Gangyi

Also known as Zi Liang

Gangyi, courtesy name Ziliang, of the Tatara clan and the Manchu Bordered Blue Banner, began as a clerk and served for years in the Board of Punishments, where he helped retry the Yang Naiwu case and clear the wrongly condemned pair. He went on to govern Shanxi, Jiangsu and Guangdong, entered the Grand Council in 1894, and rose to assistant grand secretary and minister of personnel. In 1898 he opposed the Hundred Days' Reform and after the coup helped try the reformers, and the next year he toured the Jiangnan provinces auditing their revenues and raising funds for Beijing. In June 1900 he and Zhao Shuqiao went to Liangxiang and Zhuozhou to inspect the Boxers and came back urging the court to use them against the foreign powers. When the allied armies took Beijing he followed the Empress Dowager Cixi westward and died of illness at Houma in Shanxi; in 1901, at the powers' insistence, the court stripped him posthumously of all his offices.