Abstract: Tennan Tahara's Yuan Shikai is a lengthy biography of Yuan Shikai written by a  Japanese biographer. Under great influence of Western biography, this work depicts the subject's life story that lasted from his youth to his officialdom as Governor-General of Zhili Province, China. Three phases of Yuan Shikai’s life are highlighted: “Envoy to Korea”, “Governor of Shangdong Province”, and “Governor-General of Zhili Province”, indicating that they are of decisive importance in the making of a top statesman in the late Qing Dynasty. Also, the book accentuates Yuan’s “political hand” and “art of wisdom” in terms of politics, military, economy, socio-culture and diplomacy from his reform measures and handling of foreign relations. Tahara tends to interpret the subject’s political success by comparing relations between characters, analyzing the pertinence of his endowment to opportunities of the day. The biographer’s over-emphasis on deciphering Yuan’s political career and insufficient materials of Yuan’s life story, however, results in a flat character of Yuan and undermines his interpretation accordingly.

Key Words: Tennan Tahara; Yuan Shikai; statesman; interpretation

Dr. Yuan Qi is Associate Professor of literature in School of Liberal Arts at Yangzhou University, and adjunct research fellow of SJTU Center for Life Writing. He specializes in Western literary criticism and life writing studies. He is the author of A Dialogue with Freud and Shakespeare: Norman Holland’s New Psychoanalytic Criticism (Social Sciences Academic Press, 2014) and “An Innovation or a Deconstruction of Life Writing: A Review of Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the Wind：How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare” (2015).