On July 18, 1961, a wedding was being held in "secret" at a private house in Taipei. At this wedding, there were all witnesses and introducers, but only a number of friends of the groom were missing, so it seemed that the wedding was a bit deserted.
Even so, the groom's interest did not diminish. His face was full of red light, and he also told his old friends who were present that he had just recently undergone a medical examination. The results of the physical examination showed that he was in good health, which also meant that he could spend more time with his new wife. At the end of the conversation, he also specifically mentioned that an old friend had written a letter to persuade him not to marry the bride next to him, but he did not read and knew what was written in the letter, so he threw it in the trash without opening the letter.
A few hours later, the wedding was also over with the blessings of everyone on the spot.
The groom at the wedding was Jiang Menglin, then president of Peking University, who was 75 years old at the time. The bride is Xu Xianle, who has a very bad reputation in Taiwan.
Jiang Menglin is 22 years older than Xu Xianle, and when he married, Xu Xianle was 53 years old. The two of them went from falling in love to getting married in just a few months.
In 1958, Jiang Menglin's second wife, Tao Zenggu, died. Jiang Menglin, who is over 70 years old, does not want to be lonely in his old age, and he longs for another woman to meet him. At that time, his friends also introduced him to the object one after another, but Jiang Menglin did not have a feeling of emotion for the women introduced to him.
In 1961, Jiang Menglin met Xu Xianle by chance. Xu Xianle's father was a director of Shanghai Gezhi Academy, and his great-grandfather Xu Shou was a famous scientist in the late Qing Dynasty. Xu Xianle was pampered from an early age because she was the youngest daughter in the family, and because she was very beautiful, she became the pearl in the palm of her parents.
With an extraordinary birth and a good education since childhood, Xu Xianle's life direction will not be too bad, but after such a famous person, he has to "break" a good hand.
Xu Xianle had made many boyfriends more than a decade before he met Jiang Menglin, and these boyfriends were all rich or expensive without exception. Xu Xianle does not seem to care much about money because he is a famous person. Instead, she paid far more attention to the men's possessions than she expressed to them.
Xu Xianle has gotten along with many men to the point of talking about marriage, but she always wants the other party to give her a large amount of money, and before marriage, she makes a request to these men, that is, after marriage, the property management power in the family is all handed over to her own hands.
These men were scared away by Xu Xianle. But there are always people who are not afraid of hitting their heads and bleeding in their marriage with her, and this first man is Yang Jie.
Yang Jie was once a famous anti-Japanese general who galloped on the battlefield, but after he saw Xu Xianle, he was bent on marrying her, and he could not tolerate other women in his heart. Therefore, even if Xu Xianle made a request to him to be in charge of the property power, Yang Jie married her without hesitation. After marriage, Xu Xianle's attitude towards Yang Jie was much colder, but he became more and more concerned about Yang Jie's property and had the intention of embezzling his property.
Yang Jie finally came back from love, and he saw through Xu Xianle's thoughts and immediately divorced her. This marriage lasted only 7 months, but it cost Yang Jie a lot of money and full of love.
Immediately after, Jiang Menglin and Xu Xianle met. The 75-year-old Jiang Menglin still has a desire for love. And when he met Xu Xianle, although Xu Xianle was more than half a hundred years old, he still had charm because of his beautiful appearance and proper maintenance, and Jiang Menglin fell in love with this beautiful woman at that moment. How much did he like her? Jiang Menglin wrote in a love letter to Xu Xianle:
"Of all the ladies I've ever met, you're the one who moves me the most."
For his love, Xu Xianle also quickly responded. The two of them fell in love. When he fell in love with Xu Xianle, Jiang Menglin often received advice from his friends to keep him away from this woman with a deep heart. But Jiang Menglin is like an ignorant teenager, lost in love, and he can't hear the outside world's evaluation of Xu Xianle.
During the period of falling in love with Xu Xianle, Xu Xianle also began to "expose his nature". She kept asking Jiang Menglin for money and gifts. Once, Xu Xianle asked Jiang Menglin for 200,000 yuan, and Jiang Menglin felt that this money was too much, so he only gave her 80,000 yuan and asked Xu Xianle to use this money as preparation for the wedding. Of course, Xu Xianle was not happy, she turned around and complained to her friends around her, and began to investigate how much property Jiang Menglin had. However, Jiang Menglin did not know anything about these things.
Soon after, Jiang Menglin decided to marry Xu Xianle, and his old friends Hu Shi, Chen Cheng, Song Meiling, and others came to persuade him, and told xu Xianle about his previous means of accumulating wealth, asking him to be careful not to have anything to do with this woman.
Jiang Menglin may have been blinded by love, and although he was hesitant about marriage under the persuasion of his old friends, he still had a little illusion about love.
On July 11, 1961, Hu Shi was living in the hospital due to illness, and Jiang Menglin went to visit him. When chatting with Hu Shi, he mentioned the letters he received from Hu Shi. The letter was full of words to dissuade Jiang Menglin from getting married. Jiang Menglin also said that he had listened to Hu Shi's words. The implication is that he decided to cancel the wedding and let Hu Shi rest in peace.
But just a week later, Jiang Menglin and Xu Xianle had a wedding. This made Hu Shi very angry.
Jiang Menglin's side is not happy either. On the wedding night, Xu Xianle asked him to tell him all the assets and savings in his name, and she also deliberately wrote them down in a book. Jiang Menglin was in the joy of marrying a beautiful wife, so he didn't think much about it. Later, Xu Xianle also borrowed 10,000 yuan from Jiang Menglin's colleagues in the name of her husband, and frequently quarreled with Jiang Menglin's daughter to get her to move out of the Jiang family.
More than a year after the two of them were married, Jiang Menglin attended the "Four Health Clubs" in Taichung, and when he went downstairs, he accidentally stepped on the air, fell from the upper floor, and broke his leg. Jiang Menglin was admitted to the hospital.
Xu Xianle only came to visit for a few days and then pretended to have something to go home, and never came to the hospital again.
After Jiang Menglin recovered, he returned home but could not find his wife, and found that many of his assets under his name were missing. After checking, I found out that these were all transferred to her name by Xu Xianle, and Xu Xianle's hukou was also transferred from the Jiang family. Jiang Menglin finally woke up at this time, he should have listened to the advice of his old friends!
On January 13, 1963, Jiang Menglin angrily wrote a letter of resignation to divorce Xu Xianle.
Xu Xianle hurried back and published the love letter that Jiang Menglin had written to her to show that Jiang Menglin's words about the discord between the two of them after marriage were not true, perhaps because he wanted to take the opportunity to catch Jiang Menglin again.
Jiang Menglin then hired a lawyer to confront Xu Xianle in court, and the farce ended with the court ruling the two divorced. But Jiang Menglin also paid a huge price of 500,000 yuan for this. The money was the alimony that Xu Xianle asked him for, and Jiang Menglin agreed to divorce him as soon as possible.
But this failed marriage left Jiang Menglin devastated, and he regretted it after the divorce, and also felt guilty about ignoring the behavior of hu shi, Chen Cheng and other old friends. Five months after the divorce, Jiang Menglin died of liver cancer in Taipei at the age of 78.
Xu Xianle, who had swept away a lot of his money, died in 2006 at the age of 98.