Four Hundred and Twenty-Nine Students

Nankai began as a private enterprise and kept that character for a long time. It grew out of the Nankai School founded by the educators Yan Xiu and Zhang Boling in 1904, and it was established as a university in 1919 with three divisions of arts, science and commerce. Private foundation matters to the institution's self-description: it was not a government academy with a guaranteed budget, and its reputation was built on teaching rather than on endowment. Before the war it had three colleges and twelve departments but only 429 students and 110 staff, a small school praised in the sources for strict teaching. A university of four hundred students is a school where the faculty know the cohort.

On 29 July 1937 Japanese aircraft bombed Tianjin and the Nankai campus, destroying Xiushan Hall and the Zhiqin Building. The next day the army looted and burned what was left, including the Muzhai Library. The two days are usually given together because they were a single act carried out in two stages: the bombing removed the buildings, and the burning removed the books. What happened next is part of the same story. In August 1937 the Ministry of Education ordered Nankai, Peking University and Tsinghua to form a temporary national university at Changsha, with Zhang Boling serving with Jiang Menglin and Mei Yiqi as its standing committee, the arrangement that became the Southwestern Associated University.

The institution's present scale is the measure of the distance travelled. Nankai now holds 3.7511 million square metres of land across its Balitai, Jinnan and TEDA campuses, with the historic Balitai campus as its registered seat. At the end of December 2024 it had 2,350 full-time teachers, including 1,006 professors, 924 associate professors and 1,394 doctoral supervisors, and 35,546 full-time students made up of 17,264 undergraduates, 12,155 postgraduates and 6,127 doctoral candidates. In 2018 it offered 80 undergraduate programmes, 231 master's and 172 doctoral programmes with 28 postdoctoral stations. Its alumni and faculty include Zhou Enlai, the first premier of the People's Republic, and the Nobel laureates Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee.