Sun Yat-sen's birth in a small farming village near Macau set in motion decades of revolutionary agitation against the crumbling Qing dynasty. He would found the Tongmenghui, inspire the 1911 Revolution, and become the founding father of the Republic of China, a figure still honored by both mainland China and Taiwan.
Sun Yat-sen grew up poor, in a house his family shared with farm animals, before an older brother's success in Hawaii gave him the chance to study abroad. That Western education—first in Honolulu, then in medicine in Hong Kong—exposed him to constitutional government and convinced him China's imperial system was doomed.
He spent nearly three decades in exile, raising money from overseas Chinese communities and plotting uprisings that mostly failed, before the 1911 Revolution finally succeeded while he was traveling in the United States. He learned of the Qing dynasty's collapse from a newspaper headline and rushed home to become provisional president of the new Republic of China.
His political philosophy, the Three Principles of the People—nationalism, democracy, and people's livelihood—remains foundational text in Taiwanese schools today. Both the Communist Party and the Kuomintang claim his legacy, a rare point of agreement between bitter rivals, and his portrait still hangs in Tiananmen Square on major state occasions.