School of Chinese Medicine: Among Hong Kong's First Degree Programmes in Chinese Medicine (1998), Standing Side-by-Side with Western Medicine

This article is a factual archive entry in the reference zone (11 Medicine), carrying no credibility badges and attaching official/secondary sources item by item. It focuses specifically on the founding of CUHK's School of Chinese Medicine, its pre-history of accumulated scholarship, and its current institutional structure, complementing 11-medical-hospital/faculty-of-medicine.md (the Faculty of Medicine's architecture) and 01-academics/special-departments.md (the School's cross-faculty positioning among "specialised departments"). Within CUHK's medical system, the "Chinese and Western medicine standing side-by-side" configuration is one of the features that sets the University apart from purely Western-medical institutions.

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# 1. Before the School: From a "Working Group on Chinese Herbal Medicine" to an "Institute of Chinese Medicine"

Before the School of Chinese Medicine was formally established in 1998, the University had already accumulated more than two decades of research on Chinese herbal medicine and Chinese medicine — a "pre-history" often overlooked in casual accounts, yet crucial to understanding how the School could "come into being as a fully-fledged system" in 1998.

According to publicly available information, CUHK's systematic research on Chinese medicine dates back to 1975, when a "Working Group on Chinese Herbal Medicine" was set up under the Faculty of Science; by 1979, the group had been upgraded to a "Research Centre on Chinese Herbal Medicine," which began systematic chemical composition analysis and identification of medicinal materials. This phase focused on "Chinese materia medica" (中药), leaning towards chemistry and pharmacology, and did not yet touch on clinical education in Chinese medicine.

Entering the late 1990s, with Hong Kong's handover approaching, the legal status of Chinese medicine in Hong Kong and its place in higher education became matters of public debate — according to sources, before the handover Chinese medicine had long lacked formal recognition and statutory status in Hong Kong; around the handover, Hong Kong society began pushing for Chinese medicine education to be formally absorbed into the university system. It was against this backdrop that CUHK and Hong Kong Baptist University, almost in lockstep, both formally established Schools of Chinese Medicine in 1998.

"Chinese herbal medicine research" and "Chinese medicine education" were two parallel streams that later converged: CUHK's research on the chemistry and pharmacology of medicinal herbs (from the 1975 working group onwards) came first, following a "scientification" path; the clinical training of practitioners and degree education (from the 1998 School onwards) was the later "medicalisation" path that filled the gap. Around the turn of the millennium, the University further established the Institute of Chinese Medicine, focusing on translational and applied research, with Hong Kong physician Professor Leung Ping-chung as its founding director — Leung, whose early specialisms were orthopaedics and microsurgery before he turned to the modernisation of Chinese medicine, is one of the representative figures in CUHK's Chinese medicine research lineage. By this point the two streams had largely merged: on one side the "School of Chinese Medicine" in the sense of degree education, on the other the "Institute of Chinese Medicine" in the sense of a research institute — advancing on separate tracks but in concert, together forming the bedrock of CUHK's present-day Chinese medicine establishment.

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# 2. Establishment: Among Hong Kong's First Degree Programmes in Chinese Medicine

According to the official introduction of CUHK's School of Chinese Medicine^※, the School was formally established in 1998. That year holds particular significance in the history of Chinese medicine higher education in Hong Kong — according to the English Wikipedia article "Faculties of Medicines in Hong Kong"^※, Hong Kong Baptist University's School of Chinese Medicine was also established in the same year (1998).

"Among the first" rather than "the one and only first": A common claim holds that CUHK's School of Chinese Medicine was "Hong Kong's first school of Chinese medicine." That is not precise — according to sources, CUHK's and HKBU's Schools of Chinese Medicine were both established in 1998, and the two belong to the same first cohort of institutions of Chinese medicine higher education in Hong Kong. Following the sources, this archive presents both side by side, avoiding the exaggeration of "uniquely first." The establishment of these Schools in 1998 marked the formal entry of Chinese medicine into Hong Kong's university degree system — a decisive step towards the "institutionalisation and standardisation" of the discipline: previously, Chinese medicine practitioners were mostly trained through master-disciple apprenticeships or private colleges, lacking a unified degree qualification and curriculum standard; after 1998, Chinese medicine education for the first time possessed a university structure and degree framework parallel to Western medicine.

