In 1912 a weaving program opened inside an industrial school in Beijing, and a century later its descendant teaches in Xi’an. Xi’an Polytechnic University is the only public university in western China built around textiles and fashion, a lineage that runs from the weaving engineering department of Beiyang Polytechnic University through the textile engineering department of Northwestern Engineering Institute to an independent institution founded in 1978 as the Northwest Textile Engineering Institute.
Textiles never left the building. The school was renamed in 2006, moved its main campus to Lintong, and won doctoral status in 2021, completing a bachelor-to-doctoral ladder that now defines it: textile science and engineering is the flagship, with design, control engineering, mechanical engineering and business management close behind.
Two campuses cover about 80 hectares, with more than 20,000 students, including about 4,800 postgraduates. One first-level doctoral program and 17 first-level master’s programs anchor the graduate side, and three fields, engineering, materials science and chemistry, rank in the ESI global top 1 percent. Eleven national first-class programs sit among 48 undergraduate majors.
Research pushes fabric to its limits: three national-level platforms, an education-ministry key laboratory for functional textile materials, and 21 provincial-level bases support work in intelligent wearables, flexible electronics and high-performance composites. The school has won a national science and technology progress first prize and two second prizes, and its journals on textile science are indexed by major international databases.
The faculty includes national talent program winners, and the university’s ties reach 80-plus institutions in 20-plus countries, with joint programs in Britain and Hong Kong. Its graduates include a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and winners of the national fashion industry’s top design honor, the Golden Top award, fitting markers for a school whose subject is what people wear.
What people wear changes every season, but the craft taught in that 1912 weaving classroom has never gone out of style, and neither has the university that grew up around it. A doctoral-granting school of textiles and design today, it has spent more than a century teaching one craft: making the people who make what we wear.
Data Source: XPU Official Website (as of 2026)
