On the night of 11 November 1937, about two hundred people from National Zhejiang University went down to the Jianggan docks in Hangzhou and got on boats. Zhejiang University was leaving Hangzhou, and for years afterwards the term kept starting in other people’s halls, until the colleges came back under one name.
They were the first of three parties. The plan was one party a night, each of them about that size, and the whole school away before the week was out. The boats were to go up the river roads to the south-west, through Fenshui and Tonglu, and tie up at Jiande, a county town some two hundred and forty kilometres from the campus they were leaving. By the fifteenth, if the count held, everyone who was going would be there. The Japanese had already landed. On the fifth, troops had come ashore at Quan Gong Ting, on the north shore of Hangzhou Bay, a little over a hundred kilometres from the city. Hangzhou was not yet taken. It was next.
Zhu Kezhen had been to Jiande in October. He was the president, a meteorologist with a Harvard doctorate, and he liked to see a place before he asked anyone else to live in it. He walked the temples and the empty schools, and he sent people to fit them out, because a president who waits for the army at the gate loses the instruments. The freshmen were already gone. In September they had been sent to the Chanyuan Monastery on West Tianmu Mountain. The dock on the eleventh was the night the rest of the university admitted that the city was finished.
A month in a borrowed town
Jiande, for a few weeks, became what the university’s own later telling calls a university city. Classes were put into whatever rooms the October reconnaissance had secured. Meicheng, the county seat, was small enough that a school of this size changed the noise of it. Students who had been in Hangzhou buildings a fortnight earlier copied notes in halls that smelled of other institutions. It worked, in the narrow sense that a term can be made to work anywhere the teachers and the boxes arrive together. It was not going to be home. On 20 November the government in Nanjing announced that it was moving, and the news reached Zhu by wireless. Suzhou had fallen. The war was not pausing at Hangzhou Bay.
Hangzhou itself fell on 24 December. The university left Jiande the same day. The second move was not a dignified embarkation. Through the last days of the year the columns were on the roads and then on the Zhejiang-Jiangxi railway, and the railway was a competition. Refugees, troop trains, and a school that wanted fourteen carriages were all asking the same stations for the same thing. From 29 December until 8 January the university sat in the snow at Yushan, on the provincial border. Zhu went to the railway people every day: the district officers, the railway bureau, the locomotive depot, the station itself. He came back with fourteen carriages. They got the school as far as Guixi, and from there, by stages, through Zhangshu and Nanchang, to Ji’an. The date the university keeps for the arrival is 20 January 1938.
Ji’an was a pause, not a campus. The staff slept in a rural normal school. Families rented rooms in the town. Students were put into the middle school on Bailuzhou, an island in the Gan River, and the middle school was available because it was the winter holiday and the boys who belonged there had gone home. A university that borrows a holiday is a university that already knows the holiday will end. On 18 February they moved again, by water and by the Guangdong trunk road, to Taihe, about two and a half kilometres west of that county town, in a village called Shangtian.
Taihe is where the borrowing became a method. Dayuan Academy, Huayang Academy, the Xiao ancestral hall, the garden called Quyuan, and a tower at Xiaguan that they turned into the library: each was somebody else’s building, and each, for a season, held a national university. A library is usually the building a university raises when it has decided to stay. At Taihe the library was a tower they had been lent. When Jiujiang fell at the end of July, the season was over. The ministry had already said Guizhou might be next. The road was long and the money was short, so Zhu looked at Guangxi first.
Thirty boys beside a temple
The university being carried west was not, in any simple sense, the school that had opened in 1897. It keeps 21 May 1897 as its birthday, and on that morning the claim is true of a different institution. Qiushi Academy opened beside Puci Temple under Lin Qi, prefect of Hangzhou. The first class was thirty students. The grounds were an east dormitory, a west dormitory, and courts added as the place grew. The name was the programme. Qiushi is an old demand: find out what is the case. Lin Qi wanted a modern academy that would still answer to it.
