Today’s episode of the Anthems podcast explores the national anthem of Taiwan, officially known as the Republic of China, titled "The Three Principles." The story behind this anthem is intertwined with significant historical events, including the Xinhai Revolution and the complex relationships between key revolutionary figures. Patrick navigates through the colonial past of Taiwan and how its anthem reflects the ideals of nationalism, democracy, and the welfare of the people as envisioned by Sun Yat-sen. The episode delves into the anthem's creation, its musical composition, and its cultural significance, offering insights into how it embodies the spirit of governance and the unique narrative of Taiwan within the broader context of Chinese history. Join us as we uncover the rich tapestry of history and music that defines this powerful national symbol.

My Sources:

1. https://www.taiwan.gov.tw/content_3.php 
2. https://english.president.gov.tw/Page/97 
3. Guy, Nancy (Winter 2002). ""Republic of China National Anthem" on Taiwan: One Anthem, One Performance, Multiple Realities". Ethnomusicology. 6 (1): 96–119. doi:10.2307/852809. JSTOR 852809
4. https://web.archive.org/web/20110722145311/http://news.chinatimes.com/mainland/11050506/112011071900180.html 
5. Oosterhoff, J.L. (1985). "Zeelandia, a Dutch colonial city on Formosa (1624–1662)". In Ross, Robert; Telkamp, Gerard J. (eds.). Colonial Cities: Essays on Urbanism in a Colonial Context. Springer. pp. 51–62. ISBN 978-90-247-2635-6.
6. Ministry of the Interior of the Republic of China. Land. Executive Yuan. 2022-12-14 [ 2023-03-29 ] . ( Archived from the original on 2022-03-04)
7. Paine, S.C.M (2003). The Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895: Perceptions, Power, and Primacy. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-81714-1.
8. Zhang, Yufa (1998), Zhonghua Minguo shigao 中華民國史稿, Taipei, Taiwan: Lian jing (聯經), ISBN 957-08-1826-3.
9. https://www.chinatimes.com/newspapers/20171010000484-260309?chdtv 
10. http://www.xhgmw.com/html/xiezhen/jishi/2014/0716/3945.html 
11. Huo Xiuyong. A New Study on the 1911 Revolution in the Hubei and Hubei Regions. National University of Defense Technology Press. 2008. ISBN  9787810995504 .
12. https://books.google.com.tw/books?id=dVzLG1aqlNkC&pg=PA373&dq=Modern+China+Liao+Zhong+Kai+workers&hl=zh-TW&sa=X&ei=w47dULvxBsnImQXomoGQAg&ved=0CDwQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Modern%20China%20Liao%20Zhong%20Kai%20workers&f=false 
13. https://archive.org/details/shenzhou-ribao-shanghai-1913.07.01/page/3/mode/1up 
14. https://www.google.com/books/edition/China_s_Relations_with_Japan_1945_83/JAsNAQAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&pg=PA23&printsec=frontcover 
15. http://books.google.com/books?id=cNpdWZddi3kC&pg=PA541 
16. https://www.scribd.com/document/340486936/Thuy%E1%BA%BFt-Tr%E1%BA%A7n-Tr%E1%BA%A7n-Xuan-Sinh 
17.  Suisheng Zhao (1995). Power by Design: Constitution-Making in Nationalist China. University of Hawaii Press. pp. 134–136. ISBN 9780824863982.
18. https://web.archive.org/web/20101125083203/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,747553,00.html 
19. https://www.thenewslens.com/article/132628 
20. Hirata Koji, "Britain's Men on the Spot in China: John Jordan, Yuan Shikai, and the Reorganization Loan, 1912–1914." Modern Asian Studies 47.3 (2013): 895–934.
21. https://web.archive.org/web/20140715082547/http://www.jxcbw.cn/wenhua/keji/20140227/33284.html 
22. https://web.archive.org/web/20140806053554/http://www.kmt.org.tw/page.aspx?id=146 
23.  刘敬坤．方治其人[J]．民国春秋，1994（2）：42－46
24. https://catalog.digitalarchives.tw/item/00/07/64/89.html 
25. Zhang Zhongli, Li Rongchang, translator: "The Chinese Gentleman: A Study on His Role in 19th Century Chinese Society" (Shanghai: Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press, 1991).
26. https://web.archive.org/web/20111122083920/http://www.hoplite.cn/Templates/hpbxj0010.htm 
27. Lu, Yan; Re-Understanding Japan (University of Hawaii Press, 2004) is an English-language study of Dai Jitao and three other Chinese intellectuals, in context of their contributions to 20th-century Sino-Japanese relations.
28. https://m.sohu.com/n/408905092 
29.  "The 45th regular meeting of the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang decided to adopt the current party anthem as the national anthem", National History Museum Digital Archive Number 001-010014-00001-019
30. https://www.storm.mg/lifestyle/965594 
31. http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/2/newsid_3582000/3582545.stm 
32. https://news.ifeng.com/history/2/shidian/200806/0621_2666_609789_1.shtml 

