How a salt merchant's son became known by a Cantonese nickname
The name the world knows, Chiang Kai-shek, is a Cantonese pronunciation of Jieshi, meaning firm as a rock, a pen name he adopted in 1912 from the I Ching. From early 1918 people used the Cantonese form, as did Sun Yat-sen. In Mandarin he was Jiang, and he collected several other names along the way.
He was born on 31 October 1887 in Xikou, a village about 48 kilometres south of the port of Ningbo. His father ran the family's Yutai Salt Store and sold salt and wine, both state monopolies, under a licence obtained through personal connections. His mother, a seamstress and devout Buddhist, was his father's third wife. His grandfather gave the baby a milk name meaning auspicious beginning; at 15 he chose a school name meaning striving to be honest, and in 1917 he took Zhongzheng, central and correct, from another line of the I Ching.
His childhood was a string of narrow escapes. At three he survived choking on a pair of chopsticks, and at five he nearly drowned after climbing into a large water jar. A teacher described a wild boy who treated his classmates as puppets yet could concentrate so fiercely that thousands of voices would not distract him.
Hardship came early. His grandfather died when he was seven, and months later, in August 1895, his father died suddenly at 54. A property dispute left most of the estate to a half-brother, and his mother supported the family by weaving linen. When tax collectors came after her, officials held the boy as collateral and hauled him before a magistrate; he later called it the first spark of his revolutionary fire. At 15 he failed the imperial examination, and before he could retry, the exams were abolished.
At a school in Ningbo called Golden Arrow, run by the Japanese-educated teacher Ku Ching-lien, he read The Art of War and first heard of Sun Yat-sen's plans to topple the Qing dynasty. He went on to lead the Nationalist government from 1925 and remained a deeply controversial figure until his death on 5 April 1975.
Source: Chiang Kai-shek
