred Days’ Reform the Guangxu Emperor received on the fourteenth day of the sixth month Zhang’s memorial and list recommending five men for diplomatic service, among them 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, salt intendant and intendant of the Changsha–Baoqing circuit in Hunan. Chen Baochen and others whom Zhang and other officials had recommended several times before were all received in audience this time. Yang Rui, recommended by Chen Baozhen, governor of Hunan, was received on the sixteenth day of the seventh month; on the twentieth day of that month Yang, Liu Guangdi, Lin Xu and Tan SitongTan SitongTan Sitong (1865–1898) was a Chinese thinker and reformer of the late Qing from Liuyang, Hunan, and the author of the Renxue (A Study of Benevolence). He took part in the reforms in Hunan in 1897–1898 and served as a secretary of the Grand Council during the Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898; after the coup of that year he refused to flee and was arrested and executed, one of the “Six Gentlemen of 1898.”Open the full entry were given the rank of fourth-grade officials and made secretaries of the Grand Council to take part in the new policies.⁠[27]

In a letter of August 9, 1898, his son Zhang Quan passed on what Liu Enpu had told him: that the emperor was pressing reform very hard, that the empress dowager strongly disapproved, and that she did not read the daily edicts at all but only said to let him make his fuss.⁠[28]

In the same year, having for a time admired the revolutionary Zhang Taiyan, he brought him onto his staff at the iron administration bureau in Wuchang, but later expelled him from his staff because Zhang Taiyan openly advocated revolution.⁠[23]

On the twenty-ninth day of the third lunar month of 1898 the grand secretary Xu Tong memorialized asking that Zhang be brought to the capital for consultation; on the third day of the intercalary third month (April 23) an edict summoned Zhang to Beijing for an audience, with Tan Jixun acting as governor-general of Huguang.⁠[29]

He first asked for a delay on grounds of illness and set out only after being rebuked, sailing on the warship Chucai by way of Nanjing and reaching Shanghai on the twenty-fifth day of the intercalary third month (May 15). Meanwhile, Mao Haijian, drawing on Qing reports, writes that on the eighteenth day of that month (May 8) a watchman of the China Merchants’ Steam Navigation Company at Shashi in Hubei beat with a carrying pole a member of the Chenzhou boatmen’s gang from Hunan who had been making a disturbance at its gate; on the nineteenth the Hunanese gang sought revenge, scuffled with customs sailors and, with Sichuanese support, set fire to the customs buildings, and the fire spread to the residence of the Japanese consul, the post office and three customs boats. On the twenty-fourth day of the intercalary month an edict ordered Zhang to return to his post at once and come to the capital only when the case was settled and the area calm; he was back in Hubei on the eighth day of the fourth month (May 27).⁠[29]

Xie Junmei holds that Xu Tong’s aim in having Zhang summoned was to use him to drive out Weng Tonghe; Mao Haijian notes that this is a conjecture without direct evidence but still agrees with it. Mao calls Zhang a figure of transition in modern China, without doubt the most important thinker of his age but not its best thinker.⁠[29]

During the Boxer crisis of 1900 he and Liu Kunyi, governor-general at Nanjing, had already disobeyed Beijing’s anti-foreign decrees, as had Li Hongzhang at Guangzhou; on June 26 the two concluded an informal pact with the foreign consuls at Shanghai under which the governors-general took charge of the safety of foreigners in their jurisdictions, first in five Yangtze provinces and later also in three coastal provinces. Feng Tianyu writes that he and Liu Kunyi planned the Mutual Protection of the Southeast.⁠[30][9]

Britannica writes that he judged the imperial edict declaring war on the foreign powers not to reflect the throne’s true intention and did not carry it out, and that he and other officials kept their territories at peace through the agreement with the foreign consuls, which the empress dowager later endorsed; the Encyclopedia of World Biography says he restrained the provinces of central China from joining the Boxer uprising and helped to prevent full-scale war with the foreign powers.⁠[1][2]

In 1900 the Independence Army rising planned by Tang Caichang and others failed; Zhang Renfeng writes that Tang was arrested by Zhang Zhidong at Hankou on the twenty-seventh day of the seventh lunar month and was put to death the next day with more than twenty others.⁠[31][32]

