Museums and the Campus Ecology

CUHK Comprehensive Information Database · 05 Campus Module

Bottom line: The CUHK campus is a hillside city scattered with museums and ecology — three public galleries of contrasting themes (the Art Museum, the Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change, and the CUHK History Gallery), plus the Shiu-Ying Hu Herbarium with nearly 40,000 specimens, all embedded in a 138-hectare campus of greenery that climbs from the waterfront up the hill.

This article follows the structure of "three galleries plus one herbarium, set within the campus ecology," recording the history, holdings and verifiable figures of the University's major display spaces, and the ecological landscape that forms their common foundation. Facts come first; sourcing is done on the spot. The buildings that house the galleries are covered in Campus Buildings and Places Directory; the Art Museum's collection lineage and institutional history are explored in depth in two dedicated articles (see below) — this piece offers only a tour-guide overview.

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# 1. At a Glance: The "Three Galleries and One Herbarium"

A quick table to set the campus's public galleries and herbarium side by side for easy orientation:

The four are quite different in nature: the Art Museum and the History Gallery are about "collecting and exhibiting," the Climate Change Museum about "education and advocacy," and the Herbarium is research infrastructure for "study and conservation." Each is unpacked below.

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# 2. Art Museum: The Flagship Gallery of the Institute of Chinese Studies

The Art Museum is CUHK's most important gallery, devoted to the collection, preservation, research and exhibition of Chinese antiquities.

• Founding and affiliation: According to Wikipedia, the Art Museum was founded in 1971 under the Institute of Chinese Studies^※, and is one of Hong Kong's public museums.
• Location: The Art Museum sits within the Institute of Chinese Studies on University Mall (百万大道), integrated with the Institute's courtyard garden.
• Collection: According to Wikipedia, the holdings span archaeological objects, painting and calligraphy, ceramics, jade, lacquerware and seals^※; celebrated items include rare Song-dynasty rubbing albums, masterworks of painting and calligraphy from the Song through the Qing, Yixing purple-clay teaware, ancient seals, and the archival papers of Sheng Xuanhuai.
• Development: According to Wikipedia, the Art Museum set up conservation, mounting, photography and carpentry workshops in 1977 and established the Friends of the Art Museum in 1981^※, gradually growing from a university display room into a museum with a full conservation and education chain.

The foundation of the Art Museum's collection rests on a single studio name — Beitang (北山堂). Its owner, Li Rongsen (Li Jung-sen), donated works that alone account for nearly half of the entire museum. The museum's true weight lies not in how precious the objects are, but in half a century of unbroken scholarly cataloguing. That lineage of "private collection turned public," and how Rocco Yim's new wing responds to the old building, are not repeated here — see the two dedicated articles: Art Museum and the Institute of Chinese Studies on the institution and its buildings, and Treasures of the Art Museum: Seals, Guangdong Painting and Calligraphy, and the Beitang Collection on the collection and its donors.

# 2.1 The Art Museum's New Wing (2025)

According to Wikipedia, the Art Museum's new wing opened on 21 March 2025^※, housing the K.S. Lo Gallery and the Lee Hoh-ak and Lo Yin-kwan Galleries; designed by architect Rocco Yim, it features a cantilevered structure with exposed fair-faced concrete; the inaugural exhibition was "Elegant Images of a Floating World: Art and Culture of Late-Ming Jiangnan," co-organised with the Shanghai Museum. With the new wing complete, the Art Museum's permanent and special exhibition space has expanded significantly, allowing its holdings to be shown in more systematic rotation.

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# 3. Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change

According to Wikipedia, the Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change is located on the 8th floor of Yasumoto International Academic Park and opened on 16 December 2013^※, making it the world's first museum dedicated to climate change. It turns a research university's sustainability commitments into a physical educational space, open to the public and available for guided tours by appointment.

• Origins and funding: According to Wikipedia, the Museum was established under CUHK's "Jockey Club Initiative Gaia" programme, funded by the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust^※. The Initiative itself was a five-year community engagement programme launched in 2012 with a HK$70 million donation from the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust^※, promoting local environmental protection through public education and carbon-reduction partnerships; the Climate Change Museum is the physical landmark that programme left behind, still operated by it and open to the public free of charge.
• Scale: According to the Museum's official materials, it houses over 100 exhibits related to climate change or global warming, and more than 50 multimedia installations^※, carrying abstract climate topics through interactive means.

