N University
DecodedN University is both an institution with a history of public controversy and a place where the novel’s private and political strands converge. Founded as Lillie’s Academy of Mathematics in C City, it became known for admitting women, for the mathematical achievements associated with its community, and for a department regarded as among the country’s best. Later, its classrooms and campus mark successive turns in Rong Jinzhen’s life: his accelerated education, his scientific work, and his departure for Unit 701.
From Lillie’s Academy to N University
Young Lillie used silver left to him by Grandmother Rong to open a school in the provincial capital after returning from his studies. The academy, later the predecessor of N University, had a practical beginning rooted in family support; its public identity, however, was shaped by a decision that provoked opposition. Young Lillie insisted that women should be admitted, despite the prevailing attitudes and the risk that the authorities might close the school.
For its first years, the academy attracted gawking visitors as much for the novelty of women students as for its teaching. The Rong family’s official genealogy offered a reason the school survived the uproar: its early female students belonged to the family’s principal branch. Keeping the experiment within the family helped blunt gossip, while the controversy itself drew wider attention. In this account, the academy’s reputation did not arise in spite of the scandal alone; public resistance helped make the school conspicuous.
A second source of recognition was Rong Youying, Young Lillie’s niece. She entered the academy at eleven and, at twelve, competed against an expert abacist. Her unusual speed at calculation made her a public marvel and connected the school’s reputation to a specific mathematical talent. Later, while studying at Cambridge University, she designed a version of Newton’s Mathematical Bridge requiring 388 nails. After the Xinhai Revolution, she returned to her alma mater to head its mathematics department, by then under the name N University. In the summer of 1913, Sir Joseph Larmor, president of the Newtonian Mathematical Society, brought a 1:250 model of her design to China; the bridge was constructed on the university grounds, renewing attention to the institution and its mathematical work.
The model did not survive the university’s destruction. In October 1943, Japanese bombing burned N University to the ground, and the Model of the Mathematical Bridge Designed by Rong Youying was lost in the fire. Rong Youying herself had died twenty-nine years earlier, the year after Sir Joseph Larmor’s visit, before she was forty. The damaged campus thus carries a history in which institutional distinction, individual achievement, and physical loss are closely joined.
A mathematics department and a student’s education
N University’s mathematics department was described as a cradle of the country’s strongest mathematicians and as one of the best in the world. That reputation gives context to Rong Jinzhen’s progress through its educational system. After his mathematical ability became apparent in primary school, Young Lillie initially resisted placing him among much older pupils, concerned that isolation and premature academic pressure might damage his social development. But teachers at the affiliated high school found his questions increasingly difficult to answer, and he began skipping grades.
Rong Jinzhen passed the university entrance examinations with full marks in mathematics and ranked seventh across the province. He entered N University’s mathematics department. The university was not merely the next step in a sequence of institutions: he remained there through a serious illness and returned to his studies afterward, rejoining his original classmates rather than beginning again as a freshman.
His recovery changed the pattern of his learning. At home, he read widely beyond mathematics, borrowing more than two hundred books from the university library in one term across subjects including philosophy, literature, economics, art, and military science. He skipped classes, including some taught by his sister, yet finished the first term after his return at the top of the class by a considerable margin. His expanding interests eventually led him to a graduation thesis on a political problem, a subject that other professors found difficult to supervise. The account emphasizes that Rong Jinzhen wrote the thesis himself; Young Lillie recommended reference books and supplied its introduction.
Research, recruitment, and departure
After the thesis was published, Young Lillie made an unexplained trip to Beijing. The decisions that followed linked the university to a new research program: Young Lillie was permitted to resign as chancellor, government funding was provided to establish a computer research unit at N University, and he was assigned responsibility for setting it up. He interviewed prospective staff but judged none to meet Rong Jinzhen’s standard. Rong Jinzhen became the unit’s first recruit; the others hired worked largely as his assistants. That arrangement prompted gossip that the internationally oriented research unit had been monopolized by the Rong family, set against Young Lillie’s record of refusing to appoint relatives during his years in office.
The university’s research ambitions were not presented as an uncomplicated success. In the summer of 1956, Young Lillie decided that Rong Jinzhen should leave the work. He explained that the research had encountered serious problems and that he did not want a gifted young man to risk his future on a path he believed offered little prospect of success. The decision was widely discussed on campus, but observers did not know why Young Lillie was willing to let Rong Jinzhen go or why the limping visitor who came to take him away had appeared.
The visitor was Zheng the Gimp, sent to recruit talent for the cryptography division in Unit 701. His connection to N University went back to his youth. After meeting Young Lillie through his maternal grandfather, he attended the university’s affiliated high school and spent a year at the university before beginning his revolutionary career. Fifteen years later, he returned on a talent search. Young Lillie could not tell him the nature of the work, but recommended Rong Jinzhen, whose abilities he trusted. Zheng judged the recommendation correct after meeting him.
The recruitment scene places Zheng in a campus briefly emptied by a student assembly about the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army. He had planned to stay at the university guest house and asked his driver to return three days later. As students streamed out of the auditorium, they moved carefully around him without realizing that his special shoe concealed the difference in his legs. The episode makes the campus more than a backdrop: Zheng’s memories of his student years and his encounter with the present-day university meet at the moment he comes to recruit Rong Jinzhen.
The campus as a threshold
At five in the morning on 11 June 1956, Rong Jinzhen left N University in a jeep for a destination his family did not know. Before leaving, he asked the old couple who had raised him for permission to change his name to Rong Jinzhen. The university had been his home and workplace for years, and his departure marked a separation from that established life. The only contact address left behind was Box No. 36, making the new destination feel both remote and, in the family’s imagination, potentially close at hand.
N University therefore gathers several kinds of passage into one institutional history. A family-funded academy becomes a public university; a contested experiment in admitting women becomes a source of fame; Rong Youying’s bridge design carries that reputation beyond China; and, generations later, Rong Jinzhen moves from mathematics and computer research into secret cryptographic work. The campus’s significance lies in these crossings as much as in its buildings: it is where learning is cultivated, recognized, organized into research, and finally left behind.
