
EMERGENCE OF MODERN INSTITUTIONS 373
to multiply, especially in Peking and Shanghai and some provincial cities.
The best-known example of educational entrepreneurship was Nankai,
the secondary school and higher education complex that grew up in
Tientsin under the leadership of Chang Po-ling (1876-1951). In contrast
to many late Ch'ing pioneers of modern education, Chang was no classical
scholar, but a star graduate of the Peiyang Naval Academy, a modern
school, at the age of eighteen. He ended his naval career abruptly,
however, in 1898, after witnessing the lowering of the Chinese flag and
the raising of the British one at Weihaiwei, the Chinese naval base acquired
by the British
as a
leased territory
in
that
year.
That excruciating humiliation
had a traumatic impact on Chang. Leaving the navy, he vowed to devote
his life to education, 'the road to self-strengthening'.
28
As Chang related
in his
Reminiscences,
'The Nankai Schools were born from China's
calamity. Therefore their object was to reform old habits of life and to
train youth for the salvation of the country.' The task of educators was
to aim this training at the elimination of the five aspects of China's
weakness: physical weakness and poor health, superstition and lack of
scientific knowledge, economic poverty, disunity as shown by the lack
of a group life and activity, and selfishness. The comprehensive educational
programme Chang later developed in the Nankai system was designed
to meet China's needs in these five areas.
29
Chang's educational odyssey had begun modestly as family tutor to the
children of Yen Hsiu, a prominent Tientsin gentryman who, like Ts'ai
Yuan-p'ei, was a progressive-minded Hanlin scholar. On the basis of this
connection and that of another tutorship in the home of a second
well-known Tientsin gentryman, Wang I-sun, Chang Po-ling was to build
the first of his schools. In 1904 Yen and Wang jointly financed the
establishment of a middle school and a normal school. The first normal
school class graduated in 1906, and the first middle school class in 1908.
Although the local gentry were heavily represented in the first group of
students - family names such as Han, Yen, T'ao, Pien and Cheng figured
prominently in the initial rosters - the new curriculum of the school
attracted a rapidly increasing enrolment. In 1908, through the generous
donation of land by a third local benefactor, Cheng Chvi-ju, and further
financing by Yen Hsiu, the school was able to move into its first permanent
buildings at a location called Nan-k'ai Hollow, from which the school
took its name.
30
Despite the political upheavals at the end of the Ch'ing, Chang Po-ling
28
Chang Po-ling,' Ssu-shih-nien Nan-k'ai hsueh-hsiao chih hui-ku' (Retrospect of Nankai after forty
years,
1944), in Wang Wen-t'ien et al.
Chang
Po-ling jS Nan-ka'i (Chang Po-ling and Nankai),
hereafter Wang Wen-t'ien,
Chang/Nankai,
83. BDRC 1.101.
2
' Hu Shih, 'Chang Po-ling, educator", in J. L. Buck, et al.
There
is
another
China,
10.
30
Wang Wen-t'ien,
Chang/Nankai,
7-9. The Nankai Normal School closed in 1906, therefore only
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