The Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall 中山纪念堂 中英文.docVIP

The Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall (Ladies and Gentlemen: Our next destination is the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. The Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, as its name suggests, is a structure built in honor of a person by the name of Sun Yat-sen. Do you know who Sun Yat-sen was?) Sun Yat-sen was the forerunner of Chinese bourgeois democratic revolution. He was born on November 12, 1866 in a farmer’s family in the Cuiheng Village in Xiangshan County (the present-day Zhongshan City) 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 Hong Kong to study 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 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 20 Chinese shop-keepers and farm-owners in Honolulu, he established the first Chinese bourgeois revolutionary organization – the Society for the Revival of China (the Xing Zhong Hui). In the following spring, he returned to Hong Kong and staged the first armed uprising against the 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” (the Tong Meng Hui), which later developed into the Nationalist Party (the Guomindang). Since then, he had made successive attempts to topple the Qing regime and finally succeeded in the W