Zuo Zongtang

Zuo Zongtang was born on November 10, 1812, in Xiangyin, Hunan province, in the seventeenth year of the Jiaqing reign of the Qing dynasty.⁠[1][2][3]

He was born at Zuojiaduan in Xiangyin county, today's Xinguang village in Jinlong town, Xiangyin.⁠[4]

His courtesy name was Jigao and his literary name Pucun; he also called himself the Farmer on the Xiang (Xiangshang nongren), a name he took while living in seclusion at Liuzhuang.⁠[3][5][6]

By his father's generation the Zuo family of Xiangyin had produced licentiates (xiucai) for seven generations, but it was not well off; his grandfather and father both made their living by running private schools. His father was Zuo Guanlan.⁠[7][8][6]

From his great-grandfather Zuo Fengsheng onward the family was known for filial piety and charity: the local gazetteer records Zuo Fengsheng as sincerely filial and generous though poor, and he set up a free tea pavilion at Gaohualing in Xiangyin county for travellers; his grandfather, Zuo Renjin, and his father, Zuo Guanlan, ran a relief society and a grain store, and in famine years distributed gruel and grain locally.⁠[7]

Accounts of the family's means differ: 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 describes a well-connected scholarly family, the Encyclopedia of World Biography a moderately well-off one, and a 2018 Hunan Daily article a family that was not well off.⁠[1][9][7]

From the age of four his grandfather taught him to read, write and compose matching couplets, and he became known locally for his memory and quickness at couplets; when he was five his father opened the Xiangshan school in Changsha, where he sat in on the lessons.⁠[8]

From the time he was twelve his eldest brother, his mother and his father died one after another, and the family's circumstances grew harder; he left all the family land to his widowed sister-in-law. An essay by Ni Wenhua says that within a few years after he turned twelve his parents and elder siblings died, leaving only him and his second brother.⁠[10][8]

Another Hunan Daily article places his parents' deaths in the years after he passed the provincial examination at twenty, when the family declined until it could barely feed and clothe itself.⁠[6]

His father, Zuo Guanlan, had agreed a marriage with his classmate Zhou Xiyu. In 1831 Zhou Xiyu's widow, Wang Ciyun, sent her son Zhou Yiyu to bring the impoverished Zuo Zongtang to Guizaitang, the Zhou family house in Paitou township, Xiangtan county.⁠[6][11]

Guizaitang was popularly called Guizitang and earlier known as Tingziwuchang. A 2019 article in Wenshi bolan places it in Chenshan village, Paitou township, Xiangtan county; a 2023 Hunan Daily article places it in Zishanju village, Paitou township.⁠[11][6]

Zhou Xiyu (1788–1815), courtesy name Liqi and literary name Hengzai, who was posthumously granted the honorary rank of fengzhi dafu, had died young. Wang Ciyun (1790–1864) wrote a collection of poems, Ciyunge shichao, with four poems in the ancient style and 36 in the regulated style; Zuo Zongtang later collected and printed her poems, adding those of her two daughters and of her granddaughter Yichun.⁠[11][10]

In the eighth lunar month of the following year he married Zhou Yiduan (1812–1870), whose courtesy name was Yunxin, a native of Xiangtan who was versed in the classics and histories and wrote poetry and prose; her collection Shixingzhai shiji contains 135 poems.⁠[11][12]

Accounts of the marriage differ. A 2019 article in Wenshi bolan says that, aged 21 by Chinese reckoning, he married into the Zhou family as a resident son-in-law because of his poverty; the Changsha Library's account likewise says he married into the Zhou family in 1832; Ni Wenhua's essay gives his age as 23. A 2025 Hunan Daily article by Xiao Xiangmin cites the Xiangtan county gazetteer (the volume on mountains and rivers) as saying that Zuo lived in his wife's family home, argues that this was not a formal uxorilocal marriage but closer to a husband living with his wife's family, concludes from historical records and visits to Zhou descendants that Zuo was not a resident son-in-law, and notes that all his four sons and four daughters bore the surname Zuo.⁠[11][12][8][10]

After the wedding Zhou Yiduan persuaded the elders to let the couple live separately in the western rooms and set up their own household. He lived at Guizaitang for thirteen years in all, raising his four daughters there and writing Guang qutian zhi tushuo, an illustrated treatise on intensive field cultivation.⁠[12][11]

