[2] Born to a peasant family in Guangdong, Sun was educated overseas in Hawaii and returned to China to graduate from medical school in Hong Kong.

Although he is considered one of the most important figures of modern China, his political life campaigning against Manchu rule in favor of a Chinese republic featured constant struggles and frequent periods of exile.

After the success of the 1911 Revolution, Sun proclaimed the establishment of the Republic of China but had to relinquish the presidency to general Yuan Shikai, ultimately going into exile in Japan.

[11] After finishing primary education and meeting childhood friend Lu Haodong,[4] he moved to Honolulu in the Kingdom of Hawaii, where he lived a comfortable life of modest wealth supported by his elder brother Sun Mei.

[4] Upon returning to China, a 17-year-old Sun met with his childhood friend Lu Haodong at the Beiji Temple (北極殿) in Cuiheng,[4] where villagers engaged in traditional folk healing and worshipped an effigy of the North Star God.

[25][26][27] In the early 1880s, Sun Mei had sent his brother to ʻIolani School, which was under the supervision of the Church of Hawaii and directed by an Anglican prelate, Alfred Willis, with the language of instruction being English.

[44] Stressing that overthrowing the Manchu would result in chaos and would lead to China being carved up by imperialists, intellectuals like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao supported responding with initiatives like the Hundred Days' Reform.

[44] In another faction, Sun Yat-sen and others like Zou Rong wanted a revolution to replace the dynastic system with a modern nation-state in the form of a republic.

[66][67] At that time, Fusanosuke Kuhara, a prominent figure in Japan’s political and business circles, invited Sun to his villa, the Nihonkan, located where the current restaurant "Kochuan" in Shirokane Happo-en stands.

In 1904, Sun Yat-sen came about with the goal "to expel the Tatar barbarians (specifically, the Manchu), to revive Zhonghua, to establish a Republic, and to distribute land equally among the people" (驅除韃虜, 恢復中華, 創立民國, 平均地權).

[68] On 20 August 1905, Sun joined forces with revolutionary Chinese students studying in Tokyo to form the unified group Tongmenghui (United League), which sponsored uprisings in China.

[68] Sun's notability and popularity extended beyond the Greater China region, particularly to Nanyang (Southeast Asia), where a large concentration of overseas Chinese resided in Malaya (Malaysia and Singapore).

The United Chinese Library, founded on 8 August 1910, was one such reading club, first set up at leased property on the second floor of the Wan He Salt Traders in North Boat Quay.

In 1915, Sun wrote to the Second International, a socialist-based organization in Paris, and asked it to send a team of specialists to help China set up the world's first socialist republic.

"[88] Sun was now convinced that the only hope for a unified China lay in a military conquest from his base in the south, followed by a period of political tutelage [zh], which would culminate in the transition to democracy.

[96]: 54  The Russian revolutionary and socialist leader Vladimir Lenin praised Sun and his KMT for its ideology, principles, attempts at social reformation, and fight against foreign imperialism.

It was performed by the head of the Department of Surgery, Adrian S. Taylor, who stated that the procedure "revealed extensive involvement of the liver by carcinoma" and that Sun had only about ten days to live.

[110] Sun survived the initial ten-day period, and on 18 February, against the advice of doctors, he was transferred to the KMT headquarters and treated with traditional Chinese medicine.

[113] He also left a short political will (總理遺囑), penned by Wang Jingwei, which had a widespread influence in the subsequent development of the Republic of China and Taiwan.

[116] A glass-covered steel coffin was sent by the Soviet Union to the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall at Temple of Azure Clouds as a permanent repository for the body but was ultimately declined by the family as unsuitable.

By pure chance, in May 2016, an American pathologist, Rolf F. Barth, was visiting the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou when he noticed a faded copy of the original autopsy report on display.

Sun's widow, Soong Ching-ling, sided with the Communists during the Chinese Civil War and was critical of Chiang's regime since the Shanghai massacre in 1927.

For example, a KMT committee member Hsieh Kun-hong controversially referred to Sun as having "become immortal" after death under the posthumous name of "Great Merciful True Monarch" (Chinese: 偉慈真君) in 2021.

[132] Taiwanese Education Minister Tu Cheng-sheng and the Examination Yuan member Lin Yu-ti [zh], both of whom supported the proposal, had their portraits pelted with eggs in protest.

[155] Through the mediation of Inukai Tsuyoshi, he became acquainted with Miyazaki Toten,[156] Tōyama Mitsuru, and Uchida Ryōhei, with whom he also had ideological exchanges and received financial support.

[163] Sun Yat-sen was also the godfather of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, an American author and poet who wrote under the name Cordwainer Smith.

There was a street that was named after Sun in the Russian city of Omsk until 2005, when it was renamed in honor of the recipient of the title Hero of Soviet Union Mikhail Ivanovich Leonov.

[172] Sun's Hawaiian birth certificate, which claimed that he was not born in China but in the United States, was on public display at the American Institute in Taiwan on US Independence Day on 4 July 2011.

[184][185] Dr. Sun Yat-sen[186] (中山逸仙; ZhōngShān yì xiān) is a 2011 Chinese-language western-style opera in three acts by the New York-based American composer Huang Ruo, who was born in China and is a graduate of Oberlin College's Conservatory as well as the Juilliard School.

[188] In Space: Above and Beyond, one of the starships of the China Navy is named the Sun Yat-sen.[189] In 2010, the theatrical play Yellow Flower on Slopes (斜路黃花) was created and performed.