Distinctive Academic Units – Department of Translation, Department of Music, School of Architecture, and School of Chinese Medicine

Module: 01 Academic · Sub-file: Distinctive Academic Units Date Updated: 2026-07-01 This entry catalogues four academic units that transcend faculty boundaries and boast "Hong Kong’s first / Asia’s only" status: the Faculty of Arts’ Department of Translation and Department of Music, the Faculty of Social Science’s School of Architecture, and the Faculty of Medicine’s School of Chinese Medicine. Superficially these four disciplines could hardly be further apart—from language and text to sonic art, from spatial design to herbal pharmacology—yet they share a common thread: each represents a field where CUHK, between 1965 and 1998, became the first to institutionalise a discipline that either "didn’t exist in Hong Kong" or was "rarely seen in Asia." For a full list of departments, see departments.md.

---

# 1. Department of Translation (Asia’s First, 1972)

# 1. The Triad: Department, Research Centre, and Journal

In translation studies, CUHK operates a tripartite institutional structure—department, research centre, and journal:

• Research Centre for Translation (RCT): According to the Centre’s own "History" page, it was established in 1971, initially named the "Centre for Translation Projects." Its founder was Stephen C. Soong (宋淇, 1919–1996)—a prolific writer and translator who had long championed translation education and research. The Centre was Hong Kong’s first research centre dedicated to translation and translation studies, and was also among the earliest of its kind in Asia and globally.(RCT History)^※
• The Centre’s first director was not Soong himself but his colleague Philip S. Y. Sun (孫述宇). According to RCT’s historical records, Sun served as the inaugural director from 1971, with Stephen C. Soong taking over the directorship from 1973. Subsequent directors have included: John Minford (閔福德), the translator and sinologist, who assumed the role in 1984; Eva W. Y. Hung (孔慧怡), from 1987; and Lawrence Wang-chi Wong (王宏志), from 2005. Across half a century, the Centre has had five directors, a lineage that traces the entire arc of translation studies in Hong Kong, from its infancy to maturity.
• Department of Translation: According to the department itself, it was established in 1972 as the first such department of its kind in Asia. It now offers the full spectrum of degrees—BA, MA, MPhil, and PhD—encompassing literary translation, legal translation, commercial translation, subtitling, interpreting, translation studies, and computer-aided translation (CAT).(Department of Translation website)^※
• Renditions: According to the RCT, the journal was launched in autumn 1973, championed by the translator George Kao (高克毅, 1912–2008). Kao had joined the newly founded Research Centre for Translation as a Senior Visiting Research Fellow between 1972 and 1975, during which time he spearheaded the creation of this specialist journal of Chinese–English translation, dedicated to introducing Chinese literature to the Anglophone world over the long term.(RCT History)^※ In 1988, Kao and Stephen C. Soong jointly made a donation to establish the Renditions Fellowship Fund within the Centre, which remains one of its most prestigious academic awards.

# 2. An Institution on the Move: From "Centre for Translation Projects" to "Comparative Literature and Translation Centre" to "Research Centre for Translation"

The RCT’s own account of its history reveals that the Centre’s name itself underwent two adjustments. In 1978, it was briefly reorganised and renamed the "Comparative Literature and Translation Centre"; in 1983, it was renamed again, this time to its current title, the "Research Centre for Translation." These repeated adjustments reflect, to some extent, the reality that "translation studies" as an independent discipline was still, throughout the 1970s and 80s, competing for academic legitimacy and institutional space against neighbouring fields like comparative literature. It was only with the name change in 1983 that translation studies truly secured its independent disciplinary identity at CUHK.

The Centre’s subsequent academic expansion is also worth noting: it established the Renditions Books hardcover series in 1976; launched the Renditions Paperbacks series in 1986; set up the Renditions Visiting Research Fellowship in 1988; created the Stephen C. Soong Memorial Translation Studies Award (in memory of Stephen C. Soong) in 1997; inaugurated the "Translation Studies Series" in 1999; and launched the Chinese-language academic journal Translation History Studies in 2011. It has hosted a conference series for young scholars since 2004, and a summer school on Chinese translation history since 2009. The Centre’s publications have also garnered international recognition: the English translation Five Seasons of a Golden Year won an Association of American University Presses design award in 1982, and The Carving of Insects received the PEN USA Literary Award for Translation in 2007.

