The “Fuzhou School for the Blind” is a century-old school specializing in the education of the visually impaired (including low vision). It was founded in August 1898 (the 24th year of Emperor Guangxu’s reign) by Amy Oxle Wildinson, an Australian of British nationality, as the C.M.S. (Church Missionary Society) Blind Boys School in Fuzhou.
In 1896, Miss Amy Oxle Wildinson was sent by the Church of English to China to preach the gospel. She came to Lianjiang, Fuzhou, and worked as a nurse in a hospital. During her medical career, she came into contact with some blind children. Having compassion for them, she decided to serve them as her lifelong career. In 1898, Wildinson rented a house in Dongdai Village, Lianjiang County, to shelter blind children free of charge, and founded a school for the blind - the C.M.S. (Church Missionary Society) Blind Boys School. The earliest teaching method of the school was to learn from the teaching experience of Mr. Cook, a missionary in Shunchang County, Fujian Province. The Bible was used as the text, and raised dots were used to represent the initial and consonant sounds of Roman characters, which could be used to spell out the Fuzhou dialect. This dialect has more than 30 letters in Braille, and each syllable needs at least two dots.
The first blind child to attend the school was Xiao Lingkai, the son of a local widow. Six weeks after entering the school, he was able to read Braille and write the Gospel of Mark, and his grades were pretty good. Subsequently, six students joined, including a 4-year-old child with visual impairment and an old man in his late 70s. By 1900 (the twenty-sixth year of the reign of Emperor Guangxu of the Qing Dynasty), 17 visually impaired people had been admitted into the school. The students respectfully called Wildinson "Aunt". In 1900, due to the Boxer Rebellion, the Lianjiang School for the Blind was forced to close.
When Wildinson returned to Australia, she encouraged the local Anglican Church to support the education of blind children in China and actively raised funds. In 1901, she returned to Fuzhou and founded a school for the blind in Meiwu, Cangqian, then she moved to Hualinfang, North Gate, and finally onto Chaijingding, Fuzhou (present day site of Yuehua Hotel, of the Xihu Hotel chain). In 1903, Amy married Dr. G. Wilkinson, the president of the Chaijing Christian Hospital in Fuzhou (the predecessor of the Fuzhou First Hospital affiliated to Fujian Medical University), which was founded by the Anglican Church in 1898. Soon, the school purchased land opposite the Chaijing Christian Hospital in Fuzhou and moved the Cangqian Meiwu Blind School to that place. The school concept of “feeding the mouth with hands” was first proposed. That is, to allow the blind to feed themselves with their own hands.
In the beginning, the school had a kindergarten, junior and senior primary schools, and then added a craft department and a brass band. The school runs a part-time school system. The primary school curriculum included: Mandarin, abacus, singing, religion and so on; History, Geography, English, music, and composition were also offered in the senior primary school. The craft department had courses like knotting straw mats, weaving bamboo basket, making veranda chairs, making brown curtains, repairing organs, repairing piano, and other courses. In those days, Braille teaching in Fuzhou Lingguang Blind School was at the forefront of the country.
Around 1911, Ms. Amy improved Braille, increasing the number of letters to 53, tone symbols to 7, and each syllable was composed of 3 dots for sound, rhyme, and tone. Around 1920 (the ninth year of the Republic of China), she also put forward the word as a unit of abbreviation, and space was added before and after the abbreviated word, which is the predecessor of segmentation form of Chinese Braille word.
In 1910, Xiao Lingkai, the first student to enroll in the School for the Blind, led four other students to bring their woven bamboo baskets, straw mats, sweaters, and other handmade products to an industrial exhibition held in Nanjing and won gold medals and certificates from the Qing government. In 1915, at the first World’s Fair in Panama, the exquisite handicrafts of the blind children of Lingguang were honored. In the summer of 1929, the school moved into the Western-style school buildings in the medical school. The people in the technology department of the blind school invented the technology of tying mats with seaweed using a mat weaving machine. The mats could be dyed in various colors and sold well all over the country.
