Yung Wing

Yung Wing, whose original given name was Hong and who also used the name Guangzhao, was the son of a farming family of Nanping village in Xiangshan county, Guangdong province, in the Qing period (now Nanping town in Zhuhai).⁠[1]

In his memoir he wrote that he was born on November 17, 1828 (Gregorian calendar), in the village of Nanping (Nam Ping in his spelling) on Pedro Island, about four miles southwest of Macao; he was the third of four children, with an elder brother, an elder sister and a younger brother, and by the time the memoir appeared in 1909 he was the only one of them still living: “I am the only survivor of them all.”⁠[2]

The page of Yale University’s Council on East Asian Studies describes him as a native of Guangdong province and gives his Chinese name with its pinyin reading, Róng Hóng.⁠[3]

In 1835, when he was barely seven, his father took him to Macao and placed him in the school run by the wife of the missionary Charles Gutzlaff; the memoir says the school had been started in September 1835 and was at first for girls only. He once tried to run away from the school and was punished after he was brought back. The school was later broken up and Mrs. Gutzlaff left for the United States with three blind girls.⁠[2]

James Carter writes in his column for The China Project that this missionary boarding school closed during the Opium War.⁠[4]

He wrote in his memoir that his father died in the fall of 1840, while the Opium War was still going on, leaving his mother with four children and no means of support; he hawked candy through his own village and the next one, his brother fished, his sister kept house, and later he gleaned rice in the fields to help the family.⁠[2]

He then worked as a folder in the printing office of a Roman Catholic priest in Macao for $4.50 a month, sending $3.00 home each month; after that he was employed at the hospital of Benjamin Hobson, a medical missionary in Macao, who introduced him to the Rev. Samuel Robbins Brown.⁠[2]

The memoir records that the Morrison School, under the Rev. Samuel Robbins Brown, opened on November 1, 1839; its head, a Yale graduate of 1832, had landed at Macao on February 19, 1839. Yung wrote, “I entered the school in 1841,” as the sixth and youngest member of the first class, whose other members were Wong Shing, Li Kan, Chow Wan, Tong Chik and Wong Foon. The school moved to Hong Kong in 1842, and William Allen Macy arrived as assistant teacher on March 12, 1845.⁠[2]

Bin Muxin’s 2021 article in the Macao journal Review of Culture says that the school of the Morrison Education Society, founded in Macao in 1839, admitted Yung in 1840, which differs from the 1841 of the memoir; the Cedar Hill Cemetery Foundation’s profile says he entered the Morrison School at thirteen.⁠[1][5]

In his 2004 lecture Harold Hongju Koh said that in 1845 Yung wrote an essay titled “An Imaginary Voyage to New York and Up the Hudson” and began to dream of crossing the Pacific.⁠[6][7]

When Samuel Robbins Brown left China in December 1846 on account of poor health, he chose Yung Wing, Wong Foon and Wong Shing to go with him to study in America, with the support of the school’s patrons Andrew Shortrede, A. A. Ritchie, A. A. Campbell and the three Olyphant brothers, David, Talbot and Robert.⁠[2]

They sailed from Whampoa on January 4, 1847, on the ship Huntress under Captain Gillespie, and after a passage of 98 days landed in New York on April 12, 1847; they then stayed in East Windsor, ConnecticutConnecticutConnecticut is a U.S. state in the New England region. Its capital is Hartford and its largest city is Bridgeport (2010 census). It entered the Union on January 9, 1788, as the 5th state, and had a population of 3,605,944 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, with the family of the Rev. Shubael Bartlett, his teacher’s father-in-law.⁠[2]

He then entered Monson Academy in Monson, MassachusettsMassachusettsMassachusetts (officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts) is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States; its capital and largest city is Boston. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on February 6, 1788, the sixth state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 7,029,917.Open the full entry, whose principal, the Rev. Charles Hammond, was also a Yale graduate; his teacher’s mother, Mrs. Phoebe H. Brown, and the preceptress Rebekah Brown looked after him, and board and lodging cost $1.25 a week. He recalled that it was Hammond who introduced him to Addison, Goldsmith, Dickens and Sir Walter Scott.⁠[2]

Wong Shing returned to China on account of poor health, having gone back by the fall of 1848; in the summer of 1850 Yung and Wong Foon graduated from Monson Academy, after which Wong Foon went, as previously arranged, to Scotland and entered the University of EdinburghUniversity of EdinburghThe University of Edinburgh is a research university in Edinburgh, Scotland. Founded by the Town Council in 1583, it is one of Scotland’s four ancient universities and a member of the Russell Group.Open the full entry, while Yung stayed in America.⁠[2]

