Anqing Normal University has spent twenty years guarding a species that most people have never seen: the Yangtze finless porpoise, the river mammal known as the “giant panda of the water.” The university pioneered rescue and breeding techniques for the porpoise and has since carried the work as far as Cambodia, applying its methods to the Irrawaddy dolphin there. Conservation is an unusual specialty for a teachers university, but Anqing has always done things its own way.
Its history reaches back to 1897, when the Jingfu Academy opened as the largest provincial school of Anhui, making this city the birthplace of the province’s higher education. Through the academy’s successors, the provincial Anhui University of 1928 and its national counterpart, the school kept teaching even after the national university moved to Wuhu in 1949. Re-established as Anqing Normal College in 1980 and renamed a university in 2016, it was approved in 2024 as a key doctoral-degree cultivation unit of Anhui.
Culture runs through the campus as strongly as the river runs past it. Anqing is the hometown of Huangmei opera, and the university’s Huangmei opera research institute and its award-winning teacher team have made the school a national base for keeping the art form alive. Its studies of the Tongcheng School of prose, a major literary tradition born nearby, are similarly central: the school founded a Yangtze culture research institute and a leading journal for Tongcheng studies, and has won two national science and technology progress awards for its work on local industries.
Nine national first-class undergraduate programs, fourteen accredited teacher-training programs and one ESI top-1-percent discipline support 25,000 students across two campuses of about 2,800 mu, some 187 hectares. Twelve first-level master’s disciplines and sixteen professional master’s categories extend the reach, taught by a faculty of more than 2,000.
Research rides on 33 provincial-and-ministerial platforms, including a ministry monitoring center for aquatic animal disease in the Yangtze, and the school has completed 786 national and provincial projects in five years. Internationally it works with more than 50 universities abroad, from Malaysia to Germany to Russia, and hosts foreign students and teachers from countries across three continents.
Textbooks, folk opera, river dolphins: Anqing Normal University serves what is close at hand in ways no one else quite matches, having grown from a provincial academy of 1897 to a university that writes, performs and rescues all at once.
Data Source: AQNU Official Website (as of 2026)
