CHINESE SCHOOL FOR GIRLS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 1046, 21 May 1912, Page 4

CHINESE SCHOOL FOR GIRLS.

The only classical school for girls in Pekin is run by a Chinese new woman, an old maid whose ideas of reform are decidedly reactionary. She has condescended towards progress only to the extent of allowing a woman trained in a mission school to come fur an hour once a week and teach the rudiments of arithmetic, geography, and English. The rest of the curriculum consists of learning the Chinese classics off by heart, and reciting them in a musical drone. This principal was her lather’s only child, and it made him melancholy to think that when be died his spirit would be a lonely orphan, because he had no sou to perform the proper rights. Touched by his sorrow, she offered to make what, to a Chinese woman, is the great renunciation —giving up marriage ; thus sue could serve her lather as a son both during, and, what was more important, after his life. So she was brought up as a boy ; she wore man’s clothes, she learned the classics off by heatl as other boys learu them ; she acted as private secretary to her lather during his eighteen years of official life, and no one guessed that she was not a man. When her lather died she mourned the full three years and performed all the rights encumbent upon a sou; rier male relatives tried to get her father’s properly, but she fought them through me Chinese courts and won. Then she took off her disguise, assumed the uess oi a woman, and retired to the inner apartments, but lie; education and experience had taught her many things, the chief of which was that women should be educated. She believed that the ills of China were largely due to the neglect of woman’s education. She deplored the falling away of her people from ihe doctrine of Confucius to the, to her, superstitious of the hudhisls, Taoists a,;d Christians. To effect a ictorm she devoted her fortune to founding the Cheir-I school for gins, her purpose being to tiain a baud of educated womeu teachers, who will spread throughout Cniua as Cuufucianist missionaries.