Mountain Winds & Campus Taboos: Lake Ad Excellentiam, University Mall, and the Stories Passed Down by Word of Mouth

⚠️ This article belongs to the Alternative Histories module (15 Campus Lore & Anecdotes). With the exception of the naming of Lake Ad Excellentiam, which has an official source from Chung Chi College, the accounts presented here—including "auspicious feng shui site", "the Lotus Pond ghost woman", "the origin of the name 'Millionaires' Mile'", and the "Gate of Wisdom" taboo—are largely oral traditions circulated among the community. Each is labelled with a credibility rating and attributed to its source tradition; none is asserted as historical fact. The "Signal Tower / Gate of Wisdom" legend is also covered separately in campus-legends-and-landmarks.md and is only touched on briefly here.

In a nutshell: Among the many feng shui and taboo tales swirling around CUHK's hillside campus, the sole claim backed by an official paper trail is the renaming of Lake Ad Excellentiam in 1997, intended to convey the idea of "yet to be perfected." Almost everything else is campus folklore.

---

A boulevard said to be "worth a million dollars." A lake whose name contains the character for "incomplete." A lotus pool haunted, according to hearsay, by a female ghost who asks passers-by for the time. Beyond its timetables and colleges, The Chinese University of Hong Kong's hillside campus carries a layered topography of whispered oral traditions. Across this roughly 137-hectare university, built against a mountain overlooking the sea, nearly every landmark has had some variant of "Did you know that actually..." pinned to it. Some of these concern feng shui fortunes, some involve late-night taboos, and some are merely names whose origins no one can quite trace. Most are unverifiable, yet they have burrowed far deeper into the collective memory of successive cohorts than much of the official history.

This article aims to split the two apart: on one side, naming facts that have a documentary or official paper trail; on the other, feng shui tales and campus taboos circulating among students with no reliable source. The former are stated plainly with citations; the latter are uniformly tagged with credibility ratings, attributed to their channels of transmission, and presented with parallel versions where they exist. At no point does this article adjudicate on any claim, nor does it present lore as historical fact.

---

# Is the CUHK Campus Really an "Auspicious Site with Hills at Its Back and Water at Its Front"?

The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) was founded in 1963. Its campus is situated in the Ma Liu Shui area of Sha Tin, built into the hillside and overlooking Tolo Harbour. In purely topographical terms, "mountains behind, water before" is a verifiable fact: the official CUHK campus introduction^※ states that the colleges, academic buildings, and facilities are distributed across the rising and falling slopes, facing out toward the sea and Tolo Harbour.

The problem lies in the leap from "topographically backed by hills and facing water" to "an auspicious feng shui site." Unofficial guided tours and social media accounts often describe CUHK as "a propitious site nurturing outstanding people (地靈人傑)," invoking a traditional geomancy formula: "mountain at the back, water at the front, prospering descendants and attracting wealth." Such claims have no endorsement from the university and represent a geomatic reinterpretation of the existing terrain woven into a sightseeing narrative.

Classical geomancy stresses "mountain behind, water in front, higher left, lower right"—the house's Black Tortoise (northern) sector needs a supporting hill, its Vermilion Bird (southern) sector needs living water in a gentle embrace. By this template, CUHK, backed by the New Territories peaks and fronting Tolo Harbour, indeed formally "matches" this formula. This is likely the starting point from which the "auspicious site" claim crept into tour scripts. But formal similarity is not proof: that a landscape can be slotted into a geomatic framework has nothing to do with whether it truly "prospers descendants and attracts wealth."

According to campus lore, the CUHK site and its surrounding contours have also been overlaid with more specific readings involving a "recumbent ox" or "harbouring wind and gathering qi." But a trawl through public records shows the actual basis of the site selection was the 1960s government planning for New Territories land, coupled with the practical need for a single, sufficiently large unified campus when the three founding colleges—New Asia, Chung Chi, and United—consolidated. None of this had anything to do with geomancy. The CUHK official^※ campus introduction discusses geography, architecture, and facility distribution in detail; not one word touches on feng shui fortune or misfortune. This article accordingly labels "auspicious feng shui site" as unverified folklore: the terrain is real, but the geomatic judgments attached to it are unverifiable. Take them as stories, perhaps, but no more.

