Most of China's elite universities were built by the state, top-down, as instruments of national policy. Xiamen University wasn't. It was built by one man's fortune: Tan Kah Kee, an overseas Chinese rubber-and-trading magnate based in Singapore, who funded and founded the school in 1921 — the first university in modern Chinese history built by an overseas Chinese individual rather than a government or a religious mission. The campus he built it on, wrapped around Xiamen Bay with hills on one side and the sea on the other, is still routinely called one of the most beautiful in China.
This page follows the same rule as the rest of this site's Xiamen coverage: the author has never set foot on the campus, and says so plainly rather than writing around it. Every figure below traces to Xiamen University's own admissions office, cross-checked where possible — including a genuinely good find, a direct official cost breakdown, which not every university guide on this site has had the benefit of.
01 — Built by a businessman, not a ministry
A university funded from a Singapore trading fortune
Tan Kah Kee left Fujian for Singapore as a teenager, built a business empire in rubber, shipping, and trade, and used a substantial share of that fortune to found Xiamen University in 1921 — years before the Communist Party existed, let alone directed education policy. He went on to found Jimei University as well, on the mainland side of the bay, making him the founding figure behind two of the city's universities rather than one.
That origin story still shapes the school's self-presentation today: Xiamen University markets itself, without much competition, as one of China's most scenic campuses — hills, sea, and the historic Siming campus buildings within a short walk of Gulangyu's ferry terminal. It's also why the school's own admissions materials lean harder into founder-biography and campus beauty than most of this site's other university guides do; that's a genuine part of how the institution presents itself, not an editorial embellishment added here.
02 — What this university is today
A comprehensive research university with real international reach
The scenery and the founder's-story marketing are real, but they sit on top of an institution with substantial research weight of its own. Xiamen University holds 211 and 985 status and is one of China's Double First-Class universities, with six national world-class-discipline selections as of 2022: chemistry, marine science, biology, ecology, statistics, and education. It spans four campuses — Siming (the historic main campus), Xiang'an, Zhangzhou, and a Malaysia campus established in 2013, the first full independent overseas campus built by a Chinese university. Six faculties, 34 colleges and departments, and 17 research institutes sit under it, with roughly 3,000 full-time faculty (74% at professor or associate-professor rank) including 35 members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences or Chinese Academy of Engineering.
19 disciplines rank in the global top 1% by ESI, with chemistry, materials science, and engineering specifically inside the top 1‰. Total enrollment runs past 46,000 — about 21,000 undergraduates, 19,000 master's students, and 5,700 doctoral candidates. The university reports formal partnerships with 270 institutions abroad, and runs 14 Confucius Institutes across 12 countries on five continents plus 42 affiliated Confucius Classrooms — among the largest such networks of any Double First-Class university in China.
Rankings disagree with each other more here than on most of this site's university pages: QS placed it #341 (2026 edition); the Academic Ranking of World Universities put it 101st in 2025; Times Higher Education had it 251st for 2026. That's a wide spread for one school, and it says more about how differently each methodology weights research citations versus institutional reputation than it does about any single "true" rank — treat all three as data points, not a verdict.
03 — Can you actually study here?
What an international applicant needs to know
Xiamen University's admissions office publishes an unusually direct official cost and program breakdown — better sourced, in this respect, than some other university guides on this site have had available. Here's what it confirms for the current cycle:
| Question | What Xiamen University's own materials say |
|---|---|
| Degree tracks, language options | Chinese-medium and English-medium bachelor's, master's, and doctoral programs, plus general/senior visiting-scholar tracks and a standalone Chinese-language program. English-medium options exist at every degree level, alongside a larger Chinese-taught offering. |
| Application system | All international-student applications go through the university's own online portal at application.xmu.edu.cn; separate published admissions brochures exist for bachelor's, master's, and doctoral applicants, updated annually. |
| Scholarships | Chinese Government Scholarships, Confucius Institute/Hanban scholarships, Fujian Provincial Government scholarships, Xiamen Tan Kah Kee Scholarships, and Xiamen University's own scholarships — full awards cover tuition, accommodation, a living allowance, and insurance; partial awards cover a subset. |
| Total current international enrollment | Not confirmed — the university's public admissions materials give a detailed institution-wide enrollment figure (46,000+) but we could not locate a current, single, cited total specifically for international students at time of writing. |
Source: Xiamen University's own Admissions Office site (admissions.xmu.edu.cn), retrieved 2026, cross-checked against the university's published 2025 international-student admissions brochures. Confirm current terms directly with Xiamen University's Admissions Office before applying.
