Mrs. A. T. Mills (Mei Naide) teaching a deaf child in her private school, 1902Mrs. A. T. Mills (Mei Naide) teaching a deaf child in her private school, 1902
Yantai, Shandong Province
Photograph by C. H. Graves
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LOT 11666, Location G
Annette Thompson was a teacher at the Western New York Institution for Deaf Mutes in Rochester, New York, when she met Reverend Dr. Charles Mills, a missionary who had recently returned from Chefoo (Yantai). She accompanied him to Shandong Province in 1884, and in 1887 founded the first documented institution for the deaf in China. It still exists as the Yantai Special Education School.