Nanjing, on the other hand, was eminently suitable to be the Nationalist capital. It had already served six times as China’s first city, including during the Ming Dynasty. It was also at a healthy distance from centres of foreign power in China such as Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin. In addition, many of Chiang Kaishek’s most important supporters, including his most trusted generals, came from the lower Yangzi region.
During the Ming Dynasty, Nanjing had been a sophisticated and prosperous city, with a population of up to a million people. It was famous for its entertainment quarter, its sophisticated literary life, its commerce in porcelain, silk and ironware, and for its magnificent sixteenth-century porcelain tower, whose fame had spread as far as Europe. However, the Taiping Rebellion of 1850–64 had wreaked terrible damage on Nanjing, from which even by the 1920s it had not recovered. When on 19 July 1864 Qing forces entered the city (which had been the capital of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom) having laid siege to it for many months, they massacred its inhabitants and razed many of its buildings. During the 1911 Revolution, revolutionaries sacked its Manchu quarters, and in 1913 it once again suffered when forces loyal to President Yuan Shikai torched the city while suppressing the Second Revolution.2 The growth of China’s foreign trade had made Shanghai a global trading centre, from which other cities such as Wuhan, up the river in central China, had benefitted. But this new source of wealth had bypassed Nanjing, which remained closed to foreign trade until the 1890s and never caught up. Parts of Nanjing, especially its northern districts, remained in ruins when the Nationalists made it their capital. Farmers tilled land where once there had been houses and roads, with the occasional bridge sticking out from the weeds the only reminder of a prosperous past.
Nanjing’s condition did, however, provide the Nationalists with an excellent opportunity to demonstrate their mettle as China’s saviours. They were determined to turn Nanjing into a model capital city, on a par with Paris, Vienna, Washington, Berlin and St Petersburg, and to transform this once great but now derelict metropolis into a new source of national pride, and so make it a symbol of China’s regeneration. In 1929 the city government adopted the Capital Plan, drawn up by Chinese urban planners largely trained abroad and assisted by foreign advisors, brought in to ensure that the plans met the most exacting and advanced international standards. The Capital Plan stipulated the construction of a network of wide asphalted boulevards so that motorised traffic could travel freely around the city, an administrative district with imposing government buildings, an airport to welcome foreign visitors, a large central station, a financial district, an industrial zone and designated residential areas. The city was to be clean, with a robust sewage system and fresh water piped into homes; comfortable, because of its parks, public spaces and newly planted plane trees, which would shade the streets during the scorching summer; and interesting, because of its museums, theatres, radio stations and cinemas.3 A modern police force was to be instituted to regulate traffic and fashion order out of the feisty din that had been normal street life, while street lights were to be installed to make the roads safe to travel at night. The city was to be cleansed of all that its planners associated with backwardness: its smells, its filth, its noises, its narrow alleys and its unruly population, which lived and worked in small, tightly packed neighbourhoods.
Naturally, these hugely ambitious plans ran into resistance from Nanjing’s residents, who did not want their houses demolished or their neighbourhoods torn apart. The plans could have been realised in full only if the Nationalists’ coffers were overflowing, which they were not. In any case, the military operations against the numerous rebellions they had faced in the first eight years of their rule had taken priority. The floods, droughts and famines of the 1930s were to render lavish spending on the reconstruction of Nanjing both politically unwise and of secondary importance.
At the heart of the new Capital Plan, and hence of the new country that the Nationalists hoped to create, was the Sun Yatsen Mausoleum. This was to be much more than just the building in which Sun Yatsen was interred. The aim was to turn it into the ritual centre of the new nation, which would draw strength from his legacy, presented as uplifting and uniting. The mausoleum was designed as an illustration in stone and marble of the country’s origins, its future and its core beliefs. It was to serve as a stage on which to conduct state functions and so fill the void created by the disintegration of imperial China’s rich stock of ritual practices.
