History
The University grew out of the Faculty of Education, Imperial Capital University that was established in 1902 on the initiative of the emperor of Qing Dynasty after the Hundred Days Reform in 1898. In 1908 the Faculty of Education was named as the Imperial Capital School of Supreme Teacher Training, and was separated from the Imperial Capital University which then developed to Peking University, another prestigious university in China.
After Republic of China was established, the Imperial Capital School of Supreme Teacher Training was named as Peking Normal College in 1912. The college had its first graduate programs in 1920 and began to recruit female students in 1921. In the year 1923 it was named as Peking Normal University, and became the first normal university in Chinese modern history. The Peking Women’s College of Education merged into Peking Normal University in 1931.
When the communists established People's Republic of China in 1949, the capital of Peking was renamed Beijing and the university was therefore renamed as Beijing Normal University. During a national initiative of university rearrangement in 1952, Fu Jen Catholic University merged with Beijing Normal University. In 1954, it moved from He Ping Men to the newly established campus at Bei Tai Ping Zhuang and remains there since.
Historically, students at Beijing Normal University played a significant role in patriotic and democratic movements, particularly in the May Fourth Movement in 1919 and the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. In a New York Times article, it was described as "one of the most progressive institutions" in China.
Read more about this topic: Beijing Normal University
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“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)