The academy lasted less than twenty years under its own name. The school reforms of the last Qing decade renamed it. In 1902 it became a university in the new nomenclature, and in 1903 a higher institute, the provincial college at the top of Zhejiang’s new ladder. An American, Elmer Mattox, from the Presbyterian college in Hangzhou, was brought in to organise the teaching. The institute sent students abroad, the first provincial school in the province to do so in any systematic way. Then the republic arrived, and with it a fight about what a provincial college was for. Recruitment stopped in 1912. In 1914 the institute closed. For thirteen years the site by the temple was a former academy, not a university. Warlords argued over Zhejiang. Attempts to reopen the higher school failed. The birthday the modern university keeps is separated from the university itself by a closure.
In 1947 Zhang Qiyun, a historian on the faculty, began to write the national university’s origin as the academy of 1897. Nanjing’s ministry eventually allowed its yearbook to say the same, and after 1949 the university on the mainland kept the date as well. A birthday both governments have accepted starts to look like a fact of nature. It is a decision, and not an empty one. The name, the ground, and a line of teachers did run forward into the institution that left Hangzhou. The academy itself had been shut.
Assembled on the old ground
What reopened was a merger with a political name. In July 1927, after the Northern Expedition had put the Nationalists in Hangzhou, the government created National Third Sun Yat-sen University. It was made by putting the provincial industrial college and the provincial agricultural college together, and it was put on the old academy’s ground. The industrial college had opened in 1911 on Puchang Lane, the project of a Zhejiang governor named Zeng Yun. The agricultural school had begun as a training class for teachers of farming and later moved to Huajiachi. Neither of them was Qiushi Academy. Together, on Qiushi’s site, they were told to become a national university.
On 1 April 1928 the Sun Yat-sen name was dropped and the place was called Zhejiang University. Later that year the word National was set in front of it, which meant money and status from the central government and a president the government would recognise. The first man in the job was Jiang Menglin, an old Qiushi boy who had also taught there, and who had already run Peking University. He was the human link the birthday required. A new university assembled out of a technical school and a farming school could point at its president and say that the academy had not, after all, been a dead end. Jiang did not stay. In 1929 Shao Peizi, another old boy of the academy, succeeded him. Shao would not join the Nationalist Party. The relationship with the government soured, the funding was pulled in 1932, and he resigned.
Cheng Tianfang arrived with Chiang Kai-shek’s attention behind him, and for the first time the budget was a central budget rather than a favour that could be withdrawn. In March 1933 Guo Renyuan took the presidency. He lasted until December 1935. The demonstrations that began in Beiping on 9 December, against the government’s line on Japan, had cousins in every coastal city, and at Zhejiang the students drove Guo out. The charge they would not be talked out of was that he had helped the police take demonstrators away. A president appointed in Nanjing had been removed in Hangzhou. The government needed somebody the campus would keep, and it needed him before the war ceased to be a rumour.
Chen Bulei recommended Zhu to Chiang. Both were Zhejiang men, which made the recommendation easier to hear and guaranteed nothing about the campus. Zhu had no party post. He had a science, and a biography that ran back, by a side door, into the indemnity. In 1910 he was chosen in the second examination for the American scholarships paid from the returned Boxer money. He sailed with Hu Shi and Zhao Yuanren. He did not sleep in the Qinghua garden. The preparatory school was not ready for that cohort, and the boys already fit for an American college went straight. The school built afterwards, and the argument about what the money had bought, are told in The Garden the Indemnity Bought. Zhu’s part was the passage and the training. He came home a meteorologist. In April 1936 he was asked to be a president. Jiang Menglin presided, the old Qiushi boy handing the university to a man the indemnity had educated and the garden had never housed.
He spent the first year hiring, from the Science Society and from the literary camp around the Critical Review, using Chen’s access to money and a freedom to appoint that a party man would have spent on allies. When the boats left Jianggan, that faculty was part of the cargo.
Eighteen aircraft over Yishan
The move into Guangxi began in August 1938. Faculty, families, and students went by the Hunan roads and the Hunan-Guangxi railway. The books and the instruments, with an escort of about twenty teachers and students, went by water on the routes between Jiangxi and Guangdong. By the end of October the people were in Yishan, in the north of Guangxi. The boxes were still on the road. Classes started on 1 November anyway. A university that has moved three times in a year does not wait for the last crate before it rings a bell.
