New Asia College: Chengming, "Blossoms Scattered", and the Continuity of New Confucianism

In 1949, on Kweilin Street in Sham Shui Po, a few rented classrooms spread across a two-storey building — no library in sight. At the lectern stood Ch'ien Mu, recently arrived from mainland China, so hard up that he slept on the floor of the school premises; in the seats were refugee youths, many from the camps, unable to afford the fees. A "university" that would one day become a founding member of The Chinese University of Hong Kong began its life in that space. This article surveys New Asia College's origins, spirit, landmarks and people: one of CUHK's three founding colleges, a bastion of contemporary New Confucianism and Chinese cultural studies, whose motto is "诚明" (sincerity and perspicacity), and whose anthem's line "hands empty, holding nothing" is not rhetoric but reportage.

This is the consolidated dossier for New Asia College, far more detailed than the New Asia section in the volume overview. The institutional context of the 1976 restructuring struggle across the whole University is covered in a dedicated article in our governance module; this page only summarises it and points there.

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# 1. Basic profile

According to the official New Asia College page^※, New Asia College was founded in 1949 by a group of scholars led by Dr. Ch'ien Mu, who had come from mainland China, with the aim of "continuing the traditional Chinese culture and integrating it with modern scholarship". Among CUHK's nine colleges, New Asia carries a distinctive cultural weight, owing to its deep ties with New Confucianism and Chinese humanistic studies, and its founding narrative of building a school from nothing — "blossoms scattered" (花果飘零) yet "roots replanted in the spirit" (灵根自植).

"New Asia" signifies a "new Asia", embodying the founders' hopes for a revival of Chinese culture in a new era, one that would build bridges between East and West and advance the cause of human peace. According to the official account, the College's mission is "to emulate the spirit of the Song–Ming academies' tradition of lecturing, while drawing on the Western European university tutorial system" — reaching back to the lecture traditions of Song–Ming Confucians such as Zhu Xi's White Deer Grotto Academy and Wang Yangming, while also borrowing the tutorial system of Oxford and Cambridge, in an attempt to fuse the best of China and the West.

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# 2. Founding history: from Kweilin Street to Shatin

# 1949: Asia College of Arts and Commerce amid the upheaval

According to the College's official history^※, in October 1949 Ch'ien Mu and a group of scholars who had come south from mainland China founded the "Asia College of Arts and Commerce" (an evening school). That same year, the political situation on the mainland was transformed overnight, and large numbers of intellectuals fled south to Hong Kong; teachers and students alike were mostly refugees, desperately short of money — "hands empty, holding nothing" is not rhetoric but plain fact. According to the CUHK University Gallery exhibition "A Master's Presence: Mr. Ch'ien Mu"^※, the founders' purpose was to preserve a lifeline for Chinese culture in a time of chaos and to give refugee youths a chance to continue their education — they were not running an ordinary school, but guarding a cultural ideal amid the wreckage of their world.

# 1950: Moving to Kweilin Street, renamed New Asia

According to the official history, in 1950 the College was reorganised, renamed "New Asia College", and moved into premises on Kweilin Street in Sham Shui Po, Kowloon. The "Kweilin Street era" thus became the point of origin of the New Asia spirit — later alumni and teachers alike would summon up the hardships of the founding years almost invariably through the symbol of Kweilin Street. Ch'ien Mu served as President, Tang Chun-i as Dean of Studies, and Chang P'ei-chieh (Zhang Peijie) as Bursar; the three founders each took charge of one area while juggling multiple roles — the classic bootstrap pattern.

The material conditions of the Kweilin Street years seem almost unimaginable today. Drawing together official CUHK sources^※ and related public accounts:

• Premises: the original "campus" was no more than a few rented classrooms on Kweilin Street (a handful of units in a two-storey building, about four classrooms), so bare-bones that there was no library at all;
• Students: nearly all were young men and women who had come south, many from the refugee camps; a great number could not pay tuition and had nowhere to live — some students reportedly slept on the rooftop and in the stairwells of the building. At its peak the whole school, teachers and students together, numbered fewer than one hundred people;
• Finances: tuition income covered only a small fraction of the College's costs (around 20 per cent); the College ran at a chronic deficit, with monthly shortfalls reported in the thousands of Hong Kong dollars — in the early 1950s, a financial gap large enough to crush a small college;
• The founders' privations: Ch'ien Mu himself lived in extreme austerity, reportedly sleeping on the floor of the school premises in the early days, later lodging in tenement districts and outlying villages, commuting by public transport each day to teach.

