Page:Twentieth Century Impressions of Hongkong, Shanghai, and other Treaty Ports of China.djvu/133

 were 438 boys on the roll at the Central School; in July and September of the same year there were at Queen's College 510 and 796 respectively. By this sudden practical doubling of the number of students, the vast majority of whom were naturally admitted to the bottom classes, one would have thought it self-evident that the work of the next three or four years would be exceptionally arduous, and that the steady progress of the previous eight years must, as a matter of course, be retarded. Sir William Robinson, however, after a residence in the Colony of six months, caused considerable astonishment, and in some quarters indignation, by the public announcement at the Queen's College Prize Distribution in January, 1892, that Queen's College was a failure. This dictum, which would have been the ruin of a private school, did not affect the popularity of Queen's College with the Chinese. It is, indeed, very instructive to note that during the very six years that the college was suffering from the gubernatorial frown, Chinese masters and pupils were urgently required at the Imperial Tientsin University, where their excellent proficiency in English secured them a hearty welcome and rapid promotion. Of these sixty young men, at least four are now Taoutais, Wen Tsung-yao is Secretary to the Viceroy at Canton, Dr. Chan Kam-to is in the Finance Bureau at Peking, and Wong Fan and Leung Lan-fan are on Railways and Telegraph Service respectively. Verily, it may be said of Queen's College, as of the prophet, that it is not without honour save in its own country.

In 1894 the constitution of the college was changed by the appointment of a governing body, whose first act in 1895 was to abolish the vernacular school, restoring it, however, nine years later. In 1896 independent examiners were nominated by the governing body to hold the winter examination and report on the college. With only two exceptions this practice was continued annually till 1903, when the governing body resolved that an annual inspection in July and report by the independent examiners would be of greater service than the examination of a thousand boys in January, the conduct of which was left in 1904 and onwards (as prior to 1896) to the control of the headmaster. A very wide gulf sunders the conditions of these two examinations. In January every boy is examined, and the whole year's work is under review; in July the boys are tested in new work upon which they have been engaged for only four months, and about 20 per cent. are taken by the sample method.

Queen's College is fortunate in the possession of an excellent staff. Of the English staff, apart from the headmaster, there are three trained certificated masters, the remainder are graduates of universities—three from Cambridge, two from Trinity College, Dublin, one from Oxford, and one from Aberdeen. The senior Chinese masters leave nothing to be desired, and most of the junior are satisfactory. The native masters are trained under the charge of a normal master. Twenty years ago, when the salary was only $4 a month, the head boys of the school were eager to be monitors, now that they receive $20 rising to $35 a month great difficulty is experienced in finding suitable boys to be articled pupil teachers, though by this course of training their market value is considerably enhanced on account of their greater proficiency in English. The Oxford Local Examinations, which have been held at Hongkong as a centre for twenty years, during which time 1,400 candidates, boys and girls, have been examined, have proved of inestimable value. Besides providing an impartial test of the educational work done in the Colony, unmarred by local bias on either side, they have been of great service to Hongkong boys in procuring for them admission to English and American schools and universities, and in obtaining exemption from professional preliminary examinations. Queen's College has always had a difficulty to cope with in presenting candidates. The majority of these boys after promotion at the commencement of the school year have in March to begin to prepare for the examination in July. They are, therefore, practically examined upon their knowledge gained in ordinary school routine, and very little on the special requirements of the locals. In spite of this drawback, however, they have done very creditably. Third Class Junior Honours were obtained in 1907, and distinctions as follow:—1895, Senior Mathematics and Preliminary History; 1898, Junior English; 1899, Senior English.

In an ambitious upward course Queen's College is hindered by the following considerations. It is a day-school, so that all attempts to teach English conversation are necessarily confined to school hours, after which all the boys immediately revert to Chinese thought and expression, and no supervision can be given to preparation of work. Again, fully one-third of the boys change annually, and this has always been the case from time immemorial. Four hundred boys leaving and four hundred new boys being admitted annually is a very serious obstacle in the way of obtaining a large and efficient upper school. In this connection it is to be observed that there is no external system for feeding the upper classes of Queen's College such as exists in any large town in England, for the half-dozen boys from the Government district schools are lost sight of when the number of seats available (420) is borne in mind.

The following table serves to illustrate the