"In view of the 100th anniversary of the 1911 Revolution and Sun Yat-sen's relations with the Nanyang communities, the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and the Chinese Heritage Centre came together to host a two-day bilingual conference on the three-way relations between Sun Yat-sen, Nanyang and the 1911 Revolution in October 2011 in Singapore. This volume is a collection of papers in English presented at the conference"--Backcover.

In view of the 100th anniversary of the 1911 Revolution and Sun Yat-sen's relations with the Nanyang communities, the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies and the Chinese Heritage Centre came together to host a two-day bilingual conference on the three-way relationships between Sun Yat-sen, Nanyang and the 1911 Revolution in October 2010 in Singapore. This volume is a collection of papers in English presented at the conference. While there are extensive research and voluminous publications on Sun Yat-sen and the 1911 Revolution, it was felt that less had been done on the Southeast Asian connections. Thus this volume tries to chip in some original and at times provocative analysis on not only Sun Yat-sen and the 1911 Revolution but also contributions from selected Southeast Asian countries.

The enigmatic personal qualities that marked Sun Yat-sen during his lifetime have encouraged controversy concerning him ever since his death more than a generation ago. Mr. Schiffrin's book deals with the first forty years of Sun's life, and attempts to find the key to this controversial personality. His study is at once biography and history, for it goes beyond Sun to the whole texture of Chinese history of Sun's time. Drawing on diplomatic archives, police reports, personal interviews, contemporary newspapers, and other hitherto unused sources in Chinese, Japanese, and Western languages, the author reveals unsuspected facets of Sun's versatile plotting on three continents, and traces the convolutions of his pragmatic style in unprecedented detail.