THE REV. JOSEPH HOPKINS TWICHELL: A CELEBRATION                              STORY 4

Rising Power in the East:
Joe Twichell, Mark Twain and the Chinese Educational Mission, 1872-81                     

The Rev. Joseph Hopkins Twichell rose before an audience of Yale Law School students on a spring day in 1878 and told them of a novel educational experiment going on in Connecticut’s capital city, 30 miles to the north. “A visitor to the city of Hartford at the present time,” he said, “will be likely to meet on the streets groups of Chinese boys in their native dress, though somewhat modified, and speaking their native tongue, yet seeming, withal, to be very much at home.” Twichell was intimately familiar with these boys, with their teachers, and with the Chinese Educational Mission, which had arrived in his city six years before.

Twichell, 39 when he spoke at Yale, had grown up in a small crossroads town in southern Connecticut. Throughout his life, he had had the small town boy’s fascination with things exotic – a poetic, rebellious theologian named Horace Bushnell; a brilliant, trigger-happy college classmate named Edward Carrington; and his murderous, political Civil War commander, Daniel Sickles, who was brave as a lion. And then there was his friendship with Samuel Clemens, whom he always addressed as “Mark” On the day Twichell spoke to the future lawyers at Yale, Clemens was in New York, about to embark with his family to Europe, where Twichell would join him that summer for the Tramp Abroad excursion.

The minister’s love for exoticism had almost led him into the missionary life. Shortly after he became pastor of Hartford’s Asylum Hill Congregational Church in 1865, Twichell and his new wife Julia Harmony considered becoming missionaries themselves. They decided against it. But after the Chinese Educational Mission came to Hartford in 1872, Twichell wrote in his journal, “Lo, God has brought the work to my very door.”

Whatever role God had had in it, a prime mover for the educational mission had been another friend of Twichell’s: Yung Wing. Yung was 10 years older than Twichell. He had been brought to the United States by a missionary and was educated at Yale, he conceived the idea of bringing other Chinese students to America. “I was determined that the rising generation of China should enjoy the same educational advantages that I had,” he wrote, “that through western education China might be regenerated, become enlightened and powerful.”

It took a decade and a half, but eventually he found sympathetic ears in some prime movers and shakers of the Qing dynasty, including the Viceroy Li Honzhang, who wanted to see China modernize after some humiliating defeats dealt by European powers. When his proposal was accepted, Yung wrote, he was “treading on clouds and walking on air.” On August 11, 1872, 30 boys aged 12 to 15 set sail with teachers and a translator toward San Francisco, there to take the new transcontinental railroad for New England. Ninety more were to arrive in three subsequent “detachments.” Their parents had been required to let them stay in America for 15 years.

The boys boarded in pairs in homes in Connecticut and Massachusetts, attending local schools. Once a year they would convene at the mission headquarters in Hartford to keep up their Chinese and their Confucianism.

There were obvious reasons for putting the mission in Hartford. It had a central location. Yung had long been friends with educators at the Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb there. But Clara Day Capron, a child living in the neighborhood in the 1870s, recalled in the 1950s that it was Yung’s meeting and subsequent friendship with Twichell that convinced him to put the headquarters of the mission there.

By 1874, the third detachment of 30 students were on their way, bringing the total to 90, and Yung had obtained authorization to construct a new building for the mission headquarters in Hartford at a cost of $75,000. Yung hailed its construction as a sign of the commitment Li and others in China were making.

Twichell became a sort of liaison to the students. He fed the Chinese boys on venison and bear meat and led them on autumn hikes of eight miles out, eight miles back, to an observation tower on a mountain near Hartford. They formed a baseball team, “The Orientals. “ The Clemenses held at least one neighborhood reception for Yung at 351 Farmington Avenue. At one point, Joe and Harmony, their 8-year-old son pulling their infant daughter in a wagon, visited the mission’s translator, Kwong Ki Chiu [Kuang Qizhao], his wife and young son. “It was an interesting sight to see the mothers meet, each armed with her offspring, and female curiosity dilating their eyes.,” Twichell wrote. “…There were various touches of nature on hand to make us all seem kin.”

