A new development worthy of all praise is the opening, by imperial command, of a school for the training of officials for the customs service. It is a measure which Sir Robert Hart with all his public spirit, never ventured to recommend, because it implies the speedy replacement of the foreign staff by trained natives.
Filling the sky with a glow of hope not unlike the approach of sunshine after an arctic winter, the reform in the field of education throws all others into the shade. By all parties is recognised its supremacy. Its beginning was feeble and unwelcome, implying on the part of China nothing but a few drops of oil to relieve the friction at a few points of contact with the outside world.
The new treaties found China unprovided with interpreters capable of translating documents in foreign languages. Foreign nations agreed to accompany their despatches with a Chinese version, until a competent staff of interpreters should be provided. With a view to meeting this initial want, a school was opened in 1862, in connection with the Foreign Office, and placed under the direction of the Inspector-General of Maritime Customs, by whom I was recommended for the presidency. Professors of English, French, and Russian were engaged; and later on German took a place alongside of the three leading languages of the Western world.
At first no science was taught or expected, but gradually we succeeded in obtaining the consent of the Chinese ministers to enlarge our faculty so as to include chairs of astronomy, mathematics, chemistry, and physics. International law was taught by the president; and by him also the Chinese were supplied with their first text-books on the law of nations. What use had they for books on that subject, so long as they held no intercourse on equal terms with foreign countries? The students trained in that school of diplomacy had to shiver in the cold for many a year before the Government recognised their merits and rewarded them with official appointments. The minister recently returned from London, the ministers now in Germany and Japan, and a minister formerly in France, not to speak of secretaries of legation and consuls, were all graduates of our earlier classes.
In 1898 the young Emperor, taught by defeat at the hands of the Japanese, resolved on a thorough reform in the system of national education. It would never do to confine the knowledge of Western science to a handful of interpreters and attachés. The highest scholars of the Empire must be allowed access to the fountain of national strength. A university was created with a capital of five million taels, and the writer was made president by an imperial decree which conferred on him the highest but one of the nine grades of the mandarinate.
Two or three hundred students were enrolled, among whom were bachelors, masters, and doctors of the civil service examinations. It was launched with a favouring breeze; but the wind changed with the coup d'état of the Empress Dowager, and two years later the university went down in the Boxer cyclone. A professor, a tutor, and a student lost their lives. How the cause of educational reform rose stronger after the storm, I relate in a special chapter. It is a far cry from a university for the élite to that elaborate system of national education which is destined to plant its schools in every town and hamlet in the Empire. The new education was in fact still regarded with suspicion by the honour men of the old system. They looked on it, as they did on the railway, as a source of danger, a perilous experiment.
As yet the intercourse was one-sided: envoys came; but none were sent. Embassies were no novelty; but they had always moved on an inclined plane, either coming up laden with tribute, or going down bearing commands. Where there was no tribute and no command, why send them? Why send to the very people who had robbed China of her supremacy! It was a bitter pill, and she long refused to swallow it. Hart gilded the dose and she took it. Obtaining leave to go home to get married, he proposed that he should be accompanied by his teacher, Pinchun, a learned Manchu, as unofficial envoy—with the agreeable duty to see and report. It was a travelling commission, not like that of 1905-06, to seek light, but to ascertain whether the representative of a power so humbled and insulted would be treated with common decency.
The old pundit was a poet. All Chinese pundits are poets; but Pinchun had real gifts, and the flow of champagne kindled his inspiration. Everywhere wined and dined, though accredited to no court, he was in raptures at the magnificence of the nations of the West. He lauded their wealth, culture, and scenery in faultless verse; and if he indulged in satire, it was not for the public eye. He was attended by several of our students, to whom the travelling commission was an education. They were destined, after long waiting as I have said, to revisit the Western world, clothed with higher powers.
The impression made on both sides was favourable, and the way was prepared for a genuine embassy. The United States minister, Anson Burlingame, a man of keen penetration and broad sympathies, had made himself exceedingly acceptable to the Foreign Office at Peking. When he was taking leave to return home, in 1867, the Chinese ministers begged his good offices with the United States Government and with other governments as occasion might offer—"In short, you will be our ambassador," they said, with hearty good-will.
Burlingame, who grasped the possibilities of the situation, called at the Customs on his way to the Legation. Hart seized the psychological moment, and, hastening to the Yamên, induced the ministers to turn a pleasantry into a reality. The Dowagers (for there were two) assented to the proposal of Prince Kung, to invest Burlingame with a roving commission to all the Treaty powers, and to associate with him a Manchu and a Chinese with the rank of minister. An "œcumenical embassy" was the result. Some of our students were again attached to the suite; reciprocal intercourse had begun; and Burlingame has the glory of initiating it".