Xia De-hong, who survived persecution and torture as an official in Mao Zedong’s China and was later the central figure in her daughter’s best-selling 1991 memoir, “Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China,” died on April 15 in Chengdu, China. She was 94.

Ms. Xia’s death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter Jung Chang.

Ms. Chang’s memoir, which was banned in China, was a groundbreaking, intimate account of the country’s turbulent 20th century and the iron grip of Mao’s Communist Party, told through the lives of three generations of women: herself, her mother and her grandmother. An epic of imprisonment, suffering and family loyalty, it sold over 15 million copies in 40 languages.

The story of Ms. Chang’s stoic mother holding the family together while battling on behalf of her husband, a functionary who was tortured and imprisoned during Mao’s regime, was the focus of “Wild Swans,” which emerged out of hours of recordings that Ms. Chang made when Ms. Xia visited her in London in 1988.

Ms. Xia was inspired as a teenager to become an ardent Communist revolutionary because of the mistreatment of women in the Republic of China, as well as the corruption of the Kuomintang nationalists in power. (Her own mother had been forced into concubinage at 15 by a powerful warlord.)

In 1947, in Ms. Xia’s home city of Jinzhou, the Communists were waging guerrilla war against the government. She joined the struggle by distributing pamphlets for Mao, rolling them up inside green peppers after they had been smuggled into the city in bundles of sorghum stalks.

Captured by the Kuomintang, she was forced to listen to “the screams of people being tortured in the rooms nearby,” her daughter later wrote. But that only stiffened her resolve.

She married Chang Shou-yu, an up-and-coming Communist civil servant and acolyte of Mao, in 1949.

It was then that disillusionment began to set in, according to her daughter. The newlyweds were ordered to travel a thousand miles to Sichuan, her husband’s home province. Because of Mr. Chang’s rank, he was allowed to ride in a jeep, but she had to walk, even though she was pregnant, and suffered a miscarriage as a result.

“She was vomiting all the time,” her daughter wrote. “Could he not let her travel in his jeep occasionally? He said he could not, because it would be taken as favoritism since my mother was not entitled to the car.”

That was the first of many times that her husband would insist she bow to the rigid dictates of the party, despite the immense suffering it caused.

When she was a party official in the mid-1950s, Ms. Xia was investigated for her “bourgeois” background and imprisoned for months. She received little support from Mr. Chang.

“As my mother was leaving for detention,” Ms. Chang wrote, “my father advised her: ‘Be completely honest with the party, and have complete trust in it. It will give you the right verdict.’ A wave of aversion swept over her.”

Upon her release in 1957, she told her husband, “You are a good Communist, but a rotten husband.” Mr. Chang could only nod in agreement.

He became one of the top officials in Sichuan, entitled to a life of privilege. But by the late 1960s, he had become outraged by the injustices of the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s blood-soaked purge, and was determined to register a formal complaint.

Ms. Xia was in despair; she knew what became of families who spoke out. “Why do you want to be a moth that throws itself into the fire?” she asked.

Mr. Chang’s career was over, and both he and his wife were subjected to physical abuse and imprisoned. Ms. Xia’s position was lower profile; she was in charge of resolving personal problems, such as housing, transfers and pensions, for people in her district. But that did not save her from brutal treatment.

Ms. Xia was made to kneel on broken glass; paraded through the streets of Chengdu wearing a dunce’s cap and a heavy placard with her name crossed out; and forced to bow to jeering crowds.

Still, she resisted pressure from the party to denounce her husband. And unlike many other women in her position, she refused to divorce him.

Twice she journeyed to Beijing to seek his release, the second time securing a meeting with the prime minister, Zhou Enlai, who was considered a moderate. Ms. Xia was “one of the very few spouses of victims who had the courage to go and appeal in Peking,” her daughter wrote in “Wild Swans.”

But Ms. Xia and her husband never criticized the Cultural Revolution in front of their children, checked by the party’s absolute power and the fear it inspired.

“My parents never said anything to me or my siblings,” Ms. Chang wrote. “The restraints which had kept them silent about politics before still prevented them from opening their minds to us.”

She was held at Xichiang prison camp from 1969 to 1971 as a “class enemy,” made to do heavy labor and endure denunciation meetings.

The camp, though less harsh than her husband’s, was a bitter experience. “She reflected with remorse on the pointlessness of her devotion,” her daughter wrote. “She found she missed her children with a pain which was almost unbearable.”

