This is a Chinese name; the family name is Soong (traditional Chinese: 宋美齡;

Soong May-ling or Soong Mei-ling,  (Song Meiling) also known as Madame Chiang Kai-shek

 

Soong May-ling 宋美齡
First Lady of the Republic of China
In office May 20, 1948 – April 5, 1975
President	Chiang Kai-shek
Succeeded by	Chiang Fang-liang (a.k.a Faina Ipat'evna Vakhreva)
Born	March 5, 1898(1898-03-05)[1] Shanghai, China[2]
Died	October 23, 2003 (aged 105) New York City, United States
Nationality	Chinese
Political party	Kuomintang (KMT)
Spouse(s)	Chiang Kai-shek
Children	Chiang Ching-kuo (step-son) and Chiang Wei-kuo (adopted)
Alma mater	Wesleyan College, Wellesley College
Occupation	First Lady of the Republic of China
Religion	Methodist
Signature

Soong May-ling or Soong Mei-ling, also known as Madame Chiang Kai-shek (traditional Chinese: 宋美齡; simplified Chinese: 宋美龄; pinyin: Sòng Měilíng; March 5, 1898^[1] – October 23, 2003) was a First Lady of the Republic of China, the wife of former President Chiang Kai-shek. She was a politician and painter. The youngest and the last surviving of the three Soong sisters, she played a prominent role in the politics of the Republic of China. Childhood

She was born in Shanghai, China, on March 5, 1898, but some biographies use the year 1897 because Chinese tradition considers everyone to be one year old at birth.^[3] She was the third of six children of Charlie Soong, a Hainanese Chinese Methodist minister and businessman. Her siblings were: Oldest sister Ai-ling, middle sister Ching-ling, May-ling herself, then her brothers T. V., T.L., and last T.A.

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1943 photo taken during a visit to Wellesley.

In Shanghai, May-ling attended the McTyeire School for Girls with her sister, Ching-ling, before their father arranged to have them further their education in the United States in 1907. Initially, May-ling and Ching-ling were attending a private school in Summit, New Jersey. In 1908, Ching-ling was accepted by her sister Ai-ling's alma mater, Wesleyan College, at the age of 15 and the two sisters moved to Macon, Georgia, to join Ai-ling. However, the problem arose that May-ling could neither gain permission to stay with her sister on campus as a family member nor could she gain acceptance as a student due to her young age. May-ling spent the subsequent year in Demorest, Georgia, with the family of Ai-ling's Wesleyan friend, Blanche Moss. Mrs. Moss took care of May-ling and enrolled her as an 8th grader at the Piedmont College. A year later, in 1909, Wesleyan's newly appointed president, William Newman Ainsworth, gave May-ling special permission to stay at Wesleyan and assigned her special tutors. May-ling was officially registered as a freshman at Wesleyan in 1912 at the age of 15. She then transferred to Wellesley College a year later to be closer to her older brother, T.V., who, at the time, was studying at Harvard. By then both her sisters had graduated and returned to Shanghai. She graduated from Wellesley as one of the 33 Durant Scholars on June 19, 1917, with a major in English literature and minor in philosophy. As a result of being educated in English all her life, she spoke excellent English, with a pronounced Georgia accent which helped her connect with American audiences.^[4]

 

Madame Chiang

 

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Chiang-Soong wedding photo

Soong May-ling met Chiang Kai-shek in 1920. Since he was eleven years her elder, already married, and a Buddhist, May-ling's mother vehemently opposed the marriage between the two, but finally agreed after Chiang showed proof of his divorce and promised to convert to Christianity. Chiang told his future mother-in-law that he couldn't convert immediately, because religion needed to be gradually absorbed, not swallowed like a pill. They married in Shanghai on December 1, 1927. While biographers regard the marriage with varying appraisals of partnership, love, politics and competition, it lasted 48 years. The couple never had any children.

