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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2019
This article explores the role of Chinese Christian women in the internationalization of Chinese education in the early twentieth Century. In particular, it examines the changing relationship between Church Missionary Society (CMS) missionary Louise Barnes, and Zeng Baosun, the great granddaughter of Zeng Guofan. Zeng Baosun was born in 1893 in Changsha, educated at the CMS's Mary Vaughan School in Hangzhou, and became the first Chinese woman to graduate from the University of London, before returning to China to establish a Christian school for girls in Changsha (Yifang) in 1918. Although an extraordinary example because of her elite family background, Zeng's story highlights how Chinese women used the networks to which their Christian education exposed them on a local, national and international scale to play an important role in the exchange of educational ideas between China and the West during the early twentieth century. The story of the relationship between Zeng and Barnes also reveals the changing power dynamics between foreign missionaries and Chinese Christians in the process of indigenizing the church in China: the roles of teacher and pupil were reversed upon their return to Changsha, with Zeng serving as headmistress of her own school and Barnes as a teacher.
I would like to thank Bill Lee for his kind assistance with my research and for allowing me to accompany his family and friends on a trip to Changsha in November 2015. I would also like to thank the President of the Yifang Girls’ School Alumnae Association, Gong Anqi (龚安琪), for introducing me to the Changsha Tianjiabing Experimental Middle School (长沙市田家炳实验中学) and to Zeng Xianrong (曾宪蓉), a great-niece of Zeng Baosun in Taipei. I am grateful to Andrea Janku at SOAS for kindly reading a draft of the article and to the anonymous peer reviewers for their feedback. Finally, I wish to thank Queen Mary University of London Archives for providing the images used. This work was undertaken with the support of AHRC and Confucius Institute grants during my doctoral research in China.
1 Birmingham, CRL, CMS Archive, CMS/G1/CH2/O/1913/ 87, Louise Hester Barnes to Mr Bardsley, 24 June 1913.
2 Ibid., CMS/G1/CH2/O/1913/121, Louise Barnes to CMS Committee, 30 November 1913.
3 Bieler, Stacy, ‘Patriots’ or ‘Traitors’: A History of American-Educated Chinese Students (Armonk, NY, and London, 2009)Google Scholar; see also her ‘Zeng Baosun: Embracing Chinese Ideals and Christian Education’, in Carol Lee Hamin and Stacey Bieler, eds, Salt and Light, 3: More Lives of Faith that shaped Modern China (Eugene, OR, 2011), 93–115.
4 Ying, Hu, ‘Naming the First New Woman’, Nan Nu: Men, Women, and Gender in Early and Imperial China 3 (2001), 196–231CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Lutz, Jessie Gregory, China and the Christian Colleges, 1850–1950 (New York, 1971)Google Scholar; Bays, Daniel H. and Widmer, Ellen, eds, China's Christian Colleges: Cross-Cultural Connections, 1900–1950 (Stanford, CA, 2009)Google Scholar; Hayhoe, Ruth, China's Universities 1895–1995: A Century of Cultural Conflict (London, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 Pui-Lan, Kwok, ‘Chinese Women and Protestant Christianity at the Turn of the Twentieth Century’, in Bays, Daniel H., ed., Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Stanford, CA, 1996), 194–208Google Scholar, at 196.
7 Kennedy, Thomas, Confucian Feminist: Memoirs of Zeng Baosun 1893–1978 (Philadelphia, PA, 2002)Google Scholar.
8 Ibid. 157.
9 Zeng's Memoir was originally published in 1970 by the Chinese Christian Literature Council in Hong Kong: 曾寶蓀 [Zeng Baosun], 曾寶蓀回憶錄 [Zeng Baosun huiyilu; Memoirs of Zeng Baosun] (Hong Kong, 1970).