In 1832, the twelfth year of the Daoguang reign, he sat the Hunan provincial examination as a student of the Imperial Academy (jiansheng) and passed in eighteenth place, gaining the provincial degree (juren).⁠[3][9]

At 22 he wrote a couplet of self-encouragement saying that though he owned not half a mu of land, he cared for the whole realm, and that having read ten thousand volumes he communed in spirit with the ancients. The couplet first hung at Guizaitang in Xiangtan and later beside the door of Pucunge, his study at Liuzhuang.⁠[7][12][6]

In the spring of 1833 he went to Beijing for the metropolitan examination and failed; at his second attempt in 1835 he was provisionally placed fifteenth, but because Hunan already had one successful candidate too many he was offered only a post as copyist, which he would not accept, returning to Xiangtan.⁠[11]

He failed the metropolitan examination for the highest degree (jinshi) three times, the last in 1838, and then gave up the examinations.⁠[9][7]

He then devoted himself to the study of geography and agriculture.⁠[1]

In the spring of 1837, at the invitation of Wu Rongguang, he became head lecturer of the Lujiang Academy in Liling; he enjoyed the high regard of Wu Rongguang, the governor of Hunan.⁠[11][8]

In the spring of 1840 he went to Anhua, the home of Tao Shu, as private tutor to Tao Shu's son Tao Guang; he taught for the family of the late Tao Shu, a former governor-general, until 1848.⁠[11][9]

He and Tao Shu, governor-general of Liangjiang, became related by the marriage of their children, and he was highly valued by Lin ZexuLin ZexuLin Zexu (1785–1850) was a scholar-official of the late Qing dynasty. Appointed imperial commissioner in 1838 to suppress the opium trade in Guangdong, he had the opium surrendered by foreign merchants destroyed at Humen in 1839, after which the First Opium War broke out between Britain and China; he was dismissed during the war and exiled to Xinjiang, and was recalled to high office in his last years. He organized translations of Western books and periodicals, from which the world geography Sizhou zhi was compiled.Open the full entry; he was also close to 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 and Hu Linyi, and studied under the brothers He Changling and He Xiling. His thinking was shaped by Lin Zexu and Wei Yuan.⁠[8][9]

In 1841, as the Qing armies suffered defeat after defeat at the front in the Opium War, he wrote four poems on current events expressing his indignation. At 29 he also wrote eight poems inscribed on his own portrait, Ershijiu sui zi ti xiaoxiang.⁠[11]

In 1843, the twenty-third year of Daoguang, he used about 900 taels of silver saved from years of teaching to buy land at Liujiachong in his home county of Xiangyin, where he designed and built a residence of 48 rooms large and small, naming it Liuzhuang (Willow Farm) after the unbending character he admired in the willow.⁠[6][5][10]

In October 1844 he left Guizaitang and moved with his wife, his concubine and four daughters to Liuzhuang. In 1845 he wrote a book on agriculture.⁠[11][9]

In October 1844 he left Guizaitang and moved with his wife, his concubine and four daughters to Liuzhuang. In 1845 he wrote a book on agriculture.⁠[5]

During his years at Liuzhuang he wrote Pucunge nongshu, a book on farming arranged by topic, and Guang qutian tushuo.⁠[6]

Lin Zexu, returning home after leaving the governor-generalship of Yunnan and Guizhou, passed through Changsha and sent for Zuo Zongtang, then still a provincial graduate, to talk about the affairs of the empire; it is said that Lin gave him all the material on Xinjiang he had collected. A 2026 article in Xinhua Daily Telegraph dates the meeting to early 1850; a 2007 article by Feng Weilin in The China Press dates it to 1849.⁠[13][3]

Hu Linyi had recommended him three times before: to Lin Zexu as governor-general of Yunnan and Guizhou, to Cheng Yucai as governor-general of Huguang and to Zhang Liangji as governor of Hunan; he had not taken up the first two openings.⁠[14]

Around 1850, as the Taiping Rebellion began to spread through South China, he helped organise local defence forces. On the night of the 24th day of the eighth month of the second year of Xianfeng (1852, traditional calendar) Zhang Liangji, transferred from the governorship of Yunnan to that of Hunan, reached Changsha while the Taipings were pressing hard on its south gate, and entered the city by ladder over the north wall; that year Zuo Zongtang joined his staff.⁠[1][14][9]

