Anhui’s oldest institution of higher learning sits in Wuhu and guards a book from the Ming dynasty. Anhui Normal University, heir to the provincial Anhui University founded in 1928, owns a library named a national key ancient-book protection unit, whose holdings include the only complete copy in China of the Hongwu zhengyun, a rhyme dictionary compiled in the early Ming era. The university also publishes a journal of Chinese poetry studies.
The school was created in Anqing in 1928, became National Anhui University in 1946, and moved as a complete institution to Wuhu in 1949. It passed through several names, including spells as Anhui Teachers College and a teachers university, before being formally named Anhui Normal University in 1972. The Wuhu Normal College merged into it in 2005.
Scholarship has long gathered here: among the famous names who taught in its early decades were the writer Yu Dafu and the aesthetician Zhu Guangqian. The university has produced 300,000 graduates, among them five academicians and 53 recipients of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars. Twelve first-level doctoral disciplines, 30 master’s disciplines and 89 undergraduate programs, 34 of them national first-class, serve a student body of 51,000.
Six disciplines sit in the ESI top 1 percent. The faculty of 2,777 includes two appointed academicians, nine recipients of the distinguished-young-scholar fund and seven Changjiang scholars. The campus of about 202 hectares holds a university press and a library of nearly three million printed volumes, including 195,600 ancient books.
Teaching travels well beyond the classroom: the university is a national base for Chinese-language education, a host for government-scholarship international students since the earliest years, and has received more than 5,000 international students from over 60 countries. Its Confucius Institute with Charles Darwin University in Australia and a Confucius Classroom in Ukraine carry the school’s name abroad.
A century of quiet work has turned Anhui Normal University, heir to the provincial university of 1928, into the keeper of Ming-era rhyme books and a teacher of teachers for a province: it reads, writes and teaches, quietly.
Data Source: AHNU Official Website
