Chinese modern: Sun Yat-sen's mausoleum as a crucible for defining modern Chinese architecture

No building is more significant for Republican China's architectural history than the Mausoleum of Sun Yat-sen, the First Provisional President of the Republic of China and leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party. Built in Nanjing (1925-29), the design was selected in the first truly international architectural competition held in China. A state-sponsored monument in "classical Chinese Style with distinctive and monumental features" (as stipulated in the competition guidelines), it demonstrates the relationship between new socio-political conditions and visual culture. This dissertation, through a study of the Mausoleum in the context of modern Chinese nation state building and visual culture, attempts to answer two fundamental questions in Chinese architectural history, namely, what is Chinese "modern" architecture and what is a "Chinese style" of architecture?; Modern architecture, as it is commonly understood, refers to an architecture that originated from the industrialized West; accordingly, modern architecture in a developing country such as China is one that follows the Western paradigm both technologically and aesthetically. In the case of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, I argue that modern architecture must be understood as a material embodiment of the struggle to define a modern state. As such, its references to historical models and its construction of a history to draw inspiration from will be shown as a means of direct participation in nation building. The design of a mausoleum for the man who had most influentially defined the ideal of a modern China, provides us with a case study through which we can examine the conflicted and disputed symbolic discourse that has characterized Chinese modernity.; In terms of style, the Mausoleum's form is widely characterized as "classical Chinese revival," meaning a Chinese classical form incarnated in modern Western materials and technologies. This assessment begs the question of what "classical Chinese architecture" means and whether there was any consensus in the 1920s about an existing "classical Chinese architecture" for architects to adopt. It also ignores the design's cosmopolitan scope and associations. My research demonstrates that the "Chinese Style," far from an inherited, ready-made system, was the outcome of reexamining Chinese architecture in the context of a new interest in international architecture. Thus the Mausoleum requires discussion as a discursive field in which different ideals for modernizing Chinese architecture, functionally, technologically, and stylistically, were conceived as part of the effort to make China into a modern nation-state.; As a catalyst for defining "modern Chinese" architecture, Sun's Mausoleum provides a unique opportunity to demonstrate how China, in the initial stages of nation-state building, sought simultaneous architectural expression of the new Republican ideal, the pursuit of modernization, and nationalist identity. This study demonstrates the complexity of China's self-definition within an international frame of reference. Overall, it will contribute a missing Chinese chapter to knowledge of the hybrid process of modernization throughout the non-Western world.