Yishan is remembered for a morning in February. On the fifteenth, eighteen Japanese aircraft bombed the quarters. More than a hundred bombs fell on the school buildings, and more than ten rooms were destroyed. The students got out and down towards the river. The term did not stop. The year before, while the university was still between towns in Jiangxi, Zhu’s wife and his second son had fallen ill and died within days of each other. He stayed, and the school stayed, which is why there was still a Zhejiang University to move a fourth time.
The fourth time was decided when Nanning fell. On 25 November 1939 the city was lost, and the next day the university began preparing to leave Yishan. Guizhou, which had looked too far and too expensive in the summer of 1938, was now the remaining direction. Zhu had been in Guiyang in February 1939, talking to the provincial chairman, Wu Dingchang, about sites. Two men from Meitan who were working in the capital, Chen Shixian and Song Linsheng, pressed him towards their own county: cheap, green, and, they said, kind. He went to look. The decision, once the bombs and the fall of Nanning had made it urgent, was Zunyi for part of the university and Meitan for the rest, with the first-year students held a little apart so that a growing school would not swamp either town.
They left Yishan in the first days of January 1940. The road into Guizhou was poor in good weather, and in January it was ice, then mud. Zhu reached Zunyi on the sixteenth, and the town turned out to meet him. The offices went into a building called Zidanku, because it had been an ammunition store. The library went into the Jiang ancestral hall. On the east bank of the local Xiang, not the great Xiang of Hunan, they built a swimming pool. A pool is what you build when you have decided the students will still be there in the summer.
A farm, a guildhall, a walk from Qingyan
Zunyi could not hold everyone, and was not asked to. The literary faculty, the engineering faculty, and the arts side of the teachers’ college stayed in the city. The science faculty, the agricultural faculty, and the science side of the teachers’ college went east to Meitan, seventy-five kilometres along a road that was still being finished in the spring of 1940. The agricultural college moved in May and June. On 10 June it started classes. In September the scientists followed. Meitan’s streets acquired a department of plant pathology and a department of physics. Outside the town the university opened a farm of something over two hundred mu. The county middle school was enlarged and turned into an attached high school, because the faculty had children, and because a university that means to stay for years begins to grow a school underneath itself.
The first-years were the last piece. Through 1940 a class of them had been sitting in Qingyan, south of Guiyang, in a temple and a lineage hall. In September Zhu went to Meitan with the deans of science and agriculture, and the next day walked out to Yongxing, a market about fifteen kilometres north of the county seat. He looked at the Jiangxi guildhall, the Hubei and Hunan guildhall, the Sichuan guildhall, and the Nanhua palace, the houses merchant sojourners build in a town that is not theirs, and he took them. Registration opened on 18 October. That month more than four hundred students walked up from Qingyan. Of all the movements since Jianggan, this was the one that was most nearly a walk. The rest had been boats, fourteen railway carriages, trucks, and a bad road.
The university’s later count is the measure of what the rooms did. It left Hangzhou with three colleges, sixteen departments, about seventy teachers, and about five hundred students. It came home with seven colleges, twenty-eight departments, a little over two hundred teachers, and more than two thousand students. A famous school had sat for six years where there was almost no higher education, and students who could not reach Beiping, Kunming, or the temporary campuses in Sichuan came to the place they could reach.
Among the people who taught through those years were the mathematician Su Buqing, the geneticist Tan Jiazhen, and the physicist Wang Ganchang. Su was at work on the differential geometry other mathematicians would later cross China to discuss. Tan was doing genetics with the ladybirds and the crop plants of Guizhou, in a country that would soon make the subject politically dangerous. Wang was still, in Meitan, a professor in a borrowed town. A university is the teaching it manages on a Tuesday, and the Tuesday there was real.
The visitor from Cambridge
Joseph Needham arrived in 1944. He was a Cambridge biochemist who had taken the Chinese name Li Yuese, and the British government had sent him to get books and instruments past the blockade to laboratories cut off since 1937. Zhu noted the mission in his diary in November 1942. The visit, when it came, was two stays in Guizhou, one of them about ten days. Needham walked the laboratories, read student notebooks, and heard Zhu, the chemist Wang Jin, and the historian of mathematics Qian Baocong on the history of the sciences in China. He also looked at the mechanics of silk, the inheritance of colour in ladybirds, and the ascorbic acid in a local rose hip. He was looking at a university, not at a legend.
