quality:correction, structural:reformatting, structural:expansion
Illness and death

For many years, it was popularly believed that Sun died of liver cancer. On 26 January 1925, Sun underwent an exploratory laparotomy at Peking Union Medical College Hospital (PUMCH) to investigate a long-term illness. It was performed by the head of the Department of Surgery, Adrian S. Taylor, who stated that the procedure "revealed extensive involvement of the liver by carcinoma " and that Sun had only about ten days to live. Sun was hospitalized, and his condition was treated with radium. Sun survived the initial ten-day period, and on 18 February, against the advice of doctors, he was transferred to the KMT headquarters and treated with traditional Chinese medicine. That was also unsuccessful, and he died on 12 March, at the age of 58. Contemporary reports in The New York Times, Time, and the Chinese newspaper Qun Qiang Bao all reported the cause of death as liver cancer, based on Taylor's observation. He also left a short political will (總理遺囑), penned by Wang Jingwei, which had a widespread influence in the subsequent development of the Republic of China and Taiwan.

His body then was preserved in mineral oil and taken to the Temple of Azure Clouds, a Buddhist shrine in the Western Hills a few miles outside Beijing. A glass-covered steel coffin was sent by the Soviet Union to the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall at Temple of Azure Clouds as a permanent repository for the body but was ultimately declined by the family as unsuitable. The body was embalmed for preservation by Peking Union Medical College who reportedly guaranteed its preservation for 150 years.

In 1926, construction began on a majestic mausoleum at the foot of Purple Mountain in Nanjing, which was completed in the spring of 1929. On 1 June 1929, Sun's remains were moved from Beijing and interred in the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum.

By pure chance, in May 2016, an American pathologist, Rolf F. Barth, was visiting the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall in Guangzhou when he noticed a faded copy of the original autopsy report on display. The autopsy was performed immediately after Sun's death by James Cash, a pathologist at PUMCH. Based on a tissue sample, Cash concluded that the cause of death was an adenocarcinoma in the gallbladder that had metastasized to the liver. In modern China, liver cancer is far more common than gallbladder cancer. Although the incidence rates for either one in 1925 are not known, if one assumes that they were similar at the time, the original diagnosis by Taylor was a reasonable conclusion. From the time of Sun's death to the appearance of Barth's report in the Chinese Journal of Cancer in September 2016, Sun's true cause of death was not reported in any English-language publication. Even in Chinese-language sources, it appeared in only one non-medical online report in 2013.