History of ethnology at Yunnan University spans 80 years

Ethnology, as a prestigious subject of Yunnan University, or YNU – located in Kunming, capital of Southwest China's Yunnan province – is widely said to have gone through a lot in more than 80 years there.

As early as the 1930s and 1940s, a group of scholars at Yunnan University began to engage in the teaching and research of ethnic history and participated in the surveying and boundary negotiations of the Yunnan-Myanmar border.

A group of world-renowned elite academics – including Wu Wenzao and Fei Xiaotong – taught in the Department of Sociology at Yunnan University. They wrote classics such as the Three Villages in Yunnan and Fertility System, which established the influence of Yunnan University's ethnology and sociology expertise in the academic world.

The former research center for the ethnology department at Yunnan University. [Photo/ynu.edu.cn]

Since the 1980s, the subject has continued to develop at YNU and it has gradually established and improved on its integrated undergraduate-master-doctorate curriculum.

It received authorization in 2001 to offer the first-level discipline of a doctorate in ethnology. Then, it got the green light as a national key discipline and the right to set up a post-doctoral research station in 2022.

The subject at YNU has consistently received the best in evaluations from the Ministry of Education. It ranked first in the 2009 National University Discipline Assessment, when it was rated as A+.

The diversity of ethnic groups and cultures in Yunnan – as well as the long history of anthropological and ethnological research at Yunnan University – is widely said to make YNU one of the most important bases for such research in China.