Madame Chiang initiated the New Life Movement and became actively engaged in Chinese politics. She was a member of the Legislative Yuan from 1930 to 1932 and Secretary-General of the Chinese Aeronautical Affairs Commission from 1936 to 1938. In 1945 she became a member of the Central Executive Committee of the Kuomintang. As her husband rose to become Generalissimo and leader of the Kuomintang, Madame Chiang acted as his English translator, secretary and advisor. She was his muse, his eyes, his ears, and his most loyal champion. During World War II, Madame Chiang tried to promote the Chinese cause and build a legacy for her husband on par with Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin. Well versed in both Chinese and western culture, she became popular both in China and abroad. Her prominence led Joseph Stilwell to quip that she ought to be appointed minister of defense.

In 1931, Soon May-ling had a villa built for her on the east side of Nanjing. Located a few hundred meters east of the Sifangcheng Pavilion of the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum , the villa still exists, and is commonly known as Meilinggong (美龄宫), "May-ling Palace".^[5]

 

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Mrs Roosevelt and Madame Chiang, 1943.	Madame Chiang Kai-shek with her husband and Flying Tiger Commander General Clair Chennault in 1942

Two thousand pompously arrayed Chinese witnessed the marriage, in Shanghai last week, of the defeated but honorably esteemed Marshal Chiang Kaishek, resigned generalissimo of the now scattered Nationalist armies which, under his leadership, once conquered half of holy China (TIME, Aug. 22 et ante).

Chiang loomed last week as the most matrimonially romantic of modern Chinese conquerors, because he has openly persisted in wooing a lady known to have refused him at first. In China such a refusal causes the suitor to "lose face," a disgrace so abyssmal that many Chinese have committed suicide rather than endure it. Usually this contingency is circumvented by having the proposal of marriage conveyed through intermediaries; but Chiang Kai-shek has been obliged to risk his "face" because his fiancee was that intensely Westernized "modern woman," Miss Soong Meiling.

In China "the three Soong sisters" are ladies of polite renown. The first is the wife of H. H. Kung, a gentleman whose august destiny is summed up in the fact that he claims to be a lineal descendant of Confucius. The second was internationally known as the wife, and later as the revered widow, of Dr. Sun Yatsen, "sainted" founder of the Nationalist movement. She is now reported married (TIME, Oct. 10) to her late husband's zealous co-worker Chen Yu-jen ("Eugene Chen"), until recently Foreign Minister to the defunct Hankow Nationalist Government (TIME, April 25).

Last of the Soong sisters is Meiling, Wellesley '15. Like her brother, T. V. Soong, Harvard '15, she has been closely identified with the Hankow Nationalist Government in which he was Finance Minister. In person she is charming, in mentality alert, in speech sometimes caustic. Observers, knowing her passionate Nationalist zeal, wondered if she married Chiang Kaishek, last week, with intent to rouse him from retirement to renewed leadership of a Nationalist military force.

 

Visits To The USA

 

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On February 18, 1943, she addressed both houses of the U.S. Congress.

In the United States, she drew crowds as large as 30,000 people and made the cover of TIME magazine (she had first appeared in 1937 with her husband as "Man and Wife of the Year)" ^[6] Both husband and wife were on good terms with Time Magazine senior editor and co-founder Henry Luce, who frequently tried to rally money and support from the American public for the Republic of China. On February 18, 1943, she became the first Chinese national and second woman to address both houses of the U.S. Congress.

After the defeat of her husband's government in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, Madame Chiang followed her husband to Taiwan, while her sister Soong Ching-ling stayed on the mainland, siding with the communists. Madame Chiang continued to play a prominent international role. She was a Patron of the International Red Cross Committee, honorary chair of the British United Aid to China Fund, and First Honorary Member of the Bill of Rights Commemorative Society. Through the late 1960s she was included among America's 10 most admired women.

 

 

In Her Later Life

 

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Soong May-ling giving a special radio broadcast.

After the death of her husband in 1975, Madame Chiang assumed a low profile. Chiang Kai-shek was succeeded to power by his eldest son Chiang Ching-kuo, from a previous marriage, with whom Madame Chiang had rocky relations. In 1975, she emigrated from Taiwan to her family's 36 acre (14.6 hectare) estate in Lattingtown, Long Island, New York, USA, where she kept a portrait of her late husband in full military regalia in her living room.

