. he enlarged their appetites, creating expectations that could only be fulfilled by the most extraordinary drive and rapacity. He was a living example of how anything was possible to those who dared."1 Charlie Soong was an opportunist, a shrewd businessman and a Westernized Christian who became a wealthy merchant in Shanghai at a time when the Manchu regime was disintegrating under a combination of domestic and foreign threats. His immediate forbears were overseas traders and smugglers in Southeast China whose families for three centuries had been antipathetic toward the Manchus. Charlie left China as a young boy for America where he succeeded in obtaining a college education with the help of Southern Methodist patrons. He returned to China in 1886 and served for a few years as a missionary, went into the bible publishing business, acted as an intermediary or comprador for Chinese manufacturing interests in their dealings with the West and married into money. He eventually became a key supporter of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, an impractical visionary who spearheaded the Chinese revolution which overthrew the Manchus in 1911. A respectable merchant and minister by day, Charlie Soong was also a conspirator who was linked to Shanghai's secret societies and gangsters. He "financed their father who "gave them everything they wanted the revolution of Sun Yat-sen."2
Under the strict upbringing of their mother, the ugly duckling daughter of a wealthy Christian family, the Soong sisters received a first class education at a private Methodist school in Shanghai and later at American universities.
Ai-ling was her father's favorite. Short, squat and plain, with a Seagrave says "she was smart and quick . . . tough . . . with a remarkable gift for high finance and backroom intrigue."3 In her highly laudatory biography of the sisters, Hahn, an American journalist who cultivated a close relationship with Ai-ling, said she had "the most spontane...