The city of Xianyang was the capital of the Qin dynasty, the first imperial capital of a united China, and its name still carries that weight. It was here, in the shadow of the old imperial heartland, that a teachers college was born in 1978 as a branch of Shaanxi Normal University, and it is here that Xianyang Normal University still trains the teachers of the region today.
The school began in May 1978 as the Xianyang Special Training Department of Shaanxi Normal University, became Xianyang Teachers College that December, and in 2001 merged with the Xianyang Education Institute to form Xianyang Normal University. Two further mergers followed, with the Xianyang branch of Shaanxi Radio and TV University in 2004 and with the Shaanxi Electromechanical Engineering School in 2016.
Its subject has stayed constant: teacher education. Of its 55 undergraduate programs, 22 are teacher-training majors, and the university was approved in 2024 as a master’s degree-granting institution with programs in education and cultural relics. More than 18,700 full-time students, including exchange students from abroad, study across the Weicheng and Qindu campuses.
Xianyang’s history is the university’s research ground. Chinese history, with a focus on historical geography, is a provincial advantage discipline, and the university hosts research centers on Shaanxi mausoleum culture and on rural basic education in Shaanxi, alongside study societies for the scholars Wu Mi and Liu Guyu. Its journal, founded in 1986, has won national awards for its column on the culture and history of the Qin and Han dynasties, and it also publishes Research on the Qin and Han Dynasties.
The faculty of over 1,200 includes more than 400 with senior professional titles, and the library holds 2.17 million printed volumes. Internationally, the university has ties with over 100 universities and research institutions in 27 countries, and over 1,000 students and teachers have studied, taught or volunteered abroad, from teaching Chinese in the Philippines and Thailand to exchange programs in South Korea and the United States.
Over 110,000 graduates have left the school over four decades, most of them heading back into classrooms. In a city where the first emperor of China once ruled, this university trains the people who teach the next generation of the country.
Data Source: XNU Official Website (as of 2026)
