Manufacturing Republican Martyrdom

Abstract

This chapter examines the changes in political definitions and legal regulations of martyrdom. It recounts the uprising of a group of local gentry, businessmen, overseas students, and secret society members who broke into the residence of the viceroy of Guangdong and Guangxi, Zhang Mingqi. Some leaders of the insurgency had joined the Revolutionary Alliance, founded by Sun Yat-sen in Japan in 1905. Many of the rebels were killed in battle. The body count was recorded at eighty-six, but only seventy-two of the bodies could be identified. These seventy-two men became the Yellow Flower Hill martyrs. The chapter then exposes the plan of the county magistrates to dump them on Stinking Hill, where the local authorities had been burying criminals. However, Pan Dazheng, a participant in the uprising himself, and Jiang Kongyin, a Hanlin Academy member, intervened and had them buried on a hill outside the city center. The site, with its simple graves, became the Yellow Flower Hill, where a memorial complex was constructed in the late 1910s. Instead of being condemned as criminals, the chapter further analyses how these insurgents came to represent the ideal citizens of the Republic of China.