Mao's English tutor dies aged 73

Beijing: The debonair Chinese diplomat who tutored Chairman Mao in English has died, ending an eventful life that began as an abandoned child and brought her next to Mao and US President Richard Nixon as they shared toasts and jokes.

Zhang Hanzhi died on Saturday aged 73 after an unspecified lung ailment, the Beijing News reported on Sunday, citing her daughter.

Zhang will receive a funeral at Babaoshan, the cemetery for the Communist Party's elite, in a mark of her status as a diplomat closely involved in talks between China and the United States over normalising relations in the 1970s.

She was born in Shanghai in 1935, the illegitimate daughter of a shop assistant and a powerful businessman. She was adopted by a lawyer, Zhang Shizhao.

Zhang was teaching English at a Beijing university in late 1963, when she accompanied her father to a birthday dinner for Mao Zedong.

Mao asked her to be his English tutor, and Zhang was launched on a life as his teacher, interpreter and confidante.

"The Chairman wanted the lessons to start the following day! I was dumfounded. I was to teach the great leader whom over a billion people worshipped as their god," Zhang recounted in Time magazine in 1999.