For, of far greater importance than his own graduation, was Dr. Yung Wing's determination that the rising generation of Chinese youth might enjoy similar opportunity, and that through their education in America, China might be regenerated, modernized and enlightened by the leaven of western science. This became the consuming passion of Yung Wing's life.
The passing recently of the highly esteemed Sir Shou-son Chow in Hongkong, at the age of 98, brought to mind an interview I had with this remarkable Chinese gentleman a few years ago. It is of significance in the educational world because Sir Shou-son was one of the last leaves on the tree of learning planted by Dr. Yung Wing at Yale over a century ago.
Two other oldsters of that famous mission may still be living, but they are lost behind Red China's Bamboo Curtain. One was Mr. Kwong Young-kong of Tientsin, who, as far as is known, is still living and would be 96. The other was Dr. Yung Wing's nephew, Captain Yung Fei-sang of Shanghai, who would be in his late eighties.
In any case, Sir Shou-son was their senior, and (until his death) the oldest surviving member of the first Chinese Educational Mission. I shall always remember him as I met him at 94. Not as rotund as Santa Claus, Sir Shou-son was nearly as merry as old King Cole. Hale and hearty, with twinkling eyes, rosy cheeks, snow-white hair, he was still a Prince Charming. His eyesight and hearing were good; his voice anything but weak. It was well-known in Hongkong that if presented with a microphone and asked to say a few words at a dedication ceremony, he would say: "Take that thing away,— you can hear me without it!" Then his voice would boom out. He was very much in demand in Hongkong for the laying of cornerstones or the opening of new buildings, for his presence was regarded by the Chinese as an exceedingly good omen of long life and prosperity.
When I was arranging with one of his daughters (whom I had known in China) for the interview, she asked over the phone: "Can you come tomorrow morning at 10:30?"
"Yes, or at ten," I replied.
"Wait a moment, I'll ask father," and then, "Yes, ten o'clock will be all right."
"Fine," I said, "I'll be there about 10:00."
"Not about," came her quick reply, "ten o'clock! Father is very prompt and doesn't like to be kept waiting." That was the first thing I learned about Sir Shou-son.
I made a point of being ahead of time, and was enjoying a cup of Hongkong's best coffee, which Dolly Chow (daughter of Sir Shouson and wife of former ambassador to Washington, Dr. C. T. Wang) had made famous in her Crystal Lounge Restaurant off the lobby of her father's King's Theater.
Then this diminutive tycoon came in. He had been up since 6:30, keeping other appointments, and had a busy day still ahead of him.
Here was a man who had served China under three Manchu emperors, under seven heads of the Chinese Republic, and has been a resident of Hongkong during the reigns of five British sovereigns, beginning with. Queen Victoria. (It suggests a quiz question: Can you name the seven presidents of China? Beginning with Queen Victoria, name the five sovereigns of the British Empire or Commonwealth. Sir Shou-son at 94 knew the answers.)
Moreover, since Sir Shou-son went to England as Associate Commissioner from Hongkong for the Wembley Exhibition of the empire in 1924, he had known most of the royal family personally. On that occasion he was presented to King George V, and met the Duke of York who later succeeded to the throne as George VI. He had the honor of being the first Chinese ever to be made Knight Bachelor with the special privilege of retaining the title "Honorable" as long as he should live.
He was knighted in 1928. The investiture was held in Government House, Hongkong, conducted by another member of the royal family. The late Duke of Kent (then Prince George) was serving as a naval officer on HMS "Hawkins," then in Far Eastern waters. Sir Cecil Clementi, then Governor of Hongkong, received his KCMC at the same time. It was the first instance in the history of the Crown Colony when an investiture was made by a member of Britain's royalty. Sir Shou-son entertained the duke and was impressed by his unassuming friendliness.
