The Students Dispatch Project of the Imperial University of Peking and Its Contribution to Chinese Modernization

Abstract

This paper investigates the activities of early Chinese students who were dispatched by the Imperial University of Peking (京師大学堂) to the First High School (第一高等学校) in Japan. It is based on original sources which remain partly unsorted. First, the correspondence between the Late Qing's minister of Education Zhang Baixi (張百煕) and the Imperial University of Peking's Japanese teacher Hattori Unokichi (服部宇之吉) will be analyzed, which reveals details about motives and circumstances of the dispatch project. Secondly, documents preserved at the University of Tokyo show the study life and, in particular, mathematics education offered to the foreign students in the First High School. Thirdly, the contribution of the whole project to the modernization of mathematics, natural science and technology in China will be examined, on the basis of achievements of those students after their return.