He failed at revolution ten times, succeeded on the eleventh — and ended imperial China.
Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) — Sun Zhongshan — was the revolutionary who ended two millennia of imperial rule in China: founder of the Tongmenghui revolutionary alliance, architect of the 1911 Xinhai Revolution that toppled the Qing dynasty, and first provisional president of the Republic of China in 1912.
His Three Principles of the People — nationalism, democracy, livelihood — remain the official ideology of Taiwan and are ritually honored in Beijing. He is the only 20th-century Chinese leader revered on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
Born to a peasant family in Guangdong in 1866 and trained as a physician in Hong Kong, Sun concluded that China’s humiliations — the Opium Wars, the Boxer debacle — were incurable under the Qing. In 1894 he founded the Revive China Society in Honolulu; in 1905 in Tokyo he merged the exile groups into the Tongmenghui, the Revolutionary Alliance, with the program: expel the Manchus, restore China, establish a republic, equalize land rights.
Between 1895 and 1911 he launched ten failed uprisings — each crushed, each teaching the network to organize better. Hunted by Qing agents, he raised funds from overseas Chinese communities across Southeast Asia, America and Europe: the revolution was crowdfunded by the diaspora.
The eleventh attempt succeeded almost by accident: the Wuchang Uprising of October 10, 1911 — Double Ten — began as a mutiny by revolutionary soldiers, and province after province declared independence from the Qing. Sun was in Denver, Colorado, fundraising when he read about it in the newspapers; he rushed home via London.
On January 1, 1912, he was inaugurated provisional president in Nanjing. Within weeks he resigned in favor of the Qing general Yuan Shikai — a deal to secure the dynasty’s abdication (the child emperor Puyi stepped down on February 12, 1912). The republic was born; its father had held power for barely six weeks.
Yuan’s betrayal — he made himself emperor in 1915 — drove Sun back to revolution. He rebuilt his party as the Kuomintang, allied tactically with the Soviet Union and the young Chinese Communist Party, and planned the Northern Expedition to reunify China. He died of liver cancer in Beijing on March 12, 1925, before it began.
Chiang Kai-shek completed the expedition and built the KMT state in Sun’s name; Mao’s People’s Republic calls him “the forerunner of the democratic revolution.” Both display his portrait — the revolutionary too early for power, claimed by every power since.
His mausoleum in Nanjing — a vast stairway climbing Purple Mountain, built by the Nationalist government in 1929 — remains a pilgrimage site for officials from both Taipei and Beijing, one of the few places where the two Chinas still honor the same man.