The brass band of Lingguang Blind Boys School was once famous all over the world. Amy formed the school’s brass band, or “military band,” which played Chinese and Western repertoire at school gatherings. In 1917, the band of Lingguang Blind Boys School began a two-year tour, which took them to Xiamen, Quanzhou, Shantou, and other places. In 1922, all 11 people of the blind child brass band accepted the invitation of the Anglican Church and began their tour of the three islands of Britain. They were warmly welcomed in each city, and even got received by the wife of the British King George V - Queen Mary. They performed Chinese and Western classics for the royal family. The British newspapers gave high praise. They originally planned to tour in the UK for only 3 months. However, unexpectedly, they were repeatedly urged to stay by the British people and also received by the Queen of England. This extended their journey to 22 months before they returned home. This is a fantastic story in the history of modern music and cultural exchanges between the East and the West and is also the honor of modern Fuzhou music history. Later, the brass band of Li Houji, the provincial military governor of Fujian, was guided by the people from the band of C.M.S. Blind Boys School.
In 1903, Stephen Emily, sent by the British Indian Women Church, arrived in Fuzhou and established the Private Fuzhou Mingdao Blind Girls School on Shipu Road, Cangshan, by renting a private house to teach blind girls. Most of its students were homeless blind girls and children displaced by natural disasters such as famine in Shanxi, Xiamen, and Singapore. In 1922, a red-brick school building was built, the Mingdao Blind Girls School in Shipu, which made greater progress in teaching. The teaching and manual curriculum of the school is similar to that of the C.M.S. Blind Boys School. The school was divided into kindergarten and primary school. The main subjects taught were: Braille (taking the Bible as the text to learn Braille in Fuzhou dialect), abacus, singing, learning semaphore, and playing the piano.
In 1928, the school for the blind began to teach Mandarin and Braille. By 1936, the courses offered were expanded to Mandarin, Civics, History, Geography, Nature Study, General Knowledge, English, and Religion. As the students were all visually impaired girls, knitting and weaving were offered as vocational courses. The courses were mainly about housekeeping, such as decorating the house, washing dishes, fetching water, washing clothes, sewing, babysitting, etc. According to 1928 statistics, there were more than 80 students in the Mingdao Blind Girls School, ranging from 3 years old to over 40 years old. Most of the adult students were unwilling to marry and were willing to stay on campus to teach or assist in missionary work. A church elder, Sister Cai Lixia, who is now over 80 years old, is a native of Gulangyu, Xiamen. She has been blind since childhood. With the help of the church, she went to the Fuzhou Mingdao Blind Girls School, where Li Mengxiong, a Chinese, was the principal. Ever since her graduation, she has been playing the musical instrument of Xiamen Gulangyu Trinity Church.
“She is always there where she is needed. She is a very kind and pure old woman” (Rizhao Station of Trinity Church, Dec 1, 2019).
Due to the low status of women in the old society, blind women could not live a relatively independent life like blind men. Living in schools for a long time also brought a great economic burden to girls' schools for blind children. In the middle and late periods of the Republic of China, children enrolled in the school for girls for the blind had to be recommended by an introducer.
Amy Oxle Wildinson, the first principal of the school for the blind, left her post in 1922. Miss A. M. Wolfe, and later on Miss Lamb, succeeded her. In September 1944, Miss Lamb returned to her country. After that, Li Mengxiong, a Chinese, held the post of principal of both Lingguang and Mingdao.
In 1951, the two schools of Linguang and Mingdao for the blind were merged into the Fuzhou School for the Blind. In 1979, the Fuzhou School for the Blind and the Fuzhou School for the Deaf and the Mute were merged into the Fuzhou School for the Blind, the Deaf, and the Mute. The school was moved to No. 15 Xihong Road, Fuzhou. In August 1995, the Fuzhou Municipal Government built a new school building for the Blind at No. 110 Shoushan Road, Cangshan District, Fuzhou, which independently became the current Fuzhou School for the Blind.
