Three Buildings at Xigu

The school opened with more applicants than it could take. Imperial Peiyang University was founded in October 1895 after Sheng Xuanhuai memorialised the throne, and it is described as China's first state-run higher school, with the motto seeking truth from facts. It opened on 18 October 1895 in the buildings of the former Bowen College, with more than a thousand applicants and only a dozen admitted. That ratio is the whole argument for the institution's significance: a country with no tradition of university entrance suddenly had a school where the queue was a hundred times the places, which is what demand for modern education looked like in 1895.

The campus moved because the school needed room. In September 1902 Yuan Shikai ordered that the buildings of the Xigu arsenal be handed over as the site for the school's restoration, and classes resumed at Xigu in April 1903. A military depot becoming a university is a very late-Qing arrangement, and it explains the shape of what survives: solid, utilitarian structures inside a walled compound rather than a purpose-built campus. In 1900 Wang Chonghui graduated first of his year and became the first Chinese to hold a domestic university diploma, a fact that gives the school's early period a precise endpoint.

Three buildings survive inside the campus of Hebei University of Technology: the Tuancheng, the South Building and the North Building, and they are the physical substance of the designation. The site was upgraded to a national key protected cultural relic in May 2013 and was listed in September 2016 in the first batch of China's twentieth-century architectural heritage sites. The institution itself later took the name Tianjin University in 1951, and its modern campus is elsewhere in the city, so the Hongqiao site is a birthplace rather than a working university: a small group of buildings inside another school's grounds.