Yunnan University - History

History

Yunnan University was founded in December 1922 by General Tang Jiyao, the warlord who controlled Yunnan province in the 1920s. The University began to enroll students on April 20, 1923. It started as the privately run "Dong Lu University" (Dong Lu means "Eastern Road" or "Eastern Land"). The name has changed six times in the past 80 years, but the present name dates from 1934. It is known locally as "Yunda". Following typical abbreviations for Chinese universities, "Yun" is an abbreviation of "Yunnan" and "da" is an abbreviation of daxue, the Chinese word for "university".

Yunnan University became famous during World War II. Since Kunming was not directly involved in the fighting, a great many excellent Chinese scholars, in particular from Beijing and Nanjing, many of these with PhDs from well-known American universities, retreated from the northern war zone. Most of them taught at a newly-created National Southwestern Associated University (also called "Lianda"). Several of them, however, for various reasons, ended up teaching at Yunnan University. There they found a distinct French influence. The president of Yunnan University had a PhD from the Sorbonne. The university also had an active language training program in French, which has continued to this day.

From 1937 through to 1947, the noted mathematician Professor Xiong Qinglai was invited to become the President of Yunnan University, under whose leadership Yunnan University was restructured along the same academic model as Tsinghua University. A cluster of famous scholars, such as Fei Xiaotong, Chu Tunan, Chen Xingshen, Hua Luogen, Yan Jici, Feng Youlan, Lü Shuxiang came to teach at Yunnan University, and thus gradually turned the institution into a general university that had exerted a certain degree of academic influence at home and abroad. In 1946, Yunnan University had five faculties and 18 academic departments, and was included in the Concise Encyclopædia Britannica as one of the fifteen most prestigious universities in China.

During the early 1950s, the government began reforming the Chinese education system which had affected every university. Most departments were weeded out, and by 1958, there were only two faculties and six academic departments left in Yunnan University. Again like all other Chinese universities, Yunnan experienced a difficult period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s due to events such as the Cultural Revolution. However, the situation improved remarkably thereafter when the reform era began in the late 1970s.