Distinctive Departments — Translation, Music, Architecture and Chinese Medicine

Module: 01 Academics · Sub-file: Distinctive Departments Last updated: 2026-07-01 This page covers four distinctive academic units that span different faculties and claim "first in Hong Kong / first in Asia" status: the Department of Translation and the Department of Music in the Faculty of Arts, the School of Architecture in the Faculty of Social Science, and the School of Chinese Medicine in the Faculty of Medicine. On the surface, their subject matter could hardly be more different — from language and letters to the art of sound, from the making of space to herbal medicine and pulse diagnosis — yet they share one thing in common: each was established between 1965 and 1998 as CUHK moved to institutionalise, for the first time, a disciplinary field that "Hong Kong did not have and Asia had rarely seen." For the full list of departments, see departments.md.

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# 1. Department of Translation (first in Asia, 1972)

# 1.1 A trinity: department, research centre and journal

In the field of translation, CUHK maintains a "department + research centre + journal" trinity:

• Research Centre for Translation (RCT): according to the centre's "History" page, it was founded in 1971 under the original name "Centre for Translation Projects." It was established single-handedly by Stephen C. Soong (宋淇, 1919–1996) — a prolific writer and translator who devoted much of his career to advancing translation education and research. The centre was Hong Kong's first research institution devoted to translation and translation studies, and among the earliest such centres in Asia and the world(RCT History)^※.
• The centre's founding director was Soong's own colleague Philip S. Y. Sun (孙述宇) — RCT's historical records show Sun serving as first director in 1971, with Soong himself taking over in 1973. Subsequent directors include: the translator and sinologist John Minford from 1984; Eva W. Y. Hung (孔慧怡) from 1987; and Lawrence Wang-chi Wong (王宏志) from 2005. Over half a century, the centre has seen five directors, spanning the whole arc of Hong Kong translation studies from its pioneering days to full maturity.
• Department of Translation: according to the department, it was founded in 1972 — the first of its kind in Asia — and now offers the full spectrum of BA, MA, MPhil and PhD programmes, covering literary translation, legal translation, commercial translation, subtitling, interpreting, translation studies and computer-aided translation(Department website)^※.
• Renditions: according to RCT, the journal was launched in autumn 1973, championed by the translator George Kao (高克毅, 1912–2008). Kao joined the newly founded research centre as a senior visiting fellow from 1972 to 1975, and during this period took the lead in founding this professional journal of Chinese–English translation, which has long served to introduce Chinese literature to the English-speaking world(RCT History)^※. In 1988, Kao and Soong jointly donated funds to establish the Renditions Research Fellowship within the centre — one of the most academically prestigious awards the centre offers.

# 1.2 An institution that moved: from "Centre for Translation Projects" to "Comparative Literature and Translation Centre" to "Research Centre for Translation"

According to RCT's own history, the centre's name itself was adjusted twice: in 1978 it was reorganised and renamed the "Comparative Literature and Translation Centre"; in 1983 it took its present name, the "Research Centre for Translation." These successive renamings reflected, in miniature, the struggle of "translation studies" as an independent discipline — through the 1970s and 1980s it was still vying for academic standing and institutional space against neighbouring fields such as comparative literature. Only with the 1983 naming did translation studies truly secure its independent disciplinary identity at CUHK.

The centre's subsequent scholarly expansion is also worth recording: the Renditions Books hardback series was established in 1976, followed by the Renditions Paperbacks series in 1986; the Renditions Visiting Fellowship was set up in 1988; the Stephen C. Soong Translation Studies Memorial Prize (in memory of Soong) was founded in 1997; the "Translation Studies Series" began in 1999; the Chinese-language journal Translation History Studies was launched in 2011; an annual young scholars conference series began in 2004; and a summer school on Chinese translation history has run since 2009. The centre's publications have also won international awards — the English translation of 金华饼, entitled Five Seasons of a Golden Year, won the Association of American University Presses design award in 1982, and The Carving of Insects (《虫鸣》) received the PEN USA Literary Award for Translation in 2007.

