The Last Empress Read online

  Pearson, Drew: American journalist known for his muckraking column “Washington Merry-Go-Round.”

  Prohme, Rayna: Red-haired American Communist journalist who traveled to Moscow with Ching-ling.

  Ricaud, Reverend T. Page: The man who converted Charlie Soong to Christianity.

  von Seeckt, Hans: German general, author of Chiang Kai-shek’s successful Fifth Extermination Campaign, which forced the Chinese Communists to go on their Long March.

  Service, John Stewart: A “China hand” who served in the U.S. Embassy and warned that Chiang Kai-shek was not China.

  Sills, Beverly: A highly successful operatic soprano who, after retiring from the stage in 1980, worked in opera management.

  Simon, Paul: Member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1975–85) and senator from Illinois (1985–97), he supported Taiwan and disagreed with U.S. policy to isolate the island.

  Snow, Edgar: American journalist, believed to have been the first to interview Mao Tse-tung.

  Sokolsky, George: Columnist and radio broadcaster who started as a revolutionary and became an archconservative. A friend of Tse-ven (T. V.) Soong.

  Somervell, Brehon B: Commander of the U.S. Army Service Forces in World War II, responsible for logistics.

  Soong, Charlie Jones, né Han Chiao-shun, patriarch of the Soong clan.

  Soong, Madame Ni Kwei-tseng: An aristocrat from an old Chinese family and matriarch of the Soong clan.

  Soong, Ai-ling (Loving Mood): eldest of the Soong children and Madame Chiang’s favorite sister, who married H. H. Kung.

  Soong, Ching-ling (Happy Mood): second in line in the Soong family, a liberal who married Sun Yat-sen and supported the Communists.

  Soong, Tse-an: Known as T.A. Youngest of the Soong family, he became a banker. His children often spent vacations with their Aunty May.

  Soong, Tse-ven (Hardworking Son): Always referred to as T.V., Madame Chiang’s older brother was a world-reknowned economist in his day.

  Soong, Tsu-liang: Known as T.L.; fifth child in the Soong family who became a businessman.

  Stilwell, General Joseph W.: Known as Vinegar Joe, he was sent to China in 1942 to reform the Chinese army. His contempt for appearances brought him into conflict with Chiang Kai-shek, for whom “face” was everything.

  Stimson, Henry L.: U.S. secretary of war under President Roosevelt.

  Stuart, John Leighton: Last of the U.S. ambassadors to China who dealt with the Kuomintang government on the mainland.

  Sun Chuan-fang: A warlord with five provinces.

  Sun Fo: Son of Sun Yat-sen, a changeable politician who served the KMT in several positions and took the remnants of the government to Canton as a last holdout against the CCP.

  Sun Yat-sen: The George Washington of China, who succeeded in dethroning the last of the Chinese dynasties.

  Tai Li: Head of Chiang Kai-shek’s secret police.

  Tang Shen-chih: The general left in charge of defending Nanking when the Japanese arrived.

  Teng Ying-chao: The wife of Chou En-lai who served in various positions on the Central Committee of the CCP and fought for the rights of women and children.

  Tong, Hollington: American-trained journalist and biographer of Chiang Kai-shek, who served as the KMT’s publicity man during World War II and later as ambassador to the United States.

  Utley, Freda: An English scholar, journalist, and author of a number of books, who supported the Communists until they arrested her Russian husband.

  Vincent, John Carter: Director of the Bureau of Far-Eastern Affairs, he was hounded out of the State Department by the “absurd” charges of disloyalty by Joseph McCarthy.

  Wallace, Henry A.: Vice president under Roosevelt from 1941 to 1945.

  Wang Ching-wei: The top man in the Kuomintang after Sun Yat-sen, he was expected to succeed Sun.

  Wavell, Archibald: A one-eyed Scottish general who did not get along with Chiang Kai-shek.

  Wedemeyer, Albert C.: American general who analyzed German strategy during World War II and took Stilwell’s place in China after he was dismissed.

  Wen Bing-chung: May-ling’s uncle, married to one of her mother’s sisters and an old friend of her father.

  White, Theodore H.: Major American journalist who covered China during World War II and wrote articles and books about the experience.

