Architect Wang Da-hong won the design competition for the memorial hall and then watched his plan be modified at Chiang Kai-shek's personal direction, with instructions to emphasize Chinese architectural characteristics more strongly. The result is a large-scale building in a classical Chinese palatial style — upswept yellow-tiled roof, symmetrical facades, grand staircases — transplanted into a subtropical city that was simultaneously building highways and factories. The architectural message was deliberate: this was a Chinese government on Chinese soil, maintaining Chinese cultural continuity regardless of geography. Whether or not visitors receive that message consciously, the building is unmistakably large and unmistakably formal. It communicates the weight assigned to what it commemorates.

Sun Yat-sen led the Xinhai Revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1911, ending more than two millennia of imperial rule in China. His political philosophy — the Three Principles of the People, combining nationalism, democracy, and social welfare — became the founding ideology of the Republic of China and remains enshrined in Taiwan's constitution. The memorial hall's interior displays artifacts and documents from Sun's life and the revolution he led, a permanent historical exhibition that functions as the building's core institutional purpose. In the central hall, a large bronze statue of Sun Yat-sen sits beneath the vaulted ceiling. Every hour, honor guards perform a formal changing of the guard ceremony before the statue — a ritual that draws visitors and photographers throughout the day, a choreographed reminder that the building's symbolic role remains active.

The building was never just a shrine. From the beginning it incorporated a performance hall, exhibition spaces, a multimedia theatre, an audio-visual center, lecture halls, and a library holding over 300,000 books. Taiwan's most prestigious film awards — the Golden Horse Film Festival and Awards — were held annually in the memorial hall auditorium for decades before the hall's closure for renovation in 2024. The juxtaposition is striking: a ceremony honoring Chinese-language cinema's best work taking place inside a monument to Republican revolutionary politics. The building absorbs these different uses without apparent contradiction, functioning as a public cultural institution in the full sense. In 1986, administrative authority transferred from the Taipei city government to the Ministry of Education, a change that formalized its role as a national rather than merely municipal resource.

The grounds surrounding the memorial hall are as much the point as the building itself. Chung-shan Park, in which the hall is sited, includes gardens, historical walls, and — at the center — Lake Cui, known in English as Emerald Pond. The pond and its surroundings provide a green relief from the surrounding density of Xinyi District, which has developed in the decades since the hall's completion into Taipei's primary financial and commercial center. Taipei 101, for decades the world's tallest building, stands a few hundred meters away. The contrast between the memorial hall's traditional architecture and the tower's reflective glass expresses something about Taipei's relationship to its own history: the old and the new coexisting at close range without either disappearing.

As of February 2024, the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall closed for a maintenance and renovation project, with expected reopening in 2026. For visitors who arrive before the reopening, the park and exterior grounds remain accessible even when the interior is closed. The renovation offers an opportunity to consider what the building will look like when it reopens — whether the interior will change along with the structural improvements, and what a refreshed institution will choose to emphasize about Sun Yat-sen's legacy in the political climate of contemporary Taiwan. These are not abstract questions. How Taiwan tells the story of its own founding involves, inevitably, decisions about what to celebrate, what to complicate, and what to leave in the past.