(Note: Some of the information comes from Religious Records of Fuzhou City, and the article Bath Together in the Light of the God: Part of the Photos of Cai Lixia of Trinity Church, Gulangyu, and Old Photos of Fuzhou School for Blind Children by Sister Wang Ying from Xiamen)
- Translated by Nicolas Cao
福州盲人学校，是一所专门从事视障教育（含低视力）的百年老校。前身是由英籍澳大利亚人岳爱美（Amy Oxle Wildinson）女士于1898年8月（光绪二十四年）创建的“中华圣公会私立灵光盲童学校”， 是一间专收男童的盲人学校。
1896年，岳爱美小姐奉基督教英圣公会差遣，到中国传教。她来到福州连江，在一所医院担任护士。从医期间，她接触到一些盲童，她对盲童心生怜悯，决志以服务盲童为终身事业，并于1898年在连江县东岱乡租赁一所民房免费收容盲童，创办了盲人学校——“中华圣工会私立灵光盲童学校”。学校最早的教学方法是借鉴福建顺昌县传教士库克（Mr. Cook）先前的教学经验，以《圣经》为文本，用凸点符号表示罗马字元母、辅音，拼写成福州话，这种方言盲文有字母30多个，每个音节至少需要2个以上的点符。
首位入盲校就读的盲童是当地一寡妇的儿子，名叫肖灵开，入盲校六星期后就能摸盲文读字音，书写《马可福音》，成绩优异。随后陆续来学者6人，既有4岁的视障幼童，也有年近古稀的视障老翁。直到1900年（清光绪二十六年）之前，先后有17名视障人士得以入学。学生尊称岳爱美小姐为师姑。1900年因义和团运动，连江盲人学校被迫停办。
当年岳爱美返回澳大利亚，鼓励当地基督教圣公会支持在中国开展盲童教育，积极筹款。1901年，她再次来到福州，在仓前梅坞再度创办盲校，后又迁入北门华林坊，最后迁福州柴井顶（现西湖宾馆悦华酒店址）。1903年，岳和1898年英国圣公会创办的福州柴井基督医院（现福建医科大学附属福州第一医院前身）院长宫维贤医生（Dr. G. Wilkinson）结为伉俪。不久在福州柴井基督医院对面购地，将仓前梅坞盲校搬迁于此，首次提出“以手养口”的办学理念。也就是让盲人用自己的双手养活自己。
学校起初设有幼儿园及初、高级小学校部，而后又增设工艺部和铜管乐队。学校施行半工半读制。初级小学课程有：国语、珠算、唱歌、宗教课等；高等小学另加历史、地理、英文、音乐及作文等课。工艺部设有：结草席、编竹篮、制游廊椅、制棕门帘、修风琴、修钢琴等课程。当年福州灵光盲校的盲文教学是走在全国前列的。
1911年前后，岳女士对盲文加以改进，字母增加到53个，声调符号7个，每个音节由声、韵、调3个点符组成。1920年（民国九年）前后，她还提出过以词为单位的简写方法，简写词的前后都有空格，这是我国盲文分词形式的前身。
1910年，第一位入学盲校的学生肖灵开曾带领另外4名学生携带他们编的竹蓝、草席、织的毛衣等手工制品参加在南京召开的工业展览会，获得清政府金质奖章和奖状。1915年，在首届巴拿马世博会上，灵光盲童精美的手工艺品获得嘉奖。1929年夏，学校迁入医学院内的西式校舍，盲校工艺部应用织席机发明了用一种海草结席技术，草席能染成各种颜色，畅销全国。
