His family is a small tile house with three entrances, not very rich, but a middle peasant at best. When he was in bad years, his life was very tense. His grandson, Li Hongzhang, once revealed his family's "old foundation" and once said in a letter to his younger brother, He Zhang, "My grandfather used to be so poor that by the end of the year, debtors crossed the river like crucian carp. Grandpa can't pay, but he has to prevaricate. Prevarication is not a long-term solution, that is, it is borrowed from relatives and friends, and it is gradually annoying to relatives and friends. At that time, I was lucky to have my uncle Zhou Juchu, who had a little savings. When giving alms, I advised my grandfather to be frugal and my children and grandchildren to go to school. My grandfather obeyed his words and got today ... "(Letter from Li Hongzhang). It can be seen that the early days of the Li family were not easy. However, Li's heart was high and he was determined to let all his four sons study and be an official, and his career was successful, and he was proud of his ancestors. To this end, I do not hesitate to ask the master of the examination room to be a tutor to help my sons study for the exam.
Li Wenan, the youngest of the four sons, finally realized his father's dream. He was promoted after having obtained the provincial examination in the south of the Yangtze River. Four years later, he was admitted to the Jinshi and became one of the officials in the capital, which made Li, a middle-class peasant family by the water, "rise from Hakka overnight and become a noble family in Luxian County" (Luzhou County Records). Li Wenan is the first person in this family to go out of Anhui, to officialdom, to Beijing and to the coast, and also the only scholar in the first seven generations recorded by Li Jiayou's genealogy.
At that time, Jinshi was very good! How many people study hard all their lives and are not allowed to enter the door. Liu is the only scholar among Li Hongzhang's Huai army generals. His comrades-in-arms, Tang Diankui and Tang Dingkui, can fight but can't study. In the past two hundred years, there has been only one scholar in the whole Down family, so his descendant, Mr. Tang Degang, sarcastically said, "It is normal to fail in the examination of Jinshi, and it is abnormal to fail in the examination" (Tang Degang's "Seventy Years of Late Qing Dynasty"). There is only one opportunity to enter the Jinshi exam every four years in the country, and only one hundred lucky people can make the list at a time. It can be seen that the difficulty of the imperial examination is "difficult to go to the sky."
Li Wenan studied hard in his early years. He is the youngest of the brothers and has been weak since childhood. Other people's clever children began to be enlightened at the age of four, and he began to learn at the age of eight. When I was thirteen. Everyone else was admitted to the scholar, and he just finished reading the Four Books and Shi Mao. Father looked at him and was worried. He didn't realize he was a late bloomer. He felt that he was playful and didn't study hard, so he let his eldest son, Li Wenyu, supervise his study. Li Wenyu didn't do well in the examination room either. He hasn't made much progress since he was admitted as a scholar. He also followed his father's example and opened a library to teach at home. Li Wenyu is very strict with his younger brother. School starts on the third day of the first month of every year, and he never relaxes until New Year's Eve. After all, shine on you won the prize, but his eldest brother missed it. A few years later, Li Wenan became a scholar, and all his brothers fell in Sun Shan.
However, Li Wenan has also made great efforts. He studied hard until he was thirty-five years old (1834) and was admitted to Jiangnan after having obtained the provincial examination. Before that, he had been tortured by cold lamps for more than ten years, during which he worked as a teacher, an apprentice or a librarian, but his lessons never relaxed. Four years later, he was finally admitted to Jinshi. At this time, he was nearly forty years old and had spent most of his life (according to Li Wenan's "Du Men Wang Yunxiang Fu").
But the most important thing is his life. He was neither early nor late in the Jinshi, just like Zeng Guofan, who was very popular a few years later, took the exam that year. This relationship used to be called "the same year". At that time, it was an extremely subtle and important interpersonal relationship. In the sense of "material interests", it far exceeded the relationship between fellow villagers, classmates, relatives and even compatriots, because being admitted to the Jinshi at the same time meant being an official at the same time and having the same connection and reference. When they first became officials in Beijing, they were actually a whole. In addition to their examiners, they are often closer than others in officialdom and can naturally help and use each other.
Li Wenan is introverted and a "lower middle-aged" person, but he knows everything and has a good eye. He was always close to Zeng Guofan in the same year. Zeng Guofan was just an ordinary Beijing official at that time. He first held a bachelor's degree in lectures and a bachelor's degree in cabinet in imperial academy, but he was just an idle official who compiled history books. Later, he served as assistant minister (equivalent to today's deputy minister) in the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of War and the Ministry of Official Affairs. So he arranged for his two sons, Li and Li Hongzhang, to learn from him. Once they are ready to work hard, it will be very useful. This is probably the highest wisdom that Li Wenan contributed to his family.