http://www.people.com.cn/

Hello and welcome to the Anthems podcast. I'm Patrick and I'm here to tell you the story of a song that helps to tell the story of a nation.

The fastest trip I could find involves flying first to Toronto and then onto this island nation that is easily as hotly contested a piece of land as our last nation. But surprisingly enough, this extra stop over in my own country's northern neighbor adds essentially nothing to the distance that we're traveling.

What is officially the Republic of China. Ive always heard it referred to as Taiwan.

I might have mentioned that I have a map on my fireplace that I stick a pin in every time we cover an anthem on the show. This time the nation and the anthem were discussing is an attempt at making my map a little bit more symmetric.

Ill admit its not a particularly funny or coincidental reason to be covering a song, but it still landed us on a country with a very interesting story.

As a for instance, I'll note that like many island countries, Taiwan does have a colonial past, but it figures into this story only as far as this sentence gets us. That's not really that odd, though.

What is actually kind of strange about this episode is that literally none of the story of the national anthem of the Republic of China, also known by the incipit the three principles, takes place in the country. None of it takes place in Taiwan at all. Definitely a first.

I might not need to tell you that I had a distorted perspective on Taiwan since I grew up in and continue to live in the United States. To be honest, before getting into the reading for this episode, I didn't even know why the mainland, which is the People's Republic of China.

I didn't even know why they were making claims to it. Writing this podcast has done a lot to be knocked down, ignorant positions about the world that I've had in my head.

And I'm only in the 21st episode, so learning completely new stuff all the time has got to be an objectively good thing, right? So without further ado, I will present you with about 1 minute and 10 seconds of something that you might never have heard before. So enjoy.

Jenna yeah, initial reaction for me is slightly mixed.

This version that I played for you is pretty good, and having a children's choir gives an element of novelty that I enjoy, but the music is tougher to showcase with it. With this anthem, we have more creativity and prowess exhibited in the musical composition.

But the story is very much bound up in the way that the lyrics came about.

There is, as they say, a lot in a name sometimes, and the three principles certainly adds to the data, showing that even the modern name of the country has layers and layers of meaning, with the word evolving from a named coastal sandbar that served as the first permanent settled spot on the main island. But stop it. You're not tricking me into getting lost into the surprisingly complicated etymology of place names in Asia.

We need to figure out where in the world we are. And then I need to talk about how this song came about.

Taiwan is a series of 168 islands with a main island known historically by the name Formosa, making up all but 400 of the countries just under 36,200 km². If you know where China is and you have some knowledge of where the provinces are in China, then it's easy to find Taiwan.

It's about 120 miles off the coast of Fujian province.

It's also basically the point where the East China Sea, the South China Sea and the Philippine Sea come together, a location that might help explain some of the region's history with its actual closest neighbor, Japan.

