About Journal of Taishan University

Journal of Taishan University

Overview and identity

The Journal of Taishan University, known in Chinese as Taishan Xueyuan Xuebao, is the Chinese-language academic journal of Taishan University in Tai'an, Shandong Province, China. It is a comprehensive scholarly journal, publishing research across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences rather than confining itself to a single discipline. That comprehensive character mirrors the character of its host institution, a full-time undergraduate university whose teaching spans literature, science, engineering, law, history, education, management, economics and art.

The journal takes its name from both its university and its place. Tai'an is the city at the southern foot of Mount Tai, known in Chinese as Taishan, and the university and its journal are inseparable from that setting. No ISSN was attested in the sources consulted for this profile, and this account therefore makes no claim about the journal's numbering, frequency or indexing beyond what can be verified from its identity as the university's comprehensive Chinese-language journal.

The host university: from 1958 to undergraduate status in 2002

Taishan University began providing higher education in 1958, and its deeper history is traced to the Tai'an Prefecture Government Normal School founded in 1905. For most of the twentieth century the institution worked principally as a teacher-training college serving Tai'an and central Shandong, through successive reorganisations of China's normal-school system. In March 2002 the Ministry of Education approved it to provide undergraduate education as a full-time comprehensive institution, the milestone from which the modern university dates.

In September 2012 the university moved to a management system of co-construction by Shandong Province and Tai'an city, with the province as the main body, and in the same year it passed the Ministry of Education's qualification assessment of undergraduate teaching. It is one of Shandong's provincial teacher-education bases and was among the first colleges in the province qualified to recruit publicly funded normal students, a reminder that teacher education remains central to its mission even as its subject range has broadened. Later milestones recorded in institutional histories include selection in 2021 among the first supporting units for applied undergraduate university construction in Shandong.

A campus at the foot of Mount Tai

The university has two campuses, north and south, in Tai'an, together covering roughly 1,378 acres with a building area of about 540,000 square metres in recent institutional descriptions. It recruits students from some 27 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities, and enrols close to 20,000 full-time students. Its library, the Wanli Library in one institutional account, and its laboratories and teaching buildings support teaching across nine major disciplines.

Location shapes academic identity here more than at most Chinese universities. Mount Tai is a UNESCO World Heritage site, inscribed in 1987 as a mixed cultural and natural property, and a UNESCO Global Geopark. The mountain rises immediately north of Tai'an, its highest summit, Jade Emperor Peak, reaching 1,532.7 metres by the official Chinese measurement. A university journal published in its shadow inevitably becomes a venue for scholarship about the mountain itself, and that is the journal's best-known distinction.

Mount Tai culture as a signature field

The journal is distinguished, in the description on which this profile is based, by Mount Tai culture and Dai Temple heritage studies. Mount Tai has been a place of worship for at least 3,000 years and was the foremost of China's Five Sacred Mountains, associated with sunrise, birth and renewal and with the ritual authority of emperors, who travelled to Tai'an to perform the Feng and Shan sacrifices. Its slopes and approaches carry temples, stone inscriptions, tablets and ancient buildings accumulated over two millennia, and its geology, the tilted fault-block Taishan Complex of Archean metamorphic rocks, is itself a subject of scientific study.

The Dai Temple, at the foot of the mountain in Tai'an, is the largest and best-preserved of the temples dedicated to the God of Mount Tai and the traditional starting point of the imperial ascent. Scholarship on Dai Temple heritage, on Mount Tai inscriptions and ritual history, on the mountain's ecology and medicinal plants, and on pilgrimage and tourism, therefore has a natural home in a Tai'an journal. Taishan University itself lists Taishan culture among the fields in which it has formed particular characteristics and advantages, alongside subjects such as history, Chinese language and literature, geography, physics and chemistry, and the journal is one of the channels through which that locally rooted research reaches print.

