Zheng Guanying, Merchant Reformer of Late Qing China and his Infl ...

the government compound. Shuyuan education was initiated by Song neo-Confucian scholars and initially aimed at encouraging free learning and discussion by hosting lectures and seminars, rather than focusing on test preparation. Gradually, however, the Shuyuan evolved into an attachment of the government, preparing students to pass the civil service examination.³⁸ During the 1860s, Shanghai's education system was supplemented by schools of technology and the new-style schools that combined Chinese and Western learning. The reformist bureaucrats Li Hongzhang and Ding Richang (1823–1882) and Western missionaries became the main patrons of the new education. In 1863 Li Hongzhang, then Jiangsu provincial governor, sponsored the founding of Guangfangyanguan, a foreign-language school in Shanghai. In the next year, Li hired the American missionary Young J. Allen (1836–1907) as the English instructor. In 1865 Ding Richang founded the Longmen Academy that combined Confucian doctrines with Western knowledge. Also in 1865 the Church Missionary Society established the Anglo-Chinese School [Yinghua Xuetang] in Shanghai, with the famous British missionary educator John Fryer (1839–1928) as the first president. The Anglo-Chinese School, cosponsored by missionaries and local gentry of Shanghai, was the first missionary school to emphasize education in the English language and was aimed at the children of the mercantile class. In 1865 the school put an advertisement in the English-language North China Herald and the Shanghai Xinbao newspapers to recruit students.³⁹ Zheng Guanying enrolled in this school to learn English for two years, approximately between 1865 and 1868.⁴⁰ Shanghai's foreign institutions and companies provided abundant job opportunities for students of foreign studies, and more students learned foreign languages in Shanghai than in Beijing. At the same time, the recruiting policy was different in Beijing and Shanghai. The Beijing Tongwenguan [College of Foreign Languages], an official Western learning school founded by the Zongli yamen in 1862, only admitted members of banner families until 1885.⁴¹ The curriculum of the new schools was distinct from the traditional official school and private academies. While the old-style schools stressed classics and prepared students for the imperial exams, the new schools