Alex Donovan’s article for Connecticut History says that at Monson he lived with his teacher’s family; Bin Muxin’s article notes that Eunice M. Chapin, his schoolmate at Monson Academy, later married his Yale classmate William Hutchison, who became principal of the Norwich Free Academy.⁠[8][1]

In 1850 Yung entered Yale College, the undergraduate college of Yale University, as a member of the class of 1854. He wrote in his memoir that the trustees of Monson Academy controlled a fund for needy students that was offered to help him through college on condition that he sign a written pledge to study for the ministry and afterwards become a missionary, and that he declined; Ben Railton’s article for Connecticut History quotes his answer: “the calling of a missionary is not the only sphere in life where one can do the most good.”⁠[2][9]

His costs were met by the Ladies’ Association of Savannah, by the Olyphant brothers and by his pay as assistant librarian of the debating society Brothers in Unity; Koh said in his 2004 lecture that he also worked as a waiter and struggled with calculus in his sophomore year.⁠[2][6]

In his sophomore year he won first prizes for English composition in both the second and third terms: “I was awarded the first prize in the second term, and the first prize in the third term of the year.” The Yale Council on East Asian Studies notes that he sang in the choir, played football and was a member of the Boat Club.⁠[2][3]

Bin Muxin’s article lists his teachers at Yale, among them Thomas Thatcher (Latin), James Hadley (Greek), Henry Blodget (Latin and Greek), Noah Porter, who taught him philosophy and was president of Yale from 1871 to 1886, and Theodore Dwight Woolsey, president of Yale from 1846 to 1871; Joseph Hopkins Twichell, who became his lifelong friend, was a younger Yale man who entered Yale College in 1855.⁠[1]

James Carter cites the scholar Paul Harris, who wrote that Yung had absorbed from his teacher a “misleading impression” of American collegiate education, since Yale’s curriculum was still dominated by the classical liberal arts; Yung wrote in his autobiography that he had wanted to stay on for the scientific course that was just beginning, but gave up the plan because he was poor and his friends feared he might not return to China.⁠[4]

He wrote that during his last year in college he resolved that “the rising generation of China should enjoy the same educational advantages that I had enjoyed.”⁠[2][9]

He graduated with an A.B. degree in 1854; the memoir says that the class of 1854 graduated ninety-eight in all, and he described himself as “the first Chinaman who had ever been known to go through a first-class American college.” Connecticut History and the Yale Alumni Magazine call him the first Chinese student to graduate from an American university, and the Museum of Chinese in America’s page the first to graduate from a North American university; Alex Donovan’s article notes that other Chinese students had attended American universities before him, but that he was the first to graduate.⁠[2][10][11][12][8]

On October 30, 1852, at the start of his junior year at Yale, he took the oath that made him a naturalized citizen of the United States.⁠[4][8][6]

On November 13, 1854, he sailed from New York with William Allen Macy on the clipper Eureka; the memoir says the voyage of nearly 13,000 nautical miles to Hong Kong took 154 days, while Koh in his 2004 lecture gave it as 151 days.⁠[2][6]

Soon after landing he was reunited with his mother in Macao. In the summer of 1855 he lived in Canton with the Rev. Mr. Vrooman to relearn spoken Cantonese, which came back to him within six months; he wrote that in June, July and August 1855 the viceroy Ye Mingchen (Yeh Ming Hsin in his spelling) had about 75,000 people beheaded, a figure he gives as hearsay.⁠[2]

He first served for three months as private secretary to the American medical missionary and diplomat Peter Parker in Canton at $15 a month; then he went to Hong Kong, where he stayed with his old friend Andrew Shortrede and secured a post as interpreter in the Supreme Court of Hong Kong at $75 a month.⁠[2][1]

In Hong Kong he was apprenticed to the attorney Parson in the hope of becoming a solicitor, but the local attorneys opposed him and the attorney general, Anstey, objected to his interpreting; Parson ended the apprenticeship and Yung gave up his post as interpreter.⁠[2]

In August 1856 he went to Shanghai on the tea clipper Florence, a passage of seven days for which the captain, on learning who he was, charged him nothing, and took a post in the Translating Department of the Customs at Tls. 75 a month, about $100 Mexican; after about four months he resigned on the ground of the bribery common between interpreters and shippers, and declined Chief Commissioner Lay’s offer of Tls. 200 a month to stay.⁠[2]

He next worked as a clerk in an English tea and silk house, which dissolved after six months, and then set up as a translator on his own. He recalled that when the senior partner of a leading firm died in 1857 his translation of the Chinese epitaph was accepted, and that a circular he wrote for victims of a Yellow River flood raised about $20,000 within a week.⁠[2]

He also recorded two encounters with foreigners in Shanghai: once, after a prayer meeting, he was accosted by drunken sailors, one of whom turned out to be the first mate of the Eureka and later came ashore to apologize; another time, at a furniture auction, he fought a Scotsman who had tied cotton balls to his queue.⁠[2]

