Handan is known as the home of tai chi and the capital of Chinese idioms, and its university keeps both traditions alive. Handan University’s journal hosts a Zhao culture studies section, named by the Ministry of Education as one of the country’s model academic columns, and the school itself holds a ministry-designated heritage base for Chinese traditional culture, one of the first of its kind in the country.
It began in 1905 as a county normal school, became a teachers college in 1982, and was elevated to its present form in 2004. It was named a master’s-degree cultivation unit in 2016. In 2024 and 2025 it added affiliated primary and senior high schools in the city’s development zone, completing a chain of education from primary school to university under one management.
Forty-eight undergraduate programs across 21 colleges span ten fields of study, with one national first-class program and eleven rated first-class at provincial level, supported by a postdoctoral workstation. Twelve of its teacher-training programs have passed national second-level accreditation, and thirteen are covered by the direct teacher-certification reform. More than 16,700 full-time students study on a campus of 1,193 mu, about 80 hectares.
The faculty of 1,314 includes 356 professors and associate professors. Research runs on 29 provincial and municipal platforms, and the university has secured 40 national projects, including funds from the national social-science, natural-science and arts foundations. Its journal’s Zhao culture section, which studies the ancient state of Zhao that gave Handan its idioms, was listed among the first key columns selected by the central publicity department in 2023.
Since 2023 the university has trained 320 government-funded students for the city’s schools, and it runs two Sino-foreign programs, in environmental engineering with a Polish university of ecology and management and in chemical engineering with a Malaysian university. Its graduates have won 1,795 national and provincial awards in academic competitions.
Educating the people of this city of idioms, one generation at a time: that one thing has occupied Handan University for more than a century, from a county normal school of 1905 to a university that runs schools of its own, researches the culture of the ancient state of Zhao and trains tai chi’s hometown teachers.
Data Source: HDC Official Website (as of 2025)
