Yunnan Normal University (Chinese: 云南师范大学) is located in Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan Province. Established in 1938 as the National Normal College of Southwestern Union University based on Beijing University, Tsinghua University, and Nankai University, it was named as National Kunming Normal College in 1946 when the faculties returned to the north. Yunnan Normal University (henceforth YNNU) is a key university of Yunnan Province, with a long history and a great tradition. It is a higher institution co-funded by the Ministry of Education and the Provincial Government of Yunnan and one of the one hundred universities funded by the National Key Project for the Quality Enhancement of the Higher Institutions in Central and West China.
After the Anti-Japanese War broke out in 1937, Peking University, Tsinghua University and Nankai University moved to Kunming and merged into the National Southwest Associated University, which consisted of School of Humanities, School of Science, School of Engineering, School of Business and Law, and the Teachers College. Following the end of the War, the three component universities moved back to their original sites in the north, but the Teachers College, renamed National Kunming Teachers College, stayed behind to become an independent institution. In 1950, the word “National” was dropped from its name. A few decades later, in 1984, it acquired its present name, Yunnan Normal University. In the past 75 years, YNNU has graduated more than 200,000 students for the country and is thus known as the “Cradle of Teachers on the Red-soil Plateau”.
YNNU covers a total area of thirty-three hundred and thirty mu (about five hundred and forty-three acres). It consists of twenty-six schools and more than forty research centers and institutes. It has over thirty thousand full-time students pursuing different degrees and more than eighteen thousand students of continuing education. As the Provincial Center of the Data Resources of Chinese Higher Education, YNNU’s library houses more than 3.2 million books with a new-generation digitized service system. The Journal of Yunnan Normal University (Social Science Edition), included in the highly selective CSSCI (Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index) list, ranks among the top thirty of its kind, while the Natural Science Edition is a nationally acclaimed core journal, its impact factor ranking among the top forty natural science journals in China. In addition, the Teaching and Research on Chinese as a Foreign Language Edition, the pioneer in this field, ranks among the top thirty journals of its kind in China in terms of impact factor.