Introduction

As one of the four most prestigious academies over the last 1000 years in China, Yuelu Academy has been a famous institution of higher learning as well as a centre of academic activities and cultures since it was formally set up in the ninth year of the Kai Bao Reign of the Northern Song Dynasty (976). Yuelu Academy, surviving the Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties, was converted into Hunan Institute of Higher Learning in 1903, and Hunan Normal College, Hunan Public Polytechnic School in succession, and was finally named Hunan University in 1926. The Academy has witnessed a history of more than one thousand years without a break, so it is called a “one-thousand-year-old academy”. The historical transformation from Yuelu Academy to Hunan University is an epitome of the development of China’s higher education, which mirrors the vicissitudes of China’s education system.