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Hu Bangding was lucky that Japanese planes didn't drop bombs during his entrance exam 73 years ago.
"My life would be far different otherwise," says the 92-year-old retired civil servant in Beijing.
"If bombing occurred within the first hour, the exam was invalid. If it was within the second hour, the score still counted," he recalls.
Under threat of bombardment, he completed his exams to enroll at a university in the southwest city of Chongqing. Shortly after, he was accepted by the history department of National Southwest Associated University (NSAU).
Unknown to him, he was signing up for one of the country's greatest scholarly legacies.
An alliance between Beijing University, Tsinghua University and Nankai University during the war, the NSAU was formed after the decision to move the universities southward in 1937.
Spending 9 years in southern Hunan and Yunnan provinces, the coalition was a place where Chinese masters in all subjects gathered, producing two Nobel Prize laureates and eight scientists who worked on the atomic bomb.
"The university trained many talented people who later contributed to building new China after Japan was defeated," Hu says.
"The eight-year war against Japanese invasion didn't stop college education in China. It was a miracle."
The odyssey
The journey south was rigorous.
The three universities first moved 1,500km from Beijing to Changsha, capital city of Hunan province.
"It was not an easy decision to move out of Beijing and Tianjin," says Chen Pingyuan, a scholar from Beijing University who spent years researching NSAU.
"In the flames of war, some scholars left their families, some abandoned their collections."
More than 1,000 students walked the entire distance carrying documents and science instruments, begging for food along the way.
University classes began on November 1, the day Japanese fighter planes first began hovering above Changsha.
A year later, Japanese troops began occupying cities and professors and students had to move again. This time they were bound for Kunming.
The 1,350-kilometer odyssey started in February 1938, according to the diary of Wen Yiduo, poet and literature professor with Tsinghua University.
"We spent 68 days on the way, arriving on April 28," he wrote. "Scenery was beautiful, with all kinds of plants and animals, all types of houses and tools, and people dressed in all fashions."
They had to walk 30 to 40 km a day, spending the night in temples, monasteries, farmer's shanties or even out in the open.
During the journey students from different departments conducted research; the sociology students learned about rural China, economic students asked locals about production and livelihood, literature students collected ballads and geology students examined mines, fossils and rock formations.
Zha Liangzheng, a junior student from Tsinghua, carried an English-Chinese dictionary on the way. He spent his time memorizing all the entries on a page, tearing pages out to mark progress. When they arrived in Kunming, a majority of the pages were gone.
He later became a famous poet and translator, translating Don Jon and Eugene Onegin into Chinese, as well as works from William Yeats, Alexander Poushkin and Percy Shelley.
The lessons
Despite its hardships, NSAU was perhaps the best school at the time.
"NSAU laid the foundation for every achievement I made," says physicist Yang Zhenning, a 1957 Nobel Prize winner known as Chen-Ning Franklin Yang in the west.
He still remembers teaching in a temporary classroom in Yunnan that had no glass for the windows. "On windy days, we had to hold down the paper on the desk, which would otherwise blow away," he says.
The steel roof of classrooms became noisy on rainy days, sometimes too noisy for students to hear the teacher. One day, a professor had to suspend his class, writing "let's enjoy the rain" on the blackboard.
Air raids provided constant interruption.
"During the worst of it, students had class before 10 a.m. and after 4 p.m., to avoid air attacks," Hu Bangding recalls.
He remembered several anecdotes about NSAU's professors.
"At that time, we barely had enough food," Hu says. Students would rush to the canteen to compete for their fair share. "Professor Chen Daisun had two watches, with which he assured us that we would be dismissed on time." Chen became a renowned economist.
"History professor Wu Han could always find connections between historical events and the latest news."
The professors had one thing in common: they were strict.
During eight years, close to 8,000 students passed the entrance exam to enroll in NSAU, but only 3,800 graduated.
On August 14, 1945, when Japan surrendered, everyone in the university was ecstatic. They drummed on everything that could make sound -- basins, lunch boxes and cups -- shouting and singing to celebrate.
Mathematician Hua Luogeng, who never drank alcohol, was found lying drunk on his doorstep holding a roasted chicken.
Wen Yiduo, who had grown his beard for eight years, shaved his face.
The legacy
The universities moved back to Beijing in 1946.
A monument at Yunnan Normal University captures NSAU's history, in an inscription by famous philosopher Feng Youlan. On another side of the monument are 800 carved names of soldiers who quit the university to join the army. The real number was believed much larger.
There are similar monuments at Beijing University, Tsinghua University and Nankai University where people lay flowers on special occasions such as Youth Day on May 4.
Chen Pingyuan believes NSAU epitomized China's education during the war. Dozens of universities have similar tales of moving campus in that period.
"During the war, the number of high schools grew from 108 to 141, the number of students rose from 41,992 to 83,498," he says.
"It is a miracle in the world of education history. No other country saw such a large-scale migration of professors and students during World War II."
It was a decade where students, angered by the atrocities of invaders, were eager to learn in order to build a better country, while teachers had nothing else to do but teach. "Students and teachers were both dedicated, and the migration brought them closer." Chen says.
The migration also brought better education resources to western China, helping balance education in China, Chen added.
Hu Bangding is nostalgic of the academic freedom of the time, asserting they set the standard for modern universities.
"Years of education, generations of contribution," he says.
