China’s first acupuncture hospital is attached to Anhui University of Chinese Medicine: its second affiliated hospital is the country’s first grade-A tertiary acupuncture hospital and, by scale, its largest. Acupuncture also travels well abroad, and the university maintains four overseas traditional-medicine centers and a training base for acupuncture and massage in other countries.
The school’s own history tracks the revival of traditional medicine: it began in 1952 as a provincial training class for Chinese medicine, became the Anhui College of Chinese Medicine in 1959, took university status in 2013, and in 2023 entered the province’s key list for double first-class development. A provincial academy of traditional Chinese medicine sciences, formed in 2011, operates alongside it.
Two disciplines sit in the ESI top 1 percent, and six undergraduate programs hold national first-class status. Three first-level doctoral disciplines, eight first-level master’s disciplines and three postdoctoral stations support 22,000 students, including 331 doctoral candidates. Among the faculty are two national TCM masters and four nationally recognized practitioners.
Clinical strength runs from the ancient to the modern: in 2023 the university won the province’s first national regional TCM center, built with Shanghai’s Shuguang Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Its first affiliated hospital is the largest grade-A tertiary TCM hospital in Anhui, and its network extends to nine national key clinical specialties and 23 nationally recognized TCM specialties. Twenty-eight provincial-and-ministerial platforms and 62 industry-academia bases anchor the research side.
Some 5,041 faculty and medical staff work across four campuses in Hefei. Internationally, the university cooperates with 40-plus medical and educational institutions in over 20 countries, hosts students from more than 20 countries, and runs a joint laboratory for traditional medicine quality standards. From a training class in 1952 to a university whose needles are known on four continents, Anhui University of Chinese Medicine has spent seven decades proving that an old medicine can keep learning.
Data Source: AHTCM Official Website (as of 2026)
