Nankai Middle School
| Tianjin Nankai High School 天津南开中学 |
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Nankai District Tianjin  China
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| Coordinates | Coordinates: 39°07′50″N 117°09′53″E / 39.13056°N 117.16472°E |
| Information | |
| Type | Public |
| Motto | 允公允能，日新月异 |
| Established | 1904 |
| Website | Nankai High School |
Tianjin Nankai High School (simplified Chinese: 天津南开中学; traditional Chinese: 天津南開中學; pinyin: Tiānjīn Nánkāi Zhōngxúe) is an elite college-preparatory high school in Tianjin, China. This is the original Nankai High School, and it is often referred to as Nankai High School in Tianjin to differentiate it from Chongqing Nankai Middle School, its sister school in Chongqing. Nankai is notable as one of the first modern secondary schools in China, and boasts several of the most notable men in modern Chinese history as its alumni.
Nankai High School was founded in 1904 by Yan Xiu (also known as Yan Fansun). Nankai was originally a private school, featuring a western-style college-preparatory curricula instead of a traditional Confucian curriculum. It was the first school in the Nankai Family of Schools. This system would latter be expanded to include Nankai University in 1919. Nankai University would become one of China's most prestigious universities.
Before his work at Nankai, Yan Xiu was an intellectual with a strong understanding of traditional Chinese culture who had held positions at the prestigious Hanlin Academy earlier in his career, and in both China's provincial and central governments. The difficulties that confronted China in the late nineteenth century led Yan to become interested in Western and Japanese models of education, to which he attributed the contemporary strength of the West and Japan. Yan's experiences working within the Chinese bureaucracy led him to believe that only the most progressive reforms could save China from further decline.
Yan Xiu belonged to a group of reform-minded intellectuals who, in 1905, presented a memorial that suggested abolishing the traditional examination system, focused on knowledge of the Confucian classics, to a system of education focused on practical knowledge. Yan's memorial was well received by the Qing government, which was by then interested in reform as a way to preventing the dynasty from destruction. After he had received a mandate for reform, Yan took part in a large-scale educational reform aimed at modernizing the educational institutions throughout China. After the Qing dynasty was abolished in the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, Yan was offered several high-level government positions, but refused them all in preference to devoting his time and energy to the establishment of Nankai.
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