  Willauer, Whiting: Lawyer who worked for T.V. Soong at China Defense Supplies and helped Claire Chennault start Civil Air Transport.

  Willkie, Wendell: A corporate lawyer whom the Republicans ran against Roosevelt in 1940.

  Winchell, Walter: Print and radio commentator, who broke precedent by talking about the private lives of celebrities.

  Wu Kuo-chen (K. C. Wu): Liberal governor of Taiwan, whom Chiang Kai-shek failed to silence.

  Xiang Ying: A Communist general assassinated either for gold or on the orders of Mao.

  Yang Huang-kuan: Warlord who controlled the Army of Yunnan and profited from crime in next-door Canton.

  Yang Hu-chen: Warlord of Shensi province and partner of the Young Marshal at Xian.

  Yao Yi-cheng: Chiang Kai-shek’s concubine, mother of his adopted son, Chiang Wei-kuo.

  Yen Hsi-shan: A major warlord, known as the Model Governor of the Province of Shansi

  Young, Arthur N.: Economic adviser to the U.S. State Department, the Chinese Government, and Central Bank of China (1929–47).

  Youngman, William S. Jr.: President of China Defense Supplies from 1942 to 1945. A law partner of Thomas G. Corcoran and friend of T. V. Soong, he served from 1949 to 1968 as president of C. V. Starr, the insurance giant.

  Yuan Shih-kai: Chief rival of Sun Yat-sen, he envisioned himself as the next Emperor of China.

  The Last Empress

  FOREWORD

  When China moves, she will move the world.

  —NAPOLEON BONAPARTE

  COLONEL FRANK DORN was nobody’s fool. Chief aide and confidant of General Joseph Stilwell, commander of the U.S. Army in China, Dorn arrived in the Chinese wartime capital of Chungking in March 1942. Known as Pinky— “for his complexion, not his politics”—he was a big, handsome man of forty-one, a quality that endeared him to Madame Chiang, who was known to call on Dorn during periods of military crisis to vent her frustrations with the British, the Americans, and her husband, Chiang Kai-shek, head of the Chinese government.

  In one of their conversations, May-ling complained to Dorn that she could not understand why he and other American officers called her Ma-dame, with the accent on the first syllable, instead of Madame, as it is pronounced in France. After all, she fussed, it was common knowledge that this was the term for the head of a house of prostitution. Dorn replied that he and his fellow officers certainly had no intention of insulting her. As a matter of fact, he added, she was surely aware that the queen of England was always called “Madam” to indicate royalty. “You never saw a facial expression change so fast in your life!” the colonel commented when he recounted the incident, delighted with his own quickness of wit.

  In trying to explain why a woman fathered by a Chinese peasant found it both soothing and appropriate to be compared to the queen of England, I have tried to take into account the special characteristics of May-ling’s family, a clan that benefited from the disappearance of centuries-old societal structures and helped push China into the modern world. I have started my story with Madame’s father, a man named Charlie Soong, whose life journey mirrored the upheavals taking place in his nation. In doing this, I have hoped to put the reader in a position to understand the woman called Soong May-ling Chiang, how she came to be the way she was, and how she charmed the United States out of billions of dollars. More important, I have tried to show how she managed to influence if not change the history of the twentieth century.

  PART ONE

  1866–1900

  1

  Along with business leaders and foreign policy advisors, Protestant evangelicals looked to Asia as a vast, untapped opportunity for the conversion o
f souls to Christianity, while their secular counterparts from commerce, finance, and the government saw a market for America’s rapidly expanding industrial production.

  —T. CHRISTOPHER JESPERSEN

  CHARLIE SOONG, whose original name was Han Chiao-shun, was born in 1866 on the teardrop-shaped island of Hainan off the south coast of China. What was once known as a refuge for gangsters and is now a place for entrepreneurs was, in the middle of the nineteenth century, an undeveloped tropical expanse second in size only to the island of Taiwan, six-hundred-plus miles to the east. Charlie’s father seems to have been a fairly well off trader from Wench’ang who owned boats that “go from Macow to Hanhigh about 6 days water”—i.e., west across the Gulf of Tonkin to modern-day Vietnam and east through the South China Sea to the Portuguese colony of Macao near Hong Kong. These trading boats were three-masted, oceangoing junks, known as “big-eyed chickens” for their red sails and the huge pairs of eyes painted on their bows, put there by the sailors who believed that these magic oculi could spot pirates lying in wait up ahead. Murder and robbery flourished in these waters, where pirates were particularly bloodthirsty, as were those who captured them. It was not uncommon for captors to cut the hearts and livers out of pirate corpses and eat them, and it was even said that in one case they ate the entire man so he could not be reembodied as a pirate.