He was forty years old, and on the staff he had full responsibility for military affairs.⁠[9][7]

During the siege of Changsha he proposed sending a force across the Xiang River to the west to block the Taipings' westward route; Zhang Liangji planned to take command in person at Huilongtan, which Zuo supported, but when the city wall was breached both had to stay inside and hold the city. After the siege Zhang recommended him to the throne for appointment as a county magistrate with the brevet rank of sub-prefect, the start of his official career.⁠[14]

His first period on the Hunan governor's staff lasted only four and a half months and ended when Zhang Liangji was transferred to the governor-generalship of Huguang.⁠[14]

In the third month of 1854, the fourth year of Xianfeng, he joined the Hunan governor's staff a second time, under Governor Luo Bingzhang, who followed his advice in everything and approved the documents he drafted without checking them; in this second period, which lasted six years, he became famous throughout the country.⁠[14]

He planned and handled the reinforcements, pay and supplies that Hunan sent to the Xiang Army fighting outside the province; from 1856 to 1858, the sixth to eighth years of Xianfeng, Hunan sent 2.9 million taels of silver to Zeng Guofan's army. For his work in supplying the army he was promoted to department director in the Board of War and granted the peacock feather.⁠[14]

The direct cause of his leaving the Hunan staff to command troops of his own was the Fan Xie case, which began in 1858, the eighth year of Xianfeng, grew in 1859 and was closed in 1860. As the facts were established, officials including Hu Linyi, Zeng Guofan and Pan Zuyin recommended him to the throne, and the Xianfeng Emperor decided to employ him in assisting Zeng Guofan's military affairs.⁠[14]

In the sixth month of 1860, the tenth year of Xianfeng, he recruited 5,000 men at Changsha to form the Chu Army. In the ninth month he marched from Changsha by way of Liling into Jiangxi, took Dexing and Wuyuan and defeated the Taipings at Jingdezhen and Leping; within ten days he fought across several hundred li and won four battles, securing the supply line of the Xiang Army's headquarters at Qimen.⁠[14][9]

In 1861, the eleventh year of Xianfeng, as the situation in Zhejiang worsened, Zeng Guofan secretly recommended him for the governorship of Zhejiang; he became governor of Zhejiang in 1862.⁠[14][9][2]

In 1863 he became governor-general of Fujian and Zhejiang, a post he held until 1866, continued the campaign against the Taipings in Zhejiang and was made an earl for his services; a 2010 profile on the Fuzhou News website says that in 1864 he was made Earl Kejing of the first class.⁠[9][1][2][15]

With Zeng Guofan and 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 he was one of the generals who put down the Taipings and who launched the Self-Strengthening Movement to build up Qing power with Western technology.⁠[16][17]

In 1864 Zuo Zongtang sent a secret memorial to Beijing without Zeng Guofan's knowledge, reporting statements by refugees from Nanjing that the young Taiping ruler, Hong Tianguifu, had escaped from Dongba to Guangde on the 21st day of the sixth month of the third year of Tongzhi (dates as the article gives them) and had been received into the prefectural city of Huzhou by the Taiping general Huang Wenjin. When Zeng defended himself in a memorial, Zuo replied with another, accusing Zeng of having deceived the throne; in Hu Yuan's account this ended more than ten years of friendship between the two men.⁠[18]

At Fuzhou he experimented with small steamboats, and in 1866, with French help, he memorialised for a navy yard at Fuzhou, the Fuzhou Navy Yard, sited at Mawei; the project was hardly under way when he was transferred to the northwest. The yard was built under the direction of Shen Baozhen as its commissioner, and that year it opened the Qiushi Tangyi Ju, known as the Navy Yard School, to train shipbuilding technicians and naval officers; its first warship, the Wannianqing, was launched on June 10, 1869, and by the time production stopped in 1907 the yard had built 40 vessels.⁠[9][19][15]

The Naval Institute Press description of Kenneth Swope's biography calls it China's first modern naval yard. He was 55 when he organised the Fuzhou navy yard.⁠[20][7]

