Hilltop Tales: From "Ma Liu Shui Station" to "University Station" — A Station's Renaming and a University's Hilltop Campus

⚠️ This article belongs to the Folklore module (15 Campus Folklore · Anecdotes · Remarks). The station's renaming history and dates are based on railway historical sources and have been cross-checked; the everyday picture of the hillside campus and its shuttle-bus culture draws partly on unofficial campus sources and counts as campus-life folklore. No living individuals are named. This article contains no politically sensitive content. For a full factual account of the station's engineering history (electrification, expansions, the cross-harbour extension, etc.), see 05-campus/university-station-and-railway-history.md; for neutral facts about CUHK's geography and buildings, see 05-campus/campus-geography.md.

---

A station that is seven years older than the university it serves; a university built on a hillside that turned "how to get from the foot of the hill to the top" into a shuttle-bus culture all its own. "Ma Liu Shui/University Station" and the "hilltop campus buses" — one outside, one inside — are the two spatial languages every CUHK person learns first and forgets last.

# 1. The Station Came First: Ma Liu Shui Station (1956)

Many assume "University Station" was built for CUHK. In fact, the station predates the university by seven years. According to the Wikipedia entry for University Station^※ and HKRail Fandom (Hong Kong Railway Encyclopaedia)^※:

• Located at Ma Liu Shui, Sha Tin, the station opened on 24 September 1956, originally named "Ma Liu Shui Station";
• Services were sparse at first — by the above sources, only about three trains per direction stopped each day;
• At the time this was an unremarkable rural halt along the Kowloon–Canton Railway, and The Chinese University of Hong Kong was not founded until 1963.

In other words: the station at Ma Liu Shui came first, and the university chose its site later — the reality is the reverse of the common impression that "the station was built for the university." According to the English Wikipedia^※, CUHK's choice of the sea-facing hillside at Ma Liu Shui was closely tied to the area's transport and geography.

More precisely still, the station was really built for Chung Chi College, which arrived earlier. Chung Chi College was granted land at Ma Liu Shui by the Hong Kong government in 1952, and while its campus was being built, there was no stop along the line — staff and students had great difficulty getting in and out. That inconvenience gave birth to the little station in 1956 — eleven years after Chung Chi's arrival (1952) and seven years before the university (1963). Taken together, the three timelines tell the true order: "residents first, station second, university third" — not the reverse. The full engineering history (rebuilding, expansion, the cross-harbour extension, and more) belongs to another factual article; see 05-campus/university-station-and-railway-history.md. Here we focus on the renaming itself and what it says about "identity."

---

# 2. "Correcting" the Name for the University: Announced 1966, Effective 1967

Once CUHK was established, the name "Ma Liu Shui Station" sat awkwardly with the increasingly important campus beside it. According to Wikipedia^※:

• The Kowloon–Canton Railway Corporation found the Chinese name "Ma Liu Shui" inelegant, and CUHK had been in operation since 1963;
• On 11 December 1966, the railway announced that Ma Liu Shui Station would be renamed "University Station";
• The change took effect on 1 January 1967.

A note on the "name correction": According to the sources, the stated reason for the change was that the Chinese name "Ma Liu Shui" was "inelegant" — its Chinese name did not match the university's prestige — rather than any purely locational rationale; English sources add that one reason was that the old name "did not sound pleasant when read in Mandarin." This is a classic case of "elegance replacing plainness" in place-naming: a university's standing, in turn, rewrote the name of the station at its gates. From then on, "University Station" became the starting point and end point of countless CUHK memories.

What is striking is the timing: the "correction" came barely three years after CUHK was founded — almost "as soon as the new university found its footing, it changed the sign on its own doorstep." Compared with other Hong Kong stations named after institutions (PolyU and CityU, for instance, mostly kept existing place names for nearby facilities rather than renaming stations), CUHK's "University Station" change looks unusually decisive. That decisiveness may itself be a side-signal of how much the colonial government and the railway authorities valued the new university in the 1960s. The station has since gone through many changes with the development of Hong Kong's railways (the KCR–East Rail line evolution, electrification in 1983, two expansions in 2000 and 2012, the cross-harbour extension in 2022 — see the dedicated article), but the name "University Station" has endured, becoming CUHK's iconic gateway to the world.

