Rudolf G. Wagner

The following study titled ‘Ritual, Architecture, Politics, and Publicity During the Republic: Enshrining Sun Yat-sen’ is reproduced with the kind permission of the author. It originally appeared in Jeffrey W. Cody, Nancy S. Steinhardt and Tony Atkin, eds, Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-Arts, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011, pp.236-278. The style of the original has been retained. For information on the author, see here.

For the discussions, and plans, related to the mausoleum for Mao Zedong, founder of the People’s Republic of China, some fifty years later in 1976, see Sang Ye with Geremie R. Barmé, ‘The Chairman Mao Memorial Hall’ in ‘A Beijing That Isn’t (Part I)‘, China Heritage Quarterly, No.14 (June 2008).

— The Editor

____________

The Nanjing Government’s Sun

In April 1925, shortly after the Beijing ritual, the GMD Central Executive Committee established a twelve-member Preparation Committee for the Management of the Director’s [Sun’s] Burial. It had a seat in Shanghai and many of the original Beijing Committee were in it. The Committee’s main purpose was to arrange for the eventual burial of Sun on Mt. Zijin in Nanjing. This involved developing a concept for the building and the ceremonies, getting the funds, acquiring the land, setting the parameters into which the mausoleum had to fit, selecting an architect, supervising the construction, managing the transfer of Sun’s body to Nanjing, and developing the ritual for the reburial.

The first decision was about the exact location. The committee settled for the natural place, namely, the place chosen by Sun close to Zhu Yuanzhang’s tomb. It also settled a question of rank. Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum was to be higher than that of the Ming founder, symbolically indicating that Sun had done more than Zhu Yuanzhang. In death, Sun managed to hold on to his self-assigned rank.

The Funeral Committee saw the building as something like a fossilized ceremony, a permanent tribute that would, on a lower level of intensity, regenerate the ritual performance around Sun and initiate a climax in the great inauguration ritual. People would later be able to visit Sun individually and collectively, and thus the building would provide a permanent ritual and publicity environment.

While the Shanghai Committee was at work, the framework within which it was operating changed. The Northern Expedition was a great step towards one of Sun’s dreams, the creation of a regular national government. It was presented and could be read as a ritual activity to fulfil the last wish of the father of the nation. At the same time conditions in the immediate environs of Nanjing became safer as government control gradually extended. And finally, Sun Yat-sen also changed. With the split within the GMD leadership, in which Chiang Kai-shek increasingly asserted his authority, the Communists, and important part of Sun’s agenda and inheritance, went underground. The public persona eventually buried in Mt. Zijin now stood not for the United Front, but for the unification of the country, the destruction of the warlords, and the abrogation of the unequal treaties—in short for a happy union of things Chinese and Western, and for a Party-state that would be operated by an elite committed to lead the people out of their superstitious darkness. The person to be buried was also a statesman of international dimensions who in his political teachings drew on many sources, was relevant for many countries, and attracted a large following among overseas Chinese and foreigners. The mausoleum would have to reflect in its style the internationality of the artists contributing their work and even that of the ‘advisors’ asked to go through the plans and make recommendations to the Committee. All this had to be international. In discussions of the plans eventually submitted, one judge criticized the plan submitted by ‘Liberty’ as being ‘entirely in old Chinese style,’ which ‘did not seem to fit the spirit of Mr. [Sun] Zhongshan to merge China and the West.’[1]

No grand conceptual discussions were held. While the Committee continued to show the innovative boldness characteristic of the Beijing ritual, the political essence of the Sun to be buried was left undecided.

The Committee combined in the construction of Mr. Zijin a ceremonial hall with a mausoleum to house Sun’s body and open space for the public celebration of his political bequests. Already in 1925 a public contest was announced for the best plan within these specifications, and forty painters and architects, many of them foreign, entered the competition. Such a public contest itself was exceedingly modern, and the Committee further pioneered in calling upon a group of judges that included a foreigner, the ‘famous German architect Busch (Pushi),’ that is, E. Busch of Lothar Marcks and Busch in Hankou, who had been working in that city since 1904 and was to build the German Community Center and the Kaiser Wilhelm School in Shanghai in 1928-1929.[2] While Busch worked in China for more than twenty years, it is not clear what made him ‘famous’ enough to be included as part of the selection committee. The group would get only the plans, but not the names of the architects or their firms. But in the final judgment, the group and Committee largely followed the opinions of this one foreigner although Busch’s own postwar building strictly followed the international style and showed no trace of adaptive architecture.[3]

Henry K. Murphy’s (1977-1954) notion of ‘adaptive architecture’ offers us a term with implications far beyond the Sun Yat-sen tomb. The rules for the public competition as well as the statements of some of the judges show that this notion underlay the stipulations and allows us to define the concept in more detail. The stipulations separate what might be called the ‘functional core’ of the building from the implications of its outward appearance.

The Committee requested that the Ceremonial Hall ‘should make use of old Chinese forms, but should be of a character that marked it as special and commemorative; but it is also acceptable to create a new style based on the Chinese architectural spirit.’ And while for the tomb section ‘only Western forms’ were available as models, the tomb should ‘not be too distinct from the Ceremonial Hall’ within which it was supposed to be situated. Strangely, we do not find a stress on ‘harmony.’ The painful conflict between Chineseness and stability came to a head in that little phrase ‘although the Ceremonial Hall [is to] look as if it is making use of Chinese forms, it is to be designed for eternity,’ which is followed by the stipulation to use only stone and concrete. The functional core could not be entirely accommodated within the Chinese form. The four solid walls of the Ceremonial Hall effectively blocked too close a relationship. This rule shows that in the case of conflict, the Committee preferred to stay with the modern core functions rather than with a more ornamental Chineseness.[4] In the rules submitted to the judges for their evaluation, the Committee, as well as Sun’s surviving family members, stipulated that the plan should be ‘simple and majestic’ (jianpu zhuangyan) and should not go for the ‘luxurious and pompous’ (shechi huagui).[5] This disassociation of Republican values from Qing imperial taste for excessive ornament clearly set narrow limits on the Chineseness of the building.

The person to be permanently lying in state in Nanjing was not a Cantonese Baptist or a revolutionary always in search of funds, but a transnational linguistic hybrid, ‘Mr. Sun Zhongshan, the Founding President of the republic of China,’ a title where all the elements, from ‘Republic’ to ‘President’ to ‘Mr.’ to the revolutionary pseudonym ‘Zhongshan’ were part of a new international nationalist rhetoric. For lack of a clear term in the newly imported Western terminology, the Committee turned to the ancient term lingmu (royal tomb) for the mausoleum. This came with a price. Sun had been fighting the Qing dynasty, but this term had originally been reserved for the tombs of emperors.[6] The southern orientation of the slope on Mt. Zijin combined popular notions of a good geomancy (fengshui) for a tomb with imperial notions that the emperor should face the cardinal direction south. The architectural ensemble, a ceremonial hall, tomb, and space outside large enough for up to 50,000 participants had no precedent in Chinese architecture. In particular, ‘for the structure of the tomb (with the inmate remaining permanently visibly) there is no Chinese precent,’ only the new Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square came to mind.[7] Symbolically anticipating the stability of the new Republic, while still fearful of its actual instability, the ensemble had to be safe against robbers and fire. As a consequence there could be no open sides in the Ceremonial Hall as Chinese traditional architecture would have suggested, but rather ‘it had to have firm walls on all four sides,’ while the outward form of the building had to accommodate concerns about the Chinese identity of the new nation.[8]

The winner of the design contest was Lü Yanzhi (1894-1929), a young architect who had gone to the United States after graduation from Tsinghua in 1913, had received a degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell in 1918, and had worked for a while in the ‘Oriental Department’ of Henry K. Murphy’s New York office. The ‘renaissance of Chinese architecture’ was started by the likes of Murphy and was eventually continued by Chinese architects such as Lü Yanzhi whom Murphy styled ‘the most promising Chinese exponent’ of this type of adapted Chinese architecture.[9] Although most participants in the contest were foreign architectural firms, three Chinese reached the top three positions, all with adapted Chinese architecture and all winning a high degree of agreement among the judges.

Murphy, as we have read in Jeffrey Cody’s essay, had been working in China since the 1910s. He had opened an Oriental section in his New York office in 1914 and was unique among foreign architects in developing an appreciation for traditional Chinese architecture. Many young Chinese intellectuals involved in the New Culture and May Fourth Movements rejected this architecture as feudal and antiquarian. But Murphy quickly became involved in the many building projects of Western missionary and educational institutions such as Yenching University in Beijing, Ginling College for Girls in Nanjing, and the YMCA, all of which were trying to find some modicum of accommodation between Chinese and modern architecture. Advocating what he eventually termed the ‘adaptive Chinese architectural renaissance,’[10] Murphy was able to become a dominant voice in even larger Chinese projects, such as Sun Ke’s efforts at urban planning in Guangzhou (1922), and eventually the big urban plans for the new capital, Nanjing (1927), and for Greater Shanghai (1931), both of which could lay claim to follow Sun Yat-sen’s ideas on modern urban development as outlined in his The International Development of China (1922.)[11] In 1928 the government made Murphy its official advisor to guide the development of the new China in the field of architecture.

