ABSTRACT
While it is true that public education for Chinese girls was first championed by Western missionaries, the impact on wider Chinese society represented by the first mission schools was limited. The first of such schools was opened in 1844 by Miss Mary Aldersey in the treaty port of Ningbo,1 one of five ports forcibly opened to Western trade, residence and Christian proselytization as a result of the Opium War (1839-1842). Most of those that were subsequently established were located in other treaty ports such as Shanghai (in 1849), Fuzhou (in 1851), Guangzhou (in 1853) and Amoy (in 1860). One of the first boarding schools for girls was opened by the Methodist Mission in Fuzhou in 1859. By the 1860s a number of missionary-run girls’ schools had also been opened in Tianjin and Beijing. The primary motivation for establishing these early schools was to train girls to serve as the future wives of Chinese pastors or as Bible women. Such schools, however, initially enrolled only foundlings or daughters of the destitute (especially as the schools did not charge tuition fees and provided free food and lodging). Numbers were small, often never exceeding five pupils – and even then they did not stay long, or the school itself was forced to close down.2 Regarded with suspicion and fear by elites and commoners alike, these early mission schools were thought of as ‘places of sorcery’ (yaomo shijie) in which girls might be kidnapped for nefarious purposes or ‘infected’ with a ‘demonic spirit’ (yaoqi).3