In the third month of 1866, the fifth year of Tongzhi, while writing family instructions for his children at his residence in Fuzhou, he wrote out again the couplet of self-encouragement from his youth.⁠[8][6]

He was appointed governor-general of Shaanxi and Gansu to put down the Muslim uprising there; EBSCO Research Starters and a China Science Communication article date the appointment to 1866, Britannica to 1867. At Xi'an he set up a small arsenal, the Xi'an Machine Bureau. In 1867 he was ordered to direct military affairs in Shaanxi and Gansu as imperial commissioner and led his army into Shaanxi against the Western Nian and the Muslim rebels of the northwest; on the way he was diverted to help defeat the Nian, who were suppressed in 1868.⁠[2][21][1][3][9]

He arrived at Xi'an in November 1868. From 1868 to 1878 he fought Muslim rebels in Shaanxi, Gansu and Xinjiang.⁠[22][2]

In April 1869 his troops cleared the approach to the Muslim stronghold of Jinjibao, and in the spring of 1870 he laid siege to it. In February 1871 Ma Hualong, the Muslim rebel leader of Gansu, surrendered the starving town; Zuo had him and his family put to death by slicing and executed his officials. Thousands of Muslims were also deported to eastern Manchuria.⁠[22]

He then turned south to Hezhou; after his army was defeated in February 1872, the Gansu Muslim leader Ma Zhan'ao submitted, was made a Qing general and had his troops taken into the Qing army. In November 1873 he retook Suzhou in Gansu and executed and deported many Muslims; the Muslim rebellion in Gansu was put down that year.⁠[22][16]

On the human cost of the rebellion and its suppression, Britannica's article on Shaanxi says that the Muslim rebellion of 1862–1873 and its savage suppression killed about 600,000 people in Shaanxi and left the province in serious plight, and that the effects were worse in Gansu; its article on Gansu says that the rebellion there lasted 16 years (1862–1878), affected more than 10 million people and was accompanied by much bloodshed and destruction; its history of China says that the area of the Muslim rebellions suffered catastrophic devastation and depopulation; and EBSCO Research Starters says that the Muslim rebellions in Yunnan, Shaanxi and Gansu were suppressed by 1874 at great cost to both sides.⁠[23][24][16][22]

In the northwest he combined effective taxation, the encouragement of production and Western technology to supply his armies, building his own arsenal, setting up woollen and cotton mills and having his troops grow grain and cotton.⁠[1][9]

As governor-general of Shaanxi and Gansu he combined suppression of the revolt with a policy of encouraging farming and weaving and banning opium, and planted the trees later known as Zuo's willows (Zuogong liu).⁠[25]

After destroying the rebels' strongholds he extended Chinese educational and civil-service systems into the conquered districts, for Hui and non-Hui alike.⁠[24]

In 1872 his headquarters moved to Lanzhou, where he planned the recovery of Xinjiang from Yakub Beg; he moved all the equipment of the Xi'an Machine Bureau to Lanzhou and renamed it the Lanzhou Machine Manufacturing Bureau, which mainly produced arms and ammunition.⁠[21]

In 1873 his eldest son, Zuo Xiaowei, died of illness, which grieved him deeply. Xiaowei had served with his father's army as a clerk, living, eating and dressing like an ordinary soldier without any privileges.⁠[26][7]

In January 1865 Yakub Beg, an officer of the khanate of Kokand, invaded Xinjiang; in July 1871 Russian forces occupied Ili.⁠[3]

In 1875, the first year of the Guangxu reign, the court debated whether to give up Xinjiang. Li Hongzhang, who favoured coastal defence, proposed abandoning the lands beyond the passes for the time being; Zuo Zongtang, then 64, opposed this, arguing that Xinjiang mattered because it protected Mongolia and Mongolia protected the capital, and called for frontier defence and coastal defence to be given equal weight. He won the funding for his campaign over Li Hongzhang.⁠[25][5][2]

That year the court appointed him imperial commissioner in charge of military affairs in Xinjiang.⁠[17][5][27]

In the second month of 1876, the second year of Guangxu, he moved his headquarters to Suzhou in Gansu to direct the Xinjiang campaign from closer at hand, and his armies marched out beyond the passes one after another.⁠[3]