In Murphy’s proud words, the driving forces behind this architectural renaissance were men like himself, and the young Chinese learned about Chinese architecture from them. About Lü Yanzhi he wrote, ‘this young Chinese studied the principles of Chinese architecture in New York under an American,’ who was none other than Murphy himself.[12] As we read in the last chapter, Lü had been involved in Murphy’s offices in New York and Shanghai, and he remained on friendly terms with his former employer after setting up his own company in China in 1921.[13] One of the first firms run by Chinese architects and engineers, Lü’s company built a great meeting hall for the Shanghai Bank.[14]

Four U.S.-trained Chinese architects made the short list or won honorary prizes among the forty submissions in the Sun Memorial Hall competition (fig.1). After Lü Yanzhi, second prize went to Fan Wenzhao and third to another young Chinese architect with U.S. training, Yang Xizong. Also in late 1925, Lü Yanzhi was to win the contest for another memorial building for Sun, the very large Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall (Zhongshan jinian tang), in Guangzhou, which Murphy considered ‘a much finer piece of work, architecturally, than the mausoleum and more purely Chinese in basic concept as in details.’[15] Unlike in Beijing, the GMD had power in the Guangzhou government. This allowed it to impose the regular weekly worship of Sun Yat-sen on its administration and army at a very early date and to use state resources for collecting donations to finance the building.[16] The Guangzhou building, which could seat as many as 4,700 people, was completed only in 1931 by another Chinese colleague from Murphy’s New York office, Li Jinpei (Poy G. Lee) (fig.2).[17] Lü Yanzhi in the same year also designed the highly abstract 37-meter-high Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall (fig.3).[18] At the foot of the stele Sun Yat-sen’s testament is inscribed in golden letters in the calligraphy of Wu Zifu.[19] The two buildings are linked into an ensemble through a staircase with 498 stairs leading from the Memorial Hall to the stele.

Lü Yanzhi, who also supervised the actual building of the Nanjing Mausoleum until his death, left only a rough outline of a description of his submission on which to draw for a reading of the implied symbolisms of the building.[20] But much of it is easy to see, especially when contrasted with the other plans.[21] Whether from Western architects or Chinese architects trained in the West, the plans all share the characteristic of using Western architectural features and building materials combined with an outer form and accoutrements that alluded to Chinese architectural traditions, especially in the roof, which as architect/architectural historian Liang Sicheng noted, was the most marked particularity of Chinese architecture. The plans ranged from putting a Chinese-style roof on a European-style mausoleum (Fan Wenzhao) to a pagoda flanked by two smaller pagodas (Kales) to variants on imperial buildings. Lü Yanzhi’s explanation accompanying his successful application shows that this architect, who at the time was barely thirty years of age, was fully aware that his had to be a politicized building if he were to stand a chance in the competition. And he seems to have been willing to throw himself into the immensely tempting role of national architect of the future Party-state of the GMD with the same verve that had been brought to the National Mall in Washington and that would surround the new monuments and cities in the young Soviet Union, in Mussolini’s Rome, or Nazi Germany’s Berlin. No nation or Party-state could do without architects willing and able to transform politics into powerful architectural performances.

Lü was the only one among the contestants to have an overall landscaping design for the entire ensemble on the southern slope from the bottom of the wide staircase to the top of the mausoleum (fig.4). Lü wrote: ‘It forms the shape of a great bell,’ and indeed the maps accompanying the official record of the ceremonies in Nanjing, the Zongli feng’an shilu, clearly trace the outlines of this bell. It is a classic example of what might be called ‘adaptive political landscaping.’

The Memorial Hall is the bell’s crown and the Mausoleum with Sun’s body is the point from which the bell clapper hangs. The architect does not spell out the meaning of this bell. One of the judges, railway engineer Ling Hongxun, wrote in his evaluation in 1925: ‘The entire structure of this plan is simple and dignified; it is the best suited to the character of a mausoleum and to the shape of the terrain; it furthermore forms the entire surface into the shape of a bell, which carried the meaning of the wooden bell that is to wake up the world.’[22] Ling is referring to a muduo, a metal bell with a wooden clapper used in ancient China to announce important messages from the court. Through its use by Confucius in the Lunyu (Analects), however, it had come to assume a larger meaning. Claiming that the teachings of the Zhou dynasty had already been lost for a long time, Confucius asked rhetorically, ‘Is Heaven making use of me as a muduo?’[23] Commentators have explained that ‘this [bell] is the means to awaked the masses when government teachings are about to be dispensed.’ The bell carried enough of a modern meaning to allow Ling to reduce the symbolism to ‘wake up the world,’ which certainly was Sun’s purpose, and to even imply Sun’s ideas of strong guidance from the center. No bell of this type survives, and the fantasy illustrations in traditional sources do not correspond to the shape. (fig.5). Excavated bells from the Zhou do not have outward, but rather straight or inward curving mouths, and they are brought to sound by being struck from the outside.[24]

Chinese literature since the late Qing is full of descriptions of the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia.[25] The notion of liberty as expressed through a neologism (ziyou) at this time rarely referred to individual freedom, but to national independence. This actually fits the original meaning of the Liberty Bell, which was cast for the newly renamed Independence Hall in 1776. Its association with individual freedom only came later, with the abolitionist movement (fig.6).[26]

The shape of the Liberty Bell also fits the overall design of Lü Yanzhi’s landscape even better than the Zhou one. Still, the shape of Lü Yanzhi’s bell retains a distinct hybridity between the two.

The meaning of the bell froze into that contained in the official description of the layout of the entire plan from October 1931 so that it formed an ‘alarm bell (jingzhong) with far-reaching deeper meaning.’[27] In this double ‘adaptive’ meaning we have Sun at the center of calling the Chinese to action, this time, like the fathers of American independence calling on their countrymen. The reference to the United States was apt because the spread of President Wilson’s doctrine of sovereignty had been instrumental in firing up Chinese nationalism in 1919.[28] Its being defined as an ‘alarm bell’ indicates the urgency of the nation to wake up to its duties.

The layout used further spatial symbolisms to evoke Sun’s ideas. The last slope before reaching the platform on which the memorial buildings stand is divided into three sections, an allusion to the Three People’s Principles; this was an idea also found in some of the other plans (fig. 7). The stairs between the gate and this last ascent are divided into five sections, an allusion to Sun’s doctrine of the division of the five powers (see fig. 4). The ascent prompts the visitor to ponder the bequests of the great man enthroned at the top. The trees planted alongside the staircase leading to the memorial hall bowed to form a permanent spirit path (shendao), such as is found in the approach to the Ming tombs. In a gesture to tradition as well as a break with it, they replaced the sculptures of kneeling officials that often lined the path to imperial tombs. The anniversary of Sun’s death became National Tree Planting Day during the Republican period.[29]

 

At the top of the staircase, forming the standard and goal to be reached through the strenuous effort of climbing, was to be a giant statue of Sun, rising some eighteen feet. Probably for financial reasons, this monstrosity was never realized, but the plan shows the thinking behind it. Instead of the giant, a seated statue was installed in the Ceremonial Hall. The platform on which the giant was to stand could accommodate some 50,000 people. This was to be the nation’s shrine, where spectacular national ceremonies could be held.

The idea of giving political meaning to the overall spatial arrangement again shows the influence from the Mall in Washington. There the complex of Congress, White House, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and Jefferson Memorial is a reflection of the complex institutional interaction of the different powers as well as of the foundational personalities and ideas of the United States. Only after the MacMillan Plan was accepted in 1902 as the master plan for the entire area, and then the Lincoln Memorial was completed (1922) at the opposite end from the Capitol, did the Mall take on its present shape (figs.7 and 8). Lü Yanzhi was familiar with the Washington arrangement. In fact, he sent his draft for the Nanjing competition in 1925 from the United States.[30] No direct imitation was possible at that moment on the mountain slope outside Nanjing, but the idea of symbolizing the person enshrined there through landscaping adapts the general idea upon which the Mall was developed, and the long access path to the Memorial Hall with the stairs leading to it directly recalls the access to the Lincoln Memorial and the intent to inspire awe.

 

The Lincoln Memorial was also built in something of an adaptive style. Its classical columns did not follow the contemporary trends of modern architecture, but rather those of mausoleum and memorial architecture, where Greek forms were associated with grandeur, depth, dignity, and beauty. Lü envisaged a similar front for his building, to be topped by the marker of Chinese adaptive architecture, a Chinese-style roof (fig.1).

The Lincoln Ceremonial Hall with its towers ‘resembles,’ in Lü’s words, ‘a fortress.’[31] This was a reference to the premodern symbolism of the towers as defensive bulwarks, but had nothing to do with the actual security of the building. Militarily, the towers were dysfunctional; they were symbolically supplemented by the massive walls around the building, with their equally massive secured doors. This vision was for the future. The political reality in 1925 was perceived as that of a country divided among warlords, each of whom had close connections to one or another foreign power. There was hardly a national institution intact.[32] Lü’s building offered a vision of a sovereign-free China with firm borders, guarded by towers of military might, and in fact made with the most modern reinforced concrete, complete with a copper-plated roof. Such a roof was resistant to the slow corroding action of the plants that would settle in the cracks of the old imperial tiled roofs, with the predictable consequence of the eventual collapse of the imperial edifice.[33] To verify this reading of the building, we have to go inside. There we find the envisaged GMD state.

