After almost half a century in London, one of the delights Jung Chang misses most about her home city of Chengdu in southwest China is the silk, which is among the softest anywhere in the world. Long a way of life in the city, the provincial capital of Sichuan, Chengdu’s silk industry has faced tough competition in recent years from artificial fabrics.

“One of my earliest childhood memories was making silk, gathering armfuls of mulberry leaves, feeling the fluffy downside of the leaves, and feeding them to hungry silkworms,” says Chang.

“Eventually, very quickly, actually, they started to spout from their tiny plump lips, the thin, silk fabric. The trick for the softening of the silk is the length: the longer it is, the softer the material would turn out to be.”

Chang wrote about her childhood in Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, which was translated into 37 languages and sold more than 13 million copies, making it the most successful Chinese book internationally in recent decades. Published in 1991, it told the story of Chang’s grandmother, who was a concubine to a Chinese warlord; her mother, who was an early Communist Party member; and herself.

Now Chang has published a sequel, Fly, Wild Swans, which takes up her story from 1978 when she left China to study in England and revisits in greater detail some of the episodes in the earlier book. It also describes the process of researching her most controversial book Mao: The Unknown Story, which Chang wrote with her Dundalk-b