The New Asia of those pioneering years had no comfortable endowment and no proper campus — only a band of scholars content to live in poverty, and a group of rootless young people desperate to learn. Teachers and students sustained one another through hardship — this is the most original sediment of what later became known as the "New Asia spirit". "Hands empty, holding nothing" was no self-pitying lament but a declaration of spirit: having nothing in material terms, yet carrying in the mind the whole inheritance of Chinese culture.

# 1953: Founding of the New Asia Institute

According to the College's official history^※, in 1953 the College established its Institute of Advanced Chinese Studies (新亚研究所) on Prince Edward Road, dedicated to advanced research in Chinese literature, history and philosophy and to postgraduate training. It would grow into an important institution for New Confucian and Chinese scholarly research. When New Asia College moved to Shatin in 1973, the Institute remained at the old Farm Road premises, institutionally diverging from the College that had been absorbed into CUHK — a point of frequent confusion that deserves to be clarified.

# 1954: The Yale-China Association and American foundations

According to the College's official history^※, in 1954 the American Yale-China Association began to cooperate with New Asia College; around the same time the College received support from the Asia Foundation, the Harvard-Yenching Institute, the Rockefeller Foundation and others. Yale-China (rooted in Yale University) sent graduates each year to teach English and other subjects at New Asia, and funded the construction of buildings and the further training of teachers. The Yale-China–New Asia partnership is a typical case of American foundations supporting Hong Kong higher education under the Cold War order, and it laid the material foundation for New Asia's later development.

# 1956: Moving to Farm Road

According to the official history and the English Wikipedia, in the mid-1950s New Asia moved into its permanent campus at Farm Road in To Kwa Wan, Kowloon, built with donations from American foundations; the "circular pavilion" (圆亭) on the Farm Road campus would later be regarded as the precursor of the "amphitheatre" and the "Pavilion of Harmony" imagery at the Shatin campus.

# 1963 and 1973: Founding CUHK, moving to Shatin

According to New Asia College (English Wikipedia)^※, in 1963 New Asia founded The Chinese University of Hong Kong together with Chung Chi and United Colleges; in 1973 New Asia College moved to the CUHK campus at Ma Liu Shui, Shatin. After New Asia's departure, the New Asia Education and Culture Association opened New Asia Middle School on the old Farm Road site, and the New Asia Institute also remained at Farm Road — so the name "New Asia" now lives in three places: New Asia College within CUHK (Shatin), and the independent New Asia Institute and New Asia Middle School (Farm Road).

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# 3. The founders and New Confucianism

New Asia's special standing within CUHK and across the Chinese-speaking scholarly world comes down to one thing: it was a stronghold of contemporary New Confucianism. The three principal founders — Ch'ien Mu, Tang Chun-i, and Chang P'ei-chieh — together with such figures as Xu Fuguan, Mou Zongsan and Carsun Chang (Zhang Junmai), who later gathered at New Asia or the New Asia Institute, formed a scholarly community that took as its calling "to carry on the learning of the sages for posterity" (为往圣继绝学).