Inside the building, in the cupola, we have ‘the ornament of the blue sky and the bright sun,’ the Party emblem of the GMD, a white sun on blue ground (fig.9). The floor of the Hall is covered with red burned brick to correspond to the symbolism of ‘the entire land is red.’ The state flag sponsored by the GMD had the Party emblem set into a large red field to symbolize the revolutionary fervour throughout the land as well as the ‘partification’ (danghua) of the state, in other words the control of the state by the GMD and the penetration of GMD members and ideology into all state sectors. The emblem had been designed by Sun Yat-sen for an uprising of the predecessor of the GMD, the Tongmenghui, against the Qing. Squeezed between the cupola and the red floor, the visitor would be under pressure to live up to this expected fervour. Internationally, this arrangement was an innovation in propaganda architecture.

A copper roof being too expensive, the Committee eventually settled for blue tiles on the roof. This enhanced the symbolic elements, and its colour symbolism added its share to security. The cement floor around the Hall and the walls were all white, while the blue tiles in the GMD colours, qingtian bairi (blue sky, white sun), were repeated inside.[34] In 1946 Guo Moruo was to dream up a plan to adjust the outside of the building to completely match the inside by changing the white of the cement floor to red.[35] To make sure that the dominance of the GMD over the state was symbolically expressed, an inscription was carved into a commemorative stele that read: ‘The Chinese Republican Party has here laid to rest Mr. President Sun Zhongshan.’ This was a Party, not a state, burial.

The symbolic overdose the building offered does not stop here. Again we have an architect taking it upon himself to define in great detail the core pieces of GMD doctrinal canon at the time. On the walls Lü suggested having ‘the texts of Mr. Sun Zhongshan’s Testament and [his] Strategic Plan for State Building, etc.’[36] The ‘etc.’ does not leave the rest open, but alludes to a specific set of core texts designated by Sun Yat-sen himself in his last hours as the essence of his teachings to the nation. The Testament is also found behind the speaker’s podium in the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, which Lü designed for Guangzhou in the same year. Here Lü is clearly returning to the model of the Lincoln Memorial. The Lincoln Memorial is filled with political messages. They range from the number (thirty-six) of pillars surrounding the building and Lincoln standing for the thirty-six states of the United States in 1865 to the inscription over the statue:

In this temple
as in the hearts of the People
for whom he saved the Union
the memory of Abraham Lincoln
is enshrined forever.

Finally, two of Lincoln’s canonical texts have been engraved on the inner walls of the Memorial Hall, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural Address; they are supplemented by paintings ‘emblematic of Lincoln’s principles.’[37] When the Lincoln Memorial was built, it could, much like the Sun Mausoleum, also be read as a grand project for a future United States and not a satisfied celebration of past achievements and glories. It would, in fact, take many more years before the first black man was allowed to visit the Lincoln Memorial, not to mention to be the celebration speaker within the Hall. At the same time the difference between the two buildings remains marked; the Lincoln Memorial celebrates the leader of the nation, not a party politician.

Nevertheless, in the Lincoln Memorial, as in the Sun shrine, we have a relatively small, single-purpose, single-story building with one major room. Both buildings are set up as national pilgrimage shrines and share the feature of a gradual ascent to the sphere of the eternal and important to meet the political founder, who is surrounded by the architectural, decorative, and verbal symbolic paraphernalia of the nation he was to bring about. Lü follows the international fashion of the day, which for buildings for great national purposes followed the Beaux-Arts tradition rather than avant-garde trends such as the Bauhaus.

Sun’s Body in Crisis

Before any building activity even started, however, Sun’s body in Beijing was threatened, and with it the entire project. The maintenance or decay of such a body takes on a political meaning of its own and is linked to the viability and power of the thoughts and political bequests of the original occupant. This also occurred with the embalmed bodies of Lenin and Mao Zedong. As a rumour spread that one of the northern warlords, who was being battered by the GMD/CPC Northern Expedition, wanted to vent his wrath on Sun’s body in the Western Hills, the loyal guards opened the coffin and moved the body elsewhere. According to some sources, the ensuing natural decay of the body prompted the abandonment of exhibiting it in a coffin with a glass lid.[38] No change was made in the overall plans to have the Sun Memorial Hall in Nanjing combine a mausoleum and a memorial hall. Instead of a glass lid on the coffin through which the body could be seen, the visitors would find a sculpture of Sun on the coffin lid. The coffin itself was several meters below in an attached domed building, which was good for security (fig.10); visitors would look down onto Sun’s body or eventually sculpture in an architectural arrangement modelled on Ludovico Visconti’s tomb of Napoleon I in the Dome des Invalides in Paris (fig.11).[39] Needless to say, Visconti had studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.[40]

 

As is normal, there is a long way from a plan to a building, and many changes are made for financial, or in the present case also political, reasons. One major change was the replacement of the monumental standing sculpture of Sun by a much smaller statue of Sun sitting inside the Ceremonial Hall. This, in fact, followed the Lincoln Memorial Hall model even more closely than the original design.

Plans for the Lincoln Memorial Hall had begun in 1911. Eventually it was built by the Beaux-Arts designer Henry Bacon (1866-1924). After its opening in May 1922, Daniel French’s huge statue of a seated Lincoln quickly became a national icon (fig.12)[41]: ‘Before long a million people a year were coming to visit it. The figure is sitting on a high pedestal in this templed space as if on an altar and has instilled the hearts of many with patriotic reverence, even without deserving the name of a great work of art.’[42] Sun, like Lincoln, sits on a pedestal to which the spectator will look up in reverence. Sun’s sculpture, still an imposing fifteen feet, is from the hands of Paul Landowski (1875-1961), a Parisian sculptor and illustrator strongly influenced by Rodin and specialising in memorial sculpture, whose worldwide fame was peaking at the time (fig.13)[43]. He is best known for the gigantic statue of Christ dominating Rio de Janeiro.[44] GMD leaders such as Hu Hanmin, Sun Ke, and Wang Zhonghui had decided during their visits to Europe to ask a French sculptor, and eventually the Funeral Committee decided on Landowski. Sun Ke visited the artist in 1928, brought a film about Sun Yat-sen and sundry photographys to help Landowski in his drawings, and eventually sat in lieu of his father to allow the artist to make sketches.[45]

 

Landowski had no problem being a foreigner called upon to make the sculpture for this Chinese national monument, but he seems to have felt that Sun, being Chinese, definitely had to wear what Landowski considered authentic Chinese dress, even though, perhaps unknown to Landowski, Sun had worked so hard to abolish this very dress. It is a twist reminiscent of the debates about ‘adaptive architecture.’ Sun is depicted in a long scholar’s gown, but wears Western-style leather shoes.[46]

The reclining sculpture was placed over the coffin in the attached half-buried mausoleum building with its dome of reinforced concrete. This sculpture, which was to be on view instead of the body and which, of course, has no counterpart in the Lincoln Memorial, is by the Czech sculptor B.J. Koči (Gaoqi), who had been working in China since 1920 and had sculpted bas-reliefs and sculptures with Chinese themes, among them, as a Czech dictionary claims, a feminist, a beggar, and a Shanghai rickshaw puller.[47] This statue, which was accessible only on rare occasions to high dignitaries, properly wears the Zhongshan dress (fig.10). Koči also was commissioned to do a fine relief portrait of Lü Yanzhi, which was installed in the park of the Mausoleum in 1935 (fig.14). One earlier sculpture by him is known (fig.15).

 

By the time Landowski was asked to do the sculpture, the option of Sun standing at the top of the stairs was out of consideration. For the statue of Sun sitting inside the ceremonial hall, Landowski followed the Lincolnization of Sun Yat-sen by keeping very close to French’s Lincoln statue in Washington. He surrounded the sides of the pedestal on which Sun’s seat had been mounted with bas-reliefs on themes of GMD propaganda and hagiography, most probably suggested to him by the GMD leaders. They show Sun as a medical doctor treating small children whose parents have brought them to him in great numbers (fig.16). This is a reference to a statement in a Chinese classic, the Shangshu (Book of history). There, King Wen of Zhou exhorts one of his sons in principles of good government: ‘(Deal with them) as if you were protecting your own infants, and the people will be tranquil and orderly.’[48] The relief nicely interacts with Sun’s medical training and symbolically claims that the weak, namely, women, children, and the old, have trust in the man. The second relief is divided into two themes, ‘going abroad to make propaganda’ and ‘holding discussions on making revolution’ (fig.17). Both show Sun actively promoting the Chinese revolution among leaders abroad, and among overseas Chinese. They highlight the international dimension of his activities. In the third relief, the ‘revolution is achieved,’ and the ‘new parliament elects him to be president of the Republic.’ But the Revolution had not ended. Sun denounces Yuan Shikai, who tried to restore the monarchy, and in this way he saves the nation. He now relies on mobilizing the working people (fig.18).

