Sun Yat-sen was a Chinese statesman, physician, and political philosopher who served as the first provisional president of the Republic of China and the first leader of the Kuomintang.
92 Facts About Sun Yat-sen
2.
Sun Yat-sen is called the "Father of the Nation" in the Republic of China, and the "Forerunner of the Revolution" in the People's Republic of China for his instrumental role in the overthrow of the Qing dynasty during the Xinhai Revolution.
3.
Sun Yat-sen is considered to be one of the greatest leaders of modern China, but his political life was one of constant struggle and frequent exile.
4.
Sun Yat-sen soon went to exile in Japan for safety but returned to found a revolutionary government in the South as a challenge to the warlords who controlled much of the nation.
5.
Sun Yat-sen did not live to see his party unify the country under his successor, Chiang Kai-shek, in the Northern Expedition.
6.
Sun Yat-sen died in Peking of gallbladder cancer in 1925.
7.
Sun Yat-sen Te-ming was born on 12 November 1866 to Sun Yat-sen Dacheng and Madame Yang.
8.
Sun Yat-sen's birthplace was the village of Cuiheng, Xiangshan County, Canton Province.
9.
Sun Yat-sen had a cultural background of Hakka and Cantonese.
10.
Sun Yat-sen's father owned very little land and worked as a tailor in Macau, and as a journeyman and a porter.
11.
At the age of 10, in Hawaii, Sun Yat-sen began seeking schooling.
12.
Sun Yat-sen then attended Oahu College for one semester.
13.
In 1883 he was sent home to China as his brother was becoming worried that Sun Yat-sen was beginning to embrace Christianity.
14.
When he returned to China in 1883 at age 17, Sun Yat-sen met up with his childhood friend Lu Haodong again at Beijidian, a temple in Cuiheng Village.
15.
In 1886 Sun studied medicine at the Guangzhou Boji Hospital under the Christian missionary John G Kerr.
16.
Notably, of his class of 12 students, Sun Yat-sen was one of only two who graduated.
17.
Sun Yat-sen attended To Tsai Church, founded by the London Missionary Society in 1888, while he studied Western Medicine in Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese.
18.
Sun Yat-sen pictured a revolution as similar to the salvation mission of the Christian church.
19.
Sun Yat-sen, who had grown increasingly frustrated by the conservative Qing government and its refusal to adopt knowledge from the more technologically advanced nations, quit his medical practice in order to devote his time to transforming China.
20.
In 1891, Sun Yat-sen met revolutionary friends in Hong Kong including Yeung Ku-wan who was the leader and founder of the Furen Literary Society.
21.
In 1894, Sun Yat-sen wrote an 8,000 character petition to Qing Viceroy Li Hongzhang presenting his ideas for modernizing China.
22.
Sun Yat-sen traveled to Tianjin to personally present the petition to Li but was not granted an audience.
23.
Sun Yat-sen left China for Hawaii and founded the Revive China Society, which was committed to revolutionizing China's prosperity.
24.
Thereafter, Sun Yat-sen became the secretary of the newly merged Revive China Society, which Yeung Ku-wan headed as president.
25.
Sun Yat-sen mainly used this group to leverage his overseas travels to gain further financial and resource support for his revolution.
26.
Sun Yat-sen received financial support mostly from his brother who sold most of his 12,000 acres of ranch and cattle in Hawaii.
27.
Additionally, members of his family and relatives of Sun Yat-sen would take refuge at the home of his brother Sun Yat-sen Mei at Kamaole in Kula, Maui.
28.
Sun Yat-sen was released after 12 days through the efforts of James Cantlie, The Globe, The Times, and the Foreign Office; leaving Sun a hero in the UK.
29.
Sun Yat-sen wrote a book in 1897 about his detention, titled "Kidnapped in London".
30.
Sun Yat-sen traveled by way of Canada to Japan to begin his exile there, he arrived in Yokohama on 16 August 1897 and met with the Japanese politician Toten Miyazaki.
31.
On 22 October 1900, Sun Yat-sen ordered the launch of the Huizhou uprising to attack Huizhou and provincial authorities in Guangdong.
32.
Miyazaki, who participated in the revolt with Sun Yat-sen, wrote an account of this revolutionary effort under the title "33-year dream" in 1902.
33.
In 1903, Sun Yat-sen made a secret trip to Bangkok in which he sought funds for his cause in Southeast Asia.
34.