---

# Why Is the Lake Called "未圓" (Yet to be Rounded)? — The Philosophy Embedded in a Name, Not Feng Shui

Amidst a thicket of sourceless legends, Lake Ad Excellentiam (未圓湖) is one of the rare landmarks with a documented paper trail. It lies within the grounds of Chung Chi College, sandwiched between the Chung Chi Tang student centre and Lingnan Stadium, and began life as the "Lotus Pond" familiar to every generation on campus. According to the Wikipedia entry for Lake Ad Excellentiam^※, the pond had fallen into severe eutrophication and degraded water quality. The university launched a "Lotus Pond Improvement Project" that involved dredging mud, clearing the waterway, and adding bridges and a pump house. Upon completion, on 30 October 1997, it was formally renamed Lake Ad Excellentiam—with the Chinese name 未圓湖, translating roughly to "Lake of the Uncompleted Circle." In other words, the name's very birth was a rebranding driven by a restoration project—it transformed an old, ailing lotus pond into a campus parable about self-cultivation.

This name is not about feng shui; it's about philosophy. According to the official Chung Chi College introduction^※, the Chinese characters 未圓 carry the following meaning:

「未圓」蘊含「仍未圓滿，須繼續力求圓滿」之意。 ("Wei Yuan" conveys the sense of "yet to achieve full perfection; one must continue striving toward completeness.")

The college further explains that this echoes the Chung Chi motto, "In Pursuit of Excellence (止於至善)"—taking perfect roundness as an eternal ideal, and urging ceaseless self-improvement. In other words, the lake's name is meant to convey a message of self-exhortation: one's learning is endless, always falling just shy of perfect completion. It has nothing to do with courting fortune or warding off calamity.

Around this body of water, the namers laid out a complete allegorical system of "two pools, two bridges, and a single path," every element pointed toward moral cultivation rather than geomancy:

At the heart of the lake stands the Lions Pavilion (full name: Kowloon Central Lions Pavilion), donated by the Lions Club. Lining the water's edge are bald cypresses (Taxodium distichum) that turn a striking rust-red each winter, making this one of the campus's most photogenic, social-media-famous "Instagram-pretty" spots today. The name also preserves a strain of classic Chung Chi deadpan: the "Pond of Cultivating Virtue" (養德池) plays on the character 德 (de, virtue), homophonous with the English word "duck," a nod to the pond's former waterfowl residents—a single place name doing double duty in philosophy and pun. A Saraca dives tree (a sacred species in Buddhism) was also planted by the shore, a gesture embodying this Christian college's ethos of openness and inclusivity.

Look at this full layout of names, and the semiotics of Lake Ad Excellentiam clearly constitute an expression of a church-founded college's ideals: striving for goodness, seeking truth, and practising humility. It is frequently misread as a "feng shui arrangement," but the official documentation contains not a single word about auspicious or inauspicious orientations. On this one, the credibility rating is: Confirmed (official Chung Chi College source). What makes this especially striking is the sheer irony: one of the campus's most widely broadcast and seemingly "mystical" sites turns out to have, by official writ, the most rational and well-documented naming on campus.

---

# The Ghost of the Lotus Pond and the Taboo of "Don't Answer Her"

Naming aside, the very same body of water has long carried a parallel student version. The Lotus Pond—today's Lake Ad Excellentiam—is the setting for CUHK's most pervasive taboo narrative.

According to a compilation by CUHK Student Press^※, the circulating story goes like this: a female student, distraught over a relationship, drowned herself in the Lotus Pond in the dead of night. Thereafter, male students walking past the pond late at night would encounter a female apparition "pulling them, dragging them into the water." Details vary across versions. An HK01 round-up of campus legends^※ records a more specific variant: the female ghost would ask passing men for the time; if you answered, say, "ten o'clock," she would drag you down into the water.

Intriguingly, this type of story tends to "crystallise" into a campus taboo. As the student media compilation notes, this gave rise in student circles to the admonition: "When walking past the Lotus Pond at night, don't answer her—don't even show her your watch." This is the classic form of a taboo-driven piece of alternative history: an unverifiable story that eventually settles into a behavioural prohibition passed down the generations. People may believe or disbelieve the tale itself, but the injunction—"don't answer her"—may well have genuinely influenced more than one student's moment of hesitation while walking alone at night. That is why researchers find urban legends worth studying: they may not be true, but they are "true in their effects." Multiple versions are laid out here; this article adjudges neither one as more true than another. Credibility: Unverified folklore.

It must be said that the "asking for the time" motif is not unique to CUHK. Many universities across Hong Kong and Taiwan have similar waterside or late-night legends. This is a common case of urban legend migration and localisation across campuses: the same motif, transposed to a different location and updated with a different year, becomes "this university's own story." For that very reason, readers should not try to map any of this onto a specific year, a specific hall, or a specific individual; to do so defeats the nature of these stories as fundamentally ownerless, transmissible by anyone. One body of water: officially called "Lake Ad Excellentiam," inscribed with "In Pursuit of Excellence," while students still fondly call it "Lotus Pond" and trade tales of a female ghost asking for the time. These two narrative strands have run parallel for nearly three decades, neither ever quite drowning out the other.