At the time of its founding, the School faced an institutional environment still taking shape: Hong Kong's Chinese Medicine Ordinance was not passed by the Legislative Council until 1999, and the registration regime for Chinese medicine practitioners was likewise in its infancy. In other words, the School's early graduates in a sense constituted a generation that "grew up in step" with Hong Kong's regulatory framework for Chinese medicine — they completed their degree education while witnessing the gradual implementation of practitioner registration and the Chinese Medicine Council of Hong Kong. This is also why the curriculum was, from the very start, designed to balance "Chinese medicine theory and clinical competence, complemented by modern medical knowledge" — according to the Faculty of Medicine's official "Schools, Departments & Unit" page^※, the School's mission is to cultivate "high-calibre Chinese medicine professionals with the highest standards of professional knowledge and conduct."

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# 3. Scale: Over a Thousand Graduates and a Full Programme Spectrum

According to the official introduction of CUHK's School of Chinese Medicine^※ and the Baidu Baike entry "香港中文大学中医学院"^※, the School has, since its establishment, produced over 1,000 to 1,500 graduates (official statements at different points vary slightly in range, but all refer to a "more than a thousand" scale). The School currently offers a complete spectrum of Chinese medicine degrees:

According to the CUHK undergraduate admissions page for the Bachelor of Chinese Medicine^※, the undergraduate programme is a long-cycle professional course that systematically trains professionals equipped with Chinese medicine theory and clinical competence, while also covering foundational knowledge of modern medicine — echoing the School's "proficiency in both Chinese and Western medicine" training objective.

The "dual-track logic" of programme design: A close look at the School's degree spectrum reveals a common logic — at almost every level, both a "taught" track (for newcomers/full-time students) and a "research or in-service" track (for practising practitioners) exist side by side. This is no coincidence: since its founding, the School has had to nurture a new generation of Chinese medicine practitioners "from scratch" while also offering practising practitioners an upgrading pathway towards higher qualifications or a turn to research — this is a discipline still professionalising rapidly, and it must cater to both "developing the new" and "upgrading the established."

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# 4. Clinical Work and Research in Tandem: The Teaching Clinic and the 2014 Relocation

One of the School's distinguishing features is the integration of teaching, clinical service and research. According to the School of Chinese Medicine's clinical services page^※:

• The School operates a Chinese Medicine Specialty Clinic cum Clinical Teaching and Research Centre, where students receive training in a real clinical environment;
• The clinic has 8 general consultation rooms and 1 specialist consultation room, equipped with a computerised system handling appointment booking, registration, consultation, payment and dispensing;
• The clinic offers specialist treatments in acupuncture, orthopaedics and traumatology, and tuina (推拿), along with dispensing of Chinese herbal decoction pieces and granules, and decoction preparation services;
• The clinic is led by a team of professors, professional consultants, lecturers and experienced practising Chinese medicine practitioners;
• Clinical training spans the various specialties of Chinese medicine, while evidence-based medicine research is also conducted, and internships are offered to Chinese medicine graduates.

The School's premises have also undergone one significant relocation. According to Baidu Baike^※, in September 2014 the School moved into a new teaching building at Li Wai Chun Building on Chung Chi College campus, featuring dedicated research laboratories for work including chemical purification of Chinese herbal compounds, standardisation analysis, pharmacological and clinical testing. The move to the Chung Chi campus — rather than remaining within the Faculty of Science to which it originally reported, or the Faculty of Medicine campus into which it would later be integrated — resonates, in its own way, with Chung Chi College's own collegiate tradition of "bridging the best of the East and the West" (see Chung Chi College).

According to the Faculty of Medicine's official page^※, the School's research concentrates on three major areas: musculoskeletal disorders, disorders of the central nervous system, and cancer, through translational and clinical research; the School also participates in the "Hong Kong Chinese Materia Medica Standards" project, collaborating with international partners on evidence-based services and training.

The Chinese medicine version of "research-teaching-clinical integration": This configuration is the mirror image of CUHK's Western medical faculty, which uses the Prince of Wales Hospital as its teaching hospital in an integrated "research-teaching-clinical" model (see faculty-of-medicine-founding.md) — the School of Chinese Medicine likewise treats its "teaching clinic" as the site where students receive clinical training and research is conducted. Chinese medicine is no longer merely an art passed down from master to apprentice; it has been absorbed into the modern university's "research-teaching-clinical integration" framework: students follow practising practitioners on ward rounds in the clinic, the same case data feeds evidence-based research, and research findings feed back into teaching and clinical standards — a closed loop.

