Explore the vast range of titles available.

In 1866, after the Opium Wars, the Chinese official Zuo Zongtang established the Foochow Navy Yard, which aimed to facilitate the independent construction of modern warships. French advisers, engineers, teachers, and craftsmen were hired, and a series of French schools for naval construction, drawing, and apprenticeship were set up. Previous studies have nearly exhausted the historical material on the Foochow Navy Yard, but few of them give an exact evaluation on its shipbuilding and educational levels. This paper traces the French sources on the shipbuilding technology and educational system at the Foochow Navy Yard and conducts a comparative study. With the guidance and assistance of foreigners, the Foochow Navy Yard gained the ability to assemble ships and imitate engines, while it remained necessary to import design drawings and structural components. The most outstanding students that the navy yard nurtured may have reached the level of École Polytechnique graduates, but the quality of students was hard to maintain. The backwardness of its conceptualization and the lack of financial and political support also contributed to its decline.

AS A WORK OF INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, this book argues that the things Buddhists said about science were historically contingent. That is, Buddhists’ decisions to discuss what they discussed, when they discussed them, were deeply influenced by the times in which they found themselves. That in the 1890s some literati looked for similarities between what they were learning from modern science and what they read in the Buddhist canon, for example, was part of a broader movement to find Chinese origins for the Western learning then being embraced by the Chinese literati as a whole. History also explains why the most

The Chinese Educational Mission (CEM) to the United States in the 1870s was a transnational undertaking and was the first and the most ambitious of the four study abroad programs that the Qing government launched in the late nineteenth century. However, it is often considered a failed venture because the program was cut short in midstream. Even if CEM had not been shortened, the returned students would not have revolutionized Chinese society because self-strengthening was never intended to transform China. Its aims were to borrow the superior technology of the West in order to protect the cultural essence of the Confucian order. The students were very unhappy because their talents were not better utilized. Some of the students went back to the United States, finished their studies, settled there, and were among the founding members of the emergent Chinese American community.

This chapter discusses the history of the Chinese Educational Mission (CEM) in the United States (1872–1881). It states that the CEM was a project of the late Qing government, in which 120 boys were sent to live and study in New England for an extended period of time. It explains that the mission was an early initiative of the Self-Strengthening Movement (1861–1895). It clarifies that the CEM was not the only study abroad program that China carried out during that time — but it was both the earliest and the largest one. However, during that time, these 120 students were not the only Chinese living there. By 1870, over 63,000 Chinese were living in the United States. The chapter notes that both the large concentration of Chinese on the west coast, the importation of Chinese strikebreakers to the east coast, and the study abroad program was generally regarded as politically and culturally suspicious.