Asia's top-ranked university began in an emptied asylum block
In 1905 a new medical school opened in a vacant wing of a government asylum at Pasir Panjang, funded by 87,077 Straits dollars raised from Singapore's Chinese and other non-European communities. After six name changes and two mergers, that school's descendant, the National University of Singapore, now sits in the global top ten.
The push came from Tan Jiak Kim, first president of the Straits Chinese British Association, who led a petition to the governor Sir John Anderson in September 1904. Earlier appeals had failed over doubts about student numbers and local backing, so Tan raised the money himself, adding $12,000 of his own. The school opened on 3 July 1905. A $120,000 endowment in 1912 from a memorial fund launched by the physician Lim Boon Keng led to its renaming after King Edward VII the next year, and by 1921 it had become a college of medicine.
Arts and sciences arrived with Raffles College in 1928. On 8 October 1949 it merged with the medical college to form the University of Malaya, meant to serve the whole Federation of Malaya. Growth was so fast that by 1959 it had split into semi-independent branches in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, and on 1 January 1962 the Singapore branch became the University of Singapore. Meanwhile, in 1955, the Chinese community had founded a separate institution, Nanyang University.
The government merged the two on 6 August 1980, partly to pool resources and partly to establish English as the main language of education. The coat of arms records the union: a lion inherited from the University of Singapore, which itself had swapped out the University of Malaya's tiger, an open book for knowledge, and Nanyang's three interlocking rings. Most departments moved gradually from Bukit Timah to the Kent Ridge campus between 1969 and 1986.
Today NUS runs 17 faculties and schools across Kent Ridge, Bukit Timah and Outram, including a music conservatory and the Duke-NUS Medical School. It is unusually international: 65% of faculty and staff are foreign nationals, as are 36% of students. QS placed it eighth in the world in its 2026 rankings and tenth in the edition released in June 2026, and has kept it in the top 15 since 2016. Its alumni include two Singapore prime ministers, four presidents and two Malaysian prime ministers.
Source: National University of Singapore
