The predecessor of Southwest Jiaotong University is the Beiyang Railway Official School at Shanhaiguan, which was founded in 1896. It is the first engineering education institution of higher learning in China and one of the two earliest sources of "Jiaotong University". In 1952, some faculty members were transferred to Tsinghua University, Tianjin University and other sister universities; Moved to Sichuan in 1964; In 1972, it was renamed Southwest Jiaotong University. Southwest Jiaotong University is a university directly under the Ministry of Education and a national key university jointly built by the Ministry of Education and Sichuan Province.