SUN YAT SEN AND THE
CHINESE REPUBLIC
I
THE TOWN OF BLUE VALLEY
CHOY HUNG, the Town of Blue Valley, with the purple mountain of the Plowshare for its background; the hamlet in the Vale of Blue! Just another of the tens of thousands of Chinese Sleepy Hollows, a few flecks and broken lines in white and gray in the tropical green of a valley whose mountains are blue.
It was in our Christian year 1866 that a certain "boy mouth" came as an addition to this little wayside Town of Blue Valley. It does not matter about the day of the lunar month, for Chinese do not generally hold age enumeration with Occidental exactness, their universal birthday being the Chinese New Year, when every one counts another communal year of his life. So that, in the Chinese New Year that fell in 1867, the little one—afterward known as Sun Yat Sen—according to Chinese calculations, was already two years old;
3
