Unlikely as it sounds, the serious study of Zhu Xi has a home in a modest teachers college: Shangrao Normal College publishes a CSSCI-listed journal of Zhu Xi studies, keeping alive the scholarship on the Southern Song Neo-Confucian master whose ideas shaped Chinese education for centuries. The school that does this sits in Shangrao, a city that was a gateway between the provinces for a thousand years.
The college was founded in 1958 as a normal junior college, briefly carried the name Gannan-dong University in 1959, was reestablished after the Cultural Revolution in 1977, and was elevated to undergraduate status in 2000. In 2024 it won a master’s degree granting institution approval and passed the education ministry’s teaching evaluation. Two campuses in Shangrao cover 1,600 mu, about 107 hectares, serving 16,051 students.
Forty-one undergraduate programs include two national characteristic programs in chemistry and mathematics, and seven provincial first-class programs that run from physics education to educational technology and a calligraphy program, a specialty rare among Chinese teacher-training colleges. Three professional master’s programs, in education, electronic information and sports, have just opened, and 91 percent of the full-time faculty hold doctorates or master’s degrees.
Zhu Xi studies anchor the research culture, with the journal indexed in the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index for three years running, supported by 19 provincial research platforms and a campus museum devoted to the revolutionary martyr Fang Zhimin and to Zhu Xi culture. Students have collected nearly 4,000 provincial and national competition awards in five years, and faculty have led 538 national and provincial research projects in the same period.
Abroad, the college cooperates with 15 universities in countries from the United States to Russia and Indonesia, opened a Chinese language teaching center and a culture and tourism exchange center at Mataram University in Indonesia, enrolled its first batch of 105 international students in 2025, and launched its first ministry-approved Sino-foreign program, in biology and music, with Saratov State University of Russia.
A college that keeps company with Zhu Xi and trains the teachers of Jiangxi’s classrooms: Shangrao Normal has built its reputation the quiet way, one monograph and one graduate at a time, and its newest step, the master’s degree, suggests the quiet way is working.
Data Source: SRU Official Website (as of 2026)
