At the end of the Qing Dynasty, under the national trend of promoting education and strengthening the country, Xu Handu, the governor of Sichuan, petitioned the Qing court to establish a secondary agricultural school in Sichuan.

In 1906 (the 32nd year of Guangxu reign), Sichuan Provincial Agricultural School (四川通省农业学堂) was established in an old warehouse on the right side of Baochuan Bureau inside Houzaimen in Chengdu.

The school started classes on June 1, 1906 and held an official opening ceremony on September 12.

In April 1910, the school moved to a new campus built at the agricultural experimental field near Wangjianglou outside the east gate of Chengdu.

In 1943, after investigating China’s higher education, British biochemist and historian of science and technology Joseph Needham praised agriculture as “the strongest discipline” of Sichuan University in his report, and highly affirmed the strength of the National Sichuan University College of Agriculture at that time.

Deng Xihou, then vice governor of Sichuan Province, Kang Naier, director of the Provincial Higher Education Bureau, Zhao Mengming, deputy director of the Provincial Agriculture Department, and Ya'an Party and government leaders attended the ceremony.

There were 1,134 students and 515 faculty and staff in the school, including 205 full-time teachers.In 1959, it began to recruit three-year master's degree students in rice cultivation, veterinary obstetrics and gynecology, corn breeding, livestock feeding and poultry breeding.

Since then, the school has officially entered the ranks of the first batch of “211 Project” key construction universities.

The university has 26 colleges, 4 research institutes (centers), and 2 state key laboratories, covering 10 major disciplines such as agriculture, science, engineering, economics, management, medicine, literature, education, law, and art.