Sun Yat Sen - and Guangzhou

I went to the Sun Yat Sen Memorial Park Sunday - it was unplanned & unscheduled (I took a bunch of teachers out for breakfast to celebrate the Autumn Festival). Can't help mentioning that we went via Shamian - to show a couple of the people who hadn't seen it before - and saw 11 wedding photograph parties, definitely a new record. I guess it was the public holiday.

Anyway, being unplanned & unscheduled, I only had the mobile phone with me for a camera - I might go back some time and retake these photos because they were quite interesting.

It's not a fantastic museum, but it's a better attempt than the one at Martyrs' Park with which it inevitably overlaps (history being what it is) to some extent. And the hall, which you can see behind the statue, has a really fine interior, including a stunning dome and some very 30's stained glass panels around the dome - pale beige & washed out pastel blue & greens. The effect of light is very fine, almost glowing. 

Anyway, Sun Yat Sen - who had many names - was one heck of a guy & I suggest reading about him elsewhere in more detail. All I can say is that personally, as someone who has on several occasions struggled to persuade 3 departments in a large company to move in the same direction at the same time towards a mutually beneficial end, my admiration for major political figures continues to grow. That any politician can achieve anything is remarkable - that they can achieve as much as SYS in such an enormously complex political environment is nothing short of astonishing. The museum suggests he died of overwork - easy to believe.

The museum does manage to give at least some impression of this tumult. But what particularly caught my atttention was some of the material about Guangzhou, so I'm really just going to put this down here.

This is an attempt to show all the historic Guangzhous superimposed on a schematic of the modern city. (I believe that if you double click on the picture you will get a larger version.)  YOu can see the effective boundary of the modern city along the railway line. Or you could check out Google Earth. 

The legend tells us: (sorry, couldn't manage to format this any better)

• The small solid black rectangle is the original Pan Yu, the settlement in the Qin Dynasty (221 BCE). The current Pan Yu is about 15 km south.
  
• Slightly to its left is an unfilled rectangle representing the Yue wall during the Han Period (Yue is the family who gave their name to the language spoken in the South, we call it Cantonese, but formally it is "Yue Hua" or maybe "Yue Wu") 
• The surrounding cross-hatch identifies a wall/area dating back to the Three Kingdoms (250 CE). 
  
• The diagonally hatched area is the Song Dynasty Guangzhou.
  
• The heavily dashed line is the Ming Dynasty wall
  
• The Qing wall extensions are shown by the dots on the left and right sides of the Ming Walls, leading down to the river.

Not a skerrick of those walls is visble today.

This 19th Century (well, it was drawn in 1900) map gives you an idea of the Qing walls, 11 years before the Qing dynasty ceased to exist. By this time Sun Yat Sen was criss-crossing the world raising money & consciousnesses to establish a republic.

The pink section  on the left of the city walls you could probably characterise as the outgrowth of international trade. Shamian, about which I keep banging on, is the orangey-saucer shaped "island" at the bottom of the pink. 

This map dates from 1647 which is very early in the Qing Dynasty. It shows the extended walls leading down to the river very clearly. Another thing that you can see in this map is the idea that Guangzhou is surrounded by mountains - not a feeling I particularly have, I suspect partly because of pollution and partly because of skyscrapers, and to a large degree because I spend most of my time indoors. But it has been the city of five mountains, and there is still a subway station called just that (another cluster of universities) and the next picture emphasises it even more.

Clearly not painted by somebody interested in urban geography, this dates from somewhat later in the Qing.

It's quite an interesting perspective - there is absolutely nowhere in the south you could look down on Guangzhou like this. So it's a mind's eye drawing.

This picure gives you a little idea of the way in which Bai Yun mountain has foothills that actually come right down into the city. The Sun Yat Sen memorial is built on the last hint of a foothill, providing a kind of balancing point between inside and outside the city.

It's worth having a look at Google Earth (again). There is an excellent photograph in it called "Pabellon de Sun Yat Sen" which looks back down onto the hall from the lower foothills. You can also, from slightly higher up, follow the line of the foothills back into the mountain proper.