  When he was nine, Charlie and an older brother were taken to the island of Java (modern-day Indonesia) and apprenticed to an uncle. The younger boy was apparently not happy there. When a relative who owned a silk and tea shop in Boston appeared and offered to take him to the United States, he sailed off happily in the spring of 1878. Short and sturdy, he was twelve years old at the time.

  There were not many Chinese living in Boston when Charlie, still known as Han Chiao-shun, arrived to work in his uncle’s tea shop, but he soon made friends with two boys from wealthy Shanghai families, Wen Bing-chung and New Shan-chow. Wen and New, who had come to study the progressive ways of the West, convinced Charlie that he too needed a Western education. But when Charlie asked his uncle if he could go to school, his uncle said no. He had not brought Charlie halfway around the world to study, but to work. After nearly a year in his uncle’s shop, Charlie ran away. He slipped down to Boston harbor and stowed away on a cutter, the Albert Gallatin. He was not found until the ship was already out to sea.

  The captain of the cutter, a Norwegian named Eric Gabrielson, was a staunch, God-fearing Methodist, admired for his skill as a mariner. When Charlie was discovered, he was brought before Gabrielson, who asked him his name. “Chiao-shun,” Charlie replied, giving his first name only.* Which is how, at the age of fourteen (Charlie lied and said he was sixteen), Han Chiao-shun became Charlie Soon, ship’s boy of the Albert Gallatin, which patrolled the waters between Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and Edgartown, Massachusetts, “one of the roughest stretches of coast along the Atlantic.” The man who would become Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s father was now employed—and paid—by the Revenue Service of the U.S. Treasury Department, precursor of the U.S. Coast Guard. When Captain Gabrielson was transferred to Wilmington, North Carolina, Charlie went along as his mess boy.

  A religious man, the captain had started to talk to the Chinese boy about Christianity, and he decided to help Charlie get the education he wanted as well. He arranged for his mess boy to be discharged from the service and introduced to several people in Wilmington, among them Colonel Roger Moore, who ran a Bible class at the Fifth Street Southern Methodist Church. In young Charlie Soon, the first “Celestial” (as the Chinese were known in the United States) to appear in those parts, Moore seized his chance to contribute to the great Methodist missionary movement of the day: the exporting of Christianity to China. Nor did it take long for the Reverend T. Page Ricaud, pastor of the church, to recognize opportunity when he saw it, and he soon inculcated in the boy a fervent belief in Christ the Savior. Ricaud explained to the eager teenager that he could be educated in Western ways and Western religion, prepared as a missionary, and sent home to China to save his people. On November 7, 1880, Charlie Soon became an official convert and was baptized Charles Jones Soon—the name Jones being chosen by Ricaud, who had to supply three names for converts. A short announcement in the Wilmington Star informed the town’s citizens that a baptism was to take place during the morning service—“probably the first Celestial that has ever submitted to the ordinance of baptism in North Carolina.”

  To support himself, Charlie worked in a printing shop, where he acquired skills he used with great success in later life, and also sold rope hammocks, which he had learned to make on board ship. Meanwhile, his Wilmington friends looked around to see how they were going to help him go to school. Trinity College, the forerunner of Duke University, was then a Methodist institution in Randolph County, North Carolina, and Ricaud wrote to Trinity’s president to ask if he would take his first Oriental student. Either he or Moore then contacted General Julian Shakespeare Carr of Durham, philanthropist and millionaire owner of Bull Durham tobacco, to ask if he would fund the boy’s schooling. “Send him up, and we’ll see that he gets an education,” said Carr.

