On the morning of 30 March 1911, a sixteen-year-old boy from Shaanxi sat in a new hall on the north-western edge of Beijing and was told where his breakfast had come from.
The hall had no famous name yet. Years later the school would call it Tongfangbu, the room of a shared direction, and use it for the speeches that did not need a great auditorium. That morning it was simply the place where the first class of the middle division had been ordered to assemble at eleven. Zhou Ziqi spoke first. He was the man in charge of the Office for Sending Students to America, a joint creature of the foreign ministry and the ministry of education, and he was not often on the grounds. Then Fan Yuanlian spoke. He was the superintendent actually present, because the other superintendent, Tang Guoan, was still abroad. They told the boys that the school existed because an indemnity had been given back, and that their food, their beds, their tuition, the whole of their keep, was a charge on the state. Wu Mi wrote it down. He would become one of the sharpest literary critics of his generation, a man who argued about culture as if argument were a moral duty. On that morning he was a student being informed that he was a public expense. Tsinghua spent the next century deciding what that money was for.
Outside the hall the expense had been given a prince’s garden. Willows stood over old water. A white gate, finished that same spring, carried three arches and a blank dignity it has never quite lost. The paint on the new classrooms was barely dry. Somewhere beyond the trees, close enough that a boy could walk there in an afternoon, lay the scorched ground of the Old Summer Palace, burnt half a century earlier and never restored. The school that had just opened was young. The ground under it was not. And the money that paid for the breakfast was younger than the gate and older than the boy, a debt contracted when Wu Mi was six years old, in a war he was now, without quite being asked, expected to answer.
A garden that outlived its princes
The place had been a garden before it was an idea. In 1707, the forty-sixth year of the Kangxi emperor, his third son, Yinzi, the Prince Cheng, asked leave to build on a quiet plot south-east of a water mill, beside a canal the court used when it rode out to the western hills. Kangxi, who visited this son’s garden more often than he visited the gardens of the other princes, wrote the plaque himself. He called it Xichunyuan, the garden of splendid spring. It was one of the cluster of princely gardens that sat in the shadow of the great imperial parks, the Yuanmingyuan among them, on the north-west fringe of the capital. For a while it was a son’s house at the edge of his father’s pleasure.
Princely houses in that century had a way of returning to the emperor. In 1730 Yinzi fell and the Imperial Household took the garden back. Qianlong enlarged it. In 1822 the Daoguang emperor split it in two. The western half became Jinchunyuan. The eastern half passed, by 1846, to Yicong, a son of Daoguang adopted into his uncle’s line. Neighbours called it the Little Fifth Master’s garden.
The name that stuck was written by Yicong’s brother, the emperor. In 1852, the second year of his reign, the Xianfeng emperor took up a brush and inscribed a new plaque for the eastern garden. He called it Qinghuayuan. The words were already in the air of the place. Beside the old hall shaped like the character for work, the hall the school still calls the Gongzi Hall, water ran under trees, and the scene had long been spoken of with a phrase about trees, water, and a clarity that the name itself contains. Xianfeng made the phrase into a nameplate. He could not make it safe.
Eight years later the British and French armies burnt the Yuanmingyuan. The fire took the great park and a ring of gardens around it. Qinghuayuan survived, partly because it sat off the main imperial road, far enough from the palaces the soldiers had come to punish that the flames did not walk that far. Jinchunyuan, the western half, survived the fire and then lost a slower war. In the Tongzhi reign, when the court tried to rebuild the gates and halls of the ruined Summer Palace, timber and material were stripped out of Jinchunyuan to feed the work. One half of the old Xichun garden became a ruin by policy. The other half, the Qinghua garden, stayed standing, occupied, and increasingly irrelevant.
The Boxer rising finished the irrelevance. In 1900 the household of the prince who held the garden allowed an altar of the Boxers to be set up inside it. After the allied armies entered Beijing and the court fled, that household was punished, titles were stripped, and the Imperial Household took the garden back. For close to a decade it sat weedy. The canals still ran. The old trees were still there. The halls were unlocked to weather. A visitor in those years would have seen a prince’s garden with no prince, at the edge of a burnt palace, on the wrong side of a war that had just been given a price.
