In 1850, Yung Wing--who had been brought to the U.S with returning missionaries--entered Yale as a freshman. (see post one.)
Four years later, Yung Wing returned to China. His time in the U.S. had so affected him (including the football) that he called on the court, proposing that China should send students to America to learn. The court finally agreed, and in the summer of 1872, sent 30 young men to Connecticut.
"There would be 120 of them, shipped to America over the course of four years, with 30 boys arriving annually. They would remain stateside for fifteen years. If they came back proven leaders, the program would be expanded dramatically to include as the empire could afford to send." (pg. 85, Fortunate Sons)
If this program occurred in a vacuum, perhaps it might have flourished. But the Qing government was corrupt, there were naysayers from the beginning, AND the U.S. started experiencing a wave of anti-Chinese sentiment.
"American politicians, eager to throw red meat at their constituents, were no longer bound by an international treaty (Burlingame) to allow the Chinese to settle in the United States, and the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act was not long in coming. In 1881, a bill was put forth in the U.S. Senate to ban all Chinese immigration for the next twenty years. Senator John F Miller of California who sponsored the proposed law, declared that the Chinese were 'inhabitants of another planet,' poisoning a country once 'resonant with the sweet voices of flaxen-haired children' with the 'gangrene of their oriental civilization.' His bill, enacted as law in 1882, marked the first ime in American history that people were forbidden from entering the country on the basis of their nationality." (pg. 157)
Fortunate Sons by Liel Lieibovitz and Matthew Miller
(To be continued. Next: Young men called back to China and Arrested.)
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