In the 1930's the Duke of Windsor, later to be known as the king who abdicated the throne, visited the Crown Colony and Sir Shou-son was seated next him at an official dinner. He came to know other prominent Britishers, including Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, first Labor Prime Minister of England, and he entertained the late Lord Kitchener in Manchuria when he came to visit the battle fields after the Russo-Japanese War. He was an honored guest when the Duchess of Kent visited Hongkong. But when it came to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, it didn't seem quite wise for him to attempt another trip to England. It was too bad, for I am sure the young Queen and the venerable knight would have enjoyed meeting.
Besides his knighthood, Sir Shou-son has some seven other decorations: the King George V Silver Jubilee Medal (1935); the Coronation Medal (1937) of HM King George VI; the Japanese decoration of the Rising Sun, fourth class (1907); and four decorations from the Republic of China.
This nongenarian was not a refugee from China as it fell to the Communists. No, he had been a resident of Hongkong for more than forty years. There he had built his empire. There he had been honored for his services and philanthropies to the Crown Colony. At 94 he was still going daily to his office in the Bank of East Asia. He was chairman of the board, or director, of some nine companies, including Hongkong's electric, telephone and tramway companies, the King's Theater, the Hanyang Brothers' Tobacco Co., and the China Emporium (of which a son is manager).
This revered head of five living generations occupied "Pine Villa" on Shouson Hills, a beautiful place, once a barren waste on the Peak overlooking the city below. Overlooking one of the world's most picturesque harbors, too. One enters the grounds through a pailou, or memorial arch, presented to Sir Shou-son by his Chinese friends while he could still enjoy it. On the walls of the villa may be seen bullet-holes from Japanese machine-guns, which the old gentleman desired to leave as a reminder of the days when Hongkong's famous Peak became a battleground. A reminder, too, perhaps that it could happen again.
Lady Chow died in 1936. Usually some of his great-grandchildren are at the villa, and the sprightly old man enjoys the children playing about him in the garden.
I asked him the secret of his long and remarkably healthy life. He said, "I attribute it to heredity. One of my grandmothers lived to be 105!"
He minimized the fact that he never drinks anything alcoholic, and smokes only a few cigarettes, mostly after meals. His one vice (Or was it his recreation?) was mahjong, and he could play for five or six hours at a stretch without appearing more tired than his younger competitors. He believed in "keeping active to keep young," adding,
"Keep happy and try to make others happy!" It was scarcely a new idea, but it sounded intriguingly gay from a man near 95.
This led me to ask him if he was a member of the Church of England with its imposing old Cathedral in Hongkong. His daughter, passing through the room at the moment, put in, "No, he is not baptized. But he is really a Christian. He believes as we do, and he has read the Bible through."
"Probably you are also a Confucianist?" I queried, knowing there is no conflict between the tenets of Christianity and the ethical admonitions of the sage.
"Yes, I'm a Confucianist," he agreed. "A Buddhist?" I persisted.
"No, never a Buddhist," he quickly returned.
But I was most anxious to hear about that first Chinese Educational Mission promoted by Dr. Yung Wing, America's first Chinese college graduate. Once reminiscing, he needed no questions from me. He said two other Chinese lads went to America with Yung Wing in 1847 on the 98-day voyage of the good ship "Huntress." One became ill and returned to China. The other was offered medical education in Edinburgh by the British editor of Hongkong's "China Mail." This left Yung Wing alone to graduate from Yale in 1854. Two years earlier Yung had become an American citizen. A year later he married an American woman, Mary Louise Kellogg, whose grandniece attended the Yale Centenary in June 1954.
Then Dr. Yung returned to China to plan for his educational mission. Though that mission was recalled, ending in seeming failure, Yung Wing's efforts were not in vain, and by 1912 the surge of young Chinese to ward America and Europe for higher education became almost a tidal wave.
The Taiping Rebellion of 1850-65 had demonstrated China's need for learning military science from the West. Tseng Kuo-fang, viceroy of three provinces, saw the importance of western arms, and sent Yung Wing to the USA to buy machinery for equipping the first arsenal and machine-shop at Kiangwan (Shanghai) where the first school to train Chinese mechanics was started.
