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5 A Hare-Brained, Half-Crazy Man (1873–74) The San Francisco Chronicle profile, “A Remarkable Chinaman,” was reprinted in newspapers throughout the country and gave Wong a measure of nationwide renown.1 It provided a fairly comprehensive, if somewhat embellished, summary of his life to date, including the MacGregor affair and his revolutionary activities in, and flight from, China. Connecticut’s Hartford Courant published it on October 7, 1873,2 where it must have caught the attention of Yung Wing, the Cantonese who had first arrived in America decades before Wong and who had graduated from Yale in 1854. Although Yung had become a naturalized American citizen in 1852, he had returned to China after his graduation. After a brief apprenticeship to a Hong Kong attorney, he had moved to Shanghai, where he worked for several months as an interpreter for the Maritime Customs,3 the same organization that employed Wong half a dozen years later. Yung then went into business, flirted with joining the Taiping rebels, and, in 1863, met Viceroy Zeng Guofan, the general who would eventually subdue the Taipings. Zeng, who had a strong interest in acquiring technical knowledge from the militarily superior West,4 made use of Yung’s experience and his English-language ability by sending him abroad to acquire machine tools that enabled China to manufacture some of its own munitions.5 Yung was promoted to the titled elite after this mission and became a member of Zeng’s personal staff. He used his influence to lobby for a cherished goal that had grown out of his own experience: the education abroad, under public sponsorship, of a significant number of Chinese boys. The students would study technical subjects and return to China after 15 years to put their knowledge to practical use in public service. Zeng, aware of China’s military backwardness, was supportive, but there was opposition in the conservative Manchu 50 The First Chinese American court. It was not until 1871 that a proposal submitted by Zeng and Li Hongzhang, a leading provincial official who would eventually become one of China’s key diplomats, was approved. America was chosen over Europe for this experimental program, in part because of Yung’s familiarity with it and in part because the Burlingame Treaty, which China and the United States had signed in 1868, provided for mutual rights of residence and attendance at public schools. Accordingly, four groups of 30 students each would be sent to New England, one group per year over a four-year period, to study military science, mathematics, navigation, shipbuilding, and arms manufacturing. The program would be overseen by Chen Lanbin, an old-fashioned Confucian scholar and minor official who spoke no English, with the bilingual Yung Wing as his deputy. Yung proceeded to Massachusetts to arrange accommodation for the boys: the first 30 students followed, together with Commissioner Chen and another official, in the summer of 1872. Chen and Yung set up the permanent office of what was called the Chinese Educational Mission to the United States in Hartford, Connecticut, while their colleague was assigned to Massachusetts. The Hartford office was, in fact, the first permanent mission China had ever established abroad: the isolationist Manchus had not previously seen merit in setting up diplomatic offices in foreign lands, and would not inaugurate a formal mission in America until 1878.6 As China’s first overseas office, it served also as a de facto embassy. And although it did not have an official mandate to do so, it reported to Beijing about activities in the United States that were of interest to China, and monitored conditions elsewhere in the hemisphere, such as in Cuba and Peru, where Chinese laborers were being severely mistreated.7 Yung was thus already ensconced in Hartford when the Courant ran its first article about Wong Chin Foo. Several months later, it published a second piece, in which the “remarkable” Chinaman had somehow been restyled a “swindling” Chinaman. After recounting Wong’s résumé, the Courant went on to claim that he had been traveling around the country swindling hotel keepers and others; that he had defrauded several people, both Americans and Chinese; and that he was representing himself as “a mandarin sent by the Chinese government on a special mission.”8 It added that he knew scarcely anything of Chinese literature. The following month, in a veiled reference to the Irene Martin affair, the paper made a third, passing mention of Wong, asserting that he...

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