One of China’s six earliest sports universities owes its location to a marshal. Xi’an Physical Education University was founded in 1954 as the Northwest Institute of Physical Education, its site personally chosen by Marshal He Long, and renamed with its present name two years later. It began under the national sports commission, moved to joint central-provincial management in 2001, and today is co-built by the General Administration of Sport and the Shaanxi government.
The university long trained athletes in its original Hanguang campus in central Xi’an. In October 2024 the main body of the school moved west to a new campus in Huyi district, and the university now operates across two sites covering about 731,400 square meters, roughly 73 hectares. About 8,100 undergraduates and 1,300 postgraduates study in its 21 undergraduate programs and ten second-level master’s programs, with sport science a Shaanxi first-class discipline.
Three of its programs, physical education, sports training and sports economics and management, are national first-class programs, and six courses have been named national first-class courses. The university trains doctoral candidates jointly with Shanghai University of Sport, and its faculty of nearly 800 includes winners of national talent programs.
What sets the school apart is its national teams. It hosts the China Race Walking School, built with the track and field management center of the General Administration of Sport, the China Boules School with the ball sports center, and a football school with the Chinese Football Association. Its Huyi campus served as a major venue of the 14th National Games, with an indoor handball hall and outdoor fields for hockey, baseball, softball and rugby built to international competition standards.
Research follows sport: the university runs 15 provincial and ministerial research platforms, including a key laboratory of the General Administration of Sport for sports technique analysis and a key research base for sports social science, with additional centers for sports-medicine integration and sports law.
Since 1954 the school has produced more than 70,000 coaches, teachers, athletes and sports managers, and its library is the largest collection of sports literature in northwest China. From a campus chosen by a marshal to a national base for race walking and boules, it remains what it was built to be: a factory for Chinese sport.
Data Source: XAIPE Official Website (as of 2026)
