McTyeire: The School for China’s Daughters

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 grand building with its own turret. At first glance, they seem like adolescent girls anywhere, but look closer, and the girls of the Shanghai No.3 Girls’ Middle School have a poise, confidence and ambition unusual for young women of their age — but perfectly in keeping with the legacy of their school: McTyeire was established to educate the elite young ladies of Shanghai.

McTyeire 1938 class — McTyeire Class of 1938, in front of Richardson Hall. Photo from the 1938 yearbook.

The Beginnings: A Radical Idea

In 1892, missionary Young John Allen and Laura Haygood of the Southern Methodist Mission, set up the McTyeire School for Chinese girls in Shanghai. Both natives of Georgia, Allen and Haywood were strong advocates for education – Allen had also founded the Anglo-Chinese College in Hongkou in 1885 – and an advocate for Chinese women’s education at a time when it was considered inessential and even dangerous. Education was in English, the teachers were foreign, and the outlook was decidedly Western, and, of course, Christian.

Young John Allen (left) and Laura Haygood, founders of McTyeire

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 Mary Ann Aldersey’s school in Ningbo, in neighboring Zhejiang Province, set up in 1843 — the idea was sufficiently extreme that that first class contained only five girls.

The Southern Methodist-Shanghai Connection

The school was named for Bishop Holland McTyeire, the Tennessee-based head of the Southern Methodist Mission. Bishop 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 became a supporter of the resistance against the Qing imperial government and a financial backer of Sun Yat-sen. Charlie Soong is most famous, though, as the father of an extraordinary brood of children who would go on to run China, most notably the legendary Soong sisters. But that would come later.

At the age of nine, Soong had left his native Wenchang, in Hainan province, and gone to America with his uncle — the first “tea-and-silk” Chinese merchant to emigrate to the US — to work in the uncle’s Boston shop.

Young Charlie Soong. Photo: https://founders.duke.edu/yao-ju-charlie-soong/

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. 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, who took the young stowaway under his wing, Charlie Soong eventually ended up at the School of Religion at Vanderbilt.

It was Bishop McTyeire who allowed Soong to be ordained in 1885, at a time when Chinese were not permitted to be ordained (although he later refused to allow him to rise in the ranks, causing a great deal of bitterness). Soong returned to China — to Shanghai, in 1886 — where he married and would eventually have three daughters, the 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. When the Shanghai Women’s Commercial and Savings Bank was formed, McTyeire naturally opened an account. Beyond social change, prestigious schools such as McTyeire created a new kind of elite, people who fostered community, national spirit — and “service toward the public good.” (Heidi Ross in Social Engineering and the Social Sciences in China, 1919-1949 by Yung-chen Chiang,)

McTyeire and the Soong Sisters

The McTyeire School was originally located on 21 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 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 The Soong Sisters.

Ai Ling’s 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, Dr. Sun’s successor in leading the Nationalist party — followed her to McTyeire, but none made as much of an impression as the precocious Ai Ling.

By 1922, McTyeire had moved to more spacious grounds on Edinburgh Road (today’s Jiangsu Road) and hired the American firm of R.A. Curry to construct their new buildings in the “Collegiate Gothic” style, favored in late 19th and early 20th century American colleges. Curry worked with his young, talented Hungarian associate, Laszlo Hudec, who would continue to use secular Gothic themes in his decades of work in Shanghai.

The main building, Lambuth Hall – named for Shanghai-born medical missionary Bishop Russell Lambuth – was completed in 1922, but the completion of Richardson Hall (named for the school’s second headmistress, Helen Richardson) was beset with financial difficulties and was not completed until 1934.

It was also in the 1930s that Isabel Sun, daughter of the wealthy Sun family, attended McTyeire. Her memoir, Remembering Shanghai: A Memoir of Socialites, Scholars and Scoundrels, has a delicious description of fashion at the elite school: “[it was]…the best private school in style-conscious Shanghai. At McTyeire the seven Kwok sisters, whose family owned the Wing On department store, arrived each morning wearing chic little European-made outfits complete with bejeweled hair clips, matching shoes and fur shrugs,” she writes.

Fortunately, much of McTyeire is still intact. The former Richardson Hall is now the May 4th Hall, but still faces a beautiful green sward, where the young ladies still gather to chat and play sports. Inside, vibrant stained glass casts dancing shadows in the Gothic entrance hall and brightens the atmospheric old theater. Wandering the halls today cannot feel enormously different to how it felt half a century ago.

A 1938 Snapshot of McTyeire Life

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 fresh faced 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 handed down its colors to the junior class; a class tree is planted; emotional dedications are made in the yearbook.

McTyeire became a Japanese military hospital during the war years, and ceased to exist after 1952, when it merged with St. Mary’s Hall to become the No. 3 Girls School – yet it has remained an elite girls’ school (with a brief pause from the Cultural Revolution in 1966 until 1981, when it went coed).

Today the No. 3 Girls’Middle School is one of the city’s “key” schools, the only remaining public all-girls school, and one that still sends its graduates to top universities. But some things haven’t changed: the school buildings are still the same, graduation photos are still taken on the steps of Richardson Hall, and on warm spring days, the girls of the No. 3 Girls’ Middle School still play baseball – a legacy of its American Southern Methodist past.