I have the honor, &c.,
W. ELWELL GOLDSBOROUGH.
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Mr. Cheshire to Mr. Seward.
No. 55.] FOOCHOW, March 29, 1880.
SIR: I have had the honor to receive your dispatch No. 78, calling upon me to furnish you with such information as may be available to me in regard to the education of Chinese in foreign languages within this consular district, whether in schools founded and supported by the Chinese government, or by private enterprise, or by missionaries, as far as the secular branches are concerned, and also to report upon the schools established at Hong Kong by the colonial government.
I now beg to submit the following report:
The Tung wen Kwan is the only scholastic institution under government auspices for teaching foreign knowledge in Canton. It was established by order of the Tsung li Yamen about sixteen years ago. It is under the official control of the viceroy, the haikwan (superintendent of customs), the Tartar general, and two lieutenant Tartar generals, but the practical control is left almost entirely in the hands of the Tartar general, to whom it affords opportunities of patronage, for the staff is large, and the members thereof not only benefit by the salaries they receive but their official appointment as officers of the college (Tung wen Kwan) forms a stepping-stone to promotion in other branches of the public service. The staff consists of three superintendents, (the chief of whom holds rank about equivalent to that of a major general), three Chinese teachers, a foreign teacher with a Chinese assistant, two Chinese clerks, doorkeepers, cooks, and other servants. The number of students is fixed at thirty, of whom twenty are classed as students proper and ten as supernumerary students, the latter being intended to fill vacancies as they occur in the former; and when, from various causes, the total number falls to twenty or twenty-five, fresh supernumeraries are added to make up the number. The students proper receive a small pay of three taels a month, but the supernumeraries receive nothing except a free breakfast every day.
It is difficult to define the raison d'être of the Tung wen Kwan College; in theory it is established to provide the Chinese government with a staff of interpreters and persons conversant with foreign literature and foreign habits of thought; but, so far as can be judged by patent facts, the patronage above referred to is the element most appreciated, and it may be well to notice the extent to which the theoretical object has been carried out, and how far the Chinese government has availed itself of the material for the production of which something like eight hundred dollars a month has been expended for the last sixteen years in the maintenance of the college.
About ten years ago fourteen students were drafted from Canton to the Peking college. Of these, five have retired from various causes, six are still attached to the Peking College, and the remaining three have appointments in legations abroad, one in Washington, one in London, and one in Japan. Since 1870 not one student has been drafted to Peking; none of the Canton students have in any way been called upon to render service to their government. Most of them have received an honorary literary degree (Hsin Tsai) equivalent to B.A., and three or four of them are nominally interpreters, for which they receive a small additional pay. Year after year passes, and boys of 17 grow up to be men of 27, marry and become fathers, and go on with their foreign studies without so much as a word of encouragement from their own authorities. Under such discouraging circumstances it must be that studying is often done in a perfunctory way; and yet, while some of the students have, as I understand, a very good knowledge of English, wanting only practice outside the school walls to render it equal to that of any Chinaman who has not had the advantage of living abroad, they constantly witness men of less technical knowledge than themselves, men of lower stamp altogether, men picked up here and there without any proper steps being taken to ascertain their fitness, called upon to perform the very duties for the performance of which the students of the Tung wen Kwan are in theory specially educated.