A ceremony was held last Friday to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the High-level Tibetan Buddhism College of China in Beijing, capital of China.

Zhang Yijiong, Executive Vice Minister of the United Front Work Department of CPC (the Communist Party of China) Central Committee, was present and gave a speech at the ceremony.

Zhang Yijiong said the past 30 years has seen the college create a new model to train a number of monks by combining together traditional monastery teaching method with modern academy education, contributing a lot to the inheritance and development of Tibetan Buddhism.

The ceremony was presided over by Wang Zuoan, director of the State Administration for Religious Affairs of the People's Republic of China (PRC), and attended by more than 180 representatives from Buddhism colleges in Tibet and Tibetan-inhabited areas in Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan and Yunan Province.

Proposed by the 10th Panchen Lama and Zhao Puchu, the then director of the Buddhist Association of China, the High-level Tibetan Buddhism College of China was founded in Beijing on September 1, 1987.

In 2004, it established the advanced title ranking system of Tibetan Buddhism and there are currently 148 monks who have earned advanced titles and 100 monks have become teaching masters or hold a post in Buddhist monasteries and organizations.