 

 

Lü’s idea to have two canonical texts of Sun’s engraved on the walls was confirmed by the Committee meeting chaired by Cai Yuanpei on 27 October 1927.[49] Eventually, the Jianguo dawang was carved after Sun’s own head and the Testament was carved in the handwriting of Hu Hanmin.[50] But Chiang Kai-shek had been on the ascendant since the success of the Northern Expedition, and he needed the stature to be a close confidant. Already during the visit to Azure Cloud Monastery in Beijing to prepare for the southward transfer of the body, Chiang had taken over the ritual initiative by suddenly bursting into tears in front of Sun’s coffin, going to his knees, and then giving a long speech. He quickly consolidated his powers in the Funeral Committee by making it into a government organ under his direct orders. Given the importance and duration the inscriptions had in buttressing the legitimacy of the succession, there was no way to keep him from having his own hand clearly visible in the Ceremonial Hall inscriptions. This started with Dai Jitao proposing to ask Chiang to write ‘progress of mankind’ and ‘great unity in all under heaven,’ both signal quotations from Sun, for a large inscription on the side of the door to the Mausoleum.[51] To soothe Song Qingling’s anger both about Chiang Kai-shek’s takeover of the Committee and control of her husband’s funeral ceremonies, a short postface from her had was allowed to be added in the last minute to Sun’s Jianguo dawang on 18 June 1929.[52] Finally, and without even a formal note in the protocol, Chiang Kai-shek managed to get his handwriting of a full text of Sun’s Teachings Bequeathed by Mr. Sun Zhongshan, carved onto the wall of the Ceremonial Hall.[53] The glaring absence of the Resolution of the first GMD Party Congress with its leftist, united-front message is directly evident and marks the abandonment at this time of this line of GMD thinking. The other glaring absence is Wang Jingwei, who had dominated the early ritual proceedings, but had lost out in the power struggle after the Northern Expedition. But, as we shall see, he was still to have his moment in the sun.

Sun Yat-sen’s Tomb and the New Capital

Although the combination of the Mausoleum and the Memorial Hall does not follow the Lincoln pattern and is an inheritance from a Leninist past gone awry with the deterioration of the corporeal body, the overall setting quite clearly remains within the Lincoln mold. This link again was not without foundation in Sun’s own thinking. Lincoln and Rousseau were his two main heroes before he turned to emulate Lenin; his Three People’s Principles had been suggested by Lincoln’s formula of democracy, ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people.’[54] The shift backward in model, of course, affected the person commemorated there. The theme of preserving the unity of the nation and preventing a north-south split had been at the heart of Sun’s last trip to Beijing. The Northern Expedition eventually more or less achieved this goal while the planning for the Zhongshanling (the Sun Mausoleum) went on. By the time serious thought could be given to actually transferring Sun’s body to Nanjing for the official burial ceremony, history had offered a satisfying new reading for him, which dramatically strengthened the links with Lincoln. Evidently this was not the doing of the Funeral Committee; history itself obliged. Through the GMD/CCP (Chinese Communist Party) split, the Lenin option was now definitely out, and the image of Lincoln as the man from the United States who went to war to prevent the break-up of the nation and held north and south together was too good a model to discard.

Sun himself had willed that Nanjing should eventually be the capital of China, and this had been a point of agreement among most of the GMD. From the outset the building of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum on Mt. Zijin had been linked to the notion that the capital would eventually be in Nanjing. With the end of the Northern Expedition, Nanjing now began to resemble a capital in terms of its political function, although security and government control even a short distance from the city walls remained often fragile. In architectural terms, Nanjing was at that time a field of ruins. To rapidly develop this city into the dignified capital of a dignified nation became one of the top priorities of the GMD leadership under Chiang Kai-shek. The minister of finance, Sun Ke (Sun’s son), controlled the purse strings of the new government; he had been the most active player in the Funeral Committee, and as the first mayor of the first Chinese-run city with a municipal government, Guangzhou, he had hired Murphy in 1922 to design a master plan for the modern development of this city. It included installations such as public toilets that would prompt citizens to adopt modern forms of behaviour. Sun Ke and Murphy became close friends.[55]

The Lincoln Memorial had inserted itself into an already existing architectural ensemble housing political institutions and markers; this was now redesigned to symbolize the foundation stones of the nation. This certainly was not the case for the Zhongshanling. Situated as it was on a mountain slope outside Nanjing, it was linked to some of the spiritual and political heritage of the country, but it was not integrated into any kind of urban architecture. Yet while the Lincoln Memorial was the finishing piece of the MacMillan Plan, the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum was to become the beginning and the point of orientation of a new architectural ensemble that was to match that of Washington, DC.

When Henry Murphy was hired by the GMD in 1928 to be in charge of city planning, the link with Sun Ke, then minister of railways, cannot have been without influence. Murphy’s first duty was to develop a master plan for the new capital.[56] This was a new nation, it was in need of a new capital, and the idea to squeeze the core political institutions and symbols into the preset grid of old Nanjing seemed utterly counterproductive. Following international trends in the treatment of old walled cities, most clearly visible in the transformation of Barcelona and Vienna late in the nineteenth century, Murphy picked up the lead from his former young colleague and proposed a master plan for the new Nanjing capital at the heart of which lay an axis with the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum at one end and the core political institutions arranged along it to form a government center. He submitted the plan in 1929 (fig.19).

The first stage of ‘Capitol Hill’ included three groups of buildings, one for the GMD’s congressional offices, a Government House for the head of state, and a ‘Five Houses (Yuan) and Ministries Group’ for the five segments of the executive branch of government. All were sketched in the modified Chinese architectural style. As needs would increase, the triangle was to be extended to the south, organized around a central axis and a focal tower (or pagoda) that was to symbolize Nationalist rule.[57] The purpose of a pagoda, to keep unruly spirits at bay underneath, was an apt and adapted symbol of the way the GMD conceived of its rule. The pagoda was planned for the spot where the Washington Monument would be found in the U.S. equivalent. Symbolically, the Government Center exemplified and symbolized the new political arrangement, with power and legitimacy flowing southward from the Zhongshanling into the GMD and the head of state, and only through them to the Five Houses. Sun Yat-sen here is assigned not only the anchoring place of the Liberty Bell, but also the seat of the traditional Chinese emperor, who faces south with all his subjects looking northward up to him. In this architectural ensemble no complex democratic interaction or balance of power was envisioned. The Leninist-plus-traditional structures and aspirations survived the split with the Chinese Communist Party. Clearly this is not simply a draft by a foreign architect ignorant of Chinese politics, but an arrangement that presupposes a close interaction with leading GMD figures to achieve the desired symbolism. The plan is anything but a simple imitation of the Washington plan. It takes the basic idea of a symbolic and very public ensemble at the heart of the nation and fills it with very Chinese characteristics that encode into architecture the GMD leadership’s political vision. The positioning of the GMD congressional offices, closer to the Zhongshanling than to that of the head of state, also indicates that at the time of this plan, Chiang Kai-shek’s political position was not that of a supreme leader who could claim to be above the party.

Security concerns eventually meant that this plan was never realized. The government offices, mostly in adaptive style, were put into the walled town along the new and widened Zhongshan Road that led through the city to the Mausoleum. Still, in the virtual universe of the political imaginaire, the Zhongshanling defines the axis of power and legitimacy. As we shall see, some other parts of the Washington, DC, model, such as the Heroes’ Cemetery, the Chinese Arlington, also were realized by Murphy.

From Ritual to Political Control: Transferring the Body to the Zhongshanling

The transfer of Sun’s body from Beijing to Nanjing was planned by the Committee as a multipurpose media, political, and emotional event. Made possible through the success in the Northern Campaign, the Nanjing funeral of Sun Yat-sen was to celebrate the final integration of ritual and political control under GMD leadership. The decision that it was time for the transfer was made on 9 November 1928 by the Nanjing government based on a recommendation by the Funeral Committee.[58] As part of the effort to immortalize and record the feat of this transfer, all aspects of it were as carefully recorded as if they had been scripted.[59] Again Lincoln provided an important model. After his assassination a quick decision had been reached to have him buried in his hometown of Springfield, Illinois. But the government decided to have the funeral rites begin in Washington, DC, and then bring him by funeral train over 1,700 miles to Illinois. Lincoln’s body was transferred in a grand funeral procession. The train that carried his remains was viewed by over seven million people, almost one-fifth the population of the United States at the time (fig.20).

The trip became an occasion for the divided nation to unite in grief and in the process to commit to the Union. Wherever the train passed or stopped, local citizens, even those opposed to him during his lifetime, gathered to pay their last respects. The procession became a living symbol of a united nation.[60] Messages of sympathy and condolence flooded in from all over the world. Quite unintentionally, other aspects of Lincoln’s procession, such as the public obsession with the deterioration and smell of his body as the train rumbled over the long miles, would also find their echo in Sun Yat-sen’s event.[61]

The transfer of Sun’s body would be modelled on this defining moment in U.S. history, but again the event was to have special GMD characteristics.[62] The unique American combination of the government-organized train with the locally and independently organized mourning activities of the citizenry was replaced in China by a highly scripted, centrally administered program of ritual behaviour. This was to instill momentarily the behaviour appropriate to the new government/citizen relationship, which the GMD set out to implement on a permanent basis.

