Shanghai Faithful

by Jennifer Lin

  At the century’s turn, foreign companies were eager to use their capital to develop railways in China. In time, British, German, French, American, Russian, and Japanese enterprises extracted from the Qing government the right to build, operate, and control railways. For the most part, Chinese people supported railway construction. Indeed, in November 1907, thousands jammed into a meeting hall in Fuzhou to support connecting Fujian Province to a rail line. The Chinese in attendance pledged to back the project by buying eighteen thousand shares in the venture.

  “China must have railways,” Lin Pu-chi told an audience of students and teachers in the inaugural competition of St. Mark’s debate society.

  “But,” he blurted with emphasis, “we must build it ourselves.”

  Heads nodded. “China is not strong,” he continued. “China should make a Chinese railroad for Chinese people.”

  Students applauded at the conclusion of the debate. Pakenham-Walsh walked to the front of the room and announced in Chinese, “First prize in our first debate goes to . . .”

  But everyone already knew it would be Lin Pu-chi.

  Another Sunny Sunday

  Autumn winds brought rumors sweeping into Fujian Province in 1911. In markets and teahouses, from farmer to peddler to merchant, whispers of revolution rustled among the people.

  On October 10, 1911, the accidental explosion of a bomb being made by underground rebels in the Yangtze River town of Wuchang triggered a national uprising against inept Qing rulers. Fighting spread into full-fledged revolt. After rebel forces took Wuchang, they took the revolution to other cities, defeating imperial troops in Hankou, Changsha, Jiujiang, and Shanghai. The foundation of the Qing dynasty, started by Manchu invaders from the north more than 250 years earlier, was collapsing. Clearly, Fuzhou would be next to fall.

  In the walled city, Manchu leaders fortified their compounds. The officer in charge, known as the Tartar general, threatened loudly and repeatedly that he would detonate the city’s entire stockpile of weapons and gunpowder if revolutionaries made one move on his garrison.

  “We will all die,” he promised.

  Residents panicked. They threw possessions, food, babies, and grannies with bound feet into carts and wheelbarrows, jamming all roads out of the city. Every sedan chair and boat was put into service. In days, half the population fled, many going to the Nantai neighborhood that was thought to be safer. Streets in the walled city fell silent.

  On November 6, a gloriously sunny Monday, the boys at St. Mark’s did not flee; they went about their classes but could not stop talking about the impending showdown. They handicapped the fighting. If Beijing or Tianjin fell, they reasoned, there was no way the Tartar general in Fuzhou could resist. By that afternoon, a clerk at the Eastern Telegraph office in Nantai raced to the British consulate with a telegram: Qing troops had been defeated in Hangzhou and Suzhou.

  A delegation of reform-minded Fuzhou citizens appealed to the imperial viceroy to resign and hand over the city without bloodshed. The viceroy was willing, but the Tartar general held on to his scorched-earth strategy.

  Peddlers and beggars who used to stake out every inch of the long bridge over the Min River cleared out. Men hurriedly erected wooden barricades across the span. Gunboats from Britain, the United States, Germany, and Japan dropped anchor near Fuzhou to protect their citizens if the fighting endangered them or their property. English sailors took positions guarding British buildings in Nantai, setting up tents on flat rooftops.

  In the walled old city, news of the impending danger arrived in the form of messages wrapped about copper coins and thrown into shops and homes by phantom rebels. They warned: Run! The viceroy and general will lose their heads. Blood will flow. Chinese will rule under a flag of righteousness.

  On Wednesday night—November 8—a full harvest moon illuminated the sky. Along the main roads leading to the city, Manchu troops doused bales of cotton with kerosene and set them ablaze to cut off access. But revolutionaries in white armbands stealthily infiltrated the city. Part of the city’s ancient wall had crumbled after a typhoon a month earlier, allowing the rebels to creep into position.

  After midnight, shooting erupted. The whiz and ping of metal on stone echoed through narrow corridors. Revolutionaries, staked out on a hill, lobbed three-pound shells that rattled the ground.

