Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall 中山纪念堂

Set at the southern foot of Yuexiu Mountain, the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall is a grand assembly hall raised by the people of Guangzhou together with Chinese communities overseas to honour Sun Yat-sen, the revolutionary pioneer. It was designed by the architect Lü Yanzhi and finished in 1931, standing on the ground of the former presidential office Sun used while leading the Republic of China. Its site covers 61,000 square metres; the hall itself rises 48.63 metres and is the largest memorial hall to Sun Yat-sen anywhere in the world.

The building is a celebrated marriage of Chinese forms and Western engineering. Outside, it borrows the manner of Song dynasty palace architecture, with an octagonal pyramidal roof and four projecting porches, its blue glazed tiles set off by red doors, windows and pillars. Inside, steel and reinforced concrete create a broad, column-free space of considerable drama. The hall holds a particular place in modern Chinese history: in September 1945 the Japanese forces in Guangdong signed their surrender here. Today it serves remembrance, tourism, meetings and performances at once, and is listed as a national key cultural relic and a national AAAA scenic area, a landmark on the city's historic central axis.

In the grounds you will find a pair of cloud-crane columns facing each other across the lawn, a bronze statue of Sun Yat-sen, and a venerable kapok tree planted around 1669, honoured in 2018 as China's most beautiful kapok.

Don't miss

• Octagonal hall with blue tiles and red pillars
• The kapok king, a tree of some 350 years
• Pair of cloud-crane columns on the lawn
• Bronze statue of Sun Yat-sen
• Plaque bearing the words 'All under heaven is shared'

Visiting tips

The hall sits at 299 Dongfeng Middle Road in Yuexiu District. Metro Line 2 stops at Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall station, roughly five minutes' walk away. Allow between one and a half and two and a half hours to see the building and its grounds.