Mavericks › Uprising Leaders
Chen Qimei
Revolutionary Alliance organiser who led the 1911 rising in Shanghai, became its military governor and was assassinated in 1916 after years of plotting against Yuan Shikai
A mountain camp at night, with a beacon fire burning on a wooden platform at the upper left, several white tents on the slope and a red cloth tied to a rope; a wooden palisade with a gate stands at the right beyond a timber bridge over a rough river, under a clouded moon.
Also known as Zi Yingshi
- Roles
- Uprising Leaders
Chen Qimei, courtesy name Yingshi, came from Wuxing, now Huzhou, in Zhejiang, was born in 1878 and worked as a pawnshop apprentice in his youth. In 1906 he went to Japan to study at a police academy in Tokyo and joined the Revolutionary Alliance, returning to Shanghai two years later as an organiser. On 3 November 1911 he led the rising that took Shanghai for the revolution and was chosen as its military governor. After Song Jiaoren's murder in 1913 he joined the Second Revolution as commander of the anti-Yuan forces in Shanghai and fled to Japan when it failed, becoming head of general affairs in Sun Yat-sen's Chinese Revolutionary Party the next year. On 18 May 1916 he was shot dead at a house in Shanghai, an attack generally attributed to Yuan Shikai's camp; his nephews Chen Guofu and Chen Lifu later became senior Kuomintang figures.
Life and times
Dates 1878 CE–1916 CE