The result of the interview was that Wing entered his service and was made a Mandarin of the fifth rank, there being nine degrees of that dignity in the Chinese official system. At this time the great Taiping rebellion was at its height and Tsang Koh Fan was in the field. In fact, the interview had taken place at his camp in Ngankin, on the Yang Tse River. The Viceroy first tendered Wing a military command which, on the score of lack of qualification, he asked leave to decline. He was then, shortly after, 1864, at his own suggestion, despatched abroad to purchase machinery for the manufacture of arms, for which purpose the expenditure of a large sum of money was entrusted to him. On this errand he visited France and England as well as the United States, but finally gave his orders here. On returning with his purchases to China in 1865, what he had done was so satisfactory to his chief that he was advanced to the next higher grade of official rank, viz. —the Fourth. The machinery he had bought was the foundation of the Kiang Nan Arsenal. It is curious to remark that the first work of a man whose supreme ambition it was, from Christian motives, to set his country forward in civilization, should have been the establishment of an arsenal. But it quite consisted with Yung Wing’s ideas, which were intensely patriotic.
From 1865 to 1870 he was variously employed in different places, being under command now of one superior and now of another. Among the work that he did during this period, that of translation was prominent. He translated into Chinese Parson’s Law of Contracts , and a book of English Law. He also translated large portions of Colton’s Geography, deeming that geographical knowledge was as likely to prove beneficial to his countrymen as any.
But the thing that lay nearest his heart and that was continually before him, was the question of how to accomplish the plan he had so many