It was August 1846. Samuel Robbins Brown (1810-80), principal of a missionary school in Hong Kong, stepped in the classroom and raised a surprising idea with his Chinese students.
"I am returning to the United States because I am ill. Are there any of you who would like to go with me to study there?" Brown, a class of 1832 graduate from Yale University, was quoted as saying in later publications.
The classroom plunged into silence. It was something the Chinese teenagers had never thought of at that time, considering the long-held closed-door policy of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and the impression among the Chinese of the West so soon after the Opium War (1840-42).
But, after a while, a student named Yung Wing (also known as Rong Hong, 1828-1912) stood up. He was followed by two other boys - Wong Shing (Huang Sheng) and Wong Foon (1829-78, Huang Kuan).
On January 4, 1847, the three boys and Brown boarded a ship in Guangzhou in South China's Guangdong Province for the United States.
These daring boys did not realize they were writing a new chapter of history as the first Chinese to study overseas.
Study Overseas
In 1848, Wong Shing returned to China because of illness, without finishing his studies. Two years later, Wong Foon left to study in Britain and later came back to China to be a medical doctor.
Yung was the one who stood out. He enrolled at Yale in 1850 and, four years later, became the first Chinese student to receive a Bachelor of Arts degree in the United States. After returning to China in 1854, Yung engaged in various projects to promote its modernization, most notably by sending Chinese students to the United States for advanced education.
He is best known for having organized the Chinese Educational Mission, which brought 120 young Chinese students to schools and colleges in Massachusetts and Connecticut, including Yale, in the 1870s. Many of these students went on to play important roles in China's development in the decades that followed, most notably the famous railway engineer Jeme Tien Yow (Zhan Tianyou, 1861-1919).
"Yung Wing's vision is well known. He wanted to see China catch up with Western nations through the modern sciences. He wanted it to be possible for upcoming generations in China to receive the same level of education he had received in the United States," stated Frank Yung, a grandson of Yung Wing, in an article.
Today few young people in China know about Yung Wing while studying abroad is no longer rare and tens of thousands of Chinese people are pursuing advanced studies overseas. An exhibition entitled "Learning Overseas and Succeeding in China" is re-acquainting visitors with a valuable part of history that has greatly changed China and the lives of generations of Chinese.
The exhibition is showing more than 400 photographs and about 300 precious relics on the history of Chinese people studying overseas after Yung. The exhibition is being held at the China National Museum on the east of Tian'anmen Square in Beijing until April 18.
Historic Review
"This is the first major exhibition in New China to feature the history of Chinese people learning overseas," remarked Ma Yuming, deputy-director of the China National Museum, a recent merger of the National Museum of Chinese History and National Museum of the Chinese Revolution.
"It is an attempt to review the contributions to the motherland by generations of Chinese students and scholars who have studied overseas."
The exhibition shows four major periods -- the mid to late 19th century, the first half of the 20th century, the latter part between 1949 and 1978, and the period following China's opening-up.
"The history of Chinese people studying overseas has always been closely related to the development of modern Chinese history and the fate of the motherland," said Guo You'an, co-curator of the exhibition, who spent almost a year putting it together with her colleagues.
The exhibits, selected from the museum's collection or on loan from other organizations and individuals from China and abroad, vividly recall the life and work of generations of students and their contribution to the modernization of China.
The Qing government sent the first group of young Chinese students to study in the United States in 1872.
Expected to reinvigorate the declining Qing Dynasty, most of the early students to the United States studied applied sciences and technology such as railway engineering, mining and telecommunications. Among them, Jeme Tien Yow was the first Chinese to design and build a railway in China.
Among the later students sent by the Qing government to study in Britain, Yan Fu (1853-1921) became a leading thinker and translator. A number of students also studied diplomacy in the West and became the earliest diplomats in Chinese history.
The current exhibition includes photos of Yung Wing, Jeme Tien Yow and others and an English letter by Yung to then President of Yale University discussing the plan to send students to the United States.
The second wave of people travelling overseas to study came in the early 20th century after China was defeated by Japan in a war in 1895.
Many Chinese students went to study in Japan. Unlike the earlier Chinese students to the West, many of the Chinese students in Japan studied social sciences and natural sciences. They took an increased interest in politics, law, art and literature, hoping to reform China in ways other than science and technology.
Many of the students later became the backbone of the 1911 Revolution to overthrow the Qing Dynasty and were important members in China's New Culture Movement in the late 1910s. Among them were Li Dazhao (1889-1927), a pioneering Marxist, celebrated author Lu Xun (1881-1936, original name Zhou Shuren), and Guo Moruo (1892-1978), a famous poet and historian.
Between 1909 and the early 1940s, a large number of Chinese students went to study in the United States, Britain and other European countries on government scholarships.
Many of these students later became leading scholars, scientists or government officials. Among the most well known were scholar Hu Shi (1891-1962), who studied at Cornell and Columbia Universities in the United States, and Xu Zhimo (1897-1931), a famous poet who studied at Cambridge University in Britain.
"In addition to photographs and manuscripts by Hu, Xu and others, the fascinating exhibits include a transcript of Wu Mi (1894-1978), a pioneer of comparative literature in China, when he was studying in Harvard University and a shirt of scholar Qian Zhongshu (1910-98) as a student in Oxford University," said Guo.
Nation's Backbone
From the early 1910s to the early 1920s, because of the advocacy of educators such as Cai Yuanpei (1868-1940), who studied in Germany, more than 2,000 Chinese young people went to study and work in France. Many later became leaders of the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Republic of China - including Zhou Enlai (1898-1976) and Deng Xiaoping (1904-97).
In the early 20th century, many officers from the Chinese army were also sent to study in the former Soviet Union and many later became leading revolutionaries in modern Chinese history.
After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, many Chinese students and scholars who studied overseas returned to the motherland and devoted themselves to building New China.
When the Chinese Academy of Sciences was established in 1955, a total of 156 of the 172 academicians in the section of natural science and technological science had studied overseas.
From 1951 to 1978, the Chinese Government sent more than 10,000 students to study in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe although the effort was undermined by endless political interruptions. Together with those who studied in the West before 1949, the students and scholars have played an active role in the construction of New China.
Very few Chinese were able to go and study in West European countries and North America between 1949 and 1979. While West imposed different sanctions against China, China also wrapped itself in a series of political movements, including the devastating "cultural revolution' (1966-76).
It was after the country introduced the reform and opening up policy in the late 1970s that Chinese people were again encouraged to study in the West.
A New Era
Over the past 25 years more than 580,000 Chinese people have studied overseas - the majority of them in Western countries such as the United States. With some of them sponsored by the Chinese Government or other domestic organizations, many have supported themselves with personal or family funding or financial aid from overseas universities and institutions.
"In addition to their remarkable achievements, older generations of Chinese students and scholars who studied overseas impress me most with their love of the motherland and their faithfulness to truth," said Lin Jianghong, a Beijing scholar.
"As pioneers who have introduced modern science, technology and thinking to China, they have turned out to be bridges linking Chinese and Western cultures.
"It is not necessary for younger generations of Chinese to follow their example exactly, but their scientific and patriotic spirits are certainly worth learning from."
(China Daily April 8, 2003)
