張作霖是一位從土匪崛起的軍閥，他在中國北方擁有龐大的勢力，然而他卻下令處決了李大釗，這是一件令人費解的事件。李大釗是中國共產黨的早期領導人之一，他在北京大學任教時積極推動馬克思主義的思想，對中國革命運動產生了深遠的影響。張作霖與李大釗的矛盾根源於他們對中國未來的不同設想，張作霖試圖維持自己的勢力範圍，而李大釗則致力於推動革命運動。這一事件的發生背景是中國北方軍閥混戰的局面，各個軍閥之間的鬥爭不斷，張作霖為了維持自己的地位，不惜採取極端的手段。
“Why Did Zhang Zuolin Order Li Dazhao''s Execution? | Shenzhou Dadi Episode 27” is an episode of Shenzhou Dadi (The Divine Land). Below is the full text transcript of this episode — read it word for word, or visit the video page to watch with the footage.
Zhang Zuolin -- Why Did He Order Li Dazhao''s Execution?
Why would a warlord who rose from a bandit to the head of state order the execution of a Peking University professor? In the spring of 1926, Duan Qirui''s government fell in a mutiny, and a man from the northeast -- Zhang Zuolin, the so-called ''Northeast King'' -- stepped into the vacuum. Yet at the very height of his power, he gave an order that stunned everyone: send troops into the foreign legation quarter and seize a university professor. A little over a year later, Zhang himself was dead -- killed by explosives that Japanese officers had planted beneath a railway bridge. A strongman who dared to storm a foreign embassy... why could he not dodge a neighbor''s packet of gunpowder?
To see how this ends, we must go back to the spring of 1926. The Duan Qirui we met in the last episode had just lost his seat in a coup and retreated to a foreign-style villa in the Tianjin concessions. And under that same sky, another man from the northeast took up the burden -- Zhang Zuolin. One stepped down; the other stepped up. And so the final act of the Beiyang era passed into his hands. But no one then imagined that this act would close with an explosion.
Let''s begin with the man himself. Among the warlords, Zhang was hardly an exception -- he carried the old strongman''s habits: six wives and concubines, from his first wife Zhao Chungui onward, filling the Fengtian commander''s mansion. He smoked opium, though by most accounts he kept it under control. And yet this rough-born, many-wived soldier held scholars in unusual regard, and he wanted to build industry and promote education. Those who met him wrote that he was short, with bright, penetrating eyes and a wiry intensity -- a military man who could seem as gentle as a scholar. Even the Japanese who dealt with him early muttered privately: this was no ''bandit chief with a beard to his chest,'' but a soft-spoken man a woman might glance at twice.
And yet this was a man whose beginnings lay in the greenwood. Born in 1875 in Haicheng, in Fengtian province, he served as a soldier in his youth and at one point became a ''huzi'' -- a bandit of the northeastern woods. Then he accepted amnesty from the Qing court and climbed, step by step, from a minor commander in the patrol camps to Inspector-General of the Three Eastern Provinces. By 1918, in that military portrait, he held all three northeastern provinces in his grip -- and that is how the title ''Northeast King'' was earned. From the greenwood to a provincial magnate: that climb took him more than twenty years.
But the northeast was never easy to hold. To the north lay Russia; to the south, Japan -- both with eyes on this black-soil land. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905, Zhang maneuvered in the cracks between the two powers: never committing fully to either, never losing completely to either. That art of ''relying on no one entirely'' kept him alive -- and let him grow. But a crack, in the end, is still a crack.
Zhang''s base was Fengtian -- today''s Shenyang. This city was the hub of the South Manchuria Railway and the heart of Guandong; Russian-built lines and Japanese-leased lands had carved it into a patchwork of spheres. Right in the middle of this city, Zhang built his own commander''s mansion -- the Zhang Family Mansion, still standing today in central Shenyang. A mansion raised by a greenwood man shares one sky and earth with the railway and the concession villas. And the city itself had been, three centuries before Zhang, ''the birthplace of one dynasty and the capital of two'' -- more on that ahead.
