Ping Hsin-tao

Ping Hsin-tao or Ping Xintao (; 1927 – 23 May 2019) was a Taiwanese publisher and producer. He founded Crown Magazine and Crown Publishing in 1954, which launched the careers of Chiung Yao and San Mao, two of Taiwan's most famous authors. He married Chiung Yao and produced films and television series based on her popular romance novels.

Early life

Ping was born in Shanghai, Republic of China, in 1927, with his ancestral home in Changshu, Jiangsu. Despite his interests in literature and art since childhood, he studied accounting at Utopia University at the request of his father.

Career After graduating from university, Ping moved to Taiwan in 1949 when the Communists took over mainland China, and worked for Taiwan Fertilizer. In 1954, he founded Crown Magazine (皇冠雜誌) and Crown Publishing (皇冠出版社), later known as (皇冠文化). He serialized Chiung Yao's novels in Crown Magazine before publishing them at Crown Publishing as monographs. He and Chiung Yao adapted many of her novels into television series and films, often serving as producers or screenwriters themselves. Chiung Yao became enormously popular throughout the Chinese-speaking world. Their son, Ping Yun, later succeeded him as head of Crown Publishing.

Ping married Chiung Yao in 1979, after an acrimonious divorce with Lin which lasted eight years. In 2018, Lin published a memoir in which she accused Chiung Yao of breaking up her marriage.

After Ping suffered a stroke in 2016 and lost nearly all ability to communicate, his children had a falling out with their stepmother, Chiung Yao, over whether to continue his intubation. Ping died on 23 May 2019, at the age of 92.