Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on 09/11/00 from 172.17.4.90 via proxy home.cosco.com.cn:
Christina Hardyment (as I recall) posits that Soong ChingLing, whom Ransome met in Shanghai, is the model for Missee Lee. Mme Soong, the widow of Dr Sun Yat-Sen (with whom she had eloped, to the very considerable shock of her respectable and wealthy family, who has taken the radical step of educating their daughters in American "prep" schools!) later became President of China and is vernerated to this day; her sister Soong Mei-Ling, the widow of Chiang Kaishek, lives in New York age 102 having taken the other side in the Chinese Civil War.
From accounts of the character and personality of Soong ChingLing, she seems rather a likely model, certainly as far as the "educated" side of Missee Lee's personality goes, but I think that I can offer another contribution.
At the time when Ransome was in China, a book by a Finnish journalist writing in English for American magazines, called "I sailed with Chinese Pirates" had recently been published in Hong Kong and Shanghai. It enjoyed quite a sucess, since Chinese piracy was a very live issue at the time. The first one third of the book deals with a lady pirate who commands a large fleet of war junks, rules with rod of iron, and has inherited her business from her father. I think that if we put her together with the unpiratical, but educated, Mme Soong, we get a pretty complete Missee Lee!