Shanghai’s Sun Yat-sen Statue

A hundred years ago today, on March 12 1925, Sun Yat-sen drew his last breath. The untimely death of the man who overthrew imperial Qing rule and put China on the road to modernity ushered in a multitude of commemorations around the country and around the world: a mausoleum, memorial halls, statues in his likeness. Sun was remembered each year on the anniversaries of his death and of his birth.

So it was that on an autumn day in November 1933, a grand statue of Sun was unveiled in a far suburb of Shanghai. The story of that statue, its fate and its revival, is quite a tale.