Madame Chiang returned to Taiwan upon Chiang Ching-kuo's death in 1988, to shore up support among her old allies. However, Chiang's successor as president, Lee Teng-hui, proved to be more adept at politics than she was, and consolidated his position. As a result, she again returned to the U.S.

Madame Chiang made a rare public appearance in 1995 when she attended a reception held on Capitol Hill in her honor in connection with celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II. Madame Chiang also made her last visit to Taiwan in 1995.

In the 2000 Presidential Election on Taiwan, the Kuomintang produced a letter from her in which she purportedly supported the KMT candidate Lien Chan over independent candidate James Soong (no relation). James Soong himself had never disputed the authenticity of the letter.

Soong sold her Long Island estate in 2000 and spent the rest of her life in a Gracie Square apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan owned by her niece. An open house of the estate drew many Taiwanese expatriates.

When Madame Chiang was 103 years old, she had an exhibition of her Chinese paintings in New York. To this date her work is not for sale.

The Extraordinary Secret Of Madame Chiang Kai-shek

 

The Death Of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, 1898-2003

By Tony Karon Friday, Oct. 24, 2003

Soong died in her sleep in New York City, in her Manhattan apartment on October 23, 2003, at the age of about 105.^[8] Her remains were interred at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, New York, pending an eventual burial with her late husband who was entombed in Cihu, Taiwan. The stated intention is to have them both buried in mainland China once political differences are resolved.

Madame Chiang, 105, Chinese Leader's Widow, Dies

The fact that 106-year-old Madame Chiang Kai-shek passed away in relative seclusion thousands of miles away from her homeland is testimony to the fortunes of the political project she — and her husband — once represented. Madame Chiang was the widow of the legendary Chinese nationalist general Chiang Kai-shek, who fled China in 1949 in the wake of the communist victory to set up what he envisaged as a Chinese government-in-exile in Taiwan. Chiang, whose U.S.-educated wife was his interlocutor with the West, ruled Taiwan with an iron fist for 25 years, and it was his claim to represent all of China that helped the Nixon administration adopt the "One China" policy recognizing Taiwan and China as part of a single political entity. That policy, which remains the cornerstone of U.S.-China relations today, prevents Washington from recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign state, and was crafted as a concession to Beijing's view of the island as nothing more than a rebel province. But it was made palatable to Chiang by the fact that he saw himself as the leader not simply of Taiwan, but of all China.

As for Chiang's wife, she was Born Soong May-ling in 1898 on the island of Hainan — site of the spy-plane incident that marked the first foreign policy crisis of the Bush administration — Madame Chiang was raised as a Christian and educated at Wellesley College where she graduated in 1917. Her sister, Ching-ling married Sun Yat-sen, the nationalist leader who created modern China after overthrowing the Qing imperial dynasty in 1911. May-ling married the young Kuomintang (KMT) general Chiang Kai-shek in 1926, a year after he'd taken control of the party and the year before the onset of a bloody civil conflict between the KMT and Mao's communists — a conflict that also marked a parting of ways of the Soong sisters, as Madame Sun Yat-sen made common cause with the communists.

Both sides fought the Japanese who attacked China in 1937, before resuming their civil war once Japan had been beaten. Madame Chiang's heyday came during World War II, when she came to the U.S. as her husband's spokesman and made a rousing address to the U.S. Congress appealing for help against the Japanese. A charismatic intellectual who challenged traditional ideas of silent and subservient Chinese women, she took a leading role in nationalist politics, running Chiang's air force at one point. As icons of Western-friendly modernity and of unbending resistance to the excesses of Maoism, Madame Chiang and her husband were highly regarded in the U.S., and she was even featured three times on the cover of TIME magazine. (See right.) At home, however, some regarded her as arrogant and an apologist for the authoritarian ways of the KMT regime. After her husband's death in 1975, she moved to the U.S. and a life outside of the political spotlight.

