Searching for a Modern Chinese Monument: The Design of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing

摘要

In this article, I address the design of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing (1925-31), the most important monument of republican China. By putting it in the context of Sun's ideal for a modern China, the historiography of Chinese architecture since the nineteenth century, various historical associations of competition proposals, the new commemoration rite the Chinese Nationalist Party developed for Sun, and the iconic needs in a cultural politics for awakening masses, I argue that Chinese-style architecture, rather than a readymade system, was an open-ended discourse, in which tradition was examined in relation to the new interest in international architecture. This is epitomized in the design of the mausoleum, in which various ideals for a modern Chinese monument-stylistic, functional, and symbolic-were conceived as part of an effort to fashion the new nation. Modern architecture, in this instance, must be understood as a material embodiment of the struggle to define a modern state.