Miscellany: Publishing · Libraries · Arts & Culture · Journals · Lifelong Learning · IT · Campus Culture

# 1. The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press (CUHK Press)

According to the CUHK Press official website^※, the Press grew out of the University Publishing Center, established in 1968, and began operating as an independent academic publishing body in 1977, with Dr. Francis K. Pan serving as its first Director. The Press describes itself as a "world-class bilingual (English–Chinese) academic publisher", with a list spanning history, philosophy, literature, translation, contemporary art, political science, sociology, anthropology, education and the history of medicine.

By the same source, the Press publishes around 60 new titles a year and maintains a backlist of more than 2,300 titles, of which over 1,100 remain in print and on sale. International partners include Columbia University Press^※, Princeton University Press, the University of Chicago Press, the University of Hawaiʻi Press, New York Review Books and the French publisher Gallimard.

The Press's distinguished authors include Gao Xingjian, Jao Tsung-I, Hsu Cho-yun, D. C. Lau, Lucien Bianco and Ezra Vogel. D. C. Lau's annotated bilingual editions of the Analects, the Mencius and the Daodejing have long been the Press's signature backlist titles, bringing the pre-Qin classics to the English-speaking academy in rigorous, carefully annotated translations; after Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2000, the Press continued to publish volumes on his writings and art.

The Press's twin-track "English–Chinese bilingual academic publishing" model is unusual among institutions of its kind: English monographs engage the international scholarly market, while Chinese-language academic books serve Chinese-reading audiences. Its English titles are distributed across Europe and North America through overseas university presses, while the Chinese list circulates through regional booksellers and the Press's own channels; in recent years, some journals and monographs have moved to open access, making the scholarship freely available to readers worldwide. As a non-profit body directly under the University, the Press puts scholarly value ahead of market returns in its commissioning — an institutional commitment that has sustained its "small but weighty" list in philosophy, translation and art history over the long term. The Press's ties to the Research Centre for Translation and Renditions, and the fuller genealogy of its signature authors, are treated separately in The CUHK Press and Renditions.

How does an academic press based on a hillside campus in Hong Kong sell books around the world? The answer is a network of regional agents. According to the Press's agents and booksellers page^※, its English-language list is serviced in North America by Columbia University Press (sales enquiries) with Ingram Publisher Services handling orders; in the UK, continental Europe, the Middle East and Africa by the Harrogate-based Mare Nostrum Group; in Australia and New Zealand by John Wiley & Sons Australia; in Japan by Toho Shoden; and in Taiwan by San Min Book Co. In mainland China, two non-exclusive distributors supply stock: Hong Kong's China Publishing Foreign Trade and Shanghai's Garden Books. This "one region, one agent" arrangement lets a relatively small university press cover several continents through physical book channels — and explains why its English academic titles are not uncommon in overseas library collections. On campus, the University Bookstore on the ground floor of the Yasumoto International Academic Park sells both Press titles and academic textbooks, serving as the neighbourhood bookshop for students and staff alike.

# 2. The University Library System

According to the CUHK Library website^※, the Library system comprises seven libraries: the University Library, the Elisabeth Luce Moore Library (Chung Chi College), the Ch'ien Mu Library (New Asia College), the Wu Chung Library (United College), the Architecture Library, the Li Ping Medical Library and the Lee Quo Wei Law Library. The Universities Service Centre (USC) Collection is also administered under the University Library.

By the CUHK Library Facts & Figures page^※, the collections hold over 2.8 million print volumes, more than 5.4 million accessible e-books, some 160,000 e-journals and over 1,000 databases.

# The eight-campus network: JULAC and HKALL

The CUHK Library is no island; it is embedded in a resource-sharing network built by all eight publicly funded universities in Hong Kong. According to the JULAC website^※, the Joint University Librarians Advisory Committee (JULAC) was founded in 1967 by the librarians of the eight UGC-funded institutions to coordinate collection development, shared systems and inter-library services; CUHK is a founding member. Between 2014 and 2017 the eight institutions migrated to a shared integrated library system, merging their catalogues into a single search platform.

