A thousand-year school under the mountain

The school began as a monk's bequest turned permanent. In 976, the ninth year of the Kaibao era, Zhu Dong, prefect of Tanzhou as Changsha was then called, founded the academy on the eastern foot of Yuelu Mountain, on ground where two monks had earlier cleared land and built study rooms for lay students. The site was chosen with sense: below the forested hill on the west bank of the Xiang, a short boat crossing from the walled city, close enough for scholars and far enough for quiet. Recognition came from the very top. In 1015 Emperor Zhenzong summoned the headmaster Zhou Shi to court, praised the school he ran, and wrote out its name board with his own hand; the imperial calligraphy survives as a stone carving, and after that, the records say, the academy's name was known through the realm while its rolls and buildings grew. Contemporaries counted it among the four great academies of the age — a list that varies between sources, but one on which Yuelu appears in every version. The buildings have burned repeatedly: war wrecked the school at the Song's end, when several hundred of its students are recorded as dying in the city's fall to the Mongols.

The arguments held here were famous enough to empty the ponds. In 1167 the Fujian philosopher Zhu Xi travelled to Changsha to reason with Zhang Shi, the academy's head, and their joint lectures — remembered as the Zhu–Zhang joint discussion — ran inside the hall for two months while listeners poured in; a contemporary image claims the visitors' horses and carriage animals drank the pond dry. Zhu Xi returned in 1194 as the region's pacification commissioner, rebuilt the school and issued teaching rules, and the Neo-Confucian current known as the Huxiang school thickened around the mountain. Under the later empires the academy kept its Song loyalty to moral self-cultivation while opening its curriculum to statecraft — waterworks, political economy, the management of bureaucracy — and its graduates ran the nineteenth century: Zeng Guofan, organiser of the Xiang Army; Zuo Zongtang, the general who recovered Xinjiang; Guo Songtao, China's first ambassador to a foreign country; Cai E, who took up arms for the young republic; and before them the philosopher Wang Fuzhi, an alumnus of the Ming's end. The gate couplet still boasts plainly of the output: Chu produced the talent, and here is where it gathered.

In 1903 the late-Qing reforms converted the academy into a modern institute of higher learning; by 1926 the schools on the hill had merged into Hunan University, and the academy became a part of it — the only one of China's ancient academies of classical learning to evolve continuously into a modern university. The school never actually left. Inside the restored compound the university runs a faculty that admits undergraduates and doctoral students in history and philosophy, and the imperial library pavilion still serves as the university's rare-book library for teachers and students. The fabric is largely Qing, patiently reassembled after catastrophe: Japanese bombs struck the buildings in 1938 and 1941, and the Cultural Revolution left them near ruins before a five-year restoration opened the gates to visitors in October 1986. In 1988 the State Council listed the academy among the national key protected sites. A visitor now walks a 21,000-square-metre axis — gate, second gate, lecture hall flanked by study quarters, library, temple of Confucius — and passes the Lushan Temple stele, carved by the Tang master Li Yong in 730, one of the celebrated monuments kept inside these walls.