CHINESE TRAVEL TO AMERICA.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Cabinet cards showing the scholar Ko K'un-hua and his children. A rare photograph of the first instructor of Chinese at Harvard, a well-known example of travel against the west-to-east grain. Ko brought with him from China the books that would form the basis of the Harvard-Yenching library. We can trace only a handful of these cabinet cards in commerce.In the late 1870s, Harvard decided to offer Chinese classes to prepare undergraduates for lucrative, but demanding, careers in the Chinese customs service. After the university raised $8,750 to finance a lectureship, Harvard graduates in China, including Edward Drew and H. B. Morse, searched for a suitable candidate, settling on Drew's former Chinese tutor from Ningbo. Ko (1838-1882, also romanized as Ge Kunhua) arrived at Harvard in September 1879, taking as his first student George Lane, Pope Professor of Latin, in return for Lane teaching him English. "The few remaining photographs of Ko reveal a dignified middle-aged man in the long, high-necked, heavy garments of a scholar-official of the Qing dynasty" (Harvard Magazine). Ko remained in Cambridge until his sudden death from pneumonia in 1882, following which Harvard paid for his family's return to China. His appointment was far ahead of its time: the university did not restore Chinese to the curriculum for another four decades.Ko was accompanied to the US by his six children, five of whom are shown in the second cabinet card, although only the names of the sons, Ge Zhong a

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