# 1.3 Degrees and distinctive features

• The department is a major force in Chinese-language translation teaching and research. Its curriculum balances theory and practice, and includes cutting-edge directions such as computer-aided translation (CAT)(Department website)^※.

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# 2. Department of Music (Hong Kong's first music department, 1965)

# 2.1 Sixty years of departmental history: from nothing to "longest-running postgraduate programme"

According to the department's official overview page^※, the Department of Music was founded in 1965 — the first degree-granting music department in Hong Kong — and has for sixty years offered practical and scholarly training with equal weight given to Chinese and Western music. The department awarded its first BA degrees in 1969 — a four-year gap from founding to first graduating class, corresponding to a standard full cycle of a four-year undergraduate programme.

• According to the department, its Research Postgraduate programme has the longest history and the largest intake of any in Hong Kong(Music RPg overview)^※ — meaning that, on top of its "first music department in Hong Kong" undergraduate claim, the department is also the main engine of musicology postgraduate training in Hong Kong.

# 2.2 Undergraduate: four-year BA with four streams

• The undergraduate programme is a four-year BA in Music; at the end of Year 2, students choose one of four streams: composition, pedagogy, performance or research(Music undergraduate programme)^※.
• Performance opportunities: students may join the orchestra, wind band, choir, chamber groups and more specialised ensembles — including African drumming, Chinese music, early music and jazz(Music undergraduate programme)^※.
• Performance venues and collections: performance spaces include the Lee Hysan Concert Hall, renowned for its acoustics, and the Chung Chi College Chapel; the department's music library and archive holdings are, by its own account, among the most significant in Asia(Music undergraduate programme)^※.

# 2.3 Postgraduate: degrees and specialisations

• The department offers an MMus and a DMus in composition, plus MPhil/PhD research degrees, with three specialisations: ethnomusicology, musicology and theory(Music RPg overview)^※.
• The ethnomusicology stream emphasises the study of Chinese music and other non-Western musical cultures — an orientation that echoes a broader CUHK academic stance, and that runs on the same logic as the translation department's "bringing Chinese literature to the world" and the School of Chinese Medicine's "Chinese and Western medicine standing side by side": in each of these fields, "Chinese elements" form one of the research focal points, rather than being a mere application of Western disciplinary paradigms.

The logic of the four streams: composition, pedagogy, performance and research map roughly onto the four main career paths open to practising musicians — becoming a creator, a teacher, a performer, or an academic researcher. Students do not need to choose a stream until the end of Year 2, meaning the department gives freshmen at least a year of general foundational training to discover where their interests lie — a marked contrast with many music conservatories, where students commit to a specialisation on entry.

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# 3. School of Architecture (department established 1991, upgraded 2009)

# 3.1 History and founding

• The architecture programme was established as a department at CUHK in 1991, with an inaugural intake of 50 students, initially housed on the top floor of the Chung Chi College Library(Communications and Public Relations Office: School of Architecture 25th anniversary)^※.
• The founding chair was Professor Emeritus Tunney Lee (李灿辉, 1931–2020).

# 3.2 Founding chair Tunney Lee: a planner who came out of Boston's Chinatown

Tunney Lee's life story is, in itself, a history of urban planning written across the Pacific. According to the official MIT obituary^※, he was born in China in 1931 and emigrated with his family to Boston at the age of seven (1938). He grew up and studied in the United States, becoming an architect by training and an urban planner, historian of the built environment and community activist by vocation.

His American career was, for a long time, closely tied to Boston's Chinatown and its surrounding neighbourhoods:

• He served as Director of Planning and Design at the Boston Redevelopment Authority;
• Under Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis, he was Deputy Commissioner of the Division of Capital and Planning Operations;
• He taught for many years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), serving as head of MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), with a specialty in community-based design, a particular focus on planning issues in high-density urban neighbourhoods, and a frequent practice of bringing MIT students into research collaborations with Boston-area communities.

