Sun Yat Sen A Portrait

It was the dawn of a New Year and I was ready to make my resolutions. As I watched the countdown of 2012 and prepared myself to usher in 2013, I made a commitment to complete a 1- year photography project that would explore and encompass Vancouver's Chinatown.I began in the cold months of early 2013 and started walking around Chinatown rather casually. I usually started from the large gate standing over Pender Street and then worked my way around the various other avenues and roads that encompassed Vancouver's Chinatown. I explored shops and stalls and observed people going about their daily lives, all while documenting it with my camera as best as I could.As I passed by people and observed both from a distance and up-close, a thought came to me: I was an outsider. I didn't know anyone in Chinatown and having not grown up in the neighborhood I found myself in unfamiliar territory. This meant that everything was fresh and new to me as I walked around the Chinatown streets but also meant that, despite a few visits to Chinatown in my earlier years, I was basically a blank canvas.

This is a new release of the original 1934 edition.

This biography introduces readers to the life and times of Sun Yatsen (1866-1925), a Chinese revolutionary whose popularity stretches across Greater China and into the 21st century. Concise and incisive, each interpretive biography in the Library of World Biography Series focuses on a person whose actions and ideas either significantly influenced world events or whose life reflects important themes and developments in global history. Sun Yatsen (1866-1925) was ceaselessly dynamic, leading a movement among Chinese to overthrow the last traditional dynasty of China's history and replace it with a modern-style republic. When this republic became a reality, he briefly served as its president, afterward continuing to influence his country for decades to come through the political party he created, the controversial foreign assistance he accepted, and the many writings he left behind. China is today rapidly transforming itself into the international powerhouse that Sun envisioned. In this respect, Sun's life story--occurring as it did on the dividing line between traditional dynastic rule and the search for what would replace it--enables us to understand a broad swath of China's road to contemporary prominence.

"In view of the 100th anniversary of the 1911 Revolution and Sun Yat-sen's relations with the Nanyang communities, the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and the Chinese Heritage Centre came together to host a two-day bilingual conference on the three-way relations between Sun Yat-sen, Nanyang and the 1911 Revolution in October 2011 in Singapore. This volume is a collection of papers in English presented at the conference"--Backcover.