Suzhou scholar Ye Dehui: Mao Zedong was upset that he had been killed by mistake

On October 31, 1968, Mao Zedong said in his speech at the closing ceremony of the Twelfth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China: "We must investigate and study, we must pay attention to evidence, do not engage in black labels, jets, and do not beat people." I wrote an article in Hunan in 1927, wearing a top hat and traveling to the countryside, in fact, I did not engage in it for decades. The Red Guards were gradually upgraded according to that method, hanging up black signs, engaging in jets, and all kinds of things. With regard to spies, traitors, and unrepentant bourgeoisie, we must investigate and study, pay attention to evidence, refrain from repeating confessions, and refrain from beating people, wearing high hats, and engaging in jet-style tactics. This does not turn out well. In Beijing, there are Du Yuming and Wang Yaowu. In the past, this was not the case with enemy prisoners. Teng Daiyuan engaged in the Hunan peasant movement, and when you were the chairman of the county committee, Ye Dehui was killed at your hands. This person is Hanlin of the former Qing Dynasty, and for such a big intellectual, I think it is not so appropriate to kill him. You have it in all provinces, and I always want to find an opportunity to give a lecture to my comrades, so let's talk about it this time. ”

"This Confucius Confucius, who opposes Kang Youwei, this person is called Ye Dehui. Gu Mengyu asked me later, is there such a thing? I said there was such a thing, but I didn't know much about the situation because I wasn't in Hunan. It is not appropriate to kill such a big intellectual. At that time, killing Ye Dehui, I think it was not so appropriate. ”

Ye Dehui, whom Mao Zedong mentioned twice at the closing ceremony of the 12th Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, was a native of Dongshan Town, Wu County, Suzhou.

Ye Dehui (1864~1927), the character Huanbin, the number of Zhishan, also known as LangYuan. Born in Xiangtan, Hunan Province, his ancestral home is Dongshan YeXiang, a famous scholar, writer, versionist, bibliophile and philologist in modern China.

Ye Dehui's father, Ye Junlan, was the 37th grandson of the Wuzhong Ye clan and lived in Dongshan, Dongting, Suzhou. In his previous life, he had always passed down his family as a eunuch, but Junlan was not yet an adult, his parents had died one after another, and the family was in debt, so he had to abandon Confucianism to do business to make a living. During the Xianfeng period of the Qing Dynasty, in order to avoid military disasters, Ye Junlan moved his family to Xiangxiang and settled in Changsha. With financial support, he started his business in tea, and after making a profit, he opened dyeing workshops, bad shops and money houses in the city, and later became a rich family in Xiangdi. When Ye Dehui was born in the third year of Qing Tongzhi (1864), it is said that a group of magpies flew around the house, so his nickname was Ye Qing. When he was young, Ye Dehui was not sensitive to his qualifications, forgot after reading, and had to abandon Confucianism to do business at the age of 15. In the eleventh year of Guangxu (1885), at the age of 21, he was a zhongjin, and in the eighteenth year (1892) at the age of 28, he was a zhongjinshi and the head of the official department. At that time, no one in Hunan had served in the bureaucracy for 20 years, and the same year they all went to celebrate the good news. However, Ye Dehui was relatively indifferent to fame and fortune, and after less than a year in office, he resigned as a servant and returned to The Li.

After leaving the official field, Ye Dehui began his more than 30-year academic career, freely doing his favorite book collection, reading, writing, and engraving books. Suzhou Dongshan Ye clan is a scholarly xiangmendi, Ye Dehui's father Ye Junlan liked the collection of history books, gold stones and ancient coins, and when he entered Xiang during the Xianfeng period, he "counted the number of books and carried many historical books from Dongshan". Ye Dehui continued from top to bottom, "All the four important books are collected from Hongfu and filled with cabinets." He either lived in Xiaoxiang, or You Yanyun, or returned to his wife's door, and everywhere he went, he devoted himself to the search for ancient books. Although he was displaced in middle age, he did not forget to acquire the version of the deceased. Every year, when you return, there will be new carved old books and many cabinets, filling the corridors. In the "Bibliography of the Persuasion Hall Collection" engraved in 1915, it was recorded that he had a collection of more than 5,000 kinds of books, reaching more than 200,000 volumes, which were divided into 1368 book boxes, which can be described as Fujia Hainei. Later, it continued to increase, and by the time of his death, the family had a collection of 300,000 volumes, especially Ye Dehui's set of methods for managing books in those years, namely the "Ten Chapters of the Signature Law", which is still used by libraries everywhere.

In terms of writing books, Ye Dehui praised his strengths, chose his own preferences, and took the road of his own study, and wrote more than 100 kinds of works in his lifetime. Among the works compiled by Ye Dehui, works such as "Outline of the General Catalogue of the Continuation of the Four Libraries" and "Ancient Teachings on the Interpretation of Characters in Shuowen" enjoyed a high reputation in the field of classics and studies, and some of them were also circulated to Japan. The poems he wrote were elegant in style and rich in content, although most of them were improvised and random, but they were also highly valued by the celebrities of the time. Ye Dehui also liked to engrave books, and he published most of his works in the world, and also collected many rare and rare editions, proofread them, edited and published them. There are about 300 kinds of engraved books in a lifetime, which has enabled a large number of new literature to be circulated.

During the period of the Penghu Reform Law, Hunan was the province with the most rapid implementation of institutional reform in the country, and it was also the province where the new and old factions competed most fiercely for political views. As the leader of the old school, Ye Dehui's name is recorded in history textbooks.

