Shanghai’s Sun Yat-sen Statue
A hundred years ago today, on March 12 1925, Sun Yat-sen drew his last breath. The untimely death of the man who overthrew imperial Qing rule and put China on the road to modernity ushered in a multitude of commemorations around the country and around the world: a mausoleum, memorial halls, statues in his likeness. Sun was remembered each year on the anniversaries of his death and of his birth.
So it was that on an autumn day in November 1933, a grand statue of Sun was unveiled in a far suburb of Shanghai. The story of that statue, its fate and its revival, is quite a tale.
Sun Yat-sen in the 1910s (photo: Wikipedia) and his birthday statue, erected November 12, 1933 (photo: Shanghai University of Sports archives)
It’s a tale with some twists and turns, for such were the times. Commemorations around the country began almost immediately after Sun’s death, including a magnificent mausoleum in the then-capital, Nanjing. Amid this flurry of memorials, a statue to the father of the nation was proposed for Shanghai in 1928. But the city, and the nation, had other priorities. After more than a decade of being carved up into warlord fiefdoms, China had just been reunified, in 1927, under Sun’s lieutenant, Chiang Kai-shek. The idea of a statue wasn’t forgotten, though, and work began in February 1933.
By then, the Greater Shanghai Plan for the construction of a new government center was underway in Jiangwan: a Chinese modernist enclave designed by Chinese architect Dong Dayou for the Chinese government of Shanghai. This symbol of new Shanghai would seem to be the ideal place for a statue of Sun—and indeed, that’s where the statue ended up—but it wasn’t the first choice of location.
Originally, the statue was designated for Shanghai’s North Railway Station. But the station’s destruction at the hands of the Japanese during the January 28 Incident in 1932 put paid to that idea. So it came to be that at 10am on November 12, 1933 – Sun’s birthday – a group of 25,000 stood in the shadow of City Hall to witness the unveiling.
The sculptor of the Sun statue, Jiang Xiaojian, came from a scholarly family in Suzhou: His father was a Hanlin scholar, part of an elite group that served the Emperor as advisors and secretaries. Jiang, who had studied art in Paris, based his sculpture on a photograph taken in Tianjin in 1924, featuring Sun sporting a long Chinese robe, his customary felt hat in his right hand, and his stick in his left.
Unveiling the Sun Yat-sen Statue, November 12, 1933.
With Mayor Wu Tiecheng presiding, speeches were made, awards were presented, and the words from Sun’s will were read, as they were on every birth and death anniversary:
“I have served the cause of the People’s Revolution for forty years, during which time my object has consistently been to secure liberty and equality for our country.”
Three thousand Girl Guides and Boy Scouts paraded past, and then, to collective oohs and ahs, Mayor Wu unveiled the 5’5” bronze statue. On its base, the inscription read: “Erected by Chinese public bodies in Shanghai, 1933.”
The Sun statue continued to be a gathering point for commemorations, but in 1937, disaster struck. Heavy Japanese fighting in and around the area destroyed the statue and gravely damaged the Greater Shanghai Plan buildings. Then the Japanese banned Sun’s birthday celebrations, and although the celebrations returned briefly under the Wang Jingwei collaborationist regime, Sun statues were removed.
A heartbroken postwar city, once again, had other priorities. The spot where the statue once stood was left empty until 2009, when Chinese sculptor Zhang Haiping created a replica. The statue was finally restored it to its original spot, now part of the Shanghai University of Sport. The plaque notes that the original was destroyed in 1937 by the Japanese army and reinstalled on a significant historical date: December 8, 2009, the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. That was when the Japanese, who were already occupying the Chinese parts of the city, occupied Shanghai’s International Settlement.
There are no longer gatherings under Sun Yat-sen’s statue, but on the centennial of his death, it’s worth telling the story of the birth, death, and revival of this 92-year-old statue.
The Sun statue is now part of the Shanghai University of Sport’s Jiangwan site, 399 Changhai Lu
The most famous Sun statue in Shanghai is in front of the former Sun Yat-sen Residence, 7 Xiangshan Lu.