詩手稿 題: 思羅生西湖故宅 "Thinking of My Home in Westlake Park," a poem to Tom Leung by Kang Youwei, March 9, 1906; #107 [Courtesy UCLA Digital Collections] |
Sunday, January 14, 2024
UCLA Tom Leung Baohuanghui Collection Online
Tuesday, April 12, 2022
Mapping the Baohuanghui
Play the Baohuanghui Guessing Game--Unidentified Chapters
The
Baohuanghui had more than 200 chapters, but we are still identifying where they
were located. This document lists the Chinese names of chapters in towns found in Baohuanghui documents that we can't identify by their geographical names. Remember that these would be
pronounced in Cantonese. Those in blue have
been identified since we first posted this list.
The
basis of this list (#1-48) is a 1908 document naming 94 chapters that
made donations for a Baohuanghui headquarters building. It is found
in 《捐建帝国宪政总会所买地征信录》published
in Kang Youwei yu Baohuanghui (pp. 529-537). Thanks to
Gao Weinong for pointing us to this list. We have added other unidentified
chapters as we have found them. These chapters could be in the Americas, Asia,
Australia (although we believe have fully identified Australian chapters), the
Pacific, Africa, and Europe. Chi Jeng
Chang has composed his own list of chapters based on the 1908 document as well
as a March 7, 1904 list in Hong Kong Shang
Bao of 134 signatory chapters to a petition supporting the anti-Russian movement
and the 1907 donor plaque in the Victoria, BC Baohuanghui building.
For already identified chapters, see the document Mapping the Baohuanghui. As chapters are identified, they are added to the Mapping table. Especially useful have been the 1901 and 1913 International Chinese Directories, thanks to Philip Choy.
A separate list follows with many Canadian chapters whose place names are still unknown, thanks to the research of Zhongping Chen, University of Victoria and Chi Jeng Chang, Vancouver, BC.
Please
leave your best guesses in the Comments field.
Friday, July 23, 2021
Kang's Ideal Southern California Town--Redlands?
On his first day in the city, Kang told the Los Angeles Herald, “I have found Los Angeles one of the most progressive cities I have met during my travels.” In fact, Kang came to see Los Angeles as a prime example of Western “material civilization” and gave it prominence in his "Essay on National Salvation through Material Civilization" (Wuzhi jiuguo lun), whose preface was written in April 1905 while in the city. By "material civilization," Kang meant the advancements brought by science and technology, not only convenience and efficiency, but happiness.
In Kang's view, the steam engine powered steamships, locomotives, factories, and electricity generating stations—and along with other technological innovations like the automobile—were the keys to creating a Datong-like environment where people could enjoy urban affluence close to nature.
Saturday, May 15, 2021
Using Contemporary Newspapers and Magazines to Track Kang Youwei and the Baohuanghui
For example, Lo ("Sequel," p. 198) writes:“By June 1905 [the fifth lunar month], feeling much better, [Kang] left Los Angeles for Washington, D.C., arriving there on June 10.” From local newspaper reports, supplemented by correspondence, we now know that Kang left Los Angeles on May 8 by train and stopped for speeches and meetings in Kansas City, St. Louis, Chicago, and Zion City, and arrived in Washington, D.C. on June 8. Coinciding with this month of travel was the announcement in Shanghai of a nation-wide anti-American boycott to protest Chinese Exclusion policy. Kang began promoting the boycott and recruiting American support during his trip to D.C.
Monday, February 11, 2019
Baohuanghui Badges and Medals: Kang Youwei’s Schemes to Develop Credentials and Raise Funds, 1904–1905
Wednesday, April 4, 2018
Research on Kang Youwei and the Baohuanghui in North America: Sources and Methods
Kang Youwei in Los Angeles, 1905 Private collection, Jane Leung Larson |
Jane Leung Larson spoke on “Research on Kang Youwei and the Baohuanghui in North America: Sources and Methods.” She contrasted the relatively open access to resources on Kang and the Baohuanghui in North American archives, libraries, and the internet with the much more restrictive research environment in which Chinese historians work.
Wednesday, July 19, 2017
Charter 08's Qing Dynasty Precursor
Charter 08's Qing Dynasty Precursor by Jane Leung Larson with commentary by Chinese Australian scholar Feng Chongyi (who was himself detained on his last visit to China) first appeared in Asia Pacific Journal in July 2011. Kang Youwei's 1908 constitutional petition is a forerunner of Charter 08, comparable not only as a comprehensive program to reform China's autocracy but for how the Chinese government responded. The article opens:
Over the gulf of one century and two revolutions, two groups of Chinese petitioners drafted remarkably similar blueprints for political reform. Both groups sought civil rights and political responsibilities for Chinese citizens and a Western-influenced form of constitutional government to replace rule by autocracy. Today, China’s autocratic government is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, and in the waning years of the Chinese empire, it was ruled by the Qing dynasty. The striking differences between these petition movements are as instructive as their similarities, reflecting not only the qualities of the movements themselves but the radically different political environments—inside and outside China—from which they emerged.
In 2008, Charter 08 declared that “freedom, equality, and human rights are universal values of humankind, and democracy and constitutional government are the fundamental framework for protecting these values.”[1] Charter 08’s drafters, of whom the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo is the most prominent, describe themselves as inheriting China’s historical legacy of political reform. They called for a citizens’ movement “so that we can bring to reality the goals and ideals our people have incessantly been seeking for more than a hundred years.” They credit the 1898 Hundred Days of Reform led by the Guangxu Emperor to transform China into a constitutional monarchy with being China’s “first attempt at modern political change,” and the first sentence of their petition reads, “A hundred years have passed since the writing of China‘s first constitution.”
Indeed, this decade, 1898 to 1908, foreshadowed what has been more than a century-long sporadic, often marginal, and as yet unfulfilled movement to eliminate China’s autocratic system and give Chinese people the right to take part in national affairs. As Charter 08 acerbically notes, with “the revolution of 1911, which inaugurated Asia’s first republic, the authoritarian imperial system that had lasted for centuries was finally supposed to have been laid to rest.” All too soon, “the new republic became a fleeting dream.” And, finally, “the ’new China’ that emerged in 1949 proclaimed that ‘the people are sovereign’ but in fact set up a system in which ‘the Party is all-powerful’. . . . Unfortunately, we stand today as the only country among the major nations that remains mired in authoritarian politics.”