More About "Seven Chinese Girls" by T. E. Bowen

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 27, 1913

More About "Seven Chinese Girls"

By T. E. Bowen

[In the Harvest Ingathering Signs, on page 446, appeared a picture of seven Chinese young ladies, with simply this word underneath, “Daughters of the new China who have memorized the whole New Testament.” Thinking the readers of the REVIEW might be interested in a brief sketch of these girls, the following is taken from the Bible Society Record of January, published by the British and Foreign Bible Society.—T. E. BOWEN.]

MANY of our readers will be sure to remember an interesting picture which was produced in our pages in 1907 and reproduced in February, 1912, of seven young Chinese girls, each of whom had committed to memory the whole New Testament. The picture has been reproduced in many journals and magazines, and excited no small wonderment and probably some incredulity.

A recent letter from Miss Harriet N. Noyes, who has for many years labored in the True Light Seminary for girls at Canton, China, under the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions, assures us that the facts are as stated, and even more striking. Another student in less than four years committed to memory the New Testament and half, or more than half, of the Old Testament also. She adds, “Some of our students were quite independent of a concordance, and were able to give at once the book, chapter, and verse of almost any text in the Bible.”

Such astounding feats of memory are not uncommon in the East. It is often said that the other faculties of the mind are weakened rather than strengthened by such excessive development of the memory. This does not appear to be so, however, in this case, as will appear in the following extracts from Miss Noyes’s letter, which gives some interesting particulars about several of the girls and women:—

“You will, I think, be interested to know something more of the seven girls in the photograph already referred to. The first one at the head of the line is the first Christian in China of the fifth generation of Christians—her great-great-grandmother was one of the very first Bible women in China. Her mother is the Chinese principal of the True Light Seminary; she studied for many years in the True Light, and afterward for a time in the Christian College in Canton. At that time there were eighty-five

young men in the college, and she received the highest grade that was given. When B. F. Meyer visited Canton, he told me that he counted the pleasure of meeting her more than anything else that he enjoyed in Canton. For the past two years she has taught the normal class in the seminary, and is now, I suppose, on the way to America, and is planning to take the college course at Wellesley. She is a very earnest, consecrated Christian, as well as a fine student, and we hope will be very useful.

“The second in the line is a practising physician, and the third, who is her cousin, has also recently been graduated from the Women’s Medical College. The father of the former is a physician, a graduate of Dr. Kerr’s medical class, and he has borne the expense of the whole education of both his daughter and niece.

“The fourth is the daughter of the Rev. Kwan Loi, who was for many years the pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church in Canton. She is also a physician, and has a position in the Canton Hospital. The medical profession is very attractive to the young students, or to their friends, as they receive so much larger salaries than the teachers, sometimes in a single month more than our very best teachers in a year.

“The fifth in the line has been practising medicine for several years, and very successfully. For a time she was at the head of a large hospital opened and supported by the Chinese.

“The sixth is a teacher, a very successful one. She taught for some time in the seminary, and then went to her home in one of the large interior cities, and opened at her own expense a school for girls, which has been very prosperous for several years.

“The next and last one commenced the study of medicine, but left the college before her course was completed, was married and went to Shanghai, and I have heard nothing of her for some time. These young women are all, we feel, doing good work for the ‘new China.’”