University of Hong Kong
The 'University of Hong Kong' is a public university in Pok Fu Lam, Hong Kong. It was founded in 1887 as the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese by the London Missionary Society and formally established as the University of Hong Kong in 1911. It is the oldest tertiary institution in Hong Kong.
The university was established and proposed by Governor Sir Frederick Lugard in an effort to compete with the other Great Powers opening universities in China. The university's governance consists of three bodies: the Court, the Council, and the Senate. These three bodies all have their own separate roles. The Court acts as the overseeing and legislative body of the university, the Council acts as governing body of the University, and the Senate as the principal academic authority of the university.
The university currently has ten academic faculties and 20 residential halls and colleges for its students, with English being its main medium of instruction and assessment.
The university has educated many notable alumni in many fields. Among them is Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the Republic of China, a graduate of the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese, the predecessor of HKU. Notable alumni in the field of politics include Anson Chan, Carrie Lam, Jasper Tsang and Regina Ip.
History
Founding
The origins of the University of Hong Kong can be traced back to the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese, founded in 1887 by Ho Kai. It was renamed the Hong Kong College of Medicine in 1907. The college was later incorporated as HKU's medical school in 1911.The University of Hong Kong was founded in 1911. The colony's governor, Sir Frederick Lugard, first proposed in January 1908 during a graduation ceremony at St Stephen's College to establish a university in Hong Kong to compete with the other Great Powers opening universities in China, most notably Germany, which had just opened the Tongji German Medical School in Shanghai. Sir Lugard saw the establishment of the university as an opportunity to promote British culture to China and the Chinese people through education, in turn enhancing Britain's influence in the Far East. He quoted saying, "We must either now take those opportunities or leave them for others to take...". Sir Hormusjee Naorojee Mody, an Indian Parsi businessman in Hong Kong, learned of Lugard's plan and pledged to donate towards the construction and towards other costs. The Hong Kong Government and the business sector in southern China, which were both equally eager to learn "secrets of the West's success", also gave their support. The Government contributed a site at West Point. Swire Group contributed to endow a chair in Engineering, in addition to thousands of dollars in equipment. Along with donations from other donors including the British government and companies such as HSBC, Lugard finally had enough to fund the building of the university.
Charles Eliot was appointed the university's first vice-chancellor. As Governor of Hong Kong, Lugard laid the foundation stone of the Main Building on 16 March 1910. The university was incorporated in Hong Kong as a self-governing body of scholars on 30 March 1911 and had its official opening ceremony on 11 March 1912. It was founded as an all-male institution; women were admitted for the first time ten years later.
The school opened with three founding faculties: Arts, Engineering, and Medicine. The Faculty of Medicine was previously founded as the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese by the London Missionary Society in 1887. Of the College's early alumni, the most renowned was Sun Yat-sen, who led the 1911 Revolution, which transformed China from an empire to a republic. In December 1916, the university held its first convocation, with 23 graduates and five honorary graduates.
Move towards Chinese cultural education, and WW2
After the Canton–Hong Kong strikes of 1925 and 1926, the government moved towards greater integration of Eastern culture, increasing the number of Chinese courses. In 1927, a degree in Chinese was created. Donations from wealthy businessmen Tang Chi Ngong and Fung Ping Shan – after whom two campus buildings are named – triggered an emphasis on Chinese cultural education. In 1937, the Queen Mary Hospital opened. It has served as the university's teaching hospital ever since. In 1941, the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong caused damage to university buildings, and the university closed until 1945; during this period, the university's medical school moved to Chengdu.1945 to 2001
After the end of the Second World War, the university reopened and investment in law and the social sciences increased as post-war reconstruction efforts began in earnest. The Faculty of Social Sciences was established in 1967 and the Department of Law in 1969. The student population in 1961 was 2,000, quadrupled from 1941, and in 1980 the number of students exceeded 5,500.In 1958, the librarian of University of Hong Kong, Mrs. Dorothea Scott, organized a meeting of over 40 library practitioners at the Fung Ping Shan Library on 3 April to determine and establish a library association for Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Library Association.
In 1982, the Faculty of Dentistry, based at the Prince Philip Dental Hospital, was established. To this day, it remains Hong Kong's only faculty training dental professionals. In 1984, both the School of Architecture and School of Education became fully-fledged faculties and in the same year the Faculty of Law was created. The Faculty of Business and Economics was established in 2001 as the university's tenth and youngest faculty.
After 1989, the Hong Kong government began to emphasise local tertiary education in order to retain local students who would otherwise have studied abroad in the United Kingdom. Student places and course variety were greatly increased in preparation for the handover of Hong Kong. By 2001, the number of students had grown to 14,300 and the number of degree courses to over a hundred.