Despite their mainlands being about a thousand miles away from each other, there is a japanese island named Yonaguni that's like 70 miles, or 110 km away from Taiwan. The other closest non China neighbor is the Philippines. And here you need to go about 270 miles north from mainland to mainland to get to Taiwan.

But the two closest islands are only about a third of that distance from each other.

So I thought there was going to be another non geology term for this episode, because islands are volcanic, and there's only so much I can say about that. But I discovered that Taiwan's main island is something called a tilted fault block. And that's an interesting thing that I didn't know existed.

Now, imagine that you have two sheets of paper lying flat on a table, and you slide them together and keep pushing. In some places, the sheets will slide over or under each other, and in other places, they will butt up and begin to fold and buckle.

When this happens with tectonic plates, you sometimes get gigantic chunks of rock that jut up out of the ocean, making islands. Imagine what kind of force is involved with something like that. Actually incredible.

But we're talking historical timeline and not geological timeline.

We have another kind of an odd duck here, because now that we've placed Taiwan on the map and got to the point where the story begins, we're not going to go back there.

Everything in this story happens in mainland China, and in fact, during the entirety of the song's story, the territory that will become Taiwan is a colonial property of Japan. Interesting stuff all around. It's an easy place for me to find an entry point, though.

Since the Treaty of Shimonoseki was signed to bring an end to the first sino japanese war, the treaty recognized the independence of Korea and ceded land from China to Japan in perpetuity, including Taiwan.

This loss was one of the rallying cries of the chinese nationalists that were responsible for the Xinhai revolution that defines where we're going to enter the timeline.

Like most military uprisings, the one that led to the end of imperialism in China did not develop in a vacuum, and it took place at a local maximum of democratic minded thinking among a varied and contentious revolutionary landscape.

We are going to start earlier on, and by talking about some of the parts of the very complicated revolution through the lens of four different men's politically intertwined lives, we're also going to start the story even further away from Taiwan than mainland China.

Because Lao Chong Kaidenhe was born in San Francisco, California, Lau was one of 24 children, and he lived with his parents until his father was transferred back to Hong Kong by the british bank that he worked for. This move had him by age 20, graduating from Queens College in Hong Kong, married to fellow revolutionary He Zhengjing.

I've got to apologize for the pronunciations going forward.

Lau continued his education at Waseda University in Japan, and that is where he joined Sun Yat sen's Revolutionary alliance as the director of the financial bureau before completing his studies in economics and political science at Chow University, which is also in Japan.

Probably for thinking that China should maintain close ties to Soviet Russia.

And the next guy I'm going to talk about was actually accused of being responsible for this man's death, but historians generally think that that was not the case. The next piece of the puzzle is filled with hunmen.

His early life seemed not super easy, with both of his parents passing by the time he was 15 and his brother and him being in pretty dire financial straits. But Hu was a very smart kid and he was a diligent student, and he was able to qualify fairly well in the imperial civil service exam.

And there is a lot about Hugh Hanman that I wanted to include, like the fact that he is considered one of the four great masters of traditional chinese calligraphy. But I will have to settle for encouraging you to read more on your own.

The third of the men I have tried very hard not to think of as some variation of the four horsemen of the Xinhai revolution is Xiao you Zhang.

The historical record picks him up when he passed the imperial examination when he was 13, and he was admitted into China's first western style university at 16 years old, he also joined Sun Yat sen's revolutionary league.

But he had to step down because they caught him embezzling a bunch of money.

That year he joined the revolutionary League and began openly criticizing the Qing dynasty in newspaper articles and participated in the Shanghai uprising portion of the Shinhai Revolution.

He jumped off a bridge and a fisherman rescued him.

You might have guessed that Dai was also present at the first national Kuomintang Conference and was involved in the Wampoa military department as a member of the executive board and the director of the political department respectively.

So why am I talking about four fairly random, if fairly prominent members of the party that ended up losing the civil war in China? Also, to be clear, I have no idea what the entirety of the war was like and who was in the right, although I suspect both sides were not great.

