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TIN-YUKE CHAR
To identify Li Sun's name as written in Chinese characters and to gather more information on this interesting person, a letter was written to Hamilton College on April 8, 1975. A reply from the President's office said, “A search of our records revealed that Li Sun (listed as Chan Lai Sun in our files) attended Hamilton College for two years, in 1846-48. He was awarded the honorary degree of Master of Arts during his visit to the College in 1873 [as a member of the Chinese Educational Mission]." Frank K. Lorenz, Reference Librarian at Hamilton, also wrote, "Unfortunately we cannot determine what Chan's full name was in Chinese. We have a dozen letters from him, under the letter head of the Chinese Educational Commission, but they are entirely in English (very fluent and colloquial English at that) and are all signed "Chan Laisun."
Thus began the search for Chan Laisun's name in Chinese.
Yung Wing, a commissioner of the Chinese Educational Mission in 1873 made this report: "The educational commission was to consist of two commissioners, Chin [Ch'en] Lan Pin [ ] and myself. Chin Lan Pin's duty was to see that the students keep up their knowledge of Chinese while in America; my duty was to look after their foreign education and to find suitable homes for them. Chin Lan Pin and myself were to look after their expenses conjointly. Two Chinese teachers were provided to keep up their studies in Chinese, and an interpreter was provided for the Commission. Yeh Shu Tung [***] and Yung Yune Foo [***] were the Chinese teachers and Tsang Lai Sun was the interpreter.” He was most likely selected because he had been educated in English and was familiar with the Chinese dialects of the Southern maritime provinces from where most of the students were chosen by Yung Wing who was himself from the Heung Shan (now Chung Shan) district of Kwangtung.
Tsang Lai Sun was identified with the Chinese characters 曾蘭生 (Tseng Lan-sheng in kuo-yu pronunciation) in the Chinese translation of Yung Wing's book. Thus, it appears that this Tsang Lai Sun was the same person as Chan Lai Sun as listed in Hamilton College records and also Li Sun who met the Hawaiian King.
Chan wrote in a letter to Professor Edward North of Springfield, Massachusetts, that he would be enclosing a family photograph about which Mr. Lorenz wrote on July 30, 1976, “..
we cannot