The writer Jia Pingwa, one of China’s best-known novelists, was born in Shangluo, and the university that carries the city’s name makes a point of its address: a campus in the southern foothills of the Qinling Mountains, where the cultures of Qin and Chu once met. Shangluo University is a provincial undergraduate institution whose identity is bound to the mountains around it, from mineral science to mountain ecology.
The school began modestly in 1976 as a teachers college for the Shangluo region, passed through several names, merged with the Shangluo Agricultural School in 2005, and in 2006 was approved as an undergraduate university. In 2024 it was granted master’s degree rights, with master’s programs in education and engineering.
Twelve schools now offer 41 undergraduate programs to over 12,000 students, drawn from 29 provinces and regions. Three national and 11 provincial first-class programs anchor the curriculum, and the university has built four provincial experimental teaching demonstration centers and more than 360 off-campus training bases.
Research follows the mountains. The university runs institutes for Qinling ecology and environment, Qinling biological resources, and a field of study it calls Qinling studies, alongside 18 provincial research platforms and a provincial concept verification center. Academicians and leading scholars serve on its faculty, including a scientist of environmental change from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the writer Jia Pingwa himself holds an honorary professorship.
The faculty of about 900 includes more than 40 winners of provincial talent programs, and the university has won national teaching honors including a national model teacher award. Students have taken over 2,200 provincial and national prizes in competitions, and the school has carried out over 590 research projects serving local industry and society.
Internationally, Shangluo University works with over 50 universities in a dozen countries, runs an undergraduate electrical engineering program with an American university, and has joined the Han River Basin University Alliance with ten universities across three provinces. It has trained over 60,000 graduates since its founding, most of them working in education, agriculture and local government across southern Shaanxi.
The mountains that gave China one of its great novelists also gave the university its purpose. Shangluo University still trains engineers, teachers and scientists for the Qinling foothills, and the master’s degrees of 2024 are only the latest chapter in a half-century of service to the region that raised it.
Data Source: Shangluo University Official Website (as of 2026)