In 1926 Zhang defeated Feng Yuxiang, and the real power of the Beiyang government passed to the Fengtian clique. The following year, on June 18, 1927, he took office at the Huairen Hall in Zhongnanhai as ''Grand Marshal of the Army and Navy,'' founding the Anguojun government. He was the last head of state of the Beiyang era. On the day he took office, he set out his aims -- and yet who could have guessed that this seat he took would be his for less than a year.
The place he moved into was Zhongnanhai. In today''s Beijing it is closed to the public, but in those years Yuan Shikai, Li Yuanhong, Feng Guozhang, Xu Shichang, Cao Kun, and Duan Qirui had all used it as a presidential residence. Zhang lived in the Juren Hall -- the last time this courtyard served as the power center of the nation. One garden, one crop of masters after another; and the last of them was this ''Grand Marshal'' from the northeast.
Yet this ''Grand Marshal'' lived no glory. The territory he controlled was no more than a few northern provinces; in the south, the Nanjing government had already set up its own stove. He spoke of ''punishing the Reds,'' but his Fengtian army, under the combined assault of the southern, northwestern, and Shanxi-Suiyuan forces, lost battle after battle. By the spring of 1928, Beijing was surrounded on three sides. A man who walked from the greenwood to the head of state sat in Zhongnanhai and found the seat far hotter than he had imagined. And in this very year of his greatest trouble, he did something that made everyone stare -- he sent troops into the foreign legation quarter and seized a university professor.
Speaking of Beijing: the Zhongnanhai where Zhang sat was only its newest skin. Going back, the city''s most famous card is the Forbidden City, also called the Purple Forbidden City. When the Ming Yongle Emperor seized the throne, he decided to move the capital to Beijing and began building the Forbidden City, completed in 1420. For nearly five hundred years, twenty-four emperors of the Ming and Qing sat within these red walls and yellow tiles. In 1987 it was listed as a World Heritage Site -- a concentrated showcase of five thousand years of Chinese civilization. To come to Beijing today, the Forbidden City is almost the first stop you cannot skip.
Then there is the Great Wall. Around Beijing, Badaling, Juyongguan, Mutianyu, Jiankou, Simatai -- section after section. The Wall was not built by one dynasty: from the 3rd century BC to the 17th century AD, successive dynasties repaired and extended it for more than two thousand years, from Shanhai Pass in Hebei in the east to Jiayu Pass in Gansu in the west, totaling more than twenty thousand kilometers. In 1987 it became a World Heritage Site. The old saying goes, ''He who has not climbed the Great Wall is not a true man'' -- to visit Beijing without the Wall is to have missed the point.
There is also the Temple of Heaven. It was where the Ming and Qing emperors offered sacrifices to heaven each year and prayed for a good harvest. Listed as a World Heritage Site in 1998, it is the largest complex of sacrificial architecture in the world. The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, the Imperial Vault of Heaven, the Circular Mound Altar -- its walls are square in the south and round in the north, symbolizing ''heaven round, earth square.'' A sacred ground for heaven-worship larger than the Forbidden City itself lies in the south of the city, still a place where citizens take a walk today.
Heading west to the suburbs is the Summer Palace -- formerly the Garden of Clear Ripples, begun by the Qianlong Emperor in 1750, built around Longevity Hill and Kunming Lake, the foremost representative of classical Chinese gardens, also a World Heritage Site in 1998. Heading north, the Ming Tombs, begun in 1409 at the foot of Tianshou Mountain, hold thirteen Ming emperors and are among the largest extant imperial tomb complexes, inscribed in 2003. And there is the Old Summer Palace -- once called ''the garden of gardens,'' now only broken walls remain. It says nothing, yet everyone who stands before its ruins reads that chapter of suffering. One Beijing, from Ming to Qing to the modern age, layer upon layer -- Zhang''s Anguojun government was only the newest page laid upon it.
