IT was a life from which legends have been created. An ambitious young man rises through the military ranks during China's turbulent warlord period of the 20s. Linked by marriage to one of China's top families, he gains prestige and retakes control of theNationalist movement which aims to take command of the country.
He engages in civil war with the Communists and though he loses, he establishes a hugely successful empire-state on a small island off the mainland. He becomes its revered leader and his union with Soong Mei-ling, sister of Madam Sun, the wife of Nationalist hero Dr Sun Yat-sen, is seen as an exemplary Christian marriage.
But now this ''legend'' has been brought face-to-face with brutal reality by the newly-published memoirs of the woman he tried to write out of history.
Chiang Kai-shek's Secret Past: The Memoir of His Second Wife, Chen Chieh-ju smashes the image of Taiwan's former leader with its picture of a pompous, dictatorial, temperamental man who would stop at nothing - including abandoning the wife he professed to love - in his quest for power.
Chen Chieh-ju later came to live in Hong Kong and her grandsons are now businessmen in the territory. For decades the Chiang family and the Kuomintang have suppressed the story of their leader's second marriage.
They tried to remove Chen Chieh-ju, or Jennie as she was known in English, from the official record immediately after Chiang asked her to step aside in 1927 in favour of Soong in order that he could pursue his dream of ruling China. They had been marriedseven years.
After promising Jennie that he would return to their marriage after five years, Chiang sent her away to the United States purportedly to study. By the time she reached California he was already denying he had ever married her in the media.