A teacher-training university is not the obvious home of China’s top arts prizes. Yet Henan Normal University in Xinxiang is the only university in the country to hold all three of China’s top arts awards at once, from music’s Golden Bell Award to the national Lotus Award for dance, and the surprises do not stop there.
The roots run deep. The science department of Zhongzhou University, predecessor of National Henan University, began teaching in 1923, and the Pingyuan Normal College followed in 1951, the two strands passing through successive renamings to become Henan Normal University in 1985. The campus holds the world’s only Pavarotti music and arts center, a gift of the tenor’s family that now trains young voices, and Henan’s largest biological resource museum, a working collection that backs the university’s science teaching.
Academically the university is broad rather than specialist. Seven ESI top-1-percent disciplines back the research side, and the university runs 13 first-level doctoral programs, 34 national first-class undergraduate programs and 66 provincial-or-higher research platforms across 79 undergraduate majors. Chemistry leads the science side, and the clinical payoff has been direct: China’s first oral drug for COVID-19, azvudine, was developed in its laboratories and approved for market.
The student record is unusually varied. More than 50,000 students study across the campus, taught by over 3,300 staff, and the student body has produced an Olympic bronze medal in taekwondo and a world championship title alongside its arts prizes. Graduates number 300,000-plus, including two academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the physical chemist Zhang Tongyi and the chemical engineer Zhang Suojiang.
Partnerships reach some 100 universities in nearly 30 countries, anchored by a Sino-French institute and Confucius classrooms in Pakistan and Thailand. A century on from its founding, the university still trains the teachers of Henan, even as its students win arts awards, Olympic medals and approvals for new medicines, guided by a motto, “Cultivate Virtue and Extensive Learning, Aiming for the Highest Good,” that suits a school keeping faith with both its past and its ambitions.
Data Source: HNU Official Website (as of 2026)