Beijing''s layers do not end there. The Ming Tombs gather thirteen emperors beneath Tianshou Mountain, a scale of imperial burial rarely matched; and the Old Summer Palace, though reduced to ruins, still frames the same sky. A city that held the Ming and Qing courts, then received a northeastern strongman as its last imperial-era ruler -- Zhang''s government was simply the newest tenant of a very old house.
Now to the heart of this episode. Before dawn on April 6, 1927, Fengtian troops and police surrounded the Soviet embassy in Beijing''s Legation Quarter -- more precisely, the old Russian barracks beside it. That day, Zhang''s government arrested Li Dazhao, along with his family, and the Kuomintang and Communist workers and Soviet personnel who had taken shelter there -- dozens in all.
Li Dazhao, styled Shouchang, was born in 1889 in Leting, Hebei. A professor at Peking University, he was thirty-eight when he died. He is the fuse character of this episode. We will not dwell on his party or his doctrines; we only trace him through this one event, and leave the larger story to the record.
Zhang''s government gave a public reason for the raid: that the Soviet embassy and the old Russian barracks had long been used as a base for the Comintern and the Chinese Communist Party, hiding weapons and propaganda and working to subvert its rule. The raid turned up a large cache of documents, telegrams, and meeting records; the Beiyang government later published them as the ''Soviet Conspiracy Evidence Compilation.'' The materials showed Li Dazhao and others receiving Soviet funds and instructions and organizing workers'' and peasants'' movements along Comintern lines; after his arrest, Li acknowledged in court and in the press his propagation of communism and his ties to Soviet Russia. On April 28, Li and nineteen others were tried and hanged at the Beijing Municipal Detention Center; he was thirty-eight. In the last photograph taken before his death, his expression is calm. We lay out the verifiable record -- and leave the judgment to you.
The irony sits right here: Zhang was the strongman who sent troops into an embassy, yet stories say he held a certain respect for Peking University and for education -- a contradiction within the man of the sword. And precisely in the years he held power, the newspapers of Beijing and Shanghai went on criticizing the government; the ''inclusiveness'' that Beida was known for still stood even under military rule. A regime that dared storm an embassy still tolerated a press that cursed even the Grand Marshal -- that looseness in itself is something worth noticing.
In June 1928, the Northern Expedition surrounded Beijing on three sides, and Zhang could hold no longer; he decided to retreat to the northeast. In the early hours of June 3, he left Qianmen Station by special train. The next morning, a little after five, as the train reached Huanggutun in Shenyang, beneath the triple-arch bridge where the Jingfeng Railway crosses the South Manchuria Railway, a tremendous blast -- the bridge collapsed, and his private car was blown to pieces. Zhang was gravely wounded and died that same day. Wu Junsheng, the military governor of Heilongjiang, who rode in the same train, was killed on the spot.
The explosion and the wreck of his car -- this is the moment the cameras caught. But who set the charge? The accounts do not agree, and we lay out both.
One account points to the Kwantung Army: Kawamoto Daisaku, a Japanese officer later tried as a war criminal, confessed that the Kwantung Army had planted the explosives beneath the bridge to remove this ''rely-on-no-one'' Northeast King. Another account was the official Japanese line at the time, claiming it was a ''train derailment.'' We present both. The photograph of the explosion caught in that instant already says a great deal -- for who, at the very moment of the blast, could happen to press the shutter?
After the incident, Zhang''s son Zhang Xueliang made a startling decision: he kept the death secret. The commander''s mansion kept up the pretense that the ''Grand Marshal was fine,'' deceiving the Japanese. Only after more than half a month, when Zhang Xueliang had returned to Fengtian and steadied the northeast, was the death formally announced. For those two weeks, the power of the northeast hung by a single hair. Zhang''s last words to those around him: hurry Xueliang back, and put the country above all else. All his life he had maneuvered between Russia and Japan, never fully relying on either, never quite offending either to death. He seems to have carried one ledger always: the northeast must not fall into foreign hands. He did not finish that ledger before he fell beneath that bridge. Today in Shenyang, the triple-arch bridge at Huanggutun no longer looks as it did -- but a monument marks where the railways cross, a spot made concrete enough to take the breath.