He declined a compradorship in Nagasaki offered by Webb, the manager of Dent & Co., and was later sent by the firm to the tea districts.⁠[2]

His mother died in 1858 at the age of sixty-four; he was in Shanghai at the time and returned to his village for the funeral.⁠[2]

On March 11, 1859, he left Shanghai by boat on his first trip to the tea districts and reached Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang, three days later.⁠[2]

On November 6, 1859, he left Shanghai with two missionaries, accompanied by Tsang Laisun, to learn about the character of the Taipings; they reached Suzhou on November 9, where the military commandant issued passports, and arrived at Nanjing on November 18, staying at the quarters of the Rev. Mr. Roberts.⁠[2]

On November 19 he met Hong Rengan, the Gan Wang (Prince Kan; Hung Jin in his spelling), whom he had known in Hong Kong in 1856. Hong asked whether he would join the Taiping cause; Yung declined and put forward seven proposals, among them an army organized on scientific principles, military and naval schools, a banking system and graded schools with the Bible among the textbooks.⁠[2]

The Gan Wang sent him a wooden seal conferring the fourth official rank, which he returned. He obtained a passport to leave on December 24 and left Nanjing on December 27.⁠[2]

He then engaged in bringing tea out of Taiping-held territory: the memoir says that one consignment of treasure he escorted into the Taiping tea district to pay for tea came to Tls. 40,000 (about $53,000 Mexican), that he shipped about 65,000 boxes of tea in roughly six months, and that he gave the venture up after being ill for nearly two months.⁠[2]

Carter writes that he succeeded as a merchant, facilitating the tea trade between Taiping-held areas and the treaty ports.⁠[4]

In 1863 he received the first letter from Chang Shi Kwei, a secretary of Zeng GuofanZeng GuofanZeng Guofan (1811–1872) was an official, military commander and Neo-Confucian scholar of the late Qing dynasty, the founder and commander of the Xiang (Hunan) Army. He led that army against the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom for more than a decade, then governed the Liangjiang provinces and Zhili and helped to begin the self-strengthening projects that brought Western machinery and technology to China.Open the full entry (Tsang Kwoh Fan in the memoir), inviting him to Anqing, the capital of Anhui; after a third letter arrived in July he agreed to leave by August at the latest, and in September 1863 he arrived at Anqing and met Zeng Guofan.⁠[2]

He proposed to Zeng that a machine shop able to make machinery be built first; Zeng adopted the plan, commissioned him to buy the machinery abroad and gave him the fifth official rank, with Tls. 68,000 for the purchase, provided by the Taotai of Shanghai and the Treasurer of Canton. In October 1863 he settled the matter in Shanghai with the engineer John Haskins.⁠[2]

He arrived in New York in the early spring of 1864, and through John Haskins the Putnam Machine Co. of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, took the order for the machinery. In July 1864 he attended his Yale class’s tenth-anniversary reunion in New Haven.⁠[2]

With the Civil War still in progress, he offered his services to Brigadier General Barnes as a volunteer courier for six months, as “a naturalized citizen of the United States”; the offer was declined.⁠[2][9][4][6]

The machinery was finished early in the spring of 1865 and shipped from New York to Shanghai; he returned to China by way of San Francisco, paying $500 for his passage to Yokohama. The machinery was installed in the machine shop at Gaochangmiao (Kow Chang Meu in his spelling), about four miles northwest of Shanghai, which later became the Jiangnan (Kiang Nan) Arsenal.⁠[2][4]

In October 1865 he received the substantive fifth rank as an expectant subprefect and, while waiting for a post, served as government interpreter and translator at $250 a month; he wrote that “in October, 1865, I was a full-fledged mandarin of the fifth rank.”⁠[2]

He spent about six months at Yangzhou with Ding Richang (Ting Yih Chang in the memoir) translating Colton’s geography into Chinese, and began a translation of Parsons on Contracts, which he abandoned on the advice of a Chinese scholar.⁠[2]

When Zeng Guofan visited the arsenal in 1867, Yung persuaded him to add a mechanical school to it.⁠[2]

Through Ding Richang he submitted four proposals to the court: a joint-stock steamship company managed and worked exclusively by Chinese, with an annual government subsidy based on the tribute rice it carried to Beijing; the government sending boys abroad to study, 120 in four installments of thirty; the opening of the country’s mineral resources; and barring missionaries from exercising jurisdiction over their converts.⁠[2]

The Tianjin Massacre took place early in 1870, and Zeng Guofan, Ding Richang and others were appointed to settle it. Afterwards they sent a joint memorial, with Zeng’s name heading the list, supporting his plan, which the court approved in the winter of 1870: 120 boys aged twelve to fifteen were to be sent in four annual groups of thirty and given fifteen years to finish their education.⁠[2]

