Cecilia Chiang
Chinese-American restaurateur (1920-2020)
Cecilia Sun Yun Chiang (Chinese: 江孫芸; September 18, 1920 – October 28, 2020) was a Chinese-American restaurateur and chef, best known for founding and managing The Mandarin restaurant in San Francisco, California.
Early life
Chiang was born as Sun Yun in Wuxi, Jiangsu, the tenth of twelve children in a wealthy family. Her father, Sun Long Guang, was a railway engineer who was educated in France and her mother, Sun Shueh Yun Hui, was from a wealthy family that owned textile mills and flour mills. Her mother had bound feet, but her parents refused to follow the tradition with their children.
At the age of four, her family moved to Peking (Beijing), where she was raised in a 52-room, converted Ming-era mansion that occupied an entire block. Her Chinese name, Sun Yun, means "flower of the rue". As a child, she enjoyed elaborate formal meals prepared by the family's two chefs, although the children were not allowed to cook or go into the kitchen.
She escaped with a sister from the Japanese occupation of China in 1942 by walking for nearly six months to Chongqing, where they settled with a relative. During her time there, she worked as a Mandarin teacher for the American and Soviet embassies. She met Chiang Liang (江梁), a former economics professor at Fu Jen Catholic University, and by then a successful local businessman whom she married, establishing a comfortable life in Shanghai.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Cecilia Chiang” as chinese-American restaurateur (1920-2020). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5056410. VIAF identifies the subject as 23940982. The Library of Congress control number is n2001016913. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1920, 2020 and 1942.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cecilia Chiang” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.