Scope across the humanities and sciences

Beyond its mountain signature, the journal functions as a general university journal. Its pages carry the ordinary breadth of a comprehensive undergraduate institution: Chinese language and literature, history, education, law, economics and management on the humanities and social-science side, and mathematics, physics, chemistry, geography, computer-related and engineering subjects on the science side. Institutional accounts of the university record provincial key disciplines and research platforms in fields including computer science and technology, physics, chemistry, geography, mathematics and history, and work from such programmes is the natural submission base for a house journal.

That breadth is typical of Chinese university journals, known generically as xuebao. A xuebao is not a commercial disciplinary title but the scholarly record of its institution, open in principle to every field the institution teaches. For a university whose strongest historical identity is teacher training, education research also forms a recurring part of such a journal's contents, connecting classroom practice in Shandong's schools with the university that trains many of their teachers.

Tai'an and central Shandong as a research setting

Tai'an sits in central Shandong, south of the provincial capital Jinan, in a landscape defined by Mount Tai to the north and by the plains and river systems of the lower Yellow River region around it. The city's identity is overwhelmingly shaped by the mountain: Tai'an takes its name from a phrase associated with Mount Tai and national peace, and its economy and civic life are closely tied to heritage tourism around the World Heritage site. Research published from Tai'an therefore often engages questions that join culture, environment and development, from heritage protection and tourism management to the ecology of a heavily visited sacred mountain.

For the journal, this setting supplies both subject matter and readership. Scholars of Mount Tai ritual, inscriptions and art, of Tai'an local history, and of Shandong regional culture form a specialist community for whom a Tai'an-based journal is a recognised outlet, while general readers in Chinese higher education encounter the journal as one of the many provincial university journals through which regional scholarship circulates nationally.

Place in Chinese university-journal publishing

China's system of university journals is large and decentralised: most undergraduate institutions publish at least one xuebao, usually in Chinese, edited by an editorial office within the university and distributed through national journal platforms and databases. These journals serve several functions at once. They give an institution's own staff and graduate researchers a peer-reviewed venue, they document regional and local studies that national disciplinary journals may not prioritise, and they provide a training ground in scholarly editing and reviewing for provincial academia.

The Journal of Taishan University belongs squarely to that system. Its value should be assessed in those terms rather than by comparison with international commercial titles: it is the printed scholarly voice of a specific university in a specific, culturally exceptional place. A journal that can publish a paper on Dai Temple inscriptions alongside work on mathematics education or local ecology is performing exactly the integrative function for which the xuebao form exists.

Readership and authorship

The journal's primary readership is the Chinese academic community: staff and students at Taishan University itself, scholars at other Shandong and Chinese universities working in the same fields, and specialists in Mount Tai studies wherever they are based. Because it publishes in Chinese, its natural audience is the domestic scholarly system, including the schoolteachers and local cultural workers in Tai'an and Shandong whose professional reading includes regional academic journals.

Authorship follows the usual xuebao pattern, drawing principally on the host university's academic staff across its colleges, supplemented by contributors from other institutions, particularly for its distinctive regional subjects. For Mount Tai culture and Dai Temple heritage, the journal can attract authors beyond its own campus, since Tai'an is the unavoidable centre for anyone working on those topics and its university is the local research base for them.

Assessment and continuing role

Assessed as a whole, the Journal of Taishan University is a comprehensive Chinese-language university journal whose general scope is given a distinctive edge by geography. Many provincial xuebao are interchangeable in profile; this one is not, because no other university journal is published at the foot of Mount Tai by the university that bears the mountain's name. Its Mount Tai culture and Dai Temple heritage content connects it to one of China's oldest and most continuously documented sacred landscapes, a UNESCO-listed property studied by historians, art historians, geologists, ecologists and tourism scholars alike.

The journal's continuing role is therefore twofold. Inside its university, it remains the house record of scholarship across nine disciplines, from a teacher-education-rooted institution that became a comprehensive undergraduate university in 2002. Outside, it serves as one of the local scholarly channels for Mount Tai studies, ensuring that research produced in Tai'an itself, by the community that lives with the mountain daily, has a regular place in print alongside the work of visiting national and international scholars.