Xia De-hong was born on May 4, 1931, in Yixian, the daughter of Yang Yu-fang and Gen. Xue Zhi-heng, the inspector general of the metropolitan police in the nationalist government.

When she was an infant, her mother fled the house of the general, who was dying, and returned to her parents, eventually marrying a rich Manchurian doctor, Xia Rui-tang.

Ms. Xia grew up in Jinzhou, Manchuria, where she attended school before joining the Communist underground.

In the 1950s, when she began to have doubts about the Communist Party, she considered abandoning it and pursuing her dream of studying medicine, her daughter said. But the idea terrified her husband, Ms. Chang said in an interview, because it would have meant disavowing the Communists.

By the late 1950s, during the Mao-induced Great Famine that killed tens of millions, both of her parents had become “totally disillusioned,” Ms. Chang said, and “could no longer find excuses to forgive their party.”

Mr. Chang died in 1975, broken by years of imprisonment and ill treatment. Ms. Xia retired from her government service, as deputy head of the People’s Congress of the Eastern District of Chengdu, in 1983.

Besides Ms. Chang, Ms. Xia is survived by another daughter, Xiao-hong Chang; three sons, Jin-ming, Xiao-hei and Xiao-fang; and two grandchildren.

Jung Chang saw her mother for the last time in 2018. Ms. Chang’s criticism of the regime, in her memoir and a subsequent biography, made returning to China unthinkable. She told the BBC in a recent interview that she never knew whether her mother had read “Wild Swans.”

But the advice her mother gave her and her brother Xiao-hei, a journalist who also lives in London, was firm: “She only wanted us to write truthfully, and accurately.”

In prehistoric northern Europe, peatlands — areas of waterlogged soil rich with decaying plant matter — were considered spiritual sites. Since then, swords, jewelry and even human bodies have been found fossilized in their sludgy depths. More recently, however, many of these bogs have been depleted by overharvesting, neglect and development. But as awareness of their important role in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere grows, more wetlands are being restored, while also serving as unlikely creative inspiration. Here’s how bogs are showing up in the culture.

Fashion

At fall 2026 Paris Fashion Week, several houses — including Louis Vuitton (above left) and Hermès — staged shows amid mossy sets featuring spongy green structures and mounds of vegetation. And the Danish fashion brand Solitude Studios is distressing its eerie, grungy looks (above right) by submerging them in a local peat bog.

Contemporary Art

For her exhibition at California’s San José Museum of Art, on view through October, the Chalon Nation artist Christine Howard Sandoval is presenting sculptures, drawings and plant-dyed works (above) exploring how the state’s wetlands were once sites of Indigenous resistance and community. This month, at Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley, the conceptual artist Anicka Yi will unveil an outdoor installation featuring six-foot-tall transparent columns holding algae-rich ecosystems cultivated from nearby pond water and soil.

Architecture and Design

The Bog Bothy (above), a mobile design project by the Dublin-based architecture practice 12th Field in collaboration with the Irish Architecture Foundation, was inspired by the makeshift huts once used by peat cutters who harvested the material for fuel. After debuting in the Irish Midlands last year, it’ll tour the region again this summer. In Edinburgh, the designer Oisín Gallagher is making doorstops from subfossilized bog-oak scraps carbon-dated to 3300 B.C.

Fine Dining

At La Grenouillère on France’s north coast, the chef Alexandre Gauthier reflects the restaurant’s reedy, frog-filled river valley landscape with dishes like a “marsh bubble” of herbs encased in hardened sugar. This spring, Aponiente — the chef Ángel León’s restaurant inside a 19th-century tidal mill on Spain’s Bay of Cádiz — added an outdoor dining area on a pier above the neighboring marshland, serving local sea grasses and salt marsh flowers alongside seafood (above) from the estuary.

Literature

The Irish British writer Maggie O’Farrell’s forthcoming novel, “Land,” about an Irish cartographer and his son surveying the island in 1865 after the Great Famine, depicts haunting encounters with the verdant landscape, including its plentiful oozing bogs.

SELLING OPPORTUNITY: The Story of Mary Kay, by Mary Lisa Gavenas

Mary Kay, the cosmetics company whose multilevel marketing included sales parties and whose biggest earners were awarded pink Cadillacs, was really in the business of selling second chances. Or, at least, that’s what Mary Lisa Gavenas argues in “Selling Opportunity,” a dual biography of the brand and the woman behind it.

