This article outlines the trajectory of China's higher education and its strategy of pioneering a brand-new smart e-learning environment that has functionally molded China into a hybrid educational hub. This paper chronicles the almanac of China's offline campus education, depicting how it technologically evolved into an e-learning home-campus nexus. A sequential mixed-methods design was employed to shed light on students' readiness levels toward China's newly implemented smart e-learning platform for tertiary education. The psychometric analyses of the Smart e-Learning Questionnaire and other parametric statistical tests were performed using the Rasch measurement model. Overall, there is strong evidence to suggest that the in-depth qualitative interviews captured more nuanced accounts of the participants' perceived reasons for their moderate level of readiness towards their novel home-campus e-learning course delivery. Evacuated campuses and virtual lessons have become the cliched representation of this pandemic. It is critical that e-learning offerings be contextualised in practical ways to invigorate equitable teaching strategies that can improve e-learning and support the success of China's higher education learning model for the post-pandemic agendum.