Koh said in his 2004 lecture that it was after the Tianjin Massacre of 1870 that Yung proposed sending more than a hundred Chinese youths abroad to study; Ben Railton’s article notes that the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 included reciprocal access to education for citizens of each country living within the other’s borders.⁠[6][9]

The memoir records that the mission had two commissioners, Chen Lanbin (Chin Lan Pin in the memoir) and Yung Wing, with two Chinese teachers whom the memoir names Yeh Shu Tung and Yung Yune Foo and Tsang Laisun as interpreter. In the summer of 1871 a preparatory school for the boys was opened in Shanghai under an official the memoir calls Liu Kai Sing. Bin Muxin writes that from 1872 to 1882 Yung served as assistant commissioner of the mission, stationed at Hartford, the capital of Connecticut.⁠[2][1]

The memoir records that Zeng Guofan died in Nanjing in the winter of 1871 at the age of seventy-one.⁠[2]

Late in the summer of 1872 the first group of thirty students was ready to sail, and Yung went ahead a month earlier to arrange homes for them. He first made his base at Springfield, Massachusetts, and then established the permanent headquarters of the Chinese Educational Mission at Hartford, Connecticut.⁠[2]

Ben Railton writes that the students attended the region’s leading schools, lived with host families and in Ivy LeagueIvy LeagueThe Ivy League is an intercollegiate athletic conference comprising eight universities in the northeastern United States: Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University. It was formally established in 1954, with league competition beginning in the 1956–57 academic year. Its athletic framework emphasizes student status, academic standards, and financial aid based on need. The name is also commonly used collectively for the eight member institutions.Open the full entry dormitories and had the support of both governments, a far more privileged position than that of most Chinese immigrants of the time, who worked dangerous, low-wage jobs in New York or on the Western railroads. Carter writes that under the approved plan 120 boys, thirty a year over four years, were to attend New England boarding schools and then universities, and that the plan became a key part of the Qing self-strengthening effort.⁠[9][4]

Bin Muxin’s article notes that Samuel Mills Capron (Yale 1853), principal of Hartford High School from 1865 to 1874, was a fellow Yale man and that his school took in twenty-six of the Chinese students.⁠[1]

The memoir records that he returned to China in the spring of 1873 to sell Gatling guns, one order being for a battery of fifty guns worth over $100,000; while there he was instructed by the viceroy to “proceed to Peru at once, to look into the condition of the Chinese coolies there.” Dr. E. W. Kellogg, who later became his brother-in-law, accompanied him.⁠[2]

He completed the investigation in under three months, and his report included about two dozen photographs of coolies whose backs were scarred by the lash; Chen Lanbin investigated Cuba separately. He wrote that no more coolies were allowed to go to Cuba or Peru: “The traffic had received its death blow.”⁠[2]

Bin Muxin’s article and Koh’s lecture both date the Peru journey to 1874; Bin writes that he went on Li HongzhangLi HongzhangLi Hongzhang (1823–1901) was a Chinese statesman, military commander and diplomat of the late Qing dynasty, the founder and commander of the Huai Army and one of the principal promoters of the Self-Strengthening Movement. From 1870 he served for many years as governor-general of Zhili and superintendent of trade for the northern ports, sponsored modern enterprises such as the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, the Kaiping mines, railways, telegraphs and the Beiyang Fleet, and signed treaties including the Treaty of Shimonoseki and the Boxer Protocol for the Qing government; judgments of him, in his lifetime and since, have been sharply divided.Open the full entry’s order to investigate the mistreatment of Chinese laborers and invited Edward Wilberforce Kellogg, a physician and the brother of his future wife, to go with him.⁠[1][6]

In 1874 Li Hongzhang authorized the building of a headquarters for the mission on Collins Street, Hartford; the mission moved into it in January 1875, and it had room for seventy-five students. In the fall of 1875 the last group of students arrived under a new commissioner, Ou Ngoh Liang, who resigned in 1876.⁠[2]

Bin Muxin writes that from 1875 to 1882 Yung was the Qing associate minister to the United States, Spain and Peru, the first person to hold the post. The memoir records that Chen Lanbin and he were appointed “joint Chinese ministers to Washington,” he being “an assistant or associate minister,” and that from 1878 his duties were mainly those of the legation. Koh said in his 2004 lecture that he was appointed Assistant Minister Resident of China in Washington in 1878.⁠[1][2][6]

Alex Donovan’s article notes that Yung went back to the United States to oversee the program after the mission was set up.⁠[8]

On February 24, 1875, Yung Wing married Mary Louisa Kellogg (1851–1886) at the Asylum Hill church in Hartford, Connecticut; the ceremony was performed by his friend Joseph Hopkins Twichell, the church’s pastor.⁠[1]

