Yung Wing

Yung Wing (1910)

Yung Wing ( Chinese  容 闳 , Pinyin Róng Hóng ; born November 17, 1828 in Nanping (in Xiangshan, Guangdong Province ); † April 21, 1912 in Hartford ) was a Chinese diplomat and (with Chen Lan-Pin) the first official representative of the Qing Empire in the USA .

Life

Born into a peasant family, his father sent him to a mission school in the Portuguese colony of Macau , four miles away , to learn English. From 1841 he attended the Morrison School, which was directed by Rev. SR Brown, a graduate of Yale University . On January 4, 1847, the two left Guangzhou for America, and on April 12, they reached New York . Yung Wing enrolled in at the Monson Academy Monson ( Massachusetts on). After graduating in 1850, he became a student at Yale, where he received his BA in 1854, becoming the first Chinese to graduate from an American university. On October 30, 1852, he became an American citizen.

In 1855 he returned to China. For a post in public administration in China, he would have had to take the classic Confucian civil servant examination, so that he was left without a good job for a while. In 1863 he found a job with Viceroy Zeng Guofan . On his behalf he traveled back to the United States, where he bought machines from Putnam & Co. in Fitchburg that were needed for the Kiang-Nan Arsenal in Shanghai , China's first modern arms factory.

In 1868, China and the United States signed the Burlingame Treaty , in which the Chinese government officially sent Chinese students abroad for the first time. Article 8 said: "Chinese subjects shall enjoy all the privileges of the public educational institutions under the control of the government of the United States." Viceroys Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang proposed in a memorandum to the Chinese court that 120 students should be sent to the United States to study for 15 years. Military interests also played a role, and suitable students were to be trained at West Point and the Naval Academy . The imperial court accepted the plan, and from 1872 to 1875, 120 young Chinese aged between ten and 16 with the total Chinese Education Commission (English, Chinese Educational Commission , CEC) sent into the United States.

Head of the Education Commission in Hartford ( Connecticut ) was Chen Lan-pin , a classically educated Confucians without English skills, making Yung, who was appointed as his deputy, was the decisive figure. During this stay in the US, Yung Wing married Mary Louise Kellogg from East Windsor, Connecticut.

Yung Wings grave in Hartford, Connecticut

In 1877 Yung donated 1,237 Chinese books to Yale University and thus laid the foundation for the Chinese studies there. In 1878 the first professor of sinology, Samuel W. Williams , was appointed. In 1878, Chen and Yung were given diplomatic powers by the Qing government, making them the first Chinese diplomatic representatives in the United States.

On May 12, 1881, the Chinese Foreign Ministry decided to dissolve the CEC. Numerous factors contributed to the fact that the experiment of the education commission was canceled again in 1881. Conservative Confucians like Chen were shocked at the degree to which the young students adopted American customs. Some dressed western, cut off their Manchu braid , and converted to Christianity. The liberal Yung tolerated the development. In addition, none of the Chinese students were admitted to an American military academy, which seriously disappointed the Chinese and accused the Americans of having broken the contract. The third factor was the growing anti-Chinese resentment in America, primarily against the cheaply imported Chinese labor ("coolies") for railroad construction and mines on the west coast. This was expressed through the Chinese Exclusion Act of February 1879 (US President Hayes vetoed the law in 1879, but came into effect in 1882).

In 1882 Yung returned to China, where he was appointed director of Jiangsu Province, but returned to the United States because of the deteriorating health of his wife, where she died in 1886.

In 1909 his memoirs were published in New York under the title My Life in China and America , and in 1915 it was translated into Chinese under the title Notes on the Introduction of Western Education in the East .

Web links

Commons : Yung Wing  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

• Chinese Students Memorial Society (English)
• The Yung Wing Project ( December 29, 2011 memento in the Internet Archive ) includes the copied text of his memoir My Life in China and America .

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Yung is the family name here, Wing is the first name.