Dr.Sun Yat-Sen's Memorial Hall

This guide to Dr. Sun Yat-sen's Memorial Hall in Guangzhou starts under its blue-tiled octagonal dome, spanning seventy-one meters with no column between you and the stage, an engineering feat that was nearly impossible in the late 1920s. It traces the ground back to 1922, when Sun Yat-sen ran his fragile revolutionary government from a presidential palace on this spot until his ally Chen Jiongming turned on him and shelled it through the night, forcing Sun and his wife Soong Ching-ling to flee. After Sun's death in 1925, ordinary people across Guangzhou and overseas funded a hall in his honor, awarded by competition to a young architect named Lu Yanzhi, who was also drawing Sun's mausoleum in Nanjing but died before either building was finished.