As a judicial officer, he is honest, upright, calm and insists on judging cases according to law. Every autumn trial, when the case is finally pronounced, he always looks at the case file until late at night, trying to accurately sentence a good man. "The court will be embarrassed, and people will have the goal of protecting the old and the near." But he "refused to obey the law because of stubbornness" (epitaph written by Li Hongzhang for his mother). In fact, it has always been like this in officialdom. You should be serious, not too serious, and see what it is. You take everything too seriously, so you dare not flatter an official. The problem is that Li Wenan Anhui people's temper, everything is too serious, it is bound not to please the superiors, so he has never been able to become a "ministerial cadre." In the same year, everyone else rose quickly, and he was still in prison.
Nevertheless, some honest colleagues saw clearly and recorded his good deeds in the form of poems, especially his kindness to prisoners, which was extremely rare in that dark age. At that time, no one even cared about innocent people. Who cares about those prisoners?
There are several poems about Mr Li Yuquan's imprisonment. The poem says:
A soup and a meal are shallow and deep, is it comparable to every meal?
Bitterness can push a hundred thousand troops, and the prison name is fragrant.
After dinner, I came to my stomach, and my eyes were full of sadness.
Fortunately, there is Timmy in the prison, so Mr. Zi is here.
The thorn wall is deep and closed, and summer heat fumigation is not easy to disappear.
Lai Youren's wind blew through the seat, and Pu Kui's 50,000 * * * was ostentatious.
Bowls are paid along the door, and yellow cotton is made up in autumn.
Mr. Wang even covered the sick prisoner with a quilt, so cold that he did not even shrug his shoulders. (gaoler king)
In other words, when he was in charge of the prison hall, he was in charge of two prisons and visited them every day. What the hell is the prison of punishments? It holds 50,000 prisoners! Each prison walks five miles from south to north, and two prisons walk ten miles every day. It is not easy for him to visit in person every day.
He banned prison guards from abusing prisoners and stipulated that every prisoner should eat a spoonful of rice. In order to prevent the prison guard from deducting the weight, he should personally check the food and taste the raw and cooked food. The expenses in the prison are limited, and the kitchen is closed after meals. When he met the prisoners who were sent to prison after dinner, he couldn't bear to be hungry, so he paid for it himself and donated rice and porridge to comfort him. In spring and summer, the prison is prone to infectious diseases, so he sent someone to cook the medicine early for a rainy day. Even bought fans and mats in summer, donated cotton-padded clothes in winter, and each "institute" prepared 12 quilt to make sick prisoners sweat for illness ... It can be seen that he is a very careful person besides being kind-hearted. So during his time in charge, there was no accidental death in the prison. He is also quite satisfied with his work, and he shows pride many times in his poems:
Every time I think of the thousands of houses of the Ministry of Industry, I love the autumn in Xiangshan and Wan Li more.
I will press the prison to give the big quilt, spread the grass and cut the wild pond in autumn.
Running ten miles north and south, clean clothes and sand.
I can't wait to feed my feelings as soon as I report my meal.
Dress up and wait for your official, and be well informed every day.
I often hope that the two prisons will have no sick posts and that everything will be wasted. (Li Wenan's Chronicle of Official Gardens)
His Two Fools was written by Fu Zi during the Tongzhi period (1866), ten years after his death. At that time, his two sons, Li and Li Hongzhang, were already officials of the Qing court, one was the governor of Liangjiang and the other was the governor of Hunan. The person who wrote the preface and postscript for them could have praised them and praised them. The person who wrote the preface could have been an official of the dynasty or a royal family, but otherwise, it was not his relatives or his colleagues who wrote the preface. People praised him again and again for his kindness and incorruptibility.
His kindness also contributed to a beautiful marriage for him.
When he was in his hometown of Modian, one year his father brought back a girl with smallpox. The girl cried on the side of the road and was hot all over. Obviously, she is an abandoned sick child. Although Li is in the countryside, after all, he is a little intellectual and knows a little medicine, especially pediatrics. When he saw it, he felt sorry for it and took it home for treatment. After several adjustments, it was cured. Although the girl got well, she left scattered white spots on her face, which is a big defect for the girl. When the girl had nowhere to go, she became a member of the Li family. When she grows up, she will help in the Li family. She will repay Grandpa Li's kindness by working hard. Since she has to run in and out of work all day, there is no need to bind her feet like a boudoir lady, and there is no biological mother to supervise her. Those idle feet have become a good helper in her life. Without heavy work, it is ambiguous, but over time, it has become a joke of the villagers.