Where the campus you land on matters
This isn't a minor administrative detail — it's the same island/mainland split this site's Xiamen city guide spends an entire section on. On-campus housing on the historic Siming campus (island side) is limited, and priority goes to full-scholarship recipients; other students are frequently housed on the newer Xiang'an or Zhangzhou campuses across the water instead, or arrange their own housing off-campus. Which campus you're assigned to shapes daily life — Siming puts you inside the postcard version of Xiamen; Xiang'an and Zhangzhou put you in the version most residents actually live in.
04 — What a year actually costs
Real official figures — a rarer thing than it should be
| Item | RMB/year | USD/year |
|---|---|---|
| Bachelor's, Chinese-mediumLiberal arts / other disciplines | 24,000–26,000 | ≈$3,333–3,611 |
| Bachelor's, English-mediumMBBS: ¥38,000; design programs: ¥90,000 | 38,000–90,000 | ≈$5,278–12,500 |
| Master's, Chinese-medium | 26,000–30,000 | ≈$3,611–4,167 |
| Master's, English-medium | 39,000–45,000 | ≈$5,417–6,250 |
| Doctoral, Chinese-mediumTuition waived in year 4 | 30,000–34,000 | ≈$4,167–4,722 |
| Doctoral, English-medium | 42,000–55,000 | ≈$5,833–7,639 |
| MealsCampus canteens | ≈12,000–18,000¥1,000–1,500/mo | ≈$1,667–2,500 |
| Student insuranceMandatory, flat rate | 800 | ≈$111 |
| On-campus housing, Zhangzhou campusQuad room | 1,100–1,200 | ≈$153–167 |
| On-campus housing, Xiang'an campusSuite of 4 double rooms | 1,600–4,000 | ≈$222–556 |
| On-campus housing, Siming campus2-person room, daily rate | ≈12,775–23,725¥35–65/day | ≈$1,774–3,295 |
| Off-campus, near SimingMonthly room rental | ≈30,000¥2,500/mo | ≈$4,167 |
All figures directly from Xiamen University's own Admissions Office cost page (admissions.xmu.edu.cn/Admissions/Costs.htm), current cycle as published, retrieved 2026 — not a third-party aggregator estimate. Application fee is a flat ¥400; course materials run ¥400–700/year separately. Utility charges for on-campus housing are billed separately and not included above. Converted at ¥7.2 = $1.
Look at the housing rows and the island/mainland split from §03 turns into real numbers: a year in a Zhangzhou-campus quad room can run under $170, while a comparable daily-rate room on the historic Siming campus can top $3,000 a year — and that's before considering that Siming spots are scarce and scholarship-prioritized in the first place. This is this site's Xiamen city-guide thesis playing out at the scale of a single dorm assignment.
Verify before budgeting — tuition and fee schedules are "subject to change upon approval by price regulators," in the university's own words. Treat every figure above as a strong current reference, not a locked-in number, and confirm directly with Xiamen University's Admissions Office before committing to anything.
05 — The honest brake
What this page can't tell you
A few things stay open rather than resolved:
- The author has never visited. Unlike this site's Dalian university guide, written by an actual graduate, this page is built entirely from the university's own published materials — real, current, and directly sourced, but not lived experience.
- Total international-student headcount isn't confirmed. Xiamen University publishes a detailed total enrollment figure but we couldn't locate an equally specific, current, cited number for the international-student share alone — flagged as an open gap rather than filled with a guess.
- Ranking spread is real, not a rounding error. QS #341, ARWU #101, and THE #251 for the same school in the same rough period reflects a genuine methodological gap between systems, not sloppy sourcing on this page's part — read §02's callout before treating any single number as definitive.
