By summer 1937, the
Imperial Japanese Army had bombed
Nankai University to the ground in
Tianjin and occupied areas including the campuses of
Peking University and
Tsinghua University. These three universities retreated to
Changsha, the capital city of
Hunan province (about 900 miles away from Beijing) to unite. By the middle of December 1937, many students had to leave to fight the Japanese when the city of
Nanjing fell to enemy forces. Japanese forces bombed Changsha in February 1938. The 800 staff faculty and students who were left had to flee and made the 1,000 mile journey to
Kunming, capital of
Yunnan province in China's remote and mountainous southwest. In August 1937, the Ministry of Education combined the relocated National Beijing University, National Qinghua University, and Nankai University into National Southwest Associated University (''Xi'nan Lianda
).'''' The university's mission focused on preserving Chinese culture. In 1938, while China's Ministry of Education required all higher education institutions to make "General History of China" a compulsory course for all first-year students, there was no suitable textbook available. With the encouragement of his colleague
Chen Mengjia,
Ch'ien Mu, then a professor at Lianda, began writing
the Outline of National History (國史大綱). Lianda alumni include the Nobel Prize laureates
Yang Chen-Ning and
Tsung-Dao Lee Aftermath Following the war, the majority of the Lianda community had returned to their north China campuses in Beijing and Tianjin. == See also ==