---

# 3. The Hilltop Campus: A Shuttle-Bus Culture Born of Hillsides

CUHK's campus is famous as a "hilltop city" (山城) — built on the western slopes of Ma On Shan, rising from the sea-level Chung Chi College (at the foot) up to New Asia and United Colleges (at the summit), with a considerable altitude difference. That terrain produced CUHK's distinctive commuting lore.

# 3.1 Why a Shuttle-Bus System Is Indispensable

According to the Hong Kong Buses Wiki entry on CUHK^※, because the campus is built on a hillside, walking between teaching buildings and colleges is inconvenient, so the university set up its own internal shuttle-bus (校巴) system to carry staff and students up and down the hill. According to the source, internal transport is operated by the university's transport department (the Transport Office).

# 3.2 A Neglected Origin: The "Shuttle-Bus Concept" in the 1964 Development Plan

According to the sources, the idea of an internal shuttle-bus service was already proposed in the 1964 "CUHK Development Plan" — that is, in the year after the university's formal founding (1963), the planners, sketching the campus blueprint, already foresaw the commuting problem inherent in building on a hillside and wrote "internal buses" into the development vision. This means the shuttle bus was not a "retrofit" introduced once the campus had grown large enough to feel the pain; it was designed in from the start as an "innate provision." This point is often overlooked — people tend to assume the buses were a later remedy squeezed out by crowding.

The idea took years to land. According to the sources, the shuttle-bus service formally began operating in the 1970s: the university bought its own fleet with its own funds, and the vehicles — running only within the campus, without proper licence plates — carried number plates reading only "CUHK1", "CUHK2" and so on. These were the first "identity cards" of CUHK's buses, and for many alumni they remain a signature detail of "the family's own school bus." From the 1964 paper concept to the wheels actually turning in the 1970s, at least six years elapsed — fitting the pioneer-era rhythm of CUHK's early construction.

# 3.3 From "CUHK-Numbered Vehicles" to a Systematised Route Network

The shuttle-bus system has since evolved through several rounds. According to the sources, around 2012 CUHK carried out a large-scale reorganisation of its shuttle-bus services, introducing multiple numbered routes (Routes 2, 4, 5, and others) serving different campus areas and colleges, transforming the early "one or two buses covering the whole campus" model into a systematised network of fixed routes and stops. This reorganisation was almost simultaneous with the opening of University Station's Exit D, which connects directly to the shuttle-bus interchange (see 05-campus/university-station-and-railway-history.md) — in the same year, the station exit and the bus routes each got their upgrade, one outside and one inside, together channelling the surge of students brought by the "3-3-4" curriculum reform and expanded enrolments.

Linking the railway station, the colleges, the teaching areas and the hostels, the shuttle bus is the key infrastructure that stitches a "hilltop city spanning dozens of metres of altitude" into a single walkable, rideable whole. According to the sources, the shuttle-bus service has also been a perennial issue on the CUHK Students' Union's agenda — frequency, coverage of stops, and crowding during peak hours are recurring topics in the Union's negotiations with the Transport Office.

According to current public information on the CUHK Transport Office website^※, the shuttle-bus service now divides into two broad categories totalling about twelve routes: campus shuttle buses (Routes 1A, 1B, 2, 3, 4, 8, N, H, etc., covering regular all-day services) and interchange shuttle buses (Routes 5, 6A, 6B, 7, etc.), which run only on teaching days according to class schedules; there is also a paid shuttle minibus for visitors and a rehabilitation bus operated by the Office of Student Affairs. Compared with the "one or two numbered lines" of the 3.3-era prototype, today's network has split into the two tiers of shuttle/interchange — further proof that the system has kept evolving rather than being fixed once and for all after a single reorganisation.