# 3. Degrees and Distinguishing Features

• The Department of Translation is a major hub for translation teaching and research in the Chinese-speaking world. Its curriculum balances theory and practice, and incorporates forward-looking areas such as computer-aided translation (CAT).(Department of Translation website)^※

---

# 2. Department of Music (Hong Kong’s First Music Department, 1965)

# 1. Six Decades of Disciplinary History: From Nothing to "Longest-Running Postgraduate Programme"

According to the Department of Music's official overview page^※, the department was founded in 1965, making it Hong Kong’s first degree-granting music department. For sixty years, it has provided practical and academic training that gives equal weight to Chinese and Western music. The first BA degrees were awarded in 1969—the four-year gap between the department’s founding and its first graduating class corresponds to a full standard four-year undergraduate cycle.

• The department states that CUHK’s Research Postgraduate programme in music has the longest history and the largest intake in Hong Kong.(Music Research Postgraduate Overview)^※ This means that, building on its undergraduate foundation as "Hong Kong’s first music department," the Department of Music has also been the primary training ground for the territory’s musicologists at the postgraduate level.

# 2. Undergraduate Programme: A Four-Year BA with Four Streams

• The undergraduate programme is a four-year Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Music. At the end of their second year, students choose one of four areas of concentration: composition, pedagogy, performance, or research.(Department of Music Undergraduate Programme)^※
• Performance opportunities: Students can participate in the orchestra, wind orchestra, chorus, chamber music, and more specialised ensembles (including African drumming, Chinese music, early music, and jazz).(Department of Music Undergraduate Programme)^※
• Performance and archival facilities: Performance venues include the acoustically renowned Lee Hysan Concert Hall and the Chung Chi College Chapel. The music library and archive holdings are, according to the department, among the most significant collections in Asia.(Department of Music Undergraduate Programme)^※

# 3. Postgraduate Programme: Degrees and Specialisations

• The department offers a Master of Music (MMus) and Doctor of Music (DMus) in Composition, as well as MPhil / PhD research degrees. Research postgraduates select one of three specialisations: Ethnomusicology, Musicology, or Theory.(Music Research Postgraduate Overview)^※
• The Ethnomusicology specialisation emphasises research into Chinese music and other non-Western musical cultures. The existence of this stream in some ways echoes CUHK’s broader academic orientation towards "researching Chinese music and non-Western musical traditions," following a logic consistent with the Translation Department’s aim to "translate Chinese literature for the world" and the School of Chinese Medicine’s approach of "practising Chinese and Western medicine side by side": in each disciplinary domain, "Chinese elements" are made a core research focus, rather than simply applying a Western disciplinary template.

The logic behind the four streams: Composition, pedagogy, performance, and research correspond broadly to four principal career paths for a musician—becoming a creator, a teacher, a performer, or an academic. The fact that students do not need to commit to a stream until the end of their second year means the department gives newcomers at least a year of broad foundational training to discover where their own interests lie. This differs from the model at many conservatoires, where a specialism is fixed from the moment of entry.

---

# 3. School of Architecture (Established as a Department in 1991, Elevated to a School in 2009)

# 1. Origins and Founding

• The architecture programme was established as a department at CUHK in 1991, with an inaugural intake of 50 students. It was initially housed on the top floor of the Chung Chi College Library.(CPRO: School of Architecture 25th Anniversary)^※
• The founding department head was Professor Emeritus Tunney Lee (李燦輝, 1931–2020).

# 2. Founding Head Tunney Lee: A Planner from Boston’s Chinatown

Tunney Lee’s life story is itself a narrative of transpacific urban planning. According to his official MIT obituary^※, he was born in China in 1931 and emigrated to Boston with his family at the age of seven (in 1938). He grew up and was educated in the United States, becoming an architect by training who worked as an urban planner, historian, and community activist.

His career in the U.S. was long intertwined with Boston’s Chinatown and surrounding communities:

• He served as Head of Planning and Design at the Boston Redevelopment Authority.
• Under Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis, he served as Deputy Commissioner of the Division of Capital and Planning Operations.
• He taught for many years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he once led the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP). His expertise lay in community-based design, with a particular focus on planning issues in high-density urban neighbourhoods, and he frequently led MIT students in collaborative research with communities in the Boston area.

