A portrait of Yale graduate Yung Wing, Class of 1854 -- the first person from China to graduate from an American university -- was unveiled by President Richard C. Levin and Zhang Hongxi, consul general of China, in a ceremony May 5 in a garden of the President's House on Hillhouse Ave.
The portrait of Yung Wing, painted by New Haven resident Judith Reeve, is based on a lithograph of Yung in his Yale class book. It was commissioned by the Yale-China Association with contributions from members of the Yung family, United Technologies Corporation and other individuals.
"We at Yale are proud that the first Chinese student to receive a baccalaureate degree in this country attended our university," said Levin. "And we are proud of the thousands of outstanding Chinese students and scholars who have followed him and contributed so much to the life of the University. Some three or four hundred Chinese students and visiting scholars now study at Yale each year, constituting our largest contingent of foreign students and scholars."
Frank Yung, a grandson of Yung Wing who flew in from Hong Kong for the ceremony, said of his grandfather, "Yung Wing's vision is well known. He wanted to see China catch up on the Western nations through the modern sciences. He wanted it possible for the rising generations in China to receive the same level of education he had received in the U.S. Ching Dynasty China needed a reform in education."
Yung Wing was born in 1828 in a small village in Guangdong province. He received his early education in a missionary school in Macao under the tutelage of a Yale graduate, the Reverend Samuel Robbins Brown. Yung accompanied Brown to the United States in 1847, where he enrolled in the Monson Academy and later at Yale College.
After his return to China, Yung Wing engaged in various projects to promote China's modernization, most notably the sending of 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.
-- By Thomas Violante
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