And in the ensuing three decades, "One China," and the inexorable shift towards opening the Chinese economy to the West following the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, began to change the terms of the relationship between Beijing, Taipei and Washington. Where Chiang had once represented the authoritarian strongman presiding over a booming capitalist economy offering low-cost manufactured goods to the U.S. market and raising the living standards of its people, today that role has been usurped on the mainland by the Chinese Communist Party. The tension across the Taiwan Strait remains high, but its terms have changed. Today, Beijing's claim to Taiwan is an expression of the nationalist mantle adopted by a Communist Party serving as the authoritarian steward of a booming capitalist economy, while the Taiwanese electorate — having attained a democratic voice over their own destiny in the wake of Chiang's passing — demur, increasingly eschewing "One China" in favor of an independence-minded ethnic-Taiwanese nationalism. Madame Chiang and her husband, and the KMT political apparatus they brought with them from the mainland were, after all, exiles. And today's political landscape in Taiwan reflects their declining status relative to the ethnic-Taiwanese who have little interest in KMT claims to the seat of power in Beijing.

The epic political contest that defined Madame Chiang's life has turned a page: the Communists in Beijing have taken the capitalist road and the Taiwanese electorate has eschewed Chiang's nationalism in favor of its own brand, which seeks to break away from Beijing rather than reconquer it.

Wikipedia
 

Gallery

 

Soong giving a bandage to an injured Chinese soldier (circa 1932)	1942 Chiang Kai-shek and Soong May-ling.	Soong May-ling stitching uniforms for National Revolution Army soldiers.	1943 Wellesley College speech poster
1942 Chiang, Soong and Stilwell in Burma.	1943 Soong May-ling in White House Oval Office to conduct a press conference.	General Claire Chennault,  Madame & General Chiang Kai-shek	General George C. Marshall and Soong May-ling and General Chiang
			First Lady of Nationalist China, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, is bid goodbye by well-wishers as she leaves the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco on August 28, 1965 ending a five-day visit in the Bay Area. Mme Chiang Kai-shek was scheduled to depart San Francisco on the 27th for New York but due to tornado like storms in the Midwest, her departure was cancelled until tonight.
Eleanor Roosevelt with Soong May-ling.	1948 Chiang Soong visit Sun Yatsen mousolium.	A family photo of Chiang Kai-shek, Soong May-ling, Jin-guo and wei-guo.

Wikipedia
 

Obituary: Madame Chiang Kai-Shek
(Filed: 25/10/2003) London Telegraph

Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, Soong May-ling, who died on Thursday aged 106, was the widow of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the Chinese Nationalist leader.

At the height of her fame during the Second World War, Madame Chiang was one of the world's most influential women. But in later years, a gaunt relic of her former celebrity, she was a forlorn propagandist for her husband's ostracised and diminished regime in Taiwan.

She was the last of the principal participants - the others being Chiang Kai-shek, Churchill and Roosevelt - in the 1943 Cairo Conference, which represented the zenith of pre-Communist China's significance in international affairs.

She was also the last of an exceptional brood. Her eldest sister, Qing-ling, was the widow of Dr Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China and founder of the Nationalist (Kuomintang) Party. Madame Sun became a vice-chairman of the People's Republic in Beijing. Their brother, T V Soong, was finance minister of Nationalist China and reputedly one of the richest men in the world; a third sister, Ai-ling, was the wife of another finance minister, H H Kung.

Of the three women, it was commonly said that "one loved power, one loved money, one loved China". May-ling was the first of that trio.

Soong May-ling was born in Shanghai on March 5 1897 (although some authorities have her born almost a year later), the fourth child and youngest daughter of Charlie Soong, a former Methodist missionary turned Bible publisher, entrepreneur and close political ally of Sun Yat-sen. Soong, who had been brought up in America, sent his daughters to be educated at the Wesleyan College at Macon, Georgia.

May-ling went on to Wellesley College in Massachusetts (to be close to her brother T V, who was at Harvard) where she majored in English Literature. Although no intellectual - and, in her youth, no great beauty - she was nevertheless noted by teachers for her forceful charm. She returned to China in 1917.

