China's founding revolutionary was once held captive inside a London legation
In October 1896 Qing agents detained Sun Yat-sen at the Chinese Legation in London, planning to ship him home for execution. His old medical teacher, the British press and the Foreign Office freed him after twelve days. Fifteen years later the dynasty fell, and Sun proclaimed the Republic of China.
Sun was born on 12 November 1866 in Cuiheng village, in Xiangshan County, Guangdong, to a family with very little land; his father worked as a tailor and porter. At 13 he joined his prosperous elder brother Sun Mei in Honolulu, where he learned English at the ʻIolani School, won a prize from King Kalākaua and came to admire Abraham Lincoln and Alexander Hamilton. His growing attraction to Christianity alarmed his brother, who sent him home. Back in the village he and a friend smashed a wooden idol of the North Star God, and his parents dispatched him to Hong Kong, where he was baptised in 1884.
Medicine came next. In 1892 he was one of only two graduates, from a class of twelve, at the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese. Two years later he wrote an 8,000-character reform petition to the viceroy Li Hongzhang and travelled to Tianjin to deliver it, but was refused an audience. That rebuff pushed him toward revolution. He founded the Revive China Society in Hawaii, and its first uprising in Guangzhou in 1895 was betrayed before it began. His brother sold most of a 12,000-acre Hawaiian ranch to fund the cause.
Exile shaped even his name. Sun Zhongshan, the form best known in Chinese, comes from a Japanese pseudonym, Nakayama, given to him while hiding in Japan, where many allies shared a pan-Asian dislike of Western imperialism. After the 1911 Revolution he became first provisional president in 1912 but handed the office to Yuan Shikai in return for the Qing court's abdication. Later struggles against Yuan and regional warlords brought repeated setbacks, and in the 1920s he allied with the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists in the First United Front.
He died in Beijing in 1925, and his birthplace was renamed Zhongshan in his honour. Unusually, rival Chinese governments both claim him: one calls him Father of the Nation, the other the Forerunner of the Revolution. His Three Principles of the People set out nationalism, democracy and the people's livelihood as the route to a modern China.
Source: Sun Yat-sen
