Han Suyin

Han Suyin was the pen name of Rosalie Matilda Kuanghu Chou, a Chinese-born Eurasian physician and author who lived from 1917 (some sources say 1916) to 2012. She was born in Xinyang, Henan, to a Belgian-educated Chinese engineer father of Hakka heritage and a Flemish Belgian mother. She began work as a typist at Peking Union Medical College in 1931, went to Brussels in 1935 to study medicine, and in China during the war worked as a midwife in an American Christian mission hospital in Chengdu. She continued her medical studies at the Royal Free Hospital in London and graduated MBBS with honours in 1948, then in 1949 went to Hong Kong to practise at the Queen Mary Hospital. Later she worked at the Johor Bahru General Hospital in Malaya and opened a clinic in Singapore. She wrote in English and French on modern China, set her novels in East and Southeast Asia, and drew on her own life in the bestselling novel A Many-Splendoured Thing of 1952. She lived in Lausanne, Switzerland, for many years until her death.