By the HKALL project page^※, the Hong Kong Academic Library Link (HKALL) — operated by the CUHK Library — is a union catalogue through which readers can search more than 5 million monograph records across the eight institutions in one go and request cross-campus loans. HKALL was also one of the earliest such projects to incorporate Chinese-language cataloguing on a large scale. Students and staff holding a JULAC card can use the libraries and study spaces of any of the eight institutions — a reciprocity that puts far more than a single campus's collections within reach of one CUHK reader.

The University Library's basement houses the Learning Garden and MakerSpace, which operate almost around the clock year-round, serving as the hillside campus's base for all-night study sessions and hands-on making. The full layout of the branch libraries, the history of the Learning Garden and the special-collections highlights are covered in The University Library System: Seven Libraries, the Learning Garden and Rare Books.

# Special Collections

According to the Special Collections page^※, the collections hold Chinese rare books from the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) through the Qianlong era of the Qing dynasty (d. 1795), as well as 56 oracle bones — the largest such holding in Hong Kong. In 2008, the Bei Shan Tang Foundation donated 1,383 titles in 9,886 volumes of Chinese rare books, the largest donation of its kind to the Library in fifty years. The Special Collections also include modern literary archives and manuscripts, notably the papers of the British sinologist David Hawkes, translator of The Story of the Stone, and western rare books published before 1900.

# The Universities Service Centre Collection (USC)

According to the USC introduction^※, the Universities Service Centre (USC) was founded in 1963 to serve Western scholars working on contemporary China. In 1988 it was incorporated into CUHK and renamed the Universities Service Centre for China Studies.

The USC has long been regarded as a "holy site" of overseas China studies. In the Cold War years, when Western scholars could not easily enter mainland China for fieldwork, the Centre's holdings of mainland gazetteers, newspapers, county histories, statistical yearbooks and internal documents offered an irreplaceable first-hand window; a generation of China researchers, including Ezra Vogel and Philip C. C. Huang, spent long residencies there. This history of external funding and geopolitical circumstances belongs to the same era as the overseas patronage networks that supported CUHK's founding colleges — see The "Foreign Patronage" Networks of the Founding Era.

In January 2021, the Centre's documentary resources were brought under the University Library's Special Collections management, while its academic activities were transferred to the Institute of Chinese Studies. According to the open letter from the Association for Asian Studies^※, the AAS board wrote to CUHK in 2021 to express concern over the reorganisation. The University's official response via the Communications and Public Relations Office^※ was released, committing to continued open access for visiting scholars. We present both sides of the exchange here without adjudicating.

# University Archives

Per the University Archives page^※, the Archives hold institutional records of CUHK since its founding in 1963, including papers of successive Vice-Chancellors, Council minutes and early documents of the college merger — a primary source for the University's own history. The CUHK Digital Repository^※ has additionally digitised parts of the Special Collections, including the oracle bones, Daoist texts and the Hawkes papers, all searchable online.

# Turning paper into data: the Hong Kong Literature Database

The Library's digitisation work goes well beyond rare books. According to the Hong Kong Literature Database introduction^※, the Library has been authorised to digitise a large corpus of old newspapers and literary periodicals into the Hong Kong Literature Database, giving researchers access to the original print appearances of local literature. Per the Library's July 2021 relaunch notice^※, the database underwent a complete overhaul in July 2021, with a rebuilt interface and search functions. For scholars of Hong Kong literature, serialised fiction and short pieces scattered across fragile, hard-to-find newspaper supplements of past decades now have a central, full-text-searchable home. Such thematic databases extend the idea of "collections" from physical shelves into a data layer accessible from anywhere — a feature that distinguishes the CUHK Library from a purely custodial institution. By the CUHK Digital Repository^※, most of these digitised collections are freely open to the public for full-text searching: readers need never set foot on the Ma Liu Shui campus to consult primary materials ranging from oracle bones to modern newspapers.

