About Journal of Huangshan University

Journal of Huangshan University

Overview and identity

The Journal of Huangshan University is the Chinese-language comprehensive academic journal of Huangshan University in Huangshan, Anhui Province. Its Chinese title is Huangshan Xueyuan Xuebao. The journal is distinguished by Huizhou culture studies, covering Huizhou merchants, architecture, carving and Xin'an scholarship, and by Mount Huangshan tourism research. It is published by the undergraduate university of the historic Huizhou region, in a city that holds two UNESCO World Heritage listings: Mount Huangshan itself and the ancient villages of Xidi and Hongcun.

Few university journals anywhere sit inside so concentrated a cultural landscape, and the journal's regional identity is correspondingly strong. No ISSN for the journal was attested in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is stated here.

From Huizhou Teachers College, 1978, to Huangshan University

Huangshan University was founded in 1978, formed as the Huizhou normal junior college associated with Anhui Labour University, and known as Huizhou Teachers College. In December 1997 it was renamed Huangshan College, and in February 2002, approved by the Ministry of Education, it was upgraded to a comprehensive provincial undergraduate university under the name Huangshan University. In 2004 it was granted the construction project for the revitalisation of higher education as a local application-oriented high-level university in Anhui Province.

The renaming history tells the region's own story. The college began with the name Huizhou, the historic prefecture; the city around it had been renamed Huangshan, after the mountain, and the university followed. Its scholarship, however, kept the older name alive: Huizhou culture research became one of the university's three major disciplines, alongside tourism management and environmental science, and the journal is one of the places where that research appears.

The university today

Huangshan University is a comprehensive provincial university with two campuses, Shuaishui and Hengjiang, covering about eighteen hundred mu. Institutional profiles describe sixteen schools and two departments offering some fifty-five to fifty-seven undergraduate majors across engineering, management, agriculture, literature, art, science, economics and education, with more than eighteen thousand full-time students recruited from provinces across China. Its library holds more than 1.5 million paper volumes and more than 2.4 million electronic books.

One library figure captures the university's scholarly mission: its special collections hold more than eighty thousand Huizhou documents, including over six thousand kinds of local chronicles, genealogies and local ancient books. Huizhou's merchant families kept meticulous records, and their contracts, genealogies and accounts survive in unusual density. A university holding such an archive gives its journal's contributors primary sources on their own doorstep. The university has also established featured research organisations including the Hui Culture Academy.

Huizhou culture: the journal's defining field

Huizhou culture, or Hui culture, is counted among China's most influential regional cultures. The historic prefecture, earlier called Shezhou and Xin'an, comprised six counties including She, Xiuning, Qimen, Yixian and Jixi. Its culture encompasses the Huizhou merchants, Hui cuisine, Huizhou architecture and villages, the three carvings in brick, wood and stone, Xin'an painting and medicine, Xin'an Neo-Confucian scholarship, education and the crafts of the Four Treasures of the Study: the writing brush, Huizhou ink sticks, She ink slabs and Xuan paper.

The Huizhou merchants are the culture's best-known creators. Land-poor and mountainous, Huizhou sent its people out to trade; by the end of the Ming dynasty, by some accounts over seventy per cent of its population was engaged in commerce away from home. Hui merchants came to dominate trades including salt, tea, silk, grain, timber and pawnbroking, built close relationships with officialdom, and sent their profits home to build the mansions, ancestral halls, academies and memorial archways that still fill the region's villages. Their decline came in the nineteenth century with the loss of the salt monopoly, the dumping of foreign manufactured goods and prolonged warfare. The clean record for this journal names exactly the fields their legacy created: Huizhou merchants, architecture, carving and Xin'an scholarship.

Villages, mountains and World Heritage

The journal's setting holds the physical evidence of that culture. Xidi and Hongcun, ancient villages of southern Anhui built by merchant families, are UNESCO World Heritage sites, their whitewashed walls, dark tile roofs and elaborate carvings preserving the architectural language of Huizhou wealth. Mount Huangshan, the Yellow Mountain, is a World Heritage site of both natural and cultural significance, celebrated for its pines, rock formations, sea of clouds and hot springs, and for centuries of paintings and poems it inspired, including the Xin'an school of painting that took its name from the river running through Huizhou.

The university explicitly builds its character on these assets, describing its mission as relying on the profound resources of tourism, ecology and regional culture, and enriching students' experience through Huizhou culture. Tourism management at the university dates to 1985, when it was among the earliest higher-education tourism programmes in China and the first in Anhui; it later became a national characteristic major. Mount Huangshan tourism research, named in the journal's record, grows directly from that programme and from the visitor economy of the city itself.

Scope beyond the regional specialisms

Alongside Huizhou studies and tourism, the journal is the comprehensive outlet of a full undergraduate university, publishing in literature, history, education, economics, the natural sciences, engineering, agriculture and art. Environmental science, the third of the university's major disciplines, connects its science publishing to the ecology of the Mount Huangshan region and the Xin'an River. Art and design programmes at the university draw on Huizhou culture in their teaching, including product design work based on traditional Huizhou art, so the boundary between regional culture and general scholarship in the journal is porous by design.

Education research also has its place. The institution began as a teachers college for the Huizhou region in 1978, and the training of teachers for southern Anhui's schools remains part of its inheritance, reflected in pedagogical and basic-education content.

The Xin'an scholarly tradition

The name Xin'an, the prefecture's older name and its river, carries the region's intellectual history. Xin'an Neo-Confucianism, associated above all with the Southern Song philosopher Zhu Xi, whose ancestral home was in the Huizhou area, made the region a stronghold of Confucian learning; Xin'an medicine and the Xin'an painting school carried the name into other fields. Huizhou's merchants funded academies and prized examination success, binding commerce and scholarship together. When the journal publishes Xin'an scholarship, it continues a self-consciously regional intellectual tradition that is centuries old, now carried on by a modern university's academy of Hui culture and its special collections of genealogies and local records.

The journal in China's university publishing system

Within China's system of university-sponsored Chinese-language journals, most titles are comprehensive and similar in form. Identity comes from place. The Journal of Huangshan University draws its identity from one of the most distinctive cultural regions in China, a region whose documents it archives, whose villages are World Heritage sites, and whose mountain lends the university its name. Its Huizhou culture and tourism contents give it a recognisable profile among Anhui's university journals.

Reading the journal today

Read today, the journal records how a university created in 1978 as a teachers college became a custodian of Huizhou civilisation: publishing merchant history, architectural and carving studies, Xin'an scholarship and tourism research alongside the general output of a comprehensive undergraduate institution. For readers interested in China's regional cultures, it is a primary local venue, produced in Huangshan itself, by scholars working among the villages, archives and mountains their articles describe.