It began as a privately run institution called the "University of the Eastern Land" and its name has changed six times since then.

Since Kunming was not directly involved in the fighting, a great many excellent Chinese scholars, in particular from Beijing and Nanjing, many of these with PhDs from well-known American universities, retreated from the northern war zone.

A cluster of famous scholars, such as Fei Xiaotong, Chu Tunan, Chen Xingshen, Hua Luogen, Yan Jici, Feng Youlan, Lü Shuxiang came to teach at Yunnan University, and thus gradually turned the institution into a general university that had exerted a certain degree of academic influence at home and abroad.

Again like all other Chinese universities, Yunnan experienced a difficult period from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s due to events such as the Cultural Revolution.

Its main campus faces the Green Lake Park, a winter haunt for the Siberian black-headed gull.

The campus is covered with the green shade of ginkgo and is surrounded by stretches of cherry and plum trees.

In the above-described major fields of study, History, Biology, Mathematical Science are established for the purpose of training teaching and research professionals at the national level (and Yunnan University is applying to the Ministry of Education for its approval to set up a state-level experimental base for the comprehensive quality training in liberal arts.)

Among its disciplinary branches, Yunnan University has two key state-level disciplinary groups under the current construction, sixteen key provincial-level disciplines, four doctorate degree conferring points, one post-doctorate-degree-related mobile station, forty-eight master's degree conferring points, three specialized degree (law, occupational education and MBA) conferring points, one state-level center for new product research and development, and one key laboratory of the Ministry of Education.

Yunnan University has from the very beginning attached great importance to the pursuit of scientific research, closely following international disciplines.

("Geobotany" is a term from Russian and continental European science that entails classifying and analyzing the geographical distribution of the flora of a province or nation; it is called "Phytogeography" in English-speaking countries).

library houses a collection of over 1.2 million books, some of which are rare copies of valuable historical literature.

The popularization and application of the major product Yunda-120 growth regulator produced by the Science and Technology Corporation has reached 67 billion square meters in terms of use in cultivated areas.

Biological Technology Corporation of Yunnan University is the first enterprise in China that owns an independent intellectual property right in the field of the single clone antibody research, and its products of contraceptive test paper, and sterility test paper have been adopted for codifying China's national standards.

In recent years, Yunda has established different levels of exchange relations with more than 50 institutions of higher learning and research organizations in more than twenty countries and regions such as United States, Great Britain, Russia, Japan, Australia, etc.