The three rank as mainland China's best universities in Times Higher Education's 2026 World University Rankings. Tsinghua places 12th globally, Peking 13th and Fudan 36th.
"I applied just to test myself, so when the results came I was both surprised and happy," Phuong, 18, said. "I think I was lucky, but I'm also proud that the effort paid off."
Phuong started learning Chinese in grade 6 at her parents' urging. She had not settled on it as a long-term path then, she said, and studied only casually.
It was at the start of grade 9, when she decided to sit the entrance exam for a specialized Chinese class, that she began working at it seriously.
In her first lessons with Nguyen Thi Hong Nhan, a university lecturer in Chinese, she could not read a single character, got every grammar exercise wrong and mispronounced the words she did know.
