Founded on June 16, 1924, China’s first modern military academy aimed to reunite a divided nation. It didn’t quite work out that way.
Looking out over rows of aspiring young military cadets on an island, not far from the bustling docks at Whampoa in Guangdong province, the great revolutionary Sun Yat-sen felt a stirring of hope for reigniting his vision of a unified Republic of China.
China in May, 1924, had gone grievously off-piste from the nation Sun was credited with founding over a decade ago. It was fragmented into regional satrapies ruled by warlords. Far away, in the former imperial capital of Beijing, a rotating cast of warlord-adjacent politicians took turns as the nominal president of the republic. When Sun proclaimed the cadets as the inaugural class of the Whampoa Military Academy on May 1, it was the latest in a long series of schemes and strategies to revive the fortunes of the Kuomintang (KMT), the political party he co-founded.
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