real Sun Yat-sen. There much help came to me incidentally from
oral sources, usually without its being suspected that I was to write
a book; indeed, information began coming before I thought of writ-
ing about Sun Yat-sen. I am thinking of Chinese chiefly when I say
this; occidental sources I have been able to approach frankly and
directly.

As I worked, I came to see that the materials for certain major
periods of Sun Yat-sen's life are not so accessible to his fellow‐
countrymen in China as to outsiders, for the simple reason that
Sun Yat-sen lived much of his life away from his native land. He
became President of China at forty-five; of those forty-five years he
had spent about a dozen in education in foreign territories, and for
sixteen other years he had been a revolutionary vagabond, living at
various times in Europe, Japan and America. Even after his presidency
he spent three more years in exile. The two longest periods which
Sun Yat-sen ever spent on Chinese soil were his boyhood up to
twelve years of age, and the last nine years of his life. It is a matter
to be reckoned with that we foreigners have held and still hold the
keys to some of the most important phases of Sun Yat-sen's career.
And surely we can understand better than most Chinese the oc-
cidental influences that molded Sun Yat-sen as a youth, and played
perpetually upon his thinking, planning and acting throughout life.
If the present book has any justification as another biography of
Sun Yat-sen, it will be found in its central concern with history
rather than with romantic episodes. There is no prying gossip about
the veiled intimacies of Sun Yat-sen's life. From the beginning I
have conceived of this biography as a narrative within a narrative.
What happened to China is the large epic movement without which
Sun Yat-sen's life has no meaning and little interest. What happened
to Sun Yat-sen is a stream of episode within the larger movement.
But it is a significant stream. The events of his life make the cur-
rents of the flowing river more readily observable. China, unfocussed

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