Accommodation, Hall Culture and College Traditions

At CUHK, "which Hall you live in" is nearly the same as "which family you belong to." The campus — about 137.3 hectares, the largest university campus in Hong Kong^※ — is built into the hillside, scattering hostels, canteens and lecture buildings along a series of slopes; the nine Colleges meanwhile weave accommodation into an institution in its own right, from points-based hall allocation, to High Table Dinners with full residence and communal dining, to the Banquet of a Thousand on college anniversary nights when several thousand people sit down to eat together. The mountain-campus terrain and the college system together have shaped CUHK's distinctive residential and living culture. This article focuses on accommodation and college traditions; inter-college athletics and the rivalry between Colleges are covered in 23-athletics-rivalry, while canteens and food safety have their own dedicated treatment in 19-canteen-food-safety.

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# 1. College Hostels: Who Gets In, and For How Long

Residential life at CUHK is organised around the Colleges. According to a China News Service report, CUHK operates a "whole-university college system": apart from the Graduate School, all staff and students belong to one of the nine Colleges^※, with the Colleges responsible for whole-person education and residential life. The nine Colleges fall roughly into two types by founding date and residential model:

• Traditional large Colleges (Chung Chi, New Asia, United, Shaw): provide a large number of undergraduate hostel places (Halls / Hostels), allocated on a points-based system (taking into account service performance, distance, participation, etc.); a place is not guaranteed for the full period of study.
• Newer residential Colleges (S. H. Ho, Morningside, CW Chu, Wu Yee Sun, Lee Woo Sing): according to the same China News Service report, S. H. Ho, Morningside and CW Chu offer full-period residence with regular communal college dining, including opportunities to dine with the College Head^※. This "full residence & communal dining" model fosters stronger college cohesion and closer staff–student interaction.

College hostels are mostly named after donors or people / places of commemorative significance. Postgraduate (master's and doctoral) accommodation, by contrast, sits outside the undergraduate college-hostel system: it is administered centrally by the University, which provides postgraduate halls (Postgraduate Halls, PGH), some of them family quarters. Postgraduate places are keenly competed for and are usually not guaranteed for the whole period of study. According to official CUHK postgraduate-hall information^※, the postgraduate-hall system comprises six hostel blocks offering more than 1,600 places, open to students on full-time research programmes or UGC-funded taught programmes; among them, the Jockey Club Postgraduate Halls 2 and 3 (JCPGH2, JCPGH3) — a female hall and a male hall respectively — have been in use since late 2018. Located in "Area 39" in the northern part of campus, they house a total of 676 postgraduate students, mostly in double rooms with a smaller number of single rooms, and feature an environmentally friendly design with generous green open space. The postgraduate-hall system thus runs in parallel with the undergraduate college-hostel system, reflecting the two relatively distinct administrative strands — "college undergraduates" and "postgraduates" — in CUHK's residential arrangements.

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# 2. Hall Culture: Living in Hall Is One of the "Five Things" of University

"Living in hall" is counted among what Hong Kong students colloquially call the "five things to do at university," and it is a defining experience of student life in Hong Kong — far more than a bed, it is a whole communal life organised around the hostel:

• Hall Association: each hall has its own association, run by a student cabinet (a 「莊」), which organises hall activities, welfare and social events with other halls.
• Hall traditions: hall orientation camps (Hall O Camp), annual dinners, inter-floor / inter-hall competitions, hall songs, hall colours and mascots, late-night "hall chats" and more.
• "Hall points" (住 Hall 分): residents accumulate points by taking part in hall activities — a source of belonging, but also a direct factor in whether they can keep their place the following year. This links "active participation" directly with "staying on," and is the institutional engine of hall culture.
• The mountain-campus terrain makes travelling between "upper / lower hall" and the various teaching buildings a genuine physical workout, which has fostered a heavy reliance on shuttle buses and a distinctive campus memory of "hill walking."

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# 3. Dem Beat: A Clap-and-Stomp Culture Born at CUHK

If one had to pick a single cultural emblem of the soundscape at CUHK hall / society orientation events, it would be the "Dem Beat". According to the Wikipedia entry for "Dem beat"^※, the Dem Beat is a campus culture that originated at The Chinese University of Hong Kong; literally a "demonstration of beat," it involves large numbers of students in T-shirts bearing their society's or College's logo, lined up in formation, stamping their feet and clapping rhythmically while chanting rhyming slogans in unison — with senior students sometimes even standing on canteen tables to conduct the whole scene.

Functionally, the Dem Beat serves both publicity and solidarity. It is a regular feature of college orientation camps (O Camps), society cabinet elections and recruitment drives: it grabs the attention of passers-by as a promotional device, while also being credited with building team identity and a sense of belonging among participants — the same logic as the "hall points" system described above: turning "participation" into a collective ritual that can be felt and performed.

