[ 8 ] Early years Sun Yat-sen (back row, fifth from left) and his family. Sun Yat-sen was born on 12 November 1866 to a  Hakka  family in the village of  Cuiheng , Xiangshan (later  Zhongshan ) county,  Guangzhou prefecture,  Guangdong  province (26 km or 16 miles north of Macau ), in