福州灵光男童盲校的铜管乐队曾闻名世界。岳一手组建了盲校的铜管乐队（又称“军乐队”），能在学校各种集会时演奏中西曲目。1917年，灵光男童盲校铜管乐队开始长达两年时间的巡回演出，到过厦门、泉州、汕头等地。1922年，灵光盲童铜管乐队一行11人应英国圣公会的邀请到英伦三岛巡回演出，每到一城市皆受到热烈欢迎，也得到英国乔治五世的妻子——玛丽王后的接见，为王宫贵族演出中西经典曲目。英国各大报纸都给予高度的赞誉。他们原计划在英只巡回演出3个月，怎料受到英国人民的一再挽留，也得到英国女王接见，在王宫贵族前演出中西经典曲目。这样，他们的行程就延长达到22个月时间才回国。这是近代东西方音乐文化交流历史上的奇谈，更是近代福州音乐史的荣誉。后来福建李厚基督军的铜管乐队，也是由灵光铜管乐队派人来指导。
1903年，“英国印度妇女教会”派遣沈爱美（Stephen Emily）抵达福州，在仓山施浦路租赁民房创办“私立福州明道盲女学校”，专收盲人女童，盲校所收的学生大部分是来自山西、厦门、新加坡等地因饥荒等天灾造成流离失所的孤苦女盲童。1922年，明道盲童女校在施浦建红砖楼校舍，教学方面才有更大的发展。明道盲童女校所设教学和手工课程与灵光男童盲校相仿。学校分为幼儿园、初级小学。教授科目主要为：以《圣经》为文本，学习福州方言盲文、珠算、唱歌、学旗语和弹琴等。
1928年，盲校开始设立普通话国语盲文教学。到1936年开设的课程增加至：国语、公民、历史、地理、自然、常识、英文、宗教，由于学生都是视障女童，职业科开设编织与织布。所传授手工课程以家政为主，科目有：布置住宅、洗碗、汲水、洗衣、缝纫、看护幼童等。据1928年统计，明道盲童女校有80多名学生，从3岁到40多岁不等。已成年的学生大多不愿出嫁，甘心留校任教，或辅助传教士工作。现年八十多岁的蔡丽霞主内老姐妹是地道厦门鼓浪屿人，自幼失明，在教会的帮助下到华人李孟雄任校长的福州“明道”盲童女校学习，毕业之后一直是厦门鼓浪屿三一堂司琴至今………
蔡丽霞姐妹现仍在厦门鼓浪屿三一堂司琴，“她总是出现在需要她的地方，这是一位心地非常洁净的老人”（2019年12月1日三一堂日照站）
由于旧社会女性地位卑微，女盲人不可能像男性盲人可以有相对独立的生活，久居学校给盲童女校也带来比较大的经济负担。到民国中后期，入明道女童盲校就读的孩童需要经由介绍人推荐。
明道盲童女校的第一任校长岳爱美1922年去职，后来明道女童盲校继任校长的有胡师姑（Miss A.M.Wolfe）及兰师姑（Miss Lamb）等。1944年9月，兰师姑回国。之后，由华人李孟雄一身兼灵光、明道两校校长之职。
1951年“灵光”和“明道”两所盲校合并为“福州市盲人学校”， 1979年福州市盲人学校与福州市聋哑学校合并为福州市盲聋哑学校，校址迁到福州市西洪路坊下15号。 1995年8月福州市政府在福州市仓山区首山路110号建设福州市盲校新校舍，独立成为现在的福州盲人学校。
（注：部分资讯来《福州市宗教志》和厦门王莹姐妹《共浴天光主恩：鼓浪屿三一堂司琴蔡丽霞部分影像和福州盲童学校老照片》一文
拥有百年历史的福州盲人学校 前身为传教士创办
The “Fuzhou School for the Blind” is a century-old school specializing in the education of the visually impaired (including low vision). It was founded in August 1898 (the 24th year of Emperor Guangxu’s reign) by Amy Oxle Wildinson, an Australian of British nationality, as the C.M.S. (Church Missionary Society) Blind Boys School in Fuzhou.
