Sun Yat-sen

Sun Yat-sen (1866 to 1925) was a Chinese physician who became the founder of the Republic of China and of the Kuomintang. Born to a poor peasant family in Guangdong, he was educated in Hawaii and graduated in 1892 from the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese. His public life moved quickly beyond medicine: after Li Hongzhang rejected his 1894 petition for reform of the Qing government, he went into exile and devoted himself to anti-Qing organizing through the Revive China Society, the Tongmenghui and the People's News. He is remembered chiefly for the 1911 Revolution and for the Three Principles of the People, but he belongs in a record of healers as a trained physician whose profession gave him his first public standing. He died in Beijing in 1925.