Shanghai Daily news

The main building of Shanghai No.3 Girls’ Middle School on  Jiangsu Road. The building was designed by Hungarian-born architect Ladislau Hudec in the 1930s for the former McTyeire School.(Photo: Shanghai Daily)

The school’s original stained-glass windows remain intact.(Photo: Shanghai Daily)

In the early 20th century, the McTyeire School educated the elite young ladies of Shanghai. Tina Kanagaratnam steps into the hallowed halls of the school that is today the No. 3 Girls’ Middle School.

Young women in smart uniforms run down the wide steps, ponytails flying, laughing and talking. Clusters of girls sit and chat on the green lawn that fronts the grey, castle-inspired structure. They are just like any other adolescent girl — but there is something different about them. These girls, the girls of the Shanghai No. 3 Girls’ Middle School have a poise, confidence and ambition unusual for young women of their age — but familiar to those who know the products of posh girls’ schools anywhere.
For despite its rather egalitarian name, that is exactly what the No. 3 Girls’ Middle School is — and what it has always been. It was in 1890 that the Southern Methodist Mission decided to set up the McTyeire School for Chinese girls in Shanghai. Education was in English, teachers were foreign, and the outlook was decidedly Western.
It was a radical idea for its time: the benefits of education were considered unnecessary for girls (who would, after all, be leaving their families to marry). Better that they learn to sew a fine seam and cultivate the qualities that would ensure that they married well.
Although it was not the first school for girls in China — that honor went to a school in Ningbo in neighboring Zhejiang Province, set up by a priest in 1844 — the idea was sufficiently extreme that that first class contained only five girls.
The McTyeire School was named for Bishop Holland McTyeire, the Tennessee-based head of the Southern Methodist Mission. McTyeire was a big name in the Southern Methodist world — he had been instrumental in founding Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and served as the university’s chancellor. More interesting, though, is his Shanghai connection.
In 1882, he met a young man from China named Charlie Soong, who would later become famous as the father of the legendary Soong sisters. At the age of nine, Soong had gone to America from Hainan in South China with his uncle — the first "tea-and-silk” Chinese merchant to emigrate to the US — to work in his uncle’s Boston shop.
There, while working behind the counter, he met two young Chinese students who had come to America as part of the Chinese Educational Mission, brainchild of educational pioneer (and Yale graduate) Yung Wing. The students, Wan Bing-chung and New Shanchow, convinced young Soong that he should be getting an education instead of selling tea — but Soong’s traditional family did not agree, and so he ran away, stowing away on a ship. Through a captain he met on that ship Soong eventually ended up at the School of Religion at Vanderbilt.
It was Bishop McTyeire who allowed Soong to be ordained in 1885, when Chinese were not permitted to be ordained. Soong returned to China — to Shanghai, in 1886 — where he married and would eventually have three daughters, the fabled Soong sisters (all of whom would attend McTyeire) as well as three sons.
Education in China in the early 20th century was inseparable from the social foment and formation of modern China that was going on. Prestigious schools such as McTyeire created a new kind of elite, people who fostered community, national spirit — and, as Heidi Ross points out in her chapter on McTyeire in “Social Engineering and the Social Sciences in China, 1919-1949” by Yung-chen Chiang, “service toward the public good.”
The McTyeire School was originally located on Hankou Road, near what is today the Methodist Moore Memorial Church, where Charlie Soong was the head of the Sunday school.
It was the Hankou Road school that Charlie Soong’s eldest daughter, Soong Ai Ling, attended McTyeire, when she insisted at age five that she be allowed to go to school. The other pupils were considerably older, but Ai Ling was tutored by the headmistress, Helen Richardson, and “became the mascot of the school,” according to Emily Hahn, in her biography “The Soong Sisters.”
Her two sisters — Soong Ching Ling, who married Dr Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Republic of China, and Soong Mei Ling, who married Chiang Kai-shek, the former Taiwan leader — followed her to McTyeire, but none made as much of an impression as the precocious Ai Ling.
By the 1930s, McTyeire had moved to more spacious grounds on Edinburgh Road, and hired the firm of R.A. Curry to construct their new buildings. It was a young architect, freshly arrived from Hungary, who designed the buildings: Ladislau Hudec, perhaps old Shanghai’s most gifted architect.
Fortunately, much of the McTyeire that Hudec built is still intact. The main building — what was called Richardson Hall, after Helen Richardson, until 1949 — faces a beautiful green sward, where the young ladies still gather to chat and play sports. Inside, the stained glass in the lobby is miraculously intact, as is the old, atmospheric theater. Wandering the halls today cannot feel enormously different to how it felt half a century ago.
The 1938 “McTyeiren” — the yearbook — offers up a snapshot of McTyeire life in old Shanghai. The yearbook itself is bilingual, and the senior portraits depict freshfaced young ladies, dressed in qipao, with bright, intelligent eyes staring across the years.
Some are “always cheerful, modest and accomplished,” others are “a perfect woman, nobly planned,” still others “a talented girl, a bright student.” They played basketball, hockey and baseball, acted in the “Merchant of Venice” and “Miss Yu’s Secret;” they wrote poems and sang the McTyeire School song:
“Near the mighty Yangtze River,
In the heart of old Shanghai,
There’s a school for China’s daughters
Bringing truth and freedom nigh.
May she live and grow forever,
Scatter knowledge far and near.
Till all China learns the lessons
That we learn at old McTyeire."
And like all old schools,
McTyeire was full of traditions: the senior class hands down its colors to junior class 2; a class tree is planted; emotional
dedications are made in the yearbook.
McTyeire ceased to exist after 1949, but it has remained an elite girls’ school (except for a brief period during the “cultural revolution” from 1966 to 1976 when it went coed). Today the No. 3 Girls’Middle School is a city’s “key”
school, one that still sends almost all its graduates to university.
But some things haven’t changed: the school buildings are still the same, the girls still stand on the steps of Richardson Hall, and on warm spring days, the girls of the No. 3 Girls’ Middle School still play baseball.