This study centers on the careers of Chinese economists who undertook graduate study in the West up to 1950. Some sixteen hundred of them are tracked in the author’s database. Of that number, roughly three-quarters studied in the United States. About 10 percent elected to study in Britain, while 8 percent chose Germany and 7 percent went to France. The flow of students to the West began as a trickle—initially fed largely by the fifteen missionary colleges in China—in the early years of the twentieth cen- tury. The Chinese state universities soon caught up and came to dominate the total flow westward during the period under investigation.