Classrooms in the caves: What an old university in Yan'an still teaches us

Recently, I climbed a hillside path in Qianqiaogou, south of Zhidan county in Yan'an city, Northwest China's Shaanxi province, to stand inside a row of cave dwellings that once served as classrooms.

The visit was part of "The Contemporary Value of Edgar Snow's Spirit", a program co-hosted by Xinhua News Agency and Peking University, and organized by the Xinhua Institute, marking 90 years since the Red Army's Long March and Edgar Snow's journey into northern Shaanxi that produced Red Star Over China.

I went expecting a history lesson and came away with a clearer thesis that education is most vital when societies face hardship. After visiting this remarkable site where one of China's earliest revolutionary educational institutions once operated under extraordinarily difficult conditions, I found myself reflecting not only on China's revolutionary past but also on a timeless lesson about the power of education.

The site is modest by any modern standard, with 11 cave dwellings, three tile-roofed houses, and a little over 3,000 square meters carved into a mountainside. This was the headquarters and student housing for the first department of the Chinese People's Anti-Japanese Red Army University, which was relocated here in July 1936 as the Party central committee itself moved to Zhidan county.

There were no proper desks, precious few textbooks, teachers, basic living necessities, and a shortage of buildings, and a war closing in from multiple directions. And yet, inside those caves, the Communist Party of China chose, at one of the most precarious moments in its history, to build a university.

As a teacher and researcher, what impressed me most was not simply the site's historical significance or the distinguished military leaders who once studied there. Instead, I was struck by a central question that shaped my visit: Why would a revolutionary movement, struggling for survival amid war and scarcity, devote so much attention to education?

The answer is clear and profoundly relevant to today's world: Education matters most when conditions are hardest.