CUHK Chung Chi College: Founded 1951, Thirteen Legacies, and Lake Ad Excellentiam

On the campus of a public university, inside its earliest and largest free-standing church, thirteen carved wooden emblems hang on either side of the sanctuary — the crests of thirteen Christian universities scattered across mainland China that had all ceased operations by 1951. Chung Chi took this interrupted "torch" and carried it down into the Ma Liu Shui valley in Hong Kong. This article surveys the college's origins, faith tradition, landmarks, customs, and people: it is one of CUHK's three founding colleges, established in 1951 by representatives of Hong Kong's Protestant churches, with the motto "止于至善" (Ad Excellentiam), and it is the only college at the University to house a chapel, a divinity school, and a chaplain's office.

This is the consolidated feature file on Chung Chi College, considerably more detailed than the Chung Chi section in the volume overview. University-wide issues touching on Chung Chi (CUHK's founding, the restructuring, the religion-versus-secularisation debates, and so on) have their own articles in the governance module of this site; here they are only summarised and cross-referenced.

---

# 1. Basic Facts

According to the official brief history of Chung Chi College^※, the college was founded in October 1951 by representatives of the Protestant Churches in Hong Kong, making it the first local institution of higher learning to combine a "Chinese" character with a "Christian" one. Among CUHK's nine colleges, Chung Chi carries a distinctive spiritual weight, rooted in its Christian higher-education tradition — inheriting the "torch" of thirteen Christian universities that had existed in mainland China before 1951 — and in its chapel, divinity school, and chaplain's office, all unique within the University.

The name "Chung Chi": according to the college's own account, the name carries the spirit of "revering Christ" (chung fung gi-duk, 崇奉基督) together with the sense of a "noble foundation" (崇高基础) — signalling both that the Christian faith is the college's founding bedrock and that this faith is meant to serve as a lofty groundwork for nurturing talent. It is also worth noting that Chung Chi is the only one of CUHK's nine colleges whose formal name uses 「學院」 ("Institute/College") rather than 「書院」 ("College") — a relic of its days as an independent post-secondary college (1951–1963, when it was already styled "Chung Chi College"), a name it kept after joining CUHK, making it a footnote among the nine.

---

# 2. The Founding Story: From Thirteen Legacies to Ma Liu Shui

# Before 1951: The Background of the Thirteen Christian Universities

Chung Chi's founding has to be understood within the broader history of Christian higher education in twentieth-century China. From the late nineteenth century into the first half of the twentieth, European and American mission bodies established a string of church-run universities across mainland China. As CUHK professor Ying Fuk-tsang writes in his study "The Succession of Post-War Christian Higher Education in Hong Kong: A Case Study of Chung Chi College"^※, after the reorganisation of mainland China's higher-education system in 1950, these Christian universities were successively taken over, restructured, or merged into public institutions, and their existence as church institutions came to an end.

Chung Chi officially positions itself as inheriting the tradition and mission of the thirteen Christian universities that existed in China before 1951. According to Wikipedia's Chung Chi College entry^※, the thirteen are usually listed as: Hangchow University, Central China University, West China Union University, St. John's University, Lingnan University, University of Nanking, Soochow University, Cheeloo University, University of Shanghai, Hwa Nan College, Ginling College, Fukien Christian University, and Yenching University. Hanging on either side of the sanctuary in Chung Chi Chapel are exactly these thirteen colleges' carved wooden emblems — an architectural means of carrying the torch, interrupted on the mainland, on to Hong Kong (see Section 4).

A necessary clarification: Chung Chi "succeeding the thirteen colleges" is a succession of spirit and mission, a symbolic act — it is not the legal continuation of any particular university, nor does it take on any of their assets. It is a newly founded institution that has consciously claimed this faith tradition for its own.

