Zhejiang University fled across China in wartime while guarding a vast imperial library
When Japanese armies advanced in 1937, Zhejiang University packed up and retreated from Hangzhou, moving again and again until it settled in Guizhou in China's southwest. Along the way its students took charge of protecting the province's treasures, including the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries from the Wenlan Pavilion, to keep them out of Japanese hands.
The man steering that exodus was Chu Kochen, a scholar with no political background who became president in April 1936 and held the post until 1949. With strong financial backing and the freedom to make his own appointments, he recruited leading scientists and critics. After Japan surrendered, groups that had scattered to Longquan and Guizhou made their way back to Hangzhou, the last in May 1946 with help from the United Nations relief agency.
The university traces its roots to Qiushi Academy, founded in 1897 by Hangzhou's mayor, Lin Qi. Its successor institute was the first provincial school in China to send students abroad, but it closed in 1914 amid republican reforms. The Nationalists revived it in 1927 as National Third Chung Shan University, honouring Sun Yat-sen, and renamed it National Chekiang University a year later. Its presidents clashed repeatedly with the government; one who refused to join the ruling party saw funding withdrawn in 1932.
Communist rule reshaped it drastically. In the early 1950s it was reorganised on Soviet lines into an engineering school with just four departments, while agriculture, medicine and the humanities were spun off. The Cultural Revolution halted it from 1966, though in August that year its students stood against younger Red Guards trying to wreck Lingyin Temple.
In 1998 the spun-off schools, Zhejiang Medical, Hangzhou and Zhejiang Agricultural universities, merged back in, creating what was then considered Asia's largest higher education institution, with over 30,000 students. Today it has 37 colleges and schools, and the Nature Index ranked it first in the world for scientific research output in 2026. Its alumni include Premier Li Qiang and DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng.
Source: Zhejiang University
