The Baohuanghui on Mott Street, New York City Chinatown

7-9 Mott St. ca 1905, Detroit Publishing Col, BHH on 4th floor

New York City was a Baohuanghui stronghold from the early days of the organization in the United States.  Mott Street buildings would eventually house the chapter headquarters, its newspaper, an armory, and a school.  Although it's not clear when the chapter was founded, the New-York Tribune of July 17, 1900, page 3 ("Alarm Felt in Chinatown"), gives some evidence that the local association had formed as early as 1899 (most likely after the San Francisco chapter was organized on October 26): 

Mapping the Baohuanghui

This version of Mapping the Baohuanghui is from A Chinese Reformer in Exile: Kang Youwei and the Chinese Empire Reform Association in North America, 1899–1911 (Brill, January 2025), updated with notes in red showing subsequent corrections after publication.  This table of 232 chapters reflects our efforts to provide the most complete and verified accounting of Baohuanghui locations and activities. Baohuanghui chapters in the Americas, Asia, Australia, the Pacific, Africa, and Europe are organized geographically under the original organizational divisions if these are known, led by the headquarter city, followed by an alphabetical listing of locations and all associated businesses, schools, and newspapers.

Please leave a comment with corrections and additions. 

Also see Play the Baohuanghui Guessing Game for chapters whose Chinese names we haven't been able to link with actual towns or cities. 

Documenting the Chinese and Baohuanghui in Montana: Mark T. Johnson

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The Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky

Play the Baohuanghui Guessing Game--Unidentified Chapters

The Baohuanghui had more than 200 chapters, but we are still identifying where they were located. This document lists the Chinese names of chapters in towns found in Baohuanghui documents that we can't identify by their geographical names. Remember that these would be pronounced in Cantonese.   Those in blue have been identified since we first posted this list.

The basis of this list (#1-48) is a 1908 document naming 94 chapters that made donations for a Baohuanghui headquarters building. It is found in 《捐建帝国宪政总会所买地征信录》published in Kang Youwei yu Baohuanghui (pp. 529-537). Thanks to Gao Weinong for pointing us to this list. We have added other unidentified chapters as we have found them. These chapters could be in the Americas, Asia, Australia (although we believe have fully identified Australian chapters), the Pacific, Africa, and Europe. Chi Jeng Chang has composed his own list of chapters based on the 1908 document as well as a March 7, 1904 list in Hong Kong Shang Bao of 134 signatory chapters to a petition supporting the anti-Russian movement and the 1907 donor plaque in the Victoria, BC Baohuanghui building. 

For already identified chapters, see the document Mapping the Baohuanghui. As chapters are identified, they are added to the Mapping table. Especially useful have been the 1901 and 1913 International Chinese Directories, thanks to Philip Choy.

A separate list follows with many Canadian chapters whose place names are still unknown, thanks to the research of Zhongping Chen, University of Victoria and Chi Jeng Chang, Vancouver, BC.

Please leave your best guesses in the Comments field.

The Chinese Empire Reform Association of Marysville, California, 1904

Courtesy of Community Memorial Museum, Yuba City, California

An unusual poster from California's third largest Chinese community, Marysville, illustrates both the unity and the diversity of the Baohuanghui. The poster [here in higher resolution] was printed from a glass plate donated to Yuba City's Community Memorial Museum and brought to our attention by volunteer curator Patricia Justus and historian of Marysville Chinese, Paul Chace.

The Chinese Empire Ladies Reform Association in Victoria, BC

Kang Tongbi founded this organization in 1903 in Canada, the US, and Hawaii. South Windsor Kang Tongbi collection.

In 1903, Kang Tongbi came to North America for six years of education and Baohuanghui organizing. She began her North American sojourn In Victoria and Vancouver/New Westminster, BC, where she founded two branches of a feminist-oriented Chinese Empire Ladies Reform Association. Like the regular Baohuanghui chapters, photo posters were produced showing the officers and their titles. Branches were formed in the Pacific Northwest, Honolulu, New York, and other cities in the Northeastern US. The members were mostly wives of Baohuanghui leaders. 

The poster celebrates heroic Western women like Joan of Arc who died for a cause and equally audacious and militant Chinese heroines like Qin Liangyu (1574-1648), a female general of Ming dynasty. Perhaps most surprising is the almost contemporary Russian lady assassin of Tsar Alexander II, Sophia Perovskaia (1854-1881), whose deeds had just been fictionalized in Chinese form as a serialized novel in Liang Qichao's journal, Xin Xiaoshuo (November 1902--June 1903). 

