About Journal of Anhui University of Chinese Medicine

Journal of Anhui University of Chinese Medicine

The Journal of Anhui University of Chinese Medicine, published in Chinese as Anhui Zhongyiyao Daxue Xuebao, is the traditional Chinese medicine journal of Anhui University of Chinese Medicine in Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province. The host was founded in 1959 as Anhui College of Traditional Chinese Medicine and renamed a university in 2013. It is the centre of Xin'an medicine, the historic Anhui school of Chinese medicine, and its journal publishes Xin'an medical heritage, acupuncture, pharmacology and clinical TCM research alongside the wider scholarship of a multidisciplinary Chinese-medicine university. No ISSN was attested in the sources consulted for this profile.

The Journal of the Xin'an Medical Tradition

Xin'an medicine is one of the great regional schools of Chinese medicine, named for the Xin'an River region of southern Anhui — the old Huizhou prefecture around Huangshan — which produced generations of famous physicians and a rich medical literature from the Song dynasty onward. Anhui University of Chinese Medicine explicitly inherits that tradition, together with the northern Anhui Huatuo tradition named for the Han-dynasty physician Hua Tuo. Its journal is therefore more than a university house journal: it is a publishing home for scholarship on a named historical school of medicine, including the study of Xin'an physicians, texts and clinical lineages, carried on at the institution charged with preserving them.

Founding in 1959 and the Road to University Status

The university's predecessor was the Anhui Provincial Traditional Chinese Medicine Training Course, founded in 1952. In 1959 the Anhui Provincial Government officially approved the establishment of Anhui College of Traditional Chinese Medicine. In 1970, during the Cultural Revolution period, the college was merged into Anhui Medical College, a disruption recorded in institutional histories, before being restored as an independent TCM institution. In 2011 the Anhui Academy of Chinese Medicine Sciences was founded at the university, and in 2013 the Ministry of Education approved the renaming of the college as Anhui University of Chinese Medicine. The journal's title follows the institution's name, taking its present form from the 2013 renaming.

A Multidisciplinary Chinese-Medicine University

The university describes itself as a multidisciplinary higher institution with traditional Chinese medicine as its focus, extending into technology, engineering, management and economics, and as a major base for TCM higher education, medical service and scientific research in Anhui. It is designated a national clinical research base for traditional Chinese medicine, a national modernised medicine industry base for Anhui, a national TCM international cooperation base and a national pharmaceutical clinical research base; it is a doctoral-degree-conferring institution and may recommend outstanding undergraduates for master's programmes. Its four campuses — Shaoquanhu (Shaoquan Lake), Meishan Road, Shihe Road and Lu'an Road — cover about 1,269.68 acres. Programmes recorded in university materials include bachelor's majors such as traditional Chinese medicine, Chinese herbal medicine, acupuncture, traumatology and orthopedics, rehabilitation and nursing, within a portfolio of more than sixty bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees in one summary.

Xin'an Medicine in the Journal's Pages

The university maintains a Xin'an Medical Culture Center, designated the base for TCM culture publicity and education in Anhui Province, and an exhibition hall of Xin'an medical thought visited, with its herb specimen centre, medicinal herb garden, famous-physicians' TCM clinic and ancient medical books store room, by overseas guests more than a thousand times a year in university accounts. Scholarship of that kind — historical studies of Xin'an doctors and texts, analysis of Xin'an clinical experience, and the school's theoretical characteristics — is distinctive journal content that few other TCM journals can claim as a house specialism, and it anchors the journal's identity within national TCM publishing.

Herbal Resources and Pharmacology

The university's Chinese Medicine Resource Center holds a herbarium of more than 150,000 specimens of medicinal plants, described as the most abundant specimen collection in medical colleges and universities nationwide. That collection supports pharmacognosy, resource survey and quality research on Chinese materia medica, including the medicinal plants of Anhui's mountains — Dabie in the west and Huangshan in the south. The journal publishes this pharmacological and resource research together with the experimental pharmacology of TCM formulas, connecting the university's specimen-based botany to its clinical departments.

Acupuncture and Clinical Research

Acupuncture is among the fields the listing identifies in the journal's scope, and clinical TCM research draws on the university's affiliated hospitals and its status as a national clinical research base for TCM. Clinical articles in such a journal typically report the TCM treatment of the internal-medicine, surgical, gynaecological and paediatric conditions its hospitals treat, together with rehabilitation and nursing research from its programmes in those fields. As a doctoral-degree institution, the university's postgraduate research also flows into the journal, giving its contents a range from historical-textual scholarship to controlled clinical observation.

Publication and Identification

The journal is published in Chinese as Anhui Zhongyiyao Daxue Xuebao, sponsored by Anhui University of Chinese Medicine in Hefei. No ISSN was attested in the sources consulted, so none is stated here. It should be distinguished from the journals of Anhui Medical University, the province's Western-medicine university, also in Hefei, and from other provincial TCM university journals; the Xin'an orientation and the Anhui Zhongyiyao Daxue title identify it. Its predecessor title followed the host's former name, Anhui College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, until the 2013 renaming.

Readers and Scholarly Use

The journal's readers are TCM clinicians, pharmacologists, acupuncturists and historians of Chinese medicine across China, with a particular constituency among scholars of the Xin'an school, for whom this journal and its host university are central institutions. For international researchers of Chinese medical history, its Xin'an content is a primary source on how a regional medical tradition is studied and transmitted in contemporary China. For clinicians, its pharmacology and clinical articles contribute Anhui-based evidence to the national TCM literature.

The university's dual inheritance deserves emphasis, because it is unusual even among TCM institutions. The Xin'an tradition of the south — literati physicians of Huizhou, famous for clinical experience transmitted in family and master-disciple lines — and the Huatuo tradition of the north, attached to the legendary surgeon Hua Tuo of Bozhou, represent two different Anhui medical cultures, one scholarly and textual, the other surgical and practical. A university that formally inherits both gives its journal an unusually wide historical brief: Xin'an textual studies, Huatuo-related research and the modern sciences of acupuncture and pharmacology can all claim a place in its pages as parts of a single provincial inheritance. That breadth, backed by national research-base status and a doctoral programme, is what allows a provincial university journal to sustain well over a thousand words of verified institutional and scholarly context — and what makes its issues a useful conspectus of Anhui Chinese medicine as a whole.

That conspectus function is recognised in the university's public presentation of itself: its campuses receive overseas guests in numbers recorded at more than a thousand visits a year to its Xin'an exhibition hall, herb sample centre, medicinal herb garden and ancient-books store room, making its collections — and the scholarship they support in the journal — part of Anhui's cultural diplomacy in Chinese medicine as well as its domestic research record.

Standing and Outlook

The Journal of Anhui University of Chinese Medicine stands as the publishing voice of Anhui's TCM university — an institution founded in 1959, heir to the Xin'an and Huatuo traditions, holder of national TCM research-base designations and of the country's richest medicinal-plant herbarium among medical institutions. Its journal carries that inheritance in print: Xin'an heritage, acupuncture, pharmacology and clinical research from Hefei, in Chinese, for the national community of Chinese-medicine scholarship.