Soong Sisters

Two thousand pompously arrayed Chinese witnessed the marriage, in Shanghai last week, of the defeated but honorably esteemed Marshal Chiang Kaishek, resigned generalissimo of the now scattered Nationalist armies which, under his leadership, once conquered half of holy China (TIME, Aug. 22 et ante).

Chiang loomed last week as the most matrimonially romantic of modern Chinese conquerors, because he has openly persisted in wooing a lady known to have refused him at first. In China such a refusal causes the suitor to "lose face," a disgrace so abyssmal that many Chinese have committed suicide rather than endure it. Usually this contingency is circumvented by having the proposal of marriage conveyed through intermediaries; but Chiang Kai-shek has been obliged to risk his "face" because his fiancee was that intensely Westernized "modern woman," Miss Soong Meiling.

In China "the three Soong sisters" are ladies of polite renown. The first is the wife of H. H. Kung, a gentleman whose august destiny is summed up in the fact that he claims to be a lineal descendant of Confucius. The second was internationally known as the wife, and later as the revered widow, of Dr. Sun Yatsen, "sainted" founder of the Nationalist movement. She is now reported married (TIME, Oct. 10) to her late husband's zealous co-worker Chen Yu-jen ("Eugene Chen"), until recently Foreign Minister to the defunct Hankow Nationalist Government (TIME, April 25).

Last of the Soong sisters is Meiling, Wellesley '15. Like her brother, T. V. Soong, Harvard '15, she has been closely identified with the Hankow Nationalist Government in which he was Finance Minister. In person she is charming, in mentality alert, in speech sometimes caustic. Observers, knowing her passionate Nationalist zeal, wondered if she married Chiang Kaishek, last week, with intent to rouse him from retirement to renewed leadership of a Nationalist military force.