The residence of Cao Kun, the great warlord of the Republic of China who bribed the president, is hidden in a low-key private garden in the downtown area of Tianjin

Photography & Production: Photographer Ji Ruihong

Located on Wuma Road in Tianjin's Hebei District, Caojia Garden was originally a Sun Family Garden. At the end of the Qing Dynasty, it was built for the comprador and arms dealer Sun Zhongying. Today, it is the location of the 254Th Hospital of the People's Liberation Army.

Sun Zhongying, a native of Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, first worked for a money house in Shanghai. In the sixteenth year of Guangxu (1890), he came to Tianjin to do business, and fu worked as a comprador in a foreign firm, because he met Li Hongzhang and then ran an arms business, which made a lot of profits.

In the 29th year of Guangxu (1903), during the development period of Hebei New Area, he bought land in Hebei, starting from Yuanwei Road in the west, to Zhuwei Road in the east, to Nanqi Wuma Road, and to Xinkaihe in the north, covering an area of more than 200 acres, building houses and private gardens.

The garden is full of flowers and trees, pavilions, streams and water circulation, and it is also quite elegant, so it is called Sun Family Garden. In the thirty-second year of Guangxu (1906), in order to make friends with the upstarts, he sold the garden privately to Cao Kun.

Cao Kun (December 12, 1862 – May 17, 1938), courtesy name Zhongshan, was born in Dagukou, Tianjin (Tanggu, Tianjin), the fifth president of the Republic of China, a first-class general in the Army of the National Revolutionary Army, and the leader of the warlords directly under the Republic of China. The garrison baoding was known as the "King of Baoding".

Cao Kun took a fancy to the Sun Family Garden, so he bought it from Sun Zhongying with heavy money, and since then the "Sun Family Garden" has been renamed "Cao Family Garden".

After that, Cao Kun relied on his power and used the wealth he had looted to expand the site of the garden, and built a large number of civil engineering in the park, tearing down and rebuilding the old-style houses into a palace-style building, and each building was connected by a corridor.

Cao Kun also added a Western-style double-pillared gatehouse and a gongzi and princess building with curved eaves for his children; he also built rockeries in the garden, dug artificial lakes, built lake pavilions, and built swimming pools.

And in front of each building, stone people, stone horses, stone sheep, and stone lions were placed. The garden is full of trees and flowers, elegant and pleasant, and is the crown of a private garden for a while.

In the process of expansion and renovation of the Cao family garden, many of the stones come from other garden sites such as Shuixizhuang.

According to the "Tianjin Hebei District Gazetteer", "Mr. Wang Wengru recalled that the warlord Cao Kun instructed his brother Cao Rui to take the Taihu Lake stone of Shuixizhuang, a famous historical garden in Tianjin, to use a boat from the South Canal to the Mouth of the Sancha River to the Xinkai River, and smuggled it into the Cao Family Garden. In the garden, there was a stone carving of the word "Yunyuan", which is a large character, which is said to be a relic from the Liushu Palace in the Qing Dynasty, which was destroyed during the War of Resistance.

From the end of 1917 to the beginning of 1918, when Cao Kun was the leader of the Tianjin Conference Governor Corps and thereafter, several military conferences were held here. In 1923, after Cao Kun bribed the election of the president, he once lived in this garden and received countless birthday gifts.

However, only a year later, Cao Kun was ousted from power and placed under house arrest at yanqinglou in Zhongnanhai, Beijing, before taking the opportunity to flee south. After that, in addition to the residence of his family members, the garden was sometimes used for his in-laws Zhang Zuolin. At the end of 1924, in China's great plan for peace, when Sun Yat-sen came to Tianjin for the third time at the invitation of Feng Yuxiang, Duan Qirui and Zhang Zuolin, he met with Zhang Zuolin in the garden to discuss the state of the country.

Cao Kun returned to Tianjin in 1927 as a Yugong. For its own safety, in 1935, it successively built a mansion in the Italian Concession and the British Concession, and in 1936, it moved away, and then sold the Cao Family Garden to the Ji (Hebei Province) Cha (Chahar Province, now merged into Hebei and Shanxi Provinces) Political Affairs Committee presided over by Song Zheyuan, and later changed it to "Tianjin First Park", and remodeled and expanded, adding theaters, yachts, second libraries and children's activity and entertainment parks, opening swimming pools, and setting up catering departments.

July 1937. After the fall of Tianjin in the Seventh Incident, the Japanese Kou converted the park into a rear hospital of the Japanese invading army.

After the victory of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, the Kuomintang Military and Political Department still used the equipment of the Japanese rear hospital as an army hospital.

Since the founding of new China, it has been changed to the 254th Hospital of the People's Liberation Army, and some of the building facilities in the hospital have been demolished and converted into new buildings, but the old appearance in the park is still faintly visible.