Feng Guozhang's love of money and selling fish must be true, but whether all the money from selling fish went into his pocket remains to be discussed. In the turbulent times of the Republic of China, government revenues were unstable, and Feng Guozhang became the interim president, and he also knew that it was very difficult to maintain the daily expenses of the presidential palace. Therefore, he proposed to Duan Qirui to concurrently serve as the superintendent of Chongwenmen, which was a fat difference in the Qing Dynasty, and he could earn 200,000 taxes per month. Even if he collects all this money, he is surrounded by staff members who are waiting for money to support his family, how can he afford it? Feng Guozhang has to pay subsidies out of his own pocket like Li Yuanhong, and he has to think about collecting money everywhere, and catching fish is one of them.
Feng Guozhang's greed for money, Duan Qirui is very despised. Feng Guozhang once bought more than 3,000 acres of land in his hometown, co-founded a salt reclamation company with Zhang Jian, and bought more than 1,000 houses, three gold mines, and 10 money houses and silver horns in various places. Before Feng Guozhang came to Beijing to serve as the provisional president, he had already used bonds to buy opium from foreign businessmen in Shanghai, earning profits in the name of pharmaceuticals. Duan Qirui directly said that Feng Guozhang is a rich person, but because he has a common interest relationship with Feng Guozhang, he must not speak out against it, so as not to affect the relationship between the two, so he can only turn a blind eye to his accumulation of wealth.
The fish catch incident is recorded in the book "The Final Ending of the Chinese Warlords": after Feng Guozhang lived in Zhongnanhai, he found many beautiful big fish in the three seas, and the guards around him told him that the fish here were all precious crucian carp, and many of them were released by the emperors or concubines of the Ming and Qing dynasties. In order to identify the owners of these fish, they will all have gold medals on their bodies, the largest weighing hundreds of pounds.
When ordinary people hear this, they are afraid that they will sigh that these fish must become essences and must not be moved. And President Feng Dai has a clear idea, and the first thing that comes to mind is to make money. So the next day, all the fish in Zhongnanhai were fished out and sold at a high price, and most of these fish ended up at banquets in Beijing restaurants, called "President Fish". has done business to the fish in Zhongnanhai, and the acting president is also a strange person. However, he didn't care about the world's comments on his unreasonable accumulation of money, and he also carved a seal for himself, with six characters on it - his life is determined to have food and clothing.
However, it would be wrong to list him as an uneducated person who drilled into the eyes of money just because of the fish sale, he was called the Three Heroes of Beiyang, in addition to collecting money, he naturally had extraordinary ability and personality charm. After Pu Yi's abdication, Feng Guozhang was in charge of managing the Praetorian Guards in the Qing Palace, and he managed these most noisy Praetorian Guards obediently, and was very loyal to him, and even had people to follow and protect him after he returned to his hometown.
Feng Guozhang was the central figure in the Beiyang faction who opposed Yuan Shikai's claim to be emperor, and after knowing that Yuan Shikai was secretly preparing to ascend the throne without him, he not only contacted all parties in Beiyang to protest, but also demanded that the southern army cancel its independence and withdraw from the war zone. Finally, I want to say that Feng Guozhang is famous for his love of money, and there are many people in the officialdom and the people, but he did not leave much property, which shows that he was not greedy. Compared with some black-box families or officials, his means of making money on the bright side are still far inferior.