The doctor turned professional revolutionary honoured as the Republic of China’s ‘Father of the Nation’ in Taiwan and commemorated on the mainland as a great revolutionary forerunner — the figurehead of the 1911 revolution that toppled more than two thousand years of imperial rule, the first provisional president of the Republic of China for a matter of weeks in 1912, and the author of the 'Three Principles of the People,' who spent decades in exile plotting failed uprisings against the Qing and died in 1925 before reunification, leaving an unfinished revolution and a record that scholars judge thinner in governing power than in inspiring symbol.
Sun Yat-sen is the rare modern Chinese figure that both Chinas claim. The Communist mainland and Nationalist Taiwan agree on almost nothing, yet both claim Sun: Taiwan as the Republic of China’s Father of the Nation, the mainland as a great revolutionary forerunner. His portrait has been displayed in Tiananmen Square on major national occasions; his face appears on Taiwan's money. He spent most of his life abroad, raising funds and plotting uprisings against the empire that nearly all failed. When the revolution finally came in 1911, he was overseas and learned of it from a newspaper. He served as the new republic's first provisional president for a little over two months before handing power to a general who betrayed it. He was less a ruler than a tireless symbol, and that symbol outlived every government he failed to build.