Having found that the Singapore Chinese Khoo Seok Wan was the main financial backer of the Independence Army, Zhang repeatedly telegraphed Luo Fenglu, the Qing minister in Britain, and Luo Zhongyao, the consul-general in Singapore, in 1900, asking them to persuade Khoo to break with Kang Youwei; in March 1901 he telegraphed his former student Tao Mo, the new governor-general of Guangdong and Guangxi, to have the activities of Kang, Khoo, Lim Boon Keng and others in Singapore closely watched. After Khoo had repeatedly declared his position in public, Zhang was satisfied and memorialized the court to absolve him.⁠[32]

Wu Zengfeng and Han Chunying write that, urged hard by his adviser Liang Dingfen, Zhang had Tang Caichang and others arrested on August 22, 1900, with the close cooperation of the British.⁠[23]

In suppressing the Tang Caichang affair he learned that Wu Luzhen had led the rising at Datong, and on the twelfth day of the eleventh month of Guangxu 26 (January 2, 1901) he sent a note to Japan stating that Wu had caused trouble at Datong and had slipped back to his school in Japan, and asking that the school expel him as a punishment.⁠[22]

In 1901 the three reform memorials of the governors-general of Jiangnan and Huguang, drafted by Zhang and submitted jointly with Liu Kunyi, became the programme of the late-Qing New Policies, and Feng Tianyu calls Zhang the director of those reforms; Feng’s 2006 article in the Guangming Daily gives the year of the three joint memorials as 1902.⁠[16][9]

Feng Tianyu also writes that in telegrams of 1901 to Liu Kunyi and others he called the mutual support of upper and lower houses the best of Western methods and proposed following the British model of upper and lower houses of parliament, with prefectural and county officials elected by the gentry and people of each province.⁠[9]

In the ninth lunar month of the twenty-eighth year of the Guangxu reign (1902) the court again made him acting governor-general at Nanjing, and two months later the post was given to Wei Guangtao, governor-general of Yunnan and Guizhou; the Encyclopedia of World Biography dates this second acting term to 1902–1903.⁠[13][2]

At Nanjing he wanted to see Zhang Peilun, who lived there; Zhang Peilun excused himself on grounds of illness, and the two did not meet until New Year’s Eve.⁠[13]

After the death of Liu Kunyi, governor-general of Liangjiang, in October 1902, he acted as governor-general at Nanjing and then returned to Wuchang. The Giles family albums held by the Australian National University include a photograph titled “Arrival of Viceroy Chang Chih-tung at Hankow,” which the repository suggests may show his return from Nanjing.⁠[33]

In the first month of 1903, the twenty-ninth year of the Guangxu reign, the court appointed Rongqing to manage the Imperial University together with Zhang Baixi; it then agreed to add Zhang Zhidong to revise the school regulations with the two ministers, and the revised rules were promulgated in the eleventh month of that year as the Zouding xuetang zhangcheng. The system is named after that cyclical year, guimao, and Hebei News Network describes the Guimao school system as drawn up by Zhang.⁠[16][6]

Britannica writes that in 1904 he was asked to draft regulations for the whole school system, eight volumes long, which were approved about six months later, and that between 1904 and 1909 the number of schools rose 73-fold and the number of students 225-fold.⁠[1]

Early in 1904 he returned to Nanpi to honour his ancestors and, finding education there backward, gave more than 20,000 taels of silver from imperial rewards and his accumulated salary to build a modern school in his home county. The Ci’en School was completed in 1907 and followed the Guimao system, teaching algebra, physics and chemistry among other subjects; today’s Nanpi No. 1 Middle School grew out of it.⁠[6]

In 1905, the thirty-first year of the Guangxu reign, he joined Zhao Erxun, the military governor of Shengjing, and others in a memorial asking for the abolition of the civil service examinations and the wide founding of schools; Britannica writes that he had repeatedly urged their abolition, which came in 1905.⁠[16][1][34]

In 1906 he had his aide Song Shaoxi, a native of Anlong, send from Hubei an open letter to the elders of Guizhou on founding schools and sending students to Hubei, and he paid for a middle school and a higher primary school in Guizhou and supported Guizhou students studying in Hubei, who then returned home to teach.⁠[3]

The Encyclopedia of World Biography writes that in 1906 he helped raise the sacrifices to Confucius to the level of those to heaven and earth, perhaps regretting by then the spread of Westernization.⁠[2]

In 1907 he was summoned to court as a grand secretary and grand councillor; the Encyclopedia of World Biography says he also became director of the new Ministry of Education.⁠[1][2]

He had earlier founded the first Cungu (Preserving the Ancient) School in Hubei, with a seven-year course to preserve classical learning, and as grand councillor in charge of the Ministry of Education he extended it to the whole country. Luo Zhitian writes that soon after the schools were founded, the supervising censor Li Zhuohua memorialized in 1907, setting Zhang’s founding of the Cungu school beside his writing of the Quanxue pian.⁠[15]

