Sun Yat-sen had devoted all his life to the cause of the Chinese democratic revolution, and the 1911 revolution he led had put an end to the feudal monarchy that had existed in China for several thousand of years. To commemorate his great contributions to the Chinese revolution, people of Guangzhou had this memorial hall built in 1929-1931, at the original site of the former presedential house of the South Revolutionary Government, which was burned down in 1922 by a rebel warlord,Chen Jiongming by name.
The Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall is an octagonal palace-like reinforced concrete structure, 58 meters high with a floor space of 12 thousand square meters. It looks like a traditional Chinese palace in appearance but was constructed with modern architectural technique. In front of the hall stands a bronze statue of Sun Yat-sen, which is 5.5 meters high and weighs 3.9 tons. Up on the facade below one of the eaves is written Sun Yat-sen’s motto, meaning “China Belongs to the People” in English. Inside the building is a conference hall with a seating capacity of 3,238 people. And, thanks to the ingenious designing of the architect, the acoustics of the hall are excellent and there is no pillar to obstruct the spectator’s view because the eight pillars sustaining the four long-spanned steel trusses supporting the huge dormed roof, are hidden in the walls. Today, the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall is still one the main places for mass meetings or theatrical performances in Guangzhou.
At the back of the hall, there is a 2-storied building on each side. In the backyard are planted over 70 species of trees and flowers. Among them a kapok tree is already over 300 hundred years old and the two magnolia trees on both sides of the garden are over 70 years old These two mognolia trees are the oldest magolia trees in Guangzhou and have grown up to 90 centimeters in diameter, each giving a shade of over 200 square meters.
The magnificent Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall was designed by a young Chinese architect, by the name of Lu Yan-zhi, who was born in Tianjin, graduated from the Qinghua University in Beijing and later studied architecture in the Cornell University in the USA. He died of lung cancer in 1929, at the age of 36, before the hall was completed.
