Tao Kan

Also known as Zi Shixing

Tao Kan, courtesy name Shixing, came of a Poyang family that moved to Xunyang in Lujiang after the fall of Wu. Fatherless and poor, he began as a county clerk; his mother once sold her hair to feed a visiting scholar. In the last years of the Western Jin he fought the rebels Zhang Chang and Chen Hui and became governor of Jing province until Wang Dun pushed him out to Guangzhou. There he carried a hundred bricks outdoors every morning and back in every evening, saying he must keep fit to recover the north. When Su Jun's rebels took Jiankang in 328 Tao was chosen to lead the loyalist coalition with Wen Jiao and Yu Liang and put the rising down the next year, becoming Grand Commandant and Duke of Changsha. He resigned in 334 and died at Fanxi on his way home, aged seventy-five, with the posthumous name Huan; the Book of Song names him as the great-grandfather of the poet Tao Yuanming.