• Ch'ien Mu (1895–1990): courtesy name Binsi, born in Wuxi, Jiangsu; a leading modern Chinese historian, thinker and educator, ranked with Lü Simian, Chen Yuan and Chen Yinke as one of the "four great historians" of modern China; author of Guoshi Dagang (The Outline of National History) and Xian-Qin Zhuzi Xinian. He founded New Asia in 1949 and served as its head until 1965; he personally wrote the lyrics of the College anthem and drafted the New Asia Study Regulations (新亚学规), and his educational ideal of "unity of learning and personhood" constitutes the core text of the New Asia spirit. According to the English Wikipedia, after Ch'ien Mu stepped down in 1965 the College's leadership evolved from "President (1949–1977)" to "College Head (1977–present)".
• Tang Chun-i (1909–1978): born in Yibin, Sichuan; a leading figure of contemporary New Confucianism; New Asia's first Dean of Studies and head of its Philosophy Department. In 1958, the "Manifesto for a Re-appraisal of Sinology" (《为中国文化敬告世界人士宣言》), drafted by Tang and jointly signed with Carsun Chang, Mou Zongsan and Xu Fuguan — commonly known as the "New Confucian Manifesto" — was issued, a landmark document in the 20th-century history of Confucianism. Tang's paired metaphors of "blossoms scattered" (花果飘零) and "roots replanted in the spirit" (灵根自植) to capture the predicament and the calling of the exiled intellectual almost constitute an alternative statement of the New Asia spirit.
• Chang P'ei-chieh (1905–1970): born in Guantao, Shandong; held a doctorate in economics from Germany; New Asia's first Bursar and head of its Economics Department, who held the administration together through the pioneering years. He was the first of the three founders to die.

Other scholars who gathered at New Asia or the New Asia Institute include Xu Fuguan, Carsun Chang, Mou Zongsan and Lao Sze-kwang; this roll-call of names lifts "New Asia" beyond the bounds of a single college and makes it a cultural symbol in its own right.

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# 4. The motto "Chengming", the College anthem and the Study Regulations

# The motto: Chengming

According to the official account, the College motto is "诚明" (chengming, "sincerity and perspicacity"), from the Doctrine of the Mean (《中庸》): "From sincerity to perspicacity is to be ascribed to nature; from perspicacity to sincerity is to be ascribed to instruction. But given sincerity, there will be perspicacity; given perspicacity, there will be sincerity." "Cheng" (诚) denotes the way of truthfulness without deception, and "ming" (明) the wisdom and insight that arise from sincerity. The two characters condense New Asia's ideal of the unity of "study" and "being human".

# The anthem: "Hands empty, holding nothing"

According to Wikipedia (Chinese), "New Asia College"^※, the College anthem was penned by founding head Ch'ien Mu and set to music by the celebrated composer Hwang Yau-tai. The most remembered lines give unvarnished expression to the hardship of building a school from nothing: 「手空空，无一物，路遥遥，无止境。乱离中，流浪里，饿我体肤劳我精。艰险我奋进，困乏我多情。」 ("Hands empty, holding nothing; the road long, without end. In chaos and wandering, hunger disciplines my body, toil my spirit. Through danger I press on; in want my affections deepen.") "Hands empty, holding nothing" is at once a factual portrait of the founding years and a declaration of the College's resolve to stand on spirit alone; to this day the anthem is sung in unison at New Asia's orientation, graduation and anniversary occasions.

# The New Asia Study Regulations

Ch'ien Mu personally drafted the "New Asia Study Regulations" (a score of articles) as guidance for students in both personal conduct and scholarship; they were later collected in New Asia's Legacy and Teachings (新亚遗铎). The Regulations open by stating the fundamental aim outright: "In seeking learning and in being human, what matters is that the two advance side by side — and still more, that they fuse into one." The core concern is a refusal to split "study" from "being human" into two separate realms.

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# 5. Signature buildings and landmarks

New Asia College occupies the higher ground in the northern part of the CUHK campus, commanding views of Tolo Harbour and Ma On Shan. Its several landmarks almost all mirror cultural motifs such as "unity of Heaven and humanity" (天人合一) and "sincerity and perspicacity".

# The Water Tower and the Amphitheatre

According to New Asia College (English Wikipedia)^※, New Asia's facilities include the Ch'ien Mu Library, the Pavilion of Harmony, the Clock Tower, the Water Tower and the Amphitheatre. The Water Tower is the College's most conspicuous landmark, standing beside the Amphitheatre and visible from a distance; at anniversary time a vertical banner reading "诚明 · New Asia College Anniversary" is hung from the tower. The Amphitheatre, modelled on an ancient Greek theatre and with excellent acoustics, is the centre of the "Thousand-Person Banquet", the "Dai Dat Dei" fair and other anniversary events, as well as everyday gatherings of teachers and students.