In June 1876 the western expedition attacked northern Xinjiang; it took Ürümqi in August that year.⁠[25][16]

In 1877 the Qing army moved south and took Dabancheng, Turpan and other places in the fourth month (as the article gives the month); Yakub Beg's short-lived kingdom of Kashgaria was crushed that year. Yakub Beg died the same year; on how he died, a 2025 article on Hunan Daily's platform says that he killed himself with poison, while EBSCO Research Starters dates his death to May 29, 1877, at Korla and says that most historians believe he had suffered a stroke the day before.⁠[25][9][22]

On July 21, 1877, he first memorialised the court proposing that Xinjiang be made a province.⁠[27]

On the 2nd day of the twelfth month of the third year of Guangxu (January 4, 1878) the western expedition took Hotan, completing its victory. Accounts of when the south was recovered differ: Britannica's history of China says that he recovered Kashgaria at the end of 1877, while another article on Hunan Daily's platform says that all eight cities of southern Xinjiang were recovered only by the eleventh month of 1878.⁠[3][16][25]

Within two years he recovered all of Xinjiang except Ili. A 2025 Hunan Daily report puts the territory recovered at more than 1.6 million square kilometres and says that the Qing thereby restored effective rule over Xinjiang after thirteen years; Tan Zhongchi's 2026 article gives 1.66 million square kilometres.⁠[5][26][4]

For his campaigns in the northwest and Xinjiang he was made a marquis, with the title Marquis Kejing of the second class.⁠[2][28]

By May 1880 he had set up 37 free schools in Xinjiang; the grain collected in Xinjiang rose from 253,100 shi in 1878 to 261,900 shi in 1879 and 347,200 shi in 1880. He advocated agricultural colonies, holding that civilian colonies were as important as military ones, and strongly promoted civilian settlement.⁠[27]

In the spring of 1880, the sixth year of Guangxu, he drew up a plan to advance on Ili along three routes. On May 26, 1880 (the 18th day of the fourth month in the traditional calendar), nearly seventy and in poor health, he set out from Suzhou with his personal cavalry, a coffin carried in the column to show that he was ready to fight Russia to the death, and reached Hami on June 15 to back Zeng Jize's negotiations with Russia with the threat of force; he was 68 at the time.⁠[3][25][5]

In 1880, the sixth year of Guangxu, with the negotiations with Russia dragging on, Baoting and Deng Chengxiu asked in the seventh month for him to be brought to Beijing; the court issued an edict summoning him on the 6th day of the seventh month (traditional calendar), and in the eighth month Zhang ZhidongZhang ZhidongZhang Zhidong (1837–1909) was an official, scholar and educator of the late Qing dynasty and one of the leading figures of the Self-Strengthening movement. He served as governor of Shanxi and as governor-general of Guangdong and Guangxi and of Hubei and Hunan, founded iron and steel, arms and textile enterprises and modern schools in Hubei, wrote the Quanxue pian (Exhortation to Learning) in 1898, and in his last years was a grand councillor and grand secretary in Beijing.Open the full entry sent two memorials urging that he be brought to the capital quickly to plan for war. In August 1880 he was recalled to Beijing. On the reason, the Hunan provincial government's page on Liuzhuang says it was the emergency on the southern coast, while Feng Weilin's 2007 article says that he had barely reached Hami when an edict ordered him back to Beijing at once to be available as an adviser to the court. On receiving the order he asked for sick leave.⁠[29][27][5][3][9]

To ease travel into Xinjiang he had an official road of 4,000 li built from Tongguan through Shaanxi and Gansu to Ürümqi, and ordered the soldiers of the western expedition to plant trees along both sides.⁠[27]

On September 16, 1880, the Lanzhou machine woollen mill that he had founded began operation. He had Hu Xueyan buy more than 1,200 pieces of machinery from German merchants in Shanghai, which took a year to reach Lanzhou, hired more than ten German craftsmen and chose apprentices from the soldiers of Shaanxi and Gansu. The mill produced 10 to 14 bolts of woollen cloth a day; it was the earliest government-run machine woollen mill of the Westernization Movement and closed in 1884.⁠[21]

