Chen Dai (Li Yuan)
At 1:00 a.m. on August 20, 2019, Mr. Chen Dai passed away due to illness at the age of 90. On December 22, 2013, the Oriental Morning Post Shanghai Book Review published an interview with "Chen Dai on the Chen Family in Luozhou", which is now being republished in memory of Mr. Chen.
In modern times, due to the unprecedented changes in thousands of years, Chinese society has undergone drastic changes, and chinese history has undergone major turns, and the clan families respected by traditional China have been denied at the ethical level and disintegrated at the factual level. In this way, the chain of Chinese civilization was broken on the clan and kinship ring. In fact, the old-style family that pays attention to the loyalty and inheritance of poetry and books is the backbone of traditional Chinese society and the source of talents. Chen Dai, a professor of the History Department of Fudan University and a librarian of the Shanghai Museum of Culture and History, was born in Luozhou, Fujian Province, and the Ming Dynasty became a local prominent ethnic group in the Ming Dynasty, and in the Qing Dynasty, many talents who were active on the stage of modern history were relegated. We want to tell the story of the cultural family, that is, from the Beginning of the Chen Family.
Chen Baochen, the teacher of the last emperor Puyi
The Chen family in Luojiang, Fuzhou is a famous and prestigious family in Fujian, can you talk about the situation of the Chen family's ancestors?
Chen Chen: The Chen family moved south from Gushi, Henan to Fujian at the end of the Tang Dynasty, and settled in Luojiang during the Ming Hongwu period, known as "Luozhou Chen", which has been passed down to my generation for nineteenth generation. Not long ago, CCTV broadcast the "China 100 Famous Towns" series of films, Luozhou is also among them, the Chen family is an important part of the film, the title of the film is "Yaoshi Chen Family". The Chen family was the first to become a jinshi in the eleventh year of Ming Jiajing's eleventh year, and since then, people in the previous generations have often entered the career path from the imperial examination. From Chen Ruolin, he began to show his stature, and Chen Baochen was even more in the position of Taifu. After Chen Ruolin, there were five generations of people who were among the jinshi and the lifter, and counting the two generations of the Ming and Qing dynasties, there were twenty-one jinshi in the Chen family and one hundred and ten people in the middle.
Chen Ruolin (Wangpo) was the 14th Emperor, Chen Baochen's great-grandfather, Qianlong Jinshi, who served as the governor of Huguang and Sichuan during the Daoguang Dynasty, and was an official of the Punishment Department Shangshu. There is a local drama in Fujian called "Chen Ruolin Beheads the Prince", which is a reserved repertoire of Fujian opera, and after liberation, he also performed in Shanghai, saying that a minnu was raped and committed suicide by the prince, Chen Ruolin was then the Shangshu of the Punishment Department, after accepting the accusation, he designed to record the confession of the prince, and the next day asked the Daoguang Emperor for instructions: "How to deal with the prince's violation of the law?" Daoguang replied, "Sin with the common people." As soon as the emperor said this, Chen Ruolin immediately killed the emperor. He knew that he had violated the royal family, so he told the old man to return to his hometown, and died of illness in Tianjin halfway. This incident is only folklore, which is not recorded in the history books, but it reflects that people think that he is a clean official who is upright and not afraid of the powerful. Because it involves the royal family, our family avoids talking about it. After Chen Ruolin's death, he did not receive a title from the emperor for his official rank and political achievements. Ninety years later, until 1921, when Chen Baochen was responsible for compiling the complete book of the "Records of Emperor Dezong", Puyi wanted to add him the title of Taifu, and he asked for it to be revoked and replaced by a posthumous title of Chen Ruolin, and as a result, Chen Ruolin was posthumously awarded the title of "Wencheng", and the title of Taifu was still added to Chen Baochen.