# 3. The Art Museum

According to the Art Museum history page^※, the Museum opened in autumn 1971 on the main campus, designed jointly by T. Y. Lee and I. M. Pei, with substantial support from the philanthropist Dr. J. S. Lee. Its collection now holds more than 16,000 objects — ceramics, paintings and calligraphy, ancient seals, Yixing teapots, rubbings and archaeological teaching specimens — spanning from the Neolithic period to the Ming and Qing dynasties.

In 1973, the Museum received a donation of over 1,000 works from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Jen Chung-she, including a prized rubbing of the Huashan Temple Stele. In 1984 it became the first museum in Hong Kong to collaborate with the Palace Museum in Beijing. The Museum also serves a teaching function, working with the Department of Fine Arts and the Institute of Chinese Studies' Centre for Chinese Archaeology and Art to support teaching in museology and art history.

# Bei Shan Tang: the private collection behind half a museum

A very substantial share of the Museum's 16,000-plus objects traces back to one quietly private collector: Dr. J. S. Lee, master of the Bei Shan Tang collection. By the Art Museum history page^※, Lee was involved in the Museum's founding, helped the then Vice-Chancellor recruit its first Director, James Watt, and, "under his private collection's name of Bei Shan Tang, donated or helped acquire nearly half of the Museum's holdings", including major works of painting and calligraphy by Ni Zan, Shi Tao and Zheng Xie. In 1981 he initiated the Friends of the Art Museum to rally community support for educational programmes and acquisitions. He himself remained resolutely low-key, rarely seeking the limelight.

After Lee's death in 2007, the Bei Shan Tang Foundation carried on supporting the Museum's research, exhibitions and expansion. According to the J.S. Lee Memorial Fellowship page^※, the Foundation established the Fellowship in 2008 to fund museum professionals from around the world to train at leading overseas institutions — extending Lee's guardianship of Chinese art beyond the Museum's walls. "Bei Shan Tang" has thus grown from a private studio name into a byword in Chinese art collecting and museology. The Museum's broader institutional ties to the Institute of Chinese Studies are treated in The Art Museum and the Institute of Chinese Studies.

# The golden-jubilee expansion: from one hall to the Lee Wing

In 2021 the Art Museum marked its fiftieth anniversary. Per the CUHK press announcement of the jubilee exhibitions^※, that spring it presented a suite of celebratory shows — a Lunar New Year greeting exhibition, "Pure and Fresh Air of the Universe: Ming and Qing Guangdong Paintings and Calligraphy from the Art Museum Collection", and "Appreciation of Ceramics" among them — drawing on the collection to trace fifty years of accumulation. Meanwhile the Lee family stepped in once again. According to the CUHKUpdates report^※, descendants of Harold and Christina Lee — Christina Lee, Philip Lee and Jennifer Lee — donated HK$50 million toward the Museum's new wing. Designed by Rocco Yim Architects and expected to open in 2023, the new wing's main gallery, of over 600 square metres, is permanently named the Harold and Christina Lee Gallery. The gift reaches back half a century to the Lee brothers' support for the original Art Museum and the Institute of Chinese Studies: two generations, one museum, and a private impulse that has carried the Art Museum from a single building to a complex.

# 4. Academic Journals

# Journals of the CUHK Press

According to the Press's journals page^※, the Press currently publishes or has published the following major titles:

The China Review: per the Press's China Review page^※, this was first issued as an annual in 1991; from 2001 it appeared twice yearly (April and October); from 2018 it moved to four issues a year. According to a CUHK in Focus report^※, the journal has been indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) since 2007, currently sits in the Q1 quartile, and switched to open access in 2025.

Journal of Chinese Studies: per the Institute of Chinese Studies journal page^※, the journal was first published in September 1968, adopted its present name in 1992, appears twice a year (January and July), and is indexed in the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI).