- Degree recognition back home. Whether a Xiamen University degree transfers cleanly into recognition or licensure elsewhere depends entirely on the field and the destination country. This page won't generalize an answer it can't verify for your specific case.
- Visa and residency rules. General direction only, never a guarantee — confirm directly with the university and your own country's authorities.
- Go straight to the source. For current admissions, language, and program details, Xiamen University's own Admissions Office site is the authority — not this page, not an agency, not a forum.
A businessman who left this coastline as a teenager came back with enough money to build a university on it. Everything on this page is downstream of that one fact.
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06 — The rest of Xiamen's universities
Xiamen University isn't the only one
Three other schools round out Xiamen's higher-education landscape — two of them, notably, on the mainland side of the water rather than the island:
Jimei University
Founded in 1918 by Tan Kah Kee himself — three years before Xiamen University — Jimei University traces back to a teachers' school and a fisheries/business school he built in Jimei District, on the mainland side of the bay. Merged into its present form in 1994, it's a provincial Double First-Class university with roughly 21,000–27,000 students and a genuinely distinctive credential: it's the only mainland Chinese institution qualified by the Ministry of Transport to train Taiwanese seafarers.
Huaqiao University
Jointly supported by the Ministry of Education, the United Front Work Department, and the Fujian provincial government, Huaqiao University (with a campus presence in Xiamen alongside its main Quanzhou campus) is built specifically around educating students from Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and the wider Chinese diaspora — reportedly hosting over 8,000 such students from more than 90 countries, among the largest international enrollments of any mainland university. Its engineering, chemistry, materials science, and computer science programs sit in the global top 5‰ by ESI.
Xiamen University of Technology
Founded in 1981 — the same year Xiamen's Special Economic Zone status was taking shape — as Lujiang Industrial University, this provincial school sits mainly in Jimei District with a smaller downtown campus, running about 63 undergraduate and graduate programs for roughly 20,000–21,000 students, with international students on campus since the 1990s.
These deserve their own full treatment. Coming as this guide grows.
07 — Questions people actually ask
Quick answers
When was Xiamen University founded?
In 1921, by overseas Chinese business leader Tan Kah Kee — the first university in modern Chinese history founded by an overseas Chinese individual, funded initially out of his own trading and rubber fortune in Singapore.
How much does Xiamen University cost for international students?
Chinese-medium bachelor's tuition runs ¥24,000–26,000/year; English-medium international master's programs run ¥39,000–45,000/year. On-campus meals run ¥1,000–1,500/month, insurance is a flat ¥800/year, and accommodation varies sharply by campus — as low as ¥1,100–1,200/year on the Zhangzhou campus versus a daily-rate system on the historic Siming campus.
How does Xiamen University rank internationally?
It's #341 in the QS World University Rankings 2026 edition, and 101st in the 2025 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) — a wide spread that reflects how differently the major ranking systems weight research output versus reputation.
Which Xiamen University campus will international students actually live on?
It depends on scholarship status. On-campus housing on the historic Siming campus (island side) is limited and prioritized for full-scholarship recipients; many other students are housed on the Xiang'an or Zhangzhou campuses, or arrange off-campus housing near Siming at roughly ¥2,500/month per room.
Has the author of this page actually studied at Xiamen University?
No — like this site's Xiamen city guide, this page is researched from a distance, from the university's own official admissions materials, and says so throughout rather than implying firsthand experience it doesn't have.
If you're considering it
Before you apply to Xiamen University
- Ask specifically which campus you'll be housed on before you commit — Siming, Xiang'an, and Zhangzhou are genuinely different daily-life experiences, not interchangeable dorm assignments.
- Budget for Xiamen's cost of living as a real, structural cost — the city guide linked below explains why rent and property prices here have repeatedly ranked among the least affordable in China relative to local wages.
- Don't assume campus beauty equals affordability. Xiamen University's marketing leans hard on scenery for good reason — but the surrounding city charges accordingly, as this site's Xiamen deep-dive documents in detail.
- Ask about degree recognition in your home country and field before you commit, rather than after you arrive.
- Treat every figure in this guide as dated the moment it's published. Confirm current terms directly with the university.