In September 1907 Empress Dowager Cixi brought two of China’s most powerful governors-general, Yuan Shikai and Zhang, into the central government; both became members of the Grand Council, Yuan also heading the Ministry of Foreign Affairs while Zhang was entrusted with education.⁠[35]

On January 2, 1909, the regent ordered Yuan Shikai to step down from all posts and go to his native province of Henan to receive treatment for his allegedly ailing leg. Fearing for his life, Yuan fled by train the next day to Tianjin and took refuge in the British concession; having received guarantees of his safety through the intercession of other prominent courtiers, among them Prince Qing and Zhang, he returned to the capital the same day.⁠[35]

Zhang Zhidong died in Beijing on October 4, 1909, while serving as grand secretary of the Tiren Hall and grand councillor, and was given the posthumous name Wenxiang. Britannica’s history of China notes that his death, following those of Cixi and the Guangxu Emperor, almost emptied the Qing court of prestigious members.⁠[1][6][9][30]

The Chinese Social Sciences Net article relates that in his will he wrote that in more than forty years as an official he had worked hard without seeking private gain and had added not a room or a mu of land by his death, so that he could face his ancestors without shame. When gravely ill in old age he also left his descendants an admonition: not to fail the state’s favour, not to let the family learning decline, to understand the difference between the gentleman’s righteousness and the petty man’s profit, not to quarrel over property and not to fall into base ways.⁠[3][8]

Britannica writes that despite his long tenure in high office he amassed no personal fortune and was not well off, having once pawned his belongings while a governor-general; the Chinese Social Sciences Net article says his funeral was paid for by his disciples and colleagues.⁠[1][3]

His death in October 1909 deepened British anxiety; Sir John Jordan, the British minister in Beijing, predicted that the provinces would now oppose Beijing’s decisions with still greater firmness, making it extremely difficult for the powers to conclude and carry out agreements, especially those on the financing and construction of railways.⁠[35]

In 1910 he was buried in his home county at Shuangmiao village, Nanpi, beside the Grand Canal.⁠[6]

He married three times, and all his wives died early; he had six sons and four daughters.⁠[1]

His eldest son, Zhang Quan (1859–1930), courtesy name Junli and literary name Shengke, passed the provincial examination in 1891 and the metropolitan examination in 1898, rose to the rank of grand master for assisting governance (zizheng dafu) and served as a secretary in the Chinese Legation at Washington from 1904 to 1906; Shi Ye’s article calls him Zhang Renquan. Jiang Ming writes that in a letter written around 1900 Zhang Peilun refused a visit from Zhang Quan. Another son, restless rather than studious as a child, he judged better suited to arms and sent to the Japanese army officers’ school, telling him that the country was at a time when soldiers were needed; he also urged a son studying abroad not to shrink from hard work and not to rely on his rank.⁠[13][8][7][36]

His father ran the household on principles of frugality and propriety and taught his children to be upright, careful in their work and generous to others. The People’s Daily Overseas Edition article says that Zhang was generous in giving but disliked luxury and kept his children under restraint, and that while an official in Beijing he said to relatives that he had three things he never contended for: profit with vulgar men, fame with literary men, and empty quarrels over trifles.⁠[8]

He wrote a twenty-character generation poem urging the family to keep its rules with benevolence, repay the state with loyalty, put classical learning to practical use and uphold Confucian principles, whose characters set the order of given names in the Zhang clan; Hebei News Network wrote in 2018 that the Dongmen Zhang family of Nanpi still widely used the twenty characters in his hand to name its members.⁠[8][6]

His granddaughter Zhang Houcan (April 10, 1927 – December 24, 2022) was a psychologist who graduated from the psychology department of Fu Jen Catholic University in Beijing in 1948, stayed on to teach because of her excellent record and later became a professor and doctoral supervisor at the Faculty of Psychology of Beijing Normal University. She served as a counsellor of the State Council, a member of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a standing committee member of the China Democratic League’s central committee and first deputy head of its women’s committee, vice-president of the International Union of Psychological Science and vice-president of the Chinese Psychological Society; she received the Chinese Psychological Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001, a national lifetime achievement award for educational research in 2011 and the International Union of Psychological Science’s award for achievement against the odds in 2016, and was also honoured as a national model among returned overseas Chinese and their relatives.⁠[8][37][38]

