The Hall of Three Pines: An Account of My Life

Chapter Nine. Qinghua University

In 1908, the American government agreed with the Chinese government (the Qing dynasty government) to return to China the so-called excess funds from the Boxer Rebellion reparations. These funds were to be used by the Chinese government to send students to study in America. In 1909, the Qing government set up an “Office for Study in America,” which was to be in charge of sending students to America. From 1909 to 1911, three groups of students were chosen for study in America, among them Hu Shi, Mei Yiqi, and Zhao Yuanren. People at Qinghua think of the students in these three groups as Qinghua alumni and call them “alumni from the prehistoric period.” In addition to holding examinations for overseas study, the Office for Study in America founded the Advanced Studies House to allow successful candidates to do catch-up work before leaving for overseas.This Advanced Studies House was really the forerunner of Qinghua University. In 1911, it was finally established as the Qinghua Hall of Higher Learning and became the official preparatory school for study in America.This marked a move to the second stage of learning from the West. In the spring of 1911, I went to Kaifeng to enter the middle-school section of the Zhongzhou Public School. Not long after being admitted, when I was just settling in, I received news that the Qinghua Hall of Higher Learning had been established in Beijing and was formally calling 332 c h a p t e r n i n e q i n g h u a u n i v e r s i t y for students. Many friends urged me to sign up for the examination. But my mother could hardly bear to let me leave home to study in Kaifeng in the first place, and hearing that I wanted to test into Qinghua, from which I would sail far across the seas after graduation, she was even less willing. Because my mother was not willing and I believed my age was above what was specified by Qinghua, I did not sign up for the exam.A few classmates in my year took the test, and all of them were above the specified age, but all of them were chosen. I would never have expected that, seventeen years after missing this opportunity, I would go to Qinghua University along with Luo Jialun to become part of the leading circle there.At that time Qinghua was in transition from being a preparatory school for study in America to being a university in its own right. During this process, I, too, put forth a little effort. I had no idea what Luo Jialun was going to say at the first all-campus faculty-student meeting after our arrival. When the time came, I heard him speak on his overall educational policy, which he called his “four improvements”: improvement in academics, in democratic measures, in discipline, and in military preparation. (Some accounts of the four improvements differ from this.) Of these four items, the achievements in academics were most outstanding; improvements in democratic measures and discipline were so-so; and there were no improvements in military training—that was a complete failure. To speak of the “improvement” in military training first, the actual form this took was daily morning calisthenics, presided over by the president and the dean of studies, in riding boots and spurs. Once Zhang Pengchun came to Qinghua to give a series of lectures on drama. As he took the podium Zhang said,“Your dean of studies wrote me to ask me to give these lectures, and he said,‘You have to agree to this. If you don’t, I won’t let you get away with it.’That letter gave me a big scare, because it was from a man who wears a uniform. If a man in a uniform does not want to let me get away with something, who am I to resist? So I had to agree to this!” In the beginning,the students generated enough enthusiasm to report for calisthenics at 6:00 every morning, but with the end of summer, as the days grew shorter and the weather colder, fewer students showed up on the exercise ground. Luo Jialun issued an order that anyone who missed qinghua university : 333 calisthenics without an excuse would have a demerit chalked up...