After arriving in China in 1946, Shirley Wood devoted her life to teaching and providing westerners an insight into her adopted homeland, Mo Jingxi and Robin Gilbank report

In the early hours of April 7, Shirley Wood passed away aged 96.

Born in Arkansas in the United States in 1925, Wood became a Chinese citizen in 1975 and had dedicated her life to education at Henan University located in Kaifeng, Henan province. The Chinese Ambassador to the United States Qin Gang called her "A true exemplar of China-US friendship".

Wood was one of the few surviving individuals of overseas extraction who could draw upon extensive recollections of the country both before and after 1949.

Her interest in China was first piqued at the age of thirteen by reading Red Star Over China by Edgar Snow, the first Western journalist to interview late Chinese leader Mao Zedong.

A few years later Wood enrolled at Michigan State Agricultural College, where she met the visiting Chinese microbiologist Huang Yuanbo.

Huang and Wood fell in love and were married at Christmas 1945 with an intention to return and settle in his homeland.