No. 17 Middle School: One School Name, Two Origins

Basic facts

This section is about a school that no longer exists. Its name was cancelled in 2008; the compound is still there — it is Qingyun Middle School now.

The history circulating online, and one place where it does not add up

About this school, the history that circulates online goes like this:

founded in 1906, the founder being the patriotic democrat Ms Su Benhan; first named Minli Girls' Middle School, later renamed Shanghai No. 17 Girls' Middle School; renamed Shanghai No. 17 Middle School in 1967; merged into Qingyun Middle School in 2008.

Four points, clean and tidy. But lay this account out and check it against the record, and three places fail to fit.

The first: in one and the same entry, the address is given in two different districts.

Several education platforms carry a "Shanghai No. 17 Middle School" entry that begins "located at No. 389 Zhiyuan Road, Zhabei District", and then, two paragraphs further down, says "the school is located in the central urban area of Shanghai — Huangpu District". A school cannot be in Zhabei and in Huangpu at the same time.

The second: it mentions another school's journal.

The same material says that the school "built the educational platforms Facing the Twenty-first Century and the Shishi Education Forum". "Shi Shi" is the short form of Shanghai No. 10 Middle School. A forum belonging to No. 10 has no business appearing in material about No. 17.

The third: a "Huangpu District master-teacher studio" turns up.

Again the same material: over the years 13 young teachers went into Huangpu District master-teacher studios to study. Young teachers at a school in Zhabei went into the studios of Zhabei (later Jing'an).

All three point to the same place: this history has in all likelihood been mixed with material belonging to Shanghai No. 10 Middle School.

And the history of No. 10 Middle School runs whole and continuous — the school's own website states it plainly:

One line runs from 1906 to 1969 without a break, and the words "No. 17" appear nowhere along it.

And yet Zhabei did once have a "Minli Girls' Middle School"

Had the reasoning above stopped there, the conclusion would be "No. 17 Middle School has nothing to do with Minli Girls' Middle School". But there is a photograph that stops the argument short.

The Toutiao piece Shanghai No. 17 Middle School (Now Merged Away) carries two graduation photographs:

• May 1943 (the 32nd year of the Republic): the junior graduating class of the 32nd cohort of Shanghai Minli Girls' Middle School;
• 1962: the graduating class of Shanghai No. 17 Junior Middle School.

The second shows that around 1962 the Zhabei school really was called "No. 17 Junior Middle School", and that it was already a "junior middle school" before the change to co-education.

The first is more interesting. Reckoning from "founded in 1906":

The years add up. Which means that "founded in 1906" also holds for the Zhabei school — the year was not simply lifted from somewhere else.

So only one explanation is left:

Republican Shanghai had two "Minli Girls' Middle Schools". One was the school on Wenmiao Road in Nanshi (founded by the five Su sisters, today's No. 10 Middle School); the other was this one in Zhabei (which already had thirty-two graduating cohorts by 1943, and later became No. 17 Middle School). Two schools of the same name, of different origins, and with entirely different fates afterwards.

This is no isolated case. In Republican Shanghai girls' schools were founded in droves, and names such as "Minli", "Wuben", "Chongde" and "Qixiu" were often used by several schools at once (the "Nanyang Women's Normal School" in this book's piece on Xiangdong Middle School has a tangle over its name of the same kind). The same school name does not mean the same origin.

So this book's handling is: set the two accounts side by side and mark the strength of the evidence.

The age of numbers: a city gives its schools numbers

To understand the words "No. 17", one has first to understand what Shanghai did in the 1950s.

Around 1956 the city's private middle schools turned public in batches. After the change, the old names that carried their founders' ideals — "Zhaohe", "Minli", "Nanyang", "Cuiwen", "Xingci" — were replaced by a set of numbers.

No. 60 Middle School is one specimen on this road: the private Zhaohe Middle School, founded in 1933 (to commemorate the uprising of the cruiser Zhaohe), was renamed Shanghai No. 60 Middle School in 1956. The year the name changed was exactly the year the school went from private to public.