It was this scholar — with decades of hands-on experience in American urban planning and community design — who was invited in 1991 to be the founding chair of CUHK's architecture programme. According to the CUHK Communications and Public Relations Office, by the time he returned to MIT to teach in 1998, the programme had already earned accreditation from the Hong Kong Institute of Architects (HKIA), the Architects Registration Board, and the Commonwealth Association of Architects(CPRO: School of Architecture 25th anniversary)^※ — in other words, within a mere seven-year founding tenure, he had already steered the programme through the single most crucial step towards professional recognition, giving its graduates the statutory basis to register and practise in Hong Kong.

Lee then returned to MIT to teach and research until his retirement. According to the MIT obituary, he died in Boston on 2 July 2020 from complications of cancer treatment, at the age of 88.

A "migrant planner" and his founding choice: Lee emigrated to the United States at seven, spent decades working on community planning around Boston's Chinatown, returned to Hong Kong in 1991 to lay the foundations of CUHK's architecture programme, and went back to MIT in 1998 — a career path crisscrossing the Pacific that suits the discipline of architecture itself, which is at once globally mobile and locally rooted. In Boston he addressed the predicament of Chinese immigrant communities caught up in urban renewal; at CUHK he addressed how a brand-new architecture programme could win professional accreditation within seven years. The two tasks look different, but share the same core: how to help something marginal or newly born earn its footing within an established system.

The personal details of the late founding chair are factual, neutral-to-positive biography, faithfully recorded from public obituaries.

• In 2009 the department was upgraded to the School of Architecture, housed within the Faculty of Social Science.

# 3.3 Degrees

• The undergraduate degree is the Bachelor of Social Science in Architectural Studies; the taught postgraduate degree is the professionally accredited Master of Architecture, which is the route to professional practice in Hong Kong.

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# 4. School of Chinese Medicine (integrated into the Faculty of Medicine in 2013)

# 4.1 A cross-faculty move

• Chinese medicine was originally part of the Faculty of Science (its research lineage can be traced back to a Chinese medicine research group attached to the Science Faculty in 1975). It was formally constituted as a School in 1998, and was integrated into the Faculty of Medicine on 1 July 2013(Faculty of Medicine Milestones)^※. This is one of the rare "cross-faculty migrations" in CUHK's academic structure, reflecting a shift in the positioning of Chinese medicine from a "science-based foundation" towards a "medical and clinical" identity. Chemistry and pharmacological research matter, of course, but the School's core mission is ultimately to train Chinese medicine practitioners capable of clinical practice — a mission that sits more naturally in a medical faculty.

# 4.2 Positioning

• The School of Chinese Medicine is now one of the five schools within the Faculty of Medicine (see deepdive-medicine.md), sitting alongside Western medicine, nursing, pharmacy and public health in the Faculty's multi-disciplinary structure. The School's founding history, curriculum, teaching clinics and its disciplinary significance as "Chinese and Western medicine standing side by side" are covered in depth in the dedicated chapter 11-medical-hospital/school-of-chinese-medicine.md.

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# 5. The common thread across four distinctive departments

Read together, the Department of Translation, the Department of Music, the School of Architecture and the School of Chinese Medicine reveal a common thread: none of them was part of the "standard infrastructure" with which CUHK was founded in 1963. Each was institutionalised — and in one case migrated across faculties — between 1965 and 2013, in response to a particular disciplinary gap or social need:

The founders and early leaders of the four units display a similar "importing expertise from outside academia" character: Stephen Soong and George Kao brought professional translation practice into an academic institution; Tunney Lee brought hands-on experience of Boston community planning into architecture teaching; and the early development of the School of Chinese Medicine rested on scholars such as Leung Ping-chung (梁秉中), who came from orthopaedics and microsurgery before turning to the modernisation of Chinese medicine (see 11-medical-hospital/school-of-chinese-medicine.md). This habit of inviting practitioners and cross-disciplinary experts to found new departments is, in some ways, CUHK's standing approach to pushing out the boundaries of its disciplines.

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# 6. Distinctive departments at a glance

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