THE WRITING DESK OF ZHUHAI
1 min readZhuhai Campus, Jinan University (JNU)
According to Chinese”feng shui” theory, Banzhang Mountain is the”writing desk” of Zhuhai. If the statement holds water, then the Zhuhai campus of Jinan University is the northwest corner of the “desk”.
The first piece in the city’s”university jigsaw”, the campus relocated from Tangjiawan to Qianshan area in 2000. The main road is a green walk clad in dense foliage and stretching from behind the white, European-style, arched gate into the depths of the campus. At the end of the walk is Sun-Moon Lake, obviously wordplay forming an allusion to the Ming(the Chinese character”ming” is combination of “sun” and moon”) Lake in the university’s’ headquarters in Guangzhou.
Because of the university’s special enrollment tradition that dates back to 1906, when the school was based in Nanjing and opened exclusively to Chinese returnees and students from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, the Zhuhai campus is an inheritor of the university’s strong Western architectural aesthetics, as can be seen from the arched main gate, the lakeside Baroque-style library and a petite Roman Forum.
The university’s’ library network is so well-establis that the resources at each division can be shared not only on an intercollegia basis but by people outside the university system.
Students at JNU have a lot to brag about, including a highly Westernized campus culture flavored by fairs and festivals rarely found in other universities on the Chinese mainland.
