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Sai Jinhua
Courtesan who went to Europe as the young concubine of envoy Hong Jun and became the subject of disputed stories about the German commander Waldersee in 1900
Before a thatched village house stands a stone well with a wooden bucket, beside a pole with plain cloth drying, smoke rising from a hearth inside and a dog sleeping at the left; a woman carries two buckets along a path by rice fields, with green hills beyond.
Also known as Zhao Caiyun · Weizhao Furen · Fu Caiyun · Cao Menglan
Sai Jinhua, born into the Zhao family with the childhood name Caiyun, had family roots in Yi county, Anhui, and is usually said to have been born in 1872. In 1887 the former top graduate Hong Jun took her as his concubine, renamed her Menglan and brought her with him on his mission to Germany, Russia, Austria and the Netherlands, and she lived in Berlin for several years. After Hong's death in 1893 she worked as a courtesan in Shanghai under the name Cao Menglan, then moved to Tianjin and Beijing, where she took the name Sai Jinhua. The story that after the allied capture of Beijing in 1900 she befriended the German commander Count Waldersee and persuaded him to restrain his troops comes mainly from Fan Zengxiang's ballad, Zeng Pu's novel A Flower in a Sinful Sea (Niehai hua) and her own recollections in old age, and historians largely doubt it. She died poor in Beijing in December 1936.
Life and times
Dates 1872 CE–1936 CE