Yunnan University boasts a long history in the teaching and research of ethnology and anthropology. As early as the late 1920s, Mr. Wu Wenzao and Mr.Yang Chengzhi, both inseminating professors of Chinese social anthropology, taught courses and conducted research in anthropology and ethnology here. In the 1930s, Prof. Fang Guoyu and Prof. Lin Chunshen founded the Center for Southwest China Cultural Studies and edited the journal of Southwest China Frontier, on the basis of which the eleven-volume Southwest China Cultural Series were later published. In the 1930s, the Department of Sociology was set up, which was successively chaired by such distinguished professors as Wu Wenzao, Fei Xiaotong, and Yang Kun. These scholars conducted extensive studies on the ethnic groups living in southwest China, and published numerous books and reports in the field of anthropology and ethnology. Many of these publications have won acclaim from scholars both home and abroad and have remained academically valid even up to now. In the 1950s, students and faculty members of the department participated in the nation-wide survey on the historyand society of ethnic minorities. Their work contributed greatly to the establishment of the ethnicity of Yunnan's minority groups and to the serial publication of books on these groups, which later became the basis on which the government stipulated policies on affairs concerning minority nationalities. The brilliant works by such professors as Yang Kun, Tian Rukang, Fang Guoyu, Jiang Yingliang and Ma Yao were an embodiment of the excellent tradition of the ethnologists working in the university, a tradition which later made Yunnan University a national center for ethnologicalstudies.