Yung Wing

This is a very interesting memoir, written by a man who saw, and helped foster, the beginnings of his country's transformation.

Yung Wing (�nyûûû) was born in the south of China, near Macao, and had the good luck to enter one of the few missionary schools in China the time. Although his grades were mixed, his English was good enough for him to receive a sponsorship and travel to Yale, the first Chinese student to ever travel to an American university.

After his college years, he spent a brief stretch of time wondering what to do with his life, as many students tend to do. He worked as a clerk and as a translator for American missionaries.

Then the Taiping Rebellion broke out.

The biography does an interesting sketch of this period. Rebellions were not new in China, he dryly remarks, and decides to find a way to earn a living in this time. Based on his education, he first offered to join as an adviser to the new Heavenly Kingdom, but they rejected all his proposals and gave him a nice title for his time (û~i, now ûyû). He notes that although the rebellion was tinged with Christian rhetoric, he instead asserts that it was a reactionary backlash at the internal corruption and weakness of the government from foreign influence as much as anything else. Hence their ban on opium.

After a setting up a little tea import/export business, his education and prestige brought him to the attention of Zeng Guofan (Tsang Kwoh Fan in the book) (EE¾EE½EE©), the general who was instrumental in defeating the Taiping Rebellion and restoring something like order. Yung Wing proposed the purchase and import from America of various machine tools to China for manufacturing their own small arms and naval weapons, and Zeng was impressed and sent him t… (altro)