For a large part of its history, Chinese food in the US was mostly inexpensive food catering to American tastes with a Chinese label slapped on.

But in the 1960s, Cecilia Chiang arrived in the US from China, and she began to introduce Americans to the true taste of China.

Cecilia Chiang has been dubbed the Julia Child of Chinese food and without her, Chinese food in the US would not have gained the prestige it has now.

The talented chef and restaurateur died on Oct 28 at the age of 100, but even as she has been laid to rest, her legacy lives on.

Born to a wealthy family in Shanghai on Sept 18, 1920, and named Sun Yun, Chiang was the seventh of 12 siblings and spent her childhood in Beijing.

Her family’s wealth provided a privileged childhood, with two cooks, one northern Chinese and the other southern.

Just as she was starting her college education in 1937, the Japanese invaded China and she and an elder sister fled to the Chinese-held Chongqing, 1,600km away, to live with a relative.

The journey was difficult, she later recalled, having to duck for cover with Japanese warplanes strafing convoys of refugees and being robbed by marauding soldiers.

It was in Chongqing that she would meet her future husband, and they would later move to Shanghai. They had two children, May and Phillip.

During World War II, she was a spy for the American Office of Strategic Services. When the Communists won the Chinese Civil War in 1949, she, her husband and May escaped to Tokyo on the last flight out of Shanghai, forced to leave Phillip behind. They were reunited a year later.

In Tokyo, Chiang would open her first restaurant, the Forbidden Palace, which was a success.

How she ended up in the US is quite a story. During a visit to her sister in San Francisco, Chiang met two friends from Tokyo and they decided to open a restaurant.

In a 2017 interview with NPR, she described how shocked she was then at what Americans perceived Chinese food to be. “They think chop suey is the only thing we have in China. What a shame.”

But after the restaurant lease of US$10,000 was paid, Chiang’s partners dropped out of the project and the landlord refused to return the money.

So, she took on the project by herself and opened a new restaurant, The Mandarin, in 1961, a rare feat for a woman in a male-dominated industry.

Adding to her problems was that she could not speak English at the time and the local Chinese restaurant industry was dominated by Cantonese-speaking southerners, which meant the northerner Chiang was isolated by the local Chinese community.

Still, she persevered, designing her restaurant to resemble the opulent mansion she had grown up in and coming up with a menu of 200 dishes, focusing on the elegant side of Chinese cuisine.

While business started slowly at first, things started to pick up when critics came along and were delighted by the northern Chinese delights that she served.

Peking duck, potstickers, beggar’s chicken, sizzling rice soup, moo shu pork and twice-cooked pork were among the exquisite treats that surprised Americans, quite different from the usual chop suey and chow mein.

Rave reviews drove up the prestige of the restaurant and buoyed by her success, she decided to move her relatively small restaurant to the upmarket Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco’s Marina area.

Interestingly and infuriatingly, the leasing company was reluctant to allow a Chinese restaurant to open in its commercial complex but conceded after a thorough cleanliness inspection.

While the first branch closed in 2006, she had sold it in 1991 when she retired, her son operates a sister restaurant, also The Mandarin, in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles.

Among the crowds of customers thronging her restaurants were American celebrities including Mae West, Jackie Kennedy and John Lennon; all of whom enjoyed her authentic food.

She also mentored fellow culinary stars James Beard and Julia Child, educating them about Chinese food.

She eventually received a James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award for changing the face of the Chinese culinary scene in the US.

After her retirement in 1991, she would turn her attention to charitable causes, funding school trips for the students of the Chinese American International School in San Francisco.

She lived her life to the fullest and died peacefully in her sleep in the early hours of the morning.

In a 2007 interview with The San Francisco Chronicle, she said, “I think I changed what average people know about Chinese food. They didn’t know China was such a big country.”