Xiangdong Middle School: From Shanghai's First Women's Normal School

Basic facts

This section is about a school, not a sight. The school does not receive visitors; please do not linger or take photographs at the school gate.

1912: first there was a women's normal school

Among the seven schools in this part, Xiangdong Middle School has the earliest starting point, and the most unusual — it was not a middle school at all to begin with, but a normal school.

On 17 June 1912 Ling Mingzhi founded the Nanyang Women's Normal School. By the common account of several sources, this was the first women's normal school in Shanghai's history.

This has to be put back into 1912 to be felt at its full weight. The Republic had only just been founded that year; for women to go to school was still a new thing, and for women to teach newer still. To open a women's normal school was to do two things at once: give women books to read, and give girls' schools teachers to hire. Shanghai already had some girls' schools at the time, but their teachers mostly came from the church or from other places — the Nanyang Women's Normal School was the one that grew out of the locality itself.

1927: from normal school to middle school

By 1927 the school was reorganised as the Nanyang Girls' Middle School.

Changing from training teachers to training middle-school pupils looks like a mere change of school system, but was in fact a "switch of tracks": normal-school pupils went straight to work on graduating, while middle-school pupils went on to further study. For a school to change from "outputting people" to "sending people up" means its expectations for its own pupils have changed.

A "bulwark of democracy"

The weight of the Nanyang Girls' Middle School in this book goes far beyond school history.

During the War of Liberation it was one of the underground activity bases of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai, called the "bulwark of democracy", and one of the strongholds of revolutionary student activity in the northern district of Shanghai. In the early years after Liberation its pupils eagerly joined the army and took up government work, and it gained the name of "the cradle of revolutionary cadres".

This history was later written by the school into its own school spirit:

Revolutionary ardour like a blazing fire, thirst for knowledge like hunger and thirst, the bond of teachers and pupils like hands and feet.

A girls' middle school founded in 1912 by an industrialist became, more than thirty years later, one of the most restless places in this city. Zhabei's schools were never only schools — the ruins told of in Part Three tell the same story.

In 1937, the educationist Wu Ruoan succeeded as principal. She was still received several times by Party and state leaders in the 1980s, and this school's name is bound up with hers.

Several school buildings

In more than eighty years the school changed premises several times; three are to be found in the records:

One thing must be made clear here. This book's piece on Beizhan Middle School once recorded a doubt: Jing'an District's promotional material says the Nanyang Girls' Middle School site was in the neighbourhood of Xizang North Road and Kaifeng Road, while several encyclopaedias say No. 830 Haining Road was its old site, and the two do not agree. That doubt is now resolved: both places are real, only from different periods. No. 214 Kaifeng Road belongs to the same area as the neighbourhood of Xizang North Road and Kaifeng Road, and is the stretch around 1938; No. 830 Haining Road is the place it moved to later. A school running for more than eighty years could not possibly have had only one set of premises.

But let it be said honestly: in which year it moved from Kaifeng Road to Haining Road, this book has not found. It will not allot rooms for it.

1966: renamed "Xiangdong"

In 1966 the school was renamed Shanghai Xiangdong Middle School.

There is only a line of text about this in the sources, but the school changed in two ways for it:

1. The name changed. The name "Nanyang Girls' Middle School" had been used for thirty-nine years, and was used no more after this.
2. It also began to admit boys. The school history says that "after Liberation the school expanded in scale, admitting both boys and girls" — a girls' school that had run for half a century only now became co-educational.

A women's normal school of 1912 had to reach 1966 to turn completely into a middle school that seems quite ordinary today. Those fifty-four years are just the stretch of time in which Chinese women's education moved from "a school made specially for women" to "no longer needing the distinction".

1998: one move and one merger

In 1998 Xiangdong Middle School did two things at once:

• it moved from No. 830 Haining Road into No. 48 Menggu Road — precisely the old site vacated by Xinzhong Middle School;
• and it merged two schools into itself: the junior division of Xinzhong Middle School and Zhabei No. 2 Middle School.

So in that same year a chain appeared in this district:

Xinzhong went north, Xiangdong caught the old ground; and the No. 830 that Xiangdong vacated later took up the sign of Beizhan Middle School. One school moved house, and three were set going.

The motto "Zhuangjing" and a game of Go

The motto is only two characters: Zhuangjing (dignity and respect).

The school's own explanation is very concrete — upright in character, upright in bearing, upright in appearance; respect others, respect the old, respect teachers, respect one's work. The first half is about "how one stands", the second about "how one treats people". The ethos carries on from there: Zhuangjing towards the east, eager to learn and rise.

The most unusual of its specialities is Go. The school Go team has won national and municipal prizes many times, and produced the world amateur Go champion Liu Jun — a professional player who came out of Zhabei.

The remaining years are listed here:

Lineage table

Sources: the founding of the Nanyang Women's Normal School by Ling Mingzhi on 17 June 1912 and its being Shanghai's first women's normal school, its reorganisation as the Nanyang Girls' Middle School in 1927, Wu Ruoan's succession as principal in 1937, its move into the site at No. 214 Kaifeng Road in 1938, its being one of the CCP's underground activity bases in Shanghai during the War of Liberation and being called the "bulwark of democracy", and "the cradle of revolutionary cadres" in the early years after Liberation, its renaming as Shanghai Xiangdong Middle School in 1966, its being judged one of the "ten red banners" of the Shanghai education front in the 1980s, the explanation of the motto "Zhuangjing" and the ethos, the Go speciality and Liu Jun, and its 110th anniversary in 2022, are based on Shanghai Xiangdong Middle School: A Journey Eastward, the Finest Encounter, published by the WeChat public account "Shanghai Jing'an" of Jing'an District, Shanghai, and reproduced by The Paper (Grade B), and on the school profile of Shanghai Xiangdong Middle School (reproduced from the same source on several education platforms in Shanghai, Grade B); the merger into the school in 1998 of the junior division of Xinzhong Middle School and Zhabei No. 2 Middle School, and its move from No. 830 Haining Road to No. 48 Menggu Road, are based on the above school profile and on this book's piece on Xinzhong Middle School, which already used the same source; the site of 5,171 square metres, the 124 teachers and staff, the teacher-pupil ratio of 1:8 (as of 2024), and "after Liberation the school expanded in scale, admitting both boys and girls", and the wording of the school spirit, teaching spirit and learning spirit, are based on the Baidu Baike entry "Shanghai Xiangdong Middle School" (Grade C); the ethos "Zhuangjing towards the east, eager to learn and rise" and the phrase "a journey eastward" also appear in the Haoshilai entry "Shanghai Xiangdong Middle School" (Grade C). The full bibliography is in Appendix 4.