Searching for the Roots of Western Wealth and Power: Guo Songtao and Education in Victorian England

By the winter of 1878, Guo Songtao had been in London for two years. The Qing empire’s resident minister in England and France, he was exhausted by work and hurt by defamers who called him a traitor, and he was ready to go home. When he first arrived in London he was impressed with England’s industrial might and eager to bring back its secrets to China. “In this country the local gentry strongly advise China to build railways,” he wrote to Li Hongzhang; “they say that the power and might of England are really based on the railway system.” Now, after deeper inquiries into the country’s governance, Guo was of a different opinion. He was certain that the self-strengthening officials had misplaced priorities.¹ In his letter to Shen Baozhen of November 1878, he overturned his earlier emphasis on industrial achievement and faulted the prioritization of acquiring “the arts of victory” (zhisheng zhishu). Leading self-strengtheners—Li, Shen, and even Guo himself—had a clear agenda and admirable resolve, but so long as they “did not venture to ask questions about roots and foundations … their efforts will not be of much help.”²

By “roots and foundation,” Guo means education. He thought Chinese education was rotten to its core. After the Song, driven by competition in the civil service examinations, scholars “devoted themselves all day long to who-knows-what,” and as soon as they could write a few superfluous essays to acquire prestige and wealth, the learning was finished. It was only in the west that he observed “a few schools where the structure and teaching of the Three Dynasties was preserved.” The organization of these schools was “orderly and solemn,” their inquiries and discussions were “deep and elaborate,” and “everything they taught was of substantive utility, no superfluous words.”³

Scholarly interest in Guo Songtao has been primarily focused on his acceptance of western institutions and technology, and his subsequent rejection by the Chinese elite. In this narrative, Guo’s personal failure was symptomatic of the conservatism of the late Qing literati; it was only after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 that many of them awoke to the urgency of reform. In this paper, I suggest that Guo’s mission had an important but overlooked accomplishment: he brought back a different conception of western learning, one that sees the success of the west as due to its adherence to its own roots in higher principles of humanism in education and governance. Not merely an unpopular bureaucrat and failed diplomat, Guo played a significant role in disseminating this new way of seeing western learning to his friends among the literati. In his later years, he grafted Victorian pedagogy onto Neo-Confucianism at his academy in Hunan.

A metropolitan degree holder from Hunan, Guo had joined the Xiang Army against the Taipings and served in a number of important official posts from 1858 to 1867, but he became disillusioned with the court’s hawkish foreign policy during the Second Opium War.⁴ He lived in retirement between 1868 and 1874, tending to local affairs, before being recalled by the court because of his expertise in foreign affairs. He was appointed minister to England in 1876, a post he accepted with great reluctance, and was stationed in London from late 1876 to early 1879.

In contrast with his image of a Qing that had “lost its entire foundation” (daben quanshi),⁵ the England he saw was at the height of its industrial prosperity and colonial ambition. Guo discovered in the schools of Victorian England, in particular in their stress on moral and civil education, the “roots” of western strength and power. He connected British schools with the ancient paradigm of “governance-and-teaching” during the Three Dynasties, the idea of administering the people through ritual behavior and moral teaching. From his study of history and the classics, he believed that this ancient model had been abandoned towards the end of the Zhou and replaced by a system of government-controlled civil service examinations...