Hebei Medical University began as China’s first government-established Western medical school, founded in 1894 in Tianjin by Li Hongzhang, the Qing governor-general of Zhili. More than 130 years later it is still teaching medicine, and the school that opened with Western anatomy textbooks now runs five hospitals and trains the doctors of an entire province.
It was renamed several times as it moved through Chinese history: it became Zhili Public Medical College after the 1911 revolution, moved from Tianjin to Baoding in 1915, closed during the war years and reopened in 1946, took the name Hebei Medical College in 1949, and settled in Shijiazhuang in 1958. In 1995 it merged with the provincial college of Chinese medicine and a junior medical college to form Hebei Medical University; the Chinese medicine college regained its independence in 2013.
Twenty colleges today offer 29 undergraduate programs, 15 of them rated national first-class, with seven first-level doctoral programs, nine first-level master’s programs and six postdoctoral stations. Six disciplines sit in the ESI global top 1 percent, and clinical medicine ranks in the top 1.4 per thousand. About 19,300 full-time students, more than 6,800 of them postgraduates, study at two campuses.
Its medical staff, counting its hospitals, numbers nearly 19,000, including five academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and two grand masters of Chinese medicine. Research rests on a national key discipline, a ministry key laboratory, a province-ministry key laboratory and a national key laboratory built with industry, alongside 32 national key clinical specialties.
Five directly affiliated hospitals, four of them top-grade comprehensive hospitals, open about 12,884 beds to patients, making the university the medical center of Hebei. Beyond the bedside, 151 practice bases train its undergraduates, and it cooperates with 36 medical schools and research institutes in 14 countries and regions.
The school that Li Hongzhang founded before the twentieth century has held to its motto, “Benevolence, Erudition, Integrity, and Flexibility,” for 131 years. From a single medical school in Tianjin to a university with five hospitals in Shijiazhuang, it has kept one job: training the physicians Hebei needs.
Data Source: HMU Official Website (as of 2025)
