Nankai University was founded in Tianjin by the famous patriotic educators, Zhang Bo Lin (1876-1951) and Yen Fansun(1860-1920), in 1919. In August 1937, Nankai University, Peking University and Tsinghua University merged to form "Changsha Temporary University". At the beginning of 1938, the temporary university moved to Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan Province, changing its name to the National Southwestern Associated University. In 1946, following the victory of the Anti-Japanese War, Nankai University moved back to Tianjin City.

Nankai University is a multidiscipline university directly under the Ministry of Education. On December 25, 2000, the Ministry of Education and the Tianjin Municipal Government signed an agreement to jointly develop Nankai University. As a result, Nankai University is now one of the National Key Universities in the 21st century.

Nankai University set up many majors including Human Sociology, Natural Sciences, Technical Sciences, Business Administration Sciences, Life Sciences, Medical Technology and so on. It has altogether 16 specialized faculties as well as graduate research institutes, continuing education programs, professional institutes, the modern distant learning institutes, and a strong physical education department. These combined faculties offer its students the option of 55 BA programs, 114 Master programs, 75 PhD programs, and 11 provincial-level key studies.

The enrollment consists of 20,000 students, among whom 9,193 are undergraduates, 957 are students enrolled in its special programs, 2,582 are Master's candidates, and 1,028 are PhD candidates. Furthermore, it has 715 foreign students, and there are 5,676 students in its continuing education program.

The university covers an area of 1,458,694 square meters,with 765,965 square meters of building areas. It has 7 national research laboratories, several computer centers with Internet access, a communication system spanning the entire campus and nearly 100 teaching laboratories. It has 2 libraries and a professors' library possessing over 2.88 million books, 528,000 of which are foreign-language books. Students at Nankai have access to over 20,000 journals and publications.

Nankai University is a center of education and scientific research. It is an international influential university with excellent reputation worldwide.