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Person1858 – 1927

Kang Youwei

Also called: K’ang Yu-wei

Qing reformer who led the Hundred Days’ Reform, seeking a constitutional monarchy on the model of Meiji Japan

A Guangdong scholar of the New Text school, he portrayed Confucius as an institutional reformer in his Study of the Forged Classics and Confucius as a Reformer, grounding his call for change. In 1895 he and examination candidates gathered in Beijing petitioned the throne to reject the Treaty of Shimonoseki and reform the state, and in 1898 the Guangxu Emperor took him up to lead the reforms. After the coup he fled abroad, founded the Society to Protect the Emperor and championed constitutional monarchy against Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionaries.

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1 related event

  1. 1
    1898Hundred Days’ Reform and the Coup of 1898leader

    Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao persuaded the Guangxu Emperor to launch reforms toward a constitutional monarchy on the Meiji model, but Empress Dowager Cixi’s coup ended them after about a hundred days.

People who appear alongside

  • Liang Qichao1873 – 1929

    Disciple of Kang Youwei in the Hundred Days’ Reform who, after the coup, spread new ideas from exile in Japan through his journals

  • Guangxu Emperor1871 – 1908

    Eleventh Qing emperor (r. 1875–1908) who backed Kang Youwei’s reforms but was confined after the coup of 1898

  • Empress Dowager Cixi1835 – 1908

    Consort of the Xianfeng Emperor and mother of the Tongzhi Emperor who held real power in Qing China for nearly half a century and crushed the 1898 reforms

Themes this person appears in

  • The Opening of East Asia1839 – 1901

    From the Opium War to the Boxer Protocol — sixty years in which China, Japan and Korea, forced open by Western gunboats, each tried to reform and went separate ways