Lu Xun wrote in the article "Have Chinese Lost Self-Confidence", "Since ancient times, we have had people who buried their heads in hard work, people who worked hard, people who asked for the people's lives, and people who sacrificed their lives to seek the law... This is the backbone of China. Tan Sitong is Mr. Lu Xun's "backbone of China".
In the summer of 1898, the 33-year-old Tan Sitong received an edict from the capital, and the Guangxu Emperor ordered him to go to Beijing to participate in the New Deal. Unexpectedly, the transformation lasted only a hundred days, and along with it was Tan Si's comet-like life. The opening is the end of the curtain, but he still left a strong mark in the ideological circles of the late Qing Dynasty!
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"Life and Death To Stay- Tan Si tong in the Penghu Restoration"
Don't go to the old ways
The famous "DafuDi" in Liuyang is the former residence of Tan Sitong and the ancestral residence of the Tan family. This mansion was named after Tan Si and his father Tan Jixun who served as the governor of Hubei.
Tan Sitong's great-nephew Tan Zhihong introduced that Tan's ancestors had been farmers for generations, and from Tan Jixun's generation to Liuyang's famous and prestigious family. Tan Jixun entered the army from the cloth and became a feudal official step by step, and this experience formed his expectations for tan's descendants.
When Tan Sitong was 12 years old, the second sister, his mother and eldest brother successively contracted "diphtheria" and died, Tan Sitong was also infected with this disease, fainted for three days, and luckily survived, so his father Tan Jixun changed his name to "Resurrection" to commemorate this death and resurrection. His second brother died of illness in 1889.
Tan
The hope of the Tan family shining on the lintel thus fell on Tan Si and the same person.
Unexpectedly, he suffered repeated setbacks in the field of science, and in ten years, he failed to fail in six attempts.
After failing the exam in 1889, Tan Sitong was always in a state of sadness that he had no talent and no way out. He lamented that "a lifetime of talent is half worn out".
Portrait of Tan Jixun
His father Tan Jixun could not bear to witness Aizi like this, so through activities, he spent a lot of money to donate an alternate prefect title to Tan Sitong, distributed it to Jiangsu, and waited for appointment.
In 1896, Tan Sitong went to Nanjing to meet with his official colleagues to warm up before taking office.
Zheng Jiaming, a professor at the School of History of Hunan Normal University, said: "At that time, it was equivalent to not being admitted to the college entrance examination, and I couldn't hang on to my face and felt uncomfortable in my heart." In particular, when he went to Nanjing to wait for the prefect to fill the vacancy, others looked at him as the second generation of high-ranking officials, and at the same time they were alternates and the prefects of donations, so people of insight were not particularly willing to deal with him, and they did not look up to him at all, which also made him very depressed. ”
Tan Sitong said: "Unless you have a big capital, it is difficult for the official field to stop," and "I know the darkness of the official field, but I don't care that Jinling is even more important." The hypocrisy of the officialdom deeply stimulated him.
Old photo of the Bund in Shanghai
In February 1896, Tan Sitong, who was depressed in his thinking, went to Shanghai to "travel north to study", "willing to see the people who have heard a lot in the world, humbly be taught, take the other to see and look at themselves, and also wish to see and hear more about all kinds of strange people and foreign things in the world, so as to learn from themselves." ”
In Shanghai, he saw many "novelties" through Fu Lanya from England, calculators, paleontological fossils, and even X-ray machines. In the X-ray, he saw his internal organs "with his own eyes" for the first time.
Tan Si is associated with fantasies and thinks of Western systems from technology.
He said: "The learning of the Westerners does not stop there. And his political affairs are so clear and reasonable, and the customs of the people's hearts are so uniform, there must be reasons in them, and they have not been noticed. This thought led him in another direction...
Promote new learning
Tan Sitong's earliest involvement in the Restoration Movement was in 1895, when he founded the Liuyang Arithmetic Society in Liuyang to teach mathematics.
In the summer of 1897, Tan Si, who was already an official in Nanjing, received an invitation from Chen Baozhen, the governor of Hunan, asking him to resign and return to his hometown to help run the New Deal and help the newly established School of Current Affairs.
Xu Shunfu, professor of the Party History Teaching and Research Department of the Party School of the Hunan Provincial Party Committee, said: "The Sino-Japanese War was a relatively great stimulus to the Hunan people, because the original Hunan people thought that the Xiang Army was invincible and could fight the world, because the original Xiang Army was a business card of Hunan and an image of Hunan, and now this image of this business card has changed and been defeated and erased, so the Hunan people feel very painful." ”
When he resigned at the end of 1897 and returned to the restoration camp again, Tan Sitong's thinking underwent a major change. The contrast between Nanjing's official experience and the stimulation of new ideas in Shanghai was strong, and he became more and more aware of the problems of the old system.
His later famous work "Renxue" was born during this time.
Renxue
Tan Sitong criticized: "The government of the past two thousand years, the qin government, are all great thieves; the two thousand years of learning, Xun Xueye, all the hometown wishes; the two thousand years of monarchs and ministers, especially dark and unrestrained, there is no human reason, along with the present, fang more and more dramatic! ”
Ding Pingyi, a professor at Yuelu Academy of Hunan University, said: "He said that for thousands of years, the tragic poison of the Three Principles and Five Luns was cool, the king was a vassal in his name, an official was a yoke in his name, his father was pressed by his son, his husband was trapped in his name, his brothers and friends each put one to resist, and ren still had a few survivors to get it." So if you look at these words he said, his name is the name of the famous religion, and the famous religion is the so-called Tao, the so-called Taoism. ”
Tan Si is the same
The question that has been pondering since the Sino-Japanese War seems to have an answer, and this is the newly learned idea of equal rights. With such a new idea, Tan Si went north to Beijing.
In the words of his friend Tang Caichang, Tan Sitong was drunk and had a mouthful: "The three families of the Qin Dynasty are enemies, and the gongcheng pear sweeps two Kunlun." In this way, he expressed his pride in participating in the New Deal.
On September 14, 1898, the Guangxu Emperor and Empress Dowager Cixi had a dispute, and the emperor and the empress finally showdown. Four days later, when the New Deal was facing death, Tan Si visited the Fahua Temple on the same night and asked Yuan Shikai to raise an army and surround the Summer Palace. The Pentagram Transformation Method thus set off a bloody storm!
The contrast between the old and the new forces is huge, and the reformists have nothing to rely on. On September 21, the Guangxu Emperor was imprisoned, and on the 28th, Tan Si and the "Six Gentlemen" were beheaded at Caishikou.
The "Six Gentlemen" have extinguished the hopes of the young intellectual elite to participate in social reform, but a stormy revolution is still brewing in the land of China...
Editor: Wang Dingyao