Wu Hongyu (Woo Hoong Niok) 1834-1919

Woo enrolled at the Episcopal missionary boarding school in Shanghai in 1850, and was baptized at the age of fifteen. But he left the school after a change in the administration structure and was employed on one of the frigates in the Perry Expedition in 1854, and sailed for the US where he spent the next nine years. In 1860, he was naturalized as an American citizen and enlisted as a private in the Northern Army during the American Civil War. Woo returned to Shanghai in 1864. From 1866 he devoted his energies to a clinic established by the church, and took up pastoral duties in the churches he established in the 1870s and 1880s in parts of Shanghai and Jiangsu province. He also proposed setting up a home for the destitute, and personally managed its affairs after the project materialized in 1907. He died in 1919.

         close