His sons’ generation took the character Ren in their given names, as with his eldest son Zhang Renquan and his youngest son Zhang Renli, and his grandchildren the character Hou: Zhang Renquan’s five sons were named Houkun, Houjing, Houwan, Houjian and Houyu.⁠[36]

His granddaughter Zhang Housheng was the second wife of Shui Junshao (died 1963), who had studied in France, served in Chinese consulates in France, Germany, Russia and elsewhere, worked for many years in railway administration after his return and was at one time mayor of Tianjin. It had been written that Shui Shifang, wife of the Dutch sinologist Robert van Gulik, was a granddaughter of Zhang through his daughter; in 2025 Shi Ye, drawing on newly found Van Gulik family letters, concluded that Shui Junshao was Zhang’s grandson-in-law, that Shui Shifang had no blood tie to the Zhang family and that Van Gulik was therefore not Zhang’s grandson-in-law, calling the claim that Shui Junshao was Zhang’s son-in-law and Shui Shifang his granddaughter a mistake passed from one writer to another.⁠[36]

Besides the Quanxue pian, his monographs include the bibliography Shumu dawen, Dujing zhaji and Lun jinshi zha; the Shumu dawen was at one time edited and printed in Guiyang.⁠[39][4]

His works had earlier been collected in the Zhang Wenxiang gong quanji of 1928 and in the Zhang Zhidong quanji edited by Hebei People’s Publishing House in 1998. A new Zhang Zhidong quanji, edited under Zhao Dexin and included in October 2004 among the key Qing documents projects of the National Qing History Compilation Committee, was published in 2010 in 12 volumes and 12.75 million characters, with 14,453 documents, 7,802 more than the 1928 collection and 3,473 more than the 1998 edition, arranged as official papers, letters, monographs, poetry and prose, and his disciples’ records; a symposium on its publication was held at the Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan on June 4 of that year, the centenary of his death.⁠[39]

The Zhang Wenxiang gong quanji of 1928 comprises 229 juan; among its biographical material are sketches of his life as scholar and statesman entitled Baobingtang dizi ji, named after the Baobing Hall that his subordinates built in Wuchang after he left in 1907.⁠[7]

The Palace Museum’s entry calls him one of the chief leaders of the late-Qing Self-Strengthening movement, a founder of modern heavy industry and a noted educator of the late Qing; the Chinese Social Sciences Net article says he is honoured as the father of the steel industry. Yi Chu Wang, author of the Britannica article, calls him one of the foremost reformers of his time and a capable and benevolent administrator, and writes that the empress dowager supported him and promoted him many times.⁠[5][3][1]

The Encyclopedia of World Biography calls him a brilliant Confucian scholar convinced of the peerless quality of China’s traditional culture. It writes that in the 1860s officials such as Zeng Guofan favoured only the manufacture of Western armaments, while at the end of the century Kang Youwei and others advocated even the adoption of Western political institutions; Zhang stood between these two extremes, making significant economic and even educational innovations, but only as a means of preserving what he regarded as the essence of Chinese culture, and he vehemently opposed the adoption of Western democratic institutions or concepts of social egalitarianism.⁠[2]

In April 1912, after resigning as provisional president, Sun Yat-sen visited Wuhan, where the 1911 revolution began, and remarked that by training the talent of Hubei Zhang had brought about the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty and could be called a great revolutionary who never spoke of revolution. Mao Zedong, speaking of China’s modern industry, named four men who must not be forgotten, saying that in speaking of heavy industry one must not forget Zhang Zhidong (the others were Zhang Jian for light industry, Fan Xudong for the chemical industry and Lu Zuofu for transport).⁠[16][6]

Feng Tianyu judges the Quanxue pian, centred on Chinese learning as substance and Western learning as function, to be the representative attempt of the late Qing to find a path of cultural transition, whose two-tier structure, in which tools may change but the Way may not, both advanced early modernization and, through its inner contradictions, could not last.⁠[9]

Zhang Renfeng holds that after the failure of the Independence Army it was Cixi, Zhang Zhidong and others who stifled reformist thought and the non-violent activity of the reformers, giving the revolutionaries their opportunity.⁠[32]

The Wuchang Uprising of 1911 came two years after his death, in the Hubei provincial capital he had governed for nearly twenty years. Among his undertakings Feng Tianyu lists the organizing and training of the Jiangnan Self-Strengthening Army and the Hubei New Army, and the Guiyang Daily also credits him with building the Hubei New Army.⁠[9][16][4]

