Wen Tianxiang
Chancellor of the Southern Song, resistance leader (1236-1283)
Biography
Wen Tianxiang (1236-1283) was a chancellor of the Southern Song and the most famous symbol of loyalty in Chinese history. He placed first in the empire-wide civil service examination (the great test for choosing officials) at the age of twenty, and when the Yuan army marched on the capital, he sold his own property to raise an army of volunteers.
After the capital Lin'an surrendered in 1276, Wen Tianxiang refused to give up. He escaped from captivity, gathered soldiers in the southern mountains, and kept fighting for the young emperors in exile. In 1278 he was finally captured, and he was forced to watch from a Yuan ship as the last Song fleet was destroyed at Yamen the following year.
Kublai Khan admired him and offered him the highest posts in the Yuan government if he would switch his loyalty. Wen Tianxiang refused for four years in prison. There he wrote the Song of Righteousness, a poem declaring that an upright spirit runs through heaven and earth and cannot be broken by hardship. He was executed in 1283, facing south toward his fallen homeland as he died.
For more than seven hundred years since, his poem has been memorized by students across East Asia, and his name has been a byword for keeping faith at any cost. Even the Yuan officials who executed him recorded their respect, calling him a true man of the fallen Song.