Qiu Zufen

The Yang family originates from Tongnan District in Sichuan Province, China, and boasts a long family history. According to records, Yang Huaiqing's father, Qiu Xiaomei, served as the magistrate of Changning County in Sichuan. After Yang Huaiqing's primary wife, Zhao Shi, passed away in 1903, Qiu Zufen remarried in 1906 and joined the Yang family of Shuangjiang, Tongnan. This family was regarded as a prominent aristocratic clan in the Sichuan-Chongqing region. Through this marriage, the two families formed a large extended family comprising biological children from the original marriage and children from remarriages, totaling twenty members. This created a vast family structure known as the "Fourteenth Generation Living Under the Same Roof."

In terms of family education, the Yang family engaged in several practical explorations. They established the "Mulberry Garden Poetry and Literature Competition," utilizing the family's mulberry garden as an educational venue and promoting Confucian ethical values through stories such as "The Legend of the Old Mulberry Tree." In daily education, children were required to memorize "Zhuzi Jiaxun" (The Family Instructions of Zhu Xi), emphasizing self-discipline and household management through maxims like "Rise at dawn, sweep and clean the courtyard." During weaving activities, the sound of the loom was used metaphorically to instill the importance of cherishing time, with sayings like "Time flies like an arrow" to cultivate children’s awareness of time.

Among family members, Yang Shangkun was elected President of the People's Republic of China in 1988, and Yang Baibing was awarded the rank of General in the same year. Among the grandchildren, Yang Shaoming served as vice-chairman of the Chinese Photographers Association, reflecting the family's diverse development in politics, military affairs, and cultural arts. The Tongnan residence of the Yang family preserves a handwritten version of "The Essential Rules of Managing the Family," which was listed in 2020 as a base for family tradition education in Chongqing, becoming an important symbol of family heritage.

Regarding personal evaluations, local annals and modern reports have praised their educational practices. The 2019 Tongnan District Annals Compilation Committee stated that they "foster modern elites with traditional wisdom." In 2020, Tencent published a special report describing their educational model as "a new paradigm of Republican-era modern family education." In Yang Shangkun’s memoirs, he mentioned that his mother’s loom sounds were "the earliest horn for brothers on the revolutionary journey." This reflects the Yang family’s role and influence in cultural inheritance and the cultivation of revolutionary spirit.