The bride came from Avon, Connecticut; her father, Bela Candee Kellogg (1811–1892), a man of standing in Avon, had been a rural merchant for some years and postmaster for more than ten, and also served as town clerk and judge. Alex Donovan’s article says that her grandfather was the first pastor of the East Avon church.⁠[1][8]

The Cedar Hill Cemetery Foundation also gives 1875 as the year of the marriage; Koh said in his 2004 lecture that he married three years after making Hartford his headquarters in 1872; the Museum of Chinese in America’s page says he married four years after the mission was organized in 1872; and Alex Donovan’s article says it was soon after the mission set up its Hartford headquarters in 1872.⁠[5][6][12][8]

In 1876 Yale University awarded Yung an honorary Doctor of Laws (LL.D.); Bin Muxin writes that he was the first Chinese to receive an honorary degree from Yale and that Twichell helped bring it about. Koh said in his 2004 lecture that the degree came from Yale Law School and that he may have been the first Asian to receive a degree from it.⁠[3][4][1][6]

In 1876 Chen Lanbin became minister in Washington, and in the fall of that year a new commissioner, whom the memoir calls Woo Tsze Tung, arrived and began sending complaints about the students to Beijing, charging that they played more than they studied, formed secret societies and mostly went to church.⁠[2]

Yung’s application for places for the students at West Point and Annapolis was refused by the State Department with the answer, “There is no room provided for Chinese students.” He wrote that “race prejudice against the Chinese” was then “so rampant and rank” that the Burlingame Treaty of 1868 was disregarded.⁠[2][9]

Ben Railton describes the refusal as a break with the Burlingame–Seward Treaty and the most overt of the United States government’s series of moves toward the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.⁠[9]

Bin Muxin writes that Mark TwainMark TwainMark Twain was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, an American humorist, journalist, lecturer and novelist. He is known for his travel narratives and for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, novels set in the Mississippi River world of his boyhood.Open the full entry met Twichell in 1868 and moved to Hartford in 1871, where the two became close friends, and that on October 26, 1877, Mark Twain gave a neighborly reception for Yung Wing and his wife.⁠[1]

In 1878 Yung gave more than 1,200 volumes from his own collection of Chinese books to Yale, where they became the core of the East Asian Library; shortly afterwards Yale appointed the first professor of Chinese civilization in the United States. Carter writes that, supposedly, Yale’s faculty declined to make the appointment until Yung made it clear that he would otherwise give his library to Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry.⁠[3][11][4]

The Museum of Chinese in America’s page gives the number of volumes as 12,000.⁠[12]

On April 10, 1878, Twichell gave an address about Yung before the Kent Club of the Yale Law School; it was later printed as the appendix to Yung’s memoir.⁠[2]

Ben Railton’s article reproduces an 1878 photograph of the “Orientals,” the mission students’ baseball club, in front of the headquarters on Collins Street; the team was often called the “Celestials” and did well on the local circuit.⁠[9]

Bin Muxin writes that, to prevent the recall of the students, Twichell reached Ulysses S. GrantUlysses S. GrantUlysses S. Grant (1822–1885) was an American soldier and politician who commanded the Union armies in the final years of the Civil War (1864–1865) and served as the 18th president of the United States from 1869 to 1877.Open the full entry, who had travelled in China and knew Li Hongzhang, through Mark Twain: the two visited Grant in New York on December 21, 1880, and on December 23 Twichell sent Grant’s letter to Li Hongzhang through the American minister to China, Angell. On March 10, 1881, Yung wrote to Twichell that Grant’s letter had had an effect, but on June 8, 1881, the Zongli Yamen’s memorial for the recall of the students was approved.⁠[1]

The memoir records that Twichell and the Rev. John W. Lane, with the backing of Yale’s President Porter, organized a protest, enlisting Samuel Clemens among others; the protest said, “We deeply regret that the young men have been taken away.” About one hundred students were recalled to China in 1881; Yung wrote, “Thus the fate of the educational mission was sealed.”⁠[2]

Carter writes that the mission ended abruptly in the summer of 1881, by which time forty-three students had attended or were enrolled in college, about half at Yale and the rest at nine northeastern colleges led by the Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It received its charter from Massachusetts in 1861, admitted its first students in 1865 and moved from Boston to its present campus in 1916. As of October 2025 it had 11,816 students, and it counts 106 Nobel laureates among members of its community.Open the full entry and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; conservatives in China objected to Western dress, dating, baseball and above all Christianity.⁠[4]

Ben Railton writes that most of the students went to San Francisco to wait for a steamer home and, before leaving, played and beat an Oakland team; the student Wen Bing Chung later recalled that “the Oakland men imagined that they were going to have a walk-over with the Chinese.”⁠[9]