In 1896, Miss Amy Oxle Wildinson was sent by the Church of English to China to preach the gospel. She came to Lianjiang, Fuzhou, and worked as a nurse in a hospital. During her medical career, she came into contact with some blind children. Having compassion for them, she decided to serve them as her lifelong career. In 1898, Wildinson rented a house in Dongdai Village, Lianjiang County, to shelter blind children free of charge, and founded a school for the blind - the C.M.S. (Church Missionary Society) Blind Boys School. The earliest teaching method of the school was to learn from the teaching experience of Mr. Cook, a missionary in Shunchang County, Fujian Province. The Bible was used as the text, and raised dots were used to represent the initial and consonant sounds of Roman characters, which could be used to spell out the Fuzhou dialect. This dialect has more than 30 letters in Braille, and each syllable needs at least two dots.
The first blind child to attend the school was Xiao Lingkai, the son of a local widow. Six weeks after entering the school, he was able to read Braille and write the Gospel of Mark, and his grades were pretty good. Subsequently, six students joined, including a 4-year-old child with visual impairment and an old man in his late 70s. By 1900 (the twenty-sixth year of the reign of Emperor Guangxu of the Qing Dynasty), 17 visually impaired people had been admitted into the school. The students respectfully called Wildinson "Aunt". In 1900, due to the Boxer Rebellion, the Lianjiang School for the Blind was forced to close.
When Wildinson returned to Australia, she encouraged the local Anglican Church to support the education of blind children in China and actively raised funds. In 1901, she returned to Fuzhou and founded a school for the blind in Meiwu, Cangqian, then she moved to Hualinfang, North Gate, and finally onto Chaijingding, Fuzhou (present day site of Yuehua Hotel, of the Xihu Hotel chain). In 1903, Amy married Dr. G. Wilkinson, the president of the Chaijing Christian Hospital in Fuzhou (the predecessor of the Fuzhou First Hospital affiliated to Fujian Medical University), which was founded by the Anglican Church in 1898. Soon, the school purchased land opposite the Chaijing Christian Hospital in Fuzhou and moved the Cangqian Meiwu Blind School to that place. The school concept of “feeding the mouth with hands” was first proposed. That is, to allow the blind to feed themselves with their own hands.
In the beginning, the school had a kindergarten, junior and senior primary schools, and then added a craft department and a brass band. The school runs a part-time school system. The primary school curriculum included: Mandarin, abacus, singing, religion and so on; History, Geography, English, music, and composition were also offered in the senior primary school. The craft department had courses like knotting straw mats, weaving bamboo basket, making veranda chairs, making brown curtains, repairing organs, repairing piano, and other courses. In those days, Braille teaching in Fuzhou Lingguang Blind School was at the forefront of the country.
Around 1911, Ms. Amy improved Braille, increasing the number of letters to 53, tone symbols to 7, and each syllable was composed of 3 dots for sound, rhyme, and tone. Around 1920 (the ninth year of the Republic of China), she also put forward the word as a unit of abbreviation, and space was added before and after the abbreviated word, which is the predecessor of segmentation form of Chinese Braille word.
In 1910, Xiao Lingkai, the first student to enroll in the School for the Blind, led four other students to bring their woven bamboo baskets, straw mats, sweaters, and other handmade products to an industrial exhibition held in Nanjing and won gold medals and certificates from the Qing government. In 1915, at the first World’s Fair in Panama, the exquisite handicrafts of the blind children of Lingguang were honored. In the summer of 1929, the school moved into the Western-style school buildings in the medical school. The people in the technology department of the blind school invented the technology of tying mats with seaweed using a mat weaving machine. The mats could be dyed in various colors and sold well all over the country.
