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Xu Tong
Late Qing grand secretary and tutor to the heir designate who backed using the Boxers against the powers and hanged himself when Beijing fell in 1900
In a council hall, a long table holds an unrolled map scroll, a brass-cornered chest and a brush pot, with tall-backed chairs around it and a bronze lamp at the left; a figure stands with their back turned on the balcony at the right, with palace roofs beyond.
Also known as Zi Yuru
- Roles
- Chief Ministers
Xu Tong, courtesy name Yuru, styled Yinxuan, belonged to the Chinese-martial Plain Blue Banner and passed the metropolitan examination in 1850. Early in the Tongzhi reign he served in the palace school for princes, and he went on to head the Boards of Rites and of Personnel before rising to grand secretary. A strict follower of Cheng-Zhu Confucianism who rejected Western learning, he was appointed tutor to Pujun after the boy was named heir designate at the end of 1899. In the court debates of 1900 he pressed for using the Boxers to fight the foreign powers. When the allied armies entered Beijing that August he hanged himself at home, aged eighty-two by Chinese reckoning; at the powers' demand the court then stripped him of rank and posthumous honours, and his son Xu Chengyu, a vice minister of punishments, was executed the following year.
Life and times
Dates 1819 CE–1900 CE