The spring semester for Chinese and Western girls is generally set at 3 p.m. on the third Monday after the Lunar New Year. The reason for choosing the third week is that the Chinese New Year will not really end until the fifteenth day of the first lunar month. The reason for choosing Monday is 3 p.m. because, as a boarding school, Chinese and Western girls can go home for a day off in two weeks, from Sunday afternoon to Monday 3 p.m. So Monday at 3 p.m. is the beginning of a new cycle.

The reason why students are not allowed to go home on Saturday night is because the school has a service every Sunday morning, and the school doors are only opened after the service. Although non-religious students are allowed not to worship, they should wait until the doors are opened, as everyone else.

This system of worship probably had something to do with the fact that the founder of the school was a missionary of the Overseer. The English name of the Board of Supervisors is The Methodist Episcopal Church, South, which literally translates to the Southern Methodist Church, and the Methodist Church is the initiator of the Sunday school movement in the United States.

On February 9, 1903, that is, the nineteenth day of the first month of the twenty-ninth year of Guangxu, the twelfth spring opening tea party of Chinese and Western female maturing was held on the lawn of the school center as scheduled. It was a simple self-service social tea party, attended by mostly parents of students and a small number of prominent members of the community. Compared to the first semester, when ceremonies were held separately for male and female guests, and even when male missionaries had to be invited to give speeches during the male ceremony, the atmosphere is really much more civilized.

As information from European and American countries enters Chinese society through various channels, people are stunned, then angry, and finally relieved, and the traditional concept has begun to change gradually. As far as women's education is concerned, the tradition of ignoring women's education is changing, and the prejudice that women are not talented and virtuous is becoming more and more spurned, and mainstream public opinion is introducing the education situation of Western women in an admiring tone, from despising women to actively seeking educational opportunities for their children, this process of transformation is slow but gradual.

This gradual change can be seen in the number of students enrolled in the middle and western matrimonies. When it opened in 1892, the school had only six students, in 1895 it had 21, in 1899 it had 51 students, and this year it was 99 students—and to be honest, if there were any more people, Lian Jisheng would have to think about where to rent a few more lodging buildings.

Now the primary problem that plagues Lian Jisheng has changed from the lack of students to the frequent movement of students from school. Among the students, they have been in school for four or five years, one or two years short, and some have even left school after only a few months. With the exception of three who graduated in the first class in 1900, only one graduated in 1901 and 1902 in two consecutive years, a somewhat dismal graduation rate.

The reason is nothing more than that at this time, more and more upper-class young people who are influenced by new ideas begin to require women to be educated in the conditions of marriage, which forces those women who are close to marriage age to look for educational opportunities in many ways.

Therefore, in the tea party, Lian Jisheng set the main chat object to the parents of students above the sixth grade. Because if the maximum admission age of first-year students is 8 years old, the sixth grade is exactly 14 years old, which is already the age to talk about marriage.

In addition to the mobility of students, another concern for Lian Jisheng is the quality of students.

Chinese and Western women are familiar with Lin Lezhi's founding philosophy.

In 1881, the Board of Supervisors appointed Lin Lezhi, a missionary who had worked in China for more than 20 years, as the provost and the prime minister of the Chinese Church. At that time, there were more than 340 religious schools of various denominations in China, with a total of nearly 6,000 students, and even more than 120 girls' schools with more than 2,000 students. However, these schools were all built to spread the gospel, with typical missionary education, and most of the students were street children, belonging to the lowest and most hopeless classes. These schools and students were the result of the missionary work, and the capital for them to obtain further financial support from their parent churches. However, such a church school was hardly accepted by mainstream Chinese society, and not only conservative officials and gentlemen sneered at it, but also ordinary good people.

Lin wanted to open a new type of school that would appeal to the best and most promising. He believed that if missionaries wanted to exert greater influence in China, they must first make the schools truly secular schools, attract the children of the upper classes of Chinese society to school with their excellent school system and standards, and win the favor of officials and gentlemen, so that there would be fewer obstacles to the spread of Christianity in China.

His goal was clear: to "reach the source of influence among the Chinese" and that "every student, without exception, comes from the best families living in Shanghai and includes people from almost every region of China." And the so-called best families naturally refer to the families of bureaucrats, gentry, and wealthy merchants.

Zhongxi Girl's Mature is such a Bai Fumei school specially opened for the daughters of "noble Chinese".

However, the ideal is very plump, but the reality is very skinny. Lin Lezhi personally presided over the boys' school, the Chinese and Western Academy, which was a template for Chinese and Western women's acquaintances, but became a school dedicated to cultivating the comprador class. Because its students "know little about Chinese ancient studies and lack interest; As for Western studies, they only care about English, because they hope to get a better job in Shanghai, where business is booming", and the request of the students' parents is only to "use the 'Chinese and Western' English environment to learn English well, so that they can work in customs, foreign firms, or the government after graduation", which shows that it has not attracted real bureaucrats, gentry, and wealthy businessmen.

The same is true for Chinese and Western women, although it is becoming more and more popular with the new class with new ideas, but this class is still dormant today, although the artillery fire of the Eight-Nation Coalition Army of the Gengzi Incident has awakened it, but it will not break through the hole until at least next year after the Russo-Japanese War, and then another year, that is, after Zhang Zhidong wrote a letter to abolish the imperial examination, it will not really be its turn to turn over and sing.

However, it was still 1903, and it was impossible for Ms. Lian Jisheng to be a traveler who could not have predicted two years later, so she was still in distress. Of the school's 99 parents, only three deserve her attention, and two of them are not only husband and wife, but also her colleagues.

The couple's surname was Charlie, a Chinese-American missionary of the Board of Supervisors, his wife was Ni Guizhen, the daughter of a Chinese pastor, and his mother was a descendant of the famous Xu Guangqi. Their three daughters, Nancy, Rosamund, and the adorable little Merrill Lynch, are currently enrolled in the school. It's a pity that such an excellent family is completely out of step with China's mainstream society.

The rest of the man surnamed Li is a wealthy businessman and has donated a lot of money to the school, but he runs a tobacco store called "Guangrong Lin". Although he was rich, he had no social status, not even a real wealthy merchant class.

And the parents of the new students who entered the school this year are just compradors and the like. Bureaucrats, gentry and wealthy businessmen still have a long way to go to achieve the three goals set by Lin Lezhi.

At least in today's view of Lian Jisheng.