Campus Characters and Landmarks of the Five Universities: The Mountain City, Colonial Red Brick, Seaview Newcomer, Mall-Integrated Campus, and the Red-Brick Cluster

The one-sentence verdict: No two of Hong Kong’s five major university campuses share remotely similar characters. The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) is an approximately 138.4-hectare independent mountain city hugging the hillside overlooking the sea—the largest in the city. The University of Hong Kong (HKU) has the tightest land supply (main campus roughly 14 hectares, total land around 54.8 hectares across scattered parcels) yet boasts an unbroken century-spanning sequence of architectural eras, beginning with Edwardian Baroque red brick in 1912. The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) is a seaview newcomer in Clear Water Bay on land once earmarked for an army barracks. City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has audaciously stacked its campus atop the Festival Walk shopping mall, making it Hong Kong’s only university that “grows out of a shopping centre.” The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) spreads a swath of around 20 red-brick buildings near the Cross-Harbour Tunnel entrance, only to have its unity violently punctured by a fluid white structure designed by Zaha Hadid. This article unpacks each campus’s “character” and its signature landmarks, answering in cross-comparison: which is the largest, the most beautiful, the most convenient, and the “least university-like”—with every statement sourced.

1. CUHK: The Singular Mountain City—The Largest Campus in Hong Kong, Built into a Hill Overlooking the Sea

In a nutshell: CUHK is the only university in Hong Kong that owns an entire swath of hillside—occupying roughly 138.4 hectares (Wikipedia records about 138 hectares), built into the slope overlooking Tolo Harbour. It is the undisputed “largest” among the five.

The main campus sits at Ma Liu Shui in the north-western corner of Sha Tin in the New Territories. The university’s own description—that the campus “overlooks Tolo Harbour, with views of the Pat Sin Leng mountain range”—is not mere florid publicity. In 1955, the founding head of Chung Chi College, the forestry scholar Ling Daoyang (凌道揚) , singled out Ma Liu Shui as the site, arguing that the place “faces Ma On Shan, overlooks Tolo Harbour, delights in mountains and waters, and is truly an ideal retreat for contemplation and repose.” Over the decades of subsequent expansion, the campus architect Szeto Wai (司徒惠) “meticulously planned the entire hillock… levelling it into a three-terrace layout”. The official description of CUHK today as rising “from the summit to the foot of the hill in three tiers” — the upper, middle, and lower levels — is a direct consequence of this artificial cut-and-fill operation, not a natural topography.

Where does the “mountain city” feel come from?

The three tiers correspond to the lower level (near Tolo Harbour, University Station, Lake Ad Excellentiam), the middle level (University Mall, University Library, Science Centre), and the upper level (New Asia College, United College, Pavilion of Harmony). The vertical drop is so dramatic that “waiting for the shuttle bus, climbing steep paths” has become the acknowledged daily bodily experience of a CUHK student—a campus culture shaped directly by topography, which the University mitigates with a free shuttle bus service circulating among the three tiers.

Signature landmarks: Pavilion of Harmony and Lake Ad Excellentiam

The campus landmark that most perfectly captures the “mountain and sea” spirit is New Asia College’s Pavilion of Harmony (合一亭). Completed in December 2003 with a donation from Ms. Ng Chung-lin and designed by Professor Chan Wai-kee, it uses a crescent-shaped shallow pool to make the “water of the pool appear to merge seamlessly with the scenery of Tolo Harbour”, creating a single plane of water and sky. The name is drawn from the essay “On the Unity of Heaven and Man” by New Asia’s founder Ch’ien Mu (錢穆)—the one place where CUHK’s “college spirit” and its geographic marriage of mountain and sea are framed in a single landmark.

On the lower Chung Chi College level, Lake Ad Excellentiam (previously the “Lotus Pond”) is the other major waterscape: its name, “not yet perfected, thus one must strive towards perfection,” echoes the Chung Chi motto “In Pursuit of Excellence”; the two bridges on the lake, one arcing east and one arcing west, symbolise the vicissitudes of life. Meanwhile, the University Mall (whose official English name is, indeed, “University Mall”) hosts the annual Congregation. The “Gate of Wisdom”—a sculpture named “仲門” (The Gate) by Taiwanese artist Ju Ming, commissioned by Szeto Wai and installed in 1987—anchors the plaza end near the library.

The only university with its own railway station

Another property unique to CUHK is that it possesses an MTR station literally created for it and renamed because of it. The precursor of University Station, “Ma Liu Shui Station,” opened on 24 September 1956, built specifically to serve Chung Chi College. On 1 January 1967, it was formally renamed “University Station” to coincide with the founding of CUHK. Moreover, it remains a piece of engineering peculiarity in Hong Kong’s rail network—sited on a curve, the gap between the platform and the train carriage is, at its widest, around 25 cm, and it is documented as the platform with the greatest curvature in the MTR system, a safety concern only resolved with the installation of platform screen doors in May 2025. No other university among the five has its name so directly etched into the foundational identity of a railway station.

2. HKU: The Colonial Red-Brick Museum on a Tight Site

In a nutshell: HKU feels the least like a new campus among the five. The Edwardian Baroque red brick of the Main Building (1912) remains the visual core, yet the main campus is the most constrained of the five, occupying only about 14 hectares officially. Even including all the scattered sites—Sassoon Road, Centennial Campus, the Kadoorie Centre—the total land is only about 54.8 hectares, less than half of CUHK’s undivided main campus.

