> **A note before we begin.** This is not a defense, and it is not an indictment. The Manchu–Mongol Independence Movement was inseparable from Japan’s expansion onto the Asian mainland; from China’s point of view, it was part of an invasion. I do not erase that context. What I want to do here is set the labels down for a moment — “traitor,” “spy,” “puppet” — and return four caricatures to being human beings caught in the collapse of an empire.
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## Behind the One-Line Verdict, Four People
“Traitor.” “Spy.” “The last emperor’s puppet.” In most histories, these four people are dismissed in a single line — cast as villains and nothing more. But behind that line stood four human beings caught in the collapse of an empire.
Two Manchu princes — **Pu Wei, Prince Gong**, and **Shanqi, Prince Su** — heirs to two of the Qing dynasty’s most senior “iron-cap” princedoms. The man from **Matsumoto**, in the Japanese Alps, who gave half his life to their cause — **Kawashima Naniwa**. And the girl who belonged to both their worlds at once — **Yoshiko Kawashima**, born an Aisin Gioro princess, raised a Japanese daughter.
Why did Shanqi, one of the last genuine reformers of a dying dynasty, end his days betting everything on Japan? Why did Pu Wei, who carried the purest bloodline of them all, sell off his family’s treasures down to the last scroll for a restoration that never came? Why did a man from a quiet castle town in Nagano take a Chinese princess as his daughter? And what kind of woman did that girl — torn between the father who gave her life and the father who raised her — grow up to be? Here, I want to return them, for a moment, to being people.
## Pu Wei and the Royalist Party
**Pu Wei (1880–1936)** was the grandson of Yixin — the great statesman of the Self-Strengthening Movement and first Prince Gong. Because the Prince Gong house was one of the hereditary “iron-cap” princedoms, Pu Wei inherited the title in 1898. By blood, he stood at the very summit of the Qing imperial house. Politically, he was an uncompromising hardliner who resisted the abdication of the last emperor, Puyi, to the very end.
The abdication opponents formed the **Royalist Party (宗社党)** — formally the “Association to Preserve Constitutional Monarchy” — in early 1912, to block the abdication and resist Yuan Shikai. Its leaders included Liangbi, Pu Wei, and Tieliang. But when **Liangbi, its military backbone, was assassinated by a bomb in January 1912**, the party collapsed almost overnight, and the February abdication became inevitable. The Royalist Party failed and was short-lived — but its network and its ideals did not die. They flowed into a new form: the **Manchu–Mongol Independence Movement**.
## The Movement — and the Man from Matsumoto at Its Center
If reviving the Qing in the Chinese heartland was impossible, the reasoning went, then perhaps a Qing-led **independent state in Manchuria and Mongolia** could be built instead — a base from which to attempt restoration. For Japan, this dovetailed neatly with its own aim of turning Manchuria and Mongolia into a buffer zone against Russia and China. That overlap is the movement’s light and shadow at once.
After the abdication, both Shanqi and Pu Wei moved into Japan’s sphere at Lüshun, joining a network of Manchu nobles pursuing the same goal. Its **organizer on the Japanese side** was Kawashima Naniwa, who used his friendship with Shanqi — forged in the daily work of building Beijing’s police force — to broker support from the Japanese military and the *tairiku rōnin* (mainland adventurers). The movement rose twice:
– **First Movement (1911–12)** — riding the chaos of the Xinhai Revolution. Centered on Kawashima and Shanqi, it drew in Mongol princes and Japanese adventurers, but the Japanese government declined to back it officially, and it fizzled.
– **Second Movement (1916)** — seizing the anti-Yuan Shikai backlash after Yuan declared himself emperor. This time the Mongol general **Babojab** raised a cavalry force, giving it a genuinely military character. But Babojab was **killed in battle** against Zhang Zuolin’s army; Yuan Shikai then died of illness, dissolving the anti-Yuan cause; Japan withdrew its support; and the movement collapsed.
> **Precision matters — this was not simply “Japanese state policy.”** Both attempts failed for the same core reason: the men on the ground — Kawashima, Shanqi, and their circle — consistently ran *ahead* of Tokyo’s official policy. It was not a unified Japanese state pushing Manchu–Mongol independence. It was **mainland adventurers and some military officers, plus Shanqi and the Qing loyalists, racing forward — while the government pulled the ladder away each time.** Erasing that gap makes the story false.
## Yoshiko — Sealing the Alliance in Blood
In the midst of this, Shanqi entrusted his **fourteenth daughter, Xianyu (born 1907)**, to Kawashima Naniwa as an adopted daughter (the move took place around 1912–15). She would become Yoshiko Kawashima. The adoption was more than personal friendship: it **sealed the Shanqi–Kawashima alliance in blood and carried the restoration cause into the next generation**. In one girl, the two worlds — her birth father Shanqi and her adoptive father Kawashima — met (her life: [Yoshiko Kawashima]).
## Handed Down — Yoshiko’s Political Marriage
That “handoff to the next generation” took its most naked form in Yoshiko’s marriage. **In 1927, at the Yamato Hotel in Lüshun**, she married **Ganjuurjab (born 1903), the second son of General Babojab** — the very general who had died in the Second Movement of 1916. The match was arranged by Saitō Hisashi, a former Kwantung Army chief of staff. This was not a marriage of love; it was a **political union meant to rebuild the “Manchu–Mongol alliance.”** The father had fallen on the battlefield as an ally of the movement; eleven years later his son was joined to Yoshiko, at Kawashima’s arranging. **A dead general’s alliance, handed to the next generation in the form of a marriage.** It did not last — Yoshiko clashed with her husband’s family, left, and the marriage ended within a few years. She drifted to Shanghai, and into the world of espionage.
## My Reading — The Dreamers Left First; the Cleanup Fell to the Next Generation
Lay the four lives on a single timeline and a painfully clear shape appears. It begins in **1898**, when Pu Wei and Shanqi inherit their two iron-cap princedoms in the same year. Around **1912**, the abdication, the collapse of the Royalist Party, the two princes’ exile, and Yoshiko’s adoption all cluster within a few years — the watershed of the whole network. And then the **dreamers leave the stage first**: Shanqi dies in 1922, Pu Wei in 1936, neither living to see the restoration he longed for. After their deaths, **Manchukuo is founded in 1932 — but it is not the independent Qing state they dreamed of; it is a puppet of the Japanese Kwantung Army.** The men who set the dream in motion never saw its “fulfillment.” The ones left to carry the aftermath were the next generation: the Japanese who organized it (Kawashima) and the daughter who was entrusted with it (Yoshiko).
So this is neither an epic nor an accusation. It is a record of **what a handful of people believed, chose, and lost as their world came apart.** China remembers Shanqi as a villain, and there is real historical context for that — Japan’s expansion onto the mainland, of which this movement was part. Acknowledging that, I still believe it is possible to see them as human beings ([History Is Written by the Winners]). And the knot that ties these four together is a man from my own hometown, Matsumoto — Kawashima Naniwa — while Yoshiko herself studied at a girls’ school in the same town. That double thread is why I write this.
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◀ The four, individually: [Prince Su Shanqi] · [Kawashima Naniwa] · [Yoshiko Kawashima] · [Renko Kawashima]
◀ A kindred figure: [Kodaira Soji]
◀ 日本語版: [満蒙独立運動と、四人の人間]
◀ Series thread: [History Is Written by the Winners] · Series Index: The Late Qing Dynasty
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