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# 5. Collaboration with Mainland China: Placement Bases and Joint Training

The School's clinical training is not confined to Hong Kong. According to Baidu Baike^※, the School has signed agreements with Shenzhen Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital to host student placements, and maintains teaching and research collaborations with several Chinese medicine institutions in mainland China. Such arrangements are hardly unusual across CUHK's disciplines — medicine, nursing and others routinely maintain clinical placement pipelines with mainland medical institutions (see faculty-of-medicine.md) — but for the School of Chinese Medicine this layer of collaboration carries extra disciplinary significance: the theoretical and clinical traditions of Chinese medicine are rooted in mainland China. Cooperation with mainland Chinese medicine schools and hospitals is both a practical necessity — giving students access to larger patient volumes and a richer range of clinical experience — and a way of sustaining the continuity of the Chinese medicine academic tradition: Hong Kong's Chinese medicine education cannot be entirely self-contained, and needs to maintain an ongoing exchange with the "home soil" of the discipline.

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# 6. Merger into the Faculty of Medicine in 2013: A Rare Case of Cross-Faculty Integration

The School's administrative home within CUHK has undergone one significant adjustment. According to the Faculty of Medicine's "Milestones" page^※, the Chinese medicine discipline originally sat within the Faculty of Science and was formally integrated into the Faculty of Medicine on 1 July 2013, becoming one of five schools under the Faculty (alongside the School of Biomedical Sciences, the Nethersole School of Nursing, the School of Pharmacy, and the JC School of Public Health and Primary Care).

This is a rare case of "cross-faculty migration" in CUHK's academic structure. The institutional logic is not hard to grasp: the chemistry and pharmacology of medicinal herbs (the School's "science gene") certainly matter, but the School's core mission is ultimately to train Chinese medicine practitioners capable of clinical practice — a mission closely aligned with the Faculty of Medicine's remit of "training healthcare professionals," and increasingly at odds with the Faculty of Science's positioning around "basic scientific research." The 2013 integration was, in a sense, a realignment of the School's administrative home from "what it researches" to "whom it trains."

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# 7. The Current Director, Lin Zhixiu: A Cross-Boundary Career from Guangzhou Chinese Medicine to London Pharmacology

According to the Faculty of Medicine's "Directors of Schools" page^※, the current Director of the School of Chinese Medicine is Professor Lin Zhixiu, whose CV is itself a personal version of "East-West integration": Lin graduated from Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine in 1987 with a bachelor's degree in Chinese medicine, then practised as a Chinese medicine physician at a hospital affiliated to the Guangdong Provincial Institute of Traditional Chinese Medicine; in 1999 he moved to King's College London, where he obtained a PhD in pharmacology (pharmacognosy), and joined CUHK in 2003. He currently also serves as Director of the Hong Kong Institute of Integrative Medicine and holds public offices including chairmanship of the Health Committee of the Chinese Medicine Council of Hong Kong, making him a key conduit between Hong Kong's regulatory framework for Chinese medicine and CUHK's academic research.

Lin's research focuses on the potential therapeutic effects of Chinese herbal medicines and their chemical constituents on diseases including pancreatic cancer, cognitive disorders (Alzheimer's disease), Parkinson's disease, psoriasis and atopic dermatitis. According to the CUHK press article "Chinese Medicine vs. COVID-19"^※, during the COVID-19 pandemic Lin gave an official CUHK interview on the use of Chinese medicine in treating COVID-19: he observed that from the perspective of Chinese medicine's "doctrine of warm diseases," COVID-19 is an externally contracted epidemic disease that enters "the lung" via the mouth and nose, clinically presenting with fever, cough and fatigue; the interview cited data on over 60,000 COVID-19 patients in mainland China who received integrated Chinese-Western medicine treatment, arguing that Chinese medicine intervention helps alleviate fever, cough and fatigue, shorten hospital stays, and reduce mortality — herbs such as astragalus (黄芪) and baical skullcap root (黄芩) were listed as common components of formulas used to boost immunity and protect the organs.

A "cross-boundary director" as a reflection of the discipline's temperament: Lin's own academic trajectory — from a traditional Chinese medicine education at Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine to Western-style pharmacological doctoral training at King's College London — is a miniature of the School's own "Chinese and Western standing side-by-side" character. The School's research directions under his leadership (pharmacological mechanisms, clinical trials, phytochemistry) align closely with his personal academic training, which also explains why the School's research topics (such as the mechanisms of Chinese herbal medicines on cancer and neurodegenerative diseases) are consistently underpinned by an "evidence-based" methodological orientation, rather than remaining at the level of empirical traditional formulas.

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# 8. Chinese and Western Medicine Side by Side: A Defining Feature of CUHK's Medical System

The existence of the School of Chinese Medicine gives CUHK's medical system its "Chinese medicine and Western medicine standing side by side" configuration. According to the English Wikipedia article^※, CUHK's Faculty of Medicine has expanded into a large system covering schools/departments of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, Chinese medicine, biomedical sciences, and public health — Chinese medicine being one significant pillar.

