Shandong University (; SDU) is a public university in Jinan, Shandong, China. It is affiliated with the Ministry of Education of China. The university is part of Project 211, Project 985, and the Double First-Class Construction.
Shandong University derives its official founding date from the Imperial Shandong University (官立山東大學堂), which established in Jinan in November 1901 on the request of Yuan Shikai, then Governor of Shandong, as the second modern national university in the country.The first one is Peking University in the capital city Beijing The precursor institution of Shandong University Medical School, Cheeloo University, was founded by American and English mission agencies in the late 19th century as Tengchow College of Liberal Arts in Penglai. Tengchow College was the first modern institution of higher learning in China.
Shandong University has eight campuses, all but two of which are located in the provincial capital city of Jinan. The rest are located in Weihai and Qingdao respectively.
Shandong University is constantly ranked the best university in Shandong province, and one of the top-ranked universities in the People's Republic of China. It is classified as a Double First Class University and was formerly part of both the Project 985 and Project 211 national key initiatives. Shandong University is among the Chinese universities with the most comprehensive range of academic disciplines, representing a typical comprehensive university that covers all major fields of study except military science.
As of 2024, twenty of its disciplines are ranked among the top 1% worldwide according to the ESI (Essential Science Indicators) rankings, with five disciplines ranked in the top 0.1%. The university has also signed intercollegiate cooperation agreements with more than 300 universities and institutions in over 30 countries and regions.
History Traditional learning in Shandong (1733–1901)
The Luoyuan Academy () was established in Jinan in 1733 by an imperial edict from the Yongzheng Emperor of the Qing Dynasty. The governor of Shandong, Yue Jun (), received 1,000 taels of silver (approximately 37 kg) to fund the establishment of the academy. The name "Luoyuan" (literally "source of the Luo [River]") refers to the original location of the academy near the Baotu Spring. The academy was dedicated to teaching the Chinese classics to the sons of the gentry. Scholars affiliated with the academy include: Bi Yuan (畢沅, 1730–1797), Sang Tiaoyuan (桑调元, 1695–1771), Shen Qiyuan (沈起元, 1685–1763), He Shaoji (何紹基, 1799–1873), Kuang Yuan (匡源, 1815–1881), Wang Zhihan (王之翰, 1821–1850), Liu Yaochun (), Zhu Xuedu (朱学笃, 1826–1892), and Miao Quansun (缪荃孙, 1844–1919). In 1881, the American Presbyterian missionaries John Murray () and Stephen A. Hunter () attempted to purchase a property adjacent to the Luoyuan Academy for use as a chapel. This led to a violent reaction when on July 13, 1881, literati from the academy incited an attack on the property. The incident, known as the "Jinan Missionary Incident" (), had considerable diplomatic repercussions for the relationship between the Qing Dynasty and the United States. The Luoyuan Academy was rebuilt in 1896 to become the largest institution of its kind in Shandong. Five years later (in 1901) it was replaced by the newly founded Imperial Shandong College which took over its campus (today the site of the Provincial Bureau of Statistics on Spring City Road ()).
19th-century precursors
The earliest precursor institutions that would later be fused into Shandong University were founded by American and English mission agencies: In early January 1864, Calvin W. Mateer, an American Presbyterian missionary, and his wife Julia Brown Mateer, arrived in the recently opened treaty port of Dengzhou (, now Zhifu, Yantai) in the area of the present-day city of Penglai on the north-eastern coast of Shandong Peninsula.Robert McCheyne Mateer: Character-building in China: the life-story of Julia Brown Mateer, Fleming H. Revell Company, 1912 Their journey had begun in New York on July 3, 1863, had taken them around the Cape of Good Hope to Shanghai, and had ended with a shipwreck off the coast of Yantai.Daniel W. Fisher: Calvin Wilson Mateer, Forty-Five Years a Missionary in Shantung, China, A Biography, The Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1911 In the autumn of 1864, the Mateers opened an elementary school for boys, which was called Mengyang Educational Society (), in a Guanyin temple that had been sold to them since there were insufficient funds for its upkeep as a temple. The school's first class consisted of six boarders and two day pupils. The school was enlarged to accommodate 30 boarders and divided into primary and high school sections in 1869. The high school became known as the Wenhui Guan (). The Tengchow College of Liberal Arts was formally established in 1882, i.e., at a time when the school had been operated as a primary and high school for 18 years already. By 1889, enrollment in the college had grown to 100 students. The six-year curriculum included algebra, geometry and conic sections, trigonometry and measurement, surveying and navigation, analytical geometry and mathematical physics, calculus, as well as astronomy. Religion also featured prominently in the curriculum as well as in daily life at Tengchow College. The college soon enjoyed a reputation for its high standards of academic excellence.Danian Hu: China and Albert Einstein: The Reception of the Physicist and His Theory in China, 1917–1979, Harvard University Press, June 30, 2009 When W.A.P Martin hired young professors of Western learning for the Imperial University of Peking (the precursor of present-day Peking University), 12 out of 13 young professors hired were graduates of Tengchow College of Liberal Arts. In 1884, shortly after the formal establishment of Tengchow College of Liberal Arts, British Baptists established Tsingchow Boys' Boarding School in Qingzhou, also located in northern Shandong, but not directly on the coast.
