Children dressed in straw boaters, blazers and ties aren't a common sight in Beijing. But at Harrow International School, the distinctive uniform is part of the package when it comes to selling the virtues of an English education to local parents. With a roster of old boys who include the poet Lord Byron and Winston Churchill, Harrow is one of a number of famous British public, or independent, schools, which have established franchises in Asia in recent years.
Harrow already has a branch in Bangkok, where Shrewsbury also has a school. From August 2012 it will have one in Hong Kong, whose historic links with Britain make it a logical choice. It's only since 2005, however, when Harrow and Dulwich College opened in Beijing, that the mainland has had the chance to experience a system of education that has been the preserve of Britain's middle and upper classes for hundreds of years.
While many Western expats have heard of Harrow, the sheer longevity of the school is a big part of its appeal to locals. 'I think the sense of history does to an extent validate the school. It means that parents will trust in an organisation that has been proven over time. You should be able to get something right in 500 years,' says Harrow Beijing's headmaster Matthew Farthing.
But neither Harrow nor Dulwich, which also has branches in Shanghai and Suzhou and has plans to expand to Seoul, are much like their parent institutions in Britain, which are boys-only boarding schools. The Beijing versions are co-ed day schools that take children from the age of three.
'It is the spirit of what the school represents that we've taken and in Harrow's case that is leadership,' says Mark Hensman, the former headmaster of Harrow Bangkok and the man in charge of setting up the new Hong Kong school.
For that reason old boys such as Churchill and Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, are held up as examples to new parents, rather than more recent former pupils such as the singer James Blunt. But the fact that Bo Xilai, the Chinese Communist Party chief of Chongqing, sent his son, Bo Guagua, to Harrow in Britain has done more to boost the image of the Beijing school. As mainland royalty - his grandfather was Bo Yibo, one of the eight immortals of the party - Bo's name means more to locals than the British aristocrats and politicians who have attended Harrow.