Sir John Jordan, the British minister in Beijing, regarded Zhang as the second pillar of the Qing government after Yuan Shikai, but valued him less than Yuan: compared with Yuan, a man of action and energy, Zhang had a considerable penchant for theorizing and, as the greater traditionalist, advocated more limited modernization.⁠[35]

His tomb and those of his three wives were later dug open by Red Guards and the bodies left exposed in the burial ground outside the Nanpi county town; local villagers and Wang Yuliang, a former chairman of the Nanpi county writers’ association, witnessed the scene.⁠[37]

In the spring of 1993 the Nanpi county government rebuilt the grave mound and set up a committee to plan a Zhang Park, budgeted at 30 million yuan when the county’s annual revenue was about 20 million; on October 4 of that year, the 84th anniversary of his death, Nanpi held a large public memorial ceremony, and his granddaughter Zhang Houcan, who was among the guests, suggested after seeing the plans that a memorial hall costing a little over 100,000 yuan be built first; the suggestion was not adopted.⁠[37]

As of 2018, the Zhang Zhidong tomb garden faces south, covers 15 mu and is laid out as a garden in traditional style, with a name board over the gate written by the author Wang Meng; inside is the Zhang Gong Shrine, behind which lies a three-metre-high grave mound holding his remains, and a 73-year-old villager of Nanguan had guarded the tomb for ten years. Nanpi also has a Xiangtao Culture Square, where one side of a curved wall carries a bronze relief of his life.⁠[6]

In 2017 the Hebei provincial government approved the building of a Zhang Zhidong Cultural and Creative Town; the Nanpi County Cultural Exhibition Center includes a Zhang Zhidong Memorial Hall that presents his work in industry, education and other fields through reconstructed scenes, replicas of industrial products and display boards.⁠[40]

The Guiyang Daily wrote on June 18, 2026, that a 20-square-metre exhibition room at Zhang Zhidong’s birthplace in Guiyang had officially opened on April 30 beside the Nanming section of the Guancheng River.⁠[4]

The Zhang Zhidong and Wuhan Museum in Wuhan opened free to the public in March 2017; it was built on the basis of the Zhang Zhidong and Hanyang Iron Works Museum run by the steel plant itself, which had been China’s first museum devoted to industry. Its exhibits include rails laid for the Beijing–Hankou Railway, machine tools, and the boundary stone and commissioning monument of the Hanyang Iron Works.⁠[21]

The Princeton UniversityPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry Art Museum holds an ink rubbing of a portrait of Zhang (hanging scroll, object number y1958-295, gift of George Rowley) taken from a pictorial stone carved in 1908; he is shown in official robes with a first-rank civil badge bearing a crane and sun.⁠[41]

He and Li Hongzao were in direct personal contact by the fifth day of the seventh month of 1864 (Tongzhi 3) at the latest, and by 1875 (Guangxu 1) the two were consulting each other in confidence.⁠[10]

His ties with Chen Baozhen go back at least to 1886 (Guangxu 12), when, as governor-general of Liangguang, he had Chen transferred to Guangdong by memorial and gave him various assignments; when Chen became governor of Hunan in 1895 (Guangxu 21) he was still nominally a subordinate of Zhang as governor-general of Huguang. Mao Haijian writes that the Zhang Zhidong archive and the two men’s papers show a dense exchange of telegrams and letters and broadly the same political views, so that they can be regarded as belonging to one political faction.⁠[42]

His aide Gu Hongming wrote in his memoir of Zhang’s staff that Zhang believed China could not be preserved without imitating Western methods to seek wealth and power, and that without preserving China the Confucian moral order could not be preserved either.⁠[42]

On August 4, 1904, in his instructions fixing new regulations for the military affairs office, he appointed his adviser Liang Dingfen director of the office supervising the training of the New Army.⁠[23]

Mao Haijian writes that Zhang took the whole realm as his responsibility: the officials he recommended were not confined to Liangjiang or Huguang but came from across the country, so that he built up a large network of connections, and a considerable number of them came from his own staff.⁠[27]

The Zhang Zhidong archive in the library of the Institute of Modern History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences comprises 492 cases with more than 2,000 volumes and thousands of loose sheets; its core consists of the originals or copies on which his former aide Xu Tongshen based the collected works Zhang Wenxiang gong quanji, and several hundred to a thousand items concern the Hundred Days’ Reform. Mao Haijian writes that this material shows the rejection of, and even hostility to, Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao on the part of Zhang’s group and the leading political figures of the time.⁠[42]