Four years later, Scottish universities relented and admitted women, and St George's girls were among the first women graduates in Scotland.

Its luminaries include Marie Stopes, the pioneer of family planning, and it justifies its single-sex policy on the grounds that it encourages girls to throw off stereotypes and compete in fields that are traditionally male dominated, such as medical science and engineering.

'We are turning women into not aggressive career women but equal partners with men,' Ms McClure said.

But the school is also breaking down barriers in a different direction, by forging links with Hong Kong and the mainland and enthusing pupils about learning Putonghua - and not just in St George's, but across Scotland.

A year ago Ms McClure formed the Scotland-China Education Network to bring together all schools involved in learning about China and Chinese language in primary and secondary schools. It now has 38 members.

At St George's, a 1,100-pupil fee-paying school that caters for all ages from three to 17, the East Asian connection begins with pupils aged five to seven attending Chinese clubs. More than 200 pupils aged eight to 11 are learning Putonghua. Secondary students can choose the language from a list of options that includes Chinese, French, German Spanish and Latin.

Even parents are learning at basic and intermediate level in evening classes held at the school.

'There are two things all students in Scotland have to be prepared for: how to be good global citizens and to have an understanding of the world,' Ms McClure said. 'China will be one of the most powerful economic and political forces of the 21st century. Here we have a country of 1.3 billion people with a rich history and culture about which we do not know enough and pupils need the edge of being able to communicate in Chinese.'

The school has so far organised one expedition to the mainland for senior pupils, including a visit to Hong Kong, for this year. It is hoping to start a programme of exchanges with three partner schools in the mainland and Hong Kong.

'We have had many visits of Chinese students from Hong Kong's Tsung Tsin Christian Academy, but also from Bashu Middle School in Chongqing and Yunnan University Middle School. Teachers from schools in the Hong Kong Schools Self-Evaluation Network have visited to share good practice,' she said.

The Scottish teachers are particularly keen to learn more about how their East Asian peers are developing pupils' skills in science and maths.

Ms McClure believes British schools have taken too long to recognise the need to look beyond European languages and put Chinese on the curriculum. 'It's largely because English is a world language that we have not understood the need to embed Chinese in schools and we must do it as well as we can,' she said.

One important catalyst has been a British Council scheme to send British students to China on two-week intensive introductory courses in Putonghua.

'Pupils get very quickly converted once they have been over to China, because it is so exciting,' Ms McClure said. 'It's so different and yet there is so much in common. The Chinese have strong family values, they are interested in education, very enterprising, interested in other countries, so there's an immediate rapport.'

At St George's a department of three staff has been assembled, including one head of department, one Chinese/Spanish teacher and one language assistant from China supplied each year by the British Council.

The head of Chinese is Melany-Lu Lin, 27, a direct descendant of Lin Zexu, the Governor of Guangdong whose 1839 crackdown on the opium trade sparked the first opium war and the eventual cession of Hong Kong to the British.

Ms Lin has a reputation for being a demanding teacher, expecting high standards, but she dismisses the belief that Chinese is hard for English-speaking children to learn, suggesting it is easier than French or Spanish, with its uncomplicated grammar.

'It's a very straightforward language,' Ms Lin said. 'All you have to do to learn Chinese well is work hard and practise the characters.'

She tries to make it fun, rather than simply drilling. 'We come up with stories - for instance, a character form called laughter almost seems like two smiling eyes with a happy smiling mouth underneath - so that students can picture them. They learn the characters and enjoy it.' Another important tactic is to combine language with learning about Chinese culture, so that pupils can relate the language to real life.

The school celebrates the Mid-Autumn Festival, Spring Lantern Festival and Dragon Boat Festival. Students experience calligraphy, paper cutting, tai chi, making mooncakes and other Chinese activities. They learn about Chinese legends and history and a banquet is held at a Chinese restaurant to celebrate the Lunar New Year. Students also participate in annual Chinese-speaking competitions run by the British Council.

At sixth-form level, one project involves comparing life as a student on the mainland or Hong Kong with the UK, where students face less family pressure to do well.

When Ms Lin did a teacher-training assignment in England on the exact same topic using her own experience of exam stress her tutor was shocked.

Ms Lin was born in the first year of China's one-child policy in Benxi, a city of 1.5 million in northeast China, and was one of 800 out of 100,000 applicants to be selected for a place in the senior key school - a grammar school equivalent - in Liaoning province.

In her last year doing exams she had an average of only four hours sleep a night. 'All the time you would be working,' she recalls.

'We were all pale as sheets. We worked Monday to Saturday and half day on Sunday and had private tuition during holidays.'

But she also brought positive lessons from her experience to bear on her pupils at St George's.

She recounts how one day one of her classmates walked into class looking unusually fresh. The teacher asked what time he went to bed and her friend said about 10.30pm.

'Oh you seem to be having a pretty relaxing time,' said the teacher, 'but finishing homework is not enough; you should have been preparing for today's lesson.'

So now when students tell Ms Lin they have finished their homework in 20 minutes, she tells them to look over their units for the next day and mark the areas they find puzzling so they can pay special attention to them in class - and if they still do not understand they should ask the teacher at the end of the lesson.

'In this way you can learn three times, rather than just sitting in class and learning once,' she said.

Her demanding approach does not seem to have put off the pupils. In the school's Chinese centre - a small room, decorated with Chinese wall hangings, pictures of the Great Wall and the Terracotta Army, and Chinese lamps - Francesca Leiper, 13, said she found Putonghua hard to start with, because having to learn characters added a whole new dimension, but once you had learned a lot of them it got much easier.

A real difference from European languages is the need to learn tones.

'You can say one word four different ways and it will mean four different things - like ma for mother and ma for horse,' she said.

'In Chinese we spend a lot of time on writing and how to say it, whereas French is more about learning new vocab.'

Francesca chose Chinese because she lived in Hong Kong for six months when she was eight and loves Chinese food. But she will have her work cut out to do as well as her mother, who took GCSE Putonghua last year and got an A* grade with a mark of 99 out of 100.

With parents paying secondary tuition fees of up to GBP3,000 (HK$46,000) a term plus another GBP3,000 for boarding, the pressure is on St George's to produce results and it does not tend to disappoint.

On average, about half the upper sixth pupils entered for each advanced-level subject gain a grade A, and 98 per cent of pupils go on to higher education.

But the school has also tried to stay true to its pioneering roots by committing itself to working with all schools in the state and private sector to transform education. Part of that is about tailoring the curriculum to the changing world, including the rise of China.

'The parents are delighted, because they feel learning Chinese and about China will be very useful for their children as they go into the workplace and just for life generally,' Ms McClure said.

But it won't stop with Putonghua. 'When we have conquered Chinese we will move on to Arabic,' she said.