Pingju opera was born in Tangshan, and the city’s university keeps it alive. Tangshan Normal University hosts one of the Ministry of Education’s designated heritage bases for Chinese culture, dedicated to this local opera form, in a city better known for steel and ceramics. Culture and industry, teaching and making: the university carries both traditions.
It began in 1956 as an accelerated normal college, was rebuilt as an undergraduate university in 2000, and in 2024 won the right to grant master’s degrees. Long known as the cradle of teachers for eastern Hebei, it was among the first universities selected for the ministry’s program to strengthen teacher education.
Fifty-two undergraduate programs span ten fields of study, with 17 teacher-training programs covering everything from preschool to special education; 15 of them allow graduates to obtain teacher certification directly. Thirteen programs are rated first-class at provincial level. More than 18,000 students, over 9,000 of them training to be teachers, study across three campuses totaling about 79 hectares.
Its faculty of 1,082 full-time teachers supports research in two provincial key laboratories, one for plant biotechnology and one for degradable polymers, and the university has built Tangshan’s first applied ocean college, supplying marine-science talent to the city’s coastal industries.
The university has also made itself a home for future rural teachers: since 2019 it has enrolled 1,906 government-funded teacher-education students, among the most of any university in the province. Abroad, it has credit-recognition agreements with 41 universities in six countries, and it jointly trains undergraduates with Southwest Jiaotong University under a cooperation framework.
Answering the need that created it, Tangshan Normal University still sends out teachers for the east of Hebei, and now the scientists and engineers beside them, a job that has grown from a 1956 normal college into a master’s-granting university with an opera heritage base and an ocean college.
Data Source: TSTC Official Website (as of 2025)