  In Nantai, Pakenham-Walsh sat bolt upright in bed. He reached for his pocket watch and made a mental note: the revolt began at 1:30 a.m. From the street below, he heard the crash of gongs and blare of horns. Citizen brigades patrolled the streets to scare off river pirates who might be tempted to take advantage of the outbreak of fighting in the old city to loot stores in the foreign enclave.

  All eyes in Nantai were riveted on the action across the river. Residents emerged from their homes to watch the fighting as if they were finding seats for a soccer match. At daybreak, Pakenham-Walsh and some of his students climbed a hill near school for a better look. A few boys armed themselves with the best weapons they could find: hockey sticks. Fires raged from the area where the viceroy and general had their quarters. In just a half hour, four blazes swelled into a curtain of flames.

  As plumes of smoke blackened the sky, soldiers didn’t notice that the Manchu viceroy had slipped out of his compound, using his hands to feel his way in the darkness along the city wall. At the West Gate, he saw an empty paper shop and slipped inside. He removed a coil of rope from under his long tunic. He climbed atop a stool, swung the rope over a beam, and placed a knotted loop around his neck. He stepped off. His legs flailed in the air and then stopped.

  The Tartar general fought into the next day. He played possum with his adversaries. Twice, he commanded his troops to wave a flag of surrender—and then twice ordered them to resume the charge on rebels. The third time, his soldiers no longer followed his bluff. Five hundred Manchu troops put down their rifles and bayonets. Their general had been wounded and tried to escape but was easily captured before nightfall.

  The next day, he was executed.

  “Another sunny Sunday,” Pakenham-Walsh wrote in his diary on November 12, “but what a lot has happened within one week.”

  St. Mark’s reopened the next morning. But many of the students were late getting to class. School would have to wait. Pakenham-Walsh understood why. The boys were anxious to get rid of their braided ponytails. From the dawn of the Qing dynasty, the queue had been a symbol of submission for the majority Han people of China. Manchu victors from the north wore queues, and so must they.

  But in the aftermath of the battle, men and boys all over Fuzhou stood in line at sidewalk barbers, patiently waiting for them to lop off the braids with shears. Others asked rebel soldiers to do the honors with their swords. Lin Pu-chi and the older students viewed the queue as if it were the bit of a horse, forced on them as a symbol of subjugation. But even with the exuberance of the regime change, some men hedged their bets. To be on the safe side, they retrieved their queues and brought them home. If the Manchu people returned to power, they could revert to long braids in a hurry by stitching their queues into seams of hats.

  This portrait of the Lin family was taken in 1913. Note the lack of queues on the males, a sign that this was taken after the end of the Qing dynasty. Courtesy of Lin Family Collection.

  Trinity College

  The collapse of the tea trade in Fujian presented an unexpected opportunity for Pakenham-Walsh and his school. The Irishman had been searching Nantai for land on which to expand St. Mark’s, but the only space he could find was in the outlying hills, which were dotted with gravesites. That presented myriad problems. Landowners were loath to remove graves—the equivalent of evicting ancestral spirits—especially if it was to make room for foreigners. Luckily for Pakenham-Walsh, tea drinkers in Europe were proving to be fickle customers. Tastes shifted and they began preferring stronger tea from the highlands of India to varieties grown in South Chin
a. Business was so bad that three Russian trading firms pulled up stakes. And with no subjects to protect, Russian diplomats decided they would have to follow suit.

  Before word got out, a British tea inspector who was a friend of Pakenham-Walsh tipped him off that Russian diplomats would want to sell their consulate before leaving town. The schoolmaster seized the moment. With the backing of the bishop in Fuzhou, he made an immediate offer to the Russian secretary. That very day, they sealed a deal, and Pakenham-Walsh signed a purchase agreement under the gaze of a full-length portrait of Czar Nicholas II.

