Feng Shui and Campus Taboos on the Hilltop: Lake Ad Excellentiam, University Mall, and the Stories on Everyone's Lips

⚠️ This article belongs to the Wild History series (Series 15: Campus Wild History & Anecdotes). Apart from the naming of Lake Ad Excellentiam, which has an official source from Chung Chi College, the claims made here — the "feng shui treasure spot," the ghost of the lotus pond, the origin of the name "University Mall," and the taboo surrounding the Gate of Wisdom (the "Beacon") — are for the most part oral traditions passed around campus. Each claim is flagged with a confidence rating, attributed to its channel of circulation, and presented with due qualification; nothing here is asserted as historical fact. For the full story of the "Beacon/Gate" legend, see campus-legends-and-landmarks.md; this article touches on it only briefly.

The gist in one sentence: Of all the "feng shui and taboo" lore circulating around the hilltop campus of The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), the only claim with official documentary backing is that Lake Ad Excellentiam was renamed in 1997 to carry the meaning of "not yet fulfilled" — the rest are largely campus folklore.

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There is a walkway said to be "worth a million," a lake whose very name declares itself "unfulfilled," and a pond where a female ghost is said to stop passers-by and ask them for the time. Beyond its timetables and its colleges, The Chinese University of Hong Kong's hilltop campus carries a second layer — a topography of whispered tales. Spread across roughly 137 hectares of mountainside facing the sea, nearly every well-known landmark has attracted its own "did you know that…?" rumour: some about feng shui fortunes, some about late-night prohibitions, some simply about a name whose origin no one can quite pin down. Most are unverifiable, yet they sit deeper in the collective memory of successive cohorts of students than much of the official record.

What this article sets out to do is to separate two things: on one side, the naming facts established in black and white by official or documentary sources; on the other, the feng shui legends and campus taboos that have no reliable source and circulate only among students. The former are stated plainly and sourced; the latter are each flagged with a confidence rating, attributed to their channels of circulation, and presented with competing versions side by side. This article pronounces no verdict on any of them, and it does not dress rumour up as history.

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# Is the CUHK campus really "a feng shui treasure spot backed by hills and facing the sea"?

The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) was founded in 1963, and its campus sits in the Ma Liu Shui area of Sha Tin, built into the hillside and overlooking Tolo Harbour. On the purely topographical level, "backed by hills, facing the water" is a verifiable fact: the University's official campus introduction^※ describes colleges, teaching buildings and facilities distributed across a sloping hillside, with the seaward side looking out over Tolo Harbour.

The question is what lies between the topography — "hills behind, water in front" — and the judgement that this makes it a "feng shui treasure spot." Campus tour guides and social-media posts frequently describe CUHK as a "land of spiritual energy and gifted people" (地灵人杰) blessed by feng shui, invoking the traditional geomantic formula of "backed by mountains, facing water; prosperity in descendants and wealth." Such claims carry no endorsement from the University; they are a geomantic re-reading of the terrain in the service of touristic storytelling.

Traditional geomancy prizes an arrangement of "hills behind, water in front, high on the left, lower on the right" — the rear ("tortoise") position should offer a backing mountain, while the front ("phoenix") position should be embraced by moving water. Measured against this template, CUHK, with the New Territories hills behind and Tolo Harbour before it, does formally "match" the formula — which is probably how the "feng shui treasure spot" line got a foothold in tour narratives. But a formal resemblance is not the same as the proposition being true: that a piece of terrain can be slotted into a geomantic framework is a different matter from whether it genuinely "prospers descendants and wealth."

According to campus lore, the siting of CUHK has also been variously glossed with more specific embellishments — the hillside as a "reclining ox," as a place that "gathers the wind and accumulates qi" (藏风聚气). But a search of public records shows that the actual basis for the campus location was the government's land planning for the New Territories in the 1960s, together with the practical need of three member colleges — New Asia, Chung Chi and United — to merge and to find one unified site large enough to house them. Geomancy had nothing to do with it. The University's official introduction^※ speaks throughout of geography, buildings and facilities; not a single word touches on feng shui fortune. On this basis, this article classifies "feng shui treasure spot" as unverified folklore: the topography is real, but the judgement of geomantic fortune cannot be traced to any source, and is best taken with a pinch of salt.

