Includes: Sian: A Coup d’Etat. 1937. * War Messages and Other Selections. [1937]. * China in Peace and War. 1940. * Another copy of preceding. * Paintings by Madame Chiang Kai-Shek. [1958]. * Six Typed Letters Signed from Mme. Chiang Kai-shek. 1938-1948. Five with envelopes (postage cut out). * Two letters from Pearl L. Chen, secretary to Mme. Chiang Kai-shek. 1942 & 1944. With envelopes (postage cut out).
Very interesting archives of inscribed books and letters from Mei-ling Soong (Madame Chiang Kai-shek), the youngest of the fabled Soong sisters, who married Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in 1927, ten years after she graduated from Wellesley College in Massachusetts. The recipient of the books and letters was Miss Hetty S. Wheeler, a fellow alumnus of Wellesley, who had matriculated some 15 years earlier than Ms. Soong, and at the time of the correspondence was at Pine Manor Junior College, an affiliate of Wellesley, where she raised money to send to China to aid the “warphans” under Mme. Chiang’s protection. The books are quite significant, but it is the letters that are particularly meaningful, giving a lucid picture of China under attack, first by Japanese, and later by the scourge of Communism. One of the most vivid passages is in the letter of 23 August 1940: “…In an attempt to totally destroy Chungking and browbeat our people into submission, the Japanese have been bombing us every clear day during the last three months. In Chungking there does not remain a single house unaffected by these enemy raids. On August 19, 190 Japanese bombers dropped incendiary bombs wholesale in a mile-long semi-circle through the southern section of the city. Forty fires were started. Fanned by a westerly breeze, the blaze burned in a mile-long wall of flame. Two thousand shop-residences were razed to the ground in the conflagration, while several hundred civilians were killed and wounded, and over thirty thousand people rendered homeless… I pray that you in America may be spared the horrors which we have been subjected to for more than three years now because of Japan’s ability to secure from America, and elsewhere, the war materials she needs to assault us…”