Dimensions
162 x 240 x 52mm
Beautiful, powerful and sexy, Madame Chiang Kai-shek was at the centre of one of the great dramas of the twentieth century: the founding of modern China, beginning with a revolution that swept away more than 2 000 years of monarchy, followed by the Second World War and ending in eventual loss to the Communists and exile in Taipei. An epic historical tapestry, this beautifully wrought narrative revolves around a fascinating, manipulative woman and her family: her father, a peasant who raised himself into Shanghai society and sent his daughters to college in America at a time when Chinese women were purposefully kept uneducated; her mother, an unlikely aristocratic Methodist from the Mandarin class; her husband, a dogmatic warlord who became Generalissimo of China; one sister, the wife of Sun Yat-sen; the other, married to the seventy-fifth lineal descendant of Confucius; and her older brother, a financial genius.