Zhang Xun

Origins and Late-Qing Career

Zhang Xun, courtesy name Shaoxuan, was born in 1854 in Fengxin, Jiangxi. According to his biography in the Draft History of Qing, he was orphaned and poor as a boy, joined the Guangxi army and fought in the Sino-French War, rising to the rank of colonel; during the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 he served with the Yi Army defending Fengtian, and when Yuan Shikai trained the New Army at Xiaozhan he commanded a battalion. The Japanese Nipponica encyclopedia records that he took part in Yuan’s suppression of the Boxers in Shandong (the Heibonsha World Encyclopedia dates this to 1899) and later served in Beijing as a guard to the Empress Dowager Cixi and the Guangxu Emperor. The Draft History says that after escorting the two sovereigns back to the capital he was kept on as a palace guard and was named brigade general of Jianchang and then provincial commander-in-chief of Yunnan and of Gansu, none of which posts he took up; after the Russo-Japanese War he was transferred to Fengtian to command the defence forces of the three north-eastern provinces, and then placed in charge of the Yangtze defence forces at Pukou and appointed provincial commander-in-chief of Jiangnan.

Nanjing in the 1911 Revolution

After the Wuchang Uprising of 1911, Suzhou declared independence. According to the Draft History, when the Liangjiang viceroy Zhang Renjun and the general Tieliang were planning the defence of Nanjing, Zhang Xun rebuked those who dissented; the next day the New Army mutinied and he defeated it at Yuhuatai. When the combined Jiangsu and Zhejiang armies attacked, cut off from supplies and reinforcements, he withdrew to Xuzhou with his force intact, while Zhang Renjun and Tieliang fled to Shanghai. The Qing court appointed him governor of Jiangsu and acting Liangjiang viceroy. After the abdication edict, Yuan Shikai sent an envoy to console him, and Zhang replied that he could not betray Yuan’s regard for him, nor forget the duty of a subject to his sovereign: as long as Yuan did not betray the court, how could he betray Yuan?

The Early Republic and the “Pigtailed Army”

Loyal to the Qing, Zhang forbade his men to cut their queues, and his troops became known as the “pigtailed army” and he himself as the “Pigtailed General.” Accounts of his strength differ: the scholar Zhang Ming writes that more than ten thousand men of his Dingwu Army wore queues, while the Draft History says he had several tens of thousands of men, not one of whom had cut his hair. According to Nipponica, after Yuan became president his force was renamed the Front Army of the Wuwei Corps and stationed at Yanzhou.

During the Second Revolution of 1913 he fought on Yuan’s side. According to a report of 12 September 1913 by the American chargé d’affaires E. T. Williams, Nanjing was captured by northern troops on 1 September, and in the confusion that followed three Japanese subjects were killed: some reports said they had aided the rebels, others that they were caught looting, while the Japanese account was that they had left the Japanese consulate to save their property and were shot by General Chang’s troops. The Heibonsha encyclopedia records that the pigtailed army carried out looting in Nanjing that provoked Japanese intervention. Japan presented six demands, including punishment of the culprits, indemnities for the families of the dead, an expression of regret by Zhang to the Japanese consulate and a procession of his troops to the consulate. According to the British weekly The Spectator, Zhang took a fortnight to bring himself to apologise and did so only after a Japanese ultimatum; he refused to march at the head of a regiment, apologising in person at the consulate instead and allowing a regiment to present arms there later, and then promptly visited all the other consulates to water down the significance of the apology, while the Japanese government continued to press for his dismissal as military governor.

According to the Draft History, under the Republic Yuan Shikai successively gave him the titles of General Dingwu, Pacification Commissioner of Northern Jiangsu, Inspector-General of the Yangtze, Military Governor of Jiangsu and Military Governor of Anhui; Japanese reference works record that he became military governor of Anhui in 1916 and wielded great power from Xuzhou. The Draft History also says that when Yuan proclaimed himself emperor, Zhang was the first to resist, and asked for favourable treatment for the imperial house and protection of the palace.

