* Figures on immigration obtained from An Illustrated History of the Chinese in America by Ruthanne Lum McCunn (San Francisco: Design Enterprises of San Francisco, 1979), p. 87.
* A year later the teenager was in Washington visiting her Uncle Wen and was introduced to President Theodore Roosevelt. “America is very beautiful, and I am very happy here,” she said, “but why do you call it a free country?” Explaining what had happened to her in San Francisco, she asked, “Why should a Chinese girl be kept out of a country if it is so free. We would never treat visitors to China like that.” T.R. apologized for her treatment. (Emily Hahn, The Soong Sisters, p. 49.)
* Owen Lattimore, to whom I am indebted for this explanation of the rise and fall of the dynasties.
* If the candidate was a child, his parents answered for him.
† The Chinese feared dying without all of their body parts, which, they believe, would prevent their entering the next world. This is why the Chinese government put the heads of executed traitors or other criminals on posts above the city gates, out of reach of their families.
‡ The operation made it difficult to control urination.
* By adding Tibet, Outer Mongolia, Turkistan, Dzungaria, and Nepal, thus increasing the number of inhabitants from 150 million to 450 million.
* There was an ancient Chinese belief that since the Chinese themselves had little body hair, the hairier the person, the more uncivilized he was bound to be.
* This is according to foreign records, as, for obvious reasons, Chinese records no longer went through customs offices.
* Taipan means “great manager” or “big boss.” (Ernest O. Hauser, Shanghai: City for Sale, p. 18.)
* “Griffin” was actually the name for the semiwild Mongolian horses sent to Shanghai for auction.
* A division of the Manchu army.
* T’ung-chih (1856–1875).
* Their physical training reminded observers of the art of boxing.
* According to one author, they were “barbarously executed by being cut in half at the waist.” (Israel Epstein, From Opium War to Liberation, p. 36.)
* Referred to as Zheng Guanying (Cheng Kuan-ying) in the original. He was a Cantonese compradore and reformer.
† I.e., it would be futile to ask the mandarins to stop skimming profits off the peasants’ land.
* The Sino-Japanese War had broken out in August 1894.
†Yamen: provincial governor’s office and residence.
* 1,000 silver dollars.
* Wuchang is in the province of Hupei in central China.
* In one of the nicer ironies of history, the wire was misdelivered to the Chinese Legation, the same place where Sun had been held prisoner.
* The Manchus had gained the throne by overthrowing the Ming Dynasty.
† 3 billion Chinese = $3.04 billion U.S. in 1913 ($68.1 billion today); $30,000 Chinese = $30,416 U.S. in 1913 ($682,150 today).
* Sun was, of course, already married to his village wife and the father of three children.
* See John Fairbank for an explanation of “several stumbling blocks inherited from imperial Confucianism” (The Great Chinese Revolution, p. 171).
* Known by the Chinese as the “Double Tenth.”
† See Jonathan Spence, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, p. 97.
* May-ling and T.V. were still in the United States in college.
* Sun’s wife had made only a brief visit to Japan. While there, she and their daughter, Annie, had been hurt in a car accident. Returning to Shanghai, where she was hounded by Yuan’s police in their efforts to find her husband, Mrs. Sun took Annie and fled to Sun’s brother’s home in Macao (he had moved from Hawaii), where the girl subsequently died.
* An extreme example of this is the story of a sixty-odd-year-old man who romped on the floor, pretending to be a toddler, so his parents would not realize that they had grown old and soon would die.
* According to Thomas DeLong, Emma chose the nickname “Dada” as indicative of her nonconformist attitude represented by the Nihilist movement, which spread from a European protest against World War I into the realms of art and literature. Since May-ling was two and a half years younger than her friend, she signed her letters “Daughter.” (Thomas DeLong, Madame Chiang Kai-shek and Miss Emma Mills, p. 16.)
* See Kristopher Kowal, “The Sage We Love to Hate,” Free China Review (Taipei), August 1999, pp. 48–53.
* It was said that the ladies represented twenty-six different nationalities, each with her own washbowl emblazoned with her national flag.
* Stones were considered an essential element in Chinese gardens, where they represented mountains.
* “Singsong” was a Western name for the highest class of Chinese prostitutes, versed in the arts of singing and storytelling.
* According to the recent biography of Mao by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, a representative of the Comintern had established the Chinese Chinese Party the previous year, and Mao was not counted among the eight founders. The new party was 94 percent funded by the Russians.
* His real name was Hendricus Sneevliet, but he used more than a dozen aliases.
* Some said the Chiangs were descended from the third son of the duke of Chou, a contemporary of Confucius. A highly unlikely connection, it was an ancestry that, according to at least one of his biographers, Chiang Kai-shek “went to much trouble” to prove. (Brian Crozier, The Man Who Lost China, p. 31.)