In October of the first year of the Republic of China (1912), the founding father Huang Xing returned to his hometown, and Tan Yanmin, the governor of Hunan, in order to pay tribute to him, renamed the Derun Gate at the mouth of Changsha Pozi Street to Huangxing Gate and Pozi Street to Huangxing Street. After hearing this news, Ye Dehui was very angry. Although he was powerless to prevent the establishment of the Republic of China, he was emotionally attached to the former dynasty or the monarchy, and he could maintain the old way of life, present himself as a "remnant", and spend the rest of his life. Others can honor Huang Xing as a founding man, but Ye Dehui considers him a "chaotic thief". At the same time, Ye Dehui believes that as long as they are not convicted by thought or speech, the two sides can be at peace with each other. Nowadays, the old name of the homeland is to be "changed lightly in the name of one person for a while", which undoubtedly hurts Ye Dehui's feelings. What annoyed Ye Dehui even more was that his family's house and shop were on Pozi Street, and once it was renamed Huangxing Street, then his daily life had to be invaded by "Huang Xing" and the Republic of China it represented, and the delicate balance of non-interference between the remnants and the new country that had been reluctantly reached was broken.

However, before Ye Dehui could vent his anger, the extremely personable Huang Xing, only a month after the Hunan government made the decision to change the name, sent a letter to Tan Yanmin, politely refusing to rename Derunmen and Pozi Street to Huangxing. Tan Yanmin understands this. Subsequently, two place names were restored to their original names. It is said that this matter was closed and there should be no more waves, who expected Ye Dehui to be unsatisfied, and wrote a "Record of The Names of Guangfu Pozi Street" the following year, which was distributed along the street and carried out fierce personal attacks on Huang Xing. However, Ye Dehui did not pay the price at that time. This was not his luck, but Huang Xing's generosity; or rather, it was a concrete manifestation of the protection of the right to freedom of expression for a period of time after the success of the revolution.

However, not long after, Ye Dehui attacked the government chief again, almost killing Chengren. This time, the bitter lord was Tang Qianming, the governor of Hunan. After Tang succeeded Tan Yanmin, the former governor of Hunan, to his post, one wantonly murdered Kuomintang members, and the former financial secretary, police chief, and chief of accounting and inspection were all shot by him for hanging up their Kuomintang membership; the other disordered finances and arbitrarily changing the currency system, resulting in the collapse of merchants. Ye Dehui saw the righteous and courageous deeds, and for the people to seek redress, he sent a letter to Yang Du, asking him to convey Tang's bad deeds to President Yuan Shikai. Unfortunately, after the editor-in-chief of the Asia Newspaper saw the letter, he appreciated the "sharpness of its writing" and made up his own mind and published it. Tang Shi was furious when he saw this, but in the spring of the third year of the Republic of China, he arrested Ye Dehui and wanted to kill him. Ye Dehui's friend Yi Peiji heard the letter and immediately informed Li Yuanhong and asked him to come to the rescue. Subsequently, Xu Shichang, Xu Shuzheng, Ye Gongqi, Li Xiehe, and other high-ranking officials and celebrities called Hunan one after another, sternly admonishing Tang Qianming and asking him not to act rashly. Even Xiong Xiling and Liang Qichao, who wanted to attack Ye Dehui before, also came to support him. In the end, thanks to the blessings of various nobles, Ye Dehui escaped a disaster.

However, Ye Dehui's angry and outspoken and unruly personality eventually brought him the tragic end of "being executed". At the time when "all power was returned to the Peasants' Association", Ye Dehui was still the president of his Changsha General Chamber of Commerce, and at that time, it was probably a matter of obscurity and "performance" was acceptable. Later, when the grand ceremony occurred, the "Peasant Association" asked this famous man to write a couplet. Perhaps the ghost made the gods poor, depressed in the chest for a long time dissatisfaction with the new trend, like a bone in the throat, and finally had a chance to spit out, Ye Jinshi waved a large pen, and actually wrote down the couplet of "Agricultural Movement Fang Xing Rice Sorghum Millet Millet A Class of Hybrids, the Venue Expands the Horse, Cow, Sheep, Chicken, Dog, Six Animals full of Halls", this is not counted, and a banner of "Bin Tip Card Puppet" (Changsha dialect: meaning not to be literate, not small, not big, not up, not up, not to be a ghost) was added. At this point, Ye Dehui could be regarded as stabbing this honeycomb, and this sharp and mean couplet and banner of extreme curse and insult completely angered a group of people from the Peasant Association, so he was pushed onto the guillotine.

On April 11, 1927, the 16th year of the Republic of China , the Hunan Provincial Special Court for the Trial of Local Tyrants and Inferior Gentry sentenced Ye Dehui to death and confiscated his property in accordance with Articles 1 and 2 of the Interim Regulations on the Trial of Local Tyrants and Inferior Gentry in Hunan. At 4 p.m. on April 11, Ye Dehui was escorted to The Literacy Ridge outside Liuyang Gate in Changsha County, where he was sentenced to death. According to his son Ye Shangnong, Ye Dehui was shot twice, one in the head and one in the center.

In 2008, the Suzhou Dongshan Town History and Culture Research Association edited and published a book called "Dongshan Jinshi". In the history of Dongshan Ancient Town, known as "Dongshan Jinshi Jia Jiangnan", a total of 53 Wenwu Jinshi (including 2 Champions and One Tanhua) were produced in the Ming and Qing dynasties. It records the legendary life of Ye Dehui, a Suzhou native, and makes an objective and fair evaluation of him; in the town's 2010 "Chronicle of Dongshan Town", Mao Zedong's evaluation of Ye Dehui in his speech at the closing ceremony of the 12th Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China is also mentioned. (Source People's Daily News)