National Southwest Associated University Memorial

A small but moving memorial on the grounds of Yunnan Normal University commemorates Lianda — the wartime merger of Peking, Tsinghua, and Nankai universities that operated in Kunming from 1938 to 1946. The site preserves a fragment of one of the original wood-and-thatch lecture halls, a memorial wall listing the alumni who died in the war, and a museum tracing the university's eight-year existence under Japanese bombing.

For Chinese visitors, particularly older intellectuals, Lianda is a powerful symbol of national resilience. For foreign travellers it is a window onto a less-told chapter of the Second World War — the displacement of an entire educated class to the southwest, and the academic life that continued under brutal conditions. Free entry; the museum is closed Mondays.

things to do sight museum historic
A story
When the Japanese took Beijing in 1937, the three pre-eminent universities of China — Peking, Tsinghua, and Nankai — fled south, eventually combining as the National Southwestern Associated University ('Lianda') in Kunming. In nine years of wartime existence, often under bombardment, Lianda's faculty included two future Nobel laureates and the scholars who would go on to shape mid-century Chinese intellectual life. It dissolved when the war ended and the three universities went home.

Other places in Things to Do