† Kai-shek, which means “Upright Stone” or “Firm Rock,” was actually named Jui-yuan by his grandfather but became known as Kai-shek.
* The Classics: The Great Learning, The Middle Way, The Analects, and the Sayings of Confucius’s pupil Mencius. The Canons: The Book of Odes, The Book of Ancient History, The Book of Changes, The Spring and Autumn Chronicles, and The Book of Rites.
* This book, along with Record of the Warring States, which enumerates the arts of playing rivals off against one another and the judicious use of bribes, became Chiang’s two favorite books and the sources of his method of governing.
* His real name was Chang Ching-chiang.
* Han Suyin’s most famous book was A Many-Splendored Thing, later made into a movie. Born of a Chinese father and Belgian mother, she was a doctor before becoming a well-known writer.
† His name was Ch’en Chiung-ming.
* Addressing someone as “Elder Brother” was a customary honorific and had nothing to do with age or relationship.
* Chiang already had two sons: Chiang Ching-kuo by Fu-mei, and Chiang Wei-kuo, an adopted child, the son of a friend (Tai Chi-tao) and Yao, the concubine they are said to have shared when he lived in Japan. Chiang always claimed he had adopted Wei-kuo to spare his friend embarrassment, but there were many people who thought he was Chiang’s own child. In 1996, however, Wei-kuo announced that he was, in fact, the son of the friend, born out of wedlock in 1916.
* Ai-ling’s children.
† Sterling Seagrave in The Soong Dynasty.
* Jonathan Fenby, who wrote that it can now be seen in the Shanghai Museum of Public Security.
* $10,000 Chinese = $12,400 U.S. in 1920 ($133,220 today).
† $180,000 Chinese = $223,200 U.S. in 1920 ($2,398,000 today).
‡ $100,000 Chinese = $124,000 U.S. in 1920 ($1,332,200 today).
* Her brother’s room had been painted three months before.
* Tun Li-ch’en, Annual Customs and Festivals in Peking, p. 21.
* Identified by DeLong as Mr. Birnie.
* Joffe was head of the delegation that had signed the armistice at Brest-Litovsk that took Russia out of World War I. A friend of Leon Trotsky, with whom he founded the newspaper Pravda, Joffe eventually committed suicide in protest against the policies of Stalin.
* He was in fact already in the coma that would end in his death.
* Second only to Harvard in size during the first decade of the twentieth century, Valparaiso University counted Walter Bedell Smith, Lowell Thomas, and a member of the Court of In
ternational Justice at the Hague among its graduates.
† Later in his life, he told an American reporter that he had taken the name of Borodin in honor of the great Russian composer.
* According to a visitor to Sun’s home on the Rue Molière in Shanghai, the bull-faced Cohen “always sat on a bench in the front hall and carried a large revolver in his hip pocket, which caused the seat of his trousers to sag grotesquely.” Whereas this might lead one to think that Cohen bought a second gun to even out his appearance, it seems he acquired the name “Two-Gun” only after a wound in his left arm made him realize that if “it had been my right arm and I carried my gun that side, I’d not have been able to use it… [so] I got me a second gun, another Smith and Wesson revolver, and I packed it handy to my left hand. I practiced drawing and soon found that I was pretty well ambidextrous—one gun came out about as quick as the other.” (Daniel S. Levy, Two-Gun Cohen, pp. 120–25.)
* Ching-ling was May-ling’s older sister but Ai-ling’s younger sister.
* Number five was Liu Chen-huan (“Living Angel Liu”); number six was Wu Chih-hui, an educator, known as one of the Four Elder Statesmen of the Kuomintang.
* In a plan he submitted a few days later to the Military Council, Chiang recommended that soldiers be provided with winter clothes, health and medical supplies, better living quarters, and entertainment for their hours off duty. He also proposed a shorter period of service.
* The Chung Shan, coincidentally the same gunboat on which Sun and Chiang had taken refuge in 1922.
* Along with other important members of the CCP, Mao Tse-tung was removed from his position as head of the Propaganda Department, although he remained head of the Peasant Movement Training Institute.
* $500,000 Chinese = $380,000 U.S. in 1926 ($4,622,300 today).
* His self-imposed penance for infecting Jennie with venereal disease.
* The only other hotel in the resort, called the Journey’s End Inn, placed Bibles and books of French pornography in its guest rooms. (Jonathan Fenby, Chiang Kai-shek, p. 254.)
* The largest city in the three-city complex of Wuhan.
* “To asseverate” means “to declare.” By 1927, when May-ling wrote this, she had begun to use long and/or uncommon words that she thought would impress people.
* Borodin was five feet, ten inches tall.
† $3,000,000 Chinese = $2,070,000 U.S. in 1927 ($25,658,000 today).
‡ $7,000,000 Chinese = $4,830,000 U.S. in 1927 ($59,868,000 today).
