Zhang Jian

Zhang Jian was a Chinese businessman, educationist and politician. Zhang was born in Haimen County, Jiangsu Province in 1853. Despite receiving the highest honor in the Qing metropolitan civil service examination, Zhang's faith in commerce as a means to national salvation prompted him to seek a career outside imperial bureaucracy.

In 1895, Zhang started to raise capital for a textile factory. Four years later, his Dasheng Textile Mill was in full operation. Although most Chinese capitalists struggled during the years before and after the Revolution of 1911, Zhang's mounting profits encouraged him to invest in a second mill in 1913. His economic success continued and he opened two more mills in 1922 and 1923.

His business interests were not only in textile production; in 1901 he formed the Tonghai Reclamation Company to transform the Nanhuai salt-yard region of Jiangsu’s coastal Tonmghai district into farmland. Between 1914 and 1922, almost half of the 25 companies in the Tonghai area either belonged to Zhang’s Dasheng consortium or had some kind of relationship with it.

Besides commerce he also viewed education as an essential building block of national development. He founded China’s first teacher-training institution, Tonghzhou Normal School, in Nantong in 1902 and the country’s first modern museum, the Tongzhou Museum in 1905. Over the years Zhang set up dozens of technical schools and institutes specializing in agriculture, textiles, medicine, and other professions. He assisted in in establishing over 300 public and private elementary schools in Nantong county alone. He also played an instrumental role in the founding of China’s first teacher’s college, Three Rivers Normal School – the earliest precursor to Nanjing University – and a number of other schools of high education that later developed to universities. Zhang also had a fruitful political career. In 1913, Zhang became the Minister of Industry and Commerce and Minister of Agriculture and Forestry in Beiyang Government.