Dem Beat is often confused with "Dem Cheer," but the two have different origins. According to the same source, Dem Cheer traces back to the University of Hong Kong (whose first hall, St. John's College, was founded in 1912). It is older, places great emphasis on formation and near-ceremonial precision; Dem Beat, by contrast, emerged mainly from student societies under CUHK's Colleges and subsequently spread through the college halls, in a looser, more impromptu style, with slogans mostly rhymed in Cantonese and used far more frequently — just about any orientation or publicity event will feature one.

Dem Beat is not a cultural symbol without controversy. According to the source, a "SCBA Dem Beat incident" took place in 2009 — visiting outsiders at a cultural event felt disturbed by the volume and spectacle of a Dem Beat; there have also been criticisms that such activities involve "peer pressure to participate," questioning the authenticity and depth of the culture. This tension between "lively fun" and "pressure" is, in a sense, the question often raised about hall culture as a whole — is participation driven by genuine belonging, or by an implicit coercion of the group atmosphere? This portal only records the existence of the controversy; it does not adjudicate.

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# 4. The Banquet of a Thousand: Two Colleges, the Same Belonging

The "Banquet of a Thousand" (千人宴) is the grandest of CUHK's communal college-dining traditions — on college-anniversary night, several thousand staff and students sit down to eat and watch performances together, concentrating a whole College's sense of belonging into one open-air feast. New Asia and Chung Chi each have their own Banquet of a Thousand tradition.

New Asia College's "Banquet of a Thousand." New Asia College was founded in 1949 by scholars including Ch'ien Mu, Tang Chun-i and Chang Pi-chieh^※, with a strong emphasis on the humanistic tradition. According to public records, the Banquet of a Thousand is held in New Asia's circular piazza during the anniversary period, bringing large numbers of staff, students and alumni together for a shared meal (of poon choi) and performances^※. In the college calendar, the New Asia anniversary is the first major college event of the academic year, falling between September (the birthday of Confucius, the statutory anniversary date) and 10 October (the College's founding day), and includes a "Dai Dat Dei" carnival, the Banquet of a Thousand, and puzzle games^※. Its spiritual roots go back to the founding ethos — in the words of New Asia College, the "New Asia Spirit" derives from the founding period, when material conditions were harsh and equipment sparse, yet staff and students pursued their educational and cultural ideals with meagre resources^※; the shared meal of the Banquet of a Thousand is precisely that staff–student fellowship and college belonging made tangible. Such large banquets are also often tied to scholarship fundraising.

Chung Chi College's "Banquet of a Thousand." According to the CUTSA complete college handbook (an unofficial compilation)^※, Chung Chi's annual Founder's Day also features a "Banquet of a Thousand": the organisers rent the Lingnan Sports Field, erect a large stage, and the entire College gathers to watch performances while dining with hall-mates and classmates. The "thousand" in the name is a straightforward measure of the banquet's scale.

The Banquet of a Thousand is the ultimate expression of "the College as a living community": when thousands of students sit at the same tables in the same piazza or sports field, sharing food and performances, the College ceases to be an abstract symbol of belonging and becomes a tangible, embodied community — a vivid footnote to the college system's ideal of "whole-person education and communal belonging."

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# 5. High Table Dinner: A Ritual Transplanted from Oxford and Cambridge

Where the Banquet of a Thousand is defined by sheer scale, the High Table Dinner is defined by ritual. It descends from the formal long-table dinner tradition of the residential colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, adopted by Hong Kong and other Asian universities that operate a college system; according to CUHK's official description of its college system^※, in the fully residential colleges — Morningside, S. H. Ho, CW Chu and others — students live in the College and dine together regularly, and the High Table Dinner is one of their distinctive features.

The Colleges incorporate the High Table Dinner into their college general-education / whole-person (non-formal education) activities. At Shaw College, for example, High Table Dinners are non-formal education activities under the College's general-education programme, in which guest speakers share with students in a formal dining setting, on topics ranging from social service, environmental protection, arts and culture, and mediation, to wine appreciation^※; one such dinner is scheduled for the second term of the 2025/26 academic year, given by a professor on "My Journey as a Researcher and an Educator" (10 February 2026)^※. It is not merely "a meal": staff and students (and sometimes guests) dine together in a formal setting, with established etiquette and procedures, combining manners education, aesthetic education and communal dining while fostering staff–student and guest interaction; some Colleges maintain expectations of attendance or formal dress for High Table Dinners.

