Tsinghua University, a comprehensive institute of science and engineering, was founded with reparation money from the United States in 1900. It was built on the site of Tsinghua Garden, an imperial villa in the Ming and Qing dynasty.

A total of 7,600 undergraduates and 750 graduate students now take classes in 16 departments covering applied and theoretical engineering, technology and mathematics. Some 87 labs and nine factories are used for teaching and research. The library (with 2 million volumes and 3,000 journals) has exchanged with more than 200 universities and research institutes abroad.