But Yung Wing's vision embraced wider horizons than military science. His imagination foresaw the modernization of China (no less) by the technical training of able youth from the best families. There were many obstacles to overcome before the plan was approved by the Imperial Court in Peking. Dr. Yung drafted a four-point proposal which played down the risks involved in sending so many students to the United States at ages 12 to 14 years to remain there for fifteen years of education. He hedged that point fore and aft with proposals for a steamship company, managed by Chinese exclusively on a joint stock basis; development of China's mineral resources and the building of railroads; and the wisdom of preventing foreign powers from encroaching on the sovereignty of China. The plan was finally approved by the Court in 1871.
Opposition of parents also had to be overcome. Candidates had to be carefully chosen. Thirty were to go each year for four years, though only 100 were in America by the time the mission was recalled. Those selected had to promise that they would not leave America until their education was completed, and that when they returned to China they would not enter private business. They were to receive official status, ranking with Chinese who entered the imperial service by the traditional examination system.
In order to safeguard the students from being "enclosed by foreign learning," and to keep the Confucian ideal of loyalty to the Emperor before them, a staff of Chinese teachers was to accompany them and continue their education in Chinese language and Confucian classics. Periodically they were to assemble for the reading of the Imperial Edict and make the proper obeisance to the Emperor in the general direction of Peking. With more opposition to the mission in the conservative north, over 70% of the students were from the region of Canton.
They sailed into the unknown with considerable trepidation. Tsai Ting-kai of the second detachment, later China's famous admiral, said their paddle-wheel boat was "a combination of steamer, submarine and flying ship achieving the speed of ten miles an hour on occasion!" When the sea was rough it ran sideways or, as he put it "with one paddle-wheel in the water and one in the air."
President Porter of Yale had the wisdom to put the lads by twos and threes into American homes, and many of the best families of New Haven cooperated by opening their homes to these odd lads in long silk gowns, with queues of jet-black hair braided down their backs. It was not long before they shed their solemn Chinese manners, the silk gowns and in some cases the queues, and were competing for honors with their American schoolmates, both scholastically and in athletics. They acquired nicknames which were never to be forgotten at reunions in China, - Breezy Jack, Alligator, Ajax, Flounder and many others.
The renowned William Lyon Phelps of Yale, an intimate friend of several of the Chinese lads in high school, said in his memoirs that he never knew a finer group. He recalled that in choosing sides for football, whoever had first choice took Se Chung who "could run like a hound and dodge like a cat." Kong was another favorite for, strong and tall, he could cross the goal-line carrying four or five Americans on his shoulders. Chung Mung-yew steered Yale's varsity rowing-crew to victory as the coxswain two successive years.
Dr. Phelps added, "These boys not only excelled at athletics, you should have seen them cutting the double-eight and the grapevine. When they entered the social arena, none of us had a chance. Whether it was the exotic pleasure of dancing with Orientals, or what is more probable, the real charm of their manners and talk, I do not know; certain it is that at dances and receptions, the fairest and most sought-out belles invariably gave the swains from the Orient the preference. The Orientals danced beautifully.":
The early era of reciprocal good-feeling gave way in China to a deepening suspicion on the part of conservative Chinese statesmen that Yung Wing's students were becoming too westernized. A new commissioner was appointed to the educational mission as assistant to Yung Wing. This Wu Tze-teng began sending back to Peking a stream of unfavorable reports on the "un-Chinese conduct" of the students. Finally on June 8, 1880 the Chinese government ordered the Educational Mission abolished and the Chinese teachers and students to return to China.