Sun Yat-sen met local Chinese merchants Seow Houtseng, who sent financial support to him.
35.
On 6 April 1904, on his first attempt to enter the United States, Sun Yat-sen landed in San Francisco.
36.
In 1904, Sun Yat-sen came about with the goal "to expel the Tatar barbarians, to revive Zhonghua, to establish a Republic, and to distribute land equally among the people".
37.
On 20 August 1905, Sun Yat-sen joined forces with revolutionary Chinese students studying in Tokyo to form the unified group Tongmenghui, which sponsored uprisings in China.
38.
On 1 December 1907, Sun Yat-sen led the Zhennanguan uprising against the Qing at Friendship Pass, which is the border between Guangxi and Vietnam.
39.
Sun Yat-sen publicly fought off comments about how he had something to gain financially from the revolution.
40.
Sun Yat-sen had no direct involvement in it as he was in Denver, Colorado at that time, having spent much of the year in the US in search of support from ethnic Chinese there.
41.
On 12 October 1911 when Sun Yat-sen learned of the successful rebellion against the Qing emperor from press reports, he returned to China from the United States, accompanied by his closest foreign advisor, the American "General" Homer Lea, he had met in London, where they unsuccessfully tried to arrange British financing for the future Chinese republic.
42.
Sun Yat-sen is credited for the funding of the revolutions and for keeping the spirit of revolution alive, even after a series of failed uprisings.
43.
Sun Yat-sen stepped down as president, and Yuan became the new provisional president in Beijing on 10 March 1912.
44.
Sun Yat-sen sent telegrams to the leaders of all provinces requesting them to elect and to establish the National Assembly of the Republic of China in 1912.
45.
Sun Yat-sen mobilized the old Tongmenghui at the core with the mergers of a number of new small parties to form a new political party called the Kuomintang on 25 August 1912 at Huguang Guild Hall Beijing.
46.
Sun Yat-sen took part in the Anti-Monarchy war of the Constitutional Protection Movement, while supporting bandit leaders like Bai Lang during the Bai Lang Rebellion.
47.
Sun Yat-sen saw the danger of this and returned to China in 1916 to advocate Chinese reunification.
48.
On 10 October 1919 Sun Yat-sen resurrected the KMT with the new name Chung-kuo Kuomintang, or "Nationalist Party of China".
49.
Sun Yat-sen received help from the Comintern for his acceptance of communist members into his KMT.
50.
Sun Yat-sen returned the praise, calling Lenin a "great man", and indicated he wished to follow the same path that Lenin had.
51.
In 1923, after having been in contact with Lenin and other Moscow communists, Sun Yat-sen sent representatives to study the Red Army and in turn the Soviets sent representatives to help reorganize the KMT at Sun Yat-sen's request.
52.
Sun Yat-sen established the Whampoa Military Academy near Guangzhou with Chiang Kai-shek as the commandant of the National Revolutionary Army.
53.
However Sun Yat-sen was not without some opposition as there was the Canton volunteers corps uprising against him.
54.
In February 1923 Sun Yat-sen made a presentation to the Students' Union in Hong Kong University and declared that it was the corruption of China and the peace, order and good government of Hong Kong that turned him into a revolutionary.
55.
On 10 November 1924, Sun Yat-sen traveled north to Tianjin and delivered a speech to suggest a gathering for a "national conference" for the Chinese people.
56.
On 28 November 1924 Sun Yat-sen traveled to Japan and gave a speech on Pan-Asianism at Kobe, Japan.
57.
For many years, it was popularly believed that Sun Yat-sen died of liver cancer.
58.
On 26 January 1925, Sun Yat-sen underwent an exploratory laparotomy at Peking Union Medical College Hospital to investigate a long-term illness.
59.
Sun Yat-sen was hospitalized and his condition was treated with radium.
60.
Sun Yat-sen left a short political will penned by Wang Jingwei, which had a widespread influence in the subsequent development of the Republic of China and Taiwan.
61.
Sun Yat-sen remains unique among 20th-century Chinese leaders for having a high reputation both in mainland China and in Taiwan.
62.
Sun Yat-sen's likeness is still almost always found in ceremonial locations such as in front of legislatures and classrooms of public schools, from elementary to senior high school, and he continues to appear in new coinage and currency.
63.
Sun Yat-sen is even mentioned by name in the preamble to the Constitution of the People's Republic of China.
64.