Chen Baochen's grandfather, chen Jingliang (弼夫), the fifteenth ancestor, became an envoy to Yunnan, and our descendants called him "Bu Zhenggong". Like Chen Ruolin, he was an upright official and not afraid of strength, and in his early years he served as the general office of the Military Department, managing the impeachment of the military attaches Eight Banners, the Deputy Capital, and the officials below the rank of the Staff. Most of the people who serve as capital commanders and deputy governors are princes and county kings, and people often dare not abide by laws and regulations and deal with them according to law. When discussing the punishment of a military attaché who served as a prince who served as the commander of the capital, he was not in the middle, and when discussing his punishment, his colleague implied that Chen Bifu said that this person was sponsored by the prince and should be treated leniently. He said: If the judges only act in accordance with the rules, if they are dealt with in violation of the rules because they are sponsored by the prince, how can they convince the people? His colleague laughed at him for being "too shy", saying, "I have the same heart, I don't know anything else." He failed several official inspections (Jingcha), and at that time it was circulated in the Beijing officialdom: "Chen Bifu is so stubborn, he has offended the prince, and now he has a dark arrow." Someone suggested that he retreat, but he did not listen, saying: "I am dutiful and conscientious, and I do not rejoice in the interests." In the twenty-second year of Daoguang (1842), he had been in the military department for fifteen years, and he had been in the general office for eight years, and several leaders of the military department, such as Shangshu and Shilang, discussed: "Chen Bifu has worked in the ministry for many years, and there is still a shortage that has not been filled. Everyone agreed, telling him to draw up a draft of his own. He said no, saying: "Working at night is the duty of the clerk, and this matter is absolutely not feasible." The imperial court rules are the public of the world, not for one person. Now that an exception has been made to fill the vacancies because of one division, people think that I am the result of drilling the camp, so why should I defend myself? I've had a harder time since then. Colleagues all praised him: "It is really the style of the ancients to quit the honor rather than to make progress, which is rare and rare!" We all admire. Chen Ruolin and Chen Bifu inherited this straight wind bone on Chen Baochen, making him a major general of the Qing school during the late Qing Dynasty Xianfeng and Tongzhi years.
Chen Baochen's father, my great-grandfather Chen Chengqiu (Zi Liang), was given the title of "Guanglu Doctor" after his death, and our descendants called him "Guanglu Gong". He was born just as Chen Ruolin was imprisoned as the governor of Huguang, and the Daoguang Emperor rewarded him with a black fox coat. The emperor's reward was a great grace in the past, so he named him "Chengqiu", the small character "Chu'en". He was a Xianfeng jinshi, and people originally thought that he would use his grandfather's and father's connections to show his skills in the official arena, but he did not admire Shijin, indifferent to fame and fortune, resigned from his official position and returned to Luozhou, raised relatives and students, solved problems for the villagers, mediated disputes, judged the merits, held public welfare undertakings, such as running a nursery school, a righteous warehouse, a righteous school, a social science, and so on, generously donated money, received poor villagers, often made the family debt, but had a high prestige in his hometown. He liked antiques, collected many cultural relics when he was an official in Guanzhong, and there were these golden stone calligraphy and paintings all over the room, and Chen Baochen later published the golden stone part of the rubbing as two volumes of "Chengqiuguan Jijintu", and Luo Zhenyu wrote a preface. After the Sino-French War, Chen Baochen demoted his official post, and he comforted Chen Baochen and said, "What I am worried about is that your official will rise too quickly. His six sons were all raised, and acquaintances in the neighborhood congratulated him, but he said bitterly: "When my mother shook my hand on her deathbed, she said, "Don't follow up on being rich, you can study well, and be a good showman, and I will be blinded." The words of his great-grandmother's death affected his life. He loves to be good, that is, he does not like people with scheming, and often recites the poems of his predecessors: "A selfish and bad person in the world." He himself wrote two couplets, one of which was: "Loyalty and filial piety are only famous, not foolish and unrealistic; intelligent and beautiful, and keeping the right side does not go astray." Another pair is: "Entrepreneurship has been arduous, enjoy the load of thinking and energy; the surplus is overflowing, and the loss is still cheap." "We all treat these two couplets as family training.
Chen Chengqiu had a total of seven sons, the first six were born to Lady Zhengmulin, Chen Baochen was the eldest, my grandfather was the sixth, and later Lady Zhang gave birth to the seventh. Of the seven sons, except for one who died prematurely, the other six were the first three of them, and the last three were lifted.
The most famous of your grandfathers was, of course, Chen Baochen, the teacher of Emperor Puyi of Xuantong. There is an imperial master in the family, there must be a lot of legends about him, did you hear about him when you were a child?
