The Qing Dynasty’s Top Scholar: Starting by Saving Lin Zexu

The year Lin Zexu was exiled to Ili, Sun Nianlin knelt on the yellow-earth imperial road and offered him a pot of warm wine. “Lord Lin, in three years I’ll top the palace examination and bring you home!”

Everyone thought he was mad.

The Sun family had been implicated in the Lin Zexu case, and overnight, a family that had once been connected to the Liangjiang Viceroy fell into ruin. Their former retainers scattered like birds and beasts, and their classmates avoided them. No one believed a seventeen-year-old boy could turn things around amid a chorus of condemnation from the entire court.

Three years later, in the palace examination of the twenty-fourth year of Daoguang, Sun Nianlin’s essay on statecraft called for strengthening both coastal and frontier defenses and learning from the foreigners to control them. He was personally named the top graduate.

He entered the Hanlin Academy, joined the Grand Council, and went to Shanghai.

On the surface, he was a gentle and refined leader of the upright officials, a favorite of the emperor. Behind the scenes, he built factories, manufactured firearms, and trained a modern army, using the foreigners’ own rules to bring them down.

While others knelt to handle foreign affairs, he stood tall and made money.

While others shrank before the foreign powers, he spoke fluent English at the negotiating table and forced the British envoy to smash a teacup in anger.

Before Lin Zexu died, he sent a manuscript with a message: “Russia is the real threat.”

Sun Nianlin turned and began laying plans in the northwest. At the residence of the Ili General, he declared:

“I’ll finish what Lord Lin left undone. I’ll keep this nation alive.”

Some called him a “foreign lackey.” Others called him “the last backbone of the Qing.”

He offered no defense, only repeated Lord Lin’s old saying with a smile:

“Be firm in what you do and gentle in what you say.”

The day foreign warships could no longer sail into the Yangtze, he stood atop the walls of Jiangning and said to the young people behind him, their eyes opened to the world:

“Once your eyes are open, you have nothing to fear in your heart.”

[Double-faced minister × play the pig to eat the tiger × the foremost reformer of the late Qing]