The debt, and the argument over the change
The price was written down on 7 September 1901. The Boxer Protocol required China to pay the powers 450 million taels of silver, with interest at four per cent, over thirty-nine years. It was an indemnity for lives, property, and the cost of the expedition that had put the allied flags inside the Forbidden City. The American share of the bond was fixed, down to the cent, at 24,440,778 dollars and 81 cents. John Hay, the secretary of state, had set the American claim high. People who looked at the actual losses of American citizens, firms, and the army said so at the time. The bond was signed anyway. China would be paying it, in rising annual instalments, into the 1940s.
The man who spent the next years trying to get the excess back was Liang Cheng, the Qing minister in Washington. He was not a courtier who had learnt his English from a phrasebook. As a boy he had been one of the students of the Chinese Educational Mission, sent to New England in the 1870s, and he had gone to Phillips Academy at Andover. He knew the country that was holding the bond, and he knew, because Hay himself had let it slip in the course of other business, that the United States had been awarded more than it had originally demanded. From 1905 he pressed. He went to the secretary of commerce and the secretary of the interior when the State Department was cold. In the spring of 1907 he got to Theodore Roosevelt. The president, who could be moved by a personal appeal and by a calculation at the same time, agreed to have the real account looked at again.
Alongside Liang’s appeal ran a colder calculation. In 1906 Edmund James, president of the University of Illinois, told Roosevelt that the nation which schooled this generation of young Chinese would take the largest return, in influence and in trade, for the money it spent. Roosevelt liked to say that America could not expect justice from China unless it did China justice. The justice he meant was real, and it was pointed. A generation trained in American colleges would, so the hope went, look west when it went home.
Congress passed a joint resolution on 25 May 1908, authorising the president to remit the portion of the indemnity that exceeded American losses, at such times and in such a manner as he thought just. On 28 December Roosevelt signed the order. The bond would be cut. China would still pay 13,655,492 dollars and 69 cents, plus the agreed interest. The rest, a little under eleven million dollars of principal, together with the interest that would have fallen due on it, would be remitted, beginning on 1 January 1909. Elihu Root wrote to the Chinese minister the same week and called it an act of friendship. The figures were an accountant’s figures. The friendship had conditions.
The condition that mattered was what the money was for. W. W. Rockhill, the American minister in Beijing, did not trust a Chinese government to spend a windfall on what he considered worth spending it on. He campaigned, hard, for the returned sums to be locked to education, and specifically to the education of Chinese students in the United States. Parts of the Chinese government had other uses ready. Yuan Shikai’s circle wanted the money in Manchuria, for a railway and a development project that would do something visible in a contested province. In 1908 Tang Shaoyi went to Washington to make that case. He was turned away. The Roosevelt administration had already decided. The remission would happen, and it would happen as scholarships. China could have its excess back on the understanding that the excess became American classrooms.
This is the part of the founding story that later commemorations prefer to smooth. The United States did return money it had overcharged. Liang Cheng’s persistence is why the overcharge was admitted at all. And the school that resulted was not a free Chinese choice about how to use a gift. It was the use Washington would accept. A debt contracted after a defeat was to be recycled into a particular kind of young man, examined in China, finished in America, and sent home owing his training to both.
Boys sent before the school existed
The school was not ready for the first of them. The Office for Sending Students to America opened in the summer of 1909, in a lane called Shijia Hutong, with Zhou Ziqi as director and Fan Yuanlian and Tang Guoan as his deputies. The trio was a deliberate mixture: Zhou a product of the old examinations who had served in the Washington legation and helped Liang Cheng with the indemnity talks, Fan a student of Japan, Tang a boy of the same educational mission that had produced Liang Cheng. A government about to spend a foreign refund on foreign schooling did not want the office captured by only one of those educations.
