Politics
Sun Yat-sen
Revolutionary and first president of the Republic of China
Born 1866 · Died 1925
Photo: 上海波尔照相馆 · Public domain
«The world trend is vast and mighty; those who follow it prosper, those who resist it perish.»
Sun Yat-sen trained as a doctor and then led the movement that ended two thousand years of imperial rule in China in 1911. He is one of the very few figures honoured in both mainland China and Taiwan.
Key achievements
- One of the first two graduates of the Hong Kong medical college
- First provisional president of the Republic of China, 1912
Universities
Hong Kong Island, Pok Fu Lam
Graduated in 1892 from the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese, a predecessor institution of HKU, as one of its first two graduates.
Facts
- He told an audience at the university in 1923 that Hong Kong was the birthplace of his revolutionary ideas, because he could compare its orderly government with what he saw at home.
- He was kidnapped by Chinese legation staff in London in 1896 and freed after a former teacher raised the alarm in the press.
- He was travelling in the United States when the 1911 revolution actually broke out and learned about it from a newspaper.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.