In February 1881 (the first month of the traditional calendar), after negotiations at Saint Petersburg, Zeng Jize signed the revised treaty with Russia (the Treaty of Ili, or Treaty of Saint Petersburg), under which China regained Ili and the land on both banks of the upper Tekes River, together with the border passes Russia had occupied during the Muslim rebellion.⁠[3][16][1]

The Encyclopedia of World Biography says that his army strengthened China's position and helped force the Russians out of Ili, which they had occupied since 1871.⁠[9]

On the 29th day of the first month of the seventh year of Guangxu (1881, traditional calendar) he was appointed a grand councillor in charge of the Board of War and a minister of the Zongli Yamen; by then the treaty with Russia had been signed and the original reason for summoning him to Beijing no longer applied. In the sixth month of 1881 Wenshuo impeached him over the Wang Mengxiong donation case; Wu Huafeng's article regards this as in fact a political attack on him by Prince Gong's faction, which the Qingliu officials countered by impeaching Baoyun and others, and says that after the case Zuo withdrew to protect himself in the court's power struggles, which indirectly hastened his posting away from the capital. He later became governor-general of Liangjiang and commissioner of trade for the southern ports.⁠[29][28][9]

The Encyclopedia of World Biography says that his brusque, outspoken nature and his long years in Central Asia did not suit him for life in the capital, and that after asking for sick leave he was appointed governor-general at Nanjing.⁠[9]

In October 1882, as governor-general of Liangjiang, he again memorialised for a Xinjiang province. In 1882 he also asked to retire because of age and ill health, but the government refused.⁠[27][2]

He rose to be Grand Secretary of the Dongge Hall, one of the few Han Chinese officials of the Qing dynasty to reach the rank of grand secretary with only the provincial degree.⁠[5][26]

In 1884, after his fifth memorial on the subject, the court approved his plan and made Xinjiang a province, with Liu Jintang as its first governor.⁠[27][25][26]

In 1884, as tension grew between China and France over Annam (Vietnam), he was summoned to Beijing and put in charge of all the military affairs of the empire, while Li Hongzhang handled diplomacy; he was then sent to South China to take charge of defences in the Sino-French War as imperial commissioner directing military affairs in Fujian, and in late 1884 he moved to Fuzhou to direct military operations.⁠[9][1][28]

At 73 he organised the Kejing Army for the Relief of Taiwan, which crossed the strait to fight the French; he also helped bring about the creation of Taiwan province.⁠[7][28]

On June 9, 1885, Li Hongzhang, who conducted the negotiations with France, signed a treaty. The Encyclopedia of World Biography says that on his deathbed his concern for China's safety rose above his long-standing hostility to Li Hongzhang, and that he supported Li's self-strengthening measures.⁠[9]

Soon after the peace settlement he died in Fuzhou on September 5, 1885, early in the morning of the 27th day of the seventh month of the eleventh year of Guangxu (traditional calendar), aged 74, still in office at the imperial commissioner's headquarters in Fuzhou.⁠[1][9][3][8]

He was posthumously made Grand Tutor and given the posthumous name Wenxiang. To honour his services the court ordered a shrine to him, the Zuogong ci, built at Liuzhuang.⁠[28][5]

His tomb, a stone tomb of the chaoshou type, stands on a hillside in Baizhu village, Tiaoma town, in today's Yuhua district of Changsha. Tan Zhongchi's 2026 article says that he was buried there on January 23, 1886, when the place was Yangbaihe in Shanhua county; a 2024 Hunan Daily report gives the year of burial as 1885.⁠[4][30][31]

The tombstone is inscribed as the tomb of Zuo Wenxiang, Grand Tutor, Grand Secretary and Marquis Kejing of the Qing; a couplet on the flanking pillars speaks of the western frontier made secure for ever and of the frontier willows along the roads of Shaanxi and Gansu staying green. A family of tomb keepers has guarded the site since the year of the burial, 140 years by 2026.⁠[4]

He had one wife and one concubine, and four sons and four daughters, all of whom bore the surname Zuo. His wife, Zhou Yiduan, died in 1870; Hu Linyi, another senior official of the late Qing, praised her in a letter as a sage of the women's quarters.⁠[10][12]

