Kin Yamei

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Kin Yamei (1864–1934) was a Chinese-born doctor, educator, and nutrition expert who helped introduce tofu to the United States. She was born in Ningbo, China, and became an orphan at age two during a cholera outbreak. She was adopted by American missionaries who encouraged her to learn Chinese, English, and other languages. She studied medicine at the Women’s Medical College of the New York Infirmary, graduating at the top of her class in 1885, and she also studied in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., while learning photography.

From 1890 to 1894 she ran a hospital for women and children in Kobe, Japan, and later worked at a women’s hospital and nurse-training program in Tianjin. In 1907 she founded the Northern Medical School for Women at Zhili. She lectured in the United States about Chinese culture, women, and medicine, and wrote articles about Honolulu’s Chinatown and about soybeans. During World War I she worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture on soybeans and helped introduce tofu to American scientists. She married Hippolytus Laesola Amador Eca da Silva in 1894, but they divorced in 1904; their son Alexander, born in 1895, died in 1918 while serving in World War I. Kin Yamei later returned to China and died in Beijing in 1934 from pneumonia, at about age 70. She was also known as Chin Ya-mei, Jin Yunmei, or Y. May King.