Rong Zilai

Rong Zilai is the Rong family’s scholar-founder: sent abroad in the hope of prolonging Grandmother Rong’s life, he returns as John Lillie and uses family silver to establish Lillie’s Academy of Mathematics, the predecessor of N University. His path from salt-merchant heir to educator and patriot changes the family’s priorities, reputation, and fortunes, while the academy’s controversial admission of women makes education a public challenge to inherited custom.

Identity and Background

The youngest member of the seventh generation of the Jiangnan salt-merchants, Rong Zilai leaves Tongzhen in 1873 to study abroad. The family chooses him not to remake its future but in the hope that his journey will help Grandmother Rong live longer. Her authority rests on her large family—nine sons and seven daughters, all of whom reach adulthood—and on the prosperity her children establish. Yet her recurrent, distressing dreams trouble the household, and the scholars invited to interpret them provide little help.

Rong Zilai’s departure is bound to that family crisis. During his voyage, Grandmother Rong dreams that a typhoon sinks his ship and, caught in the terror of the vision, dies in her sleep. By the time he reaches his prospective tutor, the news arrives in a letter. With his grandmother dead, the purpose for which the family sent him abroad has disappeared, and he initially decides to return. Instead, an encounter with another Chinese student leads him into classes and a life of study that he had not expected to pursue.

Education Abroad and Return

Rong Zilai spends seven years abroad, attending mathematics and geometry classes with students from Bosnia and Turkey by day and concerts with a senior student from Prague at night. The years pass before he decides to return. In autumn 1880, he boards a ship with several dozen barrels of new wine; by the time he reaches home in the depths of winter, the wine has matured enough to drink.

The family and its salt business appear unchanged, but Rong Zilai has returned altered. He has taken the name John Lillie, wears a short jacket rather than a long silk gown, and speaks with unfamiliar words. Most strikingly, the son of salt merchants cannot bear the smell of salt. The aversion follows a near-drowning at sea, when he swallowed a great deal of seawater. He later explains that the experience left him unable to endure the scent; while aboard a ship, he kept a tea leaf in his mouth to manage it. The condition makes a future in the family business impractical, sharpening the break between his inherited role and his new vocation.

The Academy and Its Challenge to Custom

Before leaving, Rong Zilai had received Grandmother Rong’s written promise that the silver behind a sliding panel in her room would be his reward for filial devotion. He puts the money toward founding Lillie’s Academy of Mathematics in C City. The academy becomes the institutional beginning of N University, and Rong Zilai makes its early reputation not only through scholarship but through a disputed decision: despite opposition, he opens it to women students.

The school draws spectators as well as students. In a society hostile to women’s education, visitors treat the academy as a curiosity, and its admission policy risks official closure. The Rong family genealogy later explains that the earliest women students belonged to the family’s principal branch. Keeping the experiment within the family helps the academy survive the gossip, while the public uproar paradoxically makes it better known. Rong Zilai’s educational project therefore carries both a practical and a symbolic force: it creates a lasting institution and tests how far a prominent family can push against convention.

Family Responsibility and Public Allegiance

Rong Zilai’s authority also appears in the household’s response to a woman who arrives from outside the province claiming to be the child’s mother of the dead Killer. After the Lin family turns her away, she seeks help at N University. Rong Zilai, described as upright and deeply sympathetic to people who have suffered injustice, takes her in; the next day he directs his son, Rong Xiaolai, to bring her to Tongzhen. The woman later dies after giving birth. The baby’s resemblance to the Killer nearly leads the Rong household to reject him, but his resemblance to his grandmother helps secure his survival and upbringing there. This episode places Rong Zilai’s stated principles amid a more difficult family judgment: shelter is offered, but belonging remains contested.

His public commitments come at a direct material cost. When the National Revolutionary Army reaches C City, Rong Zilai sees students collecting money for the Northern Expedition and is moved to return to Tongzhen that night. He sells the family’s docks and half its shops, using the proceeds to buy a boatload of ammunition for the campaign. The family receives a plaque recognizing its support. Later, when the calligrapher becomes a wanted criminal pursued by the KMT government, officials offer to exchange the plaque for a new one with the same wording and different handwriting. Rong Zilai refuses; he insists that it remain in place even as the family’s relations with the government worsen and its business suffers.

Legacy and Significance

Rong Zilai’s choices help transform the Rong family from a wealthy mercantile clan into one associated with education and patriotism. The academy’s later importance gives institutional form to his departure from the salt trade, while his decision to devote family assets to the Northern Expedition makes that break financially consequential. The family’s decline is also tied to forces beyond his individual decisions: the state monopoly on salt removes its principal source of income, and younger relatives who study at the academy show little interest in returning to the business.

His legacy is thus marked by a deliberate exchange. He converts inherited wealth into a school and military support, preserving the family’s public ideals at the cost of its commercial security. The plaque he will not surrender and the academy he founds stand for different aspects of the same refusal: neither family identity nor education, in his view, should be governed solely by the convenience of power or custom.