Yuan Longping, the agronomist known as the father of hybrid rice, served for years as honorary president of Hunan Agricultural University, and the university’s own story runs just as deep into the soil. Its roots reach back to the Xiuye Academy founded in 1903, which makes HUNAU one of China’s older agricultural universities, a school that grows what the country eats.
Mao Zedong once taught at the Xiuye Academy in its early years. The academy became a provincial agricultural and forestry college in 1950, merged with the agricultural college of Hunan University in 1951 to form the Hunan Agricultural College, and took its present name in 1994. Today it is co-built by the agriculture ministry and the Hunan government, and ranks among the province’s A-class domestic first-class construction universities.
Twenty-five colleges and schools cover ten fields, with 78 undergraduate programs, 21 of them national first-class. Plant and animal science and agricultural science both sit in the ESI top 1 per mille, and eight disciplines in all reach the global top 1 percent. Twelve first-level doctoral disciplines and eleven postdoctoral stations support a body of 35,098 undergraduates and 8,625 postgraduates, taught by 2,587 faculty including five academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.
Research centers on the national pantry: a state engineering research center for plant functional ingredients, a national rice engineering research center in Changsha, and nine more national platforms, plus 95 provincial-and-ministerial ones. Over the past decade the school has won ten national science and technology awards, registered more than 300 new varieties, and seen its rice, oilseed, tea and vegetable varieties spread across the country, with brands such as Ningxiang pig, Zhangshugang chili and Anhua dark tea known far beyond Hunan.
International ties link the university to some 130 universities and institutions in over 40 countries, with programs at the University of British Columbia, the University of Hawaii, Greenwich University and Kagoshima University among them. HUNAU was among the first Chinese universities to pass the national quality certification for international students, and it runs the province’s first Sino-foreign undergraduate program and its first rural-revitalization talent project under the national scholarship council.
What does a century-old agricultural university do? One thing, mostly: turn seed into harvest, and harvest into knowledge. The school that began as the Xiuye Academy in 1903 went on to feed the hybrid-rice revolution, and under a motto of sincerity, sedulity, practicality and creativity, it remains a school of the land, for the land.
Data Source: HUNAU Official Website (as of 2026)