Having come this far, you may wonder: are these places still there? They are. Start with the Zhang Family Mansion in Shenyang, just south of the Shenyang Imperial Palace -- a national key cultural relic and a 4A scenic spot; that is the Republican trace. But the city itself, three centuries before Zhang, was ''the birthplace of one dynasty and the capital of two.'' In 1625, Nurhaci built the Shenyang Imperial Palace here; Hong Taiji finished it. Together with the Forbidden City in Beijing, it is one of only two complete royal palace complexes surviving in China -- inscribed as an extension of the Imperial Palaces of the Ming and Qing in 2004. The Shenyang palace has a feature found nowhere else: the Manchu ''palace high, hall low.'' The Da Zheng Hall and the Ten Kings'' Pavilions stand in a row; the Wen Su Ge once housed the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries. To visit Shenyang, this ''Forbidden City beyond the pass'' is a stop you cannot skip.
The Zhang Family Mansion -- the Daqing Tower within it -- sits right beside the imperial palace. A Republican building raised by a greenwood man, sharing one city with the Qing dragon''s rise. A mansion and a palace, a few streets apart, tell the same Shenyang story from two centuries.
Outside Shenyang lie two founding emperors. The North Tomb -- the Zhao Mausoleum -- is the tomb of Hong Taiji and Empress Xiaoduanwen, begun in 1643; it is a model of Qing imperial tomb joined with modern garden, its stone spirit way stretching in solemn ranks, and today it is Beiling Park right inside the city. The East Tomb -- the Fu Mausoleum -- holds Nurhaci and Empress Yehe Nara, built from 1629 to 1651; up its spirit way run one hundred and eight steps, the ''one hundred and eight rises,'' a living specimen of Jurchen burial custom. With the Yongling Mausoleum at Xinbin near Fushun, they are called the ''Three Mausoleums of Shengjing.'' One Fengtian city keeps the dragon''s rise of the Qing laid whole beneath the ground.
The East Tomb of Nurhaci, with its one hundred and eight stone steps, and the North Tomb of Hong Taiji, with its long avenue of stone figures, anchor the Qing''s northeastern origins. Together with Yongling, the ''Three Mausoleums of Shengjing'' turn Shenyang into an open textbook of the dynasty that would rule China for nearly three hundred years.
Go back further still, to prehistory. The Xinle site in the northern suburbs of Shenyang is a Neolithic matriarchal village settlement more than seven thousand two hundred years old. Stone tools and pottery have been unearthed there, and a wood-carved bird -- the oldest precious artifact excavated in the Shenyang area, and one of the world''s oldest surviving wood-carving crafts. See: from a Neolithic village seven thousand years ago, to the Qing dragon''s rise, to Zhang''s Republican mansion, Shenyang stacks the whole timeline of the northeast onto one patch of ground. Zhang''s mansion is only the newest layer.
Enough of sights -- let''s talk of eating and living. The northeast has an old saying almost every local has heard: ''Guan Dong has three treasures -- ginseng, sable, and wulacao grass.'' That is the old trio. As times changed, the people made a new trio: ''ginseng, sable, and deer antler'' -- swapping wulacao for antler. Why the swap? Because wulacao was an old cold-weather grass; once industrial cotton shoes arrived, it stepped aside, while antler became a more valuable medicine. The shift of one saying is itself a chapter of economic history. Ginseng, the locals call it ''bangchui''; the ''fangshan'' who gather it tie the root with a red string for fear it ''runs,'' then dig it with care -- a craft of reverence for nature, listed as provincial intangible heritage.
