Zhang Kangren was the only lawyer out of all Boy Students. This is the only picture we found about of him. Shortly after he was summoned home in the middle of his studies at Yale, he returned to the U.S. with help from friends. With a law degree from Columbia University in New York, he was became the first officially licensed Chinese lawyer.

The longest-living Chinese student wais Kuang Rongguang, a mining engineer. He , was born in 1862 and died at 103 years of age in 1965.

Mr Hinners is the only descendant of the American host families we got in touch so far. His great grandfather, Gardner, used to bewas a prominent architect in Springfield, Connecticut, and was the chief designer and supervisor for the building which housed of the Chinese Educational Mission.

The Gardner family used tohad housed Tang Shaoyi and three other Chinese students, and this connection lasted more than half a century. During the 1960s when the Sino-US relations froze, it was broken. Following the visit of President Nixon to China in 1972, Mr Hinners managed to find the postal address of Manli, his aunt Helen's childhood friend, and finally got through to Tang Hongguang, a descendant of Tang Shaoyi.

After his retirement in 1985, Mr Hinners as the only Gardener, interested in this part of the family history, went to China to gather those lost stories about the relationship between these two families. As a result, Mr Hinners published had hisa book "Tang Shaoyi and His Family" about the published interesting episodes between the two families over the last century.

On the Christmas of 2002, we met with a descendant of Rong Hong.

On April 20, 1912, Rong Hong passed away in Hartford, Connecticut at age 78. He was buried at the Cedar Hill Cemetery. Upon his graduation from Yale 57 years earlier, he had made such a vow. "The rising generation of China should enjoy the same educational advantages that I have enjoyed; so that through western education China might be regenerated, and become enlightened and powerful."

Rong Hong has passed on, and so, too, have the other Boy Students. All the happiness, dismay, departures, and reunions that these Boy Students went through simply mirrored the same dramatic journey that an ancient nation had undertaken in order to survive. The Boy Students were the first explorers in a wilderness of the unknown. They were the first sailors across an the ocean of turmoil. They laughed, they cried, they failed, and they succeeded. The history they witnessed and created more than a century ago was once forgotten, and is now being rediscovered.

Editor:Ge Ting