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1 Origins The Chinese Educational Mission to the United States was an unprecedented undertaking by the Chinese government. Down through the nineteenth century, Chinese education had at its core the Confucian classics and their ethical teachings; its purpose was to prepare students for the civil service examinations and, if the students were successful, for a career in the government. To seek knowledge from any other source would have been considered, at best, a waste of time and, at worst, a betrayal of cultural norms. Indeed, in 1866, when the newlyfounded Beijing Translators College, as part of the Self-Strengthening Movement, added (in the words of historian Knight Biggerstaff) “a scientific department to which only members of the traditionally educated elite might be admitted as students,” a leading metropolitan official, Woren, famously protested that “astronomy and mathematics are of very little use,” and that “the way to establish a nation is to lay emphasis on propriety and righteousness, not on power and plotting.”1 Nevertheless, six years later the Qing government came to sanction the Chinese Educational Mission. This happened largely as a combined result of the vision and lobbying of Yung Wing, the patronage of two influential Qing officials, and, possibly, the recent example of Japan. The CEM was, by nearly all accounts, the brainchild of Yung Wing.2 Born in 1828, Yung came from a humble farming family in Nanping village, Xiangshan county, Guangdong, two miles from the Portuguese settlement of Macau. (Nanping is now a part of Zhuhai municipality, and Xiangshan county has been renamed Zhongshan.) At an early age his parents sent him to study with Protestant missionary educators in Macau and later, after the First Opium War, in the new British colony of Hong Kong. For several years he attended the Morrison Education Society School, which was founded by Western traders and missionaries and named to honor the memory of Robert Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to China, who had died in 1834. As previously explained, in 1847, when the headmaster of the school, the Rev. Samuel Robbins Brown, returned to the United States, he arranged for Yung Wing and two other pupils 8 Stepping Forth into the World (Huang Kuan and Huang Sheng) to go with him. The three teenagers were taken to Brown’s hometown of Monson, Massachusetts, where they lived across the road from his parents’ house and took their meals with them. They also attended Brown’s alma mater, Monson Academy. When Yung enrolled in Yale College in 1850, he was once again following in Brown’s footsteps.3 After graduating from Yale with a B.A. degree in 1854, Yung Wing returned to China, having spent seven and a half years in the United States. In China, however, he had little success at first in finding suitable employment. On the one hand, he lacked the Confucian education that would have prepared him for the civil service examinations; on the other hand, despite his Western education and command of the English language, he refused to work either as a missionary or as a comprador (the English-speaking head of the Chinese staff in a foreign trading firm, or, as he put it dismissively in his English-language autobiography, “the head servant of servants”). In time he became an independent businessman in Shanghai, specializing in the tea trade. A few years later, with the beginning of the Self-Strengthening Movement, Yung’s intimate knowledge of the West finally proved to be a qualified asset. In 1863, he was invited to meet the powerful official Zeng Guofan, who was a prime mover of the self-strengthening effort as well as the commander-in-chief of the campaign to suppress the Taiping Rebellion. Yung joined Zeng Guofan’s staff as an expert on foreign matters, and was sent back to the United States to purchase the machinery that became the basis of the Jiangnan Arsenal. (It was on this trip that he took with him his nephew, Rong Shangqin, who, as previously noted, enrolled at Monson Academy in 1864.) As a reward for the successful purchase of the machinery, Yung Wing, though lacking a classical Chinese education and a degree from the civil service examination system, was given a mid-ranking title (tongzhi, first-class subprefect ), and an official position working in Shanghai for the Jiangsu provincial government as a translator.4 Yung Wing claimed, in his autobiography, that even before he graduated from Yale, he was already “determined that the rising generation of China...

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