Peking University outlived the failed reform movement that created it in 1898
The Guangxu Emperor authorised an imperial university in June 1898 as part of the Hundred Days' Reform. By late September the conservative Empress Dowager Cixi had seized power and scrapped most of the reforms. The university survived, shrunken, opening that December with 160 students instead of 500.
China's defeat by Japan in 1895 spurred intellectuals like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao to demand educational change. Liang wrote the charter that the emperor approved on 3 July 1898, creating a school that was also the country's top education authority. Its first president was an American, William Alexander Parsons Martin, and it taught mathematics, astronomy, physics, botany and zoology in modern laboratories. Only Tianjin University, founded in 1895, is older in China. After the 1911 revolution it took the name Peking University in 1912.
Cai Yuanpei, appointed president on 26 December 1917, remade it along German lines of academic freedom and faculty self-government. He hired leading voices of the progressive New Culture Movement, including Hu Shih, Chen Duxiu, Li Dazhao and the writer Lu Xun, while also keeping prominent conservatives on staff. Enrolment topped 2,000 across 14 departments. Cai resigned several times in protest at government meddling.
His campus became the spark for the May Fourth Movement. On 1 May 1919 students learned that the Treaty of Versailles would hand Germany's rights in Shandong to Japan. Three days later students from thirteen universities marched to Tiananmen, and strikes and boycotts of Japanese goods spread nationwide. Under pressure the government released arrested students and sacked three officials, and China's delegates refused to sign the treaty. During the Second World War, Peking, Tsinghua and Nankai staff formed a joint university in Kunming.
Later politics left odd marks. In the mid-1970s writing teams at Peking and Tsinghua published under the pen name Liang Xiao, which sounds like a personal name but puns on two schools. In 2015 alumna Tu Youyou won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering artemisinin, a malaria drug credited with saving millions. Its campus sits on former Qing imperial gardens around Weiming Lake, and its library of 8 million holdings is Asia's largest university collection.
Source: Peking University