In 1874, the Chinese government asked Yung, who had quasi-diplomatic status, to study the condition of Chinese workers in Peru. He invited Twichell and Yung’s future brother-in-law, Dr. E.W. Kellogg, to accompany him. Yung was outraged by the squalid conditions he found, and his report helped end Peru’s infamous “coolie” trade. Twichell described surreptitious interviews with frightened laborers and a dramatic railroad journey through the Andes, as well as Yung’s statement that he would give up his impending marriage to devote his life to the cause of China. This amused Twichell, being pronounced in the presence of the bride-to-be’s brother. It was on this trip that Twichell had the coincidental encounter with Captain Ned Wakeman – “Captain Stormfield” -- whom Clemens had met on shipboard in 1866, and whose life and tales were one of the writer’s lifelong admirations.

By 1876, after the fourth detachment of 30 students had brought the total to 120, the fame of the mission had spread beyond New England. In the summer, President Ulysses S. Grant shook the hand of each Chinese student as they visited the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. The same year, Yung was named Associate Minister to the United States and promoted to a mandarin of the second rank. At the suggestion of Twichell, a member of the Yale Corporation, the university granted Yung an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

Huang Zunxian, a Chinese poet and diplomat, wrote about the mission in an 1881 poem called “The Closure of the Educational Mission in America,” drawing a fanciful picture of the boys’ lives:

Many have lost themselves in the environment.
They step on a thousand flowers in the red carpet;
They look out of four windows framed with green glass;
They ride on golden-reined horses to marble-pillared palaces;
They feast off silver platters and drink from ever-brimming cups.

This was poetic license. The boys lived in the wood-frame homes of middle-class New Englanders – ministers, teachers, doctors. But they lived a life different from anything their parents dreamed of. A classmate at Hartford Public High School, William Lyon Phelps, recalled that at dances and receptions “the fairest and most sought-out belles invariably gave the swains of the Orient preference.” Elsie Yung, Yung Wing’s granddaughter, told me how, when she was a girl in Shanghai, her father’s ex-Mission friends would tell her, “I used to dance with Mark Twain’s daughters.”
But Anti-Chinese agitation in California, which Twichell called a “worked-up irrational furor kindling by contagion,” was festering out of economic depression and racism. And some Chinese officials began to wonder just what the Chinese boys were learning in America.

On May 8, 1877, Twichell related in his journal: “One of the Chinese pupils asked me (privately) how he should be a Christian. Another came to me with the same inquiry less than a week ago. The Lord give me wisdom for these great occasions.” The freedoms allowed American children made an impression. One of the boys, Yung Kwai, wrote years later “A bird born in captivity can not indeed appreciate the sweet odor of the woods; but let it once have free space to exercise its wings, off it flies to where natural instinct leads.”

For all his breadth of outlook and hatred of bigotry, Twichell believed firmly in what he called unabashedly “the conversion of the world.” He saw the Chinese students’ souls in need of salvation. When the wife of a Chinese mission official died, he spoke disparagingly of the ceremony: “Incense, prostration, the reading of a memoir in praise of the dead. …It seemed sad to think that she probably received not one real ray of Gospel Light, i.e. by spoken word, the three years she lived among us.”

In 1880, a new commissioner arrived at the mission: Wu Jiashin. From all accounts, Wu was shocked at the Americanization of the boys. Huang Zunxian wrote:

Then came the new Principal, Mr. Wu,
and his associate, who were fond of showing bureaucratic powers
And who said, “These are runaway horses’;
We have to bridle them before we can ride them.”
… The Principal rose up in a rage
And panted like an air pump made of bamboo.

But Wu was not the only villain of the piece. The California anti-Chinese agitation led Congress to consider severely limiting immigration and denying the Chinese citizenship. In 1879, President Rutherford B. Hayes vetoed the first attempt at such a law. “I knew the President would veto that infamous Chinese bill,” Clemens wrote. Twichell took up Chinese cause before the American Missionary Association: “It is one of the most humiliating confessions that can be made, to say that these people cannot be granted room on our soil, with liberty and justice under our laws, with safety to ourselves.” He took special notice of the virulently anti-Chinese Sen. James G. Blaine of Maine. This aspect of Blaine may have figured as prominently as his personal corruption in sending Clemens and Twichell down the Mugwump road in 1884. That year they opposed Blaine, by then their beloved Republican Party’s presidential candidate.

