Fang Xiaoru
Fang Xiaoru refused to write one document and is said to have cost hundreds of people their lives. He was the leading Confucian scholar of his generation, a student of Song Lian, and tutor and adviser to the young Jianwen emperor, whose policy of reducing the power of his princely uncles he supported. One of those uncles was the prince of Yan, who rebelled, fought a three-year civil war, and took Nanjing in 1402. The usurper needed the accession proclamation drafted, and needed it drafted by the man whose name would make it legitimate to the scholarly class. His own adviser had warned him that killing Fang Xiaoru would extinguish the seed of learning in the empire. He was brought in wearing mourning white and weeping. Told to write, he is reported to have thrown down the brush and written four characters meaning that the usurper had seized the throne, and to have said that he did not care if his nine degrees of kindred were exterminated. The traditional account has the emperor answering that it would be ten, and adding his students and friends as a tenth degree - some 870 people executed, with the man himself cut in half at the waist. The figure comes from later sources and is disputed; the execution is not. His writings were banned on pain of death and survived because people copied them anyway. He was rehabilitated in the following century and became the standard example of the scholar who will not sign.
- Lived: 1357 CE – 1402 CE
- Nationality: Chinese
- Roles: scholar
