ABSTRACT
Most of Sun Yatsen’s 281 days variously and discontinuously spent in Hawai‘i throughout the years 1894, 1895 and 1896 were spent with and among the Hawaiian-Chinese huaqiao community there. China’s land mass and population resources in the mid-19th century dwarfed those of the Hawaiian Kingdom by a factor of several thousand. Chinese immigration to Hawai‘i took place almost entirely from the southwestern seaboard Province of Guangdong, and to a much lesser extent from the seaboard Province of Fujian. There was no silver lining for the Chinese community in the sudden imposition of the Bayonet Constitution in June 1887 by the secretive American-dominated Hawaiian League. The advent of the Provisional Government in January 1893 and its initial 18-month dictatorship as a closet republic saw the formal suspension of any pretence of representative government or democratic politics in Hawai‘i. Ho Fon lived out his days in Honolulu running a succession of Chinese-language newspapers, and simultaneously working for Bishop’s Bank.