Why "side by side" matters especially for CUHK: CUHK is a university founded on the mission of "the Chinese cultural heritage and the integration of Chinese and Western learning" (see 00-overview/history.md). In medicine, "Western medicine" represents the modern scientific medical system, and "Chinese medicine" represents the traditional Chinese medical tradition — the two standing side by side at CUHK is precisely the University's "integration of Chinese and Western learning" mission made concrete in the medical sphere. On one side, world-class Western medical research such as NIPT and translational oncology (see ../04-research/nipt-deepdive.md); on the other, the School of Chinese Medicine and Chinese herbal medicine research that began in 1975 and became a School in 1998 (the State Key Laboratory includes a medicinal plants focus; see ../04-research/state-key-laboratories.md) — two streams running in parallel within a single university for nearly half a century: that is the distinctive character of CUHK medicine. This side-by-side arrangement is not a simple "smorgasbord of disciplines": the Chinese medicine clinic and the Western-medical Prince of Wales Hospital both follow the "teaching hospital / teaching clinic" logic; the School of Chinese Medicine's research likewise pursues the international standards of evidence-based medicine — what stands side by side is not merely two bodies of knowledge, but a shared "research-teaching-clinical integration" methodology of the modern university.

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# 9. 2025: The Hong Kong Chinese Medicine Hospital and the Completion of the Teaching Hospital Landscape

The School's "teaching clinic" model is set to undergo an institutional upgrade at the end of 2025. According to a Hong Kong government press release^※, Hong Kong's first Chinese medicine hospital — the Hong Kong Chinese Medicine Hospital (located at Pak Shing Kok Path, Tseung Kwan O) — has been wholly funded by the government, will operate under a public-private partnership model, and will commence phased services on 11 December 2025, offering outpatient and day inpatient services in its first year, with inpatient services expanding mainly from the second year. The hospital's operator is Hong Kong Baptist University (appointed through a tender process in 2021), but according to a China News Service report^※ and a Ta Kung Wen Wei Media report^※, the hospital has signed cooperation agreements with The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong Baptist University, and The University of Hong Kong — the three local universities that offer Chinese medicine programmes — covering hospital governance, talent exchange, medical services, teaching and training, and research: experts in Chinese medicine from the three universities will jointly develop clinical standards and guidelines, and the hospital will also serve as a teaching hospital of Chinese medicine for the three universities, providing local clinical placements and advanced training opportunities for undergraduate and postgraduate students.

For CUHK's School of Chinese Medicine, this cooperation has clear institutional significance: previously, its students' clinical training relied primarily on the School's own Chinese Medicine Specialty Clinic cum Clinical Teaching and Research Centre (see Section 4 above) and the placement agreement with Shenzhen Traditional Chinese Medicine Hospital (see Section 5); the opening of the Hong Kong Chinese Medicine Hospital means that, for the first time, CUHK Chinese medicine students will have access within Hong Kong to a large-scale teaching hospital resource — public-private in operation and with all six Chinese medicine specialties (internal medicine, surgery, gynaecology, paediatrics, orthopaedics and traumatology, and acupuncture) on offer. This bears similarities to the role of the Prince of Wales Hospital in CUHK's Western medical system (see faculty-of-medicine.md), and belongs with the CUHK Medical Centre, completed in 2021, to the same "government/institution-funded, university deeply involved in teaching" model — except that the Hong Kong Chinese Medicine Hospital is shared among three universities rather than exclusive to CUHK.

From "one school, one clinic" to "three schools, one shared hospital": Since its founding in 1998, the School of Chinese Medicine has long relied on its own clinic as its sole local clinical teaching venue — a stable model, but one in which patient volume and specialty coverage were ultimately limited. The Hong Kong Chinese Medicine Hospital changes precisely this picture: it is affiliated with no single university, but is co-governed by three, with shared clinical resources and patient referral channels — according to reports, patients of the university's Chinese medicine clinics may be referred to the hospital for treatment, and the universities and the hospital cooperate on Chinese medicine clinical research. This is the first "cross-institutional shared" teaching hospital in the history of Chinese medicine education in Hong Kong; in a sense, it marks a new stage in which the 1998 competitive-cooperative relationship of "CUHK and HKBU founding Schools in the same year" has, by 2025, evolved into "three universities collaborating to run a hospital."

Related reading: Faculty of Medicine architecture and clinical departments, Founding of the Faculty of Medicine and its founding dean, Prince of Wales Hospital and SARS, CUHK Medical Centre: Hong Kong's first smart private teaching hospital (2021), Medicine in-depth archive, Specialised departments (Translation/Music/Architecture/Chinese Medicine), State Key Laboratories (including medicinal plants).

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