Why did Kang Youwei die?
Bleeding from seven orifices, sudden death in Qingdao
On March 18, 1927, Kang Youwei took a boat from Shanghai to Qingdao.
Facing the rough sea, he recalled his seventieth birthday 10 days ago.
The day before the birthday banquet, Puyi sent a handwritten plaque of "Yue Zhi Yuan Qing" and a jade Ruyi as congratulatory gifts. This made Kang Youwei so flattered that he actually redressed his former upright official uniform and worshiped God from afar, regardless of the fact that the imperial power of the Qing Empire had disappeared for 16 years. After he kowtowed, he wrote a "Thank you", which the secretary transcribed clearly in small regular script, printed thousands of copies, and distributed them to the congratulators who came to celebrate his birthday. This was also the last time in his life that he used the name of a wise minister of the empire to express his gratitude. In the name of writing a "memorial" to the "Emperor".
On the day of the birthday banquet, relatives, friends, and disciples gathered at "Youcunlu" in Shanghai to celebrate Kang Youwei's birthday. However, at this time, the Northern Expeditionary Army was marching into Shanghai in a mighty manner, and Sun Chuanfang was defeated one after another. Kang Youwei was very panicked and wanted to move his family to a safe place to avoid the sharp edge of the Northern Expeditionary Army, so he made the trip to Qingdao. After arriving in Qingdao, Kang Youwei lived in the "Tianyouyuan" villa he had purchased previously. On March 29, he came to Yingji Restaurant, a Cantonese restaurant on Zhongshan Road, to attend a banquet with his fellow villagers. After drinking a glass of orange juice, he suddenly felt unbearable abdominal pain and hurried home. Vomiting continued that night and two doctors were called for diagnosis. One of the Japanese doctors diagnosed her with food poisoning. On the 30th, Kang Youwei, who had been vomiting all night, felt that the poison had been eliminated and was very talkative. He watched the sky at night as usual. But after watching it for a while, I suddenly shouted alone: "It's over, it's over!". At 2 o'clock in the morning on the 31st, he suddenly said to the people around him: "I have no place in China, but I cannot die in a foreign country." It seemed that he meant to explain his future affairs. At about 5 o'clock, Kang Youwei "died of bleeding from all seven orifices."
Shortly after Kang Youwei's death, his disciples asked Puyi to be given the posthumous title of "Ren Zhong", but he was rejected. It was also planned to bury his coffin next to the tomb of Emperor Guangxu in the Western Tomb of the Qing Dynasty, so that they could be accompanied by the emperor and his ministers, but this was abandoned due to lack of funds. More than ten days later, the coffin was buried in Zaoer Mountain (someone mistakenly called "Elephant Ear Mountain") in Licun, Qingdao. This is the cemetery that Kang Youwei selected after he hired a Feng Shui master from the south to survey it for three days in the rain.
Who poisoned Kang Youwei?
The above information about the circumstances of the few days before Kang Youwei's death mainly comes from the records of Kang Youwei's fellow villagers, disciples, and former Qing Juren Lu Zhenwen and Kang Youwei's nephew Li Yunguang. The descriptions of the two men coincidentally used the words "died from bleeding from the seven orifices", which is most likely a sign of abnormal death. Most people believe it is related to poisoning. But it was unknown whether someone deliberately poisoned it, so various speculations arose.
Kang Tongbi believed that his father was "poisoned in food and died." According to an account written by Luo Yifeng, Kang's daughter, Kang was poisoned to death by the Kuomintang. This statement has not been recorded in any other historical materials so far, but because it is a self-report by a descendant of the Kang family, it deserves attention and needs to be verified by historians. Some people also say that the poison was inflicted by the assassins sent by the Empress Dowager Cixi during her lifetime. It is said that after the failure of the Reform Movement of 1898, Cixi sent four assassins out of Beijing to assassinate Kang Youwei. One of them was named Wu Fang. Cixi once gave him 100,000 taels of silver and ordered him to secretly leave the capital and assassinate Kang Youwei. After killing Kang, he would be rewarded and given a title from the Jin Dynasty. For the next twenty or thirty years, he kept looking for opportunities to assassinate Kang Youwei, and finally succeeded in Qingdao. In 1904, on her 70th birthday, Cixi issued an edict to pardon a large number of people convicted of the 1898 Movement, but Kang and Liang were not included. This shows that he has never been forgiven by Cixi. However, this statement is also debatable, because Kang Youwei supported the restoration of the Qing Dynasty in his later years, and the grievances during the Reform Movement of 1898 have changed.
Kang Youwei's other daughter Kang Tonghuan disagrees with both statements. She wrote in the article "My Late Father's Tombstone": "Kang Youwei struggled in pain before his death, and there were blood stains in all his orifices. It was certainly a sign of poisoning. However, the so-called food poisoning may have been caused by unclean food in Yingji Restaurant, not necessarily He died because of political struggle." In recent years, a fourth theory has emerged. Kang Youwei was poisoned by the Japanese. According to this descendant of the Lu family, Lu Zhenwen was also present at the banquet hosted by his fellow villagers at Yingji Restaurant. Kang Youwei suffered from abdominal pain after drinking orange juice, so Lu Zhenwen took him back to his apartment in a carriage.
It was not until decades later that Lu Zhenwen revealed the truth to his son: He got the exact information from people close to the Japanese Emperor that Kang Youwei was poisoned to death by the Japanese. Because Kang Youwei always disagreed with Puyi following the Japanese, he once fought with Puyi against the emperor. For this reason, the Japanese have always held a grudge and finally put it to death.