61 years, 1.1 million eye visits a year, and the country’s only WHO eye centre
To walk into the Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center in Guangzhou is to step into what is, by clinical volume, the largest public eye hospital in China. The Center was founded in 1965 by Professors Chen Yaozhen and Mao Wenshu as the country's first university-affiliated eye hospital, and in 1983 it was expanded, with the approval of the Ministry of Health, into a dedicated national eye centre combining clinical care, teaching, research, and blindness prevention. Today it treats more than 1.1 million outpatient eye visits a year and performs more than 78,000 eye operations a year, numbers that no other Chinese eye hospital approaches. It is the only tertiary Grade-A specialised ophthalmic hospital administered directly by the National Health Commission. In the 2024 Fudan Hospital Specialty Reputation Rankings, the Center was named China's leading ophthalmology hospital, a position it has held for years.
The Center's role in the country is not just clinical. It hosts the only State Key Laboratory of Ophthalmology in China (established 2005 and now the National Key Laboratory of Ophthalmic Disease Prevention), and it is China's only World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Eye Health and Vision. It is the Asian secretariat of both the Asia-Pacific Academy of Ophthalmology and the Afro-Asian Academy of Ophthalmology. In 2024 the Nature Index ranked the Center the No.1 eye institution in the world by research output.
What the place actually looks like
Where most eye hospitals in the world are organised around one or two flagship procedures (refractive surgery, cataract), the Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center is organised around the full chain of eye disease. Its 20+ clinical subspecialties include cataract, glaucoma, corneal disease, retinal disease, ocular trauma, orbital disease and ocular oncology, oculoplastics, strabismus and amblyopia, paediatric and inherited eye disease, laser refractive surgery, neuro-ophthalmology, and traditional-Chinese-medicine ophthalmology. Its corneal transplant programme is among the largest in the world by annual case volume. The Center operates two campuses in Guangzhou — the original Quezhuang campus in Yuexiu District, and the newer Zhujiang New Town campus in Tianhe District, opened with a dedicated 18-storey clinical tower and an 8-storey research tower and 200 inpatient beds.
That structural choice — a single hospital that handles every kind of eye disease in every kind of patient, with the country's only national ophthalmic research laboratory attached — is the operational reason the Center has been able to lead the Chinese field for six decades. A patient who walks in with what looks like a routine cataract can be worked up in the same building for any coexisting retinal, corneal, or neurological problem, by teams that have seen more of the same case than any other Chinese team has.
Why it became No.1
Three factors explain the Center's grip on the Fudan ranking. First, the historical first-mover position: the Center was the country's first university-affiliated eye hospital (1965) and its first national eye centre (1983), giving it a head start of more than a decade over any competitor in building clinical subspecialty coverage. Second, an unmatched research output: the State Key Laboratory of Ophthalmology is the only one of its kind in the country; the Center published the first lens-regeneration study from a Chinese ophthalmic institution in Nature in 2016; and in 2024 the Nature Index ranked the Center the No.1 eye institution in the world. Third, and most distinctive internationally, the Center is China's only WHO Collaborating Centre for Eye Health and Vision, which gives it a formal role in the WHO's global blindness-prevention programmes and a network of clinical and research collaborations across Africa and Asia.
That history matters for international patients because the Center is the only place in China where a complex eye problem can be worked up against every relevant subspecialty on a single campus, with the country's largest corneal transplant programme, its largest retinal surgery programme, and its only national ophthalmic research laboratory attached.
What this means for international patients
For a foreign patient considering eye treatment in China, the Zhongshan Ophthalmic Center is the place that handles the cases the rest of the country refers out. The Center runs an international patient office and a multilingual case-coordination service, and in 2026 it was selected as one of the first group of Guangdong Province international-medical-service pilot hospitals. It is the host of the Asia-Pacific Academy of Ophthalmology's Asian office, which means its clinical protocols are a reference for the wider Asia-Pacific region. The hospital's wider campus includes the Sun Yat-sen University medical school, which means international patients benefit from the depth of the wider university hospital system in handling the systemic conditions that sometimes accompany eye disease.
The Center's specialty areas are anchored to internationally recognised strengths: cataract surgery (where its annual case volume is the largest in China), corneal transplantation (where its annual case volume is among the largest in the world), retinal disease (where its surgical volume and its clinical trial participation are the largest in China), glaucoma (where its surgical volume is the largest in the country), and paediatric and inherited eye disease (where its genetic diagnosis programme is the largest in China). The Center's main campus is at 7 Jinsui Road, Tianhe District, Guangzhou. This profile is editorial information based on the sources linked below, not treatment advice; individual outcomes depend on the eye condition, the stage, the team, and the patient.