# 3.1 Four Permanent Exhibition Zones

The Museum's permanent exhibition is divided into four zones of distinct focus, according to the Museum's official introduction^※:

The "Polar Gallery" carries particular weight: according to the Museum, the exhibits were donated mainly by explorer Dr. Rebecca Lee^※, who spent decades shuttling among the Three Poles and brought first-hand polar imagery and artefacts back to campus, giving the Museum something beyond charts and didactic panels — the texture of an explorer's lived experience.

Dr. Lee's own story is something of a legend. According to public records, she is the first Hong Kong woman explorer to have set foot on all "Three Poles" — the Arctic, the Antarctic and Mount Everest^※. She began as a commercial designer and advertising professional, but after first setting foot in Antarctica in 1985 she turned decisively to polar scientific expeditions; she has since been to the Arctic ten times, undertaken multiple Antarctic research trips and Everest climbs, and taken more than 40,000 polar photographs. In 1997 she founded the Polar Museum Foundation and has long promoted polar science to the public. The cabinets of polar artefacts and images in the Climate Change Museum are first-hand testimony won by "abandoning a flourishing career" — and that is what sets this Museum apart from an ordinary science exhibition.

# 3.2 From Gallery to "Living Textbook"

The Museum's positioning is less a collecting institution than a "living textbook" of climate education. Its zones run from "polar field" to "satellite-scale monitoring," then to "on-campus research" and "community action" — laying out a narrative arc from phenomenon to cause, from science to action. Open for over a decade, it has continued to offer free guided tours and educational activities for schools and community groups, and has spun off online exhibitions and forum series. Its parent programme, "Jockey Club Initiative Gaia," has over the years held public forums on biodiversity, carbon auditing and reduction, and water resource management, carrying topics beyond the gallery onto the podium. According to the organisers' public figures, the programme's "GAIA 2.0" individual membership stands at nearly 2,000 people who have pledged to cut carbon in their clothing, food, housing and transport, cumulatively reducing carbon emissions by more than 95,000 kilograms — equivalent to planting over 4,000 trees^※. The Museum thus serves as the physical footnote to CUHK's overall carbon-reduction and green-campus commitments; the related facilities and building context appear in Campus Buildings, Landmarks and Sustainability.

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# 4. CUHK History Gallery

According to CUHK Library materials, the CUHK History Gallery was established in 2013 for CUHK's golden jubilee (originally named the "University Gallery") and renamed the "History Gallery" in 2022^※. Located on the ground floor of the University Library, it presents CUHK's history through several hundred precious photographs, artefacts and multimedia resources.

What stands out is its two "jubilee moments": it was founded in 2013 for the University's 50th anniversary (golden jubilee), then substantially renovated around the 60th anniversary (diamond jubilee) — according to CUHK Library, after a full refurbishment the Gallery reopened on 19 September 2023^※. Two round-number anniversaries each left behind an exhibition, making this small space a window onto how CUHK "tells its own history."

After reopening, the Gallery uses nine thematic zones^※ to lay out six decades of University history. The themes include "The Founding of CUHK," "Excellence in Education," "Discovery and Innovation," "Chinese Studies: Tradition and Modernity," "From Barren Hills to a University Town," and "Serving the Nation, Engaging with the World." Through several hundred photographs, artefacts and enhanced multimedia interactive installations, it presents CUHK's significant moments across sixty years — and, in doing so, mirrors Hong Kong's rapid transformation. The Gallery also houses a "Donors' Wall," a "mini-theatre" screening oral-history films, and photo-opportunity spots where visitors can pose with campus landmarks — turning a university history room into a space that can be seen, heard and participated in. Individual colleges also run their own history galleries or exhibition corridors (such as the New Asia College History Gallery and the S.M. Shum United College Heritage and Museum), complementing the University-level Gallery; see the individual college materials for details.

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# 5. Shiu-Ying Hu Herbarium: A Research Facility Named After a Scholar

If the first three galleries are "for people to look at," the Shiu-Ying Hu Herbarium is more "for research to use" — it is the core infrastructure for campus ecological study, and the only herbarium on campus named after a scholar.

• Affiliation and naming: According to CUHK materials, the Herbarium belongs to the School of Life Sciences and is named after botanist Professor Shiu-Ying Hu^※.
• Holdings: According to CUHK materials, the Herbarium holds approximately 38,000 plant specimens, most of them collected and organised by Professor Hu herself^※.
• Digitisation: According to CUHK materials, the Herbarium has driven the digitisation and computerisation of its existing collection, building an internet-searchable database^※, and maintains plant websites such as hkflora.com. Today the results sit on a dedicated digitised collection portal^※, where each specimen's collection date, locality, scientific name and collector can be searched by family or species — turning a physical herbarium into an online database open to researchers worldwide.