The Nationalists were not fools to dedicate so much energy to symbolic work. The significance of ritual and symbolism in China was illustrated by the attempt of its first president, Yuan Shikai, to restore monarchical government in 1916. He had made the attempt when the institutions of the early Republic were unable to keep the country together and when he faced Japan’s Twenty-One Demands, made during the First World War, which would have virtually turned China into a Japanese colony. President Yuan’s monarchical movement, however, triggered widespread opposition, which compelled him to abort his plans. The May Fourth Movement that erupted across the country shortly afterwards not only made clear that the country’s future could not be built on a return to the past, but also left China in the throes of a divisive cultural war. The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s illustrates that the question had lost nothing of its acuteness fifty years later; the attempt today to construct national rituals around China’s war with Japan is a response to the same issue.
The turn to Sun Yatsen as a source of inspiration for a new national narrative and ritual practices was an obvious move. Sun had a long record as a nationalist revolutionary; his death had been marked by mass outpourings of grief; he had been compared to the greatest figures not just in Chinese but in world history; and in his dress and speech he represented modernity. When Sun Yatsen was interred in his mausoleum, The New York Times was dismissive of his record as a politician and thinker, but also remarked that ‘it is as a symbol of nationalism, rather than as the founder of the Chinese Republic, that Sun Yatsen bids fair to play a great role in the history of this country’.4
The Sun Yatsen Mausoleum
‘Bury me on Purple Mountain’, Sun Yatsen had said on his deathbed.5 Purple Mountain is a park with high hills and winding paths located outside the city walls to the east of Nanjing. Its highest peak rises to 450 metres above sea level. As well as the Sun Yatsen Mausoleum, Purple Mountain is dotted with hundreds of iconic buildings, most famously the Ming Xiaoling. This is the tomb of the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty, its high walls and winding Sacred Way lined with exotic marble animals and guarded by two marble eunuchs. There is also the Linggu Monastery, one of the most famous Buddhist monasteries in China; the tomb of Sun Quan, an emperor of the third century ad; the tombs of two Ming generals, Xu Da and Chang Yuchun; a memorial to foreign airmen, including Russians and Americans, who died in the Second World War; a cherry tree orchard donated by the Japanese which grows over the grave where Wang Jingwei, the man Chiang Kaishek ousted, is buried; and the tomb of the murdered Liao Zhongkai, one of the three men who might have succeeded Sun Yatsen. One can learn a vast amount of Chinese history, both ancient and modern, from walking through this park.
Sun Yatsen chose Purple Mountain because it was in Nanjing that he had established the Republic of China and had been elected its Provisional President – thereby helping change the course of Chinese history. Sun also insisted that ‘my body should be permanently preserved using scientific methods’,6 that is, it should be embalmed, as Lenin’s and Napoleon’s had been, so that his grave would become an enduring symbol of the cause he had led.
The Nationalists established a Preparatory Committee for the Funeral of Sun Yatsen. The Committee decided that Sun’s mausoleum should be built on the main southern slope of Purple Mountain, higher up and to the east of the tomb of the first Ming emperor, and that the design should be decided through an international competition. Among the Committee’s stipulations was that Sun’s sacrificial hall should be open to the public so that al
l citizens could pay their respects to him. This was a very modern idea: access to imperial mausoleums had previously been restricted to a very few, such as the succeeding emperor, the chief mourner. Sun’s mausoleum, however, was going to have enough space to accommodate a mass of up to 50,000 people, for the solemn national ceremonies that the Nationalists intended to conduct there. The revolutionaries, protesters and strikers whose energy had brought forth the upheavals of the 1911 Revolution, the May Fourth Movement of 1919 and the mass protests of 1925 were to be present as obedient citizens in these rituals.7
The Capital Plan designed the new Nanjing around Sun’s mausoleum. The plan also provided for a new centre of government south of Purple Mountain, directly below the mausoleum, with its ministries arranged along a north– south-running grass mall dissected by a wide boulevard, with new party headquarters at its northern – and hence most important – end, with a rotunda with a fountain directly south of it. Had this mall been built, party and government officials would always have had to look up to Sun Yatsen’s mausoleum, and so be reminded of the tasks he had set them. The arrangement conformed with the traditional idea that the ruler looks south and also with the feng shui notion that nature’s forces roll down a mountain.
