容闳英文传记

教师之友网

容闳



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英文传记Yung Wing was born at Nanping, Xiangshan County (presently Zhuhai City) in 1828. In 1854, after Yung Wing graduated from what was then Yale College, he came back to China with a dream “that through Western education, China might be regenerated, become enlightened and powerful.” From then on, he devoted his life to a series of reforms in China. Yung Wing resolved to save the weak Qing dynasty through education and industrialisation and shouldered the responsibility for this effort, establishing his reputation in the modern history of China. His initiative in establishing the unprecedented Chinese Educational Commission (CEC) gave rise to the Self-Strengthening Movement in the late Qing period. He is thus widely considered a trail blazer and great thinker in the modernization of China.
Yung Wing attended the Morrison School, established by Evangelical Lutheran Church minister Elijah C. Bridgman. This school was affiliated with a girls’ school established by Rev. Karl Friedrich A. Gutzlaff’s wife. The girls’ school closed, resulting in the suspension of Yung’s education for a time.
Samuel R. Brown, a Ph.D. graduate of Yale College, arrived in Macau in 1839 to take over the presidency of the Morrison School. Yung re-entered the school in 1841 and studied Elementary Arithmetic, Geography, and English courses in the mornings and Chinese in the afternoons.
In 1842 the Morrison School moved to Hong Kong, and Yung went with the school. It was closed due to lack of funds in 1849.
On January 1, 1847 ，the schoolmaster Brown took Yung Wing, Wong Foon and Wong Shing to the U.S. to study. Their ship the Huntress departed from Whampoa in Canton and after 3 months of voyaging across vast oceans, arrived in New York on April 12th. This was the very first time the three Chinese boys had set foot in the U.S. Yung and the other two boys entered Monson Academy in Massachusetts. All living expenses and tuition fees were provided by the Church or covered by other programmes.
In 1850 Yung Wing passed his exams and was admitted to Yale College.
Yung Wing, a poor student, needed financial backing to carry through his collegiate courses at Yale. The Church offered to lend him a helping hand on condition that he go back to China to take a mission there after graduation. Yung declined the offer, stating “I wanted the utmost freedom of action to avail myself of every opportunity to do the greatest good in China”. He then took a harder road to learning.
In 1854 Yung graduated from Yale College with a BA in literature, becoming the first Chinese to receive higher education in the United States. This photo was taken at his graduation.
Yung wrote a poem for his graduation: The good resembles the evergreen. The wicked resembles the flower. At present one is inferior to the others. There is mourning and the day when frost and snow fall, we only see the evergreen but not the flower.
On November 13, 1854, having declined an offer that would have promised him a decent life and a good future, Yung Wing and the Rev. William Allen Macy embarked on the sailing clipper Eureka in New York. Their adventurous 13,000 sea mile journey took 154 days to reach Hong Kong. This is the Victoria Harbour in Hong Kong of the mid-19th century.
Yung Wing came back with a dream that had far-reaching impact on China: “the rising generation of China should enjoy the same educational advantages I enjoyed, so that through western education China might be regenerated, become enlightened and powerful.”
In Dec. 1875, Chin Lan Pin and Yung Wing were respectively appointed Minister Plenipotentiary and Vice-minister Plenipotentiary to America, Spain and Peru.
In 1875 Yung Wing married the 24 year old girl Marry Kellogg. His friend J. H. Twichell had introduced them.
In 1876 Yale University, Yung’s Wing’s alma mater, awarded him an honorary doctorate in law to commend Yung for his tremendous contribution to the cultural exchange between China and America.