It was this scholar, steeped in decades of practical experience in American urban planning and community design, who was invited in 1991 to serve as the founding head of CUHK’s architecture programme. According to CUHK’s Communications and Public Relations Office, under his leadership, the programme secured accreditation from the Hong Kong Institute of Architects (HKIA), the Architects Registration Board, and the Commonwealth Association of Architects before his return to MIT in 1998.(CPRO: School of Architecture 25th Anniversary)^※ This means that within a brief, seven-year tenure as founding head, he had already guided the programme through the single most crucial step towards professional accreditation, giving its graduates the legal basis to register and practise in Hong Kong.

Tunney Lee subsequently returned to MIT to continue teaching 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 founding choice made by an "immigrant planner": Tunney Lee emigrated to the U.S. at seven, spent decades embedded in community planning around Boston’s Chinatown, came back to Hong Kong in 1991 to lay the foundations of CUHK’s architecture programme, and returned to MIT in 1998—a trajectory crossing the Pacific twice, which seems fitting for a discipline that is itself simultaneously global in its flows and rooted in the local. In Boston, he grappled with the plight of a Chinese immigrant community amid urban renewal; at CUHK, with the challenge of how a fledgling architecture programme could gain professional accreditation within seven years. Superficially different, the two tasks share a common core: how to make something marginal or new gain a firm footing within an established system.

Biographical details of the late founding head are neutral or positive historical facts, presented here faithfully based on the public obituary.

• The department was elevated to a School of Architecture in 2009, under the Faculty of Social Science.

# 3. Degrees

• The undergraduate degree is a Bachelor of Social Science in Architectural Studies (BSSc). The postgraduate programme is the professionally accredited Master of Architecture (M.Arch), which serves as the professional degree pathway towards licensure in Hong Kong.

---

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

# 1. Cross-Faculty Integration

• The Chinese Medicine discipline was originally housed within the Faculty of Science (its earliest research lineage can be traced to a Chinese Medicine Research Group under the Faculty of Science in 1975). It was formally established as a school in 1998, and was integrated into the Faculty of Medicine on 1 July 2013.(Faculty of Medicine Milestones)^※ This represents one of the rare instances in CUHK’s academic structure of a "cross-faculty migration." It reflects a shift in the discipline’s identity from a "basic science foundation" towards a "clinical medical" orientation—while chemical and pharmacological research remain important, the core mission of a School of Chinese Medicine is, ultimately, to train clinical practitioners of Chinese medicine, a purpose far better aligned with the Faculty of Medicine.

# 2. Positioning

• The School of Chinese Medicine is now one of the five constituent schools within the Faculty of Medicine (for details see deepdive-medicine.md), standing alongside Western medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and public health in a truly multi-disciplinary structure. For its founding history, curriculum, teaching clinics, and the disciplinary significance of "practising Chinese and Western medicine side by side," see the dedicated entry: 11-medical-hospital/school-of-chinese-medicine.md.

---

# 5. A Common Thread Across Four Distinctive Units

Consider the Department of Translation, Department of Music, School of Architecture, and School of Chinese Medicine together, and a common thread emerges. None of them belonged to the "standard institutional set-up" when CUHK was founded in 1963. Instead, between 1965 and 2013, each was institutionalised—and in one case, even transferred across faculties—in response to a specific disciplinary gap or societal need:

The founders or early leaders of these units also share a similar "cross-boundary introduction" profile: Stephen C. Soong and George Kao brought professional translation practice into the academic establishment; Tunney Lee brought hands-on experience from community planning in Boston into architectural teaching; the early development of the School of Chinese Medicine relied on scholars like Leung Ping-chung, who came from an orthopaedic/microsurgery background but later turned towards the modernisation of Chinese medicine (for more, see 11-medical-hospital/school-of-chinese-medicine.md). This pattern of "inviting industry professionals or cross-disciplinary experts to found departments" has, to some extent, been a consistent approach for CUHK as it expands into new academic frontiers.

---

# 6. Distinguished Academic Units at a Glance

---