The Council's schools: from a Eurasian orphanage to fifteen municipal schools, 1870–1932

The short answer. The Municipal Council of the International Settlement came to education late, by the back door, and on its own terms. It began in 1882 by refusing a Eurasian orphan school that Thomas Hanbury wanted to give it, and giving it a grant instead; it took over a foreign school in 1893 because the ratepayers would not pay to buy its site; it built its first school for Chinese boys in 1904 with money the Chinese community subscribed; and in 1911 it set down the rule it kept for twenty years, that it “had no absolute duty” to educate anyone, and should aim at “the model training of a limited number” of Chinese boys rather than at schooling the Settlement’s hundred thousand Chinese children. By 1932 it had fifteen schools, 6,200 pupils and an education budget of 1.4 million taels, and had promised two new Chinese primary schools a year. The reports in which it counted the pupils and the taels also record, in the Council’s own words and its critics’, what it thought it owed.

1870–1890: a school for Eurasians

The first school the Council paid for was not its own. In 1870, Pott records, “a school for Eurasian children was opened” in Hongkou “by a Mrs. Bonney”, for the children of foreign fathers and Chinese mothers whom neither community’s schools would take; Thomas Hanbury, the merchant who later gave Shanghai its public garden fountain and the Riviera its botanic garden, gave it a house the next year. In 1882 he offered the school to the Council, which “found it impossible to undertake this responsibility at once, but began to make annual grants”. It merged with a Children’s Home in 1889, and on 1 July 1890 the Council recorded “the Trust Deed, duly signed by Mr. Hanbury, handing over the Eurasian School property to the Council”, to be run by a committee of twelve, four named by the Council and eight by the subscribers, as the Hanbury School and Children’s Home. It then had “18 boarders under her care, (4 of whom are free)” and 45 day pupils. The Council’s whole education budget in 1890 was three grants: 1,000 taels to the Public School, 874.80 to the Eurasian School and 1,000 to the French orphanage.

1893: the Public School, taken over

The Shanghai Public School for foreign children had been founded in 1886, Darwent says, on the initiative of the Freemasons, and had got into money trouble; under its headmaster G. Lanning the ratepayers of 1890 granted it 1,000 taels when its roll had grown from 54 to 94. In 1893 the jubilee of the port gave the school’s friends their chance and the ratepayers their answer. At the annual meeting a resolution to raise 20,000 taels “for the purpose of erecting and equipping a modern school building for the use of the Shanghai Public School” as the jubilee memorial was set aside for a committee; at the special meeting of 7 June a motion that the Council be “empowered to raise the sum of forty thousand taels by debentures for the purpose of acquiring the present site of the Shanghai Public School” at Peking and Honan Roads, about six and a half mu, was lost “by a large majority” to an amendment that spent the money on illuminations and medals. The story is told in the article on the franchise. What the ratepayers would not buy, the Council took over anyway: in 1893 it assumed the school, paying “the initial expense of taking over the School, including the purchase of stock and apparatus, the property of the Head Master”, with “the grant of Tls. 4,000” a year “for working the School” and 1,000 for the first costs, under rules the ratepayers had adopted in February and a committee of five. Pott’s figure of an 8,000-tael grant in 1892 is not in the Council’s accounts. The school had an average attendance of 117 in its foreign division and 25 in a “native division” of four small classes, with 164 foreign children on the roll in December; its examiner, Wetmore, who had chaired a committee on foreign education as far back as 1882, found that “the School is not properly housed”. An agreement with the Masonic school fund gave four Masonic children free places. The Council’s education grants that year came to 9,008.76 taels: 5,000 to the Public School, 1,503.76 to the Hanbury School, 1,000 to the French orphanage and 1,500 to St Xavier’s, which kept 24 orphans at $12 a head a month. The school moved in 1895 to a new building at Boone and Chapoo Roads, and by 1904 had “about two hundred pupils” under “a committee of five ratepayers”.

