Anhui University of Arts is the province’s only public undergraduate arts university, and the eighth comprehensive arts college to be set up independently in China. Its history runs through three lives: an arts college founded in 1959, a period from 2013 as a college of Anhui University, and, since 2019, an independent school once again carrying the province’s name.
It was confirmed as a bachelor’s-degree awarding institution in 2022. The school is co-built by the province’s government with central cultural bodies, and it belongs to both the national higher drama education league and the China-ASEAN arts universities alliance. Its campus sits in Hefei, and its curriculum is anchored in the arts, reaching out toward the cultural and media industries.
Eight colleges and ten teaching and research units offer 17 undergraduate programs, led by a national first-class program in broadcasting and hosting, a provincial first-class discipline in music and dance, and four more provincial first-class programs in acting, music performance and painting. Two national first-class courses and 74 course-level projects support the teaching side, including a performance major with a specialty track in Huangmei opera.
Its identity is written in its region’s arts: it builds specialties around Huangmei opera, the Huagudeng dance and Xin’an painting, along with Anhui music and its intangible heritage. A branch of the national Huizhou studies research center sits on campus, as does a provincial key laboratory for archaeometry and heritage conservation built jointly with the University of Science and Technology of China; 12 national arts fund projects and 323 provincial-and-ministerial projects have been funded.
A faculty of 332, 36 percent with senior titles and 96 percent with master’s or doctoral degrees, includes specialists in the province’s opera and painting traditions. The school works with leading arts universities across the country and with partners in Russia, Italy and the United States, and it won approval in 2025 to enroll international students.
Small by design, Anhui University of Arts teaches the arts of its province to the next generation and lets the rest of the world in to watch, six decades into one idea: that a province famous for its opera, its painting and its crafts should have a school where those traditions are taught as living arts, not museum pieces. Reborn in 2019, it first opened as an arts college in 1959.
Data Source: AHUA Official Website (as of 2025)
