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The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China Paperback – Illustrated, November 16, 2010

by Hannah Pakula (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 114 ratings
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With a beautiful, powerful, and sexy Madame Chiang Kai-Shek at the center of one of the great dramas of the twentieth century, this is the story of the founding of modern China.

With the beautiful, powerful, and sexy Madame Chiang Kai-Shek at the center of one of the great dramas of the twentieth century, this is the story of the founding of modern China, starting with a revolution that swept away more than 2,000 years of monarchy, followed by World War II, and ending in eventual loss to the Communists and exile in Taipei. Praised by China scholar Jonathan Spence for “an impressive amount of telling material, drawn from a wide array of sources,” Pakula presents an epic historical tapestry, a wonderfully wrought narrative that brings to life what Americans should know about China—the superpower we are inextricably linked with.
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  1. Print length
    816 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Simon & Schuster
  4. Publication date
    November 16, 2010
  5. Dimensions
    6.13 x 2 x 9.25 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    9781439148945
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1439148945
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Ms. Pakula writes like a dream, and her narrative is certainly a pleasure to read; anyone who wants to learn about China in the first half of the 20th century will find The Last Empress a good guide.”

 --Melanie Kirkpatrick, The Wall Street Journal

“Pakula’s biography is often absorbing. Madame Chiang emerges as more than just her husband’s wife; we see a brilliant, scheming, deliberately alluring, brave, corrupt chameleon of a woman. . . . The Last Empress . . . presents Madame Chiang as far more complex, awful and brilliant than we had imagined.”

 --Jonathan Mirsky, The New York Times Book Review

“The tale of Soon May-ling, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s American-educated wife, is epic in scope. Hannah Pakula brings vividly to life the tormented odyssey of China during the 20th Century and the enthralling life story of this singular woman in a wonderfully accessible way.”

 --Orville Schell, Director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society

“A richly complex account of 20th-century China . . . thoroughly engrossing. . . . A vivid if often unflattering portrait of a charismatic Chinese patriot, her husband and family, in tumultuous and tragic times.”

 --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The Last Empress . . . presents Madame Chiang as far more complex, awful and brilliant than we had imagined.”

 --Jonathan Mirsky, The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Hannah Pakula is the author of The Last Empress, which was a New York Times notable book, The Last Romantic, which was called by Graham Greene the best biography and one of the three best books of the year, and An Uncommon Woman, which was a Los Angeles Times Book Award finalist. She lives in New York City.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 1439148945
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; Illustrated edition (November 16, 2010)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 816 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9781439148945
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1439148945
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.9 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.13 x 2 x 9.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 114 ratings

About the author

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Hannah Pakula

Hannah Pakula

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Hannah Pakula attended Wellesley College, the Sorbonne and Southern Methodist University. She is a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
114 global ratings
Could be a lot shorter...not Madame, the book!
3 Stars
Could be a lot shorter...not Madame, the book!
This book is more about the birth of modern China than about Madame Chiang. The author goes into excruciating detail about the exploits of Chiang Kai-shek and all the other warlords. There are many books that provide the details of these conflicts within China in the first half of the 20th century. Do we really need another drawn-out agonizing rehash of these war exploits? The Madame seems to be left out of the picture quite often. Where are the transcripts of her famous speeches? The author should do a serious gutting of this book, call it an abridged version, and provide us with a rich drama of the Madame. A careful gutting could remove 70% of the pages...pages which have nothing to do directly with her. Details of all the background exploits of generals and politics could be provided as big picture-type short summaries. Madame Chiang left us with no autobiography also...this also makes for a challenging project when one writes about her. Despite the extended number of pages, I still found the portrayal of Madame Chiang quite titillating, and suspect she was a volcano in the sack.
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Top reviews from the United States

Mark, der Bergermeister
5.0 out of 5 stars "The Last Empress" - What a woman! What a leader!
Reviewed in the United States on September 18, 2011
Verified Purchase
My wife, who is Asian, is reading this biographical history - she's
very impressed, to say the least!

Bought it as a gift for her with the proviso that I get to read it after she's finished with it...only problem is that she likes it so much, she may never put it down!

A terrific look at a country that is now verging on global dominance in so many ways - and how one woman with brains, toughness, and perseverence, not to mention a charm that could win over an entire American Congress, helped her country battle the Japanese just before and during WWII when their formidable and often brutal military was overrunning not only China, but all of South East Asia!