Chen Chen: There are many references to Chen Baochen in recent writings. There are not many legends about him in the family, but they all respect him for his early years in Beijing, despite touching Cixi, dissuading Puyi from becoming a Japanese puppet in his later years, maintaining his national integrity. My father once told me that when Chen Baochen taught Puyi to read, Puyi was relatively frivolous, and liked to shake his legs when sitting, Chen Baochen often reminded him: "The tree shakes the leaves, and the people shake the blessings." That is, to teach him to be steady and behave decently. In 1908, Empress Dowager Cixi fell ill and died, and the following year Chen Baochen was summoned out of the mountains, and in 1911, he was appointed as the Governor of Shanxi, when Prince Yi of Qing was in power and bribed the public to do so. Before he took office, he was as usual to resign from Prince Yili of Qing, and the janitor of the prince's palace asked him for a red envelope, but he sternly refused, and he did not go to Shanxi. This incident is recorded in Zhang Peilun's grandson and son-in-law Zhang Zimei's aunt compiled his "Annals". Later, Chen Baochen was reassigned as Puyi's master, the governor of Shanxi was succeeded by Lu Zhongqi, and during the Xinhai Revolution, Lu was killed by the new army led by Yan Xishan; fortunately, his later years changed. Chen Baochen was very saddened to see the warlords fighting in the early years of the Republic of China, the people's hearts were not ancient, and the morality was degenerate. Most of our brothers took names next to "纟", and the clan asked him to show him what the next generation would use to take the name of the side, he said: "The most important thing now is to learn to be a person, just take the "Qi" side." Therefore, his great-grandson took the names "倜" and "Confession", etc., and my two sons took the names "Ren" and "Chuan", both of which were single-handed.
Chen Baochen's wife, Wang Meishou, was the sister of Wang Renkan of Guangxu Zhuangyuan, and she could be said to be the first female educator in Fujian, who once founded a women's training center in her hometown.
At that time, Puyi gave Chen Baochen a lot of things, in addition to sending plaques every year on his birthday, he also sent a lot of precious calligraphy and painting cultural relics. What happened to the treasures later?
Chen: I don't know, because it was something in their longhouse, and we didn't ask about it. Three years ago, the Fujian Museum published a special edition of the collection of fan noodles, collecting a total of 210 pieces of fan noodles, of which almost half of the upper sections were Chen Baochen and Chen Maofu's father and son, and the authors of the late Qing Dynasty and the early years of the Republic of China were Zheng Xiaoxu, Yan Fu, Lin Shu and so on. I wrote the end of the poem: These old things of Luozhou's old home, "I don't know when, where and how they were scattered in the street, Chu Bow Chude, now all into the Fujian Museum in Tibet, turning private property into public, can also be said to have their own way" ("Swaying Danqing" Baowei," Oriental Morning Post, Shanghai Review of Books, March 17, 2013).
Chen Baochen brothers six, three jinshi, three lifting people, very powerful! Can you tell us about your grandfather and several other uncles?
Chen: Of the seven brothers, one of them passed away very early. The first three zhongjin soldiers, including my grandfather Chen Baoxuan, and the last three, were lifted. After he was raised in The 1893 Enko, someone told my great-grandmother that it was possible to hang a plaque of "Five Sons Dengke", and the great-grandmother said, "No, there is still one son who has not been lifted." A year later, that is, in the year of the Sino-Japanese War, the seventh uncle Chen Baohuan (YanQiao) was also lifted, and the plaque of "Six Sons of Kejia" was hung in the hall of the family.
Great Uncle Chen Baochen won the jinshi very early, and generally the middle jinshi should be about twenty-eight years old, and he passed the examination at the age of twenty-one. However, the Second Uncle Baoyan (Zhongmian) did not enter the army until he was forty-two years old, several years later than his brother. The great-grandmother was very anxious at that time, and after the second uncle's examination, the great-grandmother happily said that "the stone mortar finally flew into the sky", and people said that "chicken feathers can fly to the sky", referring to it easily, and it is very difficult for the stone mortar to fly to the sky. The Second Bozu Baoyu was the third uncle Of the Ancestor Baolu and the second Bozu's eldest son Mao Ding, who was admitted to the Guangxu Gengyin (1890) Enke Jinshi at the same time, and the family hung a plaque of "Father and Son Brothers, Uncles and Nephews and Peers with the List of Jinshi".