Lu Yanzhi, the architect whose design won the competition, stipulated that a retaining wall in a bell shape should form the border of the mammoth 12-hectare site. According to Lu, his choice of shape had been made purely on aesthetic grounds, but the judges of the competition seized upon this feature as uniquely appropriate, illustrating Sun Yatsen’s lifelong aim of awakening China.8 It suggested that Sun’s message would continue to echo through China and referenced the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, thus giving Sun’s mausoleum a connection with the American Revolution.
The mausoleum was designed to take mourners and pilgrims on a journey that begins at an oval plaza at the base of the mountain slope, on which stands an archway adorned with the Chinese characters for ‘universal love’ in Sun Yatsen’s own hand. From there a stairway with 392 steps, symbolising China’s estimated 392 million citizens at the time of building, ascends through the formal entrance gate of the mausoleum inscribed with the characters for ‘all under heaven are one community’, again in Sun’s own calligraphy. The stairway ends at a large plaza leading to the main sacrificial hall in which sits a statue of Sun, staring ahead with a scroll on his lap, as if patiently giving a lecture. A narrow corridor leads to a round tomb chamber in which is a marble sarcophagus with a marble effigy of Sun Yatsen on its lid. From a balustraded walkway, visitors walk round the sarcophagus, their gaze drawn to Sun’s body, before re-entering the sacrificial hall.
The tomb chamber is similar in design to Napoleon’s at the Hotel des Invalides in Paris, while the sacrificial hall echoes the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. The Chinese words for democracy, nationalism and the people’s livelihood – that is, Sun’s Three People’s Principles – are inscribed above its entrance. Sun’s Outline for National Construction as well as his Last Testament, including the famous injunction ‘the revolution has not been completed; let all comrades strive to implement it’, are engraved into its walls. These texts assert that China was not yet ready for democratic government but needed a period of tutelage by the KMT to awaken it, thus providing a justification for Nationalist rule.9
All who made the pilgrimage up the stairway into the sacrificial hall, around Sun’s tomb, and then down again would be constantly reminded of Sun’s principles and urged, again and again, to direct their lives towards their fulfilment. They would also be reminded in many ways of China’s imperial mausoleums. This was a clear attempt to draw strength and legitimacy from the mystique of China’s imperial past, but it also indicated a new beginning. Many of its features – the steps in three rows, the large curved roofs, the arches, the marble and columns – would be familiar to pilgrims, but they would also be struck by what was new. The mausoleum’s roofs were covered in blue rather than yellow tiles, blue being the colour of the sky and of the KMT, for whom Sun had designed as its flag a white sun in a blue sky. If visitors looked up to the ceiling of the sacrificial hall, they would see the KMT flag painted on it. The suggestion was that the Nationalists were building a New China, but one that accorded with an enduring sense of the country’s essence.
The mausoleum was a piece of didactic architecture. It positioned the Nationalists’ New China as a country with a distinct and venerable cultural heritage, but also a backward present, with the KMT, as part of a worldwide revolutionary process, leading the country towards a new future of unity, nationalism and democracy. It made Sun into ‘the father of the country’, portraying him as a kind and sagacious teacher who was concerned for all and who had pointed out the path towards a prosperous, inclusive future, free from foreign oppression.
The mausoleum emphasised certain elements of Sun Yatsen’s ideology and neglected others. Sun envisioned the New China as a democratic republic with five branches of government, namely the executive, the judiciary and the legislative as per normal, but also an examination branch to supervise national examinations and a control branch to inspect misbehaviour in office. The republic would be based on Sun’s Three People’s Principles – as mentioned, democracy, nationalism (including the elimination of all foreign privilege in China) and the people’s livelihood (a concept never fully explained, but which referred to the use of a tax on rent to provide housing, clothing, education and transport for all). Sun wrote, lyrically almost, about large infrastructure projects such as a national railway system (which China’s current government has now delivered). Though the Nationalists made much of these aspects of Sun Yatsen’s legacy, especially his idea of China needing a period of tutelage, they heeded little his advocacy of high levels of local self-government.
