National Tsing Hua University was founded in 1911 as Tsing Hua Imperial College , a junior college located in Peking. The college gained full university status in 1925 and thereafter in 1928 was renamed National Tsing Hua University. In 1956 when the University was relocated to Hsinchu , it established its first institute, the Graduate Institute of Nuclear Science , which was then made up of three divisions. The Physics Division was one of them.

    The Department of Physics is a succession of the Physics Division. It admitted its first B.S. students in 1965 , the year it came into being. In 1966 , the Graduate Institute of Physics was set up with a Master's program. It initiated the doctoral program the next year. In 1965, the Institute was chosen to be the site of the Physics Research Center ( now the Physics Research Promotion Center ) of the National Science Council. Since then, the Institute has been in charge of the activities of the Center to promote physics research throughout the country by, for example, establishing a centralized library to serve all universities.