Ministers › Remonstrators
Chen Baochen
Fuzhou scholar-official of the Pure Stream group who spent twenty years at home after a demotion and returned in 1911 as tutor to the boy emperor Puyi
At dawn in a palace courtyard, a large drum hangs in a small roofed frame beside a red pillar, with a bound bundle of scrolls on a low stand in front; a stone balustrade leads toward a large hall in the mist, and a row of tiny people stands far away.
Also known as Zi Boqian · Hao Taoan
- Roles
- Remonstrators
Chen Baochen, courtesy name Boqian, styled Tao'an, came from Min county, present-day Fuzhou, and passed the metropolitan examination in 1868. In the early Guangxu years he was known with Zhang Zhidong and Zhang Peilun as one of the outspoken Pure Stream censors, and during the war with France he was sent to help manage the southern coast; in 1885 he was demoted five grades because men he had recommended were defeated, and he spent more than twenty years at home. There he ran the Aofeng Academy, founded the Fujian Normal School and directed the Fujian railway company. Recalled to Beijing in 1909, he began teaching Puyi in the Yuqing Palace in 1911 and stayed at the side of the abdicated emperor, though in 1932 he refused office in Manchukuo. He died in Tianjin in 1935, Puyi gave him the posthumous name Wenzhong, and his poems are collected as Cangqulou shiji.
Life and times
Dates 1848 CE–1935 CE