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Preface This book grew out of an interest in the first group of Chinese to come to the East Coast of the United States in the 1870s, the shoemakers of North Adams, Massachusetts. As I tediously scoured the microfilmed pages of the Springfield Republican from the early years of that decade—this was in the not-so-distant era before newspapers were digitized and easily searchable—I came across frequent references to one “Chan Laisun.” According to the Republican “Laisun” was, along with Yung Wing, a leader of the Chinese Educational Mission, which was headquartered in nearby Hartford. To a historian of modern China like myself, Yung Wing was a well-known figure—he was the first Chinese to graduate from an American college—but I had never heard of Chan Laisun. As I began to delve into the mystery of Chan Laisun, I discovered that his Chinese name was Zeng Laishun, that he had come to the United States and enrolled in an American college four years earlier than Yung Wing (though he did not graduate), that he was the Chinese Educational Mission’s translator (not its commissioner), and that two of his sons were among the one hundred and twenty students of the mission. It was thus from the Chinese shoemakers of North Adams via Zeng Laishun and his two sons that I arrived at this study of the Chinese Educational Mission (CEM). In the course of my research, which has taken as long as the mission itself, I have incurred an enormous number of debts, which I now gladly acknowledge. First and foremost, I wish to thank the dozen or so descendants of CEM students around the world whom I have had the good fortune to meet either in person or virtually on line. All were generous in providing me with family histories and patient in answering my questions. They include—listed alphabetically by their CEM forebear—Reed Tang 唐越 in Zhuhai (great grandson of Huang Youzhang), Richard V. Lee in Buffalo, New York (grandson of Li Enfu), Liang Zanxun 梁贊勳 in Beijing (grandson of Liang Puzhao), Crystal Lin Yau in Baltimore (granddaughter of Liu Yulin), K. T. Mao 毛觀岱 in Beijing and Colorado (grandson of Pan Sichi), Dana B. Young in Austin, Texas (grandson of Rong xiv Preface Kui), Yvonne Yung Ying-yue in Tokyo and the late Richard Yung in Singapore (granddaughter and grandson, respectively, of Rong Yaoyuan), Mary Severin in Oxfordshire, England (great great granddaughter of Zeng Laishun), and Bruce Chan in Toronto and Sunny Chung 鍾仁國 in Hong Kong (grandsons of Zhong Wenyao). I am particularly grateful to Dana Young and Bruce Chan who, as the Notes will indicate, have been enormously helpful to me in a variety of ways over the years. Since 2006 the two of them have maintained a website, http://www. cemconnections.org/, which has served as a clearinghouse on all matters relating to the Chinese Educational Mission. Next on my list of people to thank are four individuals who left behind major collections of historical materials. Arthur G. Robinson, a missionary in north China in the 1930s, had intended to write a history of the CEM but, aside from a few articles, never did. However, he turned the documents that he had collected over to Thomas E. La Fargue, a China historian at the State College of Washington (now Washington State College), who gathered additional materials in China and used them to write his book, China’s First Hundred (1942), which for over a half century has been the standard work on the subject. The photographs, autobiographical sketches, and interview notes that Robinson and La Fargue accumulated are now in the library of Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. Meanwhile, in 1930s Paul Chih Meng 孟治, the director of the China Institute in New York City, had also become interested in the CEM as part of a broader history of Chinese students in the United States. The papers that Meng collected independently of Robinson and La Fargue are now at Wesleyan University’s Mansfield Freeman Center for East Asian Studies in Middletown, Connecticut. Finally, Phyllis Kihn, an archivist at the Connecticut Historical Society in Hartford, laboriously read through a decade’s worth of various Hartford newspapers and copied out in longhand all the articles she could find on the CEM; these notes, together with other materials that she may have collected, make up the bulk of the file on the Chinese Educational Mission (MS. 81877) in the society’s library. All four of...

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