Role of 'First Shot' in events disputed

Eighty-five-year-old Xiong Hui tells a good story, eloquently recounting the tale of his famous father's role in the 1911 revolution that overthrew thousands of years of imperial rule in China.

His father, Xiong Bingkun, has been widely credited with firing the first shot in the Wuchang uprising of October 10, 1911, and is better known as 'Xiong of the First Shot'.

As one of few surviving first-generation offspring of the 1911 revolutionaries, Xiong Hui has become something of a celebrity in the lead-up to the centenary.

'My father always said that by the time they decided to take up arms, they had already put their lives on the line,' said Xiong Hui, a retired official with the Hubei branch of the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang, one of the mainland's eight approved non-communist parties. 'That's because they regarded the destiny of the country as their own, that's the legacy of the Xinhai revolution we should pass on.' Xinhai was the year of the revolution according to the traditional 60-year Chinese calendrical cycle.

However, his textbook-perfect utterances have been increasingly disputed by historians, underscoring the tumultuous nature of the event and the difficulty of piecing together what actually happened.

During a recent interview at his home in Wuhan, Xiong Hui said that through a revolutionary he met in the same city, his father, then in his twenties, joined the Qing army engineering battalion stationed on the outskirts of Wuchang. There he joined a loose group of revolutionaries opposed to imperial rule.