The Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall - Photos by Jessie Hua, China, Guangdong Province, Guangzhou
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.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.
Sun Yat-sen had devoted all his life to the cause of the Chinese democratic revolution, and the 1911revolution 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 presidential 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 fa?ade below one of the eaves is written Sun Yat-sen’s motto, meaning “China Belongs to the People” in English (or literally “Let Public Spiritedness Rule under the Sky”). 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 domed roof, are hidden in the walls. Today, the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall is still one of 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 years old and the two magnolia trees on both sides of the garden are over 70 years old. These two magnolia trees are the oldest magnolia 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 Lv 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.