They held an examination before they had a campus. In 1909, 630 candidates sat. Forty-seven were chosen. Mei Yiqi, a Tianjin student who had been in the first class at Nankai, was one of them. He sailed in 1910, studied electrical engineering at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, and came home in 1914. He would spend the rest of his life on the payroll of the school that had not existed when he sat the paper. The second examination, in 1910, took seventy more. Hu Shi was among them, and so were Zhao Yuanren and the meteorologist Zhu Kezhen. They did not pass through the garden. They went straight. The preparatory school was the idea that came next, once it was obvious that China could not keep finding forty-seven boys a year who were already fit for an American college, and that the ones it found would arrive in Massachusetts lost.
The office looked first at the old hot-spring palace at Xiaotangshan, and rejected it as too far from anything. Then someone remembered the empty garden at Haidian. In 1909 the Imperial Household handed Qinghuayuan over. The weeds were still in the courts. The brief for the new institution, written before a single boy had slept there, was blunt about what it was for. It was to teach enough, and in the right way, that a graduate could enter an American university without stumbling. It was to teach American manners and American classroom habits, so that the stumbling, when it happened, would be small. And it was to stand as a model, so that other Chinese schools might copy it. A garden taken back from a disgraced prince was to become a pier.
Through 1910 the walls and the gate went up. The first buildings were a mixture that said exactly what the school was: an old Chinese hall left standing, new dormitories with foreign roofs, a hospital, and the white gate where a temple called Yong’en had been pulled down to make room. Na Tong, the grand councillor who oversaw both ministries, wrote the name. The school would be Tsinghua Xuetang, taking the garden’s word and the Wade-Giles spelling that the university has never abandoned. By the early spring of 1911 the middle division could be put into a room and spoken to. On 29 April, the date the university still keeps as its anniversary, the place was counted as open, with something over four hundred students and about thirty teachers. A grander ceremony was planned for 16 October, when the ministries would come out from the city and the work would be declared finished.
The ceremony never happened. On 10 October the Wuchang rising began, and the news reached Beijing faster than any ministry could arrange a procession. Boys asked leave to go into the city and find out whether their families were safe. Some left for their home provinces and did not come back. On 28 October Fan and Tang, Tang having by then returned, stood in the dining hall and told the students that rumours were shaking the school, that leave would no longer be granted, and that anyone who went would be treated as having withdrawn. They also said, with an honesty that Wu Mi recorded, that they could not promise the grounds would stay quiet. In November the school closed. American teachers left for Korea and Japan. The garden that had just been fitted out as a pier sat half empty, while the dynasty that had signed the indemnity gave way.
What reopened in May
The republic reopened it. In April 1912 the foreign ministry of the new government named Tang Guoan superintendent. On 1 May the boys came back. In October the school was renamed Tsinghua School, and Tang was its first president under that name. He did not have long. He died in August 1913, still a young man, and Zhou Yichun succeeded him. Zhou was the president who decided that a pier should at least look like a place a person might stay.
In the summer of 1914 he brought in Henry Murphy, an American architect who had begun to make a career in China, and Murphy walked the garden with him for three days in June. What Murphy designed, with his partner Richard Henry Dana, was a lawn. At the head of it he put an auditorium, brick, with a dome and a white portico, large enough to seat a thousand and to graduate a class. Beside that plan he set a library, a science building, and a gymnasium. The four of them went up across the late 1910s. The library was finished in 1919. The auditorium, begun in September 1917, was finished in March 1921, and it was the largest hall of its kind in the country. Murphy had in mind the American college grounds he knew, and behind the auditorium stood the example of Jefferson’s lawn at the University of Virginia, a domed building closing a green. He built that idea in Haidian, in brick and white stone, on top of a canal dug for a Kangxi prince.
The old garden was not cleared to make room for it. The Gongzi Hall stayed, and the water, and the white gate, where a visitor still left his rickshaw and walked in. A student of 1920 crossed from a Qing waterside hall to a dome modelled on Virginia between one class and the next. The school had not yet decided which building was the point. It was still, officially, a place you left.