Consternation smote the young Chinese and their American friends. Two well-known Americans who at least temporarily postponed the order for their recall were General U.S. Grant and Mark Twain. But the order was not rescinded, and in 1881 the students had to pack up and leave the United States at a most unfortunate point in their education. The first two contingents (about sixty students) were by this time in university or technical schools. Another five years would have seen them thoroughly qualified for engineering, mining, ship-building, communications and other specialized professions. The astounding thing is that of the hundred who did get to America, the great majority achieved ability to get things done. Despite incomplete technical training, frustrations by officialdom, conservatism, opposition to Western methods, corruption under the Manchus, they persevered. They built China's first railroads, developed coal mines, constructed the first telegraph and telephone system in China, organized a modern army and navy. (Seven lost their lives in naval engagements with the French, British or Japanese). They filled the ranks of consular and diplomatic service, became distinguished physicians, officials of integrity in the Customs service and Salt Gabelle.
Yung Wing's hopes came to fruition. In 1908 when President Theodore Roosevelt with the sanction of Congress returned to China the unexpended millions of the Boxer Indemnity Fund with the suggestion that it be used to send Chinese students to the United States, China agreed. Tsing Hua University was established near Peking to prepare students to enter American colleges and universities for advanced study (far better from the Chinese viewpoint than being away fifteen years). The first forty-seven came the next year.
When China became a republic in 1912, the trickle became a steady stream. Some 20,000 Chinese students altogether have had part or all of their higher education in the USA. To guide and aid them, the China Institute in America was founded, now housed in headquarters dedicated as a memorial to Henry Luce's missionary father, and directed by able Dr. Chih Meng at 125 East 65tb Street, New York City.
When a reactionary Empress and a general fear of westernization led to the recall of the first mission, Shou-son Chow was in Columbia University. He had finished grammar school in Winstead, Conn., had graduated from Phillips-Andover Academy, passed Columbia's entrance examinations, and had just started his technical training. Like the others, he was bitterly disappointed. But, like so many of the others also, he became extremely useful to his country despite the unfinished academic career.
Young Chow was sent to Korea to reorganize the Customs service. He became private secretary to Tong Shao-yi, then Consul-General there, and remained in Korea ten years. Later he served as "tao-tai" (commissioner) of Customs in Newchwang, Manchuria. This gave him responsibility for a territory of several hundred square miles with a population of several million people. He had civil and military control, and responsibility for foreign intercourse, in addition to his Customs duties. When the revolution broke out in 1911, he went to Hongkong, his home and the seat of his activities since. His civic and philanthropic services are as long as the list of his honors and decorations, from trustee for the Hongkong Society for the Protection of Children to patron of St. Johns' Ambulance Brigade.
His sense of merriment is well-known in the Crown Colony. When Mr. Malcolm MacDonald was Commissioner-General for Southeast Asia, he visited Hongkong as guest of Sir Alexander Grantham, then governor. Sir Shou-son was invited to a dinner at Government House in his honor. Mr. MacDonald deferentially addressed the old gentleman as “Sir Shou-son."
"Oh no, no, Mr. MacDonald," he said with a smile and a twinkle in his eye. "None of that from you, please. I knew your father when you were just a toddler. I should really be 'Uncle Chow' to you!"
With a twinkle in his own eye, Mr. Mac Donald said, "From now on, sir, it's 'Uncle'!"
As I prepared to leave Sir Shou-son, my courtly Prince Charming, I could hardly believe that some 20,000 Chinese had studied in America during the life time of this one pioneer. Of course his life covered a span of nearly a century. Those students have acquired over 12,000 academic degrees from many institutions in everything from one in paleontology to well over a thousand in Imsiness administration and as many in engineering of various types. Their contribution to China's modernization-and America's contribution through them-is the fulfillment of Yung Wing's dream.
Unlike Oliver Wendell Holmes' "last leaf on the tree in the Spring," there was nothing sad or wistful about the elderly Chinese scholar and man-of-affairs I was parting from. I said, "I hope you live as long as your grandmother-or longer." (Ninety-eight was a good try.)
His eyes under the heavy white brows twinkled. "There's a lot of 'kick' in me yet," he said. It might have been the lad in long silk gown with black queue down his back so long ago in New Haven-learning to use American slang.
*Wm Lyon Phelps "Autobiography and Letters," 1939.