Canadian teacher Isabel Crook marks 100th birthday

As one of the first foreign teachers at a Chinese university and a witness to China's transformation from war to peace, Canadian Isabel Crook celebrated her 100th birthday on Thursday.

Together with her family, former students and old friends from the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs, Crook commemorated the landmark at Beijing Foreign Studies University.

For her students, Crook is a role model who devoted most of her life to English education in China.

"She is the best English teacher I have ever seen," former student Tang Wensheng said. "She would spend hours preparing and doing research before coming to class and there was always something we could learn from her."

Born in Chengdu, Sichuan province in 1915 to a Canadian missionary family, Crook spent half her youth in China.

In 1939, after six years' study at the University of Toronto, she returned to China with a double degree in Art and Psychology. She then started her research on anthropology in Sichuan province.

The book Prosperity's Predicament: Identity, Reform, and Resistance in Rural Wartime China was based on her work from 1940 to 1941 in a small village in Sichuan province.

She met her late husband, David Crook, who was an active communist, in China and influenced by him, joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1942.

Since the establishment of the People's Republic of China, she and her husband taught at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, then named the Beijing Foreign Languages Institute, the leading foreign language university in China and known as the "cradle of diplomats". She retired in 1980.

For her and her late husband's contribution to the victory in the Chinese People's War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and World Anti-Fascist War, Crook received a commemorative medal from Zhang Jianguo, director of the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs, in early September.