  Pakenham-Walsh went home and excitedly mapped out a layout for a new campus, using his children’s blocks and books on the floor of his parlor. The Anglican mission had decided to group all of the boys’ schools in Fuzhou under the direction of Irish clerics who were working in China as part of the Dublin University foreign mission. So that meant Pakenham-Walsh had to have a new school not only for St. Mark’s but also for the other CMS high school and a middle school.

  In the fall of 1912, four hundred students passed through the gates of the new Trinity College, named after the Dublin alma mater of Pakenham-Walsh and most of the faculty. With five acres of land, athletic fields, and a majestic banyan tree at the heart of the campus, Trinity College rivaled any school in Dublin or London.

  Lin Pu-chi was seventeen when St. Mark’s moved into a new, two-story building on the Trinity campus. With a full head of post-Qing hair tamed into a center part with gobs of pomade, he looked every bit the modern man. He and his classmates took to wearing Western hats. Felt fedoras, straw boaters, and rakish caps were all the rage in Fuzhou. His generation was caught up in the spirit of revolution and change, of possibility and invention. The five-striped flag of the new republic fluttered from government buildings. China had its first president, and everything Western—schools, railways, factories, telegraph wires, electricity, even fashion—was sought with urgency. Many students, including Lin Pu-chi, dreamed of studying abroad in England or the United States.

  Compared to his peers, Lin Pu-chi left little room for frivolity. This made him seem, even to his teachers, intense and a bit high-strung. He delighted in spinning a new phrase, correcting someone’s spelling, or lobbing a multisyllabic word as if he were playing a match point—habits that classmates found tiresome. He used a word like “verdure” in a sentence simply because he could, knowing that it would send any academic rival scurrying to the pages of his dictionary.

  Clearly, he was a student with a plan, and it was this: he hoped to leave home after graduation and enroll in the American-run St. John’s University in Shanghai, the best school in China for studying English. Lin Pu-chi ranked first in his class. By now, he spoke and wrote English flawlessly but still enjoyed studying the Chinese classics. In the dense text of philosophers such as Confucius and Mencius, Lin Pu-chi felt as if he were peering into the past life of the country, seeing all of the thought, sentiment, imagination, and will of the Chinese people.

  Pakenham-Walsh encouraged this pursuit. He had Lin Pu-chi and other senior students read the Analects of Confucius next to an open Bible. They compared sayings of the great sage with passages from the New Testament, seeing how the message of one was flowing into the meaning of the other.

  The thought of joining the ministry was something Lin Pu-chi carried all through his years at St. Mark’s. It was something his father wanted for him, too. Dr. Lin and other lay leaders in the Anglican Church fretted about the future. If the mission could not recruit more local men and women to carry on their work, Christianity would wither like an alien weed with shallow roots.

  One night during the first fall term at Trinity, Lin Pu-chi rapped on the door of Pakenham-Walsh’s study. He told his mentor he had come to talk to him about an important decision.

  On the third Sunday in February, just after Chinese New Year and the heralding in of the Year of the Cow in 1913, the Anglican community braved a downpour for the consecration of the chapel on the Trinity campus. Clerics from all over the province, Chinese as well as foreign, arrived by rickshaw and high-stepped through puddles and mud to make their way up a hill to the chapel. Their own doubting Thomas—Archdeacon Wolfe, who only five years earlier had predicted Pakenham-Walsh’s failure—proudly joined the bishop to bless the building.

  The chapel was the centerpiece of the college as well as the entire Anglican diocese in Fujian. A foreign architect in Shanghai designed the building, which was striking for its lack of any attempt to blend in with the surrounding Chinese architecture. Instead, it looked like the Episcopal chapel at the American-run St. John’s University in Shanghai. With the new Trinity chapel, everything about it—the pointed steeple, ivy-covered brick walls, tall windows—exalted the Anglican roots of the missionary society.

  Just as they would back home, missionaries donned their university robes for the consecration, which was religious pageantry of the highest order. Many wore blue hoods marking them as graduates of Trinity College in Dublin; others sported the white silk of Cambridge. And humbly dressed in their Sunday vestments were Chinese clerics, including Pastor Ding, father of the now legendary tenth student of St. Mark’s who made the whole venture possible.

