In adolescence, Sun felt the stings and urges of resentment driving him to reform and revolution. He had kin who were involved in the T'aip'ing Rebellion (1850-65), the vast peasant uprising which, under Christian collectivist leadership by the Messianic Hung Hsiu-ch'üan, swept North to the Yangtze and drowned in a sea of blood less than two years before Sun's birth. He thus had direct knowledge not merely of Chinese revolt against the alien Manchu empire, but he knew of the revolutionary technique of a religious leader. The effect of this presumptive knowledge has never been explored; it would explain a great deal in Sun's career--much of the sharp enthusiasm, the use of ecstatic slogans, the emphasis on will, his demands for faith in himself--if one could know that he followed the instance of a Chinese Joseph Smith or Brigham Young, not that of a Chinese Mazzini or Marx. The other important feature about his early life was Western education.[1] [Footnote 1: _Sun Yat-sen_ is the Cantonese pronunciation of _Sun I-hsien_, just as _Chiang K'ai-shek_ is that of _Chiang Chieh-shih_. Both men first acquired their world reputations under this pronunciation, which has become standard in English. According to Chinese custom, one's given name is used only by one's elders; consequently Sun Yat-sen has been referred to, by his grateful followers, by his "courtesy name" Wên, which is the name by which one refers to one's elder. In addition, he is referred to by another special name which he took for conspiratorial work, Chung-shan (allusive to an ancient hero), or by his title--as _Tsung-li_ or _Sun Tsung-li_, much as we refer to President Wilson rather than to Woodrow Wilson. Sun was known most widely in life as Sun Wên; Chiang is most commonly mentioned as Chiang Chung-chêng. The question of names is extensively discussed in the biographies of the two leaders, cited below.] Western training gave him a channel upward which the Confucian system had denied a hundred generations of his predecessors. Patriots, rebels, reformers--these have been sown by temperament and fortune across the centuries of Chinese social existence, but such potential heroes have been ploughed out or crippled by the language and the examinations. No man could command power--save in its transient forms: banditry, conspiracy, commerce--without mastering the Confucian canon. Once the intricate scholarship of the past gripped him, the complex, beautiful, archaic language of the mandarinate stopped up his mouth for plain utterance. He was isolated from the people. Sun escaped this by the use of the English language and the command of Western science. He was par excellence the great counter-ideologue, whose self-confidence and command of men rested upon foundations beyond the ken of his adversaries. Judge Linebarger wrote, on the basis of what Sun told him: