10 Yuan Yuelu Academy

Yuelu Academy in Changsha, founded in 976 AD during the Northern Song dynasty, is one of the four great academies of classical Chinese scholarship. It survived repeated destruction — most devastatingly during the Taiping Rebellion and again during the Second Sino-Japanese War — and was absorbed into what became Hunan University in 1926, making it arguably the oldest continuously operating site of higher education in China.

This coin belongs to a Chinese mint series commemorating ancient academies, issued in the mid-2000s when the People's Bank was aggressively expanding its cultural commemorative program for collector export markets.