Daughter of two 'moms'

Fang's vision of fostering mutual understanding among the young generations can be traced back to 2008 when she started financing the five-year construction of a building at Peking University for teaching foreigners Chinese language and culture.

Fang put $2.5 million into its completion, and the only request she made was for the installation of an open area in the building to function as an international hall where students and scholars from all over the world could sit and meet.

On Oct 16, 2013, Fang attended the completion ceremony of the building in the School of Chinese as Second Language on the campus of Peking University, a six-story learning center named the Florence Lee Fang Building.

"I had dreamed of becoming a student of Peking University at quite an early age, and I hope the completion of the building will make a contribution of promoting Chinese culture to the entire world," Fang later told more than 150 distinguished guests at the ceremony, including Oakland, California, mayor Jean Quan and her family.

Fang says she selected Peking University as a sponsor because teaching Chinese as a second language started at the university in 1952.

Among 40 internationally acclaimed people who have studied in China, 60 percent chose to study at Peking University, including former US treasury secretary Timothy Geithner and Barry Marshall, who was awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

Mellow and soft-spoken, Fang says the traditional Chinese education she had received in her childhood had shaped her way of thinking in her 20s and 30s.

Born in 1935 in Zhengzhou, Henan province, Fang's adolescent years were filled with bitter war-related memories - first the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 when her whole family had to flee amid piercing sirens; then the War of Liberation (1946-49), during which she fled the Chinese mainland with her family for Taiwan.

In 1960, she married John Fang, then a journalism major at the University of California Berkeley, and gave birth to three boys in four years. When John died in 1992 after a three-year battle with skin cancer, it was Florence who shrugged off competitors' smears and retained the family publishing business and expanded it into real estate, dining and trade.

Her accomplishments would see her awarded the California Woman of the Year in 1990 and 2003. In 2006, she donated $3 million to the East Asian Library at the University of California, Berkeley. With Bill Gates, she is an honorary trustee at Peking University, and an honorary trustee and an honorable professor at Wuhan University, to which she gave about $100,000 in 2008.