In China, Getting a History Lesson and Glimpsing the Life of a Patriot

Planning a trip to Beijing several months ago, my sister asked me what she should see. The Forbidden City and Great Wall of China came to mind, of course. But then I remembered my favorite place in Beijing. “Above all,” I said, “see the home of Soong Ching-ling.”

I discovered it four years ago, without fully comprehending who Soong Ching-ling was or why she is considered the mother of modern China. I was wandering through alleyways, known as hutongs (some so small and maze-like they aren’t shown on maps), in the old-fashioned northern lake district of Beijing where princes lived. Ching-ling’s low-slung, many-winged house, surrounded by a lush garden, is on the grounds of a mansion owned by the father of the last Qing Dynasty emperor, Pu Yi, who abdicated in 1911.

The walled compound has a pretty pond, favored by ducks, and inside the house are old photographs and displays telling of Soong Ching-ling’s marriage in 1915 to Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the rebellion that ended the rule of emperors in China. When Sun died in 1925, his widow carried on his efforts to build a republican China, while the country was all but destroyed by 15 more years of chaos and civil war.

Seeing the calm loveliness of Ching-ling’s home gave me an hour’s respite from Beijing’s blaring hurly-burly. Beyond that, though, I was appalled that I knew almost nothing about a woman who is beloved by millions of Chinese and who played such an important part in 20th century history. To educate myself about her life and times, I read “The Gate of Heavenly Peace: The Chinese and Their Revolution, 1895-1980,” by Jonathan D. Spence, and “The Soong Dynasty,” by Sterling Seagrave, which tells the story of Ching-ling’s ghastly but remarkable family.

Learning is the best upshot of travel and all the better when it forces you to rethink your beliefs. A child of the ‘50s, I grew up imagining China an evil empire. The story of Soong Ching-ling, who chose to support the Communists instead of her brother-in-law, nationalist dictator Chiang Kai-shek, taught me that, alas, even evil is relative.

Ching-ling (which means “Glorious Life”) was born in the early 1890s (different references give different dates) and raised in the wealthy European section of Shanghai, along with three brothers, elder sister Ai-ling (“Friendly Life”) and a younger sister, May-ling (“Beautiful Life”). Their father, Charlie Soong, made millions as a Bible publisher and entrepreneur, and sent his daughters to college in America at a time when Chinese mothers were still binding their little girls’ feet or, worse, selling them into slavery for a portion of rice.

As a student, Ching-ling studied hard and yearned for a people’s revolution in her homeland. One of her biographers, Roby Eunson, author of “The Soong Sisters,” says that when her father sent her the new flag of republican China in 1911, she tore down the Qing emblem in her dorm room, stamped on it and cried: “Down with the dragon! Up with the flag of the republic!”

Back in Asia after graduation, she had to run away from home to marry Sun Yat-sen, a friend of her father’s but unsuitable because he was divorced and 26 years her senior. In “Journey to the Beginning,” American Asia hand Edgar Snow reports that Ching-ling told him: “I didn’t fall in love. It was hero worship.”

Her sisters married breathtakingly as well, Ai-ling to millionaire banker H.H. Kung and May-ling to Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the anti-Communist, nationalist China movement. By the time her little sister wed Chiang in 1927, Ching-ling had made it clear that she opposed him. Her literary and liberal friends were being persecuted by Chiang’s henchmen, and her movements were being watched, even though Chiang couldn’t risk public opprobrium by harming the widow of Sun Yat-sen.

The Soong family saga is more tangled than a paperback potboiler, with Ai-ling and May-ling often in America drumming up funds to underwrite battles against the Communists, much of which went into their husbands’ pockets, author Seagrave says. At the time of the Communist takeover in 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek retreated to Taiwan, the Shanghai Soongs were one of the richest families in the world, Seagrave notes. And there was a saying about the Soong sisters: “One [Ai-ling] loves money, one [May-ling] loves power and one loves China.”

The one who loved China, it would seem, was Ching-ling. Most of the Soong family ended up in the U.S., living off apparently ill-gotten gains. “They’re all thieves, every . . . one of them,” President Harry Truman once said.

But not Ching-ling. She made no money during the revolution and ultimately cast her lot with Mao Tse-tung. She had no better choice, she said.

The Communists were eager to embrace her, because the people loved her. Mao made her a deputy chairwoman of the government in 1949, and she won the Stalin Peace Prize two years later. She promoted China on diplomatic missions around the world, worked for children and for gender equity, adopted two daughters and suffered during the Cultural Revolution until Premier Chou En-lai rose to her defense. Shortly before she died in 1981, she was inducted into the Communist party, though it’s uncertain how lucid she was at the time. When she died, China lowered its flags to mourn her.

You can see her mausoleum and home in Shanghai and her husband’s monumental crypt near Nanjing. But her final, modest home in the capital speaks eloquently about a woman who endured a century of turmoil with integrity and conviction.

The home of Soong Ching-ling is at 46 Hanhai Beiyan, on the northern edge of Houhai Lake.