Tales from the Hill Campus: From ‘Ma Liu Shui Station’ to ‘University Station’ — A Station Renamed and a University’s Hill Campus

⚠️ This article belongs to the Anecdote module (15 Campus Legends, Anecdotes, and Sayings). The station’s renaming history and dates are based on railway historical sources and cross-checked; the everyday aspects of the hillside campus and campus bus service, where noted, draw on informal sources and are campus-life anecdotes. No living individual is named; the article does not contain politically sensitive content. For a complete factual account of the station’s engineering history (electrification, expansion, cross-harbour extension, etc.), see University Station and Campus Railway History (Factual Record); for neutral facts on CUHK’s geography and buildings, see Campus Geography.

A railway station seven years older than the university it serves; a hillside university that has turned the question of how to get from the bottom of the hill to the top into a distinctive campus bus culture. ‘Ma Liu Shui/University Station’ and the ‘hill campus shuttle’ — one external, one internal — are the two spatial languages that CUHK students learn first and remember longest.

# 1. A Station Before a University: Ma Liu Shui Station (1956)

Many people assume that ‘University Station’ was built for CUHK, but in fact the station predates the university. According to the Wikipedia entry for University Station^※ and Hong Kong Railway Encyclopedia^※:

• The station at Ma Liu Shui in Sha Tin opened on 24 September 1956, originally named ‘Ma Liu Shui Station’;
• In its early days it was served by only about three trains per direction per day, according to sources;
• At the time, this was a modest rural halt on the Kowloon–Canton Railway — and The Chinese University of Hong Kong would not be founded until 1963.

In other words, the station at Ma Liu Shui existed first, and the university chose the site later — the university was partly ‘built around the station’, not the other way round. CUHK’s choice of the hillside coastal site at Ma Liu Shui was, according to the English Wikipedia entry^※, precisely because of the area’s transport and geographical conditions.

More precisely, the station was actually built for Chung Chi College, which had arrived earlier. Chung Chi College was granted land by the Hong Kong government in 1952 and settled at Ma Liu Shui; at the time there was no stop along the line, and travel was extremely inconvenient for staff and students. It was this need that led to the small station opening in 1956 — the university (1963) came eleven years after Chung Chi moved in (1952) and seven years after the station opened (1956). These three timelines neatly illustrate the real sequence: residents first, then a station, then a university — not the usual idea of the university first and the station added later. The full engineering history (station rebuilding, expansion, cross-harbour extension, etc.) belongs to a separate factual record; see University Station and Campus Railway History (Factual Record). This article focuses on the renaming itself and the sense of ‘identity’ it reveals.

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

After CUHK was established, the name ‘Ma Liu Shui Station’ increasingly seemed inadequate for the growing importance of the university campus. According to Wikipedia^※:

• The Kowloon–Canton Railway authorities felt that the Chinese name ‘Ma Liu Shui’ was not sufficiently refined, and that CUHK had been operating since 1963;
• On 11 December 1966, the railway announced that Ma Liu Shui Station would be renamed ‘University Station’;
• The change came into effect on 1 January 1967.

A note on the ‘correction’ of the name: Sources state that the explicit reason for the change was that the Chinese name ‘Ma Liu Shui’ was ‘inelegant’ (the Chinese station name did not match the university’s standing), not simply a matter of geographical reference; an English-language source also records that one reason was that the old name ‘sounded unpleasant in Mandarin’. This is a classic case of replacing a vulgar name with a refined one — a university’s prestige rewriting the name of the station at its doorstep. From then on, ‘University Station’ became the beginning and end of countless memories for the CUHK community.

It is striking that this ‘correction’ happened within just three years of CUHK’s founding — the speed with which the new university, barely on its feet, changed the name on the sign at its front door. Compared with other Hong Kong stations named after institutions (e.g. facilities near PolyU and CityU mostly kept existing place names, without necessarily renaming stations), the renaming to ‘University Station’ for CUHK seems particularly decisive — perhaps reflecting the importance that the Hong Kong government and the railway authorities attached to this new university during its establishment in the 1960s. The station has since undergone many changes along with Hong Kong’s railway development (KCR–East Rail Line evolution, electrification in 1983, two expansions in 2000 and 2012, and the cross-harbour extension in 2022 — details in a separate article), but the name ‘University Station’ has remained, becoming CUHK’s iconic gateway to the world.

# 3. The Hill Campus: A Campus Bus Culture Born of the Hillside

CUHK is famed as a ‘hill campus’ — built on the slopes of the western foothills of Ma On Shan, it climbs from the seaside Chung Chi (at the bottom) all the way up to New Asia and United Colleges (at the top), with a significant change in elevation. This terrain gave rise to CUHK’s unique commuting lore.

# 3.1 Why a Campus Bus Is Essential

According to the Hong Kong Bus Encyclopedia entry on CUHK^※, with a campus built on a hillside and walking between teaching buildings and colleges being highly inconvenient, the university set up its own campus bus (shuttle) system to ferry staff and students up and down the hill. The on-campus public transport is, according to sources, operated centrally by the university’s transport department (the Transport Office).

# 3.2 A Neglected Origin: The ‘Campus Bus Concept’ in the 1964 Development Plan

According to sources, the idea of an on-campus bus service was actually first proposed in the 1964 CUHK Development Plan — that is, in only the second year after CUHK was formally founded (1963), when the university was drawing up the campus master plan, it already foresaw the commuting difficulties that building on a hillside would inevitably bring, and wrote an ‘on-campus bus’ into the development concept. This means that the campus bus was not a remedial measure introduced only after the campus had expanded to a certain size, but was a ‘built-in’ feature considered from the very start of planning — a fact that is often overlooked, with people generally assuming the bus service was a later response to overcrowding.