* $3,000,000 Chinese = $2,070,000 U.S. in 1927 ($25,658,000 today).
* Estimates range between 800 and 8,000.
* 250,000 taels = $172,500 U.S. in 1927 ($2,138,150 today).
† 100,000 taels = $69,000 U.S. in 1927 ($855,200 today).
* There are several stories, possibly apocryphal, told about T.V. and the Shengs. See the endnotes to this chapter for a few of them.
* $200,000 Chinese = $138,000 U.S. in 1927 ($1,710,400 today).
† $500,000 Chinese = $172,500 U.S. in 1927 ($2,138,000 today).
‡ $500,000 Chinese = 345,000 U.S. in 1927 ($4,276,000 today).
* 150,000 Chinese = $103,000 U.S. in 1927 ($1,282,800 today).
* $30,000 Chinese = $28,750 U.S. in 1927 ($356,360 today).
* Sung Chang.
* According to Chiang, they were introduced for the first time in December of 1922 at a party given by T.V. in the Suns’ residence in Shanghai. He said he was “deeply attracted by her elegant appearance and delightful conversation.” (Chen Jin-jin, “Stories of Love,” A Study of Modern Chinese Women, Vol. 2., pp. 275–88.)
* Chiang’s government fell to the Communists twenty-two years later, at which time he was forced to leave the Chinese mainland.
* According to members of their household, Chiang did not divorce his village wife until he was preparing to marry May-ling, when he gave the divorce papers to her family.
* In 1931 Jennie sent Chiang a letter, asking for permission to return to China and for $10,000 in travel expenses. “I got mad and lost my temper and tore it into pieces,” he wrote. “I thought this showed my sincerity and loyalty. The letter might have been sent deliberately to destroy our marriage. I better ignore it and not allow myself to get trapped by such a dirty trick.” May-ling, who caught Chiang reading the letter, was so angry that she left Nanking, where they were then living, for Shanghai. (See Wang Xiaohua, et al, The Six-Dimensional Puzzle of Chiang Kai-shek, Taipei: Xianzhi Chubanshe, 1995, p. 77.) In 1933 Jennie did return to China, where she apparently lived on money Chiang gave her along with what she earned as a language teacher. In need of money more than thirty years later, she wrote the story of her marriage to Chiang in English with the help of James Zee-min Lee, a former English tutor to the Chiangs. After arranging for the book to be published by Doubleday, her literary agent, Lawrence Hill, was informed that he would be sued by two major New York law firms if he allowed publication to proceed. To further assure his cooperation, he was beaten up twice. Doubleday subsequently withdrew its offer. Lee and his brother, who lived in New York, then offered the book to Chiang’s son’s lawyer to be destroyed. Jennie gave the lawyer two (out of three probable) copies of the manuscript, for which she was paid $170,000. Twenty years later, Professor Lloyd Eastman, a China scholar at the University of Illinois, found what was probably a third copy, kept by her agent, in the archives at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, and the book was finally published in 1992. For these cloak-and-dagger details, see Ch’en Chieh-ju, Chiang Kai-shek’s Secret Past, edited with an introduction by Eastman, pp. xi–xxviii. Meanwhile, according to the FBI, Jennie had apparently tried to blackmail Chiang for $1,000,000 to keep her from publishing her story; in response, he gave her an allowance of $500 every three months. The FBI also reported that the U.S. State Department “attempted to suppress publication of the book because the CHIANG government is friendly to the United States and such a book could have a deleterious effect on the relations between the two countries.” (FBI files, #62-71649-64 to 77. Materials furnished to the author by the Department of Justice in response to a Freedom of Information Act inquiry.) Jennie died in 1971.
* I.e., May-ling.
† A clause in the Discipline of the Methodist Church prohibited ministers from conducting marriages of divorced persons, if in fact anyone believed that Chiang Kai-shek was legally divorced.
* Laura Tyson Li.
* According to DeLong, the doctors told May-ling that she was not pregnant. (Thomas A. DeLong, Madame Chiang Kai-shek and Miss Emma Mills, p. 80.)
* Fulton Oursler, an American writer known primarily for his books on Christian themes.
* $15,000,000 Chinese = $10,650,000 U.S. in 1928 ($133,857,000 today).
* The same situation occurred two years later. When T.V. refused to commit himself to finding the money, May-ling told him that she would sell her house, the one he had given the Chiangs as her dowry. “If we cannot get money for the army, we will be beaten,” she said. “Kai-shek will sacrifice himself on the front lines, and I will die with him.” (Chen Jin-jin, “Stories of Love,” A Study of Modern Chinese Women, Vol. 2., pages 275–88.)
* The fact that the Japanese party in power failed to force the army to punish the assassins brought about the political intervention of the emperor and the fall of the government in question—one of the few times this ever happened in Japan.
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