Sun Yat-sen's tomb was one of the first stops made by the leaders of both the Kuomintang and the People First Party on their pan-blue visit to mainland China in 2005.
65.
Sun Yat-sen's Three Principles of the People has been reinterpreted by the Chinese Communist Party to argue that communism is a necessary conclusion of the Three Principles of the People and thus provides legitimacy for the communist government.
66.
Sun Yat-sen then voiced her displeasure in 2002 in a private letter to Jiang about the distortion of history.
67.
In November 2004, the ROC Ministry of Education proposed that Sun Yat-sen was not the father of Taiwan.
68.
Sun Yat-sen spent years in Hawaii as a student in the late 1870s and early 1880s, and was highly impressed with the economic development he saw there.
69.
Sun Yat-sen used the independent Kingdom of Hawaii as a model to develop his vision of a technologically modern and politically independent and actively anti-imperialist China.
70.
Sun Yat-sen was an important pioneer of international development, proposing in the 1920s international institutions of the sort that appeared after World War II.
71.
Sun Yat-sen focused on China, with its vast potential and weak base of mostly local entrepreneurs.
72.
Sun Yat-sen promoted the ideas of economist Henry George and was influenced by his ideas on land ownership.
73.
Sun Yat-sen favored premarital health examinations, sterilization of those perceived as unfit, and other programs to socially engineer China's population.
74.
Sun Yat-sen said that Asia is the "cradle of the world's oldest civilisation" and that "even the ancient civilisations of the West, of Greece and Rome, had their origins on Asiatic soil".
75.
For Sun Yat-sen "Pan-Asianism is based on the principle of the Rule of Right, and justifies the avenging of wrongs done to others".
76.
Sun Yat-sen advocated overthrowing the Western "Rule of Might" and "seeking a civilisation of peace and equality and the emancipation of all races".
77.
Sun Yat-sen was born to Sun Dacheng and his wife, Lady Yang on 12 November 1866.
78.
Sun Yat-sen had an older brother, Sun Dezhang, and an older sister, Sun Jinxing, who died at the early age of 4.
79.
Sun Yat-sen had an older sister, Sun Miaoqian, and a younger sister, Sun Qiuqi.
80.
At age 20, Sun Yat-sen had an arranged marriage with fellow villager Lu Muzhen.
81.
Sun Yat-sen bore a son, Sun Fo, and two daughters, Sun Jinyuan and Sun Jinwan.
82.
Sun Yat-sen Fo was the grandfather of Leland Sun Yat-sen, who spent 37 years working in Hollywood as an actor and stuntman.
83.
Sun Yat-sen was the godfather of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, American author and poet who wrote under the name Cordwainer Smith.
84.
Sun Yat-sen's first concubine, the Hong Kong-born Chen Cuifen, lived in Taiping, Perak for 17 years.
85.
On 25 October 1915 in Japan, Sun Yat-sen married Soong Ching-ling, one of the Soong sisters.
86.
Xiangshan, Sun Yat-sen's hometown in Guangdong, was renamed Zhongshan in his honor, and there is a hall dedicated to his memory at the Temple of Azure Clouds in Beijing.
87.
In George Town, Penang, Malaysia, the Penang Philomatic Union had its premises at 120 Armenian Street in 1910, during the time when Sun spent more than four months in Penang, convened the historic "Penang Conference" to launch the fundraising campaign for the Huanghuagang Uprising and founded the Kwong Wah Yit Poh; this house, which has been preserved as the Sun Yat-sen Museum, was visited by president-designate Hu Jintao in 2002.
88.
Sun Yat-sen's US citizen Hawaii birth certificate that show he was not born in the ROC, but instead born in the US was on public display at the American Institute in Taiwan on US Independence day 4 July 2011.
89.
In 1993 Lily Sun, one of Sun Yat-sen's granddaughters, donated books, photographs, artwork and other memorabilia to the Kapi'olani Community College library as part of the "Sun Yat-sen Asian collection".
90.
Dr Sun Yat-sen is a 2011 Chinese-language western-style opera in three acts by the New York-based American composer Huang Ruo who was born in China and is a graduate of Oberlin College's Conservatory as well as the Juilliard School.
91.
The life of Sun Yat-sen is portrayed in various films, mainly The Soong Sisters and Road to Dawn.
92.
Sun Yat-sen is portrayed during his struggle to overthrow the Qing dynasty in Once Upon a Time in China II.