Purple Mountain, Nanjing (南京钟山)

Why Go

A Monument Both Sides Still Keep

1. The man in the tomb

Sun Yat-sen spent most of his adult life abroad raising money and support for the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, was out of the country when it actually fell in 1911, came back to serve briefly as provisional president of the new republic, and then spent his remaining years trying and largely failing to unify a country that had broken into warlord territories. He died in Beijing in 1925 with that work unfinished.

What he left was a programme rather than a state: the Three Principles of the People, usually rendered as nationalism, popular sovereignty and the people’s livelihood. Those three phrases are carved in pairs of characters over the three doorways of the hall at the top of the stairs, which is visible in one of the pictures below. A visitor who knows to look for them is reading the argument the building was put up to make.

The part worth understanding before arriving is what happened to his reputation afterwards. The party he founded lost the civil war and withdrew to Taiwan, where he is the father of the nation. The party that won honours him too, as the forerunner of the revolution it completed. Both claims are official, both are still made, and the result is a monument that neither side has any interest in removing.

2. The emblem is still on the ceiling

That shared claim is not an abstraction here, and the photographs show it. The ceiling of the memorial hall carries a white twelve-rayed sun on a blue ground. That is the emblem of the Kuomintang and the device in the canton of the flag still flown on Taiwan. The floor of the burial chamber below repeats the theme in a star of blue and yellow mosaic. The gateway on the approach is carved with a phrase from a classical text, often translated as the world belongs to all, which Sun used as his motto throughout his career.

None of it has been altered, and the site is maintained by the government of the People’s Republic. Foreign visitors sometimes assume this must be an oversight or a recent concession. It is neither. Sun occupies a position in the official history of the mainland that makes the emblem part of his monument rather than a competing flag, and it has stayed in place through periods when very little else from that era did.

This page takes no position on the politics and is not the place to settle them. What it can usefully do is tell a visitor what they are looking at, because without that the hall reads as a handsome stairway with a statue at the top, and the most interesting thing in it goes straight past.

3. The building is an argument about style

The mausoleum was designed in the 1920s through a public competition, won by a young Chinese architect who did not live to see it finished. The problem he was set was a real one at the time: what should a modern Chinese public monument look like, when the imperial system that produced the old building types had just been abolished and the obvious alternative was to copy Europe?

The answer is in the pictures. The hall is a plain squared mass of white granite, monumental in a way no Chinese hall had been, approached up a formal stairway that owes more to Washington or Paris than to a Ming tomb. On top of it sits a Chinese roof in blue glazed tile, and inside it the decoration is coffered, painted and gilded in the traditional manner. It is deliberately both, and the blue was chosen to match the party colours rather than the imperial yellow on the roofs a few hundred metres away.

That is also why the stairway matters more than its length. The whole composition is built to be climbed slowly on a single axis, with the hall withheld behind each successive terrace and the city dropping away behind. Taking the shuttle to the top and walking down reverses the argument the building is making.

Orientation

Three Sites, One Hill

The mountain sits immediately east of the city and is covered in forest. Three things on it matter, and they are separate visits rather than one walk. The mausoleum occupies a slope on one side, laid out on a single straight axis: an ornamental archway, a gate, a pavilion, then the long stairway, then the hall and the chamber behind it. There is one route and it goes up.

The Ming tomb lies to the west of it, and is organised completely differently: a long curving avenue lined with stone animals and officials leading to a walled enclosure and a burial mound, with the buildings in front of it largely gone. The Buddhist foundation sits between the two. Shuttle transport runs between them, and working out how it operates on the day is worth doing before setting off rather than after climbing the stairs.

Context

Why He Is Buried Here

Nanjing was the capital of the republic Sun helped create, and choosing it was itself an argument. The Qing had ruled from Beijing; putting the new government in Nanjing asserted a break with that and a link to the Ming, the last dynasty ruled by Han Chinese, whose founder had made his capital in this city and was buried on this hill. Sun is said to have chosen the site himself while out in the hills near the Ming tomb.

Placing his monument within sight of an emperor’s is the point rather than a coincidence. The Ming tomb is approached along a curving spirit way of carved animals, a form that had been fixed by ritual for centuries. The mausoleum answers it with a straight axis, a public stairway anyone may climb, and a hall whose doors carry a political programme rather than a reign title. One is a tomb designed to be visited by officials performing rites. The other was designed from the start to be visited by citizens.

The reburial in 1929 was staged as a national event, with the coffin brought down from Beijing by train. Within two decades the government that organised it had lost the country. That the monument survived the change, and that the emblem of the defeated party is still on its ceiling, is the single most surprising thing about the site and the reason it is worth more than a photograph from the bottom of the steps. This site covers the river quarter in the same city at the Confucius Temple and Qinhuai riverside.

Where to Base

Nanjing (南京)

Nanjing has been the capital of China several times and carries the buildings of each attempt, along with the memorial to the massacre of 1937. It sits on the Yangtze about an hour and a half from Shanghai by fast train, which makes it among the easiest major Chinese cities to add to a trip and among the most often skipped.

This mountain is the city’s principal sight and takes a full day. The city wall, the museum and the memorial fill a second, and the river quarter fills an evening, which makes two nights the sensible minimum for anyone stopping at all.