Bio

BIOGRAPHY OF STERLING SEAGRAVE

1937-2017

Bestselling author Sterling Seagrave grew up on the China-Burma border, fifth generation of an American family of medical missionaries and teachers working in Burma since 1832. His father, Dr. Gordon Seagrave, was the author of Burma Surgeon and five other books. Sterling was educated in Burma, India, and America. After four years as a reporter, writer, and assistant foreign news editor for the Washington Post, he spent ten years in Asia as a freelance journalist contributing to Life, Time, Esquire, Atlantic, Smithsonian, GEO, Readers Digest, and Far Eastern Economic Review.

Sterling Seagrave's first book, Soldiers of Fortune, was a history of mercenary pilots from 1911 in the Balkans to 1975 in Saigon, including Air America and Bird & Sons. Seagrave made headlines in 1981 when he was the first to correctly identify a biological toxin causing deaths from internal bleeding thousands of miles apart in Laos and Afghanistan. His findings, published in Yellow Rain (1981), were confirmed by laboratories in Norway, Holland, France, Canada, and America.

In 1985, The Soong Dynasty became a nationwide bestseller, main selection of the Book of the Month Club, and was optioned by Paul Newman and director George Roy Hill. It was the first behind-the-scenes account of the family of Madame Chiang Kai-shek, whose wealth and power dominated China and American policy toward Asia in the 20th century. Now a classic of Asia studies, still in print, it introduced one of the great gangsters of all time: Big-Ears Tu Yueh-sheng, boss of the Shanghai underworld, an intimate of the Soong family. 

In The Marcos Dynasty (1988), Seagrave then showed that Ferdinand Marcos fabricated his family history and his heroic legend, and was kept in power by four U.S. presidents to facilitate covert operations around the world.

In 1995, Lords of the Rim was a highly entertaining study of the origins of a bourgeoisie in ancient China, tracing its growth into global networks of super-rich Overseas Chinese who keep their wealth offshore and manipulate governments in the countries that enrich them. A bestseller across Asia, selling over 60,000 copies in the British edition alone, it is published in many regional languages.

In Dragon Lady - The Life and Legend of the Last Empress of China. Seagrave re-investigated the "evil" Manchu empress Tzu Hsi, showing how her image as a murderous, sex-crazed monster was concocted and spread around the world by the Times correspondent George E. Morrison and his ally, the counterfeit historian and art forger Sir Edmund Backhouse. At the Mitchell Library in Australia, Peggy Seagrave discovered that the Boxer Siege of the Peking Legations in 1900 was largely the invention of Morrison, who kept a secret diary contradicting his triumphalist reports published by the Times. 

Peggy Seagrave

Peggy Seagrave worked with Sterling Seagrave on The Soong Dynasty and other books, and became co-author of The Yamato Dynasty. Before they met, Peggy Sawyer Seagrave had graduated with honors from the University of North Carolina, worked for the John F. Kennedy Library, the Smithsonian Institution, and Time-Life Books, where she was a senior researcher. Peggy passed away in 2016.

Following The Marcos Dynasty, The Yamato Dynasty became the first multi-generational biography of the Japanese imperial family to include its women. Among other revelations, the Seagraves revealed for the first time that Hirohito’s mother was secretly a Quaker with close ties to a Quaker network in Wall Street. They also show how Hirohito's brother, Prince Chichibu, headed a secret campaign to loot twelve Asian countries and colonies conquered by Japan during the half-century from 1895 to 1945. With the collusion of US Quakers, Hirohito was exonerated of war guilt, and Japan pretended to be bankrupt, using the hidden war loot to regain its place as a world economic power and America’s far right bastion in East Asia.

The Seagraves' powerful collaboration, Gold Warriors (2005), is a close look at how Japan systematically looted Asia, and what happened to the plundered treasure after 1945 when it was secretly recovered by Washington and used as a global slush fund. Writing in The London Review of Books, Dr. Chalmers Johnson said: “Gold Warriors is easily the best guide available to the scandal of 'Yamashita's gold', and the authors play fair with their readers by supplying them with massive amounts of their raw research materials.”

It is an intricate and shocking story. Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking, said: “The Seagraves have uncovered one of the biggest secrets of the Twentieth Century.”