At a lecture before he left, he called Zhejiang the Cambridge of the East. He had just come from ancestral halls, a farm outside a county town, and a first-year class in a row of guildhalls, and he had read the notebooks. The comparison was a visitor’s way of saying that the work in those rooms was work he recognised. It was not a claim that Meitan resembled Cambridge. Zhu seems not to have struck him as a spectacle. The diaries call Zhu China’s leading meteorologist and move on to the ladybirds. What lasted was the crates of sources Zhu sent to Cambridge after the war, once Needham had said he meant to write a history of Chinese science.
One hundred and forty cases
The other cargo of those years was not the university’s at all. In the first three days of August 1937, before a single student had left Hangzhou, the staff of the Zhejiang Provincial Library packed the Wenlan Pavilion set of the Siku Quanshu. The Complete Library of the Four Treasuries had been copied out in the Qianlong reign in seven sets. War and fire had taken most of them. The Wenlan set, kept in a garden library on Solitary Hill, above the West Lake, was the last of the southern copies still intact. Chen Xunci, the director of the provincial library, had it boxed: one hundred and forty cases of the Wenlan books, and eighty-eight more of rare editions, two hundred and twenty-eight cases in all. On the morning of 4 August they left the library for Fuyang. Chen was Zhu’s student from an earlier life. When the cases needed a truck, he came to the president.
The university’s trucks, already being gathered for a move that had not yet been ordered, took the cases on from Tonglu when no boats could be found. Chen wrote in his diary that three days of those trucks brought the whole shipment into Xutang, at Jiande. Hangzhou fell in December with the books already out. That was the first debt. The second was Zhu’s refusal to let the cases stop moving. On 22 January 1938, from Ji’an, he telegraphed Chen Lifu at the Ministry of Education. The instruments were on their way, he reported, and so was a fact Chen Lifu needed: the Wenlan set was the only one of its kind still safe, the university had helped to move it as far as Jiande, and Jiande was not far enough. The ministry agreed. Zhejiang University was told to help carry the books inland. In February Zhu sent the literature professor Li Jiefei back towards Zhejiang to arrange it.
The cases left Longquan on 27 March 1938, through Pucheng in Fujian and across Jiangxi to Changsha, and reached Guiyang at the end of April. They were stored first in a Zhang lineage temple on the west side of the city. In the spring of 1939 they went into Dimu Cave, a limestone hollow in the hills to the north, and they stayed until December 1944. Paper rots if it is not aired. Zhu, passing through, wrote down what the store needed: a tile roof, a person whose job it was to be there, and about one hundred and sixty yuan a month. In October 1942 the historian Tan Qixiang offered to take a turn at the airing. Zhu noted the offer, and the weather. Guizhou sun is a summer fact. After August you do not dry a book and call it preserved.
When the fighting reached Dushan late in 1944, the cases moved a last time, to Qingmuguan outside Chongqing, and the university’s part in the carrying ended. The books came home on 5 July 1946, six trucks back to the library on Solitary Hill. They had been away since 4 August 1937. The Guizhou campuses, with help from the United Nations relief agency for the transport, had come back in May. A school and a library had shared a war without being the same procession. Chen Xunci’s librarians packed the cases and aired them. Zhu’s part was narrower, and real: he understood early that a provincial border was not a vault, and he had trucks and a telegraph on the day that understanding mattered.
An engineering school with the lights on
The Hangzhou they returned to was not the Hangzhou of the dock. A medical school was opened on the ministry’s instruction. Buildings went up at Huajiachi for the agricultural side. Prices, strikes, and a civil war everyone could see coming made the presidency a daily argument. Zhu held the job until the campus changed hands in May 1949. He did not go to Taiwan. He stayed in Shanghai, in the buildings of Academia Sinica, and the rest of his life went to the science of climate. He had taken the job in peacetime and given it back in a different country.