The brass band of Lingguang Blind Boys School was once famous all over the world. Amy formed the school’s brass band, or “military band,” which played Chinese and Western repertoire at school gatherings. In 1917, the band of Lingguang Blind Boys School began a two-year tour, which took them to Xiamen, Quanzhou, Shantou, and other places. In 1922, all 11 people of the blind child brass band accepted the invitation of the Anglican Church and began their tour of the three islands of Britain. They were warmly welcomed in each city, and even got received by the wife of the British King George V - Queen Mary. They performed Chinese and Western classics for the royal family. The British newspapers gave high praise. They originally planned to tour in the UK for only 3 months. However, unexpectedly, they were repeatedly urged to stay by the British people and also received by the Queen of England. This extended their journey to 22 months before they returned home. This is a fantastic story in the history of modern music and cultural exchanges between the East and the West and is also the honor of modern Fuzhou music history. Later, the brass band of Li Houji, the provincial military governor of Fujian, was guided by the people from the band of C.M.S. Blind Boys School.
In 1903, Stephen Emily, sent by the British Indian Women Church, arrived in Fuzhou and established the Private Fuzhou Mingdao Blind Girls School on Shipu Road, Cangshan, by renting a private house to teach blind girls. Most of its students were homeless blind girls and children displaced by natural disasters such as famine in Shanxi, Xiamen, and Singapore. In 1922, a red-brick school building was built, the Mingdao Blind Girls School in Shipu, which made greater progress in teaching. The teaching and manual curriculum of the school is similar to that of the C.M.S. Blind Boys School. The school was divided into kindergarten and primary school. The main subjects taught were: Braille (taking the Bible as the text to learn Braille in Fuzhou dialect), abacus, singing, learning semaphore, and playing the piano.
In 1928, the school for the blind began to teach Mandarin and Braille. By 1936, the courses offered were expanded to Mandarin, Civics, History, Geography, Nature Study, General Knowledge, English, and Religion. As the students were all visually impaired girls, knitting and weaving were offered as vocational courses. The courses were mainly about housekeeping, such as decorating the house, washing dishes, fetching water, washing clothes, sewing, babysitting, etc. According to 1928 statistics, there were more than 80 students in the Mingdao Blind Girls School, ranging from 3 years old to over 40 years old. Most of the adult students were unwilling to marry and were willing to stay on campus to teach or assist in missionary work. A church elder, Sister Cai Lixia, who is now over 80 years old, is a native of Gulangyu, Xiamen. She has been blind since childhood. With the help of the church, she went to the Fuzhou Mingdao Blind Girls School, where Li Mengxiong, a Chinese, was the principal. Ever since her graduation, she has been playing the musical instrument of Xiamen Gulangyu Trinity Church.
“She is always there where she is needed. She is a very kind and pure old woman” (Rizhao Station of Trinity Church, Dec 1, 2019).
Due to the low status of women in the old society, blind women could not live a relatively independent life like blind men. Living in schools for a long time also brought a great economic burden to girls' schools for blind children. In the middle and late periods of the Republic of China, children enrolled in the school for girls for the blind had to be recommended by an introducer.
Amy Oxle Wildinson, the first principal of the school for the blind, left her post in 1922. Miss A. M. Wolfe, and later on Miss Lamb, succeeded her. In September 1944, Miss Lamb returned to her country. After that, Li Mengxiong, a Chinese, held the post of principal of both Lingguang and Mingdao.
In 1951, the two schools of Linguang and Mingdao for the blind were merged into the Fuzhou School for the Blind. In 1979, the Fuzhou School for the Blind and the Fuzhou School for the Deaf and the Mute were merged into the Fuzhou School for the Blind, the Deaf, and the Mute. The school was moved to No. 15 Xihong Road, Fuzhou. In August 1995, the Fuzhou Municipal Government built a new school building for the Blind at No. 110 Shoushan Road, Cangshan District, Fuzhou, which independently became the current Fuzhou School for the Blind.
(Note: Some of the information comes from Religious Records of Fuzhou City, and the article Bath Together in the Light of the God: Part of the Photos of Cai Lixia of Trinity Church, Gulangyu, and Old Photos of Fuzhou School for Blind Children by Sister Wang Ying from Xiamen)
- Translated by Nicolas Cao
Century-old Fuzhou School for the Blind Founded by Missionaries
