Dana Robert's edited volume, Converting Colonialism: Visions and Realities in Mission History, explores the way in which local and socio-political conditions shaped mission practices so that indigenous churches under European colonialism often did not become the institutions that missionaries envisaged.Footnote ¹ Historical reality deviated from missionary vision. For instance, one case study explores shifting ideals regarding the constitution of indigenous churches after contentious encounters in the dioceses of Colombo and on the Niger. Although the original intention was to achieve the consecration of indigenous bishops at all costs, conflicts relating to episcopal authority and missionary control resulted in more cautious approaches towards indigenous church organization.Footnote ² In the broader study of the history of Christianity, this historical method reflects how non-Western Christianity is no longer treated merely as a derivative of missionary activity, but as a complicated entanglement of cross-cultural contexts, colonial government, Christian essentialism and both missionary and indigenous agency.Footnote ³

The following article extends this approach to Anglican mission schools in Hong Kong from 1849 to 1941, which are exemplars of how inspired visions took institutional shape differently from the form initially planned, owing to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial context.Footnote ⁴ This case study builds upon extensive historiography tracing the worldwide development of Protestant mission schools in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Footnote ⁵ Although missionaries aimed to enable indigenous converts to encounter the Bible through English education, they were often confronted by the realities of government restrictions on school operations as well as graduates deploying their literacy differently from how the missionaries imagined.

The first Anglican mission school in Hong Kong was founded as a by-product of burgeoning missionary expansion worldwide during the 1840s. Eugene Stock observes that the growth of Church Missionary Society (CMS) activity in this decade stemmed from unprecedented voluntary subscriptions in England as well as British imperial conquests in China and India, which led ultimately to the establishment of new bishoprics around the world.Footnote ⁶ The Revd Vincent Stanton was accordingly dispatched as colonial chaplain to Hong Kong after it was ceded by China's Qing Empire in 1842 following the First Opium War.Footnote ⁷ Stanton's ultimate aim was to reach China, an endeavour which in his mind would begin with an Anglo-Chinese college and a cathedral church in Hong Kong.Footnote ⁸ Stanton's hope was eventually realized by Bishop George Smith, the first bishop of the newly-constituted diocese of Victoria (Hong Kong). In a memorandum to Earl Grey, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, Smith expressed his hope that the diocese would diffuse ‘the blessings of liberty of civilization and of Christianity’, in line with imperial and missionary activity across the British Empire.Footnote ⁹ His ideal was to enable Hong Kong to become ‘a scene of educational measures of a high order and on a large scale … as the most eligible locality for a central base of indirect missionary operations in China’.Footnote ¹⁰ To this end, Smith advocated the formation of St Paul's College (SPC) as an Anglo-Chinese college to train indigenous evangelists who would propagate both Christianity and civilization:

In effect, Smith foresaw graduates of the school being so moved by their encounter with Western Christian education that they would passionately spread Christianity throughout the rest of China. This was consistent with wider expectations and assumptions at the time about the superiority of Western civilization vis-à-vis Chinese culture. For example, the Revd S. R. Brown, headmaster of the nearby Morrison Education Society School, which sent its students to SPC after closing down, thought poorly of the ‘passive inanity’ of indigenous students and of the ‘unfit instruments of education’ in Chinese literature, but was hopeful for their enlightenment through Christianity and Western learning.Footnote ¹²

The beginnings of SPC showed promise. A permanent site was obtained after the colonial government granted Inland Lot 76 to the archbishop of Canterbury for 999 years ‘for the object of training a body of native clergy and Christian teachers for the propagation of the gospel of China’.Footnote ¹³ After two years’ operation, some thirty-three male students aged between twelve and eighteen had enrolled in the college. Staying on school premises, they took part in daily morning and evening services and also took classes in English, Chinese, Geography, Astronomy, Divinity and History.Footnote ¹⁴ In 1858, the Diocesan Native Female Training School (which became the Victoria Home and Orphanage in 1869, when it opened to boys as well, and then the Diocesan Boys’ School in 1902) was founded by Bishop Smith's wife with a similar aim in mind. By simultaneously evangelizing and civilizing colonial subjects, Lydia Smith sought ‘to introduce among a somewhat superior class of native females the blessings of Christianity and of religious training’; her hope was that graduates would become the wives of SPC graduates.Footnote ¹⁵