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# Why is Lake Ad Excellentiam "not yet round"? — a philosophy in the naming, not feng shui

Among a pile of unsourced legends, Lake Ad Excellentiam is a rare spot with official documentary backing. It lies within Chung Chi College, between the Chung Chi Staff and Student Centre (Chih Tsi Tong) and the Lingnan Sports Ground, and its predecessor is the pond every member of the campus knows as the "Lotus Pond." According to the Wikipedia entry for the lake^※, the water had at one point deteriorated badly through eutrophication, prompting the College to launch a "Lotus Pond improvement project" that included dredging the mud, flushing the water body, and adding bridges and a pump house. On completion, on 30 October 1997, the pond was formally renamed "未圆湖" — in English, Lake Ad Excellentiam, literally "towards excellence." In other words, the name "Lake Ad Excellentiam" was born of a re-naming occasioned by an engineering overhaul: a pond with a water-quality crisis was rewritten into a campus parable of self-improvement.

The name is not feng shui; it is philosophy. According to the official Chung Chi College introduction^※, the characters 「未圓」carry the meaning:

"Not yet fulfilled; we must continue to strive towards fulfilment."

The College further explains that this echoes its motto, "To strive for the highest excellence" (止于至善) — with perfection as an eternal ideal and ceaseless self-improvement as the calling. In other words, the lake's name is meant to convey a self-admonition of "learning is limitless, and we are always a little short of perfection" — not any geomantic calculus of fortune and avoidance.

Around this same stretch of water, the namers wove an entire system of symbolism — "two ponds, two bridges, one path" — each element pointing to self-cultivation rather than geomancy:

In the middle of the lake stands a "Lion Pavilion" (full name: Kowloon Central Lion Pavilion), donated by the Lions Club. Bald cypress trees planted around the shore turn red every winter and have made the lake one of the most sought-after spots on campus for amateur photographers. The naming also carries Chung Chi's characteristic dry wit: Yang De Pond takes its name from "seeing virtue at the water's edge," but according to the Wikipedia entry for the lake, the character 「德」 (virtue) happens to be a homophone of the English word "duck" — a wink at the pond's former residents. A "Tree of No Worries" (a sacred tree in Buddhism) was also planted by the shore, expressing the open-mindedness of this Christian college.

Laid out in full, the symbolism of Lake Ad Excellentiam is a church college's concrete expression of "doing good, seeking truth, and remaining humble" — it is often mistaken for a "feng shui arrangement," yet no official text says a single word about fortune or orientation. On this point, the confidence rating: verified (official source from Chung Chi College). What is worth noting is precisely the irony: one of the most "mystical" and most circulated sites on campus turns out, in its official naming, to be the most rational and best-documented part of the whole story.

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# The ghost of the Lotus Pond, and the campus taboo of "don't answer her"

Names aside, the same stretch of water has another version in the mouths of students. The Lotus Pond — today's Lake Ad Excellentiam — is the stage for CUHK's most widely circulated taboo legend.

According to a compilation by the Chinese University Student Press^※, the story goes: a female student, heartbroken over a failed relationship, drowned herself in the Lotus Pond late one night; thereafter, a male student passing the pond after dark was "pulled and dragged into the water" by a female apparition. Details vary across tellings, and a HK01 compilation of campus legends^※ records a more specific version: the ghost asks passing male students for the time; if the answer is "ten o'clock," the student is dragged into the water.

Interestingly, such legends tend to "crystallise" into a campus taboo — per the student-media compilation above, the tale has given rise to the admonition "when passing the Lotus Pond at night, don't answer her — don't even show her your watch." This is the archetypal shape of a taboo-centred wild-history tale: an unverifiable story, settling at last into a behavioural prohibition passed from cohort to cohort. Everyone may be of two minds about the story itself, but the warning "don't answer her" may have genuinely given some students pause on a solitary late-night walk — which is why researchers take urban legends seriously: they may not be true, but they are "really doing things." The competing versions are presented side by side here; this article rules on neither. Confidence rating: unverified folklore.