After my grandfather was raised in the middle of the autumn of 1893, he went to Beijing to participate in the ceremonial examination the following year, returned to Luozhou, unfortunately contracted the epidemic epidemic that was circulating in Fujian at that time, was misdiagnosed by the doctor and died, and died at the age of thirty-four, leaving my father and uncle, only ten years old. Therefore, Chen Baochen mourned his elegance and wrote: "There is an old father on the top, a lonely orphan on the bottom, and a long hu who is old and mature; The field house Is RuLao, the sword Gui Ru is wrong, and the poor people in heaven are ashamed of being brothers." "My grandmother is Wang Youling's granddaughter. When Wang Youling was the governor of Zhejiang and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Li Xiucheng attacked the city of Hangzhou, and he hanged himself in Yazhong, and later called himself "Zhuang Huan". At that time, Li Xiucheng entered the yamen, and after seeing this situation, he said that this man, each of whom was his master, had loyalty and buried him generously. When I was a child, I heard my father comment on Li Xiucheng, saying that this "chaotic thief" was not bad, knew loyalty, and could be loyal and loyal.
How many more?
Chen Dai: The second uncle Zu Baoyan later became the prefect of Qujing Province in Yunnan, and soon after the Xinhai Revolution broke out, he returned to his hometown. He and Chen Baochen were only one year apart in age, and both of them lived to be more than eighty years old. I read Chen Baochen's letter to him, and I felt that among the six brothers, the two of them were similar in age, the longest together, and the closest. In 1907, Chen Baochen raised money from overseas Chinese for the construction of the Fujian Zhangxia Railway to Nanyang, and after returning, he wrote to him about the situation of the journey: "This is the place where the eunuchs of the Three Treasures went to the West, and when they were young, they and my brother tasted The Garopa and Sumatra thought it was a joke. The return can be described in order to prove the books of the "Records of the Hearing and Seeing of the Sea Country". "You can imagine the joy of reading together in their childhood. The Third Uncle Zu Baolu, with good learning, was not as famous as Chen Baochen. After he became a junior, he served as an advisor to the Lixueguan and the chief (dean) of the Fujian Academy. He died in early 1913 at the age of fifty-six. Chen Baochen said that he had "ruled the ancient Chinese for forty years, and he was extremely popular, and he was particularly arrogant in the scriptures." He had a special study of the I Ching, and there was the Yilan Room Wencun, and many people respected him. The fourth uncle, Baoqi, died in Beijing at the age of twenty. The Fifth Bozu Baoyu died early. The seventh uncle, Chen Baohuang, was Chen Baochen's half-brother, who served as a trial county in Jiangsu after zhongju, and died at the age of forty-four, as if he had not done anything later.
Do they have sisters?
Chen Chen: Chen Chengqiu's eldest daughter, Chen Baochen's sibling Chen Bofen, married Liu Hongshou, the Fujian salt transport envoy and Fujian customs supervisor, and Liu Hongshou's sons Liu Tengye and Liu Junye brothers each married Chen Baolu's daughter Chen Jianzhen and Chen Baochen's fifth daughter Chen Zhenzhen (Yihua). Liu Guangjing is a famous historian of Chinese Descent in the United States and an academician of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. Chen Baochen's half-sister, Chen Zhifang, married Lin Erkang, the alternate prefect of Tamsui in Taiwan. The Lin family in Banqiao is a rich room in Taiwan, and the Shuzhuang Garden on Gulangyu Island in Xiamen used to be the property of the Lin family. Lin Erkang and Chen Zhifang's second son Lin Xiongxiang married Chen Baochen's fourth daughter Yuzhen, and their second daughter Lin Mulan married Yan Fu's third son, Yan Hu (Shu Xia). Yan Hu's eldest daughter, Yan Shuyun, was the wife of Gu Zhenfu during the Wang-Koo talks; the other daughter, Yan Shuyun, pen name Hua Yan, was a famous Taiwanese writer. In this way, my aunt Chen Zhifang and my aunt Chen Yuzhen, like Chen Bofen, Chen Jianzhen and Chen Jianzhen, who married the Liu family, were all made mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.