# 3.4 Shuttle-Bus Lore in Campus Life (⚠ Unofficial)

In the collective memory of CUHK students, the shuttle bus is an unavoidable part of "hilltop life." According to campus-culture lore (drawing on common student-community talk):

• "The Art of Being Late": students at the summit colleges heading down to foot-of-the-hill classrooms often need to budget generous waiting and travel time; "missing a shuttle bus" is half-jokingly cited as a reason for lateness — CUHK's local variant of the "traffic jam made me late" excuse;
• "The Walkers vs. The Riders": some students treat hiking up and down the hill as daily exercise; others insist "if I can ride, I ride." The rivalry between the two factions is evergreen campus chat — it is said many people start Year 1 as "riders," then switch to the "walker" camp in later years once they have learned the shortcuts;
• Peak-hour "sardine" experiences: at class-change peaks, buses run near capacity, and according to campus folklore, "watching a full bus pull away from the stop while you wait for the next one" is a scene almost every CUHK person has lived through;
• Stops and routes: the shuttle bus links the railway station, the colleges, the teaching areas and the hostels, and is the key infrastructure that makes the "dozens-of-metres-elevation hilltop city" a single walkable, rideable whole.

The above is a general description of everyday campus culture; for specific routes, schedules and operating arrangements, the official announcements of the University Transport Office prevail. This article deliberately lists no potentially outdated timetables or route numbers, to avoid spreading misinformation. For neutral facts about CUHK transport facilities, see 05-campus/transport-facilities.md.

# 3.5 A Geographical Coincidence: The Station Plaza and "University Plaza"

According to Q&A-style summaries common in campus communities (such as student organisations' "quiz you" social-media guides to University Station exits), Exit A of University Station leads directly to the "University Plaza" area, also a major boarding point for routes such as Route 2; from the plaza one can walk towards nearby Chung Chi College. Before 2021, this plaza was also the site of the Goddess of Democracy statue (its history and removal are covered in campus-legends-and-landmarks.md) — station, shuttle bus and landmark all overlap in a single space, another instance of CUHK's "gateway as memory site": the same plaza is both a daily commuting starting point and a place that once carried political memory.

A point of confusion: the "University Plaza" beside the station's Exit A and the "University Plaza" surrounding the main-campus tree-lined avenue (students' nickname "University Mall") are two different places sharing one name — the former sits close to the station and the foot of the hill at Chung Chi; the latter lies in the central campus, between the University Library and the Science Centre. On the origin of the name "University Mall" and the public-space lore that unfolded there, see more-landmarks-towers-mall-and-lakes.md.

---

# 4. A Cross-Generational Name Clash: "University Station" Nearly Given Away (2007–2014)

The one-sentence answer: after the 2007 merger of the two railway companies, the MTR planned a new station for the West Island Line extension near the University of Hong Kong, and at one point intended to share the name "University Station" with the East Rail line's station of the same name. Students of both universities argued heatedly online, and it ended with the new station being renamed "Hong Kong University Station" (English short form later fixed as "HKU Station") — CUHK's "University Station" kept its four-decade-old name intact.

The renaming story of "University Station" did not end in 1967 — forty years later, it nearly had the name taken over by another university's new station.

# 4.1 The Origin of the Clash: The Railway Merger and a Name Collision

According to the Wikipedia entry for HKU Station^※ and the Zhihu article "Two Hong Kong universities argue over a name"^※:

• In 2007, the Mass Transit Railway Corporation and the Kowloon–Canton Railway Corporation merged to form the MTR, bringing the two previously separate networks under one system;
• Around the same time, the MTR planned the West Island Line, with a new station near the University of Hong Kong (in the Belcher's Bay area);
• Following its usual practice of naming stations after nearby landmarks or streets, the MTR initially considered names such as "Whitty Station" (after Whitty Street in Shek Tong Tsui; a 1967–1980s proposal) and "Belcher Station / Belcher Bay Station" (after the nearby private housing estate; a 1990s proposal);
• In 2003, at the request of the University of Hong Kong, the MTR changed the proposed name to "University Station" — on the grounds that HKU had a long history, never mind that it collided with the "University Station" outside CUHK's gates.