# 1951: Starting Out on Caine Road and at St. John's Cathedral

According to Wikipedia's Chung Chi College entry^※, preparations began in February 1951, when Bishop Ronald Owen Hall of the Anglican church in Hong Kong, together with Lam Ying-lam, formerly President of Lingnan University in Canton, and Au Wai-kwok, formerly Chairman of the Board of Directors of St. John's University, Shanghai, proposed establishing a Christian institution of higher learning in Hong Kong. An application went to the colonial government in May of that year; negotiations and the recruitment of refugee scholars from the north proceeded in parallel; admissions began in September; a founding thanksgiving service was held at St. John's Cathedral on 2 October; and classes formally began on 3 October. According to Wikipedia, 63 students turned up on the first day. The college had no campus of its own at the outset — it held classes in Cathedral Hall, St. Paul's Co-educational College, and premises on Caine Road. The fact that the first Head, Lam Ying-lam, had been President of Lingnan University in Canton gave Chung Chi a particularly close bond with the Lingnan lineage (one of the reasons the "Lingnan Sports Ground / Sports Hall" is so named to this day). Of the three founders, Bishop Ronald Owen Hall is himself a figure of considerable weight in Hong Kong Anglican history: according to Wikipedia's entry on Hall^※, in 1944 he ordained Li Tim-Oi as the first female priest in Anglican history, a move that provoked enormous controversy across the Anglican Communion, drew objections from two successive Archbishops of Canterbury, and at one point put Hall's own orders under threat. That a bishop willing to break with convention within the church should, two years later, throw himself into founding Chung Chi lends the college's "Christianity × modern education" founding ethos a layer of character it would be unwise to overlook.

# Chung Chi and New Asia: Two Refugee-University Models on Caine Road and桂林街

Set Chung Chi's borrowed premises on Caine Road against New Asia's borrowed premises on Kweilin Street (see New Asia College) and you see two refugee-founded institutions born of the mainland's upheavals between 1949 and 1951 taking very different paths. New Asia was built from nothing by scholar-refugees like Ch'ien Mu, with almost no outside funding; Chung Chi, by contrast, had behind it the financial and human networks of transnational church bodies — the North American United Board for Christian Higher Education in Asia, the Asia Christian Colleges Association in Britain, and others — and so began life in comparatively comfortable circumstances. This difference in resources foreshadowed, to some degree, the two colleges' very different trajectories in campus scale and buildings.

# 1955–1962: Registration, the Move to Ma Liu Shui, Land Purchase, and the Ma Liu Shui New Village

According to the official brief history, in 1955 Chung Chi was formally registered under a Hong Kong government ordinance as an approved post-secondary college; in September of the same year it bought up salt pans, deserted dikes, and paddy fields around Ma Liu Shui to build sports grounds. In 1956 it moved to its permanent site in the Ma Liu Shui valley, Shatin, New Territories — according to Wikipedia, the government granted seven plots totalling about ten acres, and built a new railway station nearby (opened in September 1956, later renamed "University Station"). In November of the same year, two teaching blocks, a library, an assembly hall doubling as a dining hall, and temporary student hostels were completed, and Chung Chi formally took up residence.

More land was soon needed. According to Wikipedia's Chung Chi College entry^※, in 1957 the second Head, Ling Do-yang, negotiated with the Wen clan of Ma Liu Shui village to buy village land for campus expansion, and purchased land twice the size of the original farmland near Lung Yeuk Tau and the military area in Fanling to build a "Ma Liu Shui New Village" to rehouse the original residents; the new village was completed in 1962. In gratitude, the villagers named one of the village's streets "Do-yang Road" — a street name commemorating the then Head Ling Do-yang. It is a documented relocation story, with names on both sides and a settlement that satisfied everyone, and a direct witness to the place-name history of the Ma Liu Shui area.

A side note: the government also earmarked some three hundred acres around Ma Liu Shui for Chung Chi to use as an afforestation area — land that later became part of the main campus of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Chung Chi's early landholdings, in other words, objectively laid the groundwork for the scale of the eventual CUHK campus.

# 1963: Forming CUHK

According to the official brief history of Chung Chi College^※, in 1963 Chung Chi, together with New Asia College and United College, became one of the three founding colleges of The Chinese University of Hong Kong. After joining CUHK, Chung Chi's academic structure was progressively absorbed into the University's unified framework, but the college retained its distinctive functions in general education, religious life, and communal culture.

---

# 3. Motto, Crest, and Christian Tradition

# Motto: 止于至善

Chung Chi's motto is 「止于至善」, from the Great Learning: "The way of the great learning lies in illuminating luminous virtue, in loving the people, and in resting in the highest excellence." In Latin it is Ad Excellentiam, rendered into English as "In Pursuit of Excellence". According to the English Wikipedia, "止于至善" signals the college's aim of cultivating students toward the highest excellence in scholarship, physique, character (with an emphasis on integrity), and spirit (understanding the true meaning of life). The motto chimes with Chung Chi's Christian ethos: grounded in Christian faith, pursuing the fullness of both character and learning.

