TAIPEI -- The widow of former Taiwan strongman Chiang Kai-shek, famous for using her beauty, charm and fluent English to lobby Washington to help China fight the Japanese and later the Chinese Communists, died on Thursday in New York at age 105, Taiwan's Foreign Ministry said on Friday.

Madam Chiang, born Soong Mei-ling, had been treated for cancer and other ailments. She lived in semi-seclusion after her husband's death in 1975, spending most of the time in her Manhattan apartment or at her family's 18-ha estate in Lattingtown, an exclusive Long Island suburb 56 km east of New York City.

Madam Chiang and her husband Generalismo Chiang Kai-shek were once one of the world's most famous couples. They married in 1926, one year after her husband took over China's ruling Nationalist Party.

The Nationalists, or Kuomintang, overthrew China's last dynasty, the Qing, but their pledges to bring democracy to China and modernise the economy were frustrated by Japan's invasion during World War II and corruption within the government.

After the war, the Nationalists lost a bloody civil war to Mao Tse-tung's Communist Party and retreated to Taiwan in 1949.

Though born in the East, Madam Chiang was thoroughly Western in thought and philosophy. Brought up in a Methodist family, she studied in America between the ages of 10 and 19 and graduated with honours from Wellesley College in Massachusetts in 1917.

'The only thing Oriental about me is my face,' she once said.

Her supporters said she was a powerful force for international friendship, understanding and good. But her detractors called her an arrogant dragonlady and propagandist for her husband's corrupt and incompetent government.

She was a working wife, taking on tasks ranging from interpreter and social worker to head of China's air force during World War II.

She was also one of her husband's most prominent lobbyists in Washington. The Generalismo could not speak English and disliked dealing with foreigners, so his wife became his spokesman for the outside world, creating an image of an attractive, young couple trying to steer China out of war.

As the Generalismo's health deteriorated, control of the Nationalist government eventually passed in 1972 to one of his two sons by a previous marriage, Mr Chiang Ching-kuo. Madam Chiang and her husband had no children of their own, and she had long been on bad terms with the younger Chiang.

After her husband's death in 1975, she moved to the US.

She had maintained her uncompromising anti-communist stand and urged the Nationalists to 'rescue our 1 billion compatriots on the mainland'.

But the party's ranks have become increasingly filled with native Taiwanese as the influence of the mainlanders who retreated in 1949 faded away.

In March 2000, the party lost its five-decade control of Taiwan's presidency. Madam Chiang endorsed Nationalist candidate Lien Chan, but few voters paid serious attention to her and Mr Lien was battered at the polls -- an example of her fading influence. -- AP