10 Ibid. 1.
11 Kennedy, Confucian Feminist, 4.
12 Ibid. 16.
13 Ibid. 17.
14 Mann, Susan, ‘The Education of Daughters in the Mid-Ch'ing Period’, in Woodside, Alexander and Elman, Benjamin A., eds, Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 1600–1900 (London, 1994), 19–49Google Scholar; Ko, Dorothy, ‘Pursuing Talent and Virtue: Education and Women's Culture in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century China’, Late Imperial China 13 (1992), 9–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Widmer, Ellen, ed., Writing Women in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA, 1997)Google Scholar.
15 Kennedy, Confucian Feminist, 21.
16 Cleverley, John, The Schooling of China: Tradition and Modernity in Chinese Education (London, 1985)Google Scholar; Lutz, China and the Christian Colleges, 22.
17 Kennedy, Confucian Feminist, 23.
18 Ibid. 29.
19 Ibid. 30.
20 Elwin, Arthur, A Short Sketch of the Life of Mary Vaughan of Hangchow (Oxford, 1909)Google Scholar.
21 General Register Office, England & Wales, Civil Registration Birth Index, 1837–1915, Q1/1855/B, online at: FreeBMD, <https://www.freebmd.org.uk/>, last accessed 20 November 2018.
22 See Latourette, Kenneth Scott, A History of Christian Missions in China (New York, 1929), 409CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 Kew, TNA, WO 97/ 559, Royal Hospital Chelsea: Soldiers Service Documents.
24 Ibid., RG11/1179/58, Census Returns of England and Wales 1881, 13.
25 CRL, CMS/G1/CH2/O/1909/175, Louise Hester Barnes to Mr Baring-Gould, 19 August 1909.
26 After Zeng entered the school, several more elite families signed up their daughters. On 13 September 1909, Barnes wrote: ‘We are hoping to reopen the school tomorrow with a promise of several new scholars. All daughters of Mandarins’: ibid., CMS/G1/CH2 /O/1909/186, Louise Barnes to Mr Baring-Gould, 13 September 1909.
27 Huixing nüzi zhongxue, ‘Ben xiao zhi lüe shi’ [‘A brief History of our School’], in 浙江杭州市私立惠興女子初級中學一覽 [Zhejiang Hangzhou shi sili Huixing nüzi chuji zhongxue yilan; Catalogue of the Huixing Junior Middle School for Girls, Zhejiang, Hangzhou] (Hangzhou, 1937), 1.
28 CRL, CMS/G1/CH2/O/1908/198, Louise Barnes to Mr Baring-Gould, 30 November 1908.
29 Judge, Joan, Republican Lens: Gender, Visuality and Experience in the Early Chinese Periodical Press (Berkeley, CA, 2015), 56–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 CRL, CMS/G1/CH2/O/1909/177, Louise Barnes to Mr Baring-Gould, 23 August 1909.
31 Kennedy, Confucian Feminist, 29.
32 Ibid. 30.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid. 35.
35 London, Blackheath Girls’ School, Register 1912, no. 727.
36 Zeng Baosun maintained a very close friendship with Zeng Yuenong throughout her life, and neither of them married. Zeng Yuenong was later instrumental in helping Baosun set up her school, Yifang Collegiate Girls’ School (藝芳女子學院), where he acted as dean. He became a renowned educationalist in Hunan. As a man, he had access to important political and social networks in Changsha from which Zeng may have been excluded due to her sex: Kennedy, Confucian Feminist, 37.
37 See Hunter, Jane, The Gospel of Gentility: American Women Missionaries in Turn of the Century China (New Haven, CT, 1984), 192–4Google Scholar.
38 CRL, CMS/G1/CH2/O/1913/121, Louise Barnes to Mr Bardsley, 20 May 1913.
39 London, Queen Mary University of London Archives (QMA), Westfield College papers, WFD-10-1-3, Register, 102.
40 Sondheimer, Janet, Castle Adamant in Hampstead: A History of Westfield College 1882–1982, (London, 1983), 7Google Scholar.
