May 4, 2010
Chinese one-room schoolhouses
This is what “schools” looked like 100 years ago. This is an old school on the outskirts of Yilan. From a distance, it looks like a temple.
In fact, up close, it looks like a temple, as well.
As soon as you walk in the front door, you see a shrine to Guan Yu 關羽, also called Guan Gong 關公. So far, this is a lot like typical temples.
But if you look at the right and left wings of the temple, instead of other shrines, you see tables and stools.
This is where classes were held. Not unlike church-based schools hundreds of years ago in Europe. This is the Chinese version of the one-room schoolhouse.
This is what elementary school was like. If you wanted to get education beyond the provincial schools, you had to take tests. There were several levels of test, that peaked with civil-service exams. Passing the top-level test was a ticket to a government job, usually as a provincial governor or court official.