It is, however, important to note that Bishop Smith's articulation of the benefits of mission education was published in a prospectus addressed to potential subscribers. From the outset, the college was dependent on an annual grant of 1,200 Hong Kong silver dollars (HK$; approximately £255) from the Foreign Office, which had been transferred from the recently closed Morrison Education Society school.Footnote ¹⁶ Furthermore, the college never received the anticipated support from the endowment fund of the diocese. Of the £8,000 endowment donated by ‘a brother and a sister’ in England, Bishop Smith used only £643 to repay a loan advanced by Stanton for the college before allocating the remainder to other diocesan expenses and investment in Dent & Co., a trading company in the colony.Footnote ¹⁷ Stanton lamented the fact that during the succeeding years, in which SPC expanded, he never received any further support from the endowment fund. Instead, Stanton was compelled to make his own personal donation of £1,000, supplemented by gifts from family and friends.Footnote ¹⁸

In addition, the colonial government was reluctant to increase the grant awarded to the college. Henry Pottinger, the first governor of Hong Kong, wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1843 expressing his opinion that funding two schools in Hong Kong would be ‘totally superfluous’ since Chinese residents in the colony were largely uninterested in English education, as suggested by the fact that very few families were willing to pay high school fees to attend mission schools.Footnote ¹⁹ This was because English education was closely associated with degradation. This attitude was exemplified when, in 1864, Mary Winefred Eaton, the first headmistress of the Diocesan Native Female Training School, was assaulted by a mob while riding in a sedan chair.Footnote ²⁰ Her school had to be repurposed in 1869 to cater for orphans since the school's original purpose of training ‘native females’ had resulted in financial difficulty.Footnote ²¹ Smith's successor, Bishop Charles Alford, wrote to Archbishop Charles Longley that SPC had entered bankruptcy by 1867.Footnote ²² The Foreign Office had withdrawn their annual grant of HK$1,200; the properties owned by the college, which had in the past yielded £500 per annum, had failed in recent years; and the investments in Dent & Co. had vanished when the entire company folded in 1867 following the 1866 global financial crisis.Footnote ²³ In effect, the grand vision of establishing mission schools that would impart Christianity and civilization struggled to take off as a result of wavering finances: the initial grants had run dry and the anticipated income and interest never materialized.

In addition, graduates did not go where missionaries intended. Scandalously it was revealed in 1865 that with a few notable exceptions, most girls from the Diocesan Native Female Training School were sold by their parents as mistresses to Europeans in the colony, who valued their English proficiency and the ‘refinement in their countenances’.Footnote ²⁴ As for the male graduates of SPC, Bishop Smith complained that they never pursued full-time church work once they discovered more lucrative options within the mercantile community of Hong Kong, for their proficiency in English proved to be indispensable in trade, commerce and local government.Footnote ²⁵ A polemicist of the period noted that SPC produced ‘the best instructed Chinese, who … [held] the highest positions among their countrymen’.Footnote ²⁶ This trend was amplified by the paucity of schooling in pre-colonial Hong Kong, which had mostly consisted of informal education in homes and the fluctuating presence of academies preparing youths for the Qing civil service examination.Footnote ²⁷ In addition, from the 1860s the colonial government shifted to indirect rule through indigenous leaders. Studies by Carroll and Munn highlight the increasingly prominent role of self-conscious English-speaking Chinese elites from mission schools in public life.Footnote ²⁸

Wu Ting-fang, who graduated from SPC in 1861, was the first Chinese to be called to the bar, the first Chinese member of Hong Kong's Legislative Council, Qing ambassador to the US, and ultimately Minister of Foreign Affairs for the Republic of China.Footnote ²⁹ Another prominent early graduate was Tong Mow-chee (also known as Tang Ting-gui), who graduated from SPC in 1851. Tong pursued a career in business in California before returning to China in 1857, where he worked as the chief translator for Shanghai Imperial Customs, and subsequently as the head of Jardine, Matheson & Co.'s Shanghai office from 1873 until his death in 1897.Footnote ³⁰ English education was valued highly and could be redeployed beyond Anglican missions in both colonial Hong Kong and Chinese treaty ports. This dilemma persisted even fifty years later: the fifth bishop of Victoria, Gerard Heath Lander, made the same complaint, lamenting that most SPC graduates preferred to become clerks or schoolmasters, earning double the salary of catechists and more than ordained ministers.Footnote ³¹

