ABSTRACT
Professor Harold (Zvi) Schiffrin was the first modern scholar to cite Edwin Collins’s name in association with Sun Yatsen. In his ground-breaking book of 1968, Sun Yatsen and the Origins of the Chinese Revolution, Professor Schiffrin wrote: ‘With the assistance of one Edwin Collins, he [Sun] wrote an article, “China’s Present and Future: The Reform Party’s Plea for British Benevolent Neutrality,” which appeared in the Fortnightly Review of March 1, 1897’.1 However Schiffrin did not pursue this particular line of enquiry any further in print. It was left to the indefatigable and brilliant detective work of Dr (now Professor) John Wong eighteen years later to pick up successfully the scent on Collins’s – it must be admitted – very cold trail, the results of which he summarised in his 1986 book, The Origins of an Heroic Image: Sun Yatsen in London, 1896-1897.2 John Wong’s great innovation was to adopt the methodology and outcomes of meticulous field work into his researches.