Mary Kathlyn Wagner, who would become Mary Kay Ash, “the most famous saleswoman in the world” and “maybe the most famous ever,” in Gavenas’s extravagant words, was born in 1918 to a poor family and raised mostly in Houston. Although a good student, she eloped at 16 with a slightly older boy. The young couple had two babies in quick succession.

Mary Kay’s creation was a combination of timing and good luck. Door-to-door sales was a thriving industry — but, traditionally, a man’s world: Lugging heavy samples was not considered feminine, and entering the homes of strangers, unsafe. But things began to change during the Great Depression, Gavenas suggests, thanks to a convergence of factors — financial pressures and the rise of the aspirational prosperity gospel espoused by Dale Carnegie’s self-help manuals.

At the same time, female-run beauty lines like Annie Turnbo Malone’s Poro and Madam C.J. Walker’s were finding great success in Black communities. And, coincidentally or otherwise, the California Perfume Company changed its name to Avon Products in 1939.

Ash began by selling books door to door, moving on to Stanley Home Products in the 1940s. She was talented, but direct sales was a rough gig. Every party to show off wares was supposed to beget two more bookings; these led to sales that resulted in new recruits. But there was no real security or stability: no salary, no medical benefits, no vacations. “Stop selling and you would end up right back where you started. Or worse,” the author writes.

Gavenas, a onetime beauty editor who wrote “Color Stories,” takes her time unspooling Mary Kay’s tale, with a great deal of evident research. We learn about direct sales, women’s rights and Texas history.

But, be warned: Readers must really enjoy both this woman and this world to take pleasure in “Selling Opportunity.” Mary Kay the person keeps marrying, getting divorced or widowed and working her way through various sales jobs (it’s hard to keep track of the myriad companies and last names). Gavenas seems to leave no detail out. Thus, the 1963 founding of the eponymous beauty company doesn’t come until almost 200 pages in.

Beauty by Mary Kay included a Cleansing Cream, a Magic Masque and a Nite Cream (which containined ammoniated mercury, later banned by the F.D.A.). The full line of products — which was how Mary Kay strongly encouraged customers to buy them — ran to a steep $175 in today’s money. (To fail to acquire the whole set, Ash said, was “like giving you my recipe for chocolate cake but leaving out an important ingredient.”)

Potential clients attended gatherings at acquaintances’ homes — no undignified doorbell-ringing here — where they received a mini facial, then an application of cosmetics like foundation, lip color and cream rouge — and a wig. The company made $198,514 in sales its first year.

Although Ash may have seemed a pioneer, in many ways Mary Kay was a traditionalist company, whose philosophy was “God first, family second, career third.” Saleswomen, official literature dictated, were working to provide themselves with treats rather than necessities so as not to threaten their breadwinner husbands.

And yet, they were also encouraged to sell sell sell. Golden Goblet pendants were awarded for major orders. After the company started using custom pink Peterbilt trucks for shipping, it began commissioning those Cadillacs for top consultants. (Mary Kay preferred gifts to cash bonuses, lest women save the money to spend on practical things rather than the licensed frivolities.) The Cadillacs, always driven on company leases, would become industry legend and part of American pop culture lore. “Never to be run-down, repainted or resold, the cars would double as shining pink advertisements for her selling opportunity,” Gavenas writes.

The woman herself was iconic, too. While Ash was a product of the Depression, she was also undeniably over-the-top. She wore white suits with leopard trim, lived in a custom Frank L. Meier house and brought her poodle to the office.

Mary Kay went public in 1968, making her the first woman to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange. By the 1990s, the Mary Kay headquarters near Dallas was almost 600,000 square feet. They commissioned a hagiographic company biopic; there was a Mary Kay consultant Barbie; they were making $1 billion in wholesale. When she died, in 2001, Ash was worth $98 million.

And yet, Gavenas cites that at the company’s height, in 1992, sales reps made on average just $2,400 per year.

Instead of so much time in the pink fantasia of Mary Kay, it would have been nice for a few detours showing how infrequently the opportunities the company sold were truly realized.

SELLING OPPORTUNITY: The Story of Mary Kay | By Mary Lisa Gavenas | Viking | 435 pp. | $35