Sun Yat Sen

Sun Yat-sen was a Chinese revolutionary and the first provisional president of the Republic of China, widely regarded in both mainland China and Taiwan as the founding father of the modern Chinese republic. He was born Sun Wen on November 12, 1866, in Cuiheng village, Xiangshan county, Guangdong Province, and he died on March 12, 1925, in Beijing. He was educated in Hawaii and at the College of Medicine for Chinese in Hong Kong, where he qualified as a physician in 1892.

His political organizing began in the 1890s with the Revive China Society, founded in Honolulu in 1894, which agitated for the overthrow of the Qing dynasty. After the failed 1895 Guangzhou uprising, he fled into a long exile in Japan, the United States, and Britain, raising funds and organizing among overseas Chinese communities. In 1905 he founded the Tongmenghui in Tokyo, a broader revolutionary alliance whose program he summarized as the Three Principles of the People — nationalism, democracy, and people's livelihood.

His movement reached its goal with the Wuchang Uprising of October 10, 1911, which triggered the collapse of the Qing dynasty. He was elected provisional president of the new Republic of China and inaugurated in Nanjing on January 1, 1912, but stepped down weeks later in favor of the northern military leader Yuan Shikai as part of a settlement intended to unify the country. The arrangement broke down within a few years as Yuan moved toward monarchical rule.

His later years were spent rebuilding the Kuomintang as a revolutionary party based in Guangzhou. With Soviet advisers from 1923 onward he reorganized the party, established the Whampoa Military Academy in 1924 with Chiang Kai-shek as commandant, and pursued a united front with the newly founded Chinese Communist Party. He died of liver cancer in Beijing in March 1925, before the Northern Expedition that would unify much of China under Kuomintang rule.

His name Sun Yat-sen — Cantonese for the Mandarin Sun Yixian — was the form he used in English correspondence; in Mandarin he is more commonly called Sun Zhongshan. Yixian, his courtesy name, means roughly "transformed immortal," and he carried the name from his student years onward.