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Wen Tianxiang (文天祥, 1236 - 1283), the last resisting Prime Minister of the Southern Song Dynasty, was
captured by Kublai Khan, and was brought back to Beijing under house arrest, with a company of musicians and female entertainers. Kublai Khan wanted to use
Wen Tianxiang as his prominent minister, under the Mongol Overlordship, to control the
Han Chinese population, but Wen refused to accept this offer from the Mongol
Emperor.
After three years of captivity under the Mongol rule, one day (Probably early 1283, but
anyway it's December 8, 1282 in Chinese calendar) Kublai Khan
visited Wen Tianxiang's house in person and asked what would satisfy Wen Tianxiang. Wen replied that he could not serve two
masters, and that he wished for a swift death. Accordingly the Khan ordered his execution on the next day. Later, however, he
regretted his hasty decision and mourned Wen by fasting but it's well too late.
During his house arrest in the west of Beijing, Wen Tianxiang wrote his famous Song of the Spirit of Resistance [ Jeng - Chee ].
This house still exists in the west of Beijing and is now turned into a temple under his name, together with a school, also under
his name.
The mother of Mao Zedong, the Chairman of the
People's Republic of China, was supposedly a descendant of the Wen family.
Wen Tianxiang's own two sons were killed when they were young, so he adopted the three sons of his younger brother as his own,
and advised these three to form new resistance groups against the Mongols. There are now three branches of the Wen family in the
provinces of Jiangxi, Guangdong, and
Fujian, with family names Man and Boon, a change from Wen, according to the local
dialect pronunciations. Some descendants from the Chiu-Chow coastal section of
the Wen family branch emigrated to Indochina, and these had their family name
change from Wen into Van, in line with the Vietnamese pronunciation of the Chinese
character Wen. Wen Tianxiang was born in the Province of Jiangxi. The name Wen originated from the Sechuan province 1500 years ago; before that date, the Wen family name existed during the western Chow Dynasty as
far back as 3000 years ago.
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