You left after eight years, four in the middle division and four in the higher, and you left for America, on the indemnity. The preparatory division, from the opening until the last of its old-system class finished in 1929, sent a little over a thousand students. The school’s own later count is 1,099. They were examined, uniformed, taught English until it was the language of the classroom, and embarked. The indemnity paid the passage and the tuition and, in the early years, the assumption that a Chinese university was what you attended in order to qualify for a foreign one. Zhou Yichun’s buildings were magnificent. They were also, in the strict sense, a waiting room.
A speech in the same room
In November 1914, three years after Wu Mi had sat in it, the same hall filled again. Liang Qichao had come to speak. He was the most famous public mind in the country, a man who had spent the 1890s trying to renovate a dynasty and the years since trying to explain a republic to itself. He had already sent his sons toward the school. Liang Sicheng and Liang Siyong would both pass through Tsinghua and become, in architecture and in archaeology, two of the reasons the name travelled. Their father did not come that afternoon to praise the waiting room.
He spoke on the gentleman. He went to the Book of Changes, and he took two lines that every boy in the hall would have been able to recite and almost none of them had been asked to live inside. Heaven moves with strength, and the gentleman makes himself strong without resting. The earth is broad and receiving, and the gentleman carries things with a virtue as broad as the ground. Liang pushed the lines at the audience. A gentleman did not study in bursts and then go cold. He did not advance when there was profit in it and retire when there was difficulty. He was hard on himself and slower to be hard on other people. And he was large enough, Liang said, to take in a new civilisation, to mend his own society, and to bear a political duty without becoming merely a technician of whichever country had trained him.
The school kept eight characters from that hour. Self-strengthening without cease. A virtue broad enough to carry the world. They were not adopted by a vote that afternoon, and they were not the only motto a young school tried on. They settled, because they answered the embarrassment the boys already felt. Everyone in the hall knew that the breakfast was an indemnity. Liang offered them a way to eat it without becoming the indemnity. The charter of 1911 had already said the aim was to cultivate complete talent and increase the nation’s strength, and that the method was moral effort, study, and unceasing self-strengthening. Liang took a phrase the charter had used as an educational policy and handed it back as a description of a person.
The year the pier grew a university
The preparatory school lasted longer than its own best teachers thought it should. Through the late 1910s and the early 1920s, under Cao Yunxiang and others, the argument on the grounds shifted. A place with Murphy’s library and a student body that already included boys who would rather argue about China than pack for Massachusetts was an expensive way to run a boarding pier. In May 1925 the school opened a university division and began to take students who were not on the old track to America. The same year it opened a research institute for Chinese learning, small, proud, and deliberately unlike the rest of the curriculum.
The institute is remembered for four tutors. Liang Qichao came, which surprised no one who had heard him in 1914. Wang Guowei came, the scholar of poetry, history, and oracle bones, already the most exact mind of his generation. Zhao Yuanren, the linguist who had gone to America in the second indemnity cohort of 1910, was appointed from abroad. Chen Yinke, who had studied in Japan, Europe, and America and had learnt an absurd number of languages in order to read sources other historians could not, came back to take the fourth chair. For a few years the weediest corner of a former indemnity school held a research seminar that the rest of the country’s scholars talked about with envy. Students were few. The standard was savage. A young man who wanted a credential went elsewhere. A young man who wanted to be worked until he could hear a Tang poem and a Mongol document in the same week tried to get in.
It did not last. In early June 1927 Wang Guowei walked from the campus to the neighbouring Summer Palace and drowned himself in Kunming Lake. He left a short testament about a loyalty that no longer had an object, and a body of work that the institute had been built to give a home. Liang Qichao died in January 1929. The institute was wound up that year, as the new national university reorganised itself and decided that research would live inside ordinary departments rather than in a single charmed circle. Chen Yinke stayed. He would become, over the next two decades, the historian against whom everyone else in the field measured their seriousness, and he would do a good part of that work under Tsinghua’s name, in Beijing and later in the south. The institute had been a flare. The habit it taught, that Chinese learning was a discipline and not a decoration, remained.