One name, two universities, each with its own historical claim — CUHK's "University Station" had been in effect since 1967, while HKU's renaming request came only in 2003, yet both deployed the same logic of "our university is old and venerable, so we deserve to be called 'University Station'." A clash of names was inevitable.

# 4.2 Local Residents of Shek Tong Tsui Object Too

According to the sources, the MTR's proposed "University Station" name also drew opposition from Shek Tong Tsui residents: they argued the station should first serve the community rather than any one university, and that the MTR had not consulted them over the renaming; the more mainstream view among residents was that the station should simply be called "Shek Tong Tsui Station", on the grounds that this better matched the MTR's usual "name stations after their locality" principle.

This "locality vs. institution" tussle echoed the Ma Liu Shui renaming forty years earlier, when "university prestige overrode the old local name" — except this time the opposition left clearer written records.

# 4.3 The "Name-Defence Battle" on Student Forums

Because the merged MTR system does not allow two stations with the same name, rumours circulated at the time that the existing East Rail line's "University Station" would give way to the HKU station and be renamed "Ma Liu Shui Station" again. According to the Zhihu article's summary, this rumour provoked strong discontent among CUHK students online, who argued with HKU students over "who is more entitled to be called 'University Station'" — each side wielding founding dates, station-opening dates and other evidence. It was a rare "identity" tug-of-war fought over historical research between two of Hong Kong's established universities.

# 4.4 The Outcome: The New Station Yields; the Old Station Keeps Its Name

According to the Wikipedia entry for HKU Station^※:

The final outcome: the East Rail line station kept its sole claim to "University Station," while the Island Line's new station was distinguished by the full name "Hong Kong University Station" (HKU Station). CUHK's "first come, first served" of 1967 had, over forty years later, withstood a name challenge from another university in the same city. This also means that, had it not been for that "name-defence" uproar, the "University Station" CUHK people know today could well have been forced back to "Ma Liu Shui Station" in the 2010s.

---

# 5. One Station, One City: A Dual Memory of Gateway and Hilltop

"University Station" and the "hilltop shuttle bus" — one outside, one inside — together make up the spatial memory of "arrival and passage" for every CUHK person:

• Gateway: taking the East Rail line from the city to "University Station," you step out of the station to face the campus climbing the hillside — for countless freshmen, this is their first impression of CUHK;
• Passage: once inside the campus, the shuttle bus carries you on up the hill's many levels, completing the daily journey "from station to classroom, from foot to summit."

One station "corrected" its name for a university; one university, because of a hillside, built its own bus network and wrote the idea into its development plan in the very year after its founding — these two tales, "Ma Liu Shui / University Station" and "the hilltop shuttle bus," are the micro-notes on CUHK's character of "a self-contained city by the sea and hillside."

A further note: in Hong Kong's railway network, exactly two stations are explicitly named after universities — "University Station" on the East Rail line and "Hong Kong University Station" (HKU Station) on the Island Line. What makes CUHK's "University Station" distinctive is that it was a station first (1956), a university second (1963) — it was the university's prestige that rewrote the name of an existing station; and, as Section 4 shows, in 2007–2014 it also fended off a same-name claim from another university in the same city, preserving the single word "University Station" to this day. This double curiosity — the "reversed timeline" plus the "successful name defence" — is what sets "University Station" apart from stations built specifically for a school. This archive records the detail precisely to break the assumption that "stations must have been built for their universities, and their names must have been fixed forever."

The shuttle-bus story has a similar "timeline" curiosity as well: the concept (1964) predated the operation (1970s), planning ahead of the surge in real demand — the exact reverse of the station's "station first, university later" order, yet both point to the same thing: CUHK's transport infrastructure was never a "wait until thirsty to dig a well" stopgap; it was a long-term project tightly coupled to the campus's own rhythm of growth.

Related reading: University Station and the Campus Railway History (factual), Transport and Facilities, Campus Geography, Campus Landmarks: The Two Towers, Lover's Walk and University Mall, Campus Landmarks and the Goddess of Democracy Statue.

---