Annetta Thompson Mills

Annetta Thompson Mills was an American Presbyterian missionary and educator who founded the first known formal school for deaf children in China in 1887, the Chefoo School for the Deaf, which later became the Yantai Deaf Centre School. Working in a country with no established tradition of deaf education, she adapted the Lyon Phonetic Manual's fingerspelling system to represent the phonetic forms of Chinese characters, and in 1908 she published what is understood to be the first Chinese fingerspelling textbook, giving teachers and students a shared written system for signed Chinese for the first time. Beyond the school itself, Mills trained teachers who went on to found further schools for the deaf in other parts of China, so that her original institution became a source of trained staff and teaching method for a wider network of deaf education across the country rather than a single isolated project.