Roots
Day Thirty Nine
A few years ago before the Covid pandemic, my family were visiting the little town of Harndorf in Adelaide in South Australia. We had stayed the night before and were out exploring the beautiful German settlement early in the morning and found the breakfast place open. Cold and hungry, we were warmly welcomed into the cosy little restaurant.
While the ladies were making the orders, I was attracted by the many portraits hanging on the wall, mostly in black and white. They were portraits of artists, writers, footballers and celebrities. I quickly noted they were mainly men of Irish descent.
Before long, the owner of the restaurant came out and saw me gazing at the photographs. We exchanged greetings and my question about the Irishness of the personalities got him started into an engaging conversation, especially as he saw my interest in Irish history.
His restaurant menu, as it turned out, was also a collection of timelines and anecdotes on Irish history, especially on the migration of the Irish people who went all over the world, in search of peace from conflicts, and better prospects as they were driven by famine and the depression at home. What a creative and passionate Irish man this was.
The passion for history and learning from history can be contagious. It reminded me of my own interest in history, not only of Singapore but also of world history and of course, Chinese history. I have been a student of Chinese history my whole life since nearly forty years ago. The Chinese adage, “Only by knowing the past can we understand the present” is true. Only with deep appreciation of our roots can we celebrate our culture and identity.
One of the personalities in history whom I have admired was Dr Sun Yatsen, acclaimed as the Father of Modern China. I have been to the Sun Yatsen Museum (Wan Qing Yuan) in Singapore numerous times. But it was the Sun Yatsen Memorial in Nanjing’s Purple Mountain (Zijin Shan) which I appreciated the most.
It was a Good Friday spring morning when I was in Nanjing in 2002 that I made my first trip up to the memorial. The city was bustling with the sounds of cicada and the day before, I had just climbed the 16th century Ming palace wall in the imperial street. Now I am making my ascent to the hill where Dr Sun’s tomb was situated.
Every step I climbed was like an ascent as a pilgrim, as I gave thanks to God in remembrance of this man. Dr Sun had laid aside his medical career and plunged himself into a republican revolution to help usher China into a new historic era, from two thousand years of Imperial dynastic rule into a republic.
As I stood before his tomb, I thought of his life and journeys around the world, awakening the Chinese both in China and in the diaspora to the need to strengthen China which had seen a century of humiliation and unequal treaties imposed on her by the Western powers. The solution was to overthrow the weak and ineffectual Qing regime spiraling downward in a period of dynastic decline over a hundred years due to inept leaders on the throne. Support for Dr Sun’s revolution came from within China and without, with merchants in Nanyang (Southeast Asia) who had made good and amassed wealth heartily lending support an making tremendous contribution to the funds needed for the revolution.
After a few failed attempts, the Revolution succeeded in the October of 1911. Dr Sun became the provisional President of the new Republic of China. Unfortunately his stint was to be too short as he had to hand over the reins of power to Yuan Shikai who held military power. He went into exile in Japan but eventually helped to build the Kuomintang nationalist party, consolidated his power base and started a military academy which provided him with troops needed to rule a country fragmented by warlords vying for a piece of the pie.
At the Whampoa Academy, Dr Sun groomed Chiang Kaishek as the generalissimo who would become his protege and successor to the vision of the new Republic. Dr Sun Died prematurely of liver cancer in March 1925 and was buried in Beijing. But he had indicated his wish to be buried in Nanjing’s Zijin Shan and his body was moved in 1929 after the memorial was built.
In 2004, I took a trip to the Zhongshan Harbour in Nanjing and traced the route where Dr Sun’s body was brought across the Yangzi River from Beijing to Zijin Shan. Ted, a local Nanjing medical doctor and a classmate of mine in seminary in the early 90s, led the way in my own historical journey towards Sun’s Memorial.
Sun must have learnt of Zhu Geliang’s advice given to Sun Quan, of the Three Kingdom fame, that Zijin Shan was a treasure trove befitting a king. What amazed me most about the Memorial was not so much the geomancy (fengshui) as it was about the winning design, made out in the shape of a Chinese bell.
The designer, apparently a student then, clinched the award because of her philosophical idea that the bell was fitting for Dr Sun, who had spent his entire life trying to awaken the Chinese people from the deep slumber towards the ideals of republican revolution. She contended that even in his death, he continues to rouse the Chinese consciousness to the republican ideals with the symbolic tolling of the bell.
Years later, when I was in Hangzhou in Zhejiang province, I took the opportunity to make a trip out of the beaten tourist track to visit the small village of Longmen. I have heard of this old heritage village with buildings built during the Ming dynasty, that this was home of the Sun family. This was the illustrious lineage which stretched from Sun Quan of Wu Kingdom (one of the Three Kingdoms) to Dr Sun Yatsen over nearly two thousand years. I visited the ancestral hall and saw the chart where the genealogy (family tree) was displayed. What an amazing family of members who had made history and made contributions to the nation of China.
History can inspire our present towards the awaited future. Our days on earth may be short (or long) and time is fleeting but we can make our lives count. We may not have our portraits hanging on walls of restaurants or tombs built as memorial. But as Longfellow reminded us, we can be more than dumb driven cattle on a funeral march to the grave. We can make our lives heroic and help make lives better for others…
“Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.”
Journey with me over these 40 days in reflecting on life and hope in the wilderness.
See previous day’s reflection on Heaven in a Wild Flower.
See the next reflection on The Donkey at the Great Wall
