The Soong Dynasty

The book The Soong Dynasty written by Sterling Seagrave was published in 1985. S. Seagrave grew up on the China-Burma border in the 1940s. He was a reporter with the Washington Post and a freelance journalist. This book has 20 chapters and the first few are about the family background of Charlie Soong (宋嘉樹 1864? - 1918) and his activities in the United States in early 1880s. I think these few chapters are the best part of the book in that they are well researched. The author in the Acknowledgements pages says that he is indebted to Edward Leslie who do the research on the initial parts of the book that covers the period from 1880 to 1911. Among other things, these pages explain how Charlie Soong could work in an American ship in 1879 at the age of 14. Later he arrived at the US, received education there and had some romance with a few local girls before returning to Shanghai in 1886. The primary source materials on this part mainly come from the US National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the collections of many famous institutions in the States such as libraries at Stanford, at Wellesley, and at Harvard. This book has a Chinese translation entitled "宋家皇朝", also published in 1985 (publisher: (澳門) 星光書店). The translation is of high standard. In 1986 I was impressed by this translation version because it starts with a large black & white photo of Charlie Soong taken when he was a student at Trinity and Vanderbilt. He had cut his Chinese pigtail and dressed in a suit for Methodist ministry. The caption of this photo in Chinese reads "在聖三一學院和范德比爾特大學求學時的宋查理, 一心希望成為衛理公會傳教士. 剪去了辮子, 身著西服革履的宋查理此時正是風度翩翩的美少年". I totally agree with this description. Charlie Soong was such a handsome youth as a college student. According to Seagrave, there are only two such original prints now, one has a slightly charred edge and the other has not. The charred edge has something to do with the romance of Charlie Soong in mid-1880s.