Twenty-First Century (《二十一世纪》): by the ICS introduction page^※, the journal began in October 1990 under the Institute of Chinese Studies. A non-profit academic-cum-cultural bimonthly serving the global Chinese-language scholarly community, it became, after 1989, one of the most important Chinese-language forums of intellectual debate outside mainland China.

Renditions: according to the Research Centre for Translation page^※, the journal was founded in 1973 by the Centre, and is an authoritative international publication devoted to English translation of Chinese literature, spanning more than 2,000 years. Per the Renditions Wikipedia entry^※, editorial work in the early years (1973–1976) was overseen by the Taiwan-born writer and translator George Kao, who produced the first six issues and set the journal's course of rendering Chinese literature in idiomatic English. For half a century thereafter, Renditions carried Chinese writing — from classical verse to contemporary fiction — to English readers, becoming a standard text in Western sinology and literature classrooms. The journal ceased publication in 2024 after completing its 100th issue, closing a translation flagship that had run for over fifty years in Hong Kong. The full genealogy of Renditions and the Research Centre for Translation is treated in The CUHK Press and Renditions.

The Press also issues or has issued a range of specialist journals, including Chinese Language Review (《中国语文通讯》), Journal of Translation Studies, and Communication and Society, some of which have moved to open access.

According to a 2 February 2026 announcement from the Institute of Chinese Studies^※, three of the Institute's journals — Journal of Chinese Studies, Studies in Chinese Linguistics and Current Research in Chinese Linguistics — have again been selected as CSSCI source journals for 2025–26. The index is compiled by the Chinese Social Science Research Evaluation Center of Nanjing University.

Set side by side, these flagship titles reveal a deliberate "one publisher, many journals" strategy for the humanities and China studies:

The four titles occupy four distinct lanes — scholarly review, sinological research, intellectual and cultural debate, and literary translation — with founding dates stretching from the 1960s to the 1990s, marching in step with the growth of the humanities at CUHK itself. Three are still publishing today; the fourth, Renditions, retired at a century of issues.

# 5. The School of Continuing and Professional Studies (CUSCS)

According to the CUSCS introduction^※, the School began in 1965 as the Department of Extramural Studies, was renamed the School of Continuing Studies in January 1994, and took its present name — the School of Continuing and Professional Studies (CUSCS) — in January 2006. It operates as a self-financing unit under the oversight of a committee of the University Senate.

In 2023–24, CUSCS offered 73 award-bearing programmes — professional diplomas, professional certificates, higher diplomas, diplomas and certificates — alongside general-interest courses, distance learning and corporate training. It has offered full-time higher diploma programmes since 2002. Its main learning centres are in Tsim Sha Tsui, Central and Tseung Kwan O.

Per the CUSCS history (Wikipedia)^※, the School began with short leisure courses of two to four months with no entry requirements, and from 1979 added certificated programmes at the certificate, diploma, higher diploma and professional diploma levels, spanning art and design, creative media, music, business management, accounting and finance, the social sciences, languages, healthcare and information technology. CUSCS complements the University's degree programmes: it serves working adults and secondary school leavers, is an important rung in Hong Kong's continuing-education and associate-degree progression ladder, and carries on the founding Department of Extramural Studies' mission of "taking university education beyond the campus". Adjacent further-study routes — continuing education in medicine, nursing and the professions — are run by the respective faculties and do not fall under CUSCS.

