June, 2010: Guangzhou, China.

Nearly a century after the revolution that toppled the Qing dynasty and gave birth to the Republic of China, Guangdong remain somewhat the rebel. Just weeks after I left Guangzhou, the Guangzhou Cantonese was out on the street protesting against the central government plan to encourage the use of Mandarin over the local dialect. It is then no wonder that the father of the republic is a son of Guangzhou.
Sun Yat-Sen's final resting place is in Nanjing, but he was born in Guangzhou, and it is here that you will find a memorial hall dedicated to the man and his work.
With the centennial of the revolution coming around, there is now a debate on the role of Sun on both side of the Taiwan straits. Some thinks it is time that the man should be allowed to step down from the pesdestral, to be seen as one who have great big ideas but wasn't that great when it comes to executing them. He was even known to contemporaries as "Sun the boastful".
Other argued that it was because of his lack of powess in executing his ideas that his name wasn't tainted like the strong men from both end of the Nationalist-Communist divide: Chang Kai-Shek and Mao Ze-Dong. While the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China may not agree on many things, both Taiwan and China recognized him as the father of the nation.
Interestingly, Guangdong is also home to Wang Jing-Wei. He started his career as a patriot of the republic, with an attempted assasination of a Qing prince, was a close associate of Sun Yat-Sen (close enough to have drafted his final will), but ended up with his name becoming synonymous to "traitor" when he became the head of Japan's puppet government in Guangdong.


















If you visit a smaller building besides the hall, there will be display of photoes of places dotting Guangzhou city commerating the revolution. And there are many of them. With my train leaving for WuHan the next afternoon,there is just one place I could visit the next morning: the memorial park to the 72 martyrs of the republic.
Here you will find the tomb of the 72 martyrs.
Hmmm....I am sure she is French, currently a permanent resident in New York, and her paper replica made a brief appearance up north in TainAnMen Square many years ago during an incident which the Chinese Communist Party would rather you have no recollection of.
Besides that of the 72 martyrs, there are tombs of some other players during the birth and early years of the republic. Some simple, some grand, some....whimsical.
I guess in those days before Facebook, when you can't show your conviction to a cause by simply starting a petition page, the only way is to put your life on the line.