Sun Yat-sen (12 November 1866 – 12 March 1925) was the provisional President of the Republic of China from 1 January to 10 March 1912, succeeding Emperor Puyi and preceding Yuan Shikai. Sun Yat-sen was the leader of the Chinese Revolution of 1911 and overthrew the Qing dynasty of Manchus, but Yuan Shikai seized power as a dictator. Yat-sen and Song Jiaoren jointly founded the Kuomintang party in 1912, and from 1919 to 1925 he was president of the party.
Biography[]
Sun Wen was born on 12 November 1866 was born in Xiangshan County, Guangdong in the Qing dynasty of China. He gained the nickname "Zhongshan" from his teacher Toten Miyazaki, coming from his teacher's Japanese name for him, "Nakayama". In English, his name was transliterated as "Sun Yat-sen". Sun Yat-sen converted to Christianity and learned the English language so quickly that King Kalakaua of Hawaii gave him a special award. Yat-sen developed anti-Qing sentiment and was known as one of the "Four Bandits", four anti-Qing activists. After the defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War, Sun Yat-sen decided to join a group that sought to turn China into a modern nation-state. He lived in Hawaii for quite some time, obtaining a Hawaiian birth certificate to prevent him from being expelled in the Chinese Exclusion Act. In 1911, he was one of the leaders of the Chinese Revolution, overthrowing Emperor Puyi and establishing a new republic. For three months, he served as the provisional president of China, but Yuan Shikai seized power. He helped in founding the Kuomintang, but a Kuomintang rebellion against Shikai's dictatorship failed and KMT co-founder Song Jiaoren was assassinated. Sun Yat-sen allied with Communist China in the following years as the Chinese Civil War broke out between the KMT and warlords, and Sun Yat-sen died in 1925 at the age of 58 from liver cancer at a hospital in Peking (Beijing).