The new state kept the university and changed its task. In 1950 the word National came off the name, and the name became, simply, Zhejiang University, which is the name it still has. The larger change was the reorganisation of 1952, the same national sorting that turned comprehensive universities into specialist schools and specialist schools into the raw material of comprehensive ones. Peking University’s part in that sorting, the inheritance of a missionary garden and the loss of its old city campus, is told in The Only Reform Left Standing. Zhejiang’s part was a disassembly.
Agriculture was lifted out and became Zhejiang Agricultural University. The medical school merged into the provincial medical college, later Zhejiang Medical University. Chinese, foreign literature, and education went to the Zhejiang Teachers College, on the old campus of Hangchow University, whose engineering faculty came the other way and joined Zhejiang. A number of the scientists were taken into the Academy of Sciences. What remained was engineering: electrical, chemical, civil, mechanical. In 1954 the campus moved from Daxue Road to Yuquan, under the hills on the north-west edge of the city. Liu Dan, the party secretary, spent the years after putting basic science back inside an engineering school. In 1963 Zhejiang was named one of the national key schools. The cut of 1952 had been a job description, and the university did the job.
In 1966 the Cultural Revolution closed the classrooms. Liu Dan was removed after the provincial paper and the People’s Daily attacked him. In the first August, some of the university’s students stood between a younger wave of Red Guards and the Lingyin Temple. The younger students had come to smash it. The university students held the gate. The temple is still there. Teaching, for several years, was not. When it returned, it returned inside the engineering brief. The comprehensive university of the Guizhou years was a memory held by people who had been sent elsewhere.
Four names on one register
In 1997 four old men wrote to Jiang Zemin and asked for the pieces to be put back. Wang Ganchang and Bei Shizhang wrote from Beijing. Su Buqing and Tan Jiazhen wrote from Shanghai. They had lived long enough to see the 1952 settlement become the ordinary map of Hangzhou: engineering at Yuquan, and separate universities for agriculture, medicine, and the arts, the last of these grown into Hangzhou University. The State Council agreed. On 15 September 1998 the four were declared one. The merged university opened with more than thirty thousand students, and it was spoken of that season as the largest in Asia. What mattered more than the size was that the colleges sent out in 1952 came back under the name they had left with.
Zhang Junsheng was put in as party secretary to see that four schools became one payroll and one catalogue. A notice does not dissolve an old loyalty. What the students of 1999 shared was a name, and a decision that the specialist years were over. The motto a visitor reads now is four characters. The first two, qiushi, are the academy’s name from the morning of thirty students by the temple. The second pair, the word for making something new, was added while Lu Yongxiang was president, between 1988 and 1995. The old demand survived. It was no longer asked to survive alone.
The buildings took longer than the notice. In October 2002 a new main campus opened at Zijingang, west of Hangzhou, on farmland out towards Sandun. It was not Puci Temple, and it was not Yuquan. It was large enough for a university that had just swallowed three others. On that campus a court was raised in the old academy’s manner: grey tiled roofs, white walls, red columns, a pond, a path. It is a copy, as the rebuilt white gate at Tsinghua is a copy. It is not the yard Lin Qi opened in 1897. The university chose to build the shape of that beginning, rather than leave it as a plaque and a date.
Stand in that court on a morning and the boats are invisible, which is how a campus that has succeeded prefers to look. Students cross the path. The roofs turn up at the eaves. A visitor is told that the university is old. The age is real. It is also a decision, renewed every time the university had to choose whether the term would start in whatever room it had been given.
Zhu’s diary is mostly logistics. Carriages, roofs, the price of airing paper, the name of a guildhall that would do for a first-year class. He does not stop to declare that a university is its teachers. He kept the teachers in the guildhalls, and he treated the buildings as replaceable because they were. What, of that cargo, was the university? Not the tower, which belonged to Taihe. Not the cave, which belonged to the librarians. Not the court at Zijingang, which is a careful recent answer. The university was the decision, repeated at each town, that the term would start. The thirty boys by the temple were already that decision. So were the students who walked out of Qingyan in October 1940, towards a guildhall they had not seen.