Maybe more of that will come clear when I start reading for the anthem for the People's Republic of China someday, because we're going to get more of this history. When we do that, it's all intertwined. Anyway.

I hope that I was at least completely obvious that these guys are involved in the anthem story because of course they are. My foreshadowing is not subtle here. They were also intimately involved in shaping some pretty large parts of chinese and taiwanese society.

People are complicated literally all of the time, and these men had motivations and sympathies that were all over the map, just like you and me.

And it might be the only time that I ever mentioned Japan's surrender on the show. I don't know.

What I also don't know, or didn't know, rather, was that Japan made a real effort at trying to take over mainland China that's been lost in every bit of the war's history that I've ever learned about. That's us history education for you. Though, I suppose the point here is.

I do have a point, is that China got Taiwan back from Japan and the remaining KMT members, a few hundred thousand nationalist troops and about 2 million refugees fled to the island and brought their anthem with them. But how did we get the song that you heard earlier?

The four men's lives were all intertwined with the creation of the republic, and all four were physically together for the opening of the Wampoa military academy here, Sun Yat sen gave a speech.

And despite a little historical hullabaloo, it is generally taught by thought, by historians, that it was written mostly by Huhanam with assistance from Daijatou, Lao Zhengkai, and Xiao Yo Zhang.

It was very popular speech, and after the successful reunification of China through something that I've read nothing about, called the Northern Expedition, dai Ja Tao proposed using the speech as the party anthem of the KMT. Clearly, the rest of the needed parties signed on, and a public contest was sent out with a prize of 500 silver yuan.

And those are currently trading on eBay. From anywhere from a penny to, like $12,000. I have no idea what they're worth.

Heading to Japan for study is a theme with the people involved in this show, this episode. But unlike the authors, he stayed there at the conservatory, and he studied for ten years.

And again, the committee still recommended using the Wampoa Military Academy motto as the national anthem on the grounds that it fully embodied the spirit of the revolution and was not only in line with the history and culture of the nation, but also represented the founding spirit of the republic.

Musically, it is easy to hear the ability of Cheng, and we have got another ridiculously well suited and crafted composition. The melody is direct with a clear and stately progression, and there is a symmetry to the four bar structure that is consistent.

Further, it sits nicely on top of the lyrics, and it makes that easier to sing, as does the duple meter. That's a new music word for me. Yay. It's two four or four four. And the slowish, measured tempo make it easier to sing too.

As many anthems are, this song is composed in a major key. I think this one is c, but, you know, I don't know for sure.

The anthem is a non militaristic anthem, and it focuses more on the message of the lyrics. So it's not unusual to find really sparse instrumentation or even just people singing lyrically and poetically.

This is a pretty interesting piece of writing, and it forced me to learn a bunch of stuff about traditional chinese poetry.

What I'll be reading in a few is the official translation into English, but it was written in classical literary Chinese, a very formal version of the language.

This piece adheres closely to the form called lushi, or regulated verse, where the verses are five to seven characters long and it helps create a sense of balance and symmetry in them. The writing also has the same emphasis on parallelism that traditional chinese poetry is full of.

Lucy especially uses this coupled phrases to exhibit parallels of ideas, syntax, and sound. For my western listeners. Somebody that writes in that style is Walt Whitman. Almost everything that he wrote leans very heavily on parallels.

One more thing to note before getting into the lyrical content is that again, this is the official translation to English from the government in Taiwan.

So my assumption is that they think it sufficiently gets the meaning of the thing across however, this poem is written in traditional Chinese originally, and that is a far more tonal language than English. And how stuff said super duper matters in a way it does not in the language that I am speaking.

Unfortunately, it's something you got to read more on your own about because I can't mention more for purposes of time. Now on to the lyrics of the anthem. San min chuai our aim shall be to found a free land, world peace be our stand.

Lead on comrades, vanguards ye are, hold fast your aim by sun and star be earnest and brave your country to save one heart, one soul, one mind, one goal.

We're now presented with an incredibly long piece of writing, and that makes sense because Sanmin Chuai was originally the opening of a speech and it was fit to a very specific traditional style.