2001 to present
In 2002, Growing with Hong Kong: The University and Its Graduates — The First 90 Years was published by the Hong Kong University Press as a study of the impact of HKU's graduates on Hong Kong.In January 2006, despite protest from a portion of students and alumni, the Faculty of Medicine was renamed as the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine
"to recognize the generosity of Mr Li and his Foundation as well as the wish of the donors to support, in addition to the general development of the University, research and academic activities in medicine."
On 16 August 2011, Li Keqiang, Vice Premier of the People's Republic of China, began a three-day visit to promote development between Hong Kong and mainland China. The university was locked down. The mishandling by the police force caused the Hong Kong 818 incident. In a statement to the HKU community, the university vice-chancellor Lap-Chee Tsui admitted that the security arrangements could have been better planned and organised, and apologised to students and alumni for not having been able to prevent the incident. He assured them that "the University campus belongs to students and teachers, and that it will always remain a place for freedom of expression". On 30 August 2011, the university council resolved to set up a panel to review issues arising from the vice premier's visit, to improve arrangements and to set up policies for future university events that are consistent with its commitment to freedom of expression.
From 2010 to 2012, the university celebrated its 100th anniversary and the opening of the Centennial Campus at the western end of the university site in Pokfulam. The University of Hong Kong–Shenzhen Hospital, one of the two teaching hospitals of the university, also opened in 2011.
On 10 April 2015, HKU declared itself as the first university in the world to join HeForShe, a UN Women initiative urging men to achieve more female rights. The university promised that it would triple the number of female dean-level members by 2020, so that more than 1 out of every 5 deans would be women.
On 15 December 2017, the university's governing council appointed University of California, Berkeley nanoscience professor Xiang Zhang to the posts of President and Vice-Chancellor with effect from January 2018. Zhang was the first vice-chancellor of the university born in mainland China and educated to undergraduate degree level there.
On 4 September 2023, the University announced the appointment of Fraser Stoddart, a chemist and Nobel Laureate, as a Chair Professor. Stoddart has been a Board of Trustees Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University, IL, USA for the past 16 years. Stoddart's ground-breaking research has garnered numerous accolades and awards, including the prestigious 2007 King Faisal International Prize in Science. In 2016, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Bernard L. Feringa and Jean-Pierre Sauvage for their work on the design and synthesis of molecular machines. HKU was "deeply saddened" to report the passing of Stoddart on 31 December 2024, at the age of 82.
On 17 October 2025, the University announced the appointment of Ferenc Krausz as Chair Professor at the Department of Physics. Krausz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Pierre Agostini and Anne L'Huillier in 2023 "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter." They generated and measured the first attosecond light pulse and used it to capture electron motion inside atoms, marking the birth of attophysics.
2015 political interference
The HKU Council made headlines in 2015 for alleged political interference behind the selection process for a new pro-vice chancellor. A selection committee unanimously recommended the council appoint Johannes Chan to the post, which involved the responsibility for staffing and resources, and which had been left vacant for five years. Chan, the former dean of the Faculty of Law, was a distinguished scholar in constitutional law and human rights and "a vocal critic on Hong Kong's political reform issues". Owing to his liberal political stance, Chan was roundly criticised by Communist Party-controlled media including Wen Wei Po, Ta Kung Pao, and Global Times, which together published at least 350 articles attacking him.Customarily the HKU Council accepts the recommendations of search committees for senior posts, with no prior recommendation having been rejected by the council. The council was criticised when it delayed the decision to appoint Chan, stating that it should wait until a new provost was in place. Finally, in September 2015, the council rejected Chan's appointment through an anonymous vote in a closed meeting, providing no reason for the decision. Political interference was widely suspected and the opacity of the council criticised.
The decision is seen widely viewed as a pro-government act of retaliation against "pro-democracy leaders and participants" and a blow to academic freedom. Six members of the council are directly appointed by the Chief Executive of Hong Kong, who acts as chancellor of all publicly funded tertiary institutions in the territory. Five members are delegates to the National People's Congress in Beijing and, as such, are obliged to toe the Communist Party line or risk expulsion. In overall Council makeup, university students and staff are outnumbered by members from outside the university.
The decision was decried by student groups including the Hong Kong University Students' Union and Hong Kong Federation of Students, faculty members, leading international law scholars, and legislators. They noted that the decision would serve as a warning to other academics not to engage in pro-democratic politics and would severely tarnish Hong Kong's reputation for academic freedom and education excellence. The law faculty also refuted the allegations against Chan. Billy Fung, student union president, revealed details of the discussion to the public and was subsequently expelled from the council.