No. 17 is in the same system. Its sequence of numbers runs:

One number threads three changes of name. Behind each change lay a change of system: first from private to public, then from a girls' school to co-education, and last from a junior school to a combined one.

1967: "girls'" dropped, "junior" dropped

In the change of 1967 two words went out together.

The disappearance of "girls'" was not this school's affair alone. In the late 1960s Shanghai's girls' middle schools turned co-educational in batches — No. 8 Girls' Middle School became No. 8 Middle School in 1969, No. 9 Girls' became No. 9 in 1969, No. 10 Girls' became No. 10 in 1969. No. 17 took the step earlier, in 1967.

The disappearance of "junior" meant that the school began to run a senior division and became a combined school. For this stretch of northern Zhabei it meant that a child no longer had to cross into another district to sit an entrance examination for senior middle school after finishing the junior years.

The sixteen characters of the ethos — "loyal in character, plain in style, solid in study, sound in body" — date from this period. Four of the words carry one character meaning "solid"; the first three are about how one conducts oneself and one's work, the last about the body. This was the plainest self-demand an ordinary middle school of that era could make.

2008: the name disappears, the compound stays

In 2008 No. 17 merged into Qingyun Middle School.

After the merger No. 389 Zhiyuan Road became Qingyun Middle School's address. The school's own material notes that this house number was originally No. 520 Qingyun Road — the same compound, with a new house number, and therefore with a new street name.

So the compound has a very long continuous record:

A hundred and twenty years, without a break. Among the eleven schools in Part Six, this compound has the longest record of uninterrupted schooling on one site — fifty-one years older than the school now in it (Qingyun Middle School, founded in 1957).

A school has disappeared and its name has been cancelled, and yet there have always been lessons going on in the classrooms. That is probably the only part of a "merger" that does not feel like a loss.

Connections

• Sub-district：Baoshan Road Subdistrict
• See also：Qingyun Middle School, The No. 60 High School, Baoshan Road Subdistrict

Sources: the founding of Minli Girls' Middle School Hall in 1906, financed by Su Benyan the brother and founded in Yuanshouli outside the West Gate of Nanshi by Su Benyan the sister and four other sisters; the move to Wenmiao Road in 1912; the change to public status and renaming as Shanghai No. 10 Girls' Middle School in 1956; and the renaming as Shanghai No. 10 Middle School in 1969, are based on A Century of Grounding and An Outline History of No. 10 Middle School on the official website of Shanghai No. 10 Middle School (Grade B); the account that Shanghai No. 17 Middle School "was founded in 1906, that its founder was Su Benhan, that it was first named Minli Girls' Middle School, later renamed Shanghai No. 17 Girls' Middle School, renamed Shanghai No. 17 Middle School in 1967, and merged into Qingyun Middle School in 2008" is based on entries reproduced from one source by several education platforms (Grade C, reproductions of one source, to be used with caution) — in checking them this book found that the body of such entries has "located in Huangpu District", "the Shishi Education Forum" and "Huangpu District master-teacher studios", material belonging to Shanghai No. 10 Middle School, mixed into it, and therefore accepts only the founding year, not the claim that the two schools share an origin; the 1943 photograph of "the 32nd cohort of Minli Girls' Middle School" and the 1962 photograph of "Shanghai No. 17 Junior Middle School", and the fact that the original site, No. 389 Zhiyuan Road, was originally No. 520 Qingyun Road, are based on Toutiao's Shanghai No. 17 Middle School (Now Merged Away) (Grade C); the ethos "loyal in character, plain in style, solid in study, sound in body" and the teaching ethos "teach by example as well as by word, lead step by step, learn while teaching, strive for perfection" follow the same reproduced entries (Grade C); the change of private middle schools to public status and their uniform numbering in the 1950s is corroborated by No. 60 Middle School (formerly the private Zhaohe Middle School, renamed in 1956) and by Shanghai Nos. 8, 9 and 10 Middle Schools going co-educational and being renamed in 1969 (Grade B). The full bibliography is in Appendix 4.