# The Pavilion of Harmony (Pavilion of Heaven and Humanity)

According to Wikipedia (Chinese), "Pavilion of Harmony"^※, the Pavilion of Harmony was completed in December 2003, built with donations from Ms. Wu Zonglin, in memory of the founder Ch'ien Mu and of his essay "On the Unity of Heaven and Humanity" (《天人合一论》). In front of the pavilion lies a crescent-shaped shallow pool whose waters appear almost to merge with Tolo Harbour and the Ma On Shan landscape beyond, creating a visual effect of "water and sky in one colour" — the pavilion has become one of the most celebrated photo-taking and wedding-photography spots on the CUHK campus and in Hong Kong. The full text of Ch'ien Mu's On the Unity of Heaven and Humanity is carved into the pavilion wall, in the calligraphy of Lee Yun-woon, formerly of the Fine Arts Department; the "Unity of Heaven and Humanity" seal is the work of fine-arts professor Tong Kam-tang. A former Vice-Chancellor, Professor Ambrose King, once praised the Pavilion of Harmony as "the second finest view in Hong Kong".

# Cheng Ming Building, Fung Yeun (Humanities) Building, and the Ch'ien Mu Library

• Cheng Ming Building: houses the College's administration and classrooms, and contains the College history archive, the office of the Yale-China Association's representative in China, the New Asia College office, and the CUHK Fine Arts Department.
• Fung Yeun Building: a teaching building whose name echoes New Asia's humanistic tradition.
• Ch'ien Mu Library: the College library named after the founding head, with rich holdings in Chinese literature, history and philosophy.

A bronze bust of founder Tang Chun-i stands elsewhere on the campus; many of the College's building names (Cheng Ming, Fung Yeun, Zhi Xing, Xue Si, Lok Kwan — "sincerity and perspicacity", "humanities", "knowledge and action", "learning and reflection", "delighting in fellowship") are drawn from the Confucian classics and the New Asia Study Regulations — everywhere one sees the intent to carry culture through architecture.

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# 6. College traditions

• Anniversary season: the Dai Dat Dei and the Thousand-Person Banquet: New Asia's anniversary is the first major college event of the academic year. The Dai Dat Dei (大笪地) resembles a night market, with students running stalls selling food and trinkets; the Thousand-Person Banquet is held in the Amphitheatre, drawing over a thousand teachers, students and alumni — the College's event of the year.
• The Ch'ien Mu Lecture in Chinese Culture: New Asia's most academically prestigious lecture series, inviting world-renowned scholars each year to speak at the College and promote Chinese culture. In 1978 the first lecture was delivered by the then-octogenarian Ch'ien Mu himself, who journeyed back from abroad despite illness — one of the most moving pages in the College's history. The roster of subsequent speakers has been stellar.
• Orientation camp, New Asia Singing, New Asia Night: the orientation camp helps new students settle into the community and learn the College anthem; New Asia Singing is a singing competition; New Asia Night is the College's evening gala.

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# 7. The 1976 restructuring and the resignation of the nine directors (summary)

This section is a summary. For the full institutional background of the restructuring, the origins of the Fulton Report and the struggle over governance, see the dedicated article in our governance module. This page covers only what concerns New Asia College directly.

According to Wikipedia (Chinese), "New Asia College"^※, when CUHK was established in 1963 it adopted a "federal" structure, under which the founding colleges such as New Asia retained considerable autonomy in teaching. In the 1970s the Hong Kong government pushed for a restructuring of the University, proposing that subject teaching be centralised under the University, with the colleges left responsible only for student welfare and general education — a shift from "federalism" toward a "unitary, centralised" model. The restructuring bill passed its third reading in the Legislative Council in 1976, and the colleges' teaching authority was transferred to the University centre.