And, of course, the transition - during which she played a major, and often tragic role - from a budding democracy to a Communist state. Had she succeeded, along with her husband, Chang Kai Shek,
in keeping Mao and his cohorts out of the picture, we would be looking at an entirely different global partner, economically, militarily, and ideologically!

What a woman to still accomplish what she did! - her speech to our Congress, imploring America to send aid and men to join the "Flying Tigers" - a group of volunteer fighter pilots that wreaked havoc on
the Japanese bombing squadrons who were so indiscriminate - as were their soldiers - in murdering innocents was a triumph of pure genius, laced with a charm made all the more warming by her beauty, grace, wit, and PERFECT ENGLISH! (SHE WAS EDUCATED AT AN ELITE
PRIVATE COLLEGE, WELLESLEY, IN THE U.s., BEGINNING AT AGE 15!

LIKE I SAID - WHAT A WOMAN! ALL POLITICIANS AND LEADERS OF TODAY'S WORLD COULD LEARN SO MUCH FROM HER LIFE; UNFORTUNATELY, THEY DON'T
PUT TOO MUCH STOCK IN WORLD HISTORY!

READ THIS BOOK! YOU WILL NOT BE DISAPPOINTED...UNLESS YOU ARE A COMMUNIST!
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Michael Sakowski
5.0 out of 5 stars A Beautiful Book Describes an Amazing Life
Reviewed in the United States on June 23, 2012
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Aside from being an interesting compendium of modern Chinese history, and a very well done job delineating the amazing life of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, the meticulous design, many photos, and care with which this book was made elevates it to a work of art of which the author and her collaborators should be proud. Despite the many twists and turns necessary in attempting to chronicle modern Chinese history, the author does an excellent job in doing it in an interesting and logical fashion that makes the reading very enjoyable. I think the author found just the right mix of Chinese history to showcase and explain much of Madame's life, and certainly, this is a broad study that I found completely enthralling and enjoyable.

This book opened my mind with many facts that I didn't know, and gave me the desire to learn more. It made me think very hard about the central character, and gave me the information about her in what I believe to be a completely unbiased manner. When I finished the book, I felt a real satisfaction, knowing that I had enriched my mind greatly while being entertained the whole time. I found myself wanting to learn more about some of the events that were described in the book, and in particular, about Madame Chiang Kai-Shek.

Therefore, I feel the author hit a home run with this book, because it not only entertains and educates, it instills a desire to learn more.

Bravo, to the author, Hannah Pakula, and thank you for such a beautiful book.

Michael P. Sakowski
Baltimore
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S. McGee
4.0 out of 5 stars "I think that if I had my way, I could amount to something."
Reviewed in the United States on February 20, 2010
Verified Purchase
So wrote Mei-ling Soong, youngest daughter of Chinese millionaire tycoon Charlie Soong, to an American friend, around 1919. By 1942, she had transformed herself into the first lady of China, a political and social powerhouse, and one of the world's most admired women, lionized as she toured the United States pleading for support for her husband's beleagured regime, cut off from the rest of the world in the city of Chungking. Much later in life, an observer would describe her multi-faceted personality -- Wellesley alumna, hard-boiled politician, lady patriot, Georgia belle and haughty empress. Biographer Hannah Pakula set out to describe and capture all those parts of Mme Chiang Kai-shek in this massive but often ponderous biography.

The result is not a fast or straightforward read, as Pakula's book -- the product of a decade of research, is long and dense, jam-packed with details of Chinese politics -- requires patience to peruse. At the end of it, while Mme Chiang still feels like an enigma to me, I do feel that at least I emerged with a much clearer understanding of the forces that shaped her and those around her -- and thus China itself.

Pakula does an excellent job of drawing a portrait of Mme Chiang, as one of the only people in Chiang Kai-shek's inner circle able to persuade the World War II nationalist Chinese leader to behave in a rational fashion, at least some of the time; as a humanitarian in a very un-Chinese tradition, founding orphanages and hospitals; as a member of a family that included some of China's most greedy and rapacious citizens. (As Pakula writes, "There is little question that May-ling, her sisters, brothers, and their spouses conducted themselves much like the Chinese dynasties that had preceded them, making important decisions for the country and making sure that those decisions were financially beneficial to their family.") Certainly, in many ways Mme Chiang did present herself like a Manchu empress. During her famous wartime trip to the United States, pleading for financial aid for China's orphans and weapons to fight off the Chinese, Pakula recounts Mme Chiang wearing traditional Chinese gowns fastened with diamonds, and traveling with an array of luxurious fur coats.

