Founded amid the sweeping but short-lived Hundred Days' Reform, the Imperial University of Peking was designed to modernize Chinese higher education by combining Western science with classical learning. It survived the reform's collapse and the conservative backlash that followed, eventually becoming Peking University, one of Asia's most prestigious institutions and a center of the 1919 May Fourth Movement.
China in 1898 was reeling from military defeats by Japan and encroachment by European powers, and a group of reformers around the young Guangxu Emperor pushed for rapid modernization. Among dozens of edicts issued during the Hundred Days' Reform was the founding of the Imperial University of Peking, intended to train officials in mathematics, science, and foreign languages alongside Confucian classics, breaking from the centuries-old examination system.
The reform movement collapsed after just over 100 days when the conservative Empress Dowager Cixi staged a coup, placed Guangxu under house arrest, and executed several reform leaders. Remarkably, the university survived the purge, one of the only reform institutions to do so, perhaps because its practical usefulness for training administrators was too valuable to discard.
Renamed Peking University in 1912 after the fall of the Qing dynasty, it became the intellectual heart of modern Chinese thought. Its faculty and students, including a young library assistant named Mao Zedong, helped ignite the May Fourth Movement of 1919, a watershed of Chinese nationalism and cultural rethinking. Today it remains China's most storied university, its Red Building on Beijing's Sidney Street still standing as a monument to that fraught, hopeful year of reform.
Key people: Guangxu Emperor