Sun Simiao, the Tang-dynasty physician remembered in Chinese medicine as the King of Medicine, practiced in the mountains of Shaanxi, and the province’s modern medical school inherits his shadow. Shaanxi University of Chinese Medicine began in 1952 as a training school for TCM doctors in Xi’an, moved to the ancient capital of Xianyang in 1961, and in 1978 was named one of the eight key TCM universities in China, a rank it still holds.
The school’s climb has been steady: master’s rights in 1981, university status in 2015, and in 2024 it became a doctoral degree-granting institution, joining a national consortium of TCM graduate schools. Four national masters of Chinese medicine, the highest honor in the field, have taught within its walls, part of a faculty of 1,268 full-time teachers supported by 1,153 postgraduate supervisors.
About 17,000 students study across two campuses that cover about 86 hectares, in the Xi’an-Xianyang new area, with 2,600 postgraduates among them. The academic core is TCM with a modern surround: one doctoral program in traditional Chinese medicine, five first-level master’s programs and nine professional master’s categories, with clinical medicine and pharmacology among the disciplines in the ESI global top 1 percent.
Research follows the medicine into the lab: a national center for TCM innovation leads more than 100 platforms, and the university has carried out over 1,000 national and provincial projects in five years, winning a national science and technology progress second prize. It also led the province’s complete survey of traditional medicine resources and helped choose 45 regional herbal brands, work that ties the school to Shaanxi’s Qinling mountains.
Its reach is measured in doctors: 130,000 graduates and counting, including 75 percent of Shaanxi’s leading TCM physicians and most of the staff of the province’s TCM hospitals and pharmaceutical companies. The university operates two affiliated hospitals and runs programs for international students from 19 countries, with TCM centers abroad from Russia to Zambia.
A 2,000-year-old medicine is kept alive by the doctors this university trains, one prescription at a time, in the mountains where Sun Simiao once worked. The school has moved from the Qinling foothills to a research campus since its founding seventy years ago, but the medicine it teaches still begins where the Tang-dynasty physician practiced.
Data Source: SUCM Official Website (as of 2026)