Chiang Kai-shek, a former invoice clerk who had risen to command the Whampoa military academy, emerged at the head of the Kuomintang army after Sun Yat-sen's death in 1925. Alliance with the immensely rich and powerful Soong family enabled him to consolidate his position: he divorced his second wife to marry May-ling in 1927. Shortly afterwards, he became leader of the party, and ruler of such portions of China as he was able from time to time to subdue.

The marriage was widely regarded as one of convenience. No children came of it, whilst the Generalissimo (though converted to Christianity by his wife) fathered at least two illegitimate sons elsewhere. In later years, there were rumours of separation and possible divorce, but in the 1930s, during Chiang's various struggles against warlords, Communists and Japanese invasion, they were a potent - and, according to an adoring press, devoted - couple.

May-ling's hagiographers particularly praised her role in the so-called "Xian Incident" of December 1936. Chiang had been held captive near Xian in north-central China by Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang, who sought to force him into alliance with the Communists against the Japanese. May-ling, despite illness, immediately flew from Shanghai to her husband's side, turned her charm on Marshal Chang (who in due course spent more than 30 years under house arrest) and played a part, subsequently much dramatised, in negotiating the Generalissimo's release.

Her official role in the government at the time was as Secretary-General of Aviation. She was also Chiang's adviser and personal representative in foreign affairs, as well as chairman of innumerable committees on social reform at home, especially those concerned with the welfare of women and orphans.

Several books were published under her name, including Xian - A Coup d'Etat; China Shall Rise Again; and China in Peace and War, which the British Medical Journal described as "permeated with noble thoughts, clever and unwarped". According to the BMJ's star-struck reviewer, the author was "the most understanding woman in the world", whilst the Sunday Times commended her "serene courage". With her Georgian accent and her talent for sentimentalising the struggles of her countrywomen, May-ling became a special object of fascination to the American public. Year after year she featured on American lists of the 10 most admired women in the world.

In late 1942 she embarked for the United States for medical treatment - despite her subsequent longevity, her health was often poor - followed by a tour to raise money for the United China Relief fund and to publicise her government's needs for material with which to resist the Japanese.

Eleanor Roosevelt, for one, declared a desire to help Madame Chiang "as if she had been my own daughter". Staying at the White House, May-ling supplied her own silk sheets, which she insisted should be changed whenever she had rested or sat on the bed, sometimes four or five times in a day.

The tour was a glittering success. Newsweek described her address to Congress as "enchanting". Many thousands turned out to hear her at Madison Square Garden and to see her tour the streets of New York's Chinatown. Hollywood stars lined up to greet her in Los Angeles.

The inclusion of the Chiangs in the Cairo Conference six months later was a further gesture of solidarity on the part of Roosevelt. But Churchill did not share FDR's enthusiasm. "That China is one of the world's four great powers," he wrote to Eden, "is an absolute farce." When Churchill was in Washington in May 1943, coinciding with May-ling's tour, she had suggested that he travel to New York to meet her. An alternative proposal from FDR that she should travel to Washington to join Churchill and himself for lunch was, according to Churchill, "declined with some hauteur". In her "regretted absence", the two great leaders of the free world "lunched alone. . . and made the best of things".

At Cairo, Churchill had hoped in vain that the Chiangs would "visit the pyramids" rather than distract Anglo-American discussions with the minor matter of Chinese demands for military support. But on meeting May-ling at last he found her "a most remarkable and charming personality".

After Roosevelt's death in 1945, the Chiangs found President Truman less sympathetic on a personal level, and unwilling to bankroll the struggle against Mao Tse-tung's Communist forces which the Nationalists now looked unlikely to win. There were suspicions that vast sums of American aid already provided to Chiang's government had been corruptly diverted.

