p. 15 | China Awakening

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Feb 28, 1907

China Awakening

A LADY missionary of the Church of England, who has just returned to China after a furlough of some little time, writes:

“Yesterday a party of us went to see the new College of Western Learning in Foochow. I wish I could adequately picture to you the contrast that college presents with the state of learning in 1899, when I first came to China. Then I was taken to see the Great Examination buildings in Foochow. To these buildings, once a year, flocked the students from all over the Foochow Prefecture. All the year they had studied at home, committing to their prodigious memories the Confucian books. The hall of examination consisted of rows on rows of small cells, where the students, one in each cell, wrote their papers for days together, eating and sleeping in their cells to prevent communication with one another. And to-day what do we find? The cells are gone; large, airy class rooms and lecture halls take their place. Three hundred resident students are taught Western learning. We visited three or four large classes of such youths engaged in reading English from the first and second standard reading books used in English board schools.

“This college is the largest of over one hundred new schools started, under the Chinese government, in this one city of Foochow. It is a new China I have come back to. Almost pathetic it seems to me, this longing for Western ways. Why should English be what they want most of all? ‘Because English is the language of the world,’ some one answered me. But let us look deeper. What a responsibility, what an opportunity, for us English people!”