May 08, 2019
Source: GUANGZHOU DAILY
Writer: Fang Qing

[Editor's note] Guangzhou is a famous cultural city whose long history has given it a profound historical and cultural heritage and a distinctive cultural personality. GUANGZHOU DAILY's Cultural Relics column intends to revive collective memory and pass on historical culture by collecting and sorting cultural relics scattered among the people.
 

（The gate of National Jinan University, Zhenru period in Shanghai, 1923-1937）
 
(The North Gate of Jinan University during its re-establishment period in Guangzhou, 1958)

In 1906, the late Qing Dynasty minister Duan Fang took the first 21 overseas Chinese students who had returned from Java to Nanjing. He set up a school especially for overseas Chinese students in the Miaoxiang nunnery on Xuejia Lane in Nanjing's Drum Tower. Chen Botao, who was born in Dongguan and ranked third in the imperial examinations, proposed to name the school Jinan, with the idea of “spreading the excellent culture of the Chinese nation to all parts of the country.”
With the outbreak of the Wuchang Uprising in 1911, Jinan Academy, the predecessor of Jinan University, was suspended.
Renamed the National Jinan School in 1923, it moved to Zhenru, a western suburb of Shanghai.

In 1927, National Jinan School was expanded and renamed National Jinan University, establishing five schools, including the Business School, with the goal of turning the university into a top university for overseas Chinese.
 

(JNU teachers and students in Singapore in 1936 on the way to Germany)

In 1936, 14 JNU teachers and students participated in the Berlin Olympics, traveling by way of Singapore.
 

(Thousands of teachers and students excavated Ming Lake with their shoulders and bare hands to transfer the stone and soil.)

In October 1959, JNU teachers and students organized to manually excavate a lake.  
 

(A canteen in Mongolian yurt style)
The Mongolian yurt-style building was a student canteen from the 1960s to the ’80s, when Jinan University had just been reconstructed in Shipai, Guangzhou, after being closed for 10 years. It was regarded as the most distinctive architecture among the rebuilt school’s buildings, serving as not only a student canteen but also a place for student activities and parties.