A girl with a pockmarked face and big feet who works in the fields all day can't find a good husband's family when she grows up, let alone an abandoned child. But she doesn't know that a pair of kind eyes have been paying attention to her for a long time. This is the fourth young master of the Li family. Li Wenan is a kind-hearted man, and he can't hide the pain of his family. One night when he came back from outside, he saw the girl asleep at the door of the stove, so he took off his coat and put it on her. When his father heard about it, he knew that his son had feelings for the girl, so he ordered them to get married (see Li Hongzhang's Family edited by Ding Dezhao and Chen Suzhen).
Unexpectedly, the bride has a strong support for her husband's wealth, and constantly shows her extraordinary talents after marriage. It turns out that she is also surnamed Li, the daughter of Li Hongmo in the same county. Li Hongmo was originally a poor man, but later, because her daughter was expensive, she was given to General Wei Zhen, the doctor of Ronglu. The special life experience makes her not only hard-working, full of vigor and outstanding ability, but also has the spirit of "throwing caution to the wind" and high wisdom when encountering difficulties. She is good at managing the family. She worked hard in the first half of her life and enjoyed the second half, which fulfilled the old saying in China that "you have to eat hard to be a master".
She is the great hero of the Li family. The husband should study for the exam at home and be an official impartially when he is away. Everything at home can only be taken care of by her. She also gave birth to six men and two women for the Li family. Six people are Li, Li Hongzhang, Li Hezhang, Li, and; Two daughters, the eldest daughter married Zhang Shaotang, the registered magistrate in the same county, and the second daughter married the alternate magistrate in Jiangsu and Fei Riqi in the same county, both of which were beautiful. Her great wisdom also lies in that whenever her husband and children are promoted and others are always smiling, she is not. Instead, she always takes fullness as a warning and shows the true kung fu of "blessing people" God also rewarded this hard-working woman, making her rich for the rest of her life and living to 83 years old, 28 years longer than her husband Li Wenan.
In her later years, she lived with her two sons who were governors, worked as a wife in the governor's office and enjoyed all the splendor in the world. She didn't care about the people who entered the country yard, so she left her big house in the old place of Xiongzhuanjing. After her sons helped the Qing court defeat the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, one year, the governor was relieved, and Li Hongzhang was transferred from the position of governor of Huguang to Gyeonggi in the north as governor of Zhili, leaving the position of governor of Huguang to be replaced by his brother Li Zhanghan. At that time, she and her son lived in the governor's office. The governor is going to change, and the old mother is still the same. The old lady doesn't need to move. One governor is her son and the other governor is her son. There was a word from the rural neighborhood enviously: "The Li family changed posts as governor, but the old lady didn't have to change posts." Its blessing is really loved by everyone, and it is rare to see it. After that, the two governors changed their words several times, but the old lady still said, "It's none of my business to change my words."
In the second half of her life, she not only enjoyed the prosperity of ordinary bureaucratic families, but also was favored by the royal family many times.
Her 75th birthday coincides with the 40th birthday of Empress Dowager Cixi. In order to win over Han officials and relatives, the Qing emperor specially wrote a "commendation order": "The cabinet issued an imperial decree, and the mother of Li Hongzhang, a captain of Zhili, and Li, the governor of Huguang, was nearly eighty years old. She specially gave Yu Shu a plaque of "Song Yi Yun Shou", which was a rosewood with a jade handle. 1882, the old man is old and has not recovered from a long illness. The emperor ordered that Li Hongzhang be rewarded with a one-month holiday to visit Hubei (Li Jian suo) and his mother, eight or two people, to recuperate (see Wen An Gong Companion, Li Taihou Donated to Participate in the Disease). But these eight or two people did not cure the old lady's illness, and the old lady died on the day the imperial edict was issued. So the Qing emperor issued another imperial edict: "The cabinet issued an imperial edict: Li Hongzhang, the governor of Zhili, and the mother of Li, the governor of Huguang, were prudent in nature and taught their children to be righteous. Today, she died of illness. She was heartbroken. The imperial court gave her mother a gift, and when the coffin returned to her mother's house, she took good care of the local officials along the way and arrived. Respect this! "(The Final Order of Wen 'an Gongpei Li Taihou)"
In March of the following year, the ship carrying Li Lingbin descended from Hankou along the river. Officials from all over the country came to meet them and dared not neglect them. It was transported to Modian Township via Chaohu Lake and Dianbu River and buried with her husband Li Wenan.