The original placement of the writing coupled with the traditional style are kind of a historical bridge because the themes of patriotism, national unity, and collective effort are common and present in modern and classical poetry in China and a whole bunch of other countries, too.

The poem is essentially a distillation of Sun Yat son's philosophy, starting with nationalism, democracy, and the livelihood of the people, which some sources call welfarism. Those are the three principles that we're talking about here. It is the core of what the KMT meant to the founder.

The whole song isn't just about the three principles, but they are central to what Taiwan is all about. So we're going to start with a little discussion of them specifically and what they inspire in the poem.

I will note that there are people that criticize the use of a party anthem touting these principles as the national anthem of a country that was under martial law for a long time after the defeat of the KMT by the communists. But we only get to hear about that on the show if they pick another anthem someday.

So nationalism, that's a word that's got some authoritarian connotations in the 21st century, and it's also a word that we traffick in all the time on the Anthems podcast, because national anthems are a super nationalistic thing, and the intent of the term here falls in line with an anthem's intent in general. Sun was interested first in having the country united as one and to be free of foreign dominion with the chinese people deciding their own fate.

And the anthem opens by evoking national pride and independence.

Sun's second principle is democracy, because what good is having sovereignty unless the government brought forth is representative of the people that actually want to decide their own fate? This ideal is reflected in the writing, with the stately balanced phrasing trying to reflect orderly governance and civic responsibility.

Finally, we get to potentially the only confusing principle because people's livelihood refers to all manner of well being and not just income, which possibly explains why some people just call it welfarism, making things possibly less clear. But anyway, the big aims from the KMT were originally land reform and economic modernization, and we get that as a hopeful tone in the writing.

But despite this being a distillation of a specific political philosophy, it's actually an incredibly chinese piece of writing.

The three principles was written in traditional Chinese in a form that very closely matches traditional luxi, but what makes it an anthem is the way that it embodies the chinese people. It's weird not to say taiwanese people, but when written, that country didn't actually exist. This was written for China.

Most forwardly, we hear this in the explicit embodiment of confucian ideals, with lines like be earnest and be brave, emphasizing the core confucian values of loyalty, faithfulness, and diligence. The poem also emphasizes the value of collective effort and heroism in the pursuit of a cause.

We should recall that this is a training speech for a military academy. The poem even has some imagery in it, too, but in the three principles this is symbolic imagery and not metaphorical.

All told, San Min Chu I it stands as a solemn, dignified national anthem that reflects the founding principles of the Republic of China as envisioned by Sun Yat sen.

Its straightforward melody, harmony, and rhythm make it an accessible song, while its lyrics and historical context imbue it with deep political and cultural significance.

For Taiwan, the anthem is not only a symbol of governance and ideology, but also a reminder of the unique position that Taiwan holds in the larger narrative of chinese history. Hopefully you've learned something. I sure did. On to the credits. The writing, recording, and production for the show are done by me.

I wrote and played the theme music. The music was used with my permission.

Unless otherwise noted, the anthems I play are public domain or some equivalently free to play license or something, and this time the audio comes from the official media channel of the Office of the President of the Republic of China.

This media is provided for free for distribution as long as I let you know that it was provided for me by the office of the President of the Republic of China.

It's a post about the show and an on topic page on social media is something kind of different. For now, I try to get the episodes shared onto whatever platform I can with the hashtag hash anthemspod.

Assuming hashtags Mather on that platform, it'd be cool if you hashtag the post or shared it with whatever new social media stuff kids are doing now. And it might also create a wormhole that makes this very episode be the first coherent interstellar transmission that we get on earth.

It could happen, I think.

As always, you can email me corrections, comments, concerns, suggestions, ideas, instructions on how to do awesome things and even ask me questions@anthemspodmail.com.

And you happen to be playing my show on a PA system that you have on your boat. But even if all you do is download one more for the road, you're the reason I'm talking right now. So have a great month, folks.