Madame Chiang Kai-shek, died Thursday night in New York at the age of 106, local media in Taiwan reported Friday.

Madame Chiang's niece and her niece's husband were with her when she died in her apartment in Manhattan, where Chiang had lived quietly with a few nurses and security guards.

Madame Chiang had been treated for cancer and other ailments. She lived in semi-seclusion after her husband Chiang Kai-shek's death in 1975, spending most of the time in her Manhattan apartment or at her family's estate in Lattingtown, an exclusive Long Island suburb 56 kilometers east of New York City.

She was born Soong Mei-ling in 1898, on the southern Chinese island of Hainan.

(Xinhua News Agency October 24, 2003)