In the spring of 1880 came news from Springfield: Yung Kwai, the student who was later to write of birds and captivity, had been ordered to the Hartford mission headquarters from Springfield High School, where he was due to graduate as salutatorian of his class. “His being summoned to the Mission had been in consequence of a letter he had written to his father announcing his conversion to Christianity…on his arrival he had been loaded with reproaches by the officials and shut up to live on bread and water till he should recant,” Twichell wrote in his journal. Yung Wing kept a low profile, asking Twichell to intervene. “So I went over to the mission, and …I had a long and ‘sweetly reasonable’ conference with the new commissioner [Wu Jiashin], which resulted in the revocation of the order, and the return of the boy to Springfield.”

But soon after graduation, and after he had passed the entrance examination for Harvard, Yung Kwai was ordered to return to China. Yung Wing secretly offered to pay Yung Kwai’s college expenses -- $700 a year – if he could contrive to stay in the country. The only conditions were that the student would repay the money when he could, and offer his services to the Chinese government when he graduated. Again, Yung deputized Twichell to make the proposal, which Yung and another student accepted. They went into hiding, later emerging to enter Yale.

Yung Kwai remained bitter. He wrote later: “When [Wu Jiashin] was appointed head commissioner, the fate of the mission was sealed …What else could have been expected from a man brought up to shut his eyes to everything not Chinese for fear that his relish for the dry husks of Confucian classics might be spoiled thereby?”

All through 1880 correspondence about the mission circulated among Wu, Li and Chen Lanbin, the Chinese Minister in Washington , with Yung occasionally getting in a word. In October, sensing danger, Yung asked Twichell to draw up a circular supporting the mission to be signed by the presidents of major American colleges. Twichell’s position as a member of the Yale Corporation, and his friendship with Yale President Noah Porter, enabled him to get this together quickly and forward it to the American Minister in China, who passed it on to Li. But in December, Yung wrote to Twichell that “Woo’s representations of the students together with the new treaty concerning Chinese immigration & the howl of the Pacific coast against Chinese all contributed to disgust Li & he has finally to my utter sorrow decided to give up the scheme.” But in a letter four days later, he proposed the idea of getting a world-class celebrity to sign the circular: Ulysses S. Grant.

In the late 1870s, Grant had recouped the prestige he had lost during his corruption-ridden presidency. He was still the victor of Appomattox. During a much-publicized around-the-world trip, he had traveled to China. There, flags and bunting covered junks and gongs joined with guns firing salutes. Americans admired Li Hongzhang as the “Bismarck of the East,” and when he stepped forward to meet Grant he said: “You and I, General Grant, are the greatest men in the world.”
Yung told Twichell that Grant would be at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York on Dec. 17. He enclosed a check for $20 to pay for Twichell’s travel expenses. “I had served under Gen. Grant in the army, but was personally, quite unknown to him.

How could I dare?” Twichell wrote.

Fortunately, Twichell had connections, and in this case a big one: Twichell’s neighbor and tramping companion, “Mark,” had begun the acquaintance with Grant that was to lead to his publishing the general’s memoirs.

Clemens wrote to Grant immediately, describing “the nature of the errand we were coming on, and enclosed to him a copy of my Lecture on the Mission,” Twichell related.

Dec. 21st we were at the Fifth Avenue Hotel betimes in the morning, were received most kindly by Gen. Grant, who launched out in as free and flowing a talk as I ever heard, marked by broad, intelligent and benevolent views, on the subject of China, her wants, disadvantages, &c. Now and then he asked a question, but kept the lead of the conversation. At last he proposed of his own accord to write a letter to [Li Hongzhang], advising the continuance of the Mission, asking only that I would prepare him some notes giving him points to go by.

Clemens described the meeting in a letter to Howells.

Well, it was very funny. Joe had been sitting up nights building facts & arguments together into a mighty and unassailable array, & had studied them and got them by heart … but Grant took in the whole situation in a jiffy & before Joe had more than fairly got started, the old man said “I’ll write the Viceroy a letter – a separate letter – & bring strong reasons to bear upon him; I know him well, and what I have to say will have weight with him… So all Joe’s laborious hours were for naught!

