SEF chairman Chiang Pin-kun pays homage at Sun Yat-sen memorial

BEIJING, June 12 (Xinhua) -- Chiang Pin-kun, the Taiwan-based Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) chairman, paid homage at the tomb containing personal effects of Kuomintang (KMT) founder Sun Yat-sen here on Thursday.

It was Chiang's second trip to the site. He previously visited in 2005 when he was the then KMT vice chairman.

Accompanied by Chen Yunlin, chairman of the Chinese mainland's Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS), Chiang and his wife also visited Dr. Sun Yat-sen's memorial hall in the Biyun Temple, in the Fragrant Hills in the northwest of Beijing's urban outskirts.

He laid a wreath at the statue of Dr. Sun in the memorial hall and made three bows in reverence.

Sun Yat-sen, the pioneer of China's democratic revolution and founder of the KMT, or the Nationalist Party of China, died in 1925 in Beijing. His coffin resided at the temple before it was moved and buried in Nanjing in 1929, the former seat of the KMT regime that ruled China until 1949.

Chiang said the KMT would continue its efforts to realize the ideals put forward by Dr. Sun, who stated "Shi jie da tong, tian xia wei gong", which means "The world is in harmony. The state belongs to the people".

He also hoped the two sides would promote cross-Strait peace and exchanges so as to benefit people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.

In 1998, the then SEF chairman Koo Chen-fu paid a visit to the tomb.