The Yale Council on East Asian Studies notes that the students he sent home included Zhan Tianyou, called the father of China’s railroads, and Tang Guo’an, later the first president of Tsinghua College.⁠[3]

In the fall of 1881 Yung went to Tianjin and then to Beijing; he left Beijing in 1882, spent four months in Shanghai and returned to the United States, reaching Hartford in the spring of 1883 to find his wife in poor health.⁠[2]

Koh said in his 2004 lecture that after returning to China in 1882 he was appointed an official in Jiangsu province.⁠[6]

The memoir records that his wife caught a cold at a sanitarium in Somerville, New JerseyNew JerseyNew Jersey is a state in the eastern United States on the Atlantic Ocean, bordered by New York State, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, with the Hudson River forming its northeastern boundary and the Delaware River its western boundary; its capital is Trenton and its largest city is Newark. One of the original 13 colonies, it became the third state to ratify the U.S. Constitution on December 18, 1787, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 9,288,994.Open the full entry, was brought home and “died of Bright’s disease on the 28th of June, 1886,” and was buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford; their sons were then seven and nine years old. Bin Muxin’s article gives her death as May 29, 1886, at their home in Hartford.⁠[2][1]

Ben Railton judges that her illness was caused at least partly by the strain of repeated forced separations from Yung.⁠[9]

During the Sino-Japanese War, in the winter of 1894, he drafted two plans for Zhang ZhidongZhang ZhidongZhang Zhidong (1837–1909) was an official, scholar and educator of the late Qing dynasty and one of the leading figures of the Self-Strengthening movement. He served as governor of Shanxi and as governor-general of Guangdong and Guangxi and of Hubei and Hunan, founded iron and steel, arms and textile enterprises and modern schools in Hubei, wrote the Quanxue pian (Exhortation to Learning) in 1898, and in his last years was a grand councillor and grand secretary in Beijing.Open the full entry (Chang Chi Tung in the memoir): a loan of $15,000,000 in London to buy ironclads and engage a foreign force, and the mortgaging of Formosa to some Western power for $400,000,000. He wrote that Li Hongzhang, backed by the Empress Dowager, pressed for peace, so that Sir Robert Hart sided with the court party and would not pledge the customs revenue for the loan, which fell through; the Formosa plan was never carried through either. A newspaper that Kodama Gentarō later showed him printed the sum as $800,000,000, which he corrected to $400,000,000.⁠[2]

In the summer of 1895 he arrived in Shanghai and met Zhang Zhidong at Nanjing; before leaving Nanjing for Wuchang, Zhang appointed him “Secretary of Foreign Affairs for Kiang Nan” at about $150 a month, a post Yung regarded as practically a sinecure; he resigned it after about three months under the next viceroy, Liu Kunyi (Liu Kwan Yih in the memoir), and severed his official connection with the provincial government of Jiangnan in 1896. Bin Muxin writes that he returned to China in 1895 at Zhang’s summons and left his younger son, then in high school, in Twichell’s care.⁠[2][1]

Carter writes that he worked as a diplomat for the Qing empire, helping to negotiate the end of the 1895 Sino-Japanese War.⁠[4]

He proposed a national bank in Beijing with a government appropriation of Tls. 10,000,000; Weng TongheWeng TongheWeng Tonghe (1830–1904) was an official, calligrapher and diarist of the late Qing dynasty, tutor to two emperors, Tongzhi and Guangxu, and at various times president of the Board of Revenue, Grand Councillor and Associate Grand Secretary. He was dismissed soon after the Hundred Days’ Reform began in 1898 and stripped of his ranks after the coup that ended it; the diary he kept for nearly half a century is counted among the four great diaries of the late Qing.Open the full entry (Ung Tung Hwo in the memoir), president of the Treasury Department, was about to memorialize for its approval when Sheng XuanhuaiSheng XuanhuaiSheng Xuanhuai (1844–1916) was a Chinese official and industrialist of the late Qing dynasty who for many years served as Li Hongzhang’s chief economic deputy. He ran the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, the telegraph administration, the Huasheng cotton mill, the Hanyang Ironworks and Hanyeping Company, the Railway Corporation and the Imperial Bank of China, and founded Peiyang University and Nanyang Public School. As minister of posts and communications in 1911 he pursued railway nationalization, which set off the Railway Protection Movement; dismissed after the Wuchang Uprising, he went into exile in Japan for a time and died in Shanghai in 1916. His vast personal archive is held by Shanghai Library.Open the full entry (Shing Sun Whei in the memoir) asked him to suspend the memorial for a couple of weeks. Yung wrote in his memoir that, as he heard it, Sheng came to Beijing with Tls. 300,000 as presents for princes and officials and got away with the Tls. 10,000,000 appropriation by setting up a bank to manage his own projects, and that his plan was thereby defeated.⁠[2]