Meanwhile the old track ended. The last preparatory class finished in 1929. A boy who entered after that was entering a university, or he was not entering at all. In August 1928 the Nanjing government renamed the school National Tsinghua University and sent Luo Jialun to be its president. Luo was young, a veteran of the May Fourth demonstrations, and he arrived with a programme. He wanted the indemnity school turned into a Chinese university with its own research, its own standards, and an end to the feeling that the real campus was on the far side of the Pacific. He reorganised departments, pushed the faculty, and spent money as if the waiting room were over. A great deal of what he wanted was what the best people on the grounds already wanted. He was also high-handed, and a university that had just acquired a faculty did not enjoy being reorganised by a man who seemed to think the faculty was a problem he had been sent to solve. He resigned in May 1930.
For more than a year after he left, the university had a lawn, a library, a growing reputation, and no president the campus would keep. One man sent by the government in the spring of 1931 was refused by the students before the summer was out.
Masters, not only buildings
Mei Yiqi took it on 3 December 1931. He had been in America again, this time as the official who supervised the indemnity students already there, and the ministry recalled him because the campus had run out of acceptable presidents. He did not arrive to a ceremony with banners. He called the students into the auditorium and talked to them in the level voice his colleagues always mentioned first, when they tried to explain him. A university, he said, had two purposes, to pursue learning and to form people capable of work. Tsinghua had the money and the quiet to do both, and it should spend them on depth rather than on a headcount that looked well in a report. Depth needed two things. Equipment was one, and equipment was easy if you had money and were willing to spend it on instruments and books. Professors were the other, and professors were hard.
Then he did what he often did. He reached for a sentence his hearers already knew and turned it one notch. Mencius, speaking to a king about what makes an old country, had said that an old country is not its great trees but its hereditary servants. Mei offered the parallel. A university, he said, is not its great buildings. It is its great teachers. The line has been shortened since, and polished, and painted onto walls he would not have painted it on. In the auditorium that afternoon it was a practical remark from a man who had come home to a campus already full of new buildings, with a budget swollen by the rise of the dollar, and with a faculty that could be hired if someone would go and hire it. He was not despising Murphy’s dome. He was saying the dome was the easier half.
He was himself one of the forty-seven. Worcester had trained him, Tsinghua had employed him since 1915, as a physics teacher and then as dean, and he had just been the man in America watching the indemnity students from the other end. When he said the university was its teachers, he was describing a payroll he meant to build.
He built it. Through the mid-1930s the faculty became the argument. Chen Yinke in history. Jin Yuelin, who had been in that first class of 1911, in philosophy. Feng Youlan. Zhu Ziqing, who in the summer of 1927 had sat up one night and written, about the lotus pond on the old garden, the essay that taught a generation of schoolchildren what Tsinghua looked like in the dark. Wen Yiduo in literature. Wu Youxun and Ye Qisun in physics. In 1932 an engineering college was added, civil, mechanical, and electrical, because the government wanted science and engineering encouraged and because students had asked for it. The university that had begun as a pier now kept writers as well as engineers. Cao Yu entered the department of Western languages in 1930 and wrote Thunderstorm while he was still a student. Qian Zhongshu entered in 1929, read foreign literature, and left in 1933 for Oxford. The point of those names is not a roll of honour. It is that a boy could now become a Chinese playwright without first becoming an American undergraduate. The waiting room had started to be the destination.
A roll called in the rain
The war arrived before the justification was finished. In July 1937 the fighting that began at the Marco Polo Bridge spread into Beijing, and a campus on the north-western edge of the city was not a place where a term could be completed. Tsinghua moved south with two other universities that had no reason, in ordinary times, to share a classroom: Peking University and Nankai. In the autumn they opened in Changsha as a temporary university, three schools in borrowed buildings, under a standing committee of their three presidents. It was understood to be a pause. Then the war moved again, and Changsha was no longer far enough.
