Chapter 6 Section five

After the incident of Xu Xilin's assassination, Anqing's people panicked, and the news seemed to grow wings and flew to various places.The gigantic Qing Empire was trembling.The sooner the execution of Xu Xilin and peace of mind, the better. Killing such a serious crime as an important official of the court, how to execute the sentence?There are precedents to follow. In 1870, Zhang Wenxiang avenged his friend by stabbing to death Ma Xinyi, the governor of Liangjiang who occupied his friend's wife and designed to kill his friend after making a fortune. Zhang Wenxiang suffered the punishment of cutting out his heart.

Enming's wife, the daughter of Prince Qing Yikuang, demanded that this old practice be followed to relieve hatred and have a deterrent effect.Feng Xu and others asked the governor of Liangjiang for instructions, and decided to implement it accordingly. The execution was brutal. On the night of July 6, 1907, there was heavy rain in Anqing City. At the execution ground outside the Dongyuan Gate of Anqing Fuyuan, several executioners held hammers and smashed Xu Xilin's testicles first.The pain is incomparable, and the male compatriots here must be subconsciously clamping their legs. A reactionary force that is about to be swept into the dustbin of history is always a hundred times barbaric before the end.

After the testicles were smashed, the heart was removed by laparotomy.The dug out heart is first sacrificed to Enming's "spirit in heaven"; then, Enming's guards fry the heart and serve it with wine.What they harbored "sincere" hatred towards Xu Xilin: "My lord treated you so well, but you actually killed him, we want to see what kind of heart you have?!" In China, pioneers have always been so lonely. Qiu Jin, who had agreed to start the incident on the 19th, was implicated by the confession of Xu Xilin's younger brother Xu Wei.In fact, on the 10th, she got the news that Xu Xilin's Anqing uprising had failed, but she rejected all the persuasion to leave Shaoxing, saying that "the revolution will succeed only if it bleeds." She dismissed everyone and resolutely stayed at Datong Academy. On the afternoon of the 14th, the Qing army surrounded Datong Academy and Qiu Jin was arrested.She insisted on not confessing her confession, and only wrote a poem in response, which is the famous "Autumn Wind and Autumn Rain Sorrow Sharen".

In the early morning of July 15th, Qiu Jin looked around the crowd and died calmly at Xuantingkou, Shaoxing at the age of 32.Compared with Xu Xilin's tragic death, Qiu Jin met Li Zhongyue, the upright magistrate of Shanyin County, and fulfilled her last wish of "not to behead her head and not to strip her clothes" (the wish to write a suicide note was not fulfilled, probably because he absorbed Xu Xilin’s confession was full of reactionary slogans, and they were not allowed to write), Qiu Jin’s death process was considered “civilized”. Xu Xilin's assassination of Enming dealt a heavy blow to the feudal rule of the Qing Dynasty.After the Anqing Uprising, all high-ranking officials of the Qing Dynasty were in danger. The governor of Liangjiang, Duan Fang, telegraphed Tie Liang, the Minister of Military Aircraft, "From now on, we will have no peace of mind." Of course, Xu Xilin's feat and tragic death greatly inspired people's fighting spirit to overthrow the Qing Dynasty.The crumbling Qing Dynasty is getting closer and closer to its death.

From 1873 to 1907, Xu Xilin only lived to be thirty-four years old.Died in the dark night of the "Empire", he did not see the dawn of the "Republic of China"; but in the dawn of the Republic of China, there is his hot blood.