Today – millions of Chinese revere Sun Yat-sen as the ‘father of the nation’. Although he spent the greater part of his life outside his homeland, much of it as a peripatetic wanderer, no one was more single-mindedly devoted to the cause of a free and modern China than this missionary-educated son of Chinese peasants. Despite repeated failures and disappointments, Sun refused to abandon his vision. Of all China’s leaders, none is more enigmatic, a sometimes tragic but most often courageous and many-sided ¬figure.