The northeast''s customs were also summed up as the ''Eight Oddities,'' each a real scene of daily life: first, ''paste window paper on the outside'' -- to keep winter window frames from soaking and cracking; second, ''girls with pipes'' -- rural life was dull, and girls smoked dry tobacco for relief; third, ''wear the fur coat reversed, fur out'' -- among the three treasures, sable worn fur-out blocks the wind; fourth, ''raise the child by hanging'' -- the cradle hangs from the beam, called a ''youche''; fifth, ''a jin and a half of liquor shows no stranger'' -- strong drink against the cold and warm hospitality; sixth, ''cotton wula shoes on the feet'' -- the wula boots; seventh, ''eat no fresh vegetables but pickled'' -- cabbage won''t keep through winter, so northeasterners invented pickling; eighth, ''everyone loves errenzhuan'' -- which leads to the next.
Errenzhuan is a folk art native to the northeast. The common view is that it arose during the Jiaqing reign of the Qing, born from the northeastern yangge dance -- by day the yangge wasn''t enough, so at night farmers invited the best-looking, best-dancing pair indoors; the space was too small to dance, so they worked on singing and dialogue, singing local tunes and little operas -- and that was the embryo of errenzhuan. The ''Peidu Jilue,'' printed during the Tongzhi reign, already records it, then called ''bengbeng.'' Northeasterners have a fierce saying: ''rather skip a meal than miss errenzhuan.'' Yet from the Qing through the Republic and beyond, almost every dynasty''s government banned it, on grounds of ''corrupting morals'' -- a thing born in the greenwood and raised in the rivers and lakes always walks the tightrope between the vulgar and the refined.
On food: three things run through a northeasterner''s days -- pickled cabbage, barbecue, and the bathhouse. Pickled cabbage is the landing of that ''eat no fresh vegetables'' oddity -- a jar of suancai is a northeasterner''s confidence through winter; pork-with-pickle stew, suancai with pork belly, suancai dumplings, every home makes them. Barbecue needs no saying: ''a big gold chain and a small watch, three meals a day of little barbecues'' is a joke, yet it points to barbecue''s weight in the northeastern table. And the bathhouse -- from the old public bath to today''s bath centers, rinse, soak, steam, scrub, wash, all in one -- a memory unique to every northeasterner. Add the guan dong brotherhood of the roadside inn and the bandit camp, and the human warmth of the northeast, sharing one city with the Zhang mansion''s villa, a few streets apart. Young people now joke that the ''new three treasures'' are skewers, bathhouses, and mahjong, self-mocking as ''heavy industry barbecue, light industry microphone'' -- a joke it may be, but power comes and goes, while craft and flavor remain.
What did the northeast live on? Zhang''s Northeast Kingdom rested on resources: soybeans, sorghum, timber, coal and iron, furs -- the white mountains and black waters were a granary and a mineral storehouse. With the Manchurian railway open, goods and people moved faster; Zhang himself built industry and promoted education, meaning to run this black-soil land as his own independent kingdom. Come to the northeast today, and equipment manufacturing, grain bases, and port logistics are, at bottom, the continuation of that same resource logic. And the old saying of ''ginseng, sable, and wulacao grass'' remains, to this day, the first calling card this black soil offers the world.
From the Forbidden City to the Great Wall, from the Shenyang Imperial Palace to the tombs of the Qing founders, from the seven-thousand-year-old Xinle site to the bridge at Huanggutun -- Beijing and Shenyang hold layer upon layer of time. Zhang Zuolin''s mansion is only the newest layer laid down. A man who walked from the greenwood to the head of state now rests among these places, and within the layered time of these cities.
Zhang Zuolin died; Zhang Xueliang succeeded him, and by year''s end the northeast pledged allegiance to the central government -- but that is a later story. The real sites remain today: Zhongnanhai in Beijing, the Zhang Family Mansion in Shenyang, the bridge at Huanggutun outside Shenyang; and older than all of them -- the Forbidden City and the Wall in Beijing, the Shenyang palace, the North and East Tombs, the Xinle site. A man who walked from the greenwood to the head of state left his mark among these places, and within the layered time of these cities.
The last head of state of Beiyang bowed out -- yet this land''s story never truly ends.
→ Watch this episode (with footage and maps): Why Did Zhang Zuolin Order Li Dazhao''s Execution? | Shenzhou Dadi Episode 27