Tan Sitong - His Life

His Life

Tan Sitong spent his childhood in Beijing and his youth in Liuyang. He began to study at the age of 5. He learned from a famous scholar called Ouyang Zhonggu (欧阳中鹄) when he was 10. Though he was talented in writing essays, he objected to the conventional form of the essay which was required in every exam at that time. As a result, he was only titled "mandarin scholar" (Xiu Cai), a very low educational level.

In 1879, he learned from another scholar, Xu Qixian (徐启先), with whom he began a systematic study of representative works in Chinese and was exposed to natural science.

In 1884, he left his home and began a long trip which expanded his outlook. He traveled to several different provinces of China including Hebei, Gansu, Xinjiang, Shaanxi, Henan, Hubei, Jiangxi, Jiangsu, Anhui, Zhejiang, Shangdong, Shanxi, and wrote more than 200 poems during the trip.

In 1895, through a war of aggression against China, Japan forced the Qing Government to sign the unequal Treaty of Shimonoseki, and forcibly occupied Taiwan. Tan Sitong was astonished by the news. He was disappointed with how impotent state authority was and felt indignant about such foreign aggression. He and his colleagues began to search for new ways to change the current situation.

During 1896 and 1897, he finished a famous book called “Ren Xue”, which was considered to be the first philosophical work of the reformation clique. In this book, he pointed out that absolute monarchy greatly oppressed human nature and was the fountain head of every sort of evil. In 1897, Tan Sitong helped the governor of Hunan province with the new policy. In 1898, he founded a new academy called the “South Academy” which aimed at combining the power of reformation in the South. Later, he also created “Hunan Reporter” (湘报) to give publicity to the advantage of new policies.

An officer introduced Tan Sitong to the Guangxu Emperor, and he was soon appointed a member of the Grand Council in April 1898. The Hundred Days Reform began with the issuing of a new memorial which contained a series of new policies on June 11, 1898. However, the new policies greatly harmed the existing interests of many government officials and Manchu noblemen and soon ran into serious oppositions. When Tan heard that the Empress Dowager Cixi was brewing a scheme of putting the emperor under house arrest for initiating the new policies, he immediately visited general on September 18, in the hope that Yuan's army may support the Reformation Movement and prevail over the opposition forces headed by Empress Cixi.

After Yuan Shikai came back to Tianjin on September 20, he betrayed them immediately by leaking all their conspiracy of overthrowing Cixi and regaining the power by the emperor from Cixi. Cixi soon launched a coup and issued the command of arresting all those people who were involved in the reform on September 21. In total, their reform failed after mere 103 days. Tan Sitong was arrested at "guild hall of Liuyang" (浏阳会馆) in Beijing on September 24. Before that, someone had persuaded him to escape to Japan which had expressed support of the movement, but he refused to do so hoping his death and blood will awaken the masses to take up arms against the corrupt Qing government and continue his unfinished dreams of a strong China. On September 27, he was tried for treason and attempting a military coup, but it was interrupted at four o'clock by an (most likely from Empress Dowager Cixi) for his immediate execution. Finally, he was beheaded in Caishikou outside Xuanwu Gate on September 28, 1898, along with five others. In 1899, his remains were sent back and buried in Liuyang.

Some of his last words have become famous in China and translate as follows:

I wanted to kill the robbers, but lacked the strength to transform the world. This is the place where I should die. Rejoice, rejoice!