He also obtained a concession for a railroad from Tianjin to Zhenjiang, to be routed around Shandong because of a German claim to a railroad monopoly there; “The road was to be built with Chinese, not with foreign capital,” and he had six months to raise it, but he could not find Chinese capital, his attempts to bring in foreign syndicates failed, and he gave up the project.⁠[2]

He wrote in his memoir that during the previous year he had often met Kang YouweiKang YouweiKang Youwei (1858–1927) was a Chinese scholar, political reformer and calligrapher of the late Qing and early Republican periods and a principal promoter of the Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898. After the reform was reversed he spent more than a decade in exile, founded the Baohuanghui (Chinese Empire Reform Association) and argued for constitutional monarchy; in later life he campaigned to make Confucianism the state religion. His works include The Forged Classics, Confucius as a Reformer and the Datong shu (The Great Commonwealth).Open the full entry and his disciple Liang QichaoLiang QichaoLiang Qichao (1873–1929) was a thinker, politician, journalist and scholar of the late Qing and early Republic, a disciple of Kang Youwei and a participant in the Hundred Days’ Reform of 1898. After the reform failed he spent 14 years in exile in Japan, where he ran the journals Qingyi Bao and Xinmin Congbao; returning in 1912, he helped to found the Progressive Party, served the Beijing government as minister of justice and minister of finance, and in 1915–1916 opposed Yuan Shikai’s attempt to make himself emperor. After leaving politics at the end of 1917 he devoted himself to writing and teaching, was a tutor at the Tsinghua Academy of Chinese Learning and director of the Beijing Library, and left the collected works known as the Yinbingshi heji.Open the full entry (Khang Yu Wei and Leang Kai Chiu in his spelling) in Beijing, and that “My headquarters became the rendez-vous of the leading reformers of 1898.”⁠[2]

In the coup of September 1898 the Guangxu Emperor was deposed and made a prisoner and the Empress Dowager Cixi took power; Yung wrote, “Being implicated by harboring the reformers, and in deep sympathy with them, I had to flee for my own life.” He escaped from Beijing and took quarters in the foreign settlement of Shanghai, where he organized the “Deliberative Association of China” and was chosen its first president.⁠[2]

Alex Donovan’s article says that after the coup the new government put a price of $70,000 on him and that he fled from Shanghai to Hong Kong; Carter writes that the Qing government put a price on his head and he became persona non grata in China.⁠[8][4]

He wrote, “I was in Hong Kong from 1900 till 1902.” In the spring of 1901 he visited Formosa, where the Japanese governor-general, Kodama Gentarō, informed him that the viceroy of Fujian and Zhejiang had asked for his arrest and return to the mainland, and refused: “I am not going to play the part of a constable for China.” Kodama assigned guards to him at night and escorts by day until he left for Hong Kong.⁠[2]

He wrote that he returned to the United States in 1902 to see his younger son, Bartlett G. Yung, graduate from Yale University.⁠[2]

Carter writes that when Yung applied in 1902 to return he was refused on the grounds of the Chinese Exclusion Act’s ban on immigration from China, and that he slipped back into the country with the help of friends and connections and attended his son’s graduation. The Museum of Chinese in America’s page says that in 1902 he learned that his citizenship had been revoked under the Naturalization Act of 1870; Alex Donovan’s article also says that he learned his citizenship had been revoked when he appealed from Hong Kong to the US government to let him return, and that he later sneaked back into the country illegally with friends’ help. The Connecticut History people page says that, his citizenship revoked, he returned to Hartford without legal status.⁠[4][12][8][10]

Ben Railton writes that he then stayed in the country as an illegal immigrant, living with his sons; Bin Muxin writes that he settled in the United States after 1902 and that his diary for that year records many contacts with the Twichell family.⁠[9][1]

In 1909 his memoir, My Life in China and America, was published in New York by Henry Holt and Company under the name “Yung Wing, A.B., LL.D. (Yale)” and dedicated to his sons Morrison Brown and Bartlett Golden Yung; its twenty-two chapters run from his boyhood to the coup of 1898, and the appendix reprints Twichell’s address of 1878.⁠[2]

The Yale Alumni Magazine notes that the memoir describes the challenges he faced as a foreign student and his career.⁠[11]

The Museum of Chinese in America’s page says that he remained active in high-level Chinese revolutionary politics and that in 1911 Sun Yat-sen asked him to help build the new Republic of China.⁠[12]

Yung Wing died on April 21, 1912. Ben Railton’s article writes that The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American morning daily newspaper published in New York City. Founded in 1851, it is published by The New York Times Company.Open the full entry obituary records his death at his home in Hartford; the Connecticut History people page says he died in poverty, and Alex Donovan’s article that he spent his last years in poverty in Hartford. Carter writes that The New York Times obituary noted his Yale degree and said that he had some years earlier occupied “a prominent place in Chinese diplomatic circles.”⁠[3][9][10][8][4]