Nevertheless, SPC and the Victoria Home and Orphanage discovered a new identity in the 1870s during Bishop John Shaw Burdon's episcopate, when Burdon switched the emphasis of schools away from curricular content and towards the boarding experience. The Revd M. J. Ost, a missionary educator in Hong Kong, gratefully recalled the impact of Christian schoolmasters on boarders. For the Victoria Home and Orphanage, the Revd Kwong Yat-sau (Kuang Ri-xiu) and his wife were able to establish good relations with the girls while residing with them, helping many in their faith, leading to six baptisms on Christmas Day 1889. The spiritual experience of the girls was also strengthened by the presence of two Chinese Bible teachers, as well as by the fact that over half the students were from the second generation of Chinese Christian families in South China.Footnote ³² Between 1881 and 1892, Mok Shau-tsang (Mo Shou-zeng), who in 1935 would become assistant bishop of the Chung Hua Sheng Kung Hui (the Chinese Anglican Church) and Hong Kong's first Chinese bishop, studied at SPC after a moving encounter with a distant relative who quit opium and gambling dramatically after becoming a Christian. Although most of Mok's contemporaries pursued professional careers after graduating, Mok chose to enrol in SPC's theological training programme after formative encounters with his missionary teachers.Footnote ³³ The Revd William Hipwell, who was temporarily in charge of SPC in 1905, commented on the importance of school instructors having ‘high Christian character’, for he understood this to be the key in influencing students.Footnote ³⁴ The converse could also be true, with the lack of boarding facilities limiting the influence of mission schools. For example, in 1874, two boys were withdrawn from the Victoria Home and Orphanage by their mother because she adamantly refused to allow them to be baptized.Footnote ³⁵ The shift in outlook was described in 1899 by a letter addressed to the bishop which argued: ‘A day school, however Christian in its management, bears but scanty fruit … The children go home to their heathen parents … and are led to a sort of compromise.’Footnote ³⁶

Another important shift in the 1870s concerned access to alternative funding. Renewed support for schools arrived in wake of the 1870 Forster Education Act passed in England, which enacted the provision of universal elementary education, but with conditions such as secular education and a timetable conscience clause enabling parents to withdraw their children from religious instruction.Footnote ³⁷ This approach filtered down to colonial policy in Hong Kong, which saw the introduction of a grant-in-aid scheme in 1873 to provide schools with up to HK$300 (around £105) per annum, but with similar conditions, such as a daily minimum of four hours’ secular instruction or grants being given according to school examination results.Footnote ³⁸ The supervisory body ensuring proper observance of funding conditions was Hong Kong's Department of Government Schools (later known as the Education Department), which had been established in 1865 after the removal of a more informal system that depended mostly on the voluntarism of mission agencies.Footnote ³⁹ Subsequently, Anglican mission schools which wished to qualify for the government subsidy were compelled to conform to the regulations and to provide a more balanced education not solely oriented around proselytism. In 1875, Bishop Burdon provided SPC with a modified set of statutes which stated that tutor stipends could thenceforth be taken from the colonial government or any other public society, rather than only from missionary and diocesan funds.Footnote ⁴⁰ This enabled the college to join the grant-in-aid scheme the following year, but also meant that students would have to study a broader curriculum as well as take government examinations.Footnote ⁴¹ Similarly, the Victoria Home and Orphanage was given a new constitution in 1878 so that it could receive grant-in-aid funding, but was also obliged to adjust its teaching curriculum and to incorporate government examinations.Footnote ⁴²

At the same time, mission schools turned to the philanthropy of foreign merchants and trading firms in Hong Kong, but again this was not without strings attached. For example, the Victoria Home and Orphanage received sizeable subscriptions throughout the 1870s from Jardine, Matheson & Co. and even had their accounts audited by the company free of charge. However, in 1878, the company's director, William Keswick, opposed Bishop Burdon's proposal to place the school under the care of the Female Education Society, which would have stopped the school from admitting boys.Footnote ⁴³ Keswick reasoned that such a move ran counter to the intentions of the subscribers, who understood the role of the Victoria Home and Orphanage in two inseparable ways. First, the school ought to serve as wide a demographic as possible, boys and girls alike, of Chinese, Eurasian and European origin. Second, the school was providing male graduates to take up much-needed positions in Hong Kong's economic context, especially in the civil service, at the docks, in stores and in lawyers’ and merchants’ offices.Footnote ⁴⁴ To hand over the school to the Female Education Society would essentially sever this supply of incoming staff. Eventually, the school was given a revised constitution in the 1880s, mandating it to provide ‘a wide and liberal education well fitting for professional, commercial, and clerical classes’.Footnote ⁴⁵