# The Only Christian College at the University

According to English Wikipedia's Chung Chi College entry^※, among CUHK's nine colleges Chung Chi is the only one with a religious background; it maintains a Chaplain's Office and a Divinity School to support Christian activities on campus. This religious identity is the fundamental feature distinguishing Chung Chi from the other eight colleges, and it has made "the secularisation and modernisation of religious education" a long-running scholarly theme in discussions of the Chung Chi case (see the work of Ng Kwok-ming, Ying Fuk-tsang, and others). Chung Chi is also the only college at the University to offer both theology and music — faith and arts education here run in parallel rather than at odds.

# The Crest: A Motif from the Tang Dynasty Nestorian Stele

According to Wikipedia's Chung Chi College entry^※, the central motif of the Chung Chi crest is drawn from the Tang dynasty "Nestorian Stele" (the memorial of the propagation of the Luminous Religion in China). The stele records the arrival of Christianity (as Nestorianism) in China in AD 635; Chung Chi adopted its motif to signify "commemorating the beginning of the Christian mission to China". The shape of the crest has changed once: from 1954 to 1960 it was rectangular, and from 1961 onwards it took the shield form used to this day. This crest and the thirteen wooden emblems at the chapel sanctuary — one ancient, one modern — together mark where Chung Chi locates itself in the line of "the Christian legacy in China".

---

# 4. Signature Buildings and Landscape

Chung Chi occupies a large swathe of low-lying land in the southern part of the CUHK campus, near University Station (the railway station) — the lowest-lying and earliest-developed of the nine college areas. Nearly all of its landmarks are bound up with the Christian tradition or the imagery of "highest excellence".

# Chung Chi Chapel

According to Wikipedia's Chung Chi College entry^※, Chung Chi Chapel is the earliest and largest free-standing church on a public-university campus in all of China. According to the chapel's official page^※, the foundation ceremony was held in the college's tenth-anniversary year, and the chapel was completed the following year. On the sanctuary wall are carved the emblems of the former thirteen Christian universities in China, fixing the "succession of the thirteen" permanently into the most sacred space on campus. It is a textbook case of architecture as memory-bearer: the thirteen universities no longer exist, but their spirit lives on above the altar. The chapel, with the college's Christian background and the weekly "College Assembly", together make up Chung Chi's most distinctive college features.

# Divinity School of Chung Chi College

According to the Divinity School's official pages^※ and Wikipedia, Chung Chi's theological education has deep roots: in 1962 (before Chung Chi joined CUHK), theological education was provided by the then-independent "Chung Chi Theological Seminary", built around the Hong Kong Theological Seminary of the Church of Christ in China. After Chung Chi joined CUHK, this work continued as the Divinity School of Chung Chi College, making it an important centre for Christian theological research and pastoral training in Hong Kong and the wider Chinese context. The new chapel of the Divinity School sits on the top floor of the Yung Chi-tung Memorial Building, completed in November 2011; it covers roughly 1,450 square metres, seats about 350, and serves the worship needs of the Divinity School's staff and students.

The lineage of Chung Chi's theological education goes back even further than the college itself. According to the Divinity School's official history^※ and English Wikipedia^※, its roots reach back to the Training School of the Canton Presbyterian Mission, founded in 1864; in 1914 this school merged with Anglican, Methodist, and other bodies to form the Canton Union Theological College. This tradition of theological education was preserved and developed at Chung Chi, giving rise to today's Divinity School. From 1864 to the present, the line runs unbroken for more than a century and a half, making it one of the oldest traditions in Hong Kong's higher theological education. It carries the thread of "Christian higher education in China" from the late Qing all the way to the contemporary CUHK campus — the "depth" counterpart to the "visibility" of the thirteen emblems in the chapel, together giving Chung Chi's Christian tradition its two-layered thickness.

It is also worth noting, per Wikipedia, that the Divinity School of Chung Chi College is the only divinity school in the Chinese-speaking world and in Hong Kong's public universities not affiliated with any single Christian denomination, supported jointly by four denominational bodies: the Hong Kong Council of the Church of Christ in China, the Tsung Tsin Mission of Hong Kong, the Methodist Church of Hong Kong (incorporated), and the Pentecostal Holiness Church. This "inter-denominational joint venture" arrangement echoes the founding history of Chung Chi itself, an inter-denominational, cross-background undertaking "inheriting the thirteen schools".

