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Today is the 199th birthday of America's sixteenth president. He was born in a log cabin in Kentucky.

It's a safe bet that the world will little note nor long remember anything said about the man here. But to all the tributes that continue to be made I would like to add one vignette.

When I travelled in Thailand last year I visited a museum. The museum, filled with dioramas composed of artful wax figures, was devoted to Thailand's history and the people who have shaped it. I went from room to room, seeing how Thai farmers have grown their crops and Thai families have raised their children. I saw an exhibit devoted to Thailand's kings, including Chulalongkorn, the beloved monarch who abolished slavery, and his father, Mongkut, portrayed in the book and film Anna and the King.

And I rounded a corner and saw Abraham Lincoln. He was sitting at his desk, his stovepipe hat laid nearby, holding the Emancipation Proclamation. The Stars and Stripes stretched on the wall behind him.

And I felt humbled, and proud, all at once.

His influence on Taiwan's history is no secret. Sun Yat-Sen looked to Lincoln for inspiration as he fought to establish a new, more humane society in China to replace imperial rule. His successor Chiang Kai-Shek saw the love Lincoln freely received generations after his death and hoped something like could be his, when all was done.

Sun said his Three Principles of the People - nationhood, democracy, livelihood - were derived from Lincoln's 'government of the people, by the people, and for the people.'

When Chiang assumed power in Taiwan he taught Taiwanese children to think of Sun as 'the Father of Our Country.' Aware of the association of that title with George Washington in America, Chiang wanted posterity to see him as the Lincoln to Sun's Washington. Upon his death his party, the Kuomingtang, took the hint and built a memorial for Chiang that simultaneously evoked both Sun's Mausoleum in Nanjing and the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC.

Still, a great chasm gapes between wanting to be a Lincoln and actually being one. Chiang's memorial in Taipei, for all its grandeur, does not draw the throngs or insire the hushed reverence Lincoln's memorial in Washington does as a matter of routine. The difference lies in talking about democracy as a nice thing for people to acquire in some far-off day, long after you and your cohorts have helped yourself to all the trappings of power and left the scene. It is another thing to take democracy as a fundamental right that belongs to the governed, then to order your life and career by its verdicts, and then, when you see it threatened, to fight for it and die for it, expecting nothing for yourself in return.

That is what Lincoln did. That is why free people still light candles for him. Year after year.

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