The transfer was designed as a long, drawn-out, mobile media event that was to spiritually mobilize, modernize, and unify the population around the spirit and body of Sun Yat-sen. The train was known as the Soul Train, lingche (fig.21). Again, this was designed as a rather noisy affair with its ten blue carriages all painted with slogans in white and filled with members of the press, foreign dignitaries, propaganda material, a military band and police guards, and a generator to power the broadcasting and screening devices as well as the lights for the stage where sketches were performed during stops.[63] The ease with which this exercise in ritual control could be written contrasted starkly with troublesome conditions in the real world. The building process in Nanjing was time and again interrupted by security concerns; the 12-kilometer road from Nanjing to Mt. Zijin was not ready for the procession; the propaganda train moving north suddenly turned up in Tianjin at 9.00 a.m. instead of at 7:00 p.m., which meant that the masses who planned to witness the event were not there; Song Qingling was late, having nearly refused to come back from Berlin because of Chiang Kai-shek’s turn against the Communists; and another battle between Chiang Kai-shek and Feng Yuxiang that threatened the Beijing-Hankou line over which Sun’s body was to be transported was looming. On 19 May it was reported that the railroad bridge over the Yellow River had been blown up, compliments of Feng Yuxiang.[64] A delay had to be discussed.[65] Minister of Railways Sun Ke was the key figure in all this, but while he might have the necessary railway carriages, he had no military with which to protect the tracks.

Still, with minor adjustments and much juggling of dates and routes, the process continued. Most importantly, the entire transfer from Azure Cloud Monastery to Nanjing was made into a nationally distributable media event, filmed by the North China Film Company (Huabei dianying gongsi) under contract from the government to immortalize the feat and its main actors.[66] On 9 and 10 May, the Peking papers carried the extensive ceremonial rules promulgated by the Committee for the process of transferring Sun’s body from Azure Cloud Monastery to the train station.[67] They added editorial comments on civilized behaviour during the ceremonies.[68] Similar rules were promulgated for the ceremonies during the stops of the train in Tianjin, Jinan, and other places. The most detailed rules and prescriptions were for the Nanjing ceremonies, down to a ban on the display of unauthorized banners. These rules are contained in the Zongli Feng’an shilu.[69] The exercise in ritual governance was no longer the performative anticipation and theatrical arrogation of actual power, but an enhancement, consolidation, and legitimisation of the claim of the Nanjing government to be the true government of a unified modern state. Sun was on his way to receive a proper state funeral now, because a truly national government existed, able to prepare it for him. The state flag was on his coffin. The basic organizational structure was to place overall command in the Committee, which had now been recast as an entity under the Nanjing government; to have the local Party, government, and military leaders along the train route select and organize active participants from different associations in society as the core performing units; and to have the general populace as onlookers, largely passive, but highly disciplined. As there was only one body available, it was hard to involve south China in the transfer event. However, an analogous, although much-less-reported, train was set in motion from the south to make its way slowly to Nanjing bringing the southern delegates to the ceremonies. For places not passed by either train, ceremonies were arranged to coincide with the Nanjing events.

The Beijing events were a general rehearsal for the national ceremony in Nanjing. Here we have the first real exercise in national ritual control by the GMD government. The entire country was to observe a three-minute silence at noon on the day of the ceremony, accompanied by three bows; all flags were to be at half-mast; all entertainment establishments from brothels to theatres were to stop operating for a few days. Representatives of the different localities, classes, and professions from the entire country were to attend the Nanjing events after being vetted and approved by local GMD operatives. And an endless stream of local ceremonies was to accommodate those who had not made it into the august group of the select.

Great attention was paid to the diplomats from the twelve countries that by now had official diplomatic relations with the GMD government. They were to come from Beijing in a special train and were given a prominent place in the order of the guests. After the event, international reactions were carefully reviewed. The foreign governments and press showed themselves impressed that this was the first post-Qing-era government strong enough to merit some serious attention.[70]

As might be expected, Chiang Kai-shek continued to stage himself as the true heir to Sun’s bequests. Although he could now, after his marriage to this sister of Sun’s wife, be counted a ‘family member,’ he continued to treat Sun’s body as an utterly political object. It belonged to the GMD and the new GMD state, not to the family. He was the new generalissimo.

The Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum and the 1929 ritual marked in space and time the pinnacle of the new Sun Yat-sen cult promoted by the GMD Party-state. In terms of spatial arrangement, it found its local replicas in the standardized image of Sun mandated for the central place in all meeting halls and in the Zhongshan parks with their Sun Yat-sen statues and slogans that had been developed in many urban centers next to the local government building since 1925.[71] In time, regular weekly and yearly devotional activities became routine, and they extended beyond the government, party, and military to popular circles.[72] However, even these efforts at a unified, pervasive state propaganda, based on Soviet, Italian, Japanese, and German models, could not arrest history.

The Shifting Fate and Meaning of Sun Yat-sen and the Mausoleum

We have seen that all elements of this story, from Sun’s body to the Funeral Committee, from the plan for the mausoleum to ceremony to the building itself, share a number of features. Rather than being fixed entities, they were performances, including Sun’s body and the mausoleum. The building may be constructed of reinforced concrete, but it actualised its meaning only in a public and contentious process that continues to shift to this day and does not leave either the remains or the physical building untouched.

I will reinforce this argument with a short glimpse at the further development of Zhongshanling. Mt. Zijin had gained in ‘modern’ spiritual power through the presence of Sun’s body. Many held traditional notions of some magical power that continued to exude from such illustrious bodies, and this prompted people to wish to bury their dead in close proximity in part to share in the fine geomancy, but also to siphon off some of this magical power.[73] The GMD had already passed stringent regulations to prevent this and had established rigid controls over any new building or tomb in the peak area after Sun Yat-sen was buried there. However, to enhance the standing of Mt. Zijin as the resting place of the nation’s top revolutionary leaders, a controlled development was undertaken in 1928. The GMD asked Murphy to develop a Chinese counterpart of Arlington National Cemetery in the park of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum: a resting place for the GMD’s most prestigious generals and officers that would benefit from the spiritual energy (qi) flowing from Sun’s mausoleum nearby. The place had been assigned, building started in 1932, and the cemetery was finished in 1935. In all, more than 33,000 names are listed on the 110 black marble slabs as being buried here. But for top leaders, this was not good enough. Gradually Sun Yat-sen’s tomb, following a practice traceable to the tomb of the First Emperor in the late third century BCE, became surrounded by individual tombs. Among them was Fan Hongxian, who had been killed in 1914 by an agent of Yuan Shikai’s while organizing military resistance against Yuan. He was buried here as a martyr in 1935 after having been posthumously elevated to the rank of a general. Liao Zhongkai (d. 1925), a top aide of Sun Yat-sen, was moved here in 1935. Han Hui, whom Sun had put in charge of organizing a Northern Expedition to unify the country militarily and who had been killed by the northern warlord government in 1922, was the first in the later Chinese Arlington in 1928. And Tan Yankai was here, a leading GMD figure and famous calligrapher who managed to find enough space for an entire architectural ensemble designed (about 1935) by Yang Tingbao.

The new pro-Japanese reform government set up in Nanjing was eager to be seen as an inheritor of Sun’s bequests, and Sun obliged by having had very close contacts with various individual Japanese and even closer contacts with Japanese government representatives.[74] Eventually Wang Jingwei took over this government. After being cut out from the Nanjing events in 1929, he now had his day. Chiang Kai-shek is said to have considered taking Sun’s body with him to Chongqing, but decided against it.[75] For Wang Jingwei, just having control over Nanjing, Mt. Zijin and Sun’s body would not do. His GMD needed a very particular marker to set it off against Chiang Kai-shek’s.

Wang Jingwei remembered that when Sun’s body had been prepared for preservation at the PUMC (Peking Union Medical College) Hospital in 1925, the brain and the entrails had to be taken out. Upon inquiry, it turned out that they had been kept there, preserved in alcohol. Wang now contacted the Japanese government in Beijing and asked to be allowed to transfer these innards to Nanjing. Well aware of the potential uses of Sun’s pro-Japanese leanings, the Japanese authorities were quick to oblige. Ending with a grand ceremony on 5 April 1942 that was closely modelled on the original transfer ceremony, Sun’s entrails, now sometimes called lingzang (Sacred Entrails), were transferred to Nanjing to be reunited with Sun’s body beside which they were placed.[76] Chiang Kai-shek, was the implied claim, had cut off part of Sun’s bequests just as he had enshrined only a part of Sun’s body, and the Western imperialists who controlled the PUMC had ‘privately appropriated’ the entrails of the president. With the Sacred Entrails, Wang Jingwei now had the body complete. With his own pro-Japanese politics, Sun’s political inheritance was now completely enacted. Since 1925 the GMD had the practice of beginning every meeting by reading the testament of Sun Yat-sen aloud. Wang Jingwei’s GMD now supplemented this ritual by having each Nanjing GMD meeting start with this reading as well as three ritual bows in the direction of the Sacred Entrails. Without having moved an inch, by just having a container added in which a human brain and human entrails were lying in alcohol, the body and the entire building changed meaning and function.

The Chongqing GMD, however, was not standing by idly. In 1941 it resolved to officially confer the title ‘father of the nation’ (guofu) upon Sun, thus re-establishing the direct link with George Washington’s anticolonial enterprise, for in Chinese-language writings since the 1830s the neologism guofu had been exclusively used for George Washington.[77] By the early twentieth century, many founding figures of new national states, such as Kemal Atatürk, had been given this official title.