# Lake Ad Excellentiam (formerly the Lotus Pond)

According to Wikipedia's Chung Chi College entry^※, the college's lake occupies what was originally farmland and streams. In the late 1960s it became the "Lotus Pond"; in the mid-1990s a beautification project rebuilt it and renamed it "Lake Ad Excellentiam" (未圓湖). The lake area in fact comprises two bodies of water — the Lotus Pond and the Yang Tak Pond — and two bridges. The name "未圓" ("not yet full/perfect") carries the idea that "learning and life are never complete; one should rest in the highest excellence and keep pursuing it" — echoing the college motto. By the lake, the Lion Pavilion (the red pavilion in the water, a favourite graduation-photo spot), and the Philosopher's Path skirting the shore, give staff and students places to stroll and reflect — among the most poetic corners of Chung Chi. Thirteen crape myrtle trees planted by the lakeshore (in 2001) echo, in arboreal arithmetic, the succession of the thirteen Christian universities — another instance of Chung Chi inscribing the number "thirteen" into the campus landscape, in dialogue with the wooden emblems in the chapel sanctuary.

# Hostels and the Chung Chi Tang

Chung Chi is one of the nine colleges with the largest residential capacity. According to the CUHK Info college profile of Chung Chi^※, the college's student hostels include Ying Lam Hall (named for first Head Lam Ying-lam), Hua Lien Hall, Ming Hua Hall, Theology Building, Wen Lin Hall, Mrs. Ho Sin-hang Hostel, Wen Chi Hall, Lee Shu Pui Hall (the new block), and the Pentecostal Mission Hall (high block and low block), together providing roughly 1,452 places; there is also a hostel exclusively for non-resident students, Luk Yee Hall. Chung Chi operates a "four-year residency" scheme, a deliberate contrast with the mandatory full-residency and communal-dining arrangements of newer colleges such as Morningside, S.H. Ho, and CW Chu — it is one of the few traditional large colleges to keep a residency entitlement for the whole of a student's university life (compare College General Education and the High Table System).

The Chung Chi campus also has the Chung Chi Tang — the triangular student canteen, one of the college's most recognisable buildings — the Elisabeth Luce Moore Library, the Lingnan Sports Ground / Sports Hall (commemorating the Lingnan connection), the Lee Huang Ya-ping Building, and the tightly clustered trio popularly known as the "three brothers": the Wang Fook Yuen Building, Chan Chun Bock Building, and Sino Building — three teaching blocks standing side by side, sharing basement classrooms and audio-visual equipment, and together housing some of the college's most concentrated teaching space for the arts and social sciences. The memorial archway at the campus gate bears a couplet written in the hand of scholar Ling Do-yang, among others. Building names and inscriptions across the campus repeatedly draw on the Christian faith and on the Great Learning and Doctrine of the Mean — a visible effort to carry culture through architecture.

---

# 5. College Traditions

Chung Chi's traditions run along two main lines: "faith life" and "whole-person education".

• College Assembly: a weekly all-college gathering, one of the oldest continuing Chung Chi traditions, covering sermons, lectures, music, and cultural events, embodying the whole-person ideal of "spirit, virtue, body, community, and intellect". According to the Office of University General Education's College GE page^※, the non-credit-bearing course GECC1000 "College Assembly" requires students to attend four meetings per term (2 in Part A + 2 in Part B, or alternatively 3 meetings plus one substitute activity); failure to meet the requirement earns an FF grade for the course — one of the stricter regimes among the nine colleges.
• College General Education (College GE): Chung Chi's college GE totals 6 credits, designed around the college's Christian and Chinese-cultural background with an emphasis on values education and reflection on life. Year 1 students take the compulsory GECC1130 "Idea of a University" (2 credits) and GECC1132 "Learning through Serving" (1 credit); in later years they choose one course from options such as "Exploration and Discovery" and "Servant Leadership". The college's service-learning courses lay particular stress on the spirit of "servant leadership". For a comparison of how the nine colleges assess their GE programmes, see College General Education and the High Table System.
• Year-class societies (級社): undergraduates form "classes" by year of entry, each with its own name, colours, and traditions — an important source of collegiate cohesion.
• Orientation camps, the thousand-person banquet, and the graduation service: orientation camps help new students settle into the college community; the anniversary features a thousand-person banquet and other festivities; and the graduation service, conducted in Christian liturgy, sends off graduates in a rite unique to Chung Chi.
• Scholarships and financial aid: according to the CUHK Info college profile, Chung Chi awards roughly 700 scholarships a year, most of them rewarding active participation in college life (rather than academic results alone) — reflecting a whole-person education ethos that weighs engagement more heavily than any single academic metric.