---

# Where Did the Name "Millionaires' Mile" Come From? — A Jumble of Contradictory Explanations

Walking from Chung Chi toward the central campus, one steps onto the university's most famous thoroughfare: Millionaires' Mile (百萬大道). Its official name is, in fact, "The University Mall" (林蔭大道). Running east from the Science Centre to the University Library on the west, this elongated plaza and the surrounding administrative blocks, research centres, and academic buildings together form the University Square. It serves as the venue for annual graduation ceremonies, college functions, large-scale assemblies, and even communal sports screenings (睇波)—you could fairly say that the most solemn and the most quotidian memories of a CUHK undergraduate's four years largely play out along this stretch. "Millionaires' Mile" is the colloquial name among students and staff. And where this colloquial name comes from, according to the Wikipedia entry for "百萬大道"^※, remains, to this day, a matter of "who is correct and who is wrong is unknown."

At least several theories circulate in parallel, all colliding with one another:

None of these claims can be substantiated by any public record, and several actively contradict each other: the construction-cost version says "a million dollars in works expenditure," the net-worth version says "is worth a million," while the paving-tile version attaches the "million" to a tally of floor bricks. The same word, "million," points to completely different things in different tellings. The very reason they manage to coexist for so long is precisely that "million" is a number fuzzy enough yet grand enough—not so large as to be absurd, nor so small as to be uninteresting—into which each generation of students can pour its own imaginings and aspirations. (The version claiming "all who walk it become millionaires" is especially transparent as a wink-and-a-nod well-wishing ritual.) This article sets them out side by side. Credibility: Unverified folklore. The sole certain fact is that the road's official name is The University Mall. All the rest of the "million" is an embellishment students themselves have added.

---

# Other Taboos on the Hillside: The Braid Road That's Best Avoided, and the Renumbered Room

Beyond the Lotus Pond, CUHK's hillside hosts several other site taboos of the "better to avoid than test your luck" variety. Interwoven with feng shui tales and ghost lore, they collectively form an invisible map—handed down among students—of "where not to wander late at night."

According to the CUHK Student Press compilation^※, one frequently cited taboo site is a flight of steps colloquially known as "Braid Road" (said by some to run from the United College's Adam Schall Residence to Chung Chi Tang student centre). The motif, in brief: a mainland Chinese woman, dodging a ticket inspection on a train, had her long plait caught in a window and, when the train moved, was scalped and facially flayed. Some have since claimed to see "the silhouette of a girl with a long braid" at this location, whose face, when she turns around, reveals "no eyes, ears, nose, or mouth." An HK01 round-up^※ records another version that ties the event to a stretch of railway near the CUHK campus. The mutually contradictory details are typical of an "ownerless legend"—yet it has quite effectively turned "Braid Road" into a late-night no-go zone that many students would sooner detour around.

Another tale from the Student Press compilation concerns the renumbering of a hostel room: local lore has it that an engineering student, buckling under exam pressure, took his life in a room in the Chih Wen Hall (志文樓) block. The university is then said to have renumbered the rooms on that floor to "blur" the memory, marking the location with a red floor tile as record. This, too, lacks any supporting evidence; the specific floor, room number, and year are all unverifiable. This article records it solely as an instance of the "room-number taboo" genre of urban legend, and under no circumstances does it point to any real individual.

These kinds of place-specific taboos share a common feature: whether the story itself is true or false is almost beside the point. What genuinely survives in transmission is a set of behavioural codes: where, when, and what not to do. Credibility: Unverified folklore.

---

# As a Side Note: The Taboo That Passing Through the Gate of Wisdom Bars Graduation

On the raised platform at the Library end of the University Mall stands Gate of Wisdom (仲門), a sculpture by the Taiwanese artist Ju Ming. Students colloquially call it the "Signal Tower" (烽火台). The best-known campus taboo attached to it holds that "an undergraduate who walks through the middle of the gate will be unable to graduate"—with countless elaborations claiming that walking through backwards, or sideways, can break the curse. The curious twist, according to campus lore, is that the artist himself later made a point of "rehabilitating" the work's intended meaning, emphasising that its symbolism was originally about "passing through the portal to succeed." Yet he has never managed to overcome the taboo logic of "passing through stops you graduating" spread among the student body. This is precisely what makes such campus taboos so fascinating: even a creator's own official gloss may prove no match for the oral lore passed down among incoming generations of freshers. The full taboo, the scholarly tracing of the sculpture's name, and the artist's attempt at "rehabilitation" are covered in detail elsewhere on this site; to avoid duplication, please see campus-legends-and-landmarks.md and the dedicated research note The Real Names of Two Landmarks: Ju Ming's "Gate of Wisdom" (Signal Tower / 仲門) and New Asia's "Pavilion of Harmony". The credibility rating here is likewise Unverified folklore.