Bin Muxin writes that Twichell conducted his funeral. He was buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery in Hartford, in Section 10, Lot 6, where his wife also lies; the Cedar Hill Cemetery Foundation’s profile cites a Hartford Courant article of April 22, 1912, “Death of Dr. Yung Wing.”⁠[1][5][7][6]

His wife, Mary Louisa Kellogg, came from the Kellogg family of Avon; her second elder brother, Edward Wilberforce Kellogg, was a physician. After her death the Kellogg family helped to care for his two sons while he was in China from 1894 to 1902.⁠[1]

They had two sons: Morrison Brown Yung (1876–1933), born in Avon, Connecticut, who attended Yale from 1894 to 1898, and Bartlett Golden Yung (1879–1942), born in Washington, who attended Yale from 1898 to 1902.⁠[1][6]

Ben Railton writes that Yung made a home with his wife, Mary Kellogg of Avon, and their two young sons; Bin Muxin writes that he spent more than forty years in the United States, most of them in Hartford.⁠[9][1]

Bin Muxin’s article traces Yung’s American network along three lines—school ties, marriage ties and local ties—and identifies Twichell as the most important figure in that network and one of the most important friends of his life: a fellow Yale man and pastor of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church who lived only a few blocks away, Twichell performed his wedding, helped obtain his honorary Yale degree, looked after his younger son and finally conducted his funeral.⁠[1]

The article adds that Mark Twain, Twichell’s close friend, probably came to know Yung through Twichell and perhaps also through the Kelloggs: Yung’s wife had tutored Twain’s children, and her second elder brother, Dr. Kellogg, had been Twain’s family physician and treated his wife; Twain later joined Twichell in lobbying against the recall of the students. When Mark Twain died in New York on April 21, 1910, Twichell missed the funeral on April 25 because his own wife died on April 24.⁠[1]

In 2004, for the 150th anniversary of his graduation, his home city of Zhuhai gave Yale a life-size bronze statue of him, which stands outside the International Room of Sterling Memorial Library; officials from Zhuhai attended the unveiling. On September 27 of that year Harold Hongju Koh, dean of Yale Law School, gave the lecture “Yellow in a White World,” the first in a series organized by Yale’s Asian American Cultural Center and other groups to mark the anniversary.⁠[3][4][7][6]

Yale also awards an annual Yung Wing Scholarship and holds a portrait of him, painted by Judith Reeve (born 1966) and commissioned by the Yale-China Association in 2000; it was unveiled at a ceremony attended by China’s consul general Zhang Hongxi and Yung Wing’s grandson, and is now in Campus Art Collection storage. In 2006 Yale gave a copy of the portrait to China’s Ministry of Culture.⁠[11][6]

Education Week wrote in 2007 that Zhuhai has a school named after him, the Yung Wing School, one of the city’s most elite, with his statue outside, and that educators in China regard him as a “godfather of Chinese-American exchange programs.”⁠[7]

The Museum of Chinese in America holds a ten-episode television documentary series about Yung Wing donated by Zhuhai Television. The Cedar Hill Cemetery Foundation lists him among the cemetery’s notable residents.⁠[12][5]

The Zhuhai Municipal Government’s regional website, presented by China Daily, says that the Yung Wing Memorial Hall in Nanping town, Xiangzhou district, Zhuhai, occupies the former site of the Zhenxian School, which was founded in 1871 with 500 taels of silver raised by local people following Yung Wing’s example, was one of the earliest private schools in Guangdong, and had Yung Wing as its honorary schoolmaster. The page calls him the “father of Chinese overseas studies.”⁠[13]

The Connecticut History people page calls him an educational pioneer who worked to bridge the gap between American and Chinese cultures. Ben Railton calls the final American acts of Yung and the mission “tragic but inspiring” and argues that nineteenth-century Chinese Americans formed an evolving transnational community.⁠[10][9]

Carter regards the honorary degree and the gift of his books as the high point of Yung’s work for China–U.S. ties. Bin Muxin concludes that Yung was an important link in Sino-American relations in the late Qing, that the network he built through Yale, his marriage and Hartford made him a model for the integration of early Chinese immigrants into American society, and that present-day relations between the two countries need figures who can serve as such ballast.⁠[4][1]

The Museum of Chinese in America’s page judges that he did not achieve his goal of bringing Western education to China but that his gift of books left a lasting legacy of Chinese learning in the United States.⁠[12]

Yale University: Official website: https://www.yale.edu/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]

Cedar Hill Cemetery Foundation: Official website: https://cedarhillfoundation.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[5]