1899–1905: a school for Chinese boys

“It was not until 1899,” Pott wrote, “that the Shanghai Municipal Council began to do anything for the education of Chinese children living in the International Settlement.” The proposal came from three missionaries, Timothy Richard, John C. Ferguson and Pott himself, and the ratepayers adopted it; the Chinese community found the money, “a sum of Tls. 37,000”, as both Pott and the Council’s 1922 report say, though Darwent, writing in 1904 before the school opened, had 30,000 taels “donated for the building by Chun Fai Ting and the late Tong Kidson, and others”, and a different site. Darwent also supplied the argument, in the form the foreign community could accept: “as the Chinese pay so large a portion of the taxes, they have a right to have some educational advantages provided for them.” The Council’s report for 1904 shows the building fund at 21,797.18 taels on the last day of 1903 and spent in 1904 on the school at Elgin Road, two masters’ houses and a gate-house; on the ground floor were four classrooms and an assembly hall “arranged to comfortably seat 400 pupils”. A committee of Richard, Pott, two Chinese members, Chun Oi-ting and Chu Pao-fay, and the Council’s representative E. S. Little was appointed in March 1904; the two masters “selected to inaugurate the Public School for Chinese”, Ridge and Kemp, had arrived in February; a prospectus was “published both in English and Chinese”.

The headmaster W. Sheldon Ridge’s report for 1905, “the first complete year in the history of the school”, is a schoolmaster’s honest account of a slow start. Numbers rose from 75 to 127, against a hall for 400, and he listed the reasons: the fee had been changed from $4.50 a month to $22 a term, the tiffin arrangements were poor, the school was remote, and there was “the somewhat high fee” itself. “Nearly 50% of the students being in the first form; and of these the majority are under ten years of age.” The Chinese committee that had raised the subscriptions put up 500 taels more for a dining hall seating a hundred. The school had an athletic club, singing, military drill, a debating society and an optional uniform. The budget for 1906 put it at 11,500 taels gross and 8,000 net, against 28,500 and 12,500 for the foreign Public School, with a headmaster at 3,000 taels, an assistant at 2,100 and eight Chinese teachers sharing 4,000; the Council’s whole educational budget was 28,000 taels. The foreign school had meanwhile settled, in March 1904 and “by an overwhelming majority” of the ratepayers, the question of whether the Bible should be taught in a municipal school: it would be, “from 9 to 9.30 a.m.”, “as literature and not as theology”.

1911: the rule

In 1911 the Council appointed a General Educational Committee to say what it should do, and the committee’s second report, delayed “by reason of the disorganisation due to the revolutionary movement”, gave the answer the Council quoted for the next two decades. As the Council summarised it in 1922: the Council “had no absolute duty to undertake Chinese education generally”; it “should aim rather at the model training of a limited number of youths connected with the Settlement than at any scheme of general education for Chinese, which is beyond the duty or means of this community”; children of Chinese resident in the Settlement “should be no worse off than if they were resident outside the Settlement”; and the Council should not for the time being take on the education of girls. The ratepayers endorsed it in 1912. The same committee had been as cool about foreign children: “the duty of providing education falls first upon the parents, and” then “on the nation”, the Council having “the obligation of providing educational assistance thrust upon it”, because “uneducated or partly educated children are detrimental to the community”. It was not a theory of public education. It was a theory of a town council doing what its ratepayers would pay for, and in 1913, when the Chinese merchant Nieh Chih-cheh offered 8.6 mu of land on Baikal Road for a school, the Council accepted “with cordial and unanimous thanks” while noting that its policy of declining “dogmatic religious instruction” in its Chinese schools “has been consistent” for ten years.

