Yunnan University
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Yunnan University is a prestigious university in China. Its main campuses are in urban Kunming city, Yunnan province.
Yunnan University was founded in December 1922 by General Tang Jiyao, the warlord who dominated Yunnan province in the 1920s. The University started to enroll students on April 20th 1923. It started as the privately run "Dong Lu University" ("Dong Lu" means "East Road” or “East 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 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 Nanking, many of these with Ph.D.s from well-known American universities, retreated from the northern war zone (it was as if scholars from Boston and New York retreated to Phoenix). Most of them taught at a newly-created Southwest Associated Universities. Several of them, however, for various reasons, ended up teaching at Yunda. There they found a distinct French influence. The president of Yunnan University had a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne. The university also had an active language-training program in French, which continues to this day.
Contents |
[edit] Over the Years
In 1946, there were five faculties and 18 academic departments at the university. In the 1946 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Yunda was included in the top fifteen universities in China.
The government of the Communist Party of China reformed Chinese education in the 1950s, which involved Yunnan University. Most departments were weeded out. In 1958, there were only two faculties and six academic departments left in the university.
Like all other Chinese universities, Yunda experienced a difficult period in 1970s. In the 1980s, however, it began to develop quickly.
From 1937 through 1947, the noted mathematician Professor Xiong Qinglai was President of Yunnan University and developed it following the academic model of Qinghua University. A galaxy of famous scholars such as Fei Xiaotong, Chu Tunan, Chen Xingshen, Hua Luogen, Yan Jici, Feng Youlan, Lu Shuxiang came to teach at the university, gradually turning Yunda into a general university that has exerted a certain degree of academic influence at home and abroad.
In 1946, Yunnan University was put into the world-known Concise Encyclopedia Britannia as one of the fifteen internationally prestigious universities in China.
[edit] Location
Yunnan University is located in the provincial capital of Yunnan, noted for its year-round salubrious climate. Its main campus faces Green Lake Park, a winter haunt for Black-headed Gulls from Siberia and a popular tourist destination, and next to Yuantong Hill. The campus is covered by ginkgo and Chinese plum trees under which are the classroom buildings, main library, and laboratories buildings.
[edit] Curriculum
The university has a complete curriculum of courses in the liberal arts, science, technology, economics, law, and management. There are about 20,000 students. Half are full-time undergraduate students, 3000 are graduate students (“postgraduate” students in British English, still used locally, due to America’s quarter-century failure to recognize [[Red China)] and consequent absence from the scene, but rapidly being displaced), and 7000 are students in night and correspondence classes.
[edit] Faculty
Faculty consists of over 2000, about 200 of which are full professors and 400 associate professors.
[edit] Campuses and Schools
Yunnan University currently has the following schools: School of Economics, School of Adult Education, School of Humanities and Liberal Arts, School of Life Science and Chemistry, School of Information, School of Science, Institute for Development Research, School of Occupational Technology, School of Law, School of Public Management, School of Business Administration and Tourism Management, School of Foreign Languages, International College of Modern Design Arts, School of Medicine, School of International Relations, School of International Cultures, School at Lake Dian, School of Tourism Culture at Lijiang, and School of Software Engineering.
There are more than thirty teaching departments and divisions that offer sixty-five major fields of study. Additionally, Yunnan University has sixteen centers for research and development, twenty-five research institutes, ten research offices, and four teaching-oriented service centers.
The university also has a high school, a high school of foreign language, and a kindergarten attached to it.
In recent years, the university has developed a second main campus, much larger than its old campus at Green Lake, for undergraduate study in an outlying part of the city. The Green Lake campus is being retained for graduate study, but all undergraduates have now been moved out to the new campus. Cousteau Ecotechnie Chair]], currently held by Professor Ou Xiaokun.
[edit] Library and Herbarium
The library houses a collection of over 1.2 millions books, some of which are rare copies of valuable historical literature.
The university has a sizable herbarium, believed to be second in the province only to the Kunming Institute of Botany. The herbarium specializes in the Pteridophytes of China, especially those of southwestern China. It has for many years been directed by Chu Weiming.
[edit] Stock Market
On April 27th, 1998, Yunnan University Science and Technology Corporation shares were issued on the stock markets in China. Yunnan University became the eighth among more than 1,000 higher education institutes in China that own share-issuing hi-tech companies. Science and Technology Corporation, starting from a research group that had only a fund of more than 10,000 RMB, has developed into a share-issuing corporation with a total property in excess of ten billion RMB. Biological Technology Corporation of Yunnan University is the first enterprise in China that owns an independent intellectual property right in the field of single clone antibody research, and its products of contraceptive test paper, eugenic test paper, and sterility test paper have been adopted for codifying China’s national standards.
[edit] Publishing House
Yunnan University has a publishing house which has produced over two million volumes of various academic works. Yunnan University’s academic periodical Ideological Frontier (Social Science Version) has obtained the status of “Kernel National Periodicals”, and the Academic Journal of Yunnan University (Natural Science Division) has been judged an excellent academic journal of the key national universities.
Yunda has from the very beginning attached great importance to the pursuit of scientific research, closely following the international frontier disciplines. It is, for example, a leader in ecology. Its Institute of Ecology and Geobotany has produced nationally-utilized texts on plant community classification and plant ecology. (“Geobotany” is a term from Russian and European science which entails classifying and analyzing the geographical distribution of the flora of a province or nation); it is called ‘’Phytogeography" in the US). The Institute is the home of the [[UNESCO
In recent years, Yunda has established different levels of exchange relations with more than 50 institutions of higher learning and research organizations in more than twenty countries and regions such as United States, Great Britain, Russia, Japan, Australia, etc It has sent out more than 200 persons on academic exchanges and cooperative research abroad and has successfully sponsored more than ten international academic conferences.
China has a system of centrally-designated “key” universities for the purpose of resource allocation. Yunnan University has been designated a “key” university. It is also among sixty-one “211 Project” universities in China authorized by the central government to be specially developed.