It was not until the episcopate of Burdon's successor, Joseph Charles Hoare, that the original missionary purpose of the Anglican mission schools was rediscovered. Shortly before his arrival in 1899, Hoare wrestled with the question of how to further the vision of training Chinese Christian church workers while meeting government demands relating to educational standards and also creating a financially viable system. He wrote: ‘Nothing would please me more to see SPC fulfilling the object for which it was founded … that object being the training of Chinese catechists and clergy.’Footnote ⁴⁶ His subordinate, the Revd William Banister, had expressed the same sentiment the previous year in a memorandum for the CMS, pointing out that many catechists in the diocese were in fact ‘ransacked’ from neighbouring dioceses since the diocese lacked its own training institution following the reconfiguration of SPC.Footnote ⁴⁷ Hoare was particularly disturbed by the fact that the college had strayed so far from its original purpose that it was being occupied by a Chinese school providing English lessons without the slightest hint of Christianity.Footnote ⁴⁸ From Month to Month, a regular publication set up by Hoare to provide updates on Anglican mission work in South China, re-emphasized the envisaged purpose of Anglican mission schools to train indigenous evangelists and to provide graduates of ‘high Christian character’.Footnote ⁴⁹ With reference to the fear of mission schools losing their essence by becoming distracted with secular content and the quest for funding, the article concluded with the reflection: ‘Christianity would sacrifice its divinity if it abandoned its missionary character and became a mere educational institution.’Footnote ⁵⁰

Consequently, Hoare restructured Anglican schools so that their evangelistic purpose could be reinstated. SPC was re-established in 1900 with a renewed focus on evangelism. Hoare implemented a scheme in which the CMS would take responsibility for training indigenous clergy and covering the college's working expenses, while the bishop would support the college with an annual grant of HK$900 (approximately £320) and oversee building maintenance.Footnote ⁵¹ The aim was to free the college from dependence on state funding and the need to conform to secular schooling requirements. In 1903, the Revd G. A. Bunbury, the new principal of the college, celebrated the three-year-old identity of the new SPC as ‘the training college of the CMS South China Mission’, highlighting the twelve students who were receiving training in church history, gospel outlines and sermon composition.Footnote ⁵² Bunbury praised the fact that ‘habits of truthfulness and industry have been formed or strengthened, and several of the elder lads are … true servants of the Lord Jesus Christ … the future Native Church of China’.Footnote ⁵³ A famous graduate of this period was Wang Jimin, who in 1930 would become the head doctor of Zhejiang Postal Service. Keeping his Christian faith to the end, he helped to form the True Jesus Church in the 1920s and represented China at the 1938 Madras Conference of the International Missionary Council.Footnote ⁵⁴ Hoare would dedicate himself wholeheartedly to training indigenous clergy, to the extent that he would take students on preaching tours and eventually die in the process. On 18 September 1906, while returning from Ping Shan with four students, his boat sailed through a typhoon and encountered ‘a tremendous gale … with high seas and blinding rain’, which resulted in the vessel capsizing. It was thought that Hoare tried to save the students, but in so doing was unable to save himself.Footnote ⁵⁵

