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Wen Tianxiang Wikipedia

Wen Tianxiang ( Wade-Giles: Wen T'ien-hsiang) (文天祥, 1236?1283), titled Duke of Xinguo, the last resisting Prime Minister of the Southern Song Dynasty, was captured by Kublai Khan, and was brought back to Beijing under house arrest, in the company of musicians and female entertainers. Kublai Khan wanted to use Wen Tianxiang as his chief minister, under the Mongol Overlordship, to control the Han Chinese population, but Wen refused to accept this offer from the Mongol emperor.

After three years of captivity under the Mongol rule, one day (probably early 1283; December 8, 1282, according to the Chinese calendar), Kublai Khan visited Wen Tianxiang's house in person and asked what would satisfy Wen Tianxiang. Wen replied that he could not serve two masters, and that he wished for a swift death. Accordingly the Khan ordered his execution on the next day. Later, however, he regretted his hasty decision and mourned Wen by fasting but it was well too late.

During his house arrest in the west of Beijing, Wen Tianxiang wrote his famous "Song of the Spirit of Resistance" (Zhengqige). This house still exists in the west of Beijing and is now turned into a temple under his name, together with a school, also under his name.

The well-known Ming dynasty painter and calligrapher Wen Zhengming belonged to the Wen family, and the mother of Mao Zedong, the President of the People's Republic of China|Chairman of the People's Republic of China, was supposedly a descendant as well. The preponderance of Wen Tianxiang's descendants still live in mainland China, including the New Territories, Hong Kong (History of Hong Kong). One of the oldest continuous branches of the Wen family established itself in the Hengyang/Hengshan area of present-day Hunan shortly after AD 1000. A branch of this Wen family settled in the United States in the mid-1940s and is related through marriage to the prominent Sun family of Shouxian, Anhui (Sun Jianai; Fou Foong Flour Company 福豐麵粉廠; Confucius) and Li family of Hefei, Anhui (Li Hongzhang 李鴻章).

Wen Tianxiang's own two sons were killed when they were young, so he adopted the three sons of his younger brother as his own, and advised these three to form new resistance groups against the Mongols. There are now four branches of the Wen family in the provinces of Jiangxi, Hunan, Guangdong, and Fujian, the last two with family names Man and Boon, a change from Wen, according to the local dialect pronunciations. Some descendants from the Chiu-Chow coastal section of the Wen family branch immigrated to Indochina, and these had their family name change from Wen into Van, in line with the Vietnamese language|Vietnamese pronunciation of the Chinese character Wen. Wen Tianxiang was born in the Province of Jiangxi. The name Wen originated from the Sichuan province 1,500 years ago; before that date, the Wen family name existed during the western Chow Dynasty as far back as 3,000 years ago.

Category:1236 births
Category:1283 deaths

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Last Modified:   2005-03-02