THE HONG KONG ORIGINS OF
DR. SUN YAT-SEN'S
ADDRESS TO LI HUNG-CHANG
NG LUN NGAI-HA*
2
Of the many studies on Dr. Sun Yat-sen's ideas and works, his letter presented to Li Hung-chang has received relatively less attention.* There were in the past, doubts as to whether the letter was written by Sun himself, as he made no mention of it in his autobiography and the presentation was an appeal to a Ch'ing high official for reform, which might appear to some as inconceivable. Yet, studies from contemporary sources such as the works of Feng Tzu-yu and Ch'en Shao-pei3 confirm that in February 1894 Sun did leave Canton for Tientsin to present a letter to Li Hung-chang, then governor-general of Chihli and one of China's most influential exponents of modernization. In fact, in the pamphlet written by Sun himself after the kidnap incident in 1896, he mentioned twice his attempt to petition the Ch'ing Government for reform. The letter has now been generally accepted as one of the earliest documents we have by Sun himself, showing that while his anti-Manchu sentiments and revolutionary tendencies had germinated in the 1880's, he nonetheless shared some of the notions of the reformists of the time. In view of the fact that during these early years in the formation of his political ideas, Sun had stayed in Hong Kong, where he received much of his formal education, it is worth finding out how much of Sun's proposal in the presentation to Li was nurtured by what he had seen and experienced here.
At the opening of the presentation, Sun described his educational background so as to claim knowledge which he considered was essential for the modernization and strengthening of China,
"I have obtained a British medical degree from Hong Kong. As a young man, I had been educated abroad and acquired general knowledge of Western languages, literature, politics, customs, mathematics, geography, physics and chemistry. I paid, however, special attention to their (Western) ways of
* Dr Ng lectures on Hong Kong history at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.