NOTES AND QUERIES
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ning among other matters the subjugation of the non-Chinese tribes of the interior.*
At the age of 71 he was appointed Vice-President of the Board of Civil Affairs in Nanking and later Vice-President of the Censorate. He died in great poverty in 1587 aged 74, his friends defraying the cost of his burial.
In November 1965 the editor of the Shanghai Wen Wei Pao, Yao Wen-yuan, who was also a left-inclined literary and theatre critic, published an article in which he criticised an historical drama "The dismissal of Hai Jui" written by the then Deputy Mayor of Peking, Wu Han. Yao's article was the opening volley in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which created such turmoil in China and purged so many of the senior communist cadres including Wu Han himself. Yao rose quickly and by 1969 was sixth in the leadership of the Chinese People's Republic only to slip to a lower position at the 10th Party Congress in August 1973. Yao, still a member of the Politbureau, is reported to be the son-in-law of Chairman Mao and a close associate of the radical Madame Mao.
Wu Han's historical play which cost him so dearly was criticised by Yao as an analogy of Mao's treatment of his "loyal minister” Peng Te-huai, the Minister of National Defence purged by Mao in 1959. P'eng had been very outspoken in his opposition to two of the things closest to Mao's heart, the Great Leap Forward and the establishment of the People's Communes.
Hai Jui is well known to many Chinese as the minister who steadfastly opposed corruption. A legend told to me in Singapore by an elderly Buddhist nun recounted how Hai Jui as a very young junior official had been posted to the Swatow region (Ch'aochow) where a group of tyrannical landowners together with the local magistrate's police runners were terrorizing the people. The legend then told of Hai Jui's fight, first against his local superiors in support of the poor, later against the Prime Minister and finally against the Emperor himself. Hai Jui was forced to commit suicide, she said, to compel the Emperor to take notice of the problems of the masses and for this he was deified by the subsequent Emperor and is now one of the patrons of the Ch'aochow people.
See, in part, Herbert A. Giles, A Chinese Biographical Dictionary (London and Shanghai, Bernard Quaritch and Kelly and Walsh, 1898) pp. 242-243. Also W. F. Mayers, The Chinese Reader's Manual (Shanghai, American Presbyterian Mission Press, and London, Trübner and Co., 1874) pp. 45-46. Ed.