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Home , Anqing, Courtesy name, Xu Shichang, Zhou Fu

background 1

Chapter One

Family Background

I was born in , Province on January 19, 1913. The “liang” 良 graph in my was shared with male members of my generation in the larger family. The “yi” 一 (literally, “one”) was taken from the Shuowen jiezi 說文解字 (Explaining simple and analyzing compound characters), the oldest Chinese dictionary, written by Xu Shen 許愼 (ca. 58-ca. 147) of the Later Han era. In the section under “yi,” it reads: “It originally meant the Great Ultimate, the Way being established from unity [yi]”. Early on I used the Taichu 太初, but later I stopped employing it. Although I was raised in , following the tradition of keeping one’s original native place as received from one’s forebears, I have always used Province for this. When I later went abroad, I often had to simply write down in my resume my place of birth, something that was always very confusing. The county that is given as my family’s native place was known as Jiande 建德 in the . Because there was another county with this name in Province, after the Republic of came into being in 1912, the name of my native place was changed to Qiu- pu 秋浦, and later still it was renamed Zhide 至德. In recent years it has been combined with Dongliu 東流 County and renamed Dongzhi 東至. The Zhou family members of Jiande were said to be descendants of Zhou Yao 周繇, one of the ten famed scholars of the Dali reign period (766–779) of the Tang dynasty (618–907). My paternal great-grandfather Zhou Fu 周 馥 (1837–1921), who went by the courtesy name Zhou Yushan 周玉山, be- gan his official career on the staff of 李鴻章 (1823–1901). In his youth he was exiled to another town, and fearing he would never be able to return, he changed his given name to “Fu” 復 (“return”). When Li Hongchang personally wrote him a letter of encouragement in which he miswrote this character as 馥, my great-grandfather did not change it. This was most likely because he had already submitted a report to the emperor, and, as the saying goes, “the highest authorities now knew” him by this name. The journal Anhui wenshi ziliao 安徽文史資料 (Literary and historical materials about Anhui), issue 15, carried an article by Chen Juncheng 陳 2 chapter one 鈞成 entitled “Zhou Fu yishi” 周馥軼事 (Anecdotes about Zhou Fu), which noted: Right on the main street by the Bagua Gate 八卦門 [in Anqing, Anhui], old man Yushan would read people’s fortunes and also write letters, petitions, rhyming couplets, and the like on their behalf. He later moved to the Yong­ xingde 涌興德 Grocery Store in Mawangpo 馬王坡. Li Hongzhang also lived in Mawangpo. The old man had a relative there who carried water for the Li family’s kitchen, and he thus knew the man who did the family’s shopping. He was practically illiterate and asked old man [Yushan] to do the counting for him. By chance one day Li read the shopping list and was stunned by how elegant the calligraphy was. He praised it to the sky. He thus hired [Yushan] onto his staff to handle his correspondence. In his Nanting biji 南亭筆記 (Notes from the Southern Pavilion), Li Bo­ 李伯元 (1867–1906) once wrote: “Whenever Zhou spoke with someone, he would always recount the facts of his life, and he would say that when he was young he used to hang a sign out that he was a fortune teller in some locale.” In his chronological autobiography, he generally avoids all mention of this business, but in an entry for the year in which he turned twenty-five (Xianfeng 11 or 1861), we find: “The tenth [lunar] month, I arrived in Anqing. In the eleventh month, I entered Minister Li’s service. Initially, the minister did not recognize me. When he saw my written characters, he summoned me to draft written documents.” Zhou Fu rose to serve as the governor-general of and Provinces as well as the governor-general of Guangdong and Guangxi Prov- inces. There is a biography of him in the Qing shi gao 清史稿 (Draft his- tory of the Qing dynasty). His writings have been collected in Zhou Queshen gong quanji 周愨慎公全集 (Collected works of the honorable Zhou Queshen), a book whose was based on a said to have been given to him by the “lesser court” that remained faithful to Pu-yi 溥儀 (1906–1967), the last emperor, even after the dynasty had fallen. According to a reference in the Hanliu tang jimeng weidinggao 寒柳堂 記夢未定稿 (Draft manuscript of the note-dreams from the Hanliu Pavil- ion) of Chen Yinque 陳寅恪 (1890–1969), the high officials of the central government in the late Qing and high-ranking officers in the regional posts split between the “pure stream” and “turbid stream.” The turbid stream included such central officials as Yi-kuang 奕劻 (1836–1916), 袁世凱 (1859–1916), and Xu Shichang 徐世昌 (1855–1939), as well as local officials such as Zhou Fu and Yang Shixiang 楊士驤 (1860–1909). This work by Chen was scattered and lost, and no completed work remains, thus