Below is a translation by Hongmei Sun of George Mason University and Hu Ying of UC Irvine. There are various ways the poem can be punctuated and translated, and Jane Leung Larson is responsible for the final wording below. A large format downloadable copy has been provided by Harvard-Yenching Library, which has  the same poster. 

A Drifting Stranger from 20,000 Li Away: Kang Youwei in Canada

A drifting stranger from 20,000 li away;
Long white sideburns of 40 years time [born 1858];
Turning to look at the Milky Way and enjoying the bright moonlight;
Most rare on Wen Dao [Coal Island] to chat with fellow villagers;
Ashamed to shock the neighbors with the troubles and disasters of our party;
Ashamed of having accomplished nothing for our fellow countrymen;
Afraid this may be a separation forever from my native place . . .

Kang Youwei spent Mid-autumn Festival, 1899, with a fellow countryman, Su Shiyi, on a rocky forested island near Victoria, BC, talking about "the past, our relatives, our friends, and our country. When I thought of our country, I could not help but worry. I wish to send this message to all that they may know how I feel as an exiled man."  Su recorded the poem as Kang spoke it aloud, and it was printed to mail around the world. View the poem at the UCLA Digital Library Tom Leung Collection #135.

Victoria's Treasure: The First Chinese Empire Association

February 2012, 1715 Government St.

The Baohuanghui was formally inaugurated by Kang Youwei in Victoria, British Columbia, on July 20, 1899.  Although its first home was probably on the third floor of founding member Li Fuji's Guangwanfeng store in Victoria's Chinatown, the birthplace of the international organization is most often given as the building pictured to the left, built in 1905 at 1715 Government St., also in Victoria's Chinatown.  

Archival photo, BC Archives

This February, the building's restoration was completed in time for Chinese New Year by the owner, Ian Sutherland, who has done a remarkable job in bringing to light and reconstructing historical artifacts.  Sutherland has consulted with Zhongping Chen and Jane Leung Larson, among many others, in his research on this building. The Edwardian-style building is in a National Historic District.

On the right is an historic photograph of the building from the BC Archives. You can plainly read the words "The First Chinese Empire Reform Assn." and "1905" and on the parapet see an elaborate emblem.  The image is faint, but during the restoration process found a time capsule that included an envelope fragment with a drawing that appeared close in design to the emblem on the building.  Sutherland used this to create a new image.  The Qing dragon flag is crossed with the Baohuanghui flag, which in this version has two red stripes flanking a blue stripe with three white stars.  C.E.R.A. and 保皇會 are written on the red stripes.

The Baohuanghui in the Pacific Northwest on the CINARC Site

If you're interested in the Baohuanghui in the Pacific Northwest, both Canada and the United States, a great place to begin the data search is the Chinese in Northwest America Research Committee or CINARC.  The site is managed by two China specialists and archaeologists, Chuimei Ho and Ben Bronson, and covers many aspects of Chinese life in the Northwest, including Associations. The site is full of photographs, artifacts and contemporary newspaper coverage of historical events, a list of Chinese names for Pacific Northwest towns and cities, and many other useful articles.

The Chinese Ladies Empire Reform Association of Vancouver, BC

 [Vancouver City Archives]

Baohuanghui Scholarship News

A striking poster of the "Chinese Empire Ladies Reform Association" came our way thanks to Raymond Lum of the Harvard-Yenching Library, showing the officers of the Victoria branch of this women's auxiliary, its founder Kang Tongbi, her father and BHH President Kang Youwei, Vice President Liang Qichao, and the Guangxu Emperor, 1903.  The Library also has letters from Kang Tongbi in its Rare Book collection.  View the poster here.

Using the extensive materials available in Canada, historian Zhongping Chen of the University of Victoria will be giving a paper on Kang Youwei and the Baohuanghui in Canada at the ASPAC (Asian Studies on the Pacific Coast) conference at Portland State University June 18-20, 2010.  He is also planning to organize a panel at the 2011 national meeting of the Association of Asian Studies in Honolulu tentatively titled "Toward the 1911 Revolution: The Interactions between Reformers and Revolutionaries in the Transpacific Chinese Diasopora."

Also coming in 2011 will be a docu-drama about Kang Youwei, Kang Tongbi, Datong Shu, and the Baohuanghui and their relevance to today's China by Hong Kong and New York filmmaker Evans Chan. He filmed an interview with independent scholar Jane Leung Larson in New York this spring and has done extensive filming in the U.S., Sweden, Hong Kong, Beijing, and Guangdong, speaking with many scholars and visiting historic sites.