She was president of a court in the French concession and then served in the national Legislative Yuan, helping to draft the Chinese Republican-era civil code.

[1] Raised as a young girl in the paternal family home in Guangdong, Zheng was first home-schooled before her mother enrolled her in a formal school in Beijing.

She refused to have her feet bound as she saw how the traditional practice had affected her mother who underwent the binding process as a child.

[2] She also refused a marriage arranged by her paternal grandmother because she thought her fiance's conservative upbringing and beliefs would be too incompatible with her own lifestyle.

In 1912, she met the anarchist and revolutionary organizer Li Shizeng and enrolled in his preparatory school for Chinese students hoping to go to France on the Diligent Work Frugal Study program.

[4] As a member of a revolutionary cell, Zheng hid bombs in her suitcases to transport them to Beijing with the intention of using them against officials working for the Manchu dynasty.

[6] It was difficult for Zheng to adjust to her new life in France as she was not fluent in the language, but later on she considered the country to be similar to China in terms of political aspirations and in spirit.

[10] In 1919, due to her involvement in the 1911 Revolution and her French and English language skills, Zheng Yuxiu was appointed as the sole female Chinese delegate for the Paris Peace Conference along with chief plenipotentiary Lu Zhengxiang and other male delegates and official attachés selected by the Beijing Government and the Nationalists.

President Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points speech gave China reason to believe that the United States would be supportive of their goals.

[15] Due to the mounting of pressure from Chinese students and workers, chief delegate Lu Zhengxiang slipped out of Paris on June 27, 1919, on the eve of the signing ceremony.

Sensing something was amiss, Zheng broke off a rosebush branch roughly shaped like a gun and rubbed it with dirt.

Zheng kept the rosebush gun as a historical memento and took it back to her family home in Shanghai, China, hiding it away in a drawer wrapped in a white cloth.

Her autobiography, My Revolutionary Years (1944), published while her husband was Ambassador to the United States, is a first-hand account of modern Chinese history and has been translated into many languages.