Sun’s was a message of hope, holding out the prospect of a China with efficient bureaucracies, speedy and efficient transportation systems and a prosperous people who energetically, courteously and happily worked for the common good. Sun’s call for ‘universal love’ and his insistence that ‘all under heaven are one community’ stressed equality, inclusivity and solidarity. But he also insisted that China’s revolution would go through three stages: the violent destruction of the past, to be followed by a period of tutelage before the final transition to constitutional government. Sun’s belief in the need for a period of tutelage under Nationalist auspices derived from his assessment that the cause of the implosion of the republic after the 1911 Revolution was that ‘the Chinese people are deficient in knowledge’, a condition, he said, that had resulted from them ‘having been soaked in the poison of absolute monarchy’.10
The emplacement of Sun Yatsen’s body in his mausoleum on 1 June 1929 was turned into a mass spectacle that involved the entire nation. On 10 May, a train with a giant portrait of Sun Yatsen fixed to its front was sent north to Beijing. Events to draw in the crowds – music, speeches, plays, mimes and martial arts performances – were held at each of the twenty-six stops along the way. The return journey was conducted in a sombre and solemn mode. Representatives of the party, the government, civic organisations and military bands waited at stations decorated with wooden arches and flags. When the train arrived, mourning music was played, heads were uncovered, all bowed – not kowtowed – three times to Sun’s coffin and then observed three minutes of silence. Afterwards, phonographs played records of Sun Yatsen’s speeches.
After the arrival of Sun Yatsen’s remains in Nanjing, they were interred in the mausoleum with intricate ceremony. A catafalque carrying his body processed along a boulevard now named after Sun. The body lay in state at the Presidential Palace, where Sun had announced the establishment of the Republic of China. Mourners were arranged in groups, with the highest party and government officials paying their respects first, followed by representatives of government ministries, the armed forces, provincial governments, overseas Chinese, Tibetans, Mongolians, civic associations, farmers unions and merchant associations.11 At 5 a.m. on 1 June a
large procession set off from the Presidential Palace, preceded by criers, mounted soldiers, infantry and a marching band. The procession passed through twenty ceremonial arches, symbolising each province, the special municipalities and overseas Chinese and arrived four hours later at the mausoleum, where Chiang Kaishek presided over the interment ceremony.
This was a staged affair, intricately put together to achieve a number of object ives. It provided an excellent opportunity for the Nationalists to disseminate far and wide Sun’s vision for China as they wished it to be interpreted. The ceremonies instantly turned Sun into one of China’s greatest historical figures and so sanctified the activities of those who were now left to implement his will, with Chiang Kaishek leading them. Sun’s enshrinement was also a way of ritually saying that the first phase of the revolution, marked by violence, was now over. It initiated a new set of practices, which these rituals, through their repetition, orderliness, awe and spectacle, indicated would anchor the New China.
The Nationalists worked hard to make their message stick. Sun’s portrait hung in every party and government office. The KMT flag he designed fluttered from all party and government buildings. Every Monday morning, party members conducted a Sun Yatsen memorial service. This began with attendees standing up and bowing three times to Sun’s portrait before observing a minute’s silence. The liturgy then required the presiding officer to read Sun’s Last Testament, which was followed by a lecture expounding on Sun’s ideas or reporting on recent progress towards their fulfilment. The Sun Yatsen suit became the regulation outfit for the new elite. Grey in colour, it consisted of a long jacket with a round collar and trousers, all of whose features were said to symbolise some part of Sun Yatsen’s teachings. The five buttons of the jacket, for instance, were supposed to refer to Sun Yatsen’s five branches of government.12 The Nationalists literally wore their Sun Yatsen-ism on their sleeves.
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