At the same time as his re-visioning of SPC, Hoare had satisfied the growing demand for secular education through other mission schools. In effect, theological training and English education in Hong Kong were to become distinctly separate but simultaneous endeavours. Fairlea School, an offshoot of the Victoria Home and Orphanage, was rebranded during Hoare's episcopate as an institution providing Chinese girls with a Christian education, thereby empowering them to pursue careers as teachers or ‘to become wives of young Christian Chinamen’. Most of all, they would leave the school with ‘moral and spiritual results … witnessing themselves humble and faithful followers of the Lord Jesus’.Footnote ⁵⁶ It also had an emphasis on the quality of education which was a distinct departure from earlier decades. Another pertinent illustration is St Stephen's College (SSC), which was founded in 1903 for Chinese elites as an institution modelled after British state schools.Footnote ⁵⁷ The constitution emphasized ‘offering to the Chinese an English education with Western Knowledge, upon Christian lines’.Footnote ⁵⁸ This was followed by the founding of St Stephen's Girls’ College (SSGC) in 1905, which was also driven by Chinese elites who sought to provide high-quality English instruction for their children. Chinese Christian elites conveyed that on the one hand, they wished their children to share in ‘newly awakened’ Western learning, but on the other hand, they sought an education that met the pupils’ spiritual needs as well as their intellectual and physical needs.Footnote ⁵⁹ As revealed by statistical tables published by the Chinese Anglican Church in 1915 and 1918, this development took place simultaneously in the foreign concessions of Shanghai and Hankow. In these cities, Chinese elites donated generously to Anglican schools in order to provide high-quality English education, sometimes up to ten times the per capita rate of contributions in rural provinces.Footnote ⁶⁰

Although the CMS Local Governing Body was aware of the potential pitfalls of schools becoming ‘mere educational institutions’, it was believed that having missionaries as teachers in these schools would nevertheless enable students to come under the influence of Christian character.Footnote ⁶¹ Missionaries came to terms with the reality of having to refashion their schools so that they could become eligible for government support, as well as broaden their appeal to the shifting demands of Chinese families. By the turn of the century, Smith's ideal of a single path from literacy to ordination was no more. In 1905, the revised outlook of Christian education was depicted at length by W. S. Pakenham Walsh, a missionary at Foochow Trinity College. Pakenham Walsh imagined mission schools shaping children in their formative years, after which they might take a career as a teacher at a Christian day-school while assisting their local church through outdoor preaching or by reading the lesson. It was widely accepted that graduates might take on jobs outside the ministry but ideally remain active in church as laypeople. However, the hope was that some graduates would choose to attend theological college before being ordained out of a ‘great desire to see the gospel transform and enrich [their] fellow-countrymen’.Footnote ⁶² Essentially, the financial situation of the diocese in the late nineteenth century, as well as a more refined understanding of the Chinese cultural context, forced Anglican mission schools to compromise in their manner of schooling. As the number of schools expanded, only SPC was maintained purely for theological training, while other institutions had to balance the demand for secular education with the dissemination of the Christian faith in order to secure sufficient funding and interest.

During the early twentieth century, however, Anglican mission schools were confronted with increasing government control. In Hong Kong, the colonial government implemented stricter regulations in the wake of the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, which overthrew the Qing dynasty. In an attempt to reduce politicization and ‘unlawful propaganda’ in schools that might destabilize the colony, the 1913 Education Ordinance demanded that all schools register with the government in order to be considered lawful.Footnote ⁶³ School inspectors would be empowered to regulate administrative records, discipline, hygiene and (above all) teaching materials, since education was regarded as a means of social control.Footnote ⁶⁴ Government control over education in Hong Kong expanded in the 1920s in parallel with growing anti-colonial sentiment, which stemmed from the perceived injustice of the 1919 Paris Peace Conference in which Qingdao was ceded to Japan and the 1925 May Thirtieth Incident when a violent public demonstration was met with gunfire from British police.Footnote ⁶⁵ In response, the Colonial Office instructed the Hong Kong government to increase their monitoring of schools in regard to anti-British propaganda.Footnote ⁶⁶ By 1929, the Advisory Committee on Education in Colonies had issued a circular indicating their intention to regulate textbooks in all colonies. In practice, this meant all mission schools having to submit their existing textbooks and assessments of each volume, in addition to extensive information on the constitution, functions and proceedings of publication committees. No stone was left unturned, as even the price and quality of paper and print were scrutinized.Footnote ⁶⁷

To complicate matters further, during the 1910s paradigms of education were shifting. Between 1912 and 1922, the republican government in China introduced regulations which required all schools to offer Western curricular content through academic subjects and lessons in handicrafts, singing and physical education, while adopting the simpler vernacular Chinese over the classical literary form.Footnote ⁶⁸ The 1922 School Reform Decree from the Peking Ministry of Education went so far as to place all schools under the national administration and called for the secularization of all teaching content.Footnote ⁶⁹ While educational reform in Hong Kong was not as drastic, there were similar trends in the secularization of education. E. A. Irving, director of education and a former civil servant in the Straits Settlements, called for English education to adopt a vocational emphasis, for he viewed education ‘not as a moral obligation but as a commercial necessity’.Footnote ⁷⁰

