Record collector Chai Wenhua has in his collection two gramophone records of Dr Sun Yat-sen's speech from a meeting in 1924.

Kept in the safe at his home in Southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, the two records, of 78 rpm (revs per minute), bore the emblem of the Kuomintang in the center with a mugshot of Dr Sun Yat-sen. Also printed is a copyright notice made under the supervision of Shen Zhuowu, from the record department of the Shanghai China Evening News, plus a blue seal acknowledging that the material was censored and approved by the then authorities.

According to history documents, Dr Sun arrived in Guangzhou sometime in 1924, and gave a speech to hundreds of people who gathered to meet him.

People who have listened to the records say Dr Sun, who led the Chinese to overthrow the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and end more than 2,000 years of feudal dynastic rules, had a sonorous but kind voice. In his speech, he called for the Chinese to work in concerted efforts to "save China."

"For thousands of years, China ranked among the leading powers in the world, but today it has become the poorest and weakest country," Dr Sun was saying some 81 years ago, from the record. "Invasions of imperialist countries were one of the causes."

The two records have Dr Sun's voice on the two sides, each side lasting a little more than three minutes.

Limited by the technology in the early 1920s, very few footages and records of Sun's images and voices were made and later survived.

The first set of records with Dr Sun's speech in Guangzhou was discovered there in 1979. According to a journal of Guangzhou Public Arts Gallery published in March 1979, the journal's editor found a set of three gramophone records in the home of an artist named Chen Yutian. Two bore recorded voice of Sun in Mandarin Chinese, while the third had Sun's speech in Cantonese.

In November 1996, some collectors discovered the three records appeared in an auction fair and were purchased by an anonymous collector at 50,000-plus yuan (US$6,054-plus).

No other journals since 1979 have ever recorded the appearance of similar records.

People have questioned the authenticity of the records. But an expert from the Chengdu Bureau of Cultural Heritage said some 80,000 old records are kept in Chengdu. Among them was the speech by Dr Sun given in Guangzhou in 1924.

However, those records have been sealed off since the founding of New China, and it would need a huge investment to clean those records to make reproductions.

Meanwhile, a Mr Han, from the Sun Yat-sen's Museum in Nanjing, once capital of the Republic of China (1911-49), said the museum had a set of the records.

However, without seeing the copies from Chai's collection, Han could not confirm whether the two records were of the same product.

(China Daily January 19, 2005)