In the winter of 1938 the temporary university shifted to Kunming. Most of the teachers, the families, and the women students went by rail and sea, through Hong Kong or Vietnam and up into Yunnan. A few hundred men walked. They left Changsha on the afternoon of 19 February, under Huang Shiyue, a former general of the north-eastern army, with Wen Yiduo, a chemist, a geologist, a biologist, and a handful of other teachers who had chosen the road. The students wore coarse yellow uniforms and straw sandals. The notice that sent them said the move itself should be an education.
They crossed it for sixty-eight days. The route ran through western Hunan, across Guizhou, and into eastern Yunnan, something over three thousand li, a good part of it on foot and the rest by boat or truck when the rivers and the roads allowed. They slept in schools and temples. The biologists collected. The geologist talked. Wen Yiduo drew and, by the time the war had settled on him, wore a beard he did not cut until it was over. On 28 April the column came into Kunming. Huang called the roll and handed it to Mei, who had come out to meet them. The students he had taken charge of in Changsha were accounted for. In the same month, while many of them were still on the road, the ministry gave the temporary university its wartime name. It would be the National Southwest Associated University.
For eight years the three schools lived as one, in borrowed halls and then in mud brick and tin at the edge of Kunming. The other two presidents spent much of the war in Chongqing. Mei stayed and chaired the standing committee, so the daily life of the associated university was, in large part, Tsinghua’s habit of administration on a fraction of the old budget. The school song began with a march of ten thousand li and the palaces of five dynasties left behind. Classes met under roofs that leaked. Yang Zhenning was among the young physicists. Mei’s sentence was proved in the only way that counts: the great buildings were gone, and enough of the teachers were not.
In May 1946 the associated university was dissolved, and the three schools went home. Tsinghua reopened on the old garden in October, in a city that was once again called Beiping. Mei came back to the lawn, the dome, and the white gate. The university he reopened was larger than the one he had walked out of. By the end of 1948 it held five colleges, twenty-six departments, and twenty-three research institutes: letters, law, science, engineering, and agriculture. The pier of 1911 would not have recognised itself. Then the civil war reached the garden. In December 1948 the north-western suburbs passed into Communist hands. Mei left for the south, and in time for Taiwan. A great many of his colleagues stayed. The buildings stayed. The argument about what they were for was about to be settled by a ministry.
A university cut down to its engineers
In 1952 the new state reorganised higher education across the country, on a model borrowed from the Soviet Union and aimed at a problem the Soviet Union claimed to have solved. China needed engineers, in numbers, soon, for an industrialisation that was going to be counted in plants and dams. Comprehensive universities, where a historian ate in the same canteen as a mechanical engineer, looked to the planners like a luxury and a muddle. The muddle was sorted with a thoroughness that still startles anyone who reads the lists. Departments were lifted out of one university and set down in another. Some famous colleges disappeared entirely, their campuses handed to the survivors. Yenching, the American missionary university just to the north, was dissolved, and its grounds became the new home of Peking University.
Tsinghua was given a single task. Its colleges of letters, science, law, and agriculture were moved out. The historians went largely to Peking University. Lei Haizong, who had shaped the history department, went to Nankai. Philosophy, economics, and the pure sciences were scattered to the places the plan had designated as their proper homes. In the other direction, engineering departments from Peking University, from Yenching, and from elsewhere came in. The college structure was abolished. What remained was a polytechnic: machines, power, water conservancy, architecture, electrical engineering, radio, and for a short time petroleum, until that department was taken away in 1953 to seed a petroleum institute of its own. The nickname that attached itself, and was not always said as a compliment, was the cradle of engineers.