"Banquet of a Thousand" vs. "High Table Dinner": the former is the open-air feast of the traditional large Colleges, defined by scale and belonging; the latter is the formal dinner of the newer / fully residential Colleges, defined by ritual and staff–student interaction. The two communal-dining cultures map neatly onto the two temperaments of CUHK's college system — "traditional large Colleges" and "fully residential small Colleges."

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# 6. The Beacon: A Gathering Space in the Mountain City

• The Beacon (烽火台): a landmark piazza in the main campus, formed by the bronze statue of Ch'ien Mu and a "gate"-shaped sculpture (the work "仲門" by Ju Ming; see the arts feature 12-misc for details), often mentioned together with the "Cultural Square" area nearby. It is CUHK's traditional space for student gatherings, statement-making and posting notices. Major student-organisation announcements and events are held here, and its walls are usually plastered with society publications and event posters; it has long been regarded as a symbol of the student self-governance atmosphere on campus.

The Beacon and the University Station area have long carried CUHK's gatherings, commemorations and expressions of views, and hold a special place in campus memory. This article confines itself to a factual account of its cultural role as a "gathering space"; narratives concerning specific political events and the fate of memorial objects fall within the remit of the university-administration / student-movement feature, and are not pursued here.

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# 7. What Connects the Halls: Canteens and Shuttle Buses (Briefly Noted)

The canteens and shuttle buses of the mountain campus are the two "arteries" of residential life — "waiting for the shuttle" and "rushing for the shuttle" have themselves become a distinctive topic of everyday conversation and collective memory at CUHK, while the canteens of the various Colleges and the main campus are important venues for students' daily social life. The canteen system, the contractor (判頭) model, food safety and "CUHK cuisine" are given a dedicated treatment in 19-canteen-food-safety, and are not elaborated here.

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# Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How are CUHK hostels allocated?

A: Residential life at CUHK is organised around the nine Colleges, which fall into two types: the traditional large Colleges (Chung Chi, New Asia, United, Shaw) allocate places on a points-based system (taking into account service performance, distance, participation, etc.), without guaranteeing a place for the full period of study; the newer residential Colleges (S. H. Ho, Morningside, CW Chu, Wu Yee Sun, Lee Woo Sing) offer full-period residence with regular communal college dining, including opportunities to dine with the College Head — a "full residence & communal dining" model with denser staff–student interaction.

Q: What is life like in a CUHK hostel / living in hall?

A: "Living in hall" counts as one of the "five things to do at university" in Hong Kong, and revolves around a whole communal life: each hall has a Hall Association (run by a student cabinet, or 「莊」) organising hall orientation camps (Hall O Camp), annual dinners, inter-floor / inter-hall competitions, hall songs and other traditions; residents accumulate "hall points" by taking part in hall activities, which directly affect their chances of keeping their place the following year — linking "participation" directly with "staying on." The mountain-campus terrain also makes travelling between "upper / lower hall" and the teaching buildings a real workout, making the shuttle bus a daily necessity.

Q: What is postgraduate accommodation like at CUHK?

A: Postgraduate accommodation sits outside the undergraduate college-hostel system and is administered centrally by the University. According to official CUHK postgraduate-hall information, the system comprises six hostel blocks offering more than 1,600 places, open to students on full-time research programmes or UGC-funded taught programmes, some of them family quarters; among them, the Jockey Club Postgraduate Halls 2 and 3 (JCPGH2, JCPGH3, a female hall and a male hall respectively) have been in use since late 2018, are located in "Area 39" of the northern campus, and house 676 postgraduate students, mostly in double rooms. Postgraduate places are keenly competed for and are usually not guaranteed for the whole period of study.

Q: What distinctive college / hall activities does CUHK have?

A: The most iconic is the "Dem Beat" clapping culture that originated at CUHK — students line up, stamp and clap, and chant slogans in unison, commonly seen at college orientation camps and society cabinet elections; and the "Banquet of a Thousand" on college-anniversary nights, held in the circular piazza at New Asia and on a hired sports field at Chung Chi, where thousands of staff and students dine and watch performances together. The fully residential Colleges (Morningside, S. H. Ho, CW Chu, etc.) also hold "High Table Dinners" (High Table Dinner) descended from the Oxford and Cambridge tradition, defined by ritual and formal staff–student interaction.

Q: How does CUHK's hostel / college system differ from other universities'?

A: CUHK is Hong Kong's only university with a college system. It was founded in 1963 by the union of three Colleges — Chung Chi, New Asia and United — and today has nine, to which all staff and students (apart from the Graduate School) belong. The Colleges are responsible for whole-person education and residential life, which differs from the "hostels are just for sleeping" model of most universities — from points-based hall allocation, High Table Dinners with full residence and communal dining, to the Banquet of a Thousand and Dem Beat culture, the College turns "accommodation" into a whole institutional design for living and belonging.

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