Zhongshan Road in Shijiazhuang, for example, is named after the Zhongshan state and later commandery, not Sun Yat-sen. Sun Yat-sen, a leader of the Republican revolution of the early 20th century, was remembered in China with great fervor after his death in 1925, and especially after his Kuomintang party re-unified China in 1928.
[citation needed] When the Republic of China government took over Taiwan at the end of World War II, the practice of naming streets and parks after Sun, and erecting monuments in his honor, spread to the island as well.
A conventional practice developed where no streets would be named after a political leader, except for Sun Yat-sen.
In mainland China today, Sun Yat-sen remains the only modern politician commemorated in road names: no Communist leader, such as Mao Zedong or Deng Xiaoping, shares this privilege.
[citation needed] In Taiwan, Zhongshan (more commonly and locally spelled as "Jhongshan" or "Chungshan") Roads are as ubiquitous, if not more, compared to mainland China.
The literal meaning of the characters zhong and shan are "Central/Middle" and "Mountain"; the name was adopted by Sun Yat-sen while in Japan in the early 1900s.