A chance meeting in Paris, a hurried telegram from New York, and a cross-country sprint by the father of Chinese geology helped secure Wisconsin’s role in training a generation of China’s most prominent geologists. The story of Ding Wenjiang and the five young geologists he sent to the University of Wisconsin in the 1920s lays bare the critical role played by the University of Wisconsin in aiding the development of Chinese science in the twentieth century. But the tragic end of Xie Jiarong, the first of the Chinese students to matriculate from the UW’s geology department, also reveals the wobbly tightrope and the yawning chasm below it that Chinese students trained in the United States had to walk after Mao Zedong rose to power.
Between China and Science Hall
In the summer of 1919, China’s most prominent geologist, Ding Wenjiang (who referred to himself in English as V. K. Ting), crossed paths with Charles Kenneth Leith, then chair of the University of Wisconsin’s Geology Department. Both were attending the Paris Peace Conference.1 Leith was part of President Woodrow Wilson’s negotiating team helping to establish the terms of peace in war-torn Europe, while Ding was there as an observer with a delegation of prominent Chinese intellectuals. We do not have a record of their conversation in Paris, but it is clear that Leith made a profound impression on the Chinese geologist. Ding was planning a trip to the United States later that summer, and the two agreed to meet again on American soil.
One of the first things that Ding did after arriving in New York on August 11, 1919, fresh off his twelve-day voyage from Europe, was to send an urgent telegram to Leith in Madison. “Just arrived from Paris. Anxious to see you. Please wire St. Regis Hotel to arrange a meeting,” he wrote.2 When Ding learned that Leith was not in Madison, but in Montana testifying with a team of geologists in a mining litigation case, Ding made plans to travel to meet him there. Leith responded with enthusiasm on August 15, saying, “I am very glad to learn that we may see you here.… We are all held here for probably two weeks more.”3 A week later, writing from the Douglass House hotel in Houghton, Michigan, where he was touring the Quincy copper mine, Ding plaintively closed a letter to Leith, “I am praying every night before going to bed that all of you … will still be in Butte when I arrive.”4 Ding arrived at Butte’s Silver Bow Inn on August 28, only to find he had missed Leith by two days.
But his effort was not in vain. Ding had arrived in the United States with the aim of gaining a clearer understanding of the American mining industry in order to help jump-start China’s own. Leith had hoped to accompany him for part of the trip—in the same letter he told Ding that he was “sorry indeed not to be able to take you personally through the Lake Superior country.” Instead, he furnished Ding with letters of introduction to mining contacts in Duluth On his six-week trip, Ding toured mining operations and geological sites, from the vast copper and iron ranges along the shores of Lake Superior to the massive Berkeley Pit copper mine in Butte, Montana. From Butte, Ding would head southwest to Yellowstone National Park, the Grand Canyon, and the copper mines scattered in the hills around Bisbee, Arizona, before heading to San Francisco, where he boarded a ship returning to China.