As the bill was being passed, nine directors of the New Asia College Board — recorded by Wikipedia as Tang Chun-i, Li Tsu-fa, Ch'ien Mu, Shen I-chen, Wu Chun-sheng, Hsu Chi-liang, Liu Han-tung, Jen Kuo-ta and Kuo Cheng-ta — issued a joint statement and resigned en masse in protest, on the grounds that the restructuring "seriously damages the autonomy of the University and the educational merits of the colleges" and violates the "federal" nature of CUHK. Yet the bill still passed its third reading, and the nine directors' resignations could not change the outcome. The episode is widely seen as a major institutional setback for the "New Asia spirit"; after the restructuring, New Asia's role within CUHK changed from that of a "university within a university" with a complete academic establishment to a member college focused on general education, student welfare and cultural inheritance.

On the restructuring, the divergence in stance between founding head Ch'ien Mu and his student Yü Ying-shih (Mr. Yü), who chaired the restructuring working group, has long been a matter of public speculation involving judgements of character. This page neither elaborates nor adjudicates; the two sides of the question are set out side by side in the dedicated article in our governance module.

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# 8. Notable alumni

• Yü Ying-shih (1930–2021): according to New Asia College (English Wikipedia)^※, historian; member of New Asia's first graduating class (1952); taught at Harvard, Yale and Princeton; recipient of the Kluge Prize and the Tang Prize; former Pro-Vice-Chancellor of CUHK and Head of New Asia College. One of the defining figures of 20th-century Chinese historiography.
• Liu Shu-hsien (1934–2016): philosopher; a leading representative of the third generation of contemporary New Confucianism; taught for many years in the CUHK Philosophy Department.
• Soong Kuo-tung (1922–2013): historian; former Dean of the Faculty of Arts at New Asia College and Director of the New Asia Institute; specialised in Tang and Song history.
• Samuel Sun Sai-ming: plant molecular biologist; New Asia alumnus; later founding Master of S.H. Ho College (see S.H. Ho College).

New Asia alumni are spread across academia, politics, business and culture, but their most dazzling achievements lie in the humanities and scholarship — a line of descent from the College's founding purpose of "carrying on the learning of the sages for posterity".

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# 9. Unofficial history and rumours (low reliability)

Reliability note: the items in this section are mostly campus folklore, oral tradition and internet-forum anecdotes, unverified by authoritative historical sources and of low reliability. They are offered for cultural interest only and must not be cited as fact. This site does not adopt subjective judgements about living persons; the rumours below do not correspond to any real individual.

The "Gentleman's Tower" naming mystery

The New Asia Water Tower is colloquially known as the "Gentleman's Tower" (君子塔). Several explanations circulate on campus: one holds that it evokes the saying "the gentleman is open and composed" (君子坦荡荡), referring to the tower's plain, upright form; another that the tower stands tall and solitary, "rising above the crowd like a gentleman"; and a jocular one that it is the highest point on campus and "looks down on everything" from above. All are popular embellishments, with no authoritative source — take them with a pinch of salt.

The "taboo" of the Pavilion of Harmony pool (campus ghost story)

Because of its watery reflections and tranquil night views, the Pavilion of Harmony has attracted a crop of campus ghost stories: some say the pool's surface reflects "one extra person" late at night, others that recitation can be heard from the pavilion on rainy nights, and so on. Such tales are a stock urban-legend motif attached to watery spots on university campuses everywhere; they are pure fiction, corresponding to no real person or event, of extremely low reliability, and best treated as campus folklore.

The folk dramatisation of "Ch'ien Mu and the restructuring"

In popular discourse — especially online — the affair of Ch'ien Mu and the restructuring has spawned a number of dramatised "inside story" versions: secret meetings, specific scenes and dialogues of the alleged break between master and disciple, and so on. These "you-are-there" details are for the most part untraceable to any reliable source; they are embellishments spun from later imaginings shaped by partisan sympathies, of low reliability and not to be credited. The true stances of the parties to the restructuring should be sought in their published writings and in serious scholarship.

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