Shuimu Tsinghua (Chinese: 水木清华; pinyin: shuǐmù qīnghuá; abbreviated as SMTH) BBS is the first and one of the most popular bulletin board system sites among the universities in China. Hosted by Tsinghua University, it is recognized for its diversity and depth of topics. Access to the SMTH BBS was restricted to on-campus IPs since March 16, 2005, effectively blocking away a substantial portion of its contributors, ranging from graduates living overseas to students from other universities in China. A small protest was held at elite university against tightening government censorship on the Internet. Early in 2006, the SMTH BBS reopened itself to the alien IPs from outside Tsinghua University, available to those who would confirm their identification using a valid email account. However, a large number of its discussion groups are still under tight control, refusing visits from the outside world.
1995 In early August 1995, ace set up a BBS site on a Linux/i386 machine in one of the laboratories of the Tsinghua University. Later, ming and lucky joined the endeavor and transferred the system onto a Sun SPARCstation 20 with 64M memory. On August 8, the BBS formally declared open, and was named "Shui Mu Tsing Hua", often abbreviated as SMTH, which in Chinese means "Water is clear, with trees in florescence", referring to a line in an ancient poem and an actual site in Tsinghua University. The IP address then was 166.111.1.11. In October, SMTH started to provide MUD service. Since November 27, SMTH was accessible through a service of World Wide Web (WWW). At the end of 1995, the number of the registered users at SMTH reached around several dozen.
1996 Between March and April, the SMTH community organized a kite-flying party and received a large publicity nationwide as CCTV (China Central Television) recorded and aired the event in its Our Generation program. SMTH was accessible to the entire campus community around the end of April and saw its traffic peaked. The number of online visitors often ran to the triple digits. September 18, 1996, radical opinions regarding Diaoyu Islands (as known in China, Senkaku Islands as known in Japan) issue appeared on many BBSes across China. The government reacted by closely monitoring these BBSes. Two sites in Peking University were temporarily shut down. SMTH was closed for one day. The following month, SMTH closed its Military, History, Salon and Time-Space Report discussion groups. At the end of October, a new system named FireBird BBS replaced the former one. Before that, the system administrators did a massive overhaul on the original Firebird system. In November, the second version of the WWW-BBS architecture was implemented. In December, SMTH experienced a severe hard drive breakdown, resulting in the loss of two months worth of information.
1997 In January, having recovered from its hard drive failure, SMTH reopened without WWW access. At the same time, Tsinghua University BBS Regulations came into effect. At the end of February, due to the death of Deng Xiaoping, SMTH was temporarily closed. It reopened again on the third of April, with its IP address changed to 202.112.58.200. Late June, the SMTH community launched a fund-raising campaign for a student who fell seriously ill. Late September, the SMTH BBS administration was established and began its first term. SMTH's management and maintenance became regularized.
1998 On March 4th, SMTH was again closed during the period when both the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference were on session. It reopened on April 1. In June, the site experienced another scheduled shut-down. When it was online again on June 15, users organized an offline get-together, a party they called happy98. On December 9, in the atmosphere of the Asian Games, SMTH created a temporary discussion group devoted to the news and analysis of the event, setting a precedent example for all major sports events to follow.
1999 On May 8th, the US attacked Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia. Many users simultaneously expressed their disdain on SMTH, causing a surge in the site's traffic. On December 18th, SMTH acquired the domains smth.org and smth.edu.cn.
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