On March 1927, Kang Youwei took a boat from Shanghai to Qingdao.
Facing the rough sea, he recalled his seventieth birthday 10 days ago.
On the day before the birthday party, Puyi sent someone to send a handwritten "Yuan Qing of the Moon" plaque and a jade handle as gifts. This flattered Kang Youwei, who actually reorganized the official robes of the previous dynasty and worshipped God at a distance, regardless of the fact that the imperial power of the Qing Empire had disappeared in 16. After bowing down, he wrote a "thank you fold", which was copied by the secretary in fine print, printed thousands of copies and distributed to the guests who came to celebrate his birthday-this was the last time in his life to write a "memorial" to the "emperor" in the name of a sage.
On the day of the birthday party, friends and relatives gathered in Shanghai to celebrate Kang Youwei's birthday. However, at this time, the Northern Expeditionary Army was marching into Shanghai, and Sun was defeated repeatedly. Kang Youwei was very nervous and wanted to move his family to a safe place to avoid the edge of the Northern Expeditionary Army. This is the trip to Qingdao. After arriving in Qingdao, Kang Youwei lived in the "Tianyuan Garden" villa he bought before. On March 29th, he came to Ying Ji Restaurant, a Cantonese restaurant located in Zhongshan Road, to attend a fellow banquet. He drank a glass of orange juice and suddenly had unbearable abdominal pain, so he hurried home. I vomited a lot that night and went to two doctors for diagnosis. One of them was diagnosed as food poisoning by a Japanese doctor. On the 30th, Kang Youwei, who vomited all night, felt that the poison had been cleared and he was very talkative. As usual, he watches the sky at night. But after watching it for a while, I suddenly shouted, "It's over, it's over!" " . 3 1 at 2 am, he suddenly said to the people around him, "I have no place in China, but I can't die in a foreign country." It seems that there is a meaning of explaining the aftermath. At about 5 o'clock, Kang Youwei "bled to death".
Shortly after Kang Youwei's death, his disciples asked Puyi to be "benevolent" and were rejected. It was also planned to bury its coffin next to the tomb of Emperor Guangxu in Qing Xiling, so that the monarch and the minister could accompany each other, but it was also abandoned because of insufficient funds. Ten days later, the coffin was buried in Zaoer Mountain, Licun, Qingdao (some people mistakenly thought it was "Xianger Mountain"). This is the cemetery that Kang Youwei selected after inviting Mr. Feng Shui from the South to inspect in the rain for three days.
Who poisoned Kang Youwei?
The above information about the days before Kang Youwei's death mainly comes from the records of Kang Youwei's fellow countryman, disciple, former Qing Dynasty juror Lu and Kang Youwei's nephew Li. They used the word "bleeding to death from seven orifices" in their description, which is probably a sign of abnormal death. Most people think it has something to do with poisoning. But I don't know whether someone deliberately poisoned it, so there were all kinds of speculations.
Kang Tongbi thinks that his father died of food poisoning. According to Kang Tongbi's daughter Luo Yifeng, Kang was poisoned by the Kuomintang. So far, this statement has not been recorded in any other historical materials, but it is worthy of attention and needs to be verified by historians. Some people say that it was poisoned by a killer sent by Empress Dowager Cixi before her death. It is said that after the failure of the Reform Movement of 1898, Cixi sent four assassins to Beijing to assassinate Kang Youwei. One of them is Wu Fang. Cixi once gave him 65438+ two million taels of silver, ordered him to leave Beijing secretly, assassinated Kang Youwei, and rewarded him with Jinfeng after killing Kang. In the next twenty or thirty years, he has been looking for opportunities to assassinate Kang Youwei and finally succeeded in Qingdao. 1904, on the occasion of Cixi's seventieth birthday, a letter was issued to pardon a large number of criminals convicted in the Reform Movement of 1898, but Kang and Liang were not among them, which 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 changed somewhat.
Kang Youwei's other daughter, Kang Tonghuan, disagreed with both statements. In the article "My Father's Tombstone", she wrote: "Kang Youwei struggled and suffered before his death. Of course, this is a poisoning phenomenon. But the so-called food poisoning may be because the food in Ying Ji restaurants is not clean, not necessarily because of political struggle. " In recent years, there has been a fourth statement. Kang Youwei was poisoned by the Japanese. According to Lu's descendants, he also attended a dinner hosted by Lu's fellow villagers in the restaurant. Kang Youwei had a stomachache after drinking orange juice, or Lv Wenzhen sent him back to his apartment in a carriage. It was not until decades later that Lu revealed the truth to his son: he got the exact news from people around the Japanese emperor that Kang Youwei was poisoned by the Japanese. Because Kang Youwei never agreed that Puyi would go with the Japanese, and once rebelled against the emperor with Puyi. To this end, the Japanese have always held a grudge and finally executed them.