This brings us to the second generation, your father's generation.
Chen: Chen Baochen's sons are not too famous, and they all study in Japan and the United States. The youngest, Chen Mao, studied in the United States with Li Ou, worked as a diplomat in the Nanjing government, and later became a professor at California State University in San Francisco, the head of the Department of Chinese Chinese Literature and the Department of Japanese Languages, founded the American-Asian Television Communication Company in San Francisco, and established a Chinese television station to spread Chinese culture. He once returned to China to donate funds to set up the Chen Baochen Education Fund at Fujian Normal University, and Fujian Normal University also gathered the books that Chen Baochen had donated to Normal University (formerly known as Xiehe University) and set up a special "Chen Baochen Library". He died in the United States in the summer of 2000.
When I was at Harvard University in the early 1980s, Professor Yang Liansheng told me that he once said to Chen Liou: "You are the only one who rides the emperor as a horse in history!" "Because the two were playmates when they were young, Puyi was lonely in the palace, so he asked him to go into the palace to play together, Puyi was a few years older than him, he rode on Puyi, crawled around on the ground, so he said so.
Chen Maoding (Zheng Yu), the eldest son of the Second Uncle, was the first to translate the "Revenge of The Grace of Mount Kidu" into a Chinese (Wen Yan), and the manuscript was handed over to the publishing house a few years ago and has not yet been published. He also has a collection of poems called "Huai Lou Poetry Banknotes". He and Lin Xu, one of the Six Gentlemen of Wushu, are fellow countrymen and confidants. Some of the poems in the "Huai Lou Poetry Notes" write about Lin Xu. He was very well educated and very intelligent, and had poetry and singing exchanges with some literati in the late Qing Dynasty and early Ming Dynasty, Zheng Yimei's notes on his palm mentioned him, and Huang Jun's "Memories of the Sacred Nunnery of Flowers with People" seems to mention him. In the late Qing Dynasty, he served as the head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the British Counselor, the Foreign Affairs Minister, the Foreign Affairs Minister, the Counselor of the Bide Yuan, and the Jinan Daoyin in Yuan Shikai's Beiyang Government. Later, he became a layman at home and called himself a "three-dweller". He studied the I Ching for decades and was a superbly learned Yi scholar. Pan Yuting, a famous Yi scholar and professor at the Institute of Ancient Books of East China Normal University, included in his book "Outline of Reading Yi", "Outline of Chen Maoding's "Outline of the Yi Manuscript of The Three Residents of Xiu". He died in 1940. Chen Maoding had a younger brother Chen Mao xie (夙之), who was born at the time of Chen Mao Ding's Guangxu Ji ugly (1889) Enke Xieyuan, so he took the name Mao Xie, graduated from the Cook Academy in the United States at the age of twenty (1909), entered Cornell University to study civil engineering, graduated in 1912, Hu Shi only entered the University of Kang in that year. He once laughed and said to me, "Mao Xie" is shorted as MK, and his classmates call him "monkey". He later served as chairman of the North China Water Conservancy Commission and dean of the School of Engineering at Central University in Nanjing. In the early 1930s, he, Together with Mao Yisheng and Zhang Hanying, initiated the organization "China Hydraulic Engineers Society" and was elected as a director. The general manager of the Commercial Press was originally Wang Yunwu, later Zhu Jingnong, and Wang and Zhu were closely related to the Kuomintang. On the eve of the liberation of Shanghai, a general manager without party or faction was to be promoted for a transition, and after discussions between Li Bake and Chen Shutong and other commercial directors in January 1949, chen Maoxie was asked to succeed him as general manager, but he only did it for a short period of time from the beginning of 1949 to the first half of the 1950s. He used to live in Zhaofeng Villa near Zhongshan Park, and on the eve of the liberation of Shanghai, in order to avoid the spread of war artillery, he moved to the Jing'an Villa where Wang Yunwu originally lived in the city center. Chen and Zhang Yuanji were very good friends, and during that time I saw that he often went to Zhang Yuanji's home in the garden above Huaihai Road to discuss the business museum. His wife was the sister of the famous scholar Li Xuangong (Bake). He was lucky enough to visit his relatives in Hong Kong in the summer of 1966 (when his son was in Hong Kong and later in the United States), escaped the catastrophe of the "Cultural Revolution", and never returned. His two sons, Chen Gang, Chen Yue and his daughter, both in the United States, moved to the United States in his later years and died of illness many years ago.
