Ministers › Finance Ministers
Sheng Xuanhuai
Li Hongzhang's protege who ran the China Merchants steamship line, the telegraph and the Hanyeping iron company, founded two modern colleges and fell over railway nationalisation
In a riverside storehouse, sacks of grain and white salt blocks are stacked high; workers weigh grain in a basket hung from a large steelyard, others carry sacks along a plank onto a barge at the right, and a clerk sits at an abacus beside bundled tally sticks.
Also known as Zi Xingsun · Hao Yuzhai
- Roles
- Finance Ministers
Sheng Xuanhuai, courtesy name Xingsun, styled Yuzhai, came from Wujin in Jiangsu and joined Li Hongzhang's staff in 1870, going on to run modern enterprises for nearly forty years. He managed the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company and the Tianjin telegraph administration, took over the Hanyang ironworks in 1896, became director-general of railways and in 1897 opened the Imperial Bank of China in Shanghai, later merging the ironworks with the Daye iron mine and Pingxiang colliery as the Hanyeping company. He founded a Western-learning college in Tianjin in 1895, later Peiyang University, and the Nanyang Public School in Shanghai the following year. As minister of posts and communications in 1911 he pushed through the nationalisation of trunk railways, which set off the Railway Protection Movement in Sichuan and elsewhere; after the Wuchang uprising he was dismissed and fled to Japan. He died in Shanghai in 1916, and his large archive is now held by the Shanghai Library.
Life and times
Dates 1844 CE–1916 CE