The impact of closer government supervision in Hong Kong as well as in other mission fields was not viewed lightly by the CMS in London. As early as 1916, the CMS decided to form an educational committee to provide expert advice on pedagogy, to regulate the quality of mission workers who could satisfy both the professional and spiritual requirements of the job, and to monitor the increasingly tight budget.Footnote ⁷¹ It was set up to correspond with missionaries about educational work and to keep them informed about related work around the world.Footnote ⁷² The entire situation is best summed up by J. H. Oldham, organizer of the 1910 World Missionary Conference and secretary of the International Missionary Council, who depicted the perceived crisis in Christian education in the mission field in a 1921 paper. To Oldham, mission schools now existed in ‘an entirely different kind of world’, in which governments were assuming greater responsibility for education and mission schools were becoming outnumbered by public schools.Footnote ⁷³ Consequently, mission schools would have to meet the higher standards required by civil authorities and missionaries would require professional training.Footnote ⁷⁴ Gone were the days of the missionary monopoly on vernacular schooling across European empires. The alternative ideal in the first decades of the twentieth century was to provide a distinct type of education that balanced the Christian worldview with the requirements laid out by civil authorities.Footnote ⁷⁵

In Hong Kong, mission schools were adjusted to meet the demands of the 1913 Education Ordinance. In 1909, SPC relocated its clergy training to Canton, before merging in 1914 with the newly formed Canton Union Theological College, a joint venture between seven missionary organizations in South China, who all agreed that theological education had to be separated from other educational institutions.Footnote ⁷⁶ This led to less missionary involvement in Anglican mission schools as the CMS switched their attention to the new seminaries.Footnote ⁷⁷ In the same year, Archdeacon Barnett wrote to Fred Baylis of the CMS Far East Committee, explaining the new scope of SPC and SSC. For SPC, although its goal was still to prepare students for potential further theological study, the school now turned to the broader ideal of ‘education as is necessary for the Christians at Hong Kong’.Footnote ⁷⁸ This emphasis on a broad education was accentuated by SPC's admitting non-Christians from 1909 as well as rejoining the grant-in-aid scheme from 1919.Footnote ⁷⁹ SSC endeavoured to ‘offer a first class education on Western lines … primarily towards preparing students to enter the University of Hong Kong’; the only way to maintain spiritual influence was to provide a boarding house in order to make ‘a strong Christian impression’ on students.Footnote ⁸⁰

In effect, growing intervention from the colonial government and greater emphasis on standardized education steadily encroached on the spiritual work of Anglican schools. This transition is captured through a comparison of the 1903 deed of foundation for SSC with a 1921 memorandum to the government concerning the college. The original deed underlined the aim of providing Western education built upon Christian principles as professed by the Church of England, whereas the 1921 memorandum portrayed the college's purpose ‘solely in the interests of education’, with examinations, university admissions and modern facilities.Footnote ⁸¹ Unlike the deed of foundation, the memorandum made no mention whatsoever of ‘Christian principles’, offering only a statement of intention ‘to bring the school into line … with the theory and practice of English public schools’.Footnote ⁸² During the 1920s and 1930s, religious instruction and biblical knowledge were stripped of their elevated status and were taught as classroom subjects like any other.Footnote ⁸³ Another telling sign of the times was revealed in the weekly cycle of prayers issued by Bishop C. R. Duppuy for supporters of the diocese. On Tuesdays, prayers were offered for ‘educational work’, which were conspicuously separate from Thursday prayers for evangelistic work:

