Anhui’s first medical university did not begin in Anhui. Anhui Medical University was founded in Shanghai in 1926 as the private Southeast Medical University, and in 1949 the school moved inland to Huaiyuan, becoming the first higher medical institution in the province before settling in Hefei in 1952. Its motto, inscribed by the educator Cai Yuanpei, still governs the school: “Learning and practicing, training competent doctors.”
The university, renamed in 1985 and now co-built by the Ministry of Education, the National Health Commission and the provincial government, has trained more than 200,000 medical graduates over a century. Among its alumni are members of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and the French National Academy of Medicine.
Twelve disciplines sit in the ESI top 1 percent, with clinical medicine and pharmacology and toxicology reaching the top 1 per mille, a first for any university in Anhui. Four first-level doctoral disciplines, four postdoctoral stations and 44 undergraduate programs, 12 of them national first-class, support a student body of 28,700.
Research has earned a national second prize in natural science, two national second prizes in science and technology progress, and places in China’s top ten scientific advances of 2010 and 2014. National natural-science funding has exceeded 100 projects a year for six straight years, the most of any Anhui university, and in 2022 the school published four papers in Cell, Nature and Science. Its 61 provincial-and-ministerial platforms include a provincial laboratory and three ministry key laboratories.
Its campus network is among the country’s most spread out: eight sites covering 4,165 mu, about 278 hectares, one of China’s largest medical campuses by area. Five directly affiliated hospitals, nine more affiliated hospitals and four disease-control centers serve a faculty and medical staff of nearly 20,000.
Train good doctors, and follow the health needs of the people around them. That direction, set in 1926, has carried Anhui Medical University from a private school in Shanghai to the medical center of a province.
Data Source: AHMU Official Website (as of 2026)
