Shanghai’s Sun Yat-sen Birthday Statue

On November 12 1933, grand birthday celebrations for Sun Yat-sen were underway in Shanghai. The birthday of the “father of the nation”, whose 1911 revolution ended more than 2,000 years of imperial rule, had been celebrated since his death in 1925, and on this autumn day at the Greater Shanghai City Hall, a grand statue of Sun was unveiled.

No better time than this weekend, the 90th anniversary of that unveiling, to tell the tale of Sun Yat-sen’s birthday statue.

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. Sun Yat-sen died in 1925, and commemorations began almost immediately, including a grand tomb in Nanjing. By 1928, a Shanghai statue to the father of the nation was first proposed. There were other priorities in the newly reunified China, so work didn’t begin on the statue until 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.

Left: City Hall, the location of the Sun Yat-sen statue (at the rear of the building). Right: Dong Dayou, the architect of the Greater Shanghai Plan.

Originally, the statue was designated for the 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 a group of 25,000 stood in the shadow of City Hall to witness the unveiling.

Sculptor Jiang Xiaojian was the Suzhou-born son of a Hanlin scholar. Jiang had studied art in Paris, and sculpted Sun’s likeness from a photograph taken in Tianjin in 1924, showing him in 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 given, and 3,000 Girl Guides and Boy Scouts paraded past. 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.”

Sun’s birthday statue continued to be a gathering point for celebrations, but in 1937, Japanese fighting in and around the area gravely damaged buildings and destroyed the statue. A heartbroken city left the spot empty until 2009, when Chinese sculptor Zhang Haiping created a replica and restored it to its original spot. The plaque notes that it was destroyed in 1937 by the Japanese army and reinstalled on December 8, 2009 – the anniversary of the Japanese occupation of Shanghai.

There are no longer Sun Yat-sen birthday celebrations in Shanghai, but the statue still stands, and that’s something.