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because, after Legge himself had remarried back in England in 1858, Rengan arranged for his relatives to stay with the Legge family until he called for them from Tianjing. The final demise of the rebellion included the capture and execution of Rengan by the Qing armies. In spite of the personal training given and closeness felt by Legge, the power of blood relations carried more influence than the power of Christian care. This made the need to understand the Chinese heart and mind all the more concrete to Legge.
A more direct influence was the inability of Legge and his teaching staff to produce through the Anglo-Chinese College and its Seminary a continual supply of Chinese pastors and teachers. The government licensed the school with the understanding that some of those who graduated would be sent on to government placements as translators. Since the pay from the government was far more than any pastor could receive while working with a very small community at best, most students were drawn into government and business.
There is no doubt that there were also strong theological reasons behind the change. Legge's missionary service was directed toward the Chinese population. In order to know them and to be accepted by them, he felt he had to display a knowledge which they would honour: a knowledge of the Confucian Classics. Convinced that the earliest Chinese did know the true God named Shangdi, as found in The Book of Documents (HK) and the oldest portions of The Book of Odes, Legge was all the more concerned to discover how Chinese themselves responded to these religious dimensions of Confucianism. This attitude informed Legge's educational philosophy.
Thus, Legge supported the provision of general education for selected Chinese students, rather than requiring them to follow any rigidly missionary curriculum. He closed his own parochial school in 1858. He was the head of the education committee for the Hong Kong government which developed the new public educational system in Hong Kong. This is remarkable, since general education was not standard even in many European countries at that date. Legge arranged to have Frederick Stewart, a fellow Scotsman, come to act as headmaster of Queen's College, the new school designed to provide a higher-level general education for Chinese boys.
Early in his career as the London Missionary Society representative