L. Newton Hayes

Luther Newton Hayes was born on April 19, 1883, in Soochow (now Suzhou), China, the son of American missionaries. He studied in the United States, earning a B.S. from Wooster College in 1905 and an M.A. from Princeton University in 1907.

He then returned to China, where he worked as an English tutor to the grandsons of Li Hung Chang and spent much of the next twenty-five years with the YMCA, including work in Tientsin, Nanking, and Chengdu. That long experience gave him a deep familiarity with Chinese language and culture, which shaped his writing.

Hayes is best known for The Chinese Dragon (1922) and The Great Wall of China (1929). Archival records at Yale describe him as the creator of hand-tinted lantern slides of the Great Wall and note that he later worked in the United States as well. A confirmed portrait image was not available from the sources I could verify, so no profile image is included.