  Senior students, including Lin Pu-chi, ushered guests to their seats while Pakenham-Walsh himself manned the organ and the choirmaster led boys in Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. As the procession began, heads craned over high oak pews. One missionary woman leaned over to whisper in the ear of another. “That’s Dr. Lin’s son,” Eleanor Harrison remarked, nodding in the direction of Lin Pu-chi. “I understand he’s decided to join the ministry.”

  “This means so much,” she commented. “These days, a boy from a mission school can earn so much in official or commercial work. Everyone is glad about it.”

  II

  Patriots

  • 4 •

  Light and Truth

  Shanghai, 1913

  Inside Alumni Hall at St. John’s University in Shanghai on a stage festooned with chrysanthemums and ferns, the father of modern China waited to speak.

  Earlier in the day, he had watched four companies of cadets in navy blue jackets and caps march behind a fife and drum corps on the campus parade ground. Now indoors, he prepared to address the entire student body, ambitious young men from all over China drawn to the American university with the Confucian saying in characters on its crest: Learning without thought is useless; thought without learning is dangerous.

  It was the last day of the winter term in 1913. With a fanfare of cornets and organ, the assembly stood to sing the school song in English.

  Sons of the Orient,

  Children of the morning,

  Seekers of Light,

  We come!

  The university president introduced the speaker as a leader who had stirred the hearts of the Chinese people as no one before.

  Dr. Sun Yat-sen strode to a podium flanked by two flags: the stars and stripes of the United States of America and the black, white, blue, yellow, and red bars of the new Republic of China.

  The man who inspired a revolt against imperial rule congratulated students at St. John’s for their good fortune at being at such an esteemed seat of learning. Two hundred hopefuls had applied that year for admission, but only fifty were selected.

  Even though he was fluent in English, the language of the university, Sun Yat-sen chose to address the students in Chinese. He had a critical message for them—their duty to the country. China needed educated leaders now more than ever, he told them. Only a year earlier, the last emperor, six-year-old Puyi, abdicated the throne, but his departure left a perilous void as China struggled to create a unified republican government. The current president, Yuan Shikai, was a military strongman from the north who plotted against rivals, including Sun Yat-sen and his allies, as he tried to consolidate power.

  For centuries, China had depended on the teachings of Confucius fo
r answers to its problems, Sun Yat-sen told the students. It was sufficient for young men to immerse themselves in the words of the great sage. But Confucius alone was not enough to pull China through its current problems. Foreigners brought new ideas, science, medicine, and technology. Chinese students needed practical and useful knowledge to complement what was lacking in their country’s ancient civilization.

  The Chinese people, he continued, had a respect for learning and willingness to follow educated leaders. This was their moment.

  “As you learn from the Bible, when you have the light, show others the way,” Sun Yat-sen stressed. “When you receive knowledge, teach it to others. The basis of a democratic country is education. With people who are always ready to learn, it is your duty to teach. Give unto others what you have received. Let your light shine.”

  This students rose to their feet with thunderous cheers and applause.

  City on the Sea

  In September 1915, two graduates from Trinity College sailed north to Shanghai to enroll at St. John’s University. They were the first students from the school to matriculate at the famous university. One was the son of a clerk for the British post office in Fuzhou and an accomplished athlete. He was captain of the soccer team but never could claim the top spot in academics. That honor went every year to his traveling companion, Lin Pu-chi.

  The ideals of St. John’s appealed to Lin Pu-chi. It was the notion of new learning for a new country, and no other college in China did it better than St. John’s. It was the perfect place for a twenty-year-old with the intellect, drive, and confidence to think he was destined for much more from life. The two Trinity graduates skipped two grades and entered as juniors, a nod to the quality of their education. Both had full scholarships for the annual tuition of $120, plus $100 for room and board—sums paid in silver coins minted in Mexico, the preferred currency in the foreign enclaves in China.