---

# 6. Heads of College and Notable Alumni

# Heads of College (a fuller list)

According to Wikipedia's Chung Chi College entry^※, the headship evolved from the "President" of the independent post-secondary college era to the "Head of College" after joining CUHK. The list of heads is as follows (some middle years lack authoritative public sources and are omitted):

# Notable alumni (selected)

• Yau Shing-tung: according to English Wikipedia's Chung Chi College entry^※, mathematician and Fields Medalist, graduated from Chung Chi's mathematics department in 1969. One of the founders of twentieth-century geometric analysis, later a professor at Harvard and founder of several mathematical research institutes.
• Chung Chi has also produced a large number of alumni active in theology, education, music, social service, business, and politics. Given its Christian and humanistic background, its legacy is particularly deep in theology, music, and social service — one example being Chan Kwok-fong, an alumnus of the Divinity School's Master of Arts programme, a former business professional who now convenes the "Business as Mission Forum", a representative case at the intersection of faith and the business world.

The lists of heads and alumni follow official and authoritative sources; for living persons only neutral facts are recorded. More recent administrative developments at the college level (such as the registration and operation of student self-governing bodies) are presented side by side, per public reports, in this site's article College Expansion and the 3+3+4 Curriculum Reform; we do not repeat them here.

---

# 7. Cultural Positioning: The Christian Wing of CUHK's "Twin Humanistic Traditions"

Chung Chi's "succession of the thirteen colleges" is not the legal continuation or asset transfer of any particular university; it is a succession of spirit and mission, a symbolic claim — a newly founded institution consciously taking up a faith tradition. Seen within CUHK as a whole, Chung Chi's Christian-humanist tradition and New Asia's Chinese-cultural-humanist tradition form the two wings of the University's "twin humanistic traditions":

Chung Chi (Christian humanism): inherits the tradition of Christian universities in China, grounded in the Christian spirit, Sino-Western convergence, and social concern; the chapel and the Divinity School are its institutional carriers.

New Asia (Chinese cultural humanism): inherits the Chinese cultural mission of the scholar-refugees from the mainland, grounded in New Confucianism and the Chinese scholarly tradition; the Pavilion of Harmony and the New Asia Institute of Advanced Chinese Studies are its institutional carriers (see New Asia College).

United (pragmatic refugee-education): formed from a merger of five Guangdong private colleges, carrying a diaspora-education and business-pragmatism character (see United College).

Each of the three founding colleges has its own spiritual character, but the "Christianity × Chinese culture" double source of Chung Chi and New Asia has especially shaped CUHK's overall temperament of "a gathering of humanities, a convergence of China and the West". This also echoes the "combining Chinese and Western cultures" phrasing in CUHK's founding mission — Chung Chi and New Asia are the two college-level fountainheads of that convergence. It is precisely this pronounced religious identity that has made "the secularisation and modernisation of religious education" a long-standing scholarly theme in discussion of the Chung Chi case (see the work of Ng Kwok-ming, Ying Fuk-tsang, and others).

---

# 8. Anecdotes and Rumours (Low Reliability)

Reliability note: this section consists mostly of campus lore, word-of-mouth, and internet-forum anecdotes — unverified by authoritative historical sources, of low reliability, and offered only for cultural interest. Do not cite them as fact. This site does not publish subjective judgements about living persons; the anecdotes below correspond to no real individual.

The Lotus Pond / Lake Ad Excellentiam "drowning" urban legend

The Chung Chi lotus pond (now Lake Ad Excellentiam), with its tranquil waters and dim night-time atmosphere, has long bred a crop of campus urban legends: "an extra figure appears by the shore late at night", "chanting can be heard on rainy nights", "couples who walk one lap around the lake will break up" — stories of this sort are a common motif in the folklore of university waterscapes everywhere (New Asia's Pavilion of Harmony and various residence halls have their own versions). Purely fictional imaginings, corresponding to no real person or event, of very low reliability — to be enjoyed strictly as campus folklore.

A romanticised gloss on the naming of Lake Ad Excellentiam

Popular hearsay has also read the 「未圓」 ("not yet full") of the lake's name as a romantic narrative of "(some past affair) left unfulfilled". In fact, the name was chosen in the 1990s beautification project for the sense of "learning and life are never complete; one should rest in the highest excellence" (echoing the motto). Readings of "未圓 = a love story left unfinished" are mostly later embellishment, rhetoric weighing heavier than history — low reliability.

---