By the middle of the second world war, May-ling Soong was the world’s most powerful woman, at the centre of events in China’s history and its relationship with the USA.
By the middle of the second world war, May-ling Soong was the world’s most powerful woman, at the centre of events in China’s history and its relationship with the USA. Hers is an engrossing life which spanned the 20th century and included a cast of extraordinary admirers, from Chinese warlords to Churchill. ‘I think your bark is worse than your bite,’ she cooed at him during the Cairo conference.
Born in 1897, she was one of three sisters whose lives and marriages would dominate Chinese politics during the first half of the 20th century. The Last Empress is a misleading title. May-ling Soong was very much a creature of the moment. She had almost nothing in common with China’s traditional past and she proved irrelevant to its future. But for a brief period she shone as the middle woman between China and the USA.
Born in Shanghai’s International Settle- ment, her power and wealth, like that of a Shanghai comprador, lay in finessing the ignorance between two cultures. Under her fascinating tutelage, Americans believed her husband, Chiang Kai-shek, a leader capable of transforming China into a modern democracy — with just a little more money. It was a con trick on a grand scale. Harry Truman dismissed her and her family as
thieves, every last one of them. And they stole seven hundred and fifty million dollars out of the thirty-five billion that we sent …. And I don’t want anything to do with people like that.
The clue to both her success — and ultimate failure — lies in the house and the city of her childhood.
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