Just as compasses do in China, the statue of Sun Yat-sen in Nanjing’s Xinjiekou that marks the very centre of our City, faces south. Perhaps out of respect for the accepted way of doing things, but more pragmatically so that he may face his hometown of Zhongshan in Guangdong Province.
But the statue we cannot miss today, sited in Xinjiekou most recently in 1996 on the 130th anniversary of Sun’s birth, has a predecessor, several in fact. And fascinatingly, their links lie across the East China Sea, in Japan.
Umeya Shokichi was a renowned Japanese film promoter and producer. A 2-decade long financial supporter of Sun, Umeya was a guest of honour at Sun’s state funeral, where he was the only non-family member to accompany Sun’s casket. Umeya also read an elegy to Sun before going on to sell property in order to pay for the original bronze statue in March of 1929, some 4 years after Sun’s death.
As per the then “Japan Spotlight” bimonthly magazine in 2006, “Chinese newspapers praised Umeya as the ‘benefactor of China’, at a time when the Chinese view of Japan was worsening with each passing day”.
When complete, the statue, 2.9 metres high, weighing over a tonne and posturing Sun giving a public speech, was transported from Japan to China.
The statue would provide the mould for the others to be cast, to be then sited in the Huangpu Military Academy in Guangzhou, Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou and the National Father Memorial Hall in Macau. In Nanjing, it was originally sited in the KMT Central Military Academy.
Making its first appearance in Xinjiekou in November of 1942, on the eve of the 76th anniversary of Sun’s birth, the tumultuous second half of the 1960s prompted Premier Zhou Enlai to issue instructions to protect the statue. Hence, the Nanjing Municipal Party Committee removed the bronze statue from Xinjiekou Square and transported it to the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum.
Moved from here to there over the years, the statue found its final resting place on 12 March, 1985, being the 60th anniversary of the death of Sun, when the Sutra Library of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum became the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. The statue sits on the stone steps in front of the building to this day.
It would then take until 1996 for its successor to be revealed, when Chinese sculptor Dai Guangwen cast another bronze statue of Sun, this time holding a cane in his right hand and wearing a suit jacket, waistcoat and tie. Weighing 6.2 tonnes and 5.37 metres tall, the new statue was in that same year erected back in Nanjing’s Xinjiekou Square. Dai had taken the initiative for this to be his responsibility without receiving a penny.
The modern world was then to come calling, and with it construction of the Nanjing Metro.
In 2001, Xinjiekou Square was temporarily demolished and Dai’s version of the statue was moved to a military warehouse at Xinmenkou in the north of the city. Half a year later, it was decamped once again, to a facility in Laoshan of Pukou District.
As Xinjiekou Metro Station was completed almost a decade later, the founder of modern China received his final send off. The statue came to stand once again in the centre of Xinjiekou Square, revealed to the public the morning of 13 May. Sun may not have been a communist, but he was rightfully afforded the wearing of red silk for the occasion.
