上海 SHANGHAI
Wednesday 11 November 2015
On their second day in Shanghai in 1908. the Gambles visited Southgate School, which was run by missionaries. Today, Shanghai Southgate High School exists on the same site as did the original Christian missionary Southgate School. It is difficult to think of this 30s-retro building as a high school, but the signs say as much.
On that second day in Shanghai, the Gambles also visited St. John’s University, founded by the Episopalians as St. John’s College in 1879 and in 1905 becoming St. John’s University. St. John’s was known as the “Harvard” of China and graduated seventy-three classes of highly educated individuals, fluent in Chinese and English, familiar with both Asian and Western culture, who became the international elite, excelling in all fields of endeavor, in education, law, international diplomacy, finance, government, science, engineering, linguistics, entertainment. In 1952, St. John’s was taken over by the Chinese government.
In the 1980s, when the Chinese government wanted to normalize relations with the West, it was the St. john’s graduates to whom they turned, tracking them down in all corners of the globe, engaging them to return to China and teach their expertise and what they knew of the West to the newly open Chinese nation.
St. John’s is now the East China University of Political Science and Law. In 2015, the campus is a refreshing change from the congested city, the many skyscrapers, and the lanes of city traffic. Over the century, the plantings have flourished. The campus is beautiful with its paved stone walkways, green lawns, shrubbery, and tall trees.
Although the chapel was long ago razed, several buildings, clearly from the early 1900s and of Western architectural design, along with the Si Meng Building, remain, obviously being occupied and put to use.
The Si Meng building was erected in 1909 and bears the original inscribed cornerstone, with etching and inscribed writing obviously having been scraped away. On the stone, “St John’s University” can still be made out, and originally there was written “our Lord” as part of a quote from a verse in the Bible, this verse mostly defaced.
The Si Meng building was built with funds from Yale graduates to honor the Preacher Arthur Thomas Mann, who arrived at St. John’s in 1902 to teach Philosophy. He died in July of 1907, drowning while trying to save a Chinese friend. The brass plaque adjacent to the corner of the St. John’s stone was put up by Yale graduates (Mann was a Yale man) and gives full details of his life and death.