Pakula's approach to her difficult and elusive subject -- a woman who once unplugged the power cord on a reporter's tape recorder without him knowing -- is straightforward and chronological. As a result, the book is stuffed full of detail, starting with Mme Chiang's American education (which produced the Georgia belle accent she deployed to great effect whenever she needed to charm a foreign statesman) to her marriage and the battle to save her husband's regime from the dual threat of the invading Japanese and the Chinese Communists. At times, the narrative becomes exhausting to read -- I felt as if I was on some kind of "Long March" myself, with the words "The End" as my objective rather than the caves of Yenan. Too often, I think, the biography lost its focus and ended up feeling more of a history of China and Mme Chiang's role in it, than a biography. Leaving aside the other merits or flaws of the controversial biography of Mao by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, I found that to be a much more fluid and compelling narrative, in terms of the writing, structure and choices of what to include or discard. I turned the pages of that book rapidly; this one became easy to put down for long spells.

Unbelievably, this book, vast and all-encompassing as it is, left me hungry for more, or at least, a tighter focus and greater analysis. I wanted fewer detailed analyses of the political spats within the Kuomintang and more emphasis on Mme Chiang herself; as the book unfolded, she simply became more enigmatic. Were her repeated health crises psychosomatic, invented or very real? Pakula hints at all three answers, but never really comes down on any side. What motivated the marriage and how did the relationship between husband and wife evolve? Again, Pakula ducks the core question, and instead discusses Mme Chiang's romance with Wendell Wilkie, her husband's philandering, etc. Ultimately, the portrait Pakula produces, while swarming with details and information, wasn't a revelatory one. Who was Mme Chiang and what motivated her -- greed? a desire for power? patriotism? idealism? More than 800 pages later, I'm still puzzled, but perhaps that has more to do with the subject of the book than Pakula as a biographer.

Certainly, Pakula's traditionalist and chronological approach to a biography has produced a worthy and well-researched volume that's likely to become a 'must read' biography for anyone interested in the first half of the 20th century, as China lurched from empire, to nationalist country, to a country divided by warlords and invaders, to one run by a Communist totalitarian regime. It's full of the wonderful bits of color that make all good biographies stand out, from the horrifying details of abuses practiced by all the different rulers of China (torture by the emperors, the murder of civilians by the Japanese, such as the notorious 'Rape of Nanking', and the Chiang regime's abuse of its opponents, as when Pakula tells of mass murders in the streets of Shanghai in the regime's final days, or the disembowling of a young woman in Hankow for saying publicly that Chiang wasn't the real heir to revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen) to the small details of wartime life in Chungking.

I'm glad I read this; I doubt I'll have the courage to wade through it again, but I'll keep it on my shelves should I ever need a reference book about this era. Recommended primarily to those with a strong interest in China, or who are interested in the Asian theater of World War II -- there is a lot of discussion about China's role (and inadequacies), and Chiang's relationship with both wartime political leaders and military figures from Stilwell to George Marshall.

A note to Kindle readers: This is one book, despite its heft, that might be worth buying in "real book" version. There are no photos in the Kindle version; the maps (which would be helpful) are too small to be legible on the K2; a crucial "who's who" at the front of this book is awkward to get to (when it should be readily accessible, given the number of characters who will be new to many readers), and the footnotes and bibliography also weren't as easily accessed as in many other Kindle books I've read. A final killer: there's no Table of Contents in the menu, making it more cumbersome to navigate from point to point. (You have to manually page back through the whole who's who to reach the table of contents.)
6 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

A_B_C
5.0 out of 5 stars Was she Good or Evil?
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 11, 2020
Verified Purchase
A well researched and written book. Soong Mei-ling's was a powerful woman, the one behind the throne, without her, Chiang Kia-shek might not have achieved as much as he did. On the other hand, the Soong family was a completely corrupted and self serving lot which the book hardly mentioned.
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broccoli
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 14, 2017
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excellent book
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Adrien von Ferscht
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 6, 2014
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Fascinating!
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