Many Hong Kong people who played key roles in the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and establishment of the Republic of China are little known despite the risks they took in planning uprisings before the successful 1911 revolution.
Yeung Kui-wan (1860-1901) and Tse Tsan-tai (1872-1938), also known as James See, were two who risked their lives in planning revolutions in Guangdong, along with Sun Yat-sen, the republic's first president.
The first revolutionary organisation, the Literary Society for the Promotion of Benevolence, or Furen Wenshe, was founded in Hong Kong in 1892 by Yeung, Tse and 30 others, mostly schoolmates at Central School, now Queen's College. It was ostensibly a study group that commented on social issues, with the slogan 'loving our motherland'.
In his book The Chinese Republic: Secret History of the Revolution, Tse said that 16 like-minded schoolmates met occasionally to plot the overthrow of the Qing dynasty.
The Manchu government was notoriously corrupt and regarded as having betrayed the nation after being forced to sign a number of unfair treaties with foreign powers.
However, in the late 1880s and early 1890s, very few Hongkongers dared to express revolutionary sympathies because of the large number of Qing spies in the city. That changed when the Qing navy suffered a crushing defeat in the first Sino-Japanese war of 1894-5.