Mt. Zijin itself was a contested ground. Sun had set the tone by insisting on a higher rank than Zhu Yuanzhang. To assure that only officially approved national heroes be buried on Mt. Zijin, the Funeral Committee had made it a rule that no private burials would be allowed there anymore. But it was clear that Sun’s successors in the leadership would start thinking about their own places on this mountain. Wang Jingwei thus set out to prepare for his post-mortem life. He selected a site above that of the Ming founder and below that of Sun Yat-sen. Informed about the vagaries of history, and well aware that a post-mortem attack was a regular political practice in both premodern and modern China, Wang’s mausoleum was built with multiple reinforcements intended to shield his body and inheritance. Wang died in Japan in November 1944 and was properly buried with great pomp and ceremony in his own mausoleum on Mt. Zijin. This building shows the frailty such reinforced monsters have, if their meaning goes adrift.

Once Japan had capitulated and Chiang Kai-shek’s army was back in Nanjing, Chiang set out to undo the damage done to Mt. Zijin as a national site, to Sun’s teachings as those of the Father of the Nation, and to this Father’s body. One night, Chiang had the entire area of Mt. Zijin sealed off. With a huge quantity of explosives he had the Wang Jingwei Mausoleum levelled on 21 January 1946. Wang’s body was cremated in Nanjing.[78]

As the executions of ‘traitors’ started after the war, Wang’s prime minister, Zhu Minyi, went to Mt. Zhongshan and took Sun’s Sacred Entrails as security against persecution. When Zhu was incarcerated in a ‘special prison’ in Suzhou and threatened with execution, he offered in a letter to Chiang Kai-shek the Sacred Entrails in exchange for his life. The prison officials found other means to extract the location of the entrails from him. Because they had been thoroughly polluted by contact with the Wang Jingwei government, gasoline was poured over them, and they were burned.[79]

A grand state ceremony on Mt. Zijin on 5 May 1946, on the occasion of the official return of Chiang Kai-shek’s capital to Nanjing, celebrated the repurified body of Sun and his repurified spiritual bequests, which had been cleansed of Wang’s pro-Japanese leanings.[80] Then, after his plane crash in March 1946, the body of Dai Li, Chiang Kai-shek’s secret police point man, found highly fortified rest on Mt. Zijin.[81] Chiang Kai-shek himself had in the 1930s reserved a place near the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum.[82] In this place a small pavilion, the Zhengqiting (Spirit of Correctness Pavilion), designed by Yang Tingbao, was built in 1947. The inscription was in Chiang’s own hand, and a stele in the back by Sun Ke made it clear that this place had been reserved for Chiang Kai-shek. In the same year W.Y. Tsao defined, in a book designed to introduce China’s constitutional government to a Western audience, the purified Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum as China’s National Shrine.[83]

In 1949 Chiang Kai-shek again pondered taking Sun’s body with him, this time to Taiwan, and yet again decided against it. Chiang’s own body was until a short while ago ‘temporarily’ kept in Taiwan, waiting for the reconquest of the mainland and the chance to be properly buried next to Sun Yat-sen. Eventually, when Chen Shuibian’s Democratic Progress Party with its pledge to Taiwan statehood ran the government, it withdrew the guards with their political implications and ended the ‘temporality’ of waiting for the reconquest of the mainland. Chiang lies in, we assume, eternal rest in Taiwan.

As might be expected, the stability of this set of tombs and buildings entered another period of turmoil after the PRC (People’s Republic of China) gained control over the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, Sun’s body, and the park in 1949. While he was a ‘bourgeois’ revolutionist whose revolution went only against ‘feudal’ Manchu rule, it still had been a necessary step. Better, he had understood the weakness of the Chinese bourgeoisie and therefore had opted for the alliance with the workers and the Soviet Union. His body and the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum therefore faced no immediate threat of government destruction, whereas Dai Li’s tomb was levelled after 1949.

Buildings, too, paid their toll. The manifest GMD emblems in the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum were removed or covered from early on, and the inscriptions within the ceremonial hall that were not from Sun Yat-sen’s and Song Qingling’s hands but from those of Chiang Kai-shek and Hu Hanmin were scraped off during the Cultural Revolution. Chiang Kai-shek’s pavilion survived the first years after 1949 as a decorative and slowly decaying structure. During the Cultural Revolution, even the memory of Chiang Kai-shek that might linger in this pavilion was erased by its being burned down.

When Zhou Enlai started to push for a normalization and for the ‘four modernizations’ in 1972, the situation of the surviving dead on Mt. Zijin improved. The tombs and buildings came under the administration of the Office for the Protection of Cultural Relics. Since the early 1980s the political capital hidden in Mt. Zijin was rediscovered. The Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum could be used to promote the ‘return’ of Taiwan to the fatherland. In a major renovation effort, parts of the original decoration (such as the GMD flag on the ceiling) in the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum were restored and the park, which had not been cared for during a long period, was put in order. Even Chiang Kai-shek’s Spirit of Correctness Pavilion was completely rebuilt, ‘warts’ (the inscriptions by Chiang and Sun) and all.

The PRC in its turn added a few tombs to Mt. Zijin. It refrained, however, from dotting it with Communist heroes, for whom a special Heroes’ Cemetery was built in Babaoshan cemetery in Beijing. Mt. Zijin thus remains the mountain where the doubly acceptable parts of the bourgeois revolution have been allowed to rest next to the virtual capital of Republican China that was never built below Sun’s Mausoleum. Among the plans submitted for Mao Zedong’s Mausoleum in 1976-1977, one suggested Mt. Zijin as the location. But by that time, the Lenin model was back in fashion, and Mao was made to lie in state, embalmed, in a mausoleum right in the middle of China’s counterpart to Red Square in Moscow, Tiananmen Square in Beijing, in a building that also, perhaps not coincidentally, took after the Lincoln Memorial Hall (fig. 22).

____________

Notes

[1] ‘Wang Yiting guanyu lingmu tu’an pingpan baogao’ (Report by Wang Yiting on the judgement concerning the plan for the mausoleum), in Nanjing shi dang’an guan Zhongshan Lingyuan guanlichu, ed., Zhongshan ling dang’an shiliao xuanbian (Nanjing: Jiangsu guji, 1986), 147.

[2] Torsten Warner, Deutsche Architektur in China: Architekturtransfer (Berling: Ernst und Sohn, 1995), 130-131. A photograph of the Shanghai building will be found here. This building, situated on the corner of West Yan’an St. and Huashan St., was torn down in 1989 to make space for the International Equatorial Hotel.

[3] Among the four judges, Busch was the only one who had proposed ranking the first three winners, an action eventually adopted unanimously by the Committee. On the ranking of the first two, Ling Hungxu, the president of Nanyang University, also agreed, while the sculptor Li Jinfa inverted it. The vote of the remaining judge, the guohua (Chinese-style/Nationalist) painter Wang Zhen, is not known to me. See also Guan, ‘Lingqi Binyunsi, Changchen Zijinshang,’ 12.

[4] Sun Zhongshan xiansheng zangshi zhoubei weiyuanhui, ‘Lingmu xuan jiang zhengqiu tu’an tiaoli’ (15 May 1925) (Regulations for the competition to find a plan for the mausoleum), in Zhongshan ling dang’an shiliao xuanbian, 149-150.

[5] Ibid., p.152.

[6] See Wang Liping’s comments on the use of the term lingmu, referring to an imperial tomb, for Sun’s mausoleum, ‘Creating a National Symbol,’ 33.

[7] Sun Zhongshan xiansheng zangshi zhoubei weiyuanhui, ‘Lingmu xuan jiang zhengqiu tu’an tiaoli,’ 152

[8] Ibid.

[9] Henry Killiam Murphy, ‘Architecture,’ in Harley Farnsworth MacNair, ed., China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946), 369.

[10] Henry K. Murphy, ‘An Architectural Renaissance in China,’ Asia 28 (1928): 469-475

[11] On Murphy, see three works by Jeffrey W. Cody, ‘Henry K. Murphy, and American Architect in China, 1914-1935,’ Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1989; Building in China: Henry K. Murphy’s ‘Adaptive Architecture,’ 1914-1935 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2001); and ‘Striking a Harmonious Chord: Foreign Missionaries and Chinese-style Buildings, 1911-1949,’ Architronic 5, no.3 (1996), http://architronic.saed.kent.edu/v5n3/v5n3.03a.html. Murphy wrote extensively about the development of Chinese architecture; see his ‘Architecture,’ 363-371. On city planning in Guangzhou, see Cody, Building in China, 174-182, and ‘American Planning in Republican China, 1911-1937,’ Planning Perspectives 11 (1996): 352-355. For Sun Yat-sen’s utopian master plan for China, which would attract huge amounts of international capital for its development (as, in fact, it does at present), see Sun Yat-sen, The International Development of China (London: London Office, Chinese Ministry of Information, 1922), 27-34, for Shanghai; 51-52, for a short note on the prospects of Nanjing, for which no plan for a capital is included; and 147-150, for the housing industry.

[12] Murphy, ‘Architecture,’ 369.

[13] See ‘Lü Yanzhi yu Zhongshan ling’ (Lü Yanzhi and the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall), Renwu no.5 (1986), 95.

[14] Lin Keming, ‘Lü Yanzhi,’ Zhongguo da baike quanshu. Jianzhu, yuanlin, chengshi guihua (Beijing: China Encyclopedia Press, 1988), 312. The dates in this article are not always reliable.

