Matt Wills

Hannah Pakula
The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and
the Birth of Modern China
Simon and Schuster, 2010
848 Pages
£27.50
ISBN 978-0297859758

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One might expect a biography of China’s “Last Empress” to be focused on Cixi, the notorious imperial concubine who became de facto ruler of China in the late 19th century. By instead attaching the title to Soong May-Ling, the wife of Chiang Kai-Shek (the leader of China from 1928 to 1948, and subsequently the first president of independent Taiwan up to his death in 1975), author Hannah Pakula seeks in The Last Empress to redress historical misconceptions of her subject. Rather than seeing May-Ling as an active nationalist striving to help her husband to create a modern, powerful China, we are encouraged instead to focus on her love of power and all of its material trappings. Certainly, Pakula appears to have little time for the standardly sympathetic opinions of May-Ling that persist in the Chinese media and elsewhere, despite the well-known revelations of corruption surrounding the Soong family.

However, Pakula’s work suffers from a common problem associated with historical biography: a lack of focus. Pakula attempts to fit the biographical details into a broader narrative of late 19th- and 20th-century Chinese history. While this context heightens the work’s interest, it unfortunately occupies too large a proportion of the book, detracting from the main subject. Thus, even after reading through nearly 700 pages of narrative, it is still not exactly clear that Pakula’s use of the word “empress” is vindicated. The case for May-Ling’s overarching political role is unconvincing, and the reader is left with an impression of her more as obsessed with the trappings of power than with wielding it. In many ways, Pakula fails to offer us any viable alternative to the established reputation of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek.

Its meandering content aside, Pakula’s biography suffers from more technical shortcomings. While she is to be congratulated for the depth of research, the book’s editors have chosen to put all the footnotes at the end, and worse, have not identified on each page which remarks have received a citation. The reader is left haplessly flicking back and forth between the text and the endnotes—a tedious and easily avoided process. As a casual read “The Last Empress” is excellent, but its academic usefulness is sadly—and unnecessarily—limited.

Matt Wills is reading for a BA in History at Trinity College, Oxford. Matt is a managing editor at the Oxonian Review.

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