Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

Qiu Jin – A Chinese poet, swordswoman, and feminist who plotted a revolution and was executed in her twenties

The morning she was executed, Qiu Jin refused to kneel.

That image — a young woman, barely thirty, spine straight, eyes fixed not on mercy but on memory — has outlived the blood, the politics, the brittle edicts of her time. She wore a man’s coat. She had short hair, like a soldier. The executioners thought it strange, even improper. But what is propriety to a woman who has declared war?

They cut her down in the summer of 1907, in the shade of Xiling Bridge. Her crime? Revolution. Her weapon? Words. And knives. And other women’s hearts, which she had stirred until they thudded louder than fear.

Qiu Jin was not born a martyr. She was born in 1875, in a quiet corner of Fujian Province, to a family that prized the classics and passed down Confucian values like heirlooms. But she also grew up with horses, martial arts, poetry — and a restlessness that didn’t sit well with embroidery hoops. A girl like Qiu Jin, whip-smart and wild-spirited, could memorize a Tang poem and decapitate a chicken in one breath. She did both.

The China of her girlhood was cracking like old porcelain. The Qing dynasty was crumbling. Foreign powers sliced the country like cake. Foot-binding still crushed little girls’ bones in the name of beauty. Women couldn’t vote, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even walk freely. In that silence, Qiu Jin heard music. It was rage. It was hope.

She bound her feet once, to be “proper.” Then she unbound them forever, to walk her own way — literally and metaphorically. That small defiance cost her a lot. But it gave her the first taste of rebellion.

By twenty-one, she was married off to a rich, conservative man in Shaoxing. She called the marriage a "golden cage." He wanted obedience. She wanted Japan. In 1903, she left — fled, really — taking her two children and a saber. She left them, eventually, too. That’s the hardest part of her story to explain. Maybe it’s unforgivable. Maybe it was necessary.

In Tokyo, Qiu Jin bloomed into the kind of figure who turns up in movies: an exiled firebrand learning to load pistols in one hand and declaim Shelley in the other. She wore men’s clothing. She joined anti-Qing secret societies. She studied military tactics alongside other Chinese dissidents. She started writing. And the writing—oh, it burned.

Qiu Jin’s essays and poems poured into newspapers like gasoline. She published under the name “Jianhu Nüxia,” the Woman Knight of Mirror Lake. She wrote in classical Chinese, but her voice was urgent, raw, almost modern. “We cannot just sit there waiting for salvation,” she thundered. “We must rise up ourselves!”

Her revolutionary feminism wasn’t the genteel salon feminism of the West. It was fists, fury, and footwork. She wrote about the death of a twelve-year-old girl, forced to marry and raped until her body gave out. Qiu Jin didn’t just mourn her. She called her an ancestor.

“Women’s liberation in China” wasn’t a trending hashtag in 1905. But Qiu Jin made it one — by printing manifestos, founding journals like China Women’s News, and preaching in tea houses and brothels. She believed in education for girls, yes — but also in bombs. She believed in freedom. In death. In resurrection. In all the things that sound poetic until they get you killed.

And she knew death was coming.

In 1906, Qiu Jin returned to China for good. She took a post as principal of the Datong School in Shaoxing — but the school was a cover. Inside, young men were learning physics by day and how to wield explosives by night. Her cousin, Xu Xilin, was planning an assassination: a top Qing official. They were playing chess with real lives now.

On July 6, 1907, Xu struck — and failed. He was caught, tortured, executed. Two days later, soldiers surrounded Qiu Jin’s school. She did not run. She did not cry. They found weapons. And poems.

They found, too, a manuscript. One poem read: “Autumn wind, autumn rain — fills my heart with sorrow.” Qiu Jin. Autumn. Always the season of endings.

At her trial, she refused to name names. She asked to die quickly, but honorably. Kneeling was a gesture of submission. She would not do it.

And so she stood. And they killed her.

Her head was displayed on a pike in her hometown. Let the women see, they thought. Let the girls tremble. But the effect was not what they intended.

Qiu Jin became a legend. A martyr. A spark. Within four years, the Qing dynasty was gone. China had begun its long and twisting experiment with republics, revolutions, reinventions. Her name entered history books. Statues rose. Schoolgirls learned her poetry.

Still — a statue is not a woman. And a woman is not always what history says she is.

Who was Qiu Jin, really?

A traitor. A hero. A mother who walked away. A woman who stayed true. She wrote fierce verses, but she also sewed her children’s clothes by hand. She believed in martyrdom — and beauty. She sharpened her sword — and her wit. In one letter, she confessed: “I love women. I admire women. But I pity them, too.”

She is, in many ways, uncategorizable. Which makes her a perfect figure for now.

In an age of feminism redefined, when “empowerment” is sold on T-shirts and authenticity is curated for likes, Qiu Jin’s life slices through the noise like her saber once did. She reminds us that liberation costs. That bravery is sometimes unbeautiful. That freedom may come too late — and still be worth dying for.

Her bones are buried in Hangzhou now, near West Lake. A stone stele marks the site. Tourists visit, take photos, nod solemnly. Some still quote her poems. Some leave chrysanthemums. A few young women, quietly, leave calligraphy ink and brushes.

Because Qiu Jin didn’t just fight for China. She fought for the idea — the radical, terrifying, still-unfinished idea — that women are not secondary citizens of the world.

She stood. She spoke. She was silenced. But the echo — it hasn’t stopped yet.