[15] For an illustration of this building, see Gong Deshun, Zou Denong, and Dou Yide, Zhongguo xiandai jianzhu shigang (1949-1985) (Historical sketch of Chinese modern architecture [1949-1985]) (Tianjin: Tianjin kexue jishu chubanshe, 1989), 2. For the evaluation, see Murphy, ‘Architecture,’ 369. For an analysis of some aspects of this building see Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 12-15. I cannot find the evidence for Fitzgerald’s assumption that this building was planned and completed before the mausoleum in Nanjing.

[16] See the fine documentation in Chen Yunqian, ‘ “Zongli yixiang” yu Sun Zhongshan chongbai’ (The commemorative photo of the president and the veneration of Sun Zhongshan), Jiangsu shehui kexue 6 (2006): 106-108

[17] The first three places in the competition all went to Chinese architects with a foreign education. The seven honorary prizes all went to foreign architectural bureaus; see Preparation Committee for the Management of the President’s Burial, ‘Report on the Handling of Submissions for the Memorial,’ in Sun Zhongshan feng’an dadian, 89. This report is dated 10 October 1925.

[18] The photo is under the URL http://axing.81630.com/WebGUIAdmin/index.pl/landscape_15 (downloaded 3 January 2004). There is a possible visual parallel, kindly suggested by Horst Bredekamp, to the first abstract modern commemorative monuments, the Marinedenkmal in Laboe, near Kiel, Germany, designed by Gustav August Münzer in 1927, and finished in 1936, and the roughly contemporary Monumento al Marinaio d’Italia in Brindisi. For images, see http://www.panoramio.com/photo/4718173 (25 August 2008), and http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monumento_al_Marinaio_d%27Italia (25 August 2008).

[19] See the description in the website of Yuexiu Mountain Park: http://www.yuexiupark-gz.com/zsjnb.htm. To make room for this enlightened stele, the old monastery to the bodhisattva Guanyin on this mountain was town down in 1929. To this day, however, the mountain is popularly referred to as Guanyin Mountain.

[20] See his statement accompanying the plan as submitted in 1925: ‘Lü Yanzhi guanyu Sun Zhongshan lingmu jianzhu tu’an shuoming,’ in Sun Zhongshan feng’an dadian, 94-97. The text is the same as Lü Yanzhi, ‘Sun Zhongshan xiansheng lingmu jianzhu tu’an shuoming’ (Explanatory notes on the plan for building the mausoleum for Mr. Sun Yat-sen), Liangyou huabao (December 1925): 13.

[21] The diverse plans are reproduced in Sun Zhongshan feng’an dadian, unnumbered illustrations at the beginning of the volume. See particularly the plans that received honorable mention from the architectural bureau by Cyrill Nebuskad, Zhao Shen, and the firms Francis Kales, C.Y. Anney and W. Frey, W. Livin Goldenstaedt, and Zdanwitch and Goldenstaedt. See Sun Zhongshan feng’an dadian, 89.

[22] ‘Ling Hongxu guanyu lingmu tu’an pingpan baogao’ (Ling Hongxu’s report of his evaluation of the plans for the mausoleum), Zhongshan ling dang’an shiliao xuanbian, 161.

[23] Confucius, Lunyu (Analects), 3, 24, Lunyu yinde (Taibei: Chinese Materials and Research Aids Center, 1966).

[24] The symbolism of Sun Yat-sen’s tomb has been picked up by PRC propagandists. An official PRC website has this to say: ‘The historical mission of “arousing the masses of the people” was assumed by the leaders and the political party leading the new democratic revolution and socialist revolution and construction. The bell culture developed further. When the 11^th Asian Games opened in Beijing in 1990, the sponsors held an impressive bell-and-drum-beating ceremony to enhance the spirit of striving to make the Chinese nation stronger and stronger and promoting virtue by material means. … New “Admonish-the-World” bells, such as motto bells and school motto bells, appeared in China in 1992. These bells explored the resources of moral worship from ancient Chinese bells and carried forward the ethical progress in the course of the Chinese revolution over the past dozens of years, turning the Chinese bell culture into a new culture of practical importance in which bells play a guiding tole. The core of the bell culture is education.’ ‘The age old Chinese bell culture,’ http://www.china.org.nc/english/features/FbiCh/78450.htm (3 January 2004).

[25] See Catherine V. Yeh, ‘Zeng Pu’s Niehai Hua as a Political Novel: A World Genre in a Chinese Form,’ Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1990, chap. 1.

[26] http://www.ushistory.org/libertybell/ (downloaded 3 January 2004).

[27] Zhongshan ling dang’an shilian xuanbian, 154. In 1946 Guo Moruo complained that what he called the ‘Liberty Bell’ of the landscaping could be seen only from an airplane, but not by normal pedestrians. Guo Moruo, ‘Nanjing yinxiang 8: Yeling’ (Nanjing impressions 8: Paying respects to the Mausoleum), Wenhui bao (28 July 1946): 7.

[28] This spread was greatly helped by the efforts of the China branch of the U.S. Committee on Public Information, which Wilson had originally set up in the United States to convince his countrymen to join in the Great War in far-away Europe. See George Creel, How We Advertised America: The First Telling of the Amazing Story of the Committee on Public Information that Carried the Gospel of Americanism to Every Corner of the Globe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937); Hans Schmidt, ‘Democracy for China: American Propaganda and the May Fourth Movement,’ Diplomatic History 221, no.1 (1998): 1-28.

[29] Chen Yunqian, ‘Zhishujie yu Sun Zhongshan chongbai’ (Tree Planting Day and the veneration for Sun Yat-sen), Nanjing Daxue xuebao, rewen kexue, shehuikexue 5 (2006): 76-90

[30] Jiang Yi (Chiang Yee), Chongfang Zhongguo (China revisited), quoted in Guan, ‘Lingqi Binyunsi, Changchen Zijinshan,’ 12. The submission date was postponed because a number of foreign competitors asked for an extension, as they could not make the deadline.

[31] Zhongshan ling dang’an xuanbian, 153.

[32] The actual situation was more complex, as Julia Strauss has shown through her study of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in that period: Julia Strauss, Strong Institutions in Weak Politics: State Building in Republican China, 1927-1940 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), chap. 6.

[33] Zhongshan ling dang’an xuanbian, 153.

[34] This observation follows Guo Moruo’s in his ‘Nanjing yinxiang 8,’ 7.

[35] Zhongshan ling dang’an xuanbian, 153.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Ibid., 124

[38] The story is probably based on the chapter ‘Zhongshanling heyi jian zai Zijinshan’ (Why has Zhongshanling been built on Mt. Zijin), in Du Qin, Xinhai fengyun (Anecdotes from the Xinhai Revolution), quoted in Guan, ‘Lingqi Binyunsi, Changchen Zijinshan,’ 12. Beijing ribao reported on 20 May 1929 a discussion between Song Qingling, Sun Ke, and doctors in the PUMC about the conservation of the body, especially as it was planned to allow participants in the ceremonies in Nanjing to see it with their own eyes. Wang Liping quotes a memoir from someone who claims to have seen the body when it was reclothed in Beijing and noted no signs of decay. Wang Liping, ‘Creating a National Symbol,’ 62, n.87, quoting from Han Zhengli, ‘Zhongshan ling de xin jian yu Zhongshan xiansheng feng’an’ (The new building of Zhongshanling and the funeral ceremonies for Mr. Sun Yat-sen), Jiangning chunqiu (November 1984): 51-52. The members of the Funeral Committee in Peking, however, wrote to the GMD Central Committee after having checked the body in Azure Cloud Monastery that Sun’s ‘appearance had not changed and his clothes looked like new.’ ‘Yinjiu banshi chu shimo,’ Zhongshan ling dang’an xuanbian, 243.

[39] I thank the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin, where I had the honor and the pleasure to be a Fellow for a year, to allow me to present my findings. In our discussions various links were suggested by other Fellows, on which I have followed up.

[40] Françoise Hamon and Charles MacCallum, eds., Louis Visconti, 1791-1853 (Paris Delegation a l’Action Artistique de la Ville de Paris, 1991).

[41] Daniel French (1850-1931) was the most acclaimed sculptor of public monuments in the United States at the time. Other works of his include the sculpture of Captain John Parker in Lexington, Massachusettes, and of John Harvard at Harvard University.

[42] Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, 214-217.

[43] The plaster original is today in Taipei.

[44] Since his ‘Mur des Reformateurs’ (The wall of the reformers) in Geneva (1909), Landowski’s international fame had spread, reaching a high point with his large installation Temple de l’Homme (Temple of Man) for the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes, which gave Art Deco its name. After World War II, Landowski became director of the Beaux-Arts school. A photograph and short description of the sculpture of Christ (designed by Heitor da Silva) will be found at http://www.travellatinamerica.com/articles/general/2001/christ.htm. A photograph of the Mur des Reformateurs, without mention of Landowski, can be found at http://monsite.wanadoo.fr/bd.eh.geneve/page7.htm (21 September 2003). The Temple de l’Homme has recently been the object of an exhibition at the Petit Palais in Paris, which asked Robert Wilson to create a performance based on Landowski’s drawings, donated to this Museum for the project. Paul Landowski, Le Temple de l’Homme (Paris: Bruno Foucart, 1999). Landowski was also the object of a Taipei exhibition: Sheng Shumin and Huang Guangnan, eds., Baoluo Longdefusiji diaosunzhan/ Sculpture: Paul Landowski (Taipei: Taibei shili meishuguan, 1995).

