Yuzhang Normal College carries the name of an old name for Nanchang, and a modern mission written by two very different hands: one, the pioneer of Chinese preschool education, Chen Heqin, who founded one of its predecessor schools in 1940; the other, the province’s center for special education, which the college now hosts. Preschool and special education, the two most demanding corners of teaching, are where this school does its signature work.
The college is a living slice of Chinese teacher-training history: its roots reach back to a girls’ normal school of 1908 and a provincial normal school of 1914, its predecessor schools merged in 1947 and 1949, and after decades as Nanchang Normal College and a junior college it took its present name in 2017, when the ministry of education approved its elevation to an undergraduate college. It passed the ministry’s teaching evaluation in 2025.
Thirty-four undergraduate programs span seven fields, with three provincial first-class programs in primary education, special education and preschool education leading the way, and five national first-class courses including one on preschool education theory. The campus of more than 1,200 mu, about 80 hectares, serves a school that the Nanchang city government has put at the top of its list of priority universities.
Its alumni list reads like a gallery of modern Chinese culture: the painter Fu Baoshi, the vocal educator Yu Yixuan, the mathematician Zeng Jiong and Liu Hezhen, honored in her day as a true warrior by Lu Xun. In more than a century the school has trained nearly 200,000 graduates, most of them teachers.
Special education gives the college its distinctive edge: it hosts the province’s special education resource center and runs a rehabilitation center for children with special needs, and its research platforms have produced 13 national science and social science fund projects since 2017. Abroad, it runs a music program with Myongji University of South Korea, a credit-transfer scheme with the University of Chester of Britain, and exchanges in special education with a university in Taiwan.
Since 1908, when a girls’ normal school first opened in Nanchang, Yuzhang Normal College has stood on the same front line: training the teachers of Jiangxi, from the loudest classrooms to the quietest ones for children who need the most patient hands.
Data Source: YUZNU Official Website (as of 2026)
