Since the late 19th century, Hong Kong’s high-quality English-medium schools have attracted a student population who originally hailed from elsewhere in Southeast Asia or southern China.
Multi-faceted reasons, interwoven with broader regional realities, lay behind an individual family’s decision to send their children to study here. Spanish mestizo children from across the Philippines, French Eurasians from various parts of Indochina, and the mixed-race offspring of teak company employees in Siam and Burma, and rubber planters in Malaya and Borneo were sent to Hong Kong, mainly because few schools that offered a quality education with solid future employment prospects existed in their places of origin.
English teacher Ginny Schiefer teaches a class at St Teresa’s School in Stanley in the 1970s. Photo: Sunny Lee
The most highly regarded local institutions were – and remain – those controlled by Christian religious denominations. The Roman Catholic-run Italian Convent on Caine Road originally admitted many local Portuguese children, several of whom lived in the nearby Central backstreets clustered around the Jamia Mosque on Shelley Street. Filipino mestizo children, with Spanish as their mother tongue, also attended as boarders; after the American takeover of the Philippines in 1898, English fluency was considered a pathway to advancement, and attendance figures steadily rose. St Joseph’s College, run by the Jesuit order, was the equivalent, highly sought-after boy’s school and catered to a similar demographic. The Anglican-run Diocesan Orphanage later evolved into Diocesan Boys’ School and Diocesan Girls’ School, in Kowloon. Both remain keenly sought-after, with formidably high admission requirements.
Local Chinese children were admitted into these institutions from the outset, as long as they had the requisite English-language ability and their parents the means to pay the fees, but they remained a sizeable minority in these schools until the early 20th century.
Visitors admiring some of the displays during a geography exhibition held St Joseph’s College in 1977. Photo: Sunny Lee
Student numbers were partially drawn from overseas because until the early 20th century, there were simply not enough locally domiciled Chinese children in Hong Kong with the requisite language requirements to participate in English-medium schools. Students drawn from home language heritages ensured that English became the primary language of communication outside the classroom; a similar role played by the foreign contingent who attend local “international” schools today. These days, ethnic Chinese form the overwhelming majority of the student population in all elite local English-medium schools.
