72 - HAN Suyin (韓 素音, CHOU Kuanghu, 周 光瑚, also known as). Signed autograph letter, in English, to Bess Holmes. No place, no date. One folio-sized page, printed letterhead featuring a narrative of the first meeting between Krishna and his wife Radha—symbols of perfect love—illustrated with an erotic scene; small marginal tear.

HAN Suyin (韓 素音, CHOU Kuanghu, 周 光瑚, also known as). Signed autograph letter, in English, to Bess Holmes. No place, no date. One folio-sized page, printed letterhead featuring a narrative of the first meeting between Krishna and his wife Radha—symbols of perfect love—illustrated with an erotic scene; small marginal tear. A VERY BEAUTIFUL LETTER FROM THE LEGENDARY HAN SUYIN. “I found spring moons fugitive and erratic, summer moons strenuously high-mettled. ONLY AUTUMN MOONS ARE LOVE MOONS. Dear Mrs. Holmes: in this, the autumn moon of your long life, may I thank you for letting me have your most precious gift—enduring youth and love. Han Suyin, who will soon be sixty. For the 100th birthday anniversary of Mrs. Bess Holmes” Translation: “I found the spring moons elusive and unpredictable, the summer moons intensely spirited. Only the autumn moons are moons of love. Dear Mrs. Holmes: In this autumn moon of your long life, may I thank you for bestowing upon me your most precious gift—enduring youth and love. Han Suyin, who will soon be sixty. On the occasion of Mrs. Bess Holmes’s 100th birthday. ” CHINESE-BELGIAN WRITER HAN SUYIN (1917–2012) led an eventful life that mirrored the history of 20th-century China: the daughter of a Chinese father and a Belgian mother, she graduated from Yanjing University in Beijing and practiced medicine until the late 1950s. She first married a Chinese engineer who became a general in Sun Yat-sen’s army; he died in 1947 during battles against the communists. She moved to Hong Kong and had an affair with a British journalist who soon died in Korea during the war—she then married another British man, a member of the counterintelligence service in Malaysia. After visiting Communist China in 1956, she aligned ideologically with the new regime. Divorced, she married a third time, to a Catholic Indian, and lived in Hong Kong and then in Switzerland, making regular trips to mainland China. Beginning in 1942, she published numerous works in Chinese, French, and English, many of which were autobiographical, and devoted herself exclusively to literature from the early 1960s onward.