a residential campus constructed on property owned by the High School Affiliated to Nanjing Normal University. This became the first overseas campus for an Australian high school, and the first campus established by a foreign secondary school in China. It is staffed by six full-time Australian teachers, as well as six trainees selected from the school's annual graduating Year 12 class who complete 12-month gap year placements. Most Caulfield Grammar Year 9 students take part in five-week internationalism programs and are based in Nanjing. Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard and then-Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett both sent formal congratulations letters to Caulfield Grammar on the campus' establishment, and Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Alexander Downer witnessed the signing of an agreement to build the campus in 1996; also present were the Mayor of Nanjing, the Principal of the High School Affiliated to Nanjing Normal University, and Caulfield Grammar's principal Stephen Newton. The Governor of Victoria James Gobbo officially opened the campus on 6 May 1998. Caulfield Grammar focuses on Mandarin Chinese as its major Language Other Than English, with the language first offered as a senior school subject in 1963, and later becoming the sole Asian language taught as it had higher student enrolments than Indonesian. It has been taught at every year level across all three campuses since 1994, and the establishment of a campus in Nanjing allowed the school to strengthen its ties with the region. Nanjing was selected as the campus' location in part because Jiangsu province, of which Nanjing is the capital and largest city, is Victoria's sister-state, and Nanjing University had previously established an Australian studies department. When a global outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) occurred in 2003, and had the highest confirmed cases in China, the school postponed all scheduled trips to China in 2003 indefinitely. The group which was in China at the time of the outbreak – March and April 2003 – travelled to Xi'an instead of Beijing to avoid the peak areas of infection, and returned to Australia via Tokyo's International Airport several days before the scheduled departure on the advice of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The remaining groups returned in the second half of 2003 to participate in shortened three-week programmes. On 5 May 2008, Caulfield Grammar celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Nanjing Campus and held two concerts hosted at the High School