The country did need engineers, and Tsinghua’s engineering had been serious since 1932. Concentrating it trained a remarkable share of the people who built the industrial state of the next thirty years. It also undid, in a single summer, the decision of 1925. A university that had spent twenty years refusing to be a technical waiting room was told to be a technical university, this time for a Chinese plan rather than an American scholarship. The Gongzi Hall was still by the water. Murphy’s dome was still at the head of the lawn. The faculty that had made those things into a university had been redistributed like machine tools. Mei’s sentence about teachers survived as a quotation. The teachers it described had been reassigned.
The narrowing held for a generation. Through the political campaigns of the 1950s and the ten years of the Cultural Revolution, the polytechnic was what Tsinghua was, when it was open at all. In August 1966, in the first weeks of the campaign against old things, the white gate was pulled down. It had stood since 1911. The inscription Na Tong had written for it went with the stone. For a quarter of a century the lawn’s south end was an absence. Students who arrived in the 1970s, many of them admitted as workers, peasants, and soldiers under the rules of those years, studied engineering on a campus whose old front door was a gap.
What was put back
The restoration, when it came, was slow and then sudden, in the way of Chinese universities after 1978. The sciences returned first, because a polytechnic that wanted to be more than a teaching shop for factories needed physics and mathematics of its own, and because the state had rediscovered basic research. Then economics, management, law, and at length the humanities came back onto the grounds they had left in 1952. None of this was the refounding of the institute of 1925. The new departments were larger, more ordinary, and tied to a national system of examinations and plans. But the shape of the place changed again. A student who arrived in the 1990s could read history at Tsinghua, or economics, or law, and walk past the dome on the way to a class that would have been housed, forty years earlier, at another university by decree. The cut of 1952 had been real. It was not permanent.
There was, by then, a second Tsinghua. In 1956 a National Tsing Hua University was opened in Hsinchu, in Taiwan, with Mei Yiqi as its president. He had kept the name and the claim through the years after 1948, and he served the new campus until his death in 1962. The Hsinchu school took the same eight characters for its motto. It built its own gate in memory of the one in Beijing. Alumni of the two schools have spent decades explaining to outsiders that they are not quite one institution and not quite two, and the explanation never satisfies anyone who wants a clean answer. The clean answer does not exist. One garden produced one university. A war and a change of state produced two, keeping one motto and diverging in everything a ministry can touch.
In Beijing the gate came back for the eightieth anniversary. In 1990 alumni associations around the world asked for it. About five thousand people and a few dozen organisations sent money. In April 1991, just before the anniversary, a new white gate was finished on the old site, three arches, grey brick at the base, the same proportions, Na Tong’s three characters cut again into the stone. It is a copy. Everyone who cares about the place knows it is a copy, and knows the date in August 1966 when the original fell. The copy matters because the university chose to put the door back, on the same ground, with the same word. A school that had been a polytechnic for thirty years marked its birthday by restoring the entrance of the indemnity garden.
The breakfast, again
Stand on the lawn in the morning and the story is invisible, which is how successful campuses work. The dome is red brick and white stone. Bicycles cross the grass. A visitor shown the white gate is told that the university is old and famous, and both of those things are true without being the point. The point is a sequence of decisions: a debt turned into a garden, a garden into a school, a school into an argument about what the debt was for.
Wu Mi’s diary entry is a few lines. The officials spoke. The school was founded on a returned indemnity. Everything the students received was paid for by the state. He does not say whether he found this inspiring, or shaming, or merely worth recording before lunch. The useful thing is that he was there, sixteen, in a room that is still on the campus, hearing the truth about the money before anyone had time to turn it into a legend of gratitude. The legend came later, and it is half right. There was a remission, and it built a school, and the school became one of the universities by which the country measures itself. The other half is what Wu Mi heard at eleven o’clock. The breakfast had a creditor. The garden had a prince. The boys were being asked, with their porridge, to become the kind of men who could carry both facts without being owned by either. A century on, the dome and the gate and the pond are still there, and the question Liang put in that same room is still the only one that makes the expense intelligible. What, exactly, was the money for.
What happened to the other university in that reorganisation, the one that inherited Yenching’s garden, is told in The Only Reform Left Standing.