Chen Maoding and Chen Maoxie's sister is called Chen Maoheng, the character is often, I call her Eighteen Gu, is our talented daughter of the Chen family, graduated from Yanjing University, a student of Gu Jiegang, author of "Ming Dynasty Wokou Kaoli" and "The Evolution of Ancient Chinese History", etc. The Fujian Provincial Museum of Literature and History also edited and published "Chen Maoheng's Poetry Anthology" for her the year before, and I wrote the preface. She died during the Cultural Revolution when she was forced to work in Lilang. In the early 1980s, Mr. Tan Qijun once said to me: "Your aunt is very talented, but unfortunately she left too early to make full use of her talents and could not use what she learned." ”
The third uncle, Chen Baolu, had two sons: Chen Maoyu (Yong Gang) and Chen Maoxian (Xugu). Both of their brothers were elected, and each married the daughter of Luo Fenglu, a famous diplomat from Fuzhou in the late Qing Dynasty, and Luo Zhenlu, an industrialist. Chen Maoyu was the father of the famous economist Chen Daisun; Chen Maoxian was admitted to the Beijing Normal Law University after the abolition of the late Qing Dynasty, and after graduation he served as the prefect of the Nanjing Supreme Court; although he was old, well-educated, capable, and honest as an official, he was not promoted because he refused to join the Kuomintang, and he was always the chief judge of the First Criminal Division and could not be promoted. During the Japanese and puppet periods, he was appointed by the National Government of Chongqing as the president of the District Court of the Second Special Administrative Region of the French Concession in Shanghai, and the Japanese gendarmerie suspected that someone in the court had contact with the Chongqing side, and arrested all a group of more than a dozen people in the court. He was humiliated in prison and interrogated by a Japanese cobia. The two sides did not speak the same language and talked with a pen. The cobalt asked him to write a resume, and he wrote about his origins, graduating from the Jingshi Law School. The cobia said, you are a judge with decades of senior qualifications, why don't you accept the appointment of the Nanjing government (referring to the Wang puppet government)? He replied: How can I betray my own government when I am appointed by my own government? The cobia asked: If it is directly appointed by the Japanese army, can you accept it? He replied: If you and I are belligerents, if our country occupies Tokyo, can you accept the appointment of you? The cobia wrote the word "justice" to stop.
What about your father?
Chen Dai: My father, Chen Maofeng (Lai Zhang), was admitted to Xiucai in 1905, the year before the abolition of the imperial examination system, when The Great Uncle Zu said, "You caught up with the closing of the city gate", which is the last train mentioned today. My father went to Japan to study, he graduated from the Business Department of a Japanese university in 1913, and after returning to China, he became a small Beijing official in the newly established Yamendu branch of the Qing government, and he refused to come out to do things after Xinhai. He lived on his ancestral property in Fuzhou, renting the house to others and not having to work to make money at all. He has neither done anything, nor has he ever participated in any political activities, and he has no party or faction, so there are no "political problems". Before he died, he told me: "Behind me you can call me 'Du Zhigong'. It shows that this experience of the Qing Dynasty Beijing official is a memory that he cannot erase. After liberation, the cadres of the neighborhood committee came to our house to criticize him for not doing anything in his life and not contributing to the country. My father replied proudly that I had seventeen children to contribute to the country! My mother lost her father at an early age, followed by my grandfather Wu Weiyun, who was Xianfeng Yayuan, who served as a lecturer in the Fuzhou Shipping Bureau and the Guangdong Marine School, and was the brother-in-law of Shen Baozhen, a heavy minister of the late Qing Dynasty. The Wu family is also a fuzhou family, his family Banye Xuan is a famous garden in Fuzhou, and later Wu Qingyuan, a national Go player in Japan, is his mother's cousin.
