4 - Espionage, Intrigues and Politics: Kalimpong Chung Hwa School as Playhouse

Summary

Like the tree-clad slopes of a dormant volcano, the calm everyday surface of Kalimpong life disguised feverish underground activity. This was mostly Chinese-inspired, with agents sent via Tibet to ferret out what they could about events in India; but there were also anti-government Tibetan exiles and reformers, anti-Chinese Tibetans, White and Red Russians, and a whole medley of other agents working for a variety of causes in this cozy little town.

—Hisao Kimura, Japanese Agent in Tibet

[C]aravans penetrated far and far into the Back of Beyond … registered in one of the locked books of the Indian Survey Department as C.25.1B. Twice or thrice yearly C.25 would send in a little story, baldly told but most interesting, and generally—it was checked by the statements of R.17 and M. 4—quite true. It concerned all manner of out-of-the-way mountain principalities, explorers of nationalities other than English, and the gun trade [and] was, in brief, a small portion of that vast mass of ‘information received’ on which the Indian Government acts.

—Rudyard Kipling, Kim

If the gentleman wants to transform the people and perfect their customs, must he not start from the lessons of the school?

—Li ji (Book of Rites), ‘Record on the Subject of Education’

Kalimpong as a ‘Nest of Spies’

Situated just a kilometre away from Kalimpong Police Station, the Kalimpong Chung Hwa School (see Figure 4.1 for a map of the town) opened its doors for the first time in June 1941. Established by three wealthy entrepreneurs, Ma Zhucai, Liang Zizhi and Zhang Xiangcheng, the school developed as a branch of the Calcutta Mui Kwong School. The primary purpose of the school was to provide education for the children of Chinese refugees from China and Southeast Asia who had fled to the hill station during the Second World War. The curriculum initially consisted of Chinese-language studies, complemented with Tibetan and English; class lectures on the Chinese anti-Japanese war effort were also held. Apart from transmitting and preserving ‘what was and continues to be regarded as Chinese identity … and links with the ancestral homeland’, the Kalimpong Chung Hwa School performed, unwittingly or otherwise, a dual function: like its counterparts in Calcutta, it served as a political playhouse where the factional struggles between the GMD and the CCP were staged after the 1950s.