For a university, a herbarium's value goes beyond "preservation." Every pressed, numbered specimen with collection data is a voucher that a particular plant existed at a particular place and time; tens of thousands of such vouchers stacked together become the working basis for tracking species distributions, naming new species and comparing historical change. Hu's insistence on "collecting five duplicates and distributing them to multiple institutions" was precisely about making these vouchers mutually backed up and cross-checkable across sites. Today's digitisation carries that last-century rigour into the global open-data network. That is why a herbarium rarely open to the public is nonetheless an indispensable link in the story of the campus environment.

# 5.1 Shiu-Ying Hu: The Centenarian "Holly Hu"

The Herbarium's weight owes much to the legend of its namesake. According to Wikipedia and CUHK biographical materials, Shiu-Ying Hu (胡秀英) was born in 1910 and died in 2012, at the age of 102^※. A native of Xuzhou, Jiangsu, she was a world-class authority in plant taxonomy, especially on the Aquifoliaceae (holly), Asteraceae, Malvaceae and Orchidaceae families.

Her academic CV is itself a side profile of modern Chinese science. According to CUHK biographical materials^※, she graduated from Ginling College in 1933, completed a master's degree at Lingnan University in 1937, went to the United States for further study in 1946, and earned her doctorate at Harvard University in 1949 — the first Chinese woman to receive a PhD in botany from Harvard. She then spent a long career at Harvard's Arnold Arboretum. Of the more than 400 holly species worldwide, over 300 were named by her, earning her the scholarly nickname "Holly Hu"^※.

In 1968, Hu came to The Chinese University of Hong Kong to teach, and founded the Herbarium in the Biology Department. According to public records, for more than thirty years afterwards she went up the hill nearly every day to collect, amassing over 20,000 plant specimens and identifying and cataloguing around 9,000 species of Hong Kong plants^※. Her collecting had a disciplined method: each specimen was normally duplicated five times — one copy for CUHK, the rest sent to institutions such as the Beijing Institute of Botany and Harvard — so that the fruits of a single hike were archived simultaneously in several herbaria around the world. The Herbarium's present holdings are largely the accumulation of those daily climbs.

Her name also lives on in Hong Kong's botanical records. According to contemporary Chinese sources, a bamboo species endemic to the territory, "Xiuying Bamboo," discovered at Sharp Peak in 1981, was named after her in recognition of her contributions to Hong Kong plant research^※; the folk remedy for colds known as "three-cold tea" (三冬茶) was developed by her together with CUHK, using holly-family ingredients such as roughhaired holly root, holly bark and kuding tea — a taxonomist's learning thus travelled from the specimen cabinet into the herbal-tea shop. In 2012 she passed away at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sha Tin; the Herbarium and its more than 30,000 specimens are the most tangible legacy she left to this hillside city.

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# 6. Campus Ecology: A Hillside-by-the-Sea Landscape

CUHK is built on hillsides facing the sea, with extensive vegetation cover, forming an ecological environment completely different from the flat urban areas. According to the CUHK official website, the campus covers 138.4 hectares and is the largest and most beautiful campus in Hong Kong^※; the University describes the campus as a "habitat for many birds, animals and insects" and states that it "strives to protect the campus ecology." Within the grounds are lotus ponds, old trees, a Chinese medicine garden, sculptures and award-winning buildings^※, overlooking Tolo Harbour with the Pat Sin Leng range in the distance.

The Shiu-Ying Hu Herbarium (above) is precisely the research foundation for this ecology — a living specimen bank drawn from the campus and surrounding hills. Beyond the Herbarium, the campus also hosts a "living plant bank": according to CUHK's School of Chinese Medicine, the campus includes a Chinese Medicine Garden (药园)^※, growing medicinal herbs for teaching and research — matching the "Chinese medicine garden" mentioned on the official website, and extending botany from the specimen cabinet into the field. Three further types of ecological detail follow: birds, animal traces, and waterscapes.