It should be said that the "asking the time" motif is not unique to CUHK. Similar waterside and late-night legends circulate at universities across Hong Kong and Taiwan; this is the common migration and localisation of urban legends between campuses — the same motif, relocated and re-dated, becomes "our school's story." For that reason, readers should not try to map the tale onto any specific year, residence hall or individual; doing so would run against the very nature of such stories, which are "ownerless and passed on by anyone." The same water: officially it is "Lake Ad Excellentiam," inscribed with "striving for the highest excellence"; among students it is still "the Lotus Pond," haunted by a ghost who asks the time. The two narratives have run in parallel for nearly three decades, neither drowning out the other.

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# Where does the name "University Mall" actually come from? — several competing theories

From Chung Chi, heading towards the central campus, you reach the most famous stretch of ground at the University: the University Mall (百万大道). Its formal name is in fact "The University Mall" (officially styled in English, from the Chinese 林蔭大道, "the boulevard"), running east from the Science Centre to the University Library on the west. The long rectangular plaza, together with the surrounding administration buildings, research centres and teaching blocks, forms "University Square." This is the venue for graduation ceremonies, and the common stage for college events, large gatherings and even group screenings of live football — one could say that most of a CUHK student's most solemn and most everyday memories over four years unfold on this one stretch of paving. "Million" (百萬) is the colloquial name used by students and staff — and where that nickname comes from, according to the Wikipedia entry for the University Mall^※, remains to this day a case of "no one knows which version is right."

At least several theories circulate side by side, and they contradict one another:

None of these can be nailed down by any public record, and they contradict one another: the cost theory speaks of "a million in construction fees," the status theory of something "worth a million," and the paving-stone theory pins the "million" on the number of bricks — the same "million" pointing at entirely different things in different versions. The reason they can co-exist for so long is precisely that "million" is a number fuzzy enough and grand enough — not so large as to be absurd, not so small as to be dull — for every generation of students to pour its own imaginings and aspirations into it (the "everyone who walks it becomes a millionaire" line in particular reads like a knowing piece of good-luck chatter). This article sets the versions side by side. Confidence rating: unverified folklore. The only certainty is that the walkway's official name is the University Mall; all the "millions" beyond that are a name the students gave it.

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# Other taboos on the hilltop: the "Pigtail Stairs" to be avoided, and the renumbered room

Beyond the Lotus Pond, the CUHK hilltop carries a few more place-specific taboos of the "better safe than sorry" variety. They intertwine with feng shui and ghost stories, weaving together the invisible map that students pass down of "where not to wander late at night."

According to the Chinese University Student Press compilation^※, one frequently cited taboo spot is a flight of steps known as the "Pigtail Stairs" (辫子路; rumoured to lie between Wah Lien Hall and the Chung Chi Staff and Student Centre). The motif of the tale is a mainland Chinese woman who, fleeing a ticket inspection on a train, gets her long pigtail caught in the window as she tries to escape, and is scalped — skin and all. Afterwards, people claim to have seen "the silhouette of a long-pigtailed girl" on the stairs, who turns around to reveal a face "with no eyes, ears, nose or mouth." The HK01 compilation^※ records another version, locating the tale on the railway stretch near CUHK. The two versions contradict each other in detail — precisely the signature of an "ownerless legend" — but the story has, quite concretely, made the "Pigtail Stairs" a place students prefer to avoid after dark.

Another tale, from the Student Press compilation, concerns the renumbering of a hostel room. The story goes that an engineering student, crushed by exam pressure, took his own life in a room in Zhi Wen Hall (志文樓), and that the University afterwards renumbered the rooms on that floor to "soften" the memory, leaving a single red floor tile as a marker. This, too, has no verifiable basis — the specific floor, room number and year cannot be confirmed. This article records it only as an instance of the "room-number taboo" as a form of urban legend, and does not in any way point it at any real person.

These "place taboos" share a common feature: whether the story is true hardly matters; what actually survives is a code of conduct — where, when, and what not to do. Confidence rating: unverified folklore.