The Xuzhou Conferences and the Restoration

After Yuan’s death in 1916, according to the Draft History, the provincial forces with designs of their own gathered at Xuzhou and chose Zhang Xun as their leader. Zhang Ming argues that it was precisely because Zhang had few troops that he became leader of the league of military governors, and that he was talked into going to Beijing, pulling chestnuts out of the fire for Duan Qirui’s ouster of Li Yuanhong without realising it.

In 1917 President Li Yuanhong and Premier Duan Qirui fell out over entering the First World War against Germany and other issues; after Li dismissed Duan, the dispute worsened. In June Zhang Xun led his troops into Beijing as a mediator, and Li was forced to order the dissolution of Parliament; on 16 June Zhang, in Qing court attire, paid a visit to the eleven-year-old Puyi at the Hall of Mental Cultivation in the Forbidden City. On 1 July he and Kang Youwei and others restored Puyi to the throne, and an edict proclaimed a constitutional monarchy; according to the Draft History, Zhang was appointed a deliberative minister of the cabinet and concurrently viceroy of Zhili and Commissioner for the Northern Ports. According to the historian Edward Rhoads, Zhang told a reporter that the republican form of government had not suited China and that only a restoration of the emperor could save the country from its many perils.

The restoration met opposition almost at once; the American minister Paul Reinsch reported that it was “the personal act of Chang Hsun.” Duan Qirui assembled an army “to suppress the traitor” at Machang near Tianjin, and on 12 July it entered Beijing; Zhang took refuge in the Dutch legation, and the restoration had lasted twelve days. The Draft History records that when fighting began he gathered his wives, concubines and children in one room and would not let them flee, vowing that his whole family would die with him, and that they escaped only when foreigners broke down the doors. Rhoads notes that no more than five or six of the restoration government’s appointees were Manchus and all the others were Han, and that Zhang’s effort was more an expression of Qing loyalism than of Manchu restorationism. On 21 July Sun Yat-sen wrote in a telegram to the Guangxi military governor Lu Rongting that Zhang’s forced restoration was foolish loyalty: his treason deserved death, but his devotion to his sovereign deserved pity.

Retirement in Tianjin and Death

After the restoration failed, the Beijing government ordered Zhang’s arrest and asked the Dutch legation to hand him over; the Dutch minister refused on the grounds that the matter had not been settled. In 1918 the Beiyang government pardoned those involved in the restoration: an article published by the CPPCC’s People’s Political Consultative News dates this to March 1918, while an article carried by China News Service dates it to October 1918, when, at the request of Cao Kun, Zhang Zuolin and others, the new president Xu Shichang ordered that no further action be taken against him. He then lived in the foreign concessions of Tianjin under the name “Old Man Songshou,” declaring that he had lost interest in office and not responding to posts offered by Xu Shichang and Zhang Zuolin; in early 1921, when the Beijing government, at Zhang Zuolin’s request, appointed him Director of Forestry and Land Reclamation in Rehe, he politely declined.

In Tianjin he still wore his queue. According to the People’s Political Consultative News article, when someone urged him to cut it off he replied that his queue was as good as his head: only when his head fell would his queue fall. In his later years he invested heavily in the Kailan coal mines, the Lufeng cotton mill in Jinan and other enterprises, ran a pawnshop and a bank in Beijing, and lived in great luxury. Zhang Ming writes that he was generous to fellow Jiangxi natives, especially those from Fengxin, and built the Jiangxi and Nanchang guild halls in Beijing; the warlord closest to him was Zhang Zuolin, who kept speaking up for him after the restoration and, after the Zhili–Anhui War, pressed for his rehabilitation.

Zhang Xun died of illness in Tianjin in September 1923, at the age of seventy by Chinese reckoning. The abdicated Puyi conferred on him the posthumous title Zhongwu (“loyal and martial”). Rhoads notes that this violated Article 3 of the 1914 Reconstruction Plan supplementing the Articles of Favourable Treatment, and later became one of the grounds on which critics argued that the articles should be abrogated. His coffin was carried by water back to Fengxin in Jiangxi for burial.