The Sun Yant-Sen Memorial Hall
Sun Yat-sen was the forerunner of the Chinese bourgeois democraticrevolution. He was born on November 12, 1886 in a farmer’s family in the Cuiheng Village in Xiangshan County in Guangdong Province. At the age of 12, he went to Honolulu, where his elder brother sent him to a missionary school. Later, he came back to Hongkong to sudy in a college of Western medicine and, after graduation, practiced medicine in Guangzhou and Macao. So, ever since he was a child, he had been influenced by the Western ideas of Christianity and democracy and this had helped him make up his mind to cure the ills of the old feudal China and turn it into a democratic and strong nation. At first, he had illusions about the Qing government and hoped to save this moribund regime through reforms. But, China’s defeats by foreign invaders and the corruption and incompetence of the Qing government intensified his patriotic indignation. He decided that the Qing court was rotten to the core and must be overthrown and replaced by a democratic republic.
So, in 1894, together with some twenty Chinese shop-keepers and farm-owners in Honolulu, he established the first Chinese bourgeois revolutionary organization—the Society for the Revival of China. In the following spring, he returned to Hongkong and staged the first armed uprising against th Qing Dynasty in Guangzhou; but it ended in failure. Then, in 1905, he went to Japan, where he founded China’s first political party called “China Revolutionary League”, which later developed into the Nationalist Party. Since then he had made successive attempts to topple the Qing regime and finally succeeded in the Wuchang Uprising that broke out in October 1911. The Qing regime was overthrown and he was elected the provisional president of the interim government of the Republic of China in Nanjing. This political power, however, was soon taken over by the warlords. Then in 1920, Sun Yat-sen came back to Guangzhou to set up a new government called the South Revolutionary Gvernment. In 1921, he proclaimed his extraordinary presidency in Guangzhou. In 1925, he died of illness in Beijing and was buried later in Nanjing.