# A passing note: the "walk through the Gate and fail to graduate" taboo

At the library end of University Mall, on a raised terrace, stands sculptor Ju Ming's work "Gate of Wisdom" (仲门; students call it the "Beacon"). The best-known campus taboo is that "an undergraduate who walks through the middle of the gate will fail to graduate," with a host of variants claiming that walking backwards or sideways through it can lift the curse. Interestingly, according to campus lore, the sculptor himself later made a point of "correcting the name," emphasising that his intended meaning was "passing through the gate to success" — yet his explanation never managed to overrule the students' taboo logic. This is precisely what makes campus taboos so fascinating: even the artist's official account cannot always outlast generations of incoming students passing the word along. The full story of this taboo, the sculptural naming investigation, and the artist's "corrective" is told at length in a separate article on this site; it will not be repeated here. See campus-legends-and-landmarks.md and the dedicated research piece, 两件地标的真名：朱铭「智慧之门」（烽火台/仲门）与新亚「合一亭」. Confidence rating, likewise: unverified folklore.

The "lovers' path" legends of New Asia's "Gentleman's Tower" and United's "Lady's Tower", further naming theories for University Mall, and the full renovation history of Lake Ad Excellentiam appear in the sequel, 中大校园野史·续编：水塔情缘、百万大道、未圆湖与天人合一亭.

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# Why do these stories survive?

Set the feng shui imaginings, the naming philosophies and the campus taboos side by side, and a shared structure emerges: the same place often carries two narratives layered on top of each other — one written by the University (Lake Ad Excellentiam's "striving for the highest excellence"), one handed down by students (the Lotus Pond's ghost and its taboo); one sourced, one unverifiable — and neither has managed to displace the other.

For why legends survive from cohort to cohort, anthropology may offer a better explanation than archival research. According to an interview in Ming Pao Weekly^※, a professor in CUHK's anthropology department, asked about campus ghost stories and urban legends, observed:

"Urban legends and ghost stories often reflect the problems that people of that era were facing."

On this view, the "asking the time" taboo at the Lotus Pond and the "worth a million" fantasy of University Mall may have little to do with truth or falsehood; they read more like successive generations of students projecting their own anxieties and wishes — studies, romance, the future — onto familiar terrain.

A fitting illustration is another widely told CUHK hostel legend, that of the "oxtail soup" (牛尾湯). According to the Chinese University Student Press^※ and several media compilations, the tale concerns a couple in a United College hostel: every night the girl lowered a pot of oxtail soup on a string from her upper-floor window to her boyfriend below, until one day the boy discovered she had been dead for days. At its core, the story is about the dilemma between "love" and "studying" — in an era of hostels with heavy academic pressure and restricted visiting hours for the opposite sex, it gave voice to tensions students found hard to say aloud. In the same Ming Pao Weekly interview, the anthropology professor used precisely this example to note that as younger generations' felt sense of the conflict between romance and academic work has faded, such stories have gradually lost their grip on campus. Whether a legend lives or dies often depends less on whether it is true than on whose anxieties it articulates, and how.

Lay the items in this article side by side, and a finer division comes into view: wherever there is an official source, the naming points to a rational self-admonition toward "doing good and seeking truth"; wherever there is no source, the lore tends to circle fortune, taboo, gain and loss. "Striving for the highest excellence" at Lake Ad Excellentiam is the ideal the University wrote down; "don't answer her" at the Lotus Pond is the fear students passed on; "the University Mall" on the plans is the formal name, while "walk it and become a millionaire" is the good-luck line on living lips. The former is what a university wants its students to become; the latter is what students actually worry about and hope for in their life on the hill — both are real, just on different registers of reality.

That is precisely why this article has kept them separate, and refuses to blur them: naming facts are stated plainly with their official sources; folk legends are each flagged with a confidence rating, attributed to their channels of circulation, and set out in multiple versions. This article endorses none of them, and it does not write unverifiable taboos into "allegedly true" history. The value of campus wild history lies not in confirming any one legend, but in making clear what is documented and what is not — and leaving the reader to hold that mixture of belief and doubt, in whatever proportion feels right.

The lake and the walkway are still there. The official names and the students' versions will keep passing on side by side — one on the interpretation boards, the other in the whispers of late-night conversation. Each has its place, neither usurping the other; and perhaps that is the most honest thing campus wild history can be.

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