Truman himself was caustic on the subject in later years: "They're all thieves," he told an interviewer, "every damn one of them. They stole 750 million out of the [$3.8] billions that we sent to Chiang. They stole it, and it's invested in real estate down in Sao Paulo and some right here in New York." To make matters worse, Chinese interests backed Truman's Republican opponent, Governor Thomas Dewey, in the 1948 presidential election. When total defeat became imminent for Chiang at the hands of the Communists, May-ling was dispatched across the Pacific (leaving the Chinese mainland for the last time) to rally support. But Truman declined to offer her the hospitality of the White House. "I don't think she liked it very much," he said. "But I didn't care one way or the other about what she liked and what she didn't like."

By the time she rejoined Chiang, he had retreated with the remnants of the Kuomintang army and a hoard of China's national treasures to the offshore stronghold of Formosa, now Taiwan, where he spent the remaining 25 years of his life preserving the myth of the sovereignty of his corrupted, authoritarian regime over the whole, lost territory of China. May-ling continued to spend long periods in the United States, courting the so-called China Lobby of Right-wing Republicans and enjoying the benefits of her offshore fortune.

She was finally dropped from the "most admired" list in 1967. The economic reality of Communist China, the disaster of the Vietnam War and the impossible odds against a military comeback by the ageing Generalissimo, all combined to erode the strength of the China Lobby. With the expulsion of Nationalist China from the United Nations in 1971, and Richard Nixon's visit to Beijing the next year, the decline of the Chiangs' international status was complete.

But by then Chiang Kai-shek himself had faded into feeble senility. He ceased to be seen in public; his son by his first marriage, Chiang Ching-kuo, was already prime minister, but it was May-ling who continued to speak in the president's name. After his death, aged 87, in 1975, she remained a shadowy force in Taiwanese politics and a figurehead for the older generation of Kuomintang parliamentarians who clung to the dream of triumphant return to mainland constituencies they had not seen since 1949.

Madame Chiang left to spend a decade in failing health on a family estate in Long Island, but returned to her mansion in suburban Taipei in 1986. By then her stepson had begun to sow seeds of change, both in terms of democracy within Taiwan and of a less intransigent stance towards the mainland.

When he died in 1988, she was known to oppose the appointment of his successor, the reformist Lee Teng-hui. But she appeared briefly on the platform of the 13th Kuomintang congress in Taipei later that year to shake Lee's hand and to listen to a speech, delivered on her behalf, recalling past glories.

She then retired once more to Long Island, living out her final years in a nursing home.

 

 

The Art of War

Every year about election time, the talk in the Taiwan Straits keeps turning to tanks and invasion schemes. Even on the other side of the Pacific, an exhibit of paintings got caught up in the political posturing, as old animosities outweighed the gentle skill of laying brush on silk

By Ron Gluckman /San Francisco

 

THEY ARRIVED IN WHEELCHAIRS and leaning on walkers - some of the world's most respected and venerable Chinese artists and collectors, coming together in San Francisco's Asian Art Museum for an uncommon moment. Among the pieces on show were calligraphy and paintings by the 100-year-old master Chen Li-fu and by nonagenarians Chang Long-yien and Fu Chuan-fu, two living greats of the Chinese art scene. However, the focus was not on them but on works by an even more elderly person - and one who, in all charity, could only be considered an ambitious dabbler before abandoning art altogether a quarter of a century ago.

For all that, over 10,000 people were expected to file through the gallery by the time the show closed last week. Their purpose: To get a glimpse of 10 previously unseen works by 103-year-old Soong Mei-ling, the reclusive widow of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the last man to rule both China and Taiwan. Never mind that the pieces were nondescript, without any memorable style. For many of the mainly Chinese people who gazed upon them, the paintings were less works of art than an emotional link with history and with their own troubled past.

The highlight? Lotus: A Gentleman Among Flowers, a spare, gray ink sketch of a lotus among water lilies - a work that looks just like any of the silk paintings on sale outside temples and tourist traps across China. What makes it special is a hand-sketched inscription with a red seal at the top - "In a pure wind, I smell fragrance from afar. Sitting across from my wife, I forget the heat of summer." Those are the words of her husband - and they provide a tantalizing glimpse into the private life of a man whose public demeanor was that of an unbending, ruthless soldier.