The concept took several more years to become reality. According to sources, the campus bus first went into operation in the 1970s: the university purchased its own fleet, and the vehicles operated only on campus and did not have official licence plates, carrying only number plates such as ‘CUHK1’, ‘CUHK2’, and so on — these were the earliest ‘identity cards’ of the CUHK campus bus, a distinctive detail that many alumni remember as their ‘own school bus’. The gap of at least six years between the 1964 paper concept and the wheels turning in the 1970s mirrors the early, pioneering phase of CUHK’s development.

# 3.3 From ‘CUHK Numbered Buses’ to a Systematic Route Network

The campus bus system has since undergone several rounds of evolution. According to sources, around 2012, CUHK carried out a major reorganisation of the bus service, introducing multiple numbered routes (such as Routes 2, 4, and 5) serving different parts of the campus and colleges, transforming the earlier rough model of ‘one or two buses covering the whole campus’ into a systematic route network with fixed numbers and stops. The timing of this reorganisation almost coincided with the same year’s opening of University Station Exit D, which provides direct access to the bus terminus (see University Station and Campus Railway History (Factual Record)) — the station exit and the campus bus routes were upgraded simultaneously, one external and one internal, working together to handle the surge in student numbers after the ‘3-3-4’ academic structure expansion.

The campus bus links the railway station, colleges, teaching areas, and residential halls, serving as the critical infrastructure that stitches together this ‘hill campus with a vertical drop of tens of metres’ into a whole that can be navigated on foot or by bus. According to sources, campus bus service has also been a perennial issue for the CUHK Students’ Union — frequency, coverage of stops, and overcrowding at peak times are common topics in annual negotiations between the union and the Transport Office.

# 3.4 Campus Bus Anecdotes from Student Life (⚠ informal)

In the collective memory of CUHK students, the campus bus is an inescapable part of ‘hill campus life’. Drawing on informal campus lore (and commonly cited student community accounts):

• The art of being late: Students living in hilltop colleges heading to lessons at the bottom of the hill always need to allow generous time for waiting and travelling. ‘Missing a shuttle bus’ is a half-joking, universal excuse for lateness — the CUHK version of ‘stuck in traffic’.
• Walkers vs. Bus-riders: Some students treat walking up and down the hill as daily exercise, while others insist on taking the bus whenever possible. The rivalry between the two camps is a perennial piece of campus chatter; many are said to be ‘bus-riders’ in their first year, only to switch to ‘walkers’ once they learn the shortcuts as seniors.
• The crush at peak times: During rush hours between classes, the buses are nearly full; by campus accounts, ‘watching a fully loaded bus pull away and waiting for the next one’ is an experience shared by almost every CUHK student.

The above are generalised descriptions of everyday campus culture. For specific routes, schedules, and operational arrangements, refer to the official announcements of the University Transport Office; this article does not list specific times or route numbers that may become outdated, to avoid perpetuating errors. For neutral facts about CUHK’s transport facilities, see Transport Facilities.

# 3.5 A Geographical Coincidence: The Station Plaza and ‘University Plaza’

According to common Q&A-style guides compiled by campus communities (such as student organisations posting ‘quiz’ style guides to University Station exits on social media), Exit A of University Station opens directly onto the University Plaza area, which is also a major boarding point for campus bus routes such as Route 2. From this plaza, one can also walk towards the nearby Chung Chi College. Before 2021, this plaza was also the site where the Goddess of Democracy statue once stood (for the statue’s history and removal, see Campus Legends and Landmarks) — the station, the bus, and a landmark overlapping in the same space, another example of how CUHK’s ‘gateway is a site of memory’: the same plaza is both the daily commute’s starting point and a place that has carried political memory.

# 4. One Station, One Hill Campus: A Dual Memory of Gateway and Hillside

‘University Station’ and the ‘hill campus bus’, one external and one internal, together form the spatial memory of arrival and movement for the CUHK community:

• Gateway: Arriving at University Station on the East Rail Line from the city, stepping out of the station and facing the campus climbing up the hill — this is the first impression of CUHK for countless new students.
• Movement: Once inside the campus, the shuttle buses relay people to every level of the hill, completing the daily journey from station to classroom, from bottom to top.

A station was ‘renamed’ because of a university; a university built its own bus network because of a hillside, and wrote that concept into its development plan in only its second year — these two anecdotes about ‘Ma Liu Shui/University Station’ and the ‘hill campus bus’ are micro-footnotes to CUHK’s character of being ‘built on a hill facing the sea, a self-contained city’.

A further note: Many Hong Kong higher-education institutions have stations near their gates whose names relate to the institution (other universities also have stations named after them). But what makes CUHK’s ‘University Station’ special is that the station (1956) predates the university (1963) — it was the university’s prestige that retroactively changed the name of an existing station. This ‘temporal inversion’ gives the name ‘University Station’ an extra layer of documentary intrigue, beyond a station simply built for a university. We record this detail here precisely to challenge the assumption that a station must have been built for the university.

The campus bus story has a similar chronological twist: the concept (1964) preceded the operation (1970s) — planning came before demand exploded. This is the opposite sequence to the station’s ‘station first, university later’, yet both share the same message: CUHK’s transport infrastructure has never been an emergency measure dug at the last minute, but a long-term engineering project tightly synchronised with the growth of the campus itself.

Related reading: University Station and Campus Railway History (Factual Record), Transport and Facilities, Campus Geography.