In a letter from Yung Wing pasted into Twichell’s journal, dated Dec. 30, Yung was pessimistic. “If the greatest general of the age, & the whole weight of American learning and Christian character are not heeded and their advice, then I say let China go to the dogs.” For two months Yung and Twichell were in suspense, then, in a March 10, 1881, letter marked “Strictly Confidential,” Yung wrote Twichell:

General Grant’s letter has done its work. Viceroy’s telegram to Woo instructs him not to return to China with the students at present but to consult Minister Chen. Chen & I are one in this matter. He would never allow it to be broken up.…You see how your hand is felt in this matter? And the Lord is guiding you. I think the Mission has passed its most critical crisis. Could you go over & see your friend Mr. Clemens and tell him confidentially what good he is capable of doing.

In fact, Chen had washed his hands of the matter, claiming infirmity and a desire to retire. In a letter of March 29 to the Foreign Office Li wrote:

While I was still pondering the matter there came a letter from the American Ex-President, General Grant, and another from the American Minister, Mr. Angell, the latter enclosing a copy of a public letter from the chief teachers in American colleges. All these communications state that our students have made considerable progress, that to recall them before their reaching the goal would be regrettable, and that it might injure American pride.

He requested that the office order Chen and Yung to cooperate with Wu: “Thus, Mr. Chen will find it difficult to evade longer, Mr. Yung will find it impossible to be openly obdurate, and Mr. Wu will of course be cooperative.”
Unaware of this tangled skein, Yung was optimistic enough to turn his attention to another matter he thought Grant could help him with – the idea of getting United States capital and expertise behind a new railroad project in China, to head off English efforts. This bit of insidership led to Clemens’ making another trip to New York, this time with Yung Wing, where they met with one of Grant’s business associates. “Y.W. being there could throw the building of the roads into American hands,” Twain wrote in his journal. “Remember, [Li Hongzhang] knows Y.W. personally, and is his puissant friend.”

By July, though, the Hartford papers were reporting that the mission was in danger. Yung stopped by Twichell’s house to reassure him, but Twichell was unconvinced; his doubts were confirmed two days later, on July 9. “Another dispatch from China received yesterday removes all doubt,” he wrote. “The Mission is doomed.”

More than half the students were by now either admitted to or attending college. “It is a thing to break one’s heart,” Twichell wrote. “…The boys, poor fellows, are many of them greatly distressed, seeing the infelicity, on all accounts, of such an issue. May God bless them with true brave hearts to meet whatever is before them.”

Huang Zunxian wrote:

One hundred wretchedly unhappy boys,
Each and every one had to be sent home.
It was as if a melon field had been raked up by the vines and roots;
Oh! So many were crushed.

Twichell was out of town and not able to see their train off from Hartford in August. As they traveled westward, one student wrote a postcard to the Twichells from Council Bluffs, Iowa. “I am glad that you were not at the depot to see us off, for it was the most effecting sight I ever saw.”

Ahead of them was a fairly dreary welcome in Shanghai. But they were to become statesmen, naval officers, railway builders, interpreters and mining engineers. Some were able to return to the United States and finish their studies. Yung Kwai graduated from Yale in 1884 and spent the rest of his life attached to the Chinese legation in Washington and other diplomatic posts. Yung Wing spent time in both the United States and China in business and political ventures until the Hundred Days Reforms of 1898. Supporting this movement, he had to flee to Hong Kong when the Empress Dowager suppressed it. There he got a rude shock: When he approached the U.S. Consul he discovered that he was no longer considered a U.S. citizen. The Chinese Exclusion Act, which had finally become law in 1882, denied citizenship to people of Chinese birth – though he had been a citizen since 1852. Yung made his way back to America nonetheless, and died in Hartford in 1912.

Twichell maintained his interest in “the boys,” entertaining them as visitors in his home in later years and joining Yung Wing on the lecture platform. He excoriated the Chinese Exclusion Acts. “That rising power in the East, with a great future before it, has a memory, and we shall have to pay, in the event, for the liberties we have taken with it.”

Note on names: In general, I have used Mandarin pronunciation and pinyin transcription for Qing dynasty officials and Cantonese and Wade-Giles for Yung Wing himself and the students; these are the names by which the latter were generally known in the United States. Thanks to Dr. Edward Rhoads of the University of Texas for bringing some errors to my attention. © 2003 Steve Courtney

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