One telling feature is the "one body, two faces" relationship between CUSCS and the University: it is part of CUHK, bears its name and answers to a Senate committee, yet must be self-financing, occupying no government-funded places — and so its pricing, class scheduling and curriculum refresh track market demand closely. This "self-financed extension arm" model is standard practice across Hong Kong's eight publicly funded universities, each of which runs a comparable continuing- or professional-education unit to absorb the huge demand for sub-degree programmes, articulation courses and in-service training beyond the degree curriculum. For many students who leave the HKDSE without immediate entry to university, the "step up" path — a higher diploma at CUSCS followed by articulation to a local or overseas degree — is precisely the core value such schools exist to provide. The choice of urban learning centres in Tsim Sha Tsui, Central and Tseung Kwan O, deliberately close to the commuter radius of working adults, maps out a complementary "second campus" against the full-time hillside campus at Ma Liu Shui. The College system and full-time experience of the parent campus are treated in A General History of CUHK's Founding.

# 6. Information Technology Services (ITSC)

According to the ITSC introduction^※, the Information Technology Services Centre provides comprehensive IT services for the University's academic, research and administrative units, and manages the campus-wide network (CUHKnet).

By the campus backbone network page^※, the campus is interconnected through a spine-leaf architecture built on software-defined networking (SDN), with backbone speeds up to 100 Gbps, connecting to research and education networks and cloud services via HARNET (the Hong Kong Academic and Research Network) and HKIX (the Hong Kong Internet Exchange). The campus-wide network was first established in late 1992.

Key digital platforms include the MyCUHK student portal, the CUSIS student information system, the Blackboard learning management platform, and academic tools such as Microsoft 365.

# A wireless campus and the "Charles" supercomputer

The hillside is connected by more than the wired backbone. Per the ITSC on-campus Wi-Fi page^※, the central wireless network broadcasts multiple SSIDs — CUHK1x, eduroam, CUguest and Wi-Fi.HK via CUHK — covering classrooms, libraries, canteens and public spaces. With an eduroam account, students and staff can log on without further authentication at thousands of participating institutions worldwide; conversely, visiting scholars and students from other eduroam institutions can connect directly on the CUHK campus. This cross-border roaming scheme turns a campus Wi-Fi login into an international academic passport.

On research computing, per the Central Research Computing Cluster page^※, ITSC brought the cluster online in October 2018 and nicknamed it "Charles" in memory of the late alumnus Professor Charles Kao, Nobel laureate in physics and "father of optical fibre". Equipped with more than two thousand CPU cores and thirty-two professional-grade GPUs, the cluster supports research computing across faculties, trains students in applying scientific computing to diverse fields, and serves as a shared platform for interdisciplinary collaboration. Naming a campus supercomputer after a Nobel-winning alumnus writes the "Kao Kuen legacy" directly into the hillside's infrastructure. Kao's ties to CUHK are covered in CUHK's "Firsts" and Superlatives.

# 7. Cultural Venues

# Sir Run Run Shaw Hall

According to the Sir Run Run Shaw Hall website^※, the Hall was completed in 1981 and seats 1,433. It is the largest and best-equipped performance venue on campus, suited to ceremonies, assemblies, lectures, concerts, drama, dance, film screenings and exhibitions.

# Lee Hysan Concert Hall

Per the CUHK Music facilities page^※, the Lee Hysan Concert Hall opened in spring 2001, seats 269, and occupies the lower ground floor of the Esther Lee Building. Designed by architect Rocco Yim with Joseph Myers as acoustical consultant, its sound is regarded as among the best in Asia, and it is suited to chamber music, solo recitals and choral performances.

# Chung Chi College Chapel

By the campus cultural facilities page^※, the Chung Chi College Chapel accommodates about 1,200 people and doubles as a venue for large events.

# The Jockey Club Museum of Climate Change (MoCC)

According to the MoCC official website^※, the Museum was funded by the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust and opened on 16 December 2013 on the 8th floor of the Yasumoto International Academic Park, with a floor area of about 800 square metres. It is the world's first museum devoted to climate change, promoting environmental education through interactive multimedia exhibitions and guided ecological tours.

