Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum

The competition brief of May 1925 was unusually explicit: the tomb was to be Chinese in spirit yet modern, memorial in substance, and buildable for 300,000 yuan. More than forty entries arrived; the committee chose Lü Yanzhi unanimously in September. What he delivered reads as one long ceremonial ascent rather than a building — a paifang, a gate, a stele pavilion, then a 392-step stair climbing between pines and ginkgos to a granite hall whose blue glazed roofs and white stone were taken to stand for the Nationalist flag. Beneath the palace roof profile are Western construction methods and a Beaux-Arts axial plan learned at Cornell and in Henry Murphy's office; the layout as a whole was drawn in the shape of an alarm bell, answering Sun's charge to awaken the people. Work began in January 1926, the hall and the main structures were finished in the spring of 1929 and the complex only in 1931; the final cost passed three million yuan. Lü died of cancer that March, months before Sun was interred. Liang Sicheng later argued the hall's proportions betrayed a borrowed rather than understood tradition.