Soong, better known as Madame Chiang Kai-shek, studied under masters Huang Chun-pi and Cheng Mang-ch'ing. However, she set aside her palette when she moved to New York in 1975, following the death of her husband. Now living in a Manhattan apartment, she rarely ventures out in public. Showings of her art are rarer still. The prominent display in the museum clearly indicates her immense importance, in historical, if not strictly artistic terms. Mme. Chiang is one of three remarkable sisters who helped shape contemporary China. The two others were Ching-ling, wife of Sun Yat-sen, modern China's founding father, and Ai-ling, who married mainland finance minister H.H. Kung.

When Chiang was deposed as ruler of China in 1949, his wife fled with him to Taiwan. With them they took much of their nation's imperial art treasures. And therein lies one of the intriguing undercurrents of the San Francisco exhibition. In the ongoing battle for world attention and prominence that has pitted China and Taiwan against each other for over a half-century, even art is a combatant. Staged just before Taiwan's presidential elections - a time of such increased tension between Taipei and Beijing that China raised the specter of war - the exhibition took on an almost nationalistic resonance.

Billed as "New Millennium Painting and Calligraphy By Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Masters of Chinese Painting and Calligraphy," the show might have better been dubbed a tribute to Taiwan's old guard. Au Ho-nien, who resides in a San Francisco suburb, was the youngest artist on exhibit - by over two decades. "I'm the baby," chuckled the sprightly 65-year-old painter.

The opening drew a tux-and-gown crowd, including an array of cheongsams (traditional Chinese dresses) from San Francisco's sizable Chinese community. Like the artists, nearly all claimed strong Taiwan connections. Likewise the money behind the exhibit, which - according to museum staff - was put together in an exceptional rush. Traditionally, shows of this stature involve at least a year's planning, but not this one. The ceramics normally on display at the Asian Art Museum were swiftly shunted off to the basement, and two chambers were readied in a month, involving lots of costly overtime work - bankrolled not by the museum, but by the World Journal newspaper.

The overseas arm of Taiwan's United Daily, World Journal claims to be the largest international Chinese paper. It hosted the show in its New York offices in January and plans to take it to its Los Angeles premises later this month. Arthur Ku, deputy general manager of the group's operations in the Bay Area, declined to say how much the exhibition had cost. "This isn't meant to be a promotion for the paper," he said. "It's really meant to give people a rare chance to see the works of Mme. Chiang Kai-shek, and of five other masters. But Mme. Chiang is of course the main interest for everyone - not just for Taiwanese, but for all Chinese."

The star draw was not present. Mme. Chiang is too frail to travel these days, but she did attend the opening of the exhibit in New York, which was viewed by more than 13,000 people. The turnout was no surprise, given that near-riots erupted in 1998 at the auction of 800 items from her longtime rural New York estate (now sold). Police were called in to control the thousands of Chinese-Americans eager to simply tour the home of the legendary matron who played such a pivotal role in almost a century of Chinese history.

The San Francisco exhibit featured a strong emphasis on calligraphy. "These are the top talents from Taiwan. All of them are very important," noted Terese Tse Bartholomew, the museum's curator of Himalayan and Chinese decorative art. She praised in particular the bold strokes of Wang Chi-chien, one of the first Chinese artists to emigrate to the U.S., where his style eventually became noticed in the West. Born in Suzhou, near Shanghai, Wang arrived in America in 1949. The 93-year-old artist served in the 1960s as chairman of the Art Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Bartholomew, who hails from Hong Kong and is a niece of Macau casino baron Stanley Ho, describes Mme. Chiang's work as "strong and competent." She is particularly struck by that intimate inscription accompanying Lotus: A Gentleman Among Flowers. She says: "For me, it's shocking. The Chinese never say anything like this. It's so personal." Mme. Chiang Kai-shek - more than a century old and still getting tongues wagging.

 

Ron Gluckman is an American reporter who is based in Hong Kong, but who roams around Asia for a number of publications, such as Asiaweek, which sent him to the USA for this story that ran in March 2000.