Per the MoCC Wikipedia entry^※, the Museum has four exhibition zones: the "Polar Gallery", displaying artefacts from Hong Kong explorer Dr. Rebecca Lee's expeditions to the Arctic, the Antarctic and Mount Everest; "Satellite Remote Sensing and Environmental Monitoring"; "CUHK Innovative Research"; and the "Jockey Club Green Living Zone". The centrepiece holdings are more than 40,000 photographs and films Lee has taken over the years, alongside more than a hundred specimens of plants and animals, expedition equipment and over fifty multimedia installations. By the same source, the Museum had welcomed over 300,000 visitors by May 2018, and regularly offers guided ecological tours, community workshops and multimedia loan services to schools and groups. Built on one woman explorer's polar imagery, with satellite remote sensing and the University's own carbon-reduction research as its wings, this "world's first" gives an abstract issue a tangible, visible form. Per the MoCC website^※, the Museum is free and open to the public, and treats the campus itself as an extension of its environmental teaching, linking exhibitions to on-the-ground ecological tours.

# Other exhibition and arts venues

By the campus cultural facilities page^※, the campus houses several further exhibition and arts spaces, including the CUHK History Gallery, the New Asia College History Gallery, the Shiu-Ying Hu Herbarium, the Hui Gallery and the Yueh Chiao Art Gallery.

Lay the principal performance and exhibition venues side by side, and the hillside's "arts infrastructure" reveals its generational layers and scale:

From the Art Museum in 1971, through the thousand-seat Shaw Hall in 1981, the purpose-built concert hall in 2001 and the thematic museum in 2013, these venues have arrived at a rate of roughly one per decade — accumulating, on a campus tucked away at Ma Liu Shui, a cultural settlement fit for ceremonies, performance, exhibition and science communication alike. The campus arts scene, the college cultural traditions and the genealogy of student media are treated in Student Arts, Sir Run Run Shaw Hall and the Campus Radio.

# 8. CUHK in Hong Kong's Higher-Education Landscape

According to the UGC list of funded universities^※, Hong Kong has eight UGC-funded universities, of which CUHK is one. Per the official CUHK introduction^※, the University was founded in 1963 and is most distinctive for its College system: among the eight UGC-funded universities, CUHK alone offers the residential college experience, currently through nine member Colleges.

CUHK also has the largest campus of any Hong Kong institution — about 138.4 hectares — which the University describes as "the largest and greenest" university campus in Hong Kong.

By the same source, of the 38 government-funded Areas of Excellence projects, 15 are led by CUHK researchers — a strikingly high share.

In international rankings, per a Study in HK comparison of 2025-26 tuition^※, CUHK placed 38th globally in the QS World University Rankings 2025, among the top of Hong Kong's institutions. According to a report on the 2026 QS rankings^※, CUHK rose to 32nd worldwide in the 2026 edition, alongside HKU and HKUST in the world's top 100, as several Hong Kong universities rose collectively that year. Rankings fluctuate from year to year, but CUHK has long held a steady place in the global top 40.

It is worth emphasising that the College system is no administrative fiction: every undergraduate belongs to a member College alongside their major department, and the College provides accommodation, general education, High Table dinners and whole-person development — a "dual belonging" that distinguishes CUHK from the other seven institutions. This system, along with the campus's various "firsts" and quantitative indicators, is treated in CUHK's "Firsts" and Superlatives and on the Key Numbers Dashboard; the full story of the founding and the College merger is told in A General History of CUHK's Founding.

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# 9. Further Reading

• The CUHK Press and Renditions — the Press's origins, signature authors and the translation flagship Renditions
• The University Library System: Seven Libraries, the Learning Garden and Rare Books — branch layout, the Learning Garden and special-collections highlights
• Student Arts, Sir Run Run Shaw Hall and the Campus Radio — arts facilities, college cultural traditions and the student-media genealogy
• The "Foreign Patronage" Networks of the Founding Era — the three Colleges' overseas funding networks and the USC's historical context
• The Art Museum and the Institute of Chinese Studies — the institutional ties between the Art Museum and the ICS

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