The First Modern University

The university begins with a document. In October 1895 Sheng Xuanhai, then the Tianjin customs commissioner, founded Peiyang University with the Guangxu Emperor's own brush approval, and it is described in the sources as the first university established in modern China. The distinction between a university and the academies that preceded it is a distinction about curriculum and about degrees, and it is the reason the date is remembered. English-language accounts put it plainly: established in 1895 by a royal charter from the Guangxu Emperor, Tianjin University is the oldest university in China, and it led the country's shift toward modernisation.

What the institution was called changed with what the state wanted it to be. It passed through Peiyang University Hall, Peiyang University, National Peiyang University and Peiyang Institute of Technology, and it reopened at its old Tianjin site on 22 October 1946, after the war, in language that called it a fortress of science. In September 1951 it merged with the Hebei Institute of Technology, founded in 1903, and took the name it still carries, Tianjin University. In 1959 it became one of the first sixteen national key universities accredited by the central government. Four names in fifty-six years is a fair index of how much the country's idea of a university changed in that period.

The campus is in Nankai District, at 92 Weijin Road, and it is large enough to have its own internal geography. The Weijin Road campus covers 1.811 million square metres with 1.406 million square metres of floor space and holds four lakes named Qingnian, Jingye, Aiwan and Youyi. The university now runs the Weijin Road campus, the Beiyangyuan campus and a Binhai industrial research precinct. At the end of 2025 it counted 41,755 full-time students, including 19,422 undergraduates, 15,162 postgraduates and 7,171 doctoral students, with 5,020 staff of whom 1,087 were professors. Numbers of that size describe an institution that has become a city within the city.