After my grandfather's death, the property was divided between my father and my uncle and two brothers. His father was given a money house and his uncle was given a pawnshop. As a result, the money bank collapsed during a "rollover" of fuzhou people's argument about a run, and the pawnshop always made steady money. His father gave the orange field and part of the house to his uncle, and asked him to advance money to cope with the run and help his father get through the difficulties. So later, our family relied on rent and the wages of several brothers, and there was no ground rent. It can also be regarded as a "blessing in disguise", after liberation, the family composition is evaluated, and my family is not rated as a "landlord". My uncle lived on a pawnshop and rent, and was rated as a landlord and businessman.
In addition to Chen Maoheng, how many of your aunts are there?
Chen Dai: Among my aunts, Chen Maoheng is more prominent. The other aunts, in addition to the aunts already mentioned above, who were married to the Lin family in Banqiao, Taiwan, and the Liu family in Guanglufang, Fuzhou, Chen Baochen's second daughter Wanzhen (Shiban) and the sixth daughter Qinzhen married Lin Zexu's great-grandson Lin Bingzhang (Fujian Customs Supervision) and his son Lin Chongyong (advisor to the Central Bank of Taiwan), the third daughter Xianzhen (Shi Meng) married Wang Renkan's son Wang Xiaozong, the seventh daughter Nanzhen married He Xinru of the Caoti Lane He Family, the eighth daughter Rong Zhen (Shi Song) and the ninth daughter Jing Zhen (Shi Zhou), all living on Nanyang Road in Shanghai, and also died. Rong Zhen Shilin, who seems to be a descendant of Tongzhi Jinshi, the Guangxu Dynasty Overseer Yushi, and the governor of Yungui, Lin Shaonian (Zanyu), shi zhou married Zhang Peilun's grandson Zhang Yunqiao (Zimei). Not long ago, Academician Zhang Gongqing, the eldest son of Zimei's aunt, and his brother (Gongci) sister (Zhang Yi) donated the precious ancient books collected by the Zhang family and the modern celebrity ruler to the Shanghai Library free of charge, and various newspapers in Shanghai reported it. The three daughters of the three uncles, Chen Baolu, were all married to Shen Baozhen's great-grandsons. The marriage and marriage relationship between the various people in Fuzhou is intricate, and I have described it in detail in the article "The In-laws of "Luozhou Chen" in Sanfang and Seven Alleys" (Shanghai Modern China, No. 21), and I will not repeat it.
Now it's your generation.
Chen: My father had seventeen children born to the same mother, and I was the youngest. I have eight older brothers and seven older sisters, and one died very early.
Which room does Chen Daisun have? Do you have a lot of contact with Mr. Chen Daisun?
Chen Chen: He is the grandson of Chen Baolu, the third uncle. His name is Zong, and most of our generation takes names next to "silk", because the general character is always associated with the "boss" who is a soldier, and he does not like it, so he does not use this name, but often uses the word "Daisun". I didn't interact much with him. Every time I went to Beijing, I went to see him. One year before I went to the United States, he took the initiative to write to me and introduced me to Fairbank. He knew I was going to Harvard, his alma mater, and he was friends with Fairbank, and he wanted me to go to Harvard and take a picture of the building where he lived, showing that he still missed Harvard in his later years.
What about the other cousins?
Chen Chen: Among Chen Baochen's grandsons, there was Chen Xuan (Zhi Sun), an early member of the Communist Party of China, who was the backbone of the "12.9" expedition at Yenching University and Yao Yilin and Huang Hua, and later served as the minister of social affairs of the Fujian Provincial CPC Committee, and by virtue of his family background and social relations, engaged in counter-insurgency and intelligence work in Fujian, known as "Fujian Pan Hannian"; the other Chen Xuan (Jia Sun), on the eve of the liberation of Fuzhou in 1949, led the uprising of the Hong Kong branch of the Bank of Fujian Province 601988, and was born before his death. Director and Advisor to the Hong Kong Branch, Member of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, National People's Representative, Member of the Selection Committee of the First Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region; and Chen Fan (Bo Shi), a well-known scholar of electrical transmission and electrical automation, director of the Department of Industrial Automation of Shanghai University, doctoral supervisor, director of the Institute of Electrical and Control Engineering, member of the Academic Degree Committee of the State Council, member of the Electrical Engineering Discipline Review Group of the Degree Committee of the State Council, and member of the International Steering Committee of the European Society of Power Electronics. They are all my cousins.