# 6.1 Campus Birds

The hillside terrain combining water and land makes CUHK a fine spot for birdwatching. According to published birding records, a circuit running from MTR University Station through Chung Chi College, around Lake Ad Excellentiam and on to the Ho Tim Building passes tall trees, low scrub, grassland and water sources, and in a single outing one can reasonably expect more than twenty species of birds^※. Birds active on campus include the common kingfisher, night heron, little egret, white wagtail, magpie, collared crow, spotted dove, black-collared starling, tree sparrow, and — circling the ridgelines — crested goshawks and crested serpent eagles. This species spectrum, from waterside kingfishers to high-flying raptors, is the direct ecological projection of the "hillside-by-the-sea" topography.

# 6.2 Animal Traces: The Fading Wildness

Beyond the birds, the campus's early "wildness" went much further. According to animal memories of the campus compiled by The Chinese University Student Press, the campus was once frequented by wild boars, monkeys, hedgehogs, pythons, wild rabbits and monitor lizards^※: boars appeared around the college hostels, monkeys once peered through hostel windows, a hedgehog showed up near the Chung Chi gate, and a monitor lizard was encountered on University Mall. As for snakes, frogs, bats and assorted insects, they were and are regulars of this hill town. The same record carries a wistful remark: as the campus has expanded continuously over decades and habitats have shrunk, "wild delights" such as hedgehogs and monkeys have grown increasingly hard to encounter — the campus has "gradually turned from a place like a country park into a modern urban campus" (as recounted by student media; reliability: single source). This retreat of wildness is one facet of the tension between campus development and ecological protection. Student organisations on campus also monitor and advocate for campus ecology and animal welfare, keeping records and raising awareness.

# 6.3 Waterscapes and Ecological Sites

• Lake Ad Excellentiam: The lake below Chung Chi College is the campus's best-known waterscape (its naming and two bridges are covered in Campus Buildings, Landmarks and Sustainability). The lake teems with fish, which in turn attracts waterbirds such as night herons and kingfishers to feed; bald cypress trees line the shore and turn red each autumn and winter, producing the campus's annual "red-leaf season" and making the lake a node of both scenic and ecological value.
• Tolo Harbour Shore: The lower campus faces Tolo Harbour directly, offering sea views and shoreline ecology — the "seaward" ecological edge of the campus.

How the campus's mountain-and-sea layout shapes its layered spaces and microclimates is covered in Campus Geography and Terrain.

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# 7. Visiting Guide: What to See and How

Treating the "three galleries and one herbarium" as a single campus route, a few frequent questions can be answered at once.

How do I visit the Climate Change Museum? According to the Museum's official site, it is located on the 8th floor of Yasumoto International Academic Park, open free to the public from 9:30 am to 5:00 pm on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays to Saturdays; closed on Wednesdays, Sundays and public holidays^※; a free weekend guided tour runs at 10:00 am on Saturdays (around 25 places, first come, first served), while groups of ten or more must apply online about a month in advance. Opening arrangements may be adjusted as officially announced in the event of a typhoon signal No. 8 or above or a black rainstorm warning.

Where are the Art Museum and the History Gallery, and do they charge admission? The Art Museum is inside the Institute of Chinese Studies (near University Mall); the History Gallery is on the ground floor of the University Library. Exact opening hours and arrangements for both follow their respective official websites — check in advance whether special exhibitions are running or the venues are closed. The three galleries are within walking distance of one another and can be strung into a half-day "campus museum trail."

Can I just walk into the Herbarium? The Shiu-Ying Hu Herbarium is a research facility of the School of Life Sciences, not a permanent public exhibition space. But its digitised collection portal^※ is open to everyone, allowing online searches of specimen images and collection data — the most convenient way to "see the specimens."

Where should I go for ecology and red leaves? Around Lake Ad Excellentiam is the most concentrated spot: the lakeside bald cypresses turn red each autumn and winter, and the water draws waterbirds; the circuit from Chung Chi to the Ho Tim Building is the campus's classic birdwatching route. The campus is hillside-built and large, with internal shuttle buses; see Campus Transport and Facilities for planning.

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# Related Reading

• Art Museum and the Institute of Chinese Studies — the Art Museum's institutional history and Rocco Yim's new wing.
• Treasures of the Art Museum: Seals, Guangdong Painting and Calligraphy, and the Beitang Collection — signature holdings and the lineage of donations.
• Campus Buildings and Places Directory — the buildings housing the galleries, Lake Ad Excellentiam and sustainability facilities.
• Campus Geography and Terrain — how the three-tier hillside-and-sea terrain shapes campus ecology.

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