中山紀(jì)念堂英文導(dǎo)游詞.doc

The Sun Yant-Sen Memorial HallSun Yat-sen was the forerunner of the Chinese bourgeois democraticrevolution. He was born on November 12, 1886 in a farmers family in the Cuiheng Village in Xiangshan County in Guangdong Province. At the age of 12, he went to Honolulu, where his elder brother sent him to a missionary school. Later, he came back to Hongkong to sudy in a college of Western medicine and, after graduation, practiced medicine in Guangzhou and Macao. So, ever since he was a child, he had been influenced by the Western ideas of Christianity and democracy and this had helped him make up his mind to cure the ills of the old feudal China and turn it into a democratic and strong nation. At first, he had illusions about the Qing government and hoped to save this moribund regime through reforms. But, Chinas defeats by foreign invaders and the corruption and incompetence of the Qing government intensified his patriotic indignation. He decided that the Qing court was rotten to the core and must be overthrown and replaced by a democratic republic.So, in 1894, together with some twenty Chinese shop-keepers and farm-owners in Honolulu, he established the first Chinese bourgeois revolutionary organizationthe Society for the Revival of China. In the following spring, he returned to Hongkong and staged the first armed uprising against th Qing Dynasty in Guangzhou; but it ended in failure. Then, in 1905, he went to Japan, where he founded Chinas first political party called “China Revolutionary League”, which later developed into the Nationalist Party. Since then he had made successive attempts to topple the Qing regime and finally succeeded in the Wuchang Uprising that broke out in October 1911. The Qing regime was overthrown and he was elected the provisional president of the interim government of the Republic of China in Nanjing. This political power, however, was soon taken over by the warlords. Then in 1920, Sun Yat-sen came back to Guangzhou to set up a new government called the South Revolutionary Gvernment. In 1921, he proclaimed his extraordinary presidency in Guangzhou. In 1925, he died of illness in Beijing and was buried later in Nanjing.Sun Yat-sen had devoted all his life to the cause of the Chinese democratic revolution, and the 1911 revolution he led had put an end to the feudal monarchy that had existed in China for several thousand of years. To commemorate his great contributions to the Chinese revolution, people of Guangzhou had this memorial hall built in 1929-1931, at the original site of the former presedential house of the South Revolutionary Government, which was burned down in 1922 by a rebel warlord,Chen Jiongming by name.The Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall is an octagonal palace-like reinforced concrete structure, 58 meters high with a floor space of 12 thousand square meters. It looks like a traditional Chinese palace in appearance but was constructed with modern architectural technique. In front of the hall stands a bronze statue of Sun Yat-sen, which is 5.5 meters high and weighs 3.9 tons. Up on the facade below one of the eaves is written Sun Yat-sens motto, meaning “China Belongs to the People” in English. Inside the building is a conference hall with a seating capacity of 3,238 people. And, thanks to the ingenious designing of the architect, the acoustics of the hall are excellent and there is no pillar to obstruct the spectators view because the eight pillars sustaining the four long-spanned steel trusses supporting the huge dormed roof, are hidden in the walls. Today, the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall is still one the main places for mass meetings or theatrical performances in Guangzhou.At the back of the hall, there is a 2-storied building on each side. In the backyard are planted over 70 species of trees and flowers. Among them a kapok tree is already over 300 hundred years old and the two magnolia trees on both sides of the garden are over 70 years old These two mognolia trees are the oldest magolia trees in Guangzhou and have grown up to 90 centimeters in diameter, each giving a shade of over 200 square meters.The magnificent Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall was designed by a young Chinese architect, by the name of Lu Yan-zhi, w