[45] The exact dates of Sun Ke’s visits in 1928 over a period of some three months are not known because Landowski’s journal for the period is sketchy and a part appears to be lost.

[46] The story has it (Zhou, Zhongshan lingyuan boji, 31) that a conflict ensued between Chiang Kai-shek and Hu Hanmin on one side and Song Qingling, He Xiangning, and others over this clothing. Letters from Landowski to the Funeral Committee show, however, that the suggestion to have Sun in this apparel and not in the Zhongshan suit came from Landowski himself. This does not preclude that the sculptor was already too advanced. The decision about Sun’s ‘Chinese-style dress’ was made by the Funeral Committee on 20 October 1928; see Zhongshan ling dang’an shiliao, 130. It is not clear from the protocol who made the suggestion. On 1 December 1928, the Committee also ordered a bronze bust of Sun Yat-sen from Landowski, ibid., 133. A photograph of Landowski in his studio next to Sun’s sculpture was auctioned by Vintage Works in 2002 and can be seen at http://www.vintageworks.net/search/result_list.php?newSearch=1&pNameStr=Keystone+View+Co (20 September 2002). For the shoes, see Zheng and Huang, eds., Baoluo Longdefusiji diaosuzhan, 110.

[47] See entry Koči in Prokop Toman, Nový slovník československých výtvarných umělců (New dictionary of Czechoslovak artists) (Prague: V Praze, R. Ryšavý, 1947), 308. This article refers as its source to the Hexagon, a Shanghai English-language journal ‘devoted to architecture, construction, and designs’ that was established in 1929. I have not been able to locate a copy of the issue of this journal containing this information. Koči worked on the Sun sculpture, which was made from white Beijing marble over a period of one year and three months. See Beijing ribao, 30 May 1929, 4. On the presence of Czech artists in China and their role in the Beijing Art Academy at the time, see ‘Vojtech Chytil: A Czech Painter in Beijing,’ Orientations (Hong Kong) 22, no.8 (August 1991): 26-32.

[48] Shangshu, Kanggao, trans. J. Legge, The Sacred Books of China, The Texts of Confucianism, Pt. I: The Shu King (London: Clarendon Press, 1879), 168.

[49] ‘(Zangshi zhouweihui) huiyi jilu, 52^nd session, 27 October 1927’ (Protocol of the Preparatory Committee for the Funeral, 27 October 1927), in Zhongshan ling dang’an shiliao xuanbian, 112.

[50] The decision to ask Hu Hanmin to write the script from which the Testament would be cut was made at the meeting on 7 January 1928. See ibid., 117.

[51] ‘(Zangshi zhouweihui) huiyi jilu, 65^th session, 13 December 1928’ (Protocol of the Preparatory Committee for the Funeral, 13 December 1928), ibid., 137.

[52] Ibid., 147.

[53] ‘(Zangshi zhouweihui) huiyi jilu,’ 61^st session, 25 September 1928’ (Protocol of the Preparatory Committee for the Funeral, September 25, 1928), ibid., 128.

[54] Leonard Shihlien Hsü, Sun Yat-sen, His Political and Social Ideals (Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press, 1933), 35.

[55] Cody, Building in China, 180.

[56] Murphy involved three collaborators in the project: Ernest P. Goodrich, Colonel Irving C. Möller, and Theodore T. McCroskey. See Jeffrey Cody, ‘American Planning in Republican China,’ 355, referring to China Critic 2 (1929): 517.

[57] Cody, Building in China, 186-187. Murphy’s drafts are reproduced on these pages. The description here closely follows Cody. The plan was published in 1929 in Nanjing. Guodu sheji jishu zhuanyuan banshichu, Shoudu jihua (Plan for the Capital), Nanjing, 1929. I have not seen this work. During the same period, we see other plans for capitals following the model of the National Mall in Washington, such as the plan for New Delhi by Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens with his particular brand of adaptive style and Canberra designed by the Chicago Beaux-Arts architect Walter Burley Griffin, which is discussed in the essays by Van Zanten and Kuan.

[58] Zongli feng’an shilu (True record of the funeral ceremonies for the president), Nanjing, 1930, 3b. I am grateful to the Second Archive in Nanjing for providing me with a copy of this item. Henrietta Harrison also lists it in her bibliography.

[59] The most important source is Zongli feng’an shilu. This very extensive document offers the integrated master plan for the entire Nanjing enterprise and can be used for the same purpose as the extensive article in Jianzhu xuebao that was used for my analysis of the Mao Zedong Memorial Hall transfer.

[60] Peterson, Lincoln in American Memory, 14-35. Lincoln, in his turn, was directly linked to Washington. See also the more detailed description in the Lincoln biography by Carl Sandburg, Abraham Lincoln (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1940), vol.6, 394-404. Sandburg is part of an American hagiographic literature on Lincoln that has close affinities with the Chinese writings about Sun Yat-sen.

[61] For this aspect, see Shirley Samuels, ‘Lincoln’s Baby,’ The Mickle Street Review: An Electronic Journal of Whitman and American Studies (Summer 2001), no.14 (http://micklestreet.rutgers.edu/archive/#). I am indebted to Thomas Hahn for drawing my attention to this article (consulted 15 October 2003).

[62] At this moment I boldly assume that the Funeral Committee was familiar with the story of Lincoln’s funeral train, at least through the literature surrounding the completion of the Lincoln Memorial Hall, but I do not have proof.

[63] Dagong bao, 19 May, 11.

[64] Ibid., 4.

[65] Ibid., 21 May 1929, 4.

[66] Ibid., 30 May 1929, advertisement, 16. I was not able to obtain a copy of this film.

[67] Ibid., 10 May 1929, 3-4. Also see Beijing ribao, 9 May 1929; 12 May 1929, 2; and 13 May 1929, 2. The full text of the regulations is in Zongli feng’an shilu, 6b-11a.

[68] Beijing ribao, 15 May 1929, 11.

[69] Zongli Feng’an shilu, 4-12.

[70] Dagongbao, editorial, 2 June 1929.

[71] See Chen Yunqian, ‘Kongjian chongzu yu Sun Zhongshan chongbai: Yi Minguo shiqi Zhongshan Gongyuan wei zhongxin de kaocha’ (Reconstruction of space and veneration for Sun Yat-sen: An investigation focused on the Sun Yat-sen gardens during the republic), Shilin, no.1 (2006): 1-8.

[72] See Li Gongzhong, ‘ “Zongli jinian zhou” yu Minguo zhengzhi wenhua’ (The weekly commemoration for the president and political culture of the Republican period), Fujian luntan. Renwen shehui kexue ban, no.1 (2006): 56-60.

[73] For the survival of these beliefs among revolutionaries, see Virgil Kit-Yiu Ho, ‘Martyrs or Ghosts? A Short Cultural History of a Tomb in Revolutionary Canton, 1911-1970,’ East Asian History 27 (2004): 103-138.

[74] Marius B. Jansen, The Japanese and Sun Yat-sen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1955). Wang Jingwei strengthened this aspect of Sun’s past through an English-language compilation; see Sun Yat-sen, China and Japan: Natural Friends—Unnatural Enemies: A Guide for China’s Foreign Policy, T’ang Leang-li, ed. (Shanghai: China United Press, 1941).

[75] Zhou, Zhongshan lingyuan boji, 337.

[76] Minguo ribao, 6 April 1942.

[77] Pan, Huashengdun zai Zhongguo, 12.

[78] ‘Wang Jingwei mu pinghui ji,’ (Flattening the tomb of Wang Jingwei) Yangcheng wanbao, 8 August 2002. See http://news.sina.com.cn/c/2002-08-04/1653659802.html.

[79] Zhou, Zhongshan lingyuan boji, 309-322. Wang Jingwei continued to have a shameful afterlife. In the early 1990s the administration of the Zhongshanling set up a small statue about 130cm high on the site of Wang’s original tomb. The marble statue shows a kneeling Wang Jingwei with tie and tailcoat (Japanese style), hands handcuffed behind his back, bowing in the direction of Sun Yat-sen’s tomb to confess his guilt as a traitor. The statue was removed in 1997 because onlookers had taken to polluting the site by spitting and urinating on the sculpture, and because a discussion about Wang Jingwei had begun in the PRC that went beyond depicting him as a traitor. A journalist for the Nanjing chenbao discovered the statue in 2008 hidden in a shed next to the tomb of the first Ming emperor. ‘Nanjing Meihuashan faxian Wang Jingwei guxiang, guxiang zeng mianchao Sun Zhongshan lingtang’ (On Meihua Mountain in Nanjing a statue of Wang Jingwei kneeling was discovered, which originally bowed in the direction of Sun Yat-sen’s tomb). I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for informing me about this statue. For pictures of the statue, see: http://blog.163.com/ziling6@126/blog/static/25206374200772162548694 and http://news.artxun.com/ 2008-03-24 19:01:54 (downloaded 13 July 2009).

[80] Wenhui bao, 6 May 1946, 1.

[81] Zhou, Zhongshan lingyuan boji, 324-326.

[82] Ibid., 332.

[83] W.Y. Tsao, The Constitutional Structure of Modern China (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1947), 89.