The "Lovers' Path" legend attached to the New Asia "Gentleman Pagoda" and the United "Lady Pagoda," further theories about the naming of the University Mall, and the renovation history of Lake Ad Excellentiam are covered in the sequel: CUHK Campus Alternative History — Sequel: The Water Tower Romance, Millionaires' Mile, Lake Ad Excellentiam, and Pavilion of Harmony.

---

# Why Do These Stories Endure?

Set the feng shui imaginings, the philosophical nomenclature, and the campus taboos side by side, and one shared sense of place becomes apparent: the very same location often plays host to two superimposed narratives—one written by the university (Lake Ad Excellentiam's "In Pursuit of Excellence"), the other handed down by students (the Lotus Pond female ghost and her associated taboo). One has a documented provenance; the other is beyond verification. Yet neither has managed to supplant the other.

On the question of why such legends pass from student cohort to student cohort, an anthropological explanation may be more fitting than the textual-evidence approach. In an interview with Ming Weekly^※, a professor from CUHK's Department of Anthropology, discussing campus ghost stories and urban legends, remarked:

「都市傳說或鬼故事，往往反映着那個時代的人所面對的問題。」 ("Urban legends or ghost stories often reflect the problems faced by the people of that era.")

Under this lens, the Lotus Pond "asking for the time" taboo and the "worth a million" imaginings of the University Mall might not be about truth or falsehood at all. Rather, they are one generation after another of students projecting their own anxieties and aspirations—academic, romantic, career—onto the landscape they inhabit.

A neatly illustrative case is another widely circulated CUHK residential-hall legend: "Ox-Tail Soup." According to compilations by CUHK Student Press^※ and several news outlets, the story goes that a couple living in United College hostels — the girl on an upper floor, the boy below — would have the girl lowering a pot of ox-tail soup from her window every night. The boy later discovered his girlfriend had been dead for days. At its core, the story dramatises the tension between "romantic love" and "arduous study." In an era of intense academic pressure, where dormitories placed strict limits on opposite-sex visiting hours, it voiced—on the students' behalf—an otherwise difficult-to-articulate strain. According to the Ming Weekly interview, the same anthropology professor cited this as an example, noting that as young people's felt experience of the love-versus-study conflict has weakened in the contemporary era, these stories have begun to fade on campus. The life and death of a legend often depends not on its veracity, but on what it gives voice to, and for whom.

Looking at everything assembled in this article, we can also discern a finer dividing line: wherever an official source exists, the naming points to rational self-exhortation toward "goodness and truth"; wherever a claim is sourceless folklore, the themes almost invariably orbit around fortune, taboo, gain, and loss. Lake Ad Excellentiam's "In Pursuit of Excellence" is the university's inscribed ideal; the Lotus Pond's "don't answer her" is the students' transmitted dread. The "University Mall" is the name on the plan; "walk it and you'll be a millionaire" is the well-wishing phrase traded by word of mouth. The former speaks to the person the university hopes its students will become; the latter speaks to the lived anxieties and hopes of students navigating a hillside campus. Both are true—merely true in different registers.

And that is why this article, from the start, has kept them separate and refused to conflate the two: naming facts are stated plainly with their official sources, while the oral traditions are uniformly tagged with credibility ratings, attributed to their channels of transmission, and laid out with multiple versions side by side. No claim is ever lent the weight of endorsement, and no unverifiable taboo is ever written as though "it is said to be true." The value of campus alternative histories is not to confirm which legend might "check out." It is to clarify, with transparency, what rests on evidence and what does not, and to let readers themselves navigate the delicate balance of half-belief and half-doubt.

The hillside's lakes and roads are still here. The official names and the student lore will likewise continue flowing parallel into the future—one written onto the campus signage, the other alive in the whispered exchanges of the late-night hours. The stories, true and false, each rest in their rightful domain, neither overstepping, neither pretending to be something they are not. That state of affairs might, in itself, be the most honest shape campus alternative history can take.

---