‘A Hawaiian son’: Honolulu honours Sun Yat-sen as his landmarks vanish

Eddie Flores pressed the button at a pedestrian crossing on King Street, then pointed across the road.

In the spring of 1910, Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen lodged over there, on the second floor of a shop owned by a friend and fellow party member.

“It’s no longer there,” said Flores, chairman of the restaurant chain L&L Hawaiian Barbecue. “But we can more or less point out where the building is.”

Much of Sun’s Honolulu has to be found this way. The church where he worshipped as a boy was pulled down in 1909. The basement where his followers met in secret was lost in a renovation. The theatre where he called for the overthrow of the Qing dynasty’s autocratic rule is now a market. And the place where China’s first revolutionary party was founded is a car park.