41 Kennedy, Confucian Feminist, 52.
42 Ibid. 54.
43 Ibid. 55.
44 Ibid. 59.
45 Educational Directory of China (Shanghai, 1917), 19.
46 Kennedy, Confucian Feminist, 57.
47 QMA, WFD-15-3-2, Circulars relating to I-Fang, pamphlet entitled A New School for China (n.pl., c.1916).
48 QMA, WFD-15-3-2, Winifred Galbraith, Circular letter, ‘I fang Collegiate Girls School, Changsha, Hunan’, March 1926.
49 Winifred Galbraith, ‘An Experiment in Chinese Education’, Chinese Recorder, July 1927, 425-430.
50 Zeng Jirong had been helped by Christian missionaries to recover from his addiction to opium and had been converted to Christianity at the same time as Zeng Baosun in December 1911: Kennedy, Confucian Feminist, 30.
51 Ibid. 57.
52 CRL, CMS/G1/CH2/O/1913/121, Louise Barnes to CMS Committee, 30 November 1913.
53 Kennedy, Confucian Feminist, 76.
54 Ibid. 29.
55 According to Zeng, Barnes was given £8,000 by the family of Mary Vaughan shortly after her resignation from the CMS, to use at her discretion: Kennedy, Confucian Feminist, 48. This was a significant sum. According to Barnes's will, she had almost £2,000 left when she died in 1928: Principal Probate Registry. Calendar of the Grants of Probate and Letters of Administration made in the Probate Registries of the High Court of Justice in England. London, England, 1928, 172, online at: <http://www.ancestry.com>, accessed 5 May 2017.
56 Kennedy, Confucian Feminist, 58.
57 QMA, WFD-15-3-2, Pao Swen Tseng, Circular letter, 3 March 1922.
58 Ibid., Circulars relating to I-Fang, ‘List of donors 1917–1925’.
59 Kennedy, Confucian Feminist, 57.
60 Ibid. 63.
61 Ibid. 70.
62 Ibid. 75.
63 QMA, WFD-15-3-5, Pao Swen Tseng to Dr Thwaites, 13 December 1971.
64 Kennedy, Confucian Feminist, 71.
65 QMA, WFD-15-3-2, Pao Swen Tseng, Circular letter, August 1921.
66 QMA, WFD-15-3-5, Pao Swen Tseng to the principal of Westfield College, 5 April 1948.
67 Galbraith, ‘Experiment’, 427.
68 QMA, WFD-15-3-2, Pao Swen Tseng, Circular letter, August 1921.
69 Kennedy, Confucian Feminist, 76.
70 QMA, WFD-15-3-2, Louise Barnes, Circular letter, ‘An Outstanding Educational Enterprise’, 1922.
71 On the impact of this upon the Tientsin Anglo-Chinese College, see, in this volume, Marina Xiaojing Wang, ‘Western Establishment or Chinese Sovereignty? The Tientsin Anglo-Chinese College during the Restore Educational Rights Movement, 1924–7’, 577–92.
72 Kennedy, Confucian Feminist, 93.
73 長沙田家炳實驗中學主辦 [Changsha Tianjiabing Shiyan zhongxue zhuban; Tianjiabing Experimental Middle School], 藝芳晚晴 综合性年刊 [Yifang Wanqing zonghexing niankan; Yifang School History Magazine] (Changsha, 2006).
74 The earliest missionary colleges for women were located in metropolitan eastern and coastal China, including North China Women's University in Beijing (1907), Huanan Women's College in Fuzhou (1909) and Ginling College in Nanjing (1915). In 1919 the government run Beijing Women's Normal University was established, following which government universities started accepting female students, the first being Peking University in 1920: see Xiaoping, Cong, Teachers, Schools and the making of Modern China (Vancouver, BC, 2007), 93Google Scholar.
75 The main mission-run university in Changsha, Yale-in-China, did not admit women until 1922: Bieler, ‘Zeng Baosun’, 102.
