Few others, if any, have been given a funeral procession such as this. Not only was it long, from Zhongshan Wharf in Nanjing’s northwest all the way to Purple Mountain, it was wide.
Roads along the entire route were ripped up and rebuilt anew. Zhongshan Bei Lu, Zhongshan Lu and Zhongshan Dong Lu remain today largely as they were then, minus the 21st-Century inconveniences, but each a monument to Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925; typically Sun Zhongshan in Mandarin), father of Modern China (1912-1949).
And at the head of it stood Zhongshan Men. Today, it is proudly thought of by many locals as the point at which they feel home as their car drives by underneath. But its past was dominated by upheaval, blood and controversy.
Zhongshan Men, formerly Chaoyang Men (朝阳门), named on account it was the first of Nanjing’s 13 gates to greet the morning sun after being built (with just one archway) in 1366 by Zhu Yuanzhang; became thus in 1928, when it was rebuilt into a triple-arch gate.
While constructed for a funeral, it should have been something of a new beginning too. Chaoyang Men had previously been the stage for several battles, most notably the Taiping Army’s attack on Nanjing in 1853, and the response to the Wuchang Uprising of 1911 led by Xu Shaozhen.
The most bloody of all, however, was yet to come, with Zhongshan Men the Gate through which Imperial Japanese Army General Matsui Iwane rode his horse on 13 December, 1937, initiating the Nanjing Massacre. Matsui would ultimately be executed for war crimes.
But the controversies around Zhongshan Men date back to its dawn. Embedded in the lintel was a stone inscribed by Tan Yankai, the KMT’s first internationally-recognised head of state, who lived at 112 Chengxian Jie in Nanjing and has Linggu Temple as his final resting place.
With World War II raging, that lintel was changed in 1943 to the official script of Wang Jingwei, first President of the RoC’s Reorganised National Government (essentially a Japanese puppet state) who survived an assassination attempt in 1935 to die 9 years later in Japan of lead poisoning from the bullet he had taken. Wang’s signature was chiselled out in 1946, but the three characters he wrote as the Gate’s moniker remained for a half century.
In 1996, Zhongshan Men was changed again, when it became the starting point of the expressway from Nanjing to Shanghai. During that renovation, Wang’s inscription was replaced by that of famed Eastern Jin Dynasty (266-420 CE) calligrapher Wang Xianzhi.
Zhongshan Men stands today as a National Key Cultural Relics Protection Unit.