His eldest son, Zuo Xiaowei, served with his father's army as a clerk, living, eating and dressing like an ordinary soldier without any privileges, and later died young of illness; his second son was Zuo Xiaokuan; his fourth son, Zuo Xiaotong, was a well-known epigrapher and calligrapher. His fourth daughter, Zuo Xiaobin, married Zhou Yibiao, a grandson of Zhou Xiyu. A 2025 Hunan Daily report on Liu Jianghua's new biography says that he suffered the deaths of his wife, a daughter and a son in succession.⁠[7][10][26]

In a letter to Zuo Xiaowei in 1865, the fourth year of Tongzhi, he wrote that although he held high office he did not want his descendants to become idle rich young men, and that they should remember the family's humble origins and keep to the commoner's life of farming and study.⁠[7]

Some 163 of his family letters survive, written amid military and official business to his wife, his second elder brother, his children and his nephews, and dealing with study, farming, thrift and conduct; famine relief is mentioned in them 66 times. Qin Hancai wrote in his book Zuo Wenxiang gong zai xibei that he often gave away 95 per cent of his official stipend to help others.⁠[7]

His great-great-granddaughter Zuo Huanchen was formerly a vice mayor of Shanghai. In 2018 she said that the family had always stressed Zuo Zongtang's integrity in office and his patriotism, and that although he left no great fortune, generations of the Zuo family were proud of these qualities.⁠[7]

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 called him the greatest man of the past five hundred years.⁠[6]

The Encyclopedia of World Biography calls him one of China's leading military figures of the second half of the nineteenth century, an able administrator and an early advocate of self-strengthening.⁠[9]

Britannica's article on Gansu calls him one of the most prominent governors-general of the region and says that after 1878 he brought half a century of peace to Gansu.⁠[24]

The Naval Institute Press description of Kenneth Swope's biography calls him a national hero in China whose story remains understudied in the West, and says that he rose from poverty and obscurity in rural Hunan to become the most powerful Han Chinese official in Manchu China.⁠[20]

Liuzhuang in Xiangyin is now a memorial site that includes the Zuogong shrine among its sights. Guizaitang in Xiangtan was listed by Xiangtan city as a municipal-level protected cultural relic in 2001.⁠[5][11]

Zuo Zongtang's tomb is a cultural relic protected at the level of Hunan province. The cemetery was repaired in 1985, but not in a way that faithfully restored its original form. In January 2024 Chen Yong, a deputy to the Hunan Provincial People's Congress, proposed raising its level of protection; he said that the cemetery's steps had once been taken for irrigation works and bridges and that its above-ground structures had been almost entirely destroyed. In 2024 Yuhua district of Changsha set up a working group which planned, together with Xiangyin county, to add the tomb to the Shrine of Zuo Wenxiang in Xiangyin and apply for listing of the Shrine and Tomb of Zuo Wenxiang in the ninth batch of major cultural heritage sites protected at the national level, and to develop a Zuo Zongtang cultural park.⁠[31][30]

A symposium marking the 210th anniversary of his birth, organised jointly by the Institute of Modern History of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the Hunan Academy of Social Sciences, the Yueyang municipal Communist Party committee and the Yueyang municipal government, was scheduled to be held in Xiangyin on December 10, 2022.⁠[28]

On May 17, 2024, the Naval Institute Press in the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry published Kenneth Swope's Struggle for Empire: The Battles of General Zuo Zongtang, described by the publisher as the first comprehensive modern biography of him in English. In 2025, the 140th anniversary of his death, the historian Liu Jianghua's new biography of him, Gu yong: Zuo Zongtang xin zhuan, about 560,000 Chinese characters long and in a main part and an appendix, was published by Yuelu Shushe. The Hunan Daily report on it says that the book shows him planning the Fuzhou navy yard with foresight and proposing that Xinjiang and Taiwan become separate provinces, but also approving of the custom of using human flesh as medicine, and describes him as narrow-minded and long-winded, fond of calligraphy yet opposed to his children reading Dream of the Red Chamber.⁠[20][26]

The Chinese-American dish General Tso's chicken is named after him. The chef Peng Chang-kuei created it in Taipei in 1953 for a diplomatic state dinner, feeling that General Tso's bold, commanding image matched its flavours; in 1973 he moved to New York and opened a Hunan-style restaurant, Uncle Peng's Hunan Yuan. National Geographic says that few dishes have defined Chinese-American cuisine as much as General Tso's chicken.⁠[32]