What about your aunt's children, your cousins? Chen Maoheng's two sons, Zhao Zhihua and Zhao Zhiyun, were prominent figures in the world of Go.
Chen: The Zhao brothers are younger than me. Not only do they play Go well, but they also have a very good foundation in literature and history, and they study the history of Go. Chen Maoheng taught them to learn the guqin, compose poetry, and play Go at home. Both understand literature and history, but also good chess, today's such a talent is rare. Cousin-in-law Xu Wanyun, who won the National Junior Women's Go Championship in 1965 (Nie Weiping won the Boys' Championship), she first married her brother Zhihua, who died of illness and then married her younger brother Zhiyun (who also died of illness). In the preface to the Collected Poems of Chen Maoheng, I praised her as "an ancient way chivalrous intestine, which is rare in today's people", and has the reputation of "a heroic woman in Shanghai".
Shao Xunzheng is also your cousin?
Chen: Shao Xun is a professor at Peking University and a famous historian. He was the son of the eldest daughter of the second uncle, Chen Baoyan. My eldest aunt was married to the descendant of Shao Jicheng, a fellow Fuzhou villager who had been the governor of Guizhou, and Shao Xunzheng and I were counted as cousins.
Chen Maoding's uncle had two daughters, and the son-in-law he married was also a well-known expert in literature and history: his cousin Chen Xuan, who married Yao Congwu, and Chen Ti, who married Zhu Shijia. They are all gone.
Two other cousins in my generation are writers. One is He Yiwen, who is now in the United States, and is the granddaughter of Chen Baochen. In his early years, He Yiwen hosted a radio program in Taiwan called "Deep Night", which was very popular with listeners. One is the aforementioned Granddaughter Hua Yan of Yan Fu, who has produced more than twenty literary works. Not long ago, I got a recent work by both of them: Hua Yan's "Dream of Returning to the Garden", and He Yiwen's (Lan Ming's) "Flowers Do Not Fall".
Tell us about yourself.
Chen: My life experience is very simple, very ordinary, without excessive floating and humiliation. Entering the school from his home, he graduated from the Department of Economics of St. John's University at the age of twenty-one and was admitted to the Fudan Institute of Economic Research. Later, he was assigned to the United Front Work Department of the East China Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, and in 1957 he applied for transfer to the newly built Shanghai Institute of Economics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (later renamed the Institute of Economics of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences). The "Cultural Revolution" called on Shanghai cadres to face four aspects, namely: facing the frontier, facing the factory, facing the countryside, and facing the grassroots. Several of my colleagues from the Institute of Economic Affairs were sent to the countryside of Huma County, the northernmost part of Heilongjiang, to settle down for seven years. After the end of the Cultural Revolution, Huang Yifeng presided over the restoration and reconstruction work of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, and he and Jiang Duo came to my house and hoped that I would go back, but my wife did not want me to go back, because she was very cold to the rebels in the economy. She taught in a middle school, and all the rebels in the economy came to her school, and they wanted to mobilize her to go to Heilongjiang. When some of her students knew about it, they posted her big poster and posted it on the Wuyuan Road road outside the school gate. So I went to Fudan, my alma mater. Regarding my own situation, the latest issue of "Shi Lin" published an interview with Mr. Lin Zhihong of the Institute of Recent History of the Academia Sinica in Taiwan (compiled by Mr. Zhang Ding of the Shanghai Institute of History), so I will not talk about it now.
The situation of the Chen family in Luozhou mentioned above is limited to the descendants of my great-grandfather Guanglu Gong (Chen Chengqiu). There are many famous people of the Chen clan in Luozhou in modern times, and I can't describe them all. For example, Chen Zhaozheng, the first vice admiral of the Navy' engine; Chen Changjie, a famous anti-Japanese general and commander of the Tianjin Garrison in the War of Liberation; Chen Qingjia, a kuomintang navy vice admiral; Chen Ticheng, a highway engineering expert and director of the Fujian Provincial Construction Department of the National Government in Nanjing; Chen Biao, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and an astrophysicist; Chen Wei, an academician of the Royal College of Medicine; and so on; Lin Juemin, one of the seventy-two martyrs of Huanghuagang, wrote a touching farewell letter to his wife before the uprising, and his wife Chen Yiying was also a relative of the Chen family in Luozhou.