In 1902, the American and British missionaries agreed to combine their education ventures in Shandong, and established an arts college () in Weifang, a theological college () in Qingzhou, and a medical college () in Jinan. In 1909, all three colleges were consolidated into Shantung Protestant University () which was later renamed Shantung Christian University (). "Cheeloo University", the school's informal name that had been officially approved by the school council in 1915, was derived from "Qilu", a nickname of Shandong Province coined after the ancient states of Qi (1046 BC–221 BC) and Lu (10th century BC–256 BC) that once existed in the area. Jinan was chosen as the new location for the consolidated university.
A prominent member of Cheeloo University's faculty was Henry Winters Luce (1868–1941), the father of the publisher Henry R. Luce (founder of TIME, Fortune, and Life). Henry W. Luce initially led the fundraising efforts for the new campus in Jinan (today the Baotuquan Campus of Shandong University). In this capacity, he raised 300,000 dollars between 1912 and 1915 from donors in the United States.William Joseph Haas (1996): "China voyager: Gist Gee's life in Science", M.E. Sharpe The buildings on the new Cheeloo campus were designed by the architectural firm of Perkins, Fellows, & Hamilton from Chicago. Henry W. Luce was elected vice-president of Cheeloo University in 1916, but resigned in the following year already, because he felt that he had insufficient support for his vision of a university of major national influence from the then Cheeloo president J. Percy Bruce.
Cheeloo University particularly made its mark in the field of medicine: From 1914 to 1936, the university built and subsequently expanded Cheeloo Hospital as a major facility for medical education in China. Between 1916 and 1923, the former Peking Union Medical College, the Medical Department of Nanking University, the Hankow Medical College, and the North China Union Medical College for Women were all moved to Jinan and merged into the Cheeloo University School of Medicine under Dean and acting university president Samuel Cochran.
Cheeloo University attracted Chinese intellectuals and scholars. The writer Lao She, author of the novel "Rickshaw Boy" and the play "Teahouse", taught at Cheeloo University (1930–1934) as well as at National Shandong University in Qingdao and other universities between 1934 and 1937.
In 1937, when the Japanese forces occupied northern China during the Second Sino-Japanese War, Cheeloo University evacuated to Sichuan and operated on the campus of West China Union University in Chengdu. In Jinan, the university's hospital remained open with a largely Western staff. During the war, the Japanese military used the entire campus for housing about 1,200 patients along with 600 officers.
During the Korean War (1950–1953), the Chinese government came to regard Christian schools as tools of "American imperialism" and hence embarked on closing them down. Cheeloo University was dissolved in 1952. Its Medical School was fused with Shandong Provincial Medical College and the East China Norman Bethune Medical College to form Shandong Medical College (renamed into "Shandong Medical University" in 1985).
Formal establishment
The initiative for the founding of Shandong University (as Imperial Shandong University, ) in 1901 as a national, modern university came from Yuan Shikai, then the governor of Shandong province. Yuan Shikai was the chief military modernizer of the late Qing Dynasty whose control over a powerful army combined with his personal ambition played a key role in the birth of the Republic of China as well as its descent into warlordism in the early 20th century.
Yuan Shikai had been governor of Shandong Province since December 1899. He had been appointed to this post to quell the Boxer Uprising in the province and to reassure the foreign diplomats in the country who were looking for quick decisive actions against the boxers. In 1901, the same year that marked the end of the Boxer Uprising, Yuan sent a draft for the university charter () to the Guangxu Emperor and instructed Li Yukai, the magistrate of Penglai, to start preparations for the university. The draft of the university charter was approved by the emperor in November 1901, shortly after the Boxer Uprising had officially ended with the signing of the Boxer Protocol on September 7, 1901. Shandong Imperial University became hence the second modern national university established in the country after Imperial Capital University () that had been founded in 1898 and later became Peking University. The charter of Shandong Imperial University served as a model for subsequent foundations of imperial university. The original charter document for Shandong University is now kept in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, Taiwan where it had been taken during the retreat of the Kuomintang at the end of the Chinese Civil War.