In sum, religious education in Anglican schools was marginalized as general education became more specialized. On the whole, the emphasis of educational institutions had become more secular. W. T. Featherstone, the newly appointed headmaster of the Diocesan Boys’ School (DBS) from 1918, called in his inaugural speech for better buildings, playing fields, scholarships and new endowments, for he understood that the school's existence depended on its performance according to government standards as opposed to its spiritual nurturing.Footnote ⁸⁵ Nevertheless, as an Anglican mission school, spiritual teaching was to be provided through classes on Holy Scripture and catechisms, but freedom of conscience had to be maintained in accordance with government regulations.Footnote ⁸⁶ The next best thing was for senior boys to be encouraged to read books on religion, ethics and social reform.Footnote ⁸⁷ As for SPC, although theological training had been relocated after 1909, teaching content in the 1910s was still supervised by a CMS appointee, who would have prioritized spiritual content.Footnote ⁸⁸ In contrast, by 1925, school operations were delegated to the council of SPC, whose primary purpose was to superintend the school with respect to its facilities, daily operations and financial sustainability.Footnote ⁸⁹ SPC religious activity in the 1920s was sidelined, comprising Scripture Union meetings, Sunday school classes and an evangelistic band of teachers and senior boys going one evening a week to a preaching hall in the city.Footnote ⁹⁰ Edna Atkins, headmistress of SSGC, depicted the examination results of the school at length in her 1927 annual letter before explaining that students engaged with their faith through voluntary Bible study circles and weekly prayer meetings after school on Saturdays, as opposed to other institutionalized forms.Footnote ⁹¹ In a separate article which reflected the extent of secularization, Atkins highlighted that graduates were ‘taking their place more and more in public life’ by becoming doctors, teachers, or embarking on other professional careers.Footnote ⁹²

The pattern of missionary schooling becoming secularized was expedited by the thinning supply of qualified missionary educators, exacerbated by dwindling CMS finances.Footnote ⁹³ In 1921, although a suitable and willing missionary teacher to assist in Hong Kong schools was located in Australia, the CMS Far East Committee was unable to provide the required funding.Footnote ⁹⁴ Instead, the CMS could only sponsor candidates of the highest calibre, such as Miss J. L. Vincent, who was ultimately accepted as a teacher for SSC in view of her BA from London with honours in History and her teaching diploma.Footnote ⁹⁵ For the most part, the CMS agreed only to provide the salaries of the school principals.Footnote ⁹⁶ With fewer missionaries, religious instruction simply could not be administered. In 1923, Edna Atkins expressed a strong desire to do more beyond educational work, such as visiting the homes of the students or addressing the children at local churches. However, she conceded that this would be impossible until there were more workers at the school.Footnote ⁹⁷ Since the pressure of their other duties meant that missionary teachers lacked the time to engage in evangelism, the remaining compulsory religious activity without contextualization proved to be ineffective in bringing students to faith. For instance, Chan Ting-fong, a 1908 DBS graduate, recalled how he understood morning prayers at assembly as nothing more than part of the strict disciplinary system that characterized his school experience.Footnote ⁹⁸ Similarly, William J. Howard, a 1919 DBS graduate, referred to the many church services as ‘puritanical’, with Sunday communion at 6.50 a.m. and with boys having to learn the collect of the day and a section of the gospel by heart on Sunday afternoons.Footnote ⁹⁹ In effect, although prayers and services remained, their spiritual effects were limited by the surrounding ecology of predominantly secular education. A master at SSC, the Revd Ernest Martin, questioned the efficacy of compulsory religious education, observing that despite morning prayers and a Scripture lesson at the start of each school day, a morning service on Sundays, and voluntary Christian Union meetings during Tuesday tiffin, most boys did not identify with Christianity since they came from non-Christian homes and no missionaries or clergy were available to follow up the school's religious activities.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

The trend of government regulation and tighter mission budgets was not unique to Hong Kong. By the 1930s, Anglican bishops around the world had become rattled by the changing religious education scene. A report to the 1930 Lambeth Conference observed that in British colonies, the grants-in-aid system required aided schools to reach ‘the required standard of educational efficiency’, a standard which was continually rising due to heightened competition from non-missionary public schools, which were also growing in number.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Moreover, a survey of Anglican mission schools domestically and worldwide revealed that teaching religion as a subject often yielded weak results. The teachers themselves frequently lacked the necessary religious experience to convey the message while the students encountered ‘conflicting claims’ in the ‘bewildering complexities of modern life’.Footnote ¹⁰² The proposed solution was to have religious lessons administered only by teachers with ‘a spiritual experience and a spiritual outlook’ and for Christianity to be practised through school activities, such as ‘in fellowship of work and play … [and] in fellowship of corporate worship’. The report concluded that there was no room for missions to express Christianity fully in what had now become public institutions: ‘Christian missions in non-Christian lands might urge the religious leaders of those lands to seek similar ways of bringing religious influences to bear upon the State systems while … providing and maintaining private institutions in which they may be able to give unhampered expression to their ideals.’Footnote ¹⁰³