  When Charlie arrived in Durham, he so impressed Carr with his intelligence and politeness that Carr took the boy into his own home, “not as a servant, but as a son.” Although Charlie’s cheerful nature delighted the five little Carr children, his Chinese face made the Carrs’ white neighbors and black servants open their eyes in astonishment. But Charlie, who was used to people looking at him oddly, had learned how to ingratiate himself with Americans. It also helped to have one of the leading businessmen in town as his sponsor. Within a very short time, he was an accepted member of the tight little southern community. In June of 1881, Charlie sent a letter to the head of the Southern Methodist Mission in Shanghai, Dr. Young J. Allen:

  Dear Sir:

  I wish you to do me a favor. I been way from home about six years and I want my father to know where I am and what I doing, they living in South East China in Canton state called monshou County… my father name is “Hann Hong Jos’k” in Chinese. I hope you will be able to it out where they are. I was converted few months ago in Wilmington, North Carolina… so I am a great hurry to be educated so I can go back to China and tell them about our Saviour, please write to me when you get my letter, I ever so much thank you for it, good by.

  Yours respectfully,

  Charlie Jones Soon

  With this, Charlie enclosed the following letter to his father:

  Dear Father:

  I will write this letter and let you know where I am. I left Brother in East India in 1878 and came to the United States and finely I had found Christ our Saviour… now the Durham Sunday School and Trinity are helping me and I am a great hurry to be educated so I can go back to China and tell you about the kindness of the friends in Durham and the grace of God, he sent his begotton Son to died in this world for all sinners. I am a sinner but save by the grace of God. I remember when I was a little boy you took me to a great temple to worshipped the wooden Gods. Oh, Father that is no help from wooden Gods. If you do worships all your life time would not do a bit goods. in our old times they know nothing about Christ, but now I had found a Saviour he is comforted me where ever I go to. Please let your ears be open so you can hear what the spirit say and your eyes looks up so you may see the glory of God. Soon as you get my letter please answer me and I will be very glad to hear from you. give my loves to mother Brother and Sisters please and also to yourself.… Mr. and Mrs. Carr they are good Christian family.… Will good by Father, write to Trinity College, N.C. Yours Son…

  Charlie Jones Soon

  Charlie’s father never got the letter. Dr. Allen said he couldn’t find him. He probably didn’t try very hard.

  Three months later, Charlie Soon entered Trinity College along with twelve Cherokee Indians. Even after he left the Carr home, however, he remained under the influence of Julian Carr, addressing him as “Father Carr” and picking up a great deal of business
sense from him. Charlie got along well with his fellow students and began to notice girls, particularly Ella Carr, the daughter of Professor Carr, a poor cousin of Julian who taught Greek and German at Trinity. But the adolescent attraction between Charlie and Ella caused deep concern among the worthy members of the Board of Missions of the Southern Methodist Church, who said that the boy must be shipped off immediately to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Charlie didn’t want to leave Trinity and his friends, but when he was told that he would meet people who could help him in his chosen path, that he would continue to receive Carr’s financial support, and that he could return to the Carr home for his vacations, he agreed to go. Vanderbilt records show that in 1882 he entered the Biblical Department, where he studied for a certificate in theology.

  Popular with most of his fellow students, Charlie was remembered by classmate Reverend John C. Orr with affection: “At first the boys paid little or no attention to Soon. He was more of a curiosity than anything else. He was just a Chinaman. But this soon changed. He fell into the classes of the writer, and they became… intimate friends. He had a fine mind, learned to use the English language with accuracy and fluency, and was usually bubbling over with wit and humor and good nature.” Charlie’s good humor was partly a veneer, painted on in order to maintain acceptance by his peers. A friend recalled his joining a group of fellow students who met on Sunday mornings in the chapel to pray and talk about their religious experiences: “One morning Soon (as we called him) got up and stood awhile before he said anything. Then his lips trembled and he said: ‘I feel so little. I get so lonesome. So far from my people. So long among strangers. I feel just like I was a little chip floating down the Mississippi River. But I know that Jesus is my Friend, my Comforter, My Savior.’ The tears were running down his cheeks, and before he could say anything more a dozen of the boys were around him, with their arms about him, and assuring him that they loved him as a brother. Soon broke up the meeting that morning.” A short boy— one classmate describes him as “rather low of stature, probably about five-feet-four or six inches”—his closest friend at Vanderbilt was a six-foot-two, blue-eyed student of Irish descent who weighed more than two hundred pounds, named William B. Burke.