The schools nonetheless multiplied. On 1 January 1912 the Council had “two schools only, the Public School with 319 foreign children and the Public School for Chinese with 400 pupils on the roll”; that year it “undertook to become the sole subscriber to the Thomas Hanbury School”, with 121 scholars, and on 25 November 1912 opened the Ellis Kadoorie Public School for Chinese at Cunningham and Carter Roads, given by the Baghdadi Jewish merchant of that name, with 156 boys, 342 within a year and a complement of 400. The Elgin Road school was by then full, “400 enrolled, and as usual many candidates for admission had to be refused”. The Nieh Chih Kuei school opened on Nieh’s land on 21 February 1916, and on 7 February 1917 the Polytechnic Public School for Chinese opened on Pakhoi Road, on the site of the Chinese Polytechnic Institution that Consul Medhurst had founded in 1876 and whose trustees transferred it to the Council in perpetuity by a deed completed in 1913. By the end of 1921 the Council had “eleven schools, with grand totals of 1,141 foreign and 1,182 Chinese pupils”: a Public School for Boys with 296 and for Girls with 432, Hanbury boys 205 and girls 208; the Public School for Chinese 413, Ellis Kadoorie 376, Nieh Chih Kuei 241, Polytechnic 152. Its net spending on education had gone from 31,568 taels in 1908 to 377,797 in 1921, with buildings on top.

Who paid

The Council’s rule on fees shifted once. “Prior to 1911,” it wrote in 1922, “the cost of education at the Public School was borne by the Council and the parents in approximately equal shares.” After that the Council paid more, and in 1922 it fixed the proportion: each school was to be “self-supporting from its fees to the extent of approximately one-third of its cost”, “the remaining two-thirds being found from the public purse”, a rule restated in 1932. The Hanbury trust deed still required the Council to board and clothe “twelve boys and twelve girls free”. In 1922 the Council spent 152,150 taels on extending the two boys’ schools and building the new Western District school for girls on Yuyuen Road, and warned the ratepayers that “the educational burden in Shanghai must inevitably grow”. The headmaster of the Public School for Boys worked it out for 1925: 349 taels a boy, with fees covering 30.96 per cent of an estimated 135,000 taels; the four foreign schools together cost 454,900 taels against 122,100 in receipts, the Council finding 332,800. In the Council’s accounts for that year the foreign schools cost 330,000 taels net and the four Chinese schools 161,000, for 1,364 foreign and 937 Chinese pupils: the Council spent about 240 taels on each foreign child and 170 on each Chinese one, and the Chinese population of the Settlement was twenty-seven times the foreign.

The Chinese schools paid in another coin in 1925. The Public School for Chinese had 437 on its roll in February; after May Thirtieth it was closed, “a landing party of 110 officers and men from the Italian cruiser ‘San Giorgio’ with machine-guns” took up quarters in it until 29 August, and 291 boys came back in September. The Nieh Chih Kuei school fell from 424 to 161, a decrease “undoubtedly caused by the coercive measures of the local student organizations”, which is the Council’s way of saying that Chinese parents had withdrawn their sons from the Council’s schools in the boycott.

1926–1928: “the question resolves itself into one of revenue”

The argument the Council had avoided since 1911 was put to it in writing in 1926. A Chinese schoolmaster, Yao Wei-zien of the Fee Hoong primary school, wrote on 14 April that the Council had “only four schools for Chinese”, able to hold 1,500 pupils, while “at least 100,000 Chinese children in the Settlement” needed schooling, that three schools run by the Chinese districts had over 2,000 pupils, and that “the Chinese pay more of the Municipal Rates than do the foreigners”. The chairman, Stirling Fessenden, answered in the Gazette of 2 July 1926 with the words of 1911: “the Council has no absolute duty in the matter of the education of either Chinese or foreign children”; it should “aim at the model training of a limited number of Chinese children”; “due to financial considerations no departure from the existing policy is feasible at the present time”; “the question in fact resolves itself mainly into one of revenue”; and the Council could make no provision for “thousands of foreign children” either. When the Chinese Ratepayers’ Association, under Yu Ya-ching, wrote on 26 March 1928 proposing the terms on which Chinese members would join the Council, education was one of them: the Chinese Education Committee “should be composed principally of Chinese Members”, and “the appropriation for Chinese education should be fixed on a basis of 20 per cent. of the total municipal revenue”.