The Lambeth Conference report proved to be an accurate diagnosis of the situation in Hong Kong. For the few students who sought to become Christians after their time in mission schools, the most significant aspect of their encounter with Christianity tended to be their affection towards missionary teachers and Christian social service, rather than their experience of religious education.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Mary Baxter, a teacher at SSGC, discovered that informal discussions after dinner provided a warm, conducive atmosphere for reflecting on religion with the boarders, whereas her colleague found that discussion circles achieved the same aim.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Li Luk-wa, a graduate of SSGC who in 1935 went on to open Hong Kong's first school for deaf children, developed her faith through a strong rapport with her teacher, Beatrice Pope. Li became so attached to Pope that she accompanied her almost as a daughter to London following Pope's retirement in 1963, on occasion even speaking on her behalf at CMS events due to Pope's tiredness in old age. Li remained with Pope for over a decade until she died in Hove, after which Li returned to Hong Kong.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

In addition, the students of SSGC readily supported missionaries in their social service. For instance, individual girls would take turns accompanying Edna Atkins on her weekly visits to the women's wards of the Government Hospital.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ A number of girls also joined the regular visits to Victoria Gaol, helping to teach and preach to the women inmates.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Other students volunteered to teach at a free school for poor children, while graduates helped to facilitate a school for the illiterate housekeepers.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Even after graduation, Chan Shuk-ching, former head girl at SSGC, voluntarily taught Hakka fishermen in a makeshift boat school. After storing possessions from the boat in a neighbouring vessel to make room for the class, a blackboard would be secured to the floor to withstand the wind and waves as the lesson took place.Footnote ¹¹⁰ It is apparent, therefore, that the inability to maintain religious education in mainstream curricula by the 1930s did not necessarily equate to the absence of evangelism. If anything, this leads to questions about the alternative ways in which Chinese Christian students developed their faith if not through curricular content, although such an inquiry lies beyond the scope of this study.

By the late 1930s, religious activity in schools had become completely subject to the conditions of grant-in-aid support and ordinances concerning education. This was heightened in Hong Kong, where a 1935 government report determined that schools ought to be shaped to meet the exceptionally high demand for clerks with proficiency in English to work in the city's many merchant firms, shipping offices, warehouses and banks.Footnote ¹¹¹ Four years later, Bible knowledge was officially removed from public examinations of the School Certificate and University Matriculation in Hong Kong. Edna Atkins lamented the shrinking ‘freedom and initiative with regard to the running of schools’.Footnote ¹¹² By the time of the Japanese occupation in 1941, only a few traces of Smith's vision for missionary education remained in the operations of Anglican mission schools, as economic limitations and steadily growing government controls had all but pushed Christian instruction into a corner. After the war, the SPC Old Boys’ Association identified itself more as an educational establishment than a missionary vehicle, as revealed by its petition to Archbishop Fisher to restart SPC as ‘the well-known and public-spirited institution … in the educational field of Hong Kong’.Footnote ¹¹³

For Hong Kong Anglican mission schools, the bishops of Victoria struggled to come to terms with the colonial context of education. Repeated attempts to maintain the evangelistic aspect of mission schooling were overcome by unforeseen financial constraints. Projected income did not materialize and the inherent instability of mission finances meant that schools were compelled to turn to the colonial government and private funding for support. In so doing, mission schools in Hong Kong (and across all European empires) became subject to government regulation and external interests. With the trend towards secular schooling and the professionalization of teaching during the early twentieth century, religious education in mission schools was relegated to being a subsidiary feature rather than the main aspect. Theological training was completely relocated to seminaries. Moreover, graduates generally did not pursue church work, for they were presented with a myriad of employment options in the bustling mercantile community of Hong Kong. Despite Bishop Smith's original vision, only traces of religious education remained in Anglican schools by the mid-twentieth century, whilst the number of missionary educators dwindled in parallel with declining mission finances. A handful of students were inspired by their encounter with Christianity during their school years; however, these encounters did not usually occur through the institutions envisaged by Smith, but mostly through relationships with individual missionaries.Footnote ¹¹⁴