Tracing Grandpa's dream

Other facts of the educational mission

At 19, Yung Wing followed an American priest to the United States in 1847 and became the first Chinese to graduate from a US university - Yale in 1854. He proposed in 1868 to send young Chinese to study in the US.

Tang Shaoyi, the first premier of the Republic of China (1911-1949), was one of the Chinese students to study in Hartford and later Columbia University.

Among the 22 Chinese "boy students" who studied at Yale University, two refused to return to China in 1881 and managed to graduate from Yale; two left China again for the university and obtained their degrees.

In 2006, a science teacher at New York University, Liel Leibovitz, and his wife first saw photographs on TV of young Chinese boys standing on the Yale University campus in the 1870s. He returned to China many times to trace the history, and co-authored a book with Matthew Miller about their story: Fortunate Sons.