The Council did not concede the percentage, but the policy moved. On 8 October 1928 it opened two District Primary Schools for Chinese, Eastern and Northern, the first municipal schools meant for ordinary children rather than a selected few; its educational assistant J. J. Pope wrote that the Chinese public schools “give a direction to the current of local life which makes for cordiality and good understanding”, which was the Council’s new reason. Chinese enrolment went from 1,668 in 1928 to 2,391 in 1929, 3,039 in 1930 and 3,523 in 1931, while foreign enrolment stayed near 1,500; net spending went from 564,437 taels in 1928 to 1,048,779 in 1931.

1932: fifteen schools

By 1932 the Council ran fifteen schools, nine Chinese and six foreign, with 4,631 Chinese and 1,576 foreign pupils. The year’s figures carry the war: the Chinese roll fell from 3,518 in January to 3,001 in April, while the fighting emptied Hongkou, and rose to 4,631 by October “as many Chinese households removed from Chapei and other extra-Settlement localities into the International Settlement”; the four district primary schools alone held between 448 and 608 pupils each in the winter term. The chairman told the ratepayers that “expenditure on Foreign and Chinese education is now approximately the same, but as the educational programme approved by you in principle last year progresses”, Chinese education would take more; the education budget, “approximately Tls. 1,384,000”, was “the equivalent of a 1.74 per cent rate”, and “whether a specific proportion of Municipal revenue shall be definitely allocated for educational purposes” was “a matter for serious consideration”. The programme was two new mixed primary schools for Chinese every year until 1938 and two Chinese girls’ secondary schools by 1934, the girls the 1911 committee had excluded. Grants to other people’s schools, which in 1931 had been 9,500 taels in cash and 43,000 in rate rebates to fifty-three institutions, were put on a footing of 150,000 taels, “45 per cent to schools for Foreign children and 55 per cent to schools for Chinese children”, the Japanese schools alone having had 60,000 of the foreign side in 1931. The Council that had written in 1911 that general Chinese education was “beyond the duty or means of this community” was spending, twenty-one years later, a seventh of its ordinary revenue on schools, and a Chinese education committee with Chinese members was telling it where.

The schools in numbers

Year	Schools	Foreign pupils	Chinese pupils	Net cost (taels)
1890	grants only	63 at the Eurasian School		2,875 in grants
1893	Public School taken over	164	25	9,009 in grants
1905	2	about 200	127	21,670
1912	3	319	400	55,181
1921	11	1,141	1,182	377,797
1925	8	1,364	937	499,827
1928	10	1,512	1,668	564,437
1932	15	1,576	4,631	1,440,433

What the sources disagree on

Pott’s 8,000-tael grant to the Public School in 1892 is not in the Council’s accounts, which show 4,000 a year and 1,000 once in 1893. The Chinese subscription for the 1904 school is 37,000 taels in Pott and the Council’s 1922 report and 30,000 in Darwent, who also puts the school on the North Szechuen Road extension rather than Elgin Road and the site with the Council rather than the gentry; Darwent wrote before the school was built. The 1911 committee’s reports are known here only through the Council’s 1922 summary. Pott dates the Polytechnic hand-over to 1917, the Council’s report to a deed of 1913 and an opening in 1917. The 1932 grants-in-aid figure on the foreign side is uncertain in the scan. The Council’s reports for 1899–1903, which would record the decision to build the Chinese school and its opening day, are not on the Internet Archive.

What to look for

The Public School for Boys at Boone and Chapoo Roads, today’s Tanggu and Zhapu Roads, became a Chinese school after 1943 and the site is still a school. The Public School for Chinese on Elgin Road, today’s Haining Road, is the ancestor of Shanghai’s Yucai middle school, which keeps the Chinese name, 育才, the Council gave its Ellis Kadoorie school at Cunningham and Carter Roads, now Xinzha and Shimen 2nd Roads. The girls’ school on Yuyuen Road became the Shixi middle school, which it still is. The Polytechnic on Pakhoi Road, now Beihai Road, is the Gezhi middle school, the oldest of them all, on the ground Consul Medhurst found for it in 1876. The Hanbury School in Hongkou is gone, and so is the name.