When Empress Dowager Cixi crushed the Hundred Days’ Reform with a palace coup in September 1898, she moved fast. Six officials and intellectuals who had championed the Guangxu Emperor’s modernisation drive, among them Tan Sitong and Kang Youwei’s younger brother Kang Guangren, were arrested, denied any trial, and beheaded the same day at the Caishikou execution ground in Beijing. For decades they were remembered simply as reform martyrs cut down by a reactionary court.
That story only cracked in the 1980s, when testimony surfaced in Japanese archives from a man who had been ordered to assassinate Cixi and fled before he could act. His account implicated four of the six in a genuine plot to kill the Empress Dowager, suggesting at least one of the condemned, Yang Rui, may have been entirely innocent, executed alongside men who really had been plotting murder.