An architectural timeline spanning a century

What is unique about HKU’s campus is not “size” but the juxtaposition of old and new, with clearly demarcated generations. Its oldest buildings belong to the colonial classical language of the Edwardian era: the Main Building is Edwardian Baroque/Post-Renaissance, using red brick with granite dressings, funded by Sir H.N. Mody and designed by Alfred Bryer of Leigh & Orange. The post-war era entered the age of concrete, typified by the Knowles Building (1973), nicknamed the “Rubik’s Cube” by students, its mass balanced by a grid of white solar-shading fins—the building also suffered a major fire affecting the third and fourth floors in 1984 and the Department of Architecture did not return for over a year and a half. Entering the contemporary period, HKU built a student residence in Wong Chuk Hang in the Southern District (2023) using Modular Integrated Construction (MiC), with modules prefabricated in mainland Chinese factories and hoisted into place in Hong Kong. From a red-brick monument laid by artisans’ hands to a modular high-rise assembled from factory-made parts, a century-plus of HKU’s campus is practically a microcosm of Hong Kong’s construction-industry history.

Signature landmarks: the Lily Pond and the Sun Yat-sen Statue

The Lily Pond in front of the Main Library is the best-known landscaped garden on HKU’s hillside campus—planted with water lilies and swimming with koi, it is a favourite spot for graduation photographs. The Statue of Dr Sun Yat-sen is situated by the pond, with the plaza before it named “Sun Yat-sen Path,” depicting him at the age of 56 in 1923, when he returned to HKU and gave a talk at what was then the Great Hall (the predecessor of Loke Yew Hall). This landmark layers geography, historical memory, and everyday repose onto a single hillside spot.

A campus surviving by “seeking land outward”

Constrained by its site, HKU’s modus operandi for the past two decades has been “constantly seeking land outward” rather than making a single decisive land grab: in 2012, carving into the slope west of the main campus produced the Centennial Campus, which achieved dual LEED and BEAM Platinum certifications; from 2027, the phased opening of the Pokfield Campus, replacing the old sports centre and staff quarters, will span roughly 130,000 square metres, aiming for WELL certification as a “sustainable, healthy, and smart campus.” HKU is also the only university in Hong Kong where an MTR exit opens directly into the campus core—HKU Station began service on 28 December 2014, and at its opening, it was the largest and deepest cavern station in the entire MTR network.

3. HKUST: The Clear Water Bay Seaview Campus That Nearly Became an Army Barracks

In a nutshell: HKUST is the latest-built of the five (opened in 1991), and no university has a more twisted site-selection story—its Tai Po Tsai, Clear Water Bay site was originally land destined for Kohima Camp, a barracks planned by the British Army in the 1980s to house a Gurkha regiment, a plan shelved after the signing of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration and the scaling back of the British military presence, allowing the land to be handed over to the university’s preparatory committee.

A topography “ringed by hills on three sides, facing the sea on one,” and a campus language of “navigate by letter and lift number”

Approximately 60 hectares in area, HKUST sits near the northern tip of the Clear Water Bay Peninsula, overlooking Port Shelter, its 150 acres rimmed on three sides by country park greenery and facing Port Shelter on the remaining side. The planning team (the joint venture of Simon Kwan & Associates and Britain’s Percy Thomas Partnership, the runner-up in the original design competition) adopted a “terrace-following-the-contours” approach on the steep hillside: academic blocks on the top platform, student residences and sports facilities on the lower tiers near the waterfront, with the layers stitched together by vehicular roads, footbridges, and numerous outdoor lifts. The vertical scale is such that “giving directions by lift number” has become an ingrained wayfinding habit among the HKUST community.

Signature landmarks: the Red Bird sundial and the Armillary Sphere

HKUST’s most recognised landmark is the 8.5-metre-tall red steel sundial sculpture on the Entrance Piazza—the official name is Circle of Time, but it is popularly called the Red Bird (紅鳥) because of its form suggestive of a bird in flight. It was commissioned with a donation from the Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust and created by the Irish-Australian sculpting couple Charles and Joan Walsh-Smith, unveiled on 8 October 1991—precisely between HKUST’s formal opening and its inauguration ceremony, born simultaneously with the university. The base’s relief panel, a 7-metre-long, 1.5-metre-high frieze, catalogues 39 ancient Chinese scientific and technological achievements spanning the 6th century BC to the 13th century AD—the iron plough, the magnetic compass, the seismograph, movable-type printing, porcelain—a complete inventory. For a university founded in the name of “Science and Technology,” the first piece of public art at its entrance being a sundial—a tribute to ancient science—is a rather distinctive self-presentation.

Answering this is the Armillary Sphere placed at the start of the Fung Shiu Ching Promenade—a scaled-down replica of the Ming-dynasty armillary sphere from the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing—unveiled on 3 September 2008, donated by the Fong Shu Hung Foundation. The sundial measures “time,” the armillary sphere measures “celestial position”; the two instruments echo each other from east to west, translating “ancient Eastern science” into campus landscape—a subtle, implicit narrative thread in HKUST’s spatial storytelling.

The “natural air conditioning” built in from day one

Another unusual trait is that HKUST has, since its founding, drawn seawater directly from Clear Water Bay to cool its academic buildings—seawater-cooled central chilling, a pioneering technology adopted from the university’s earliest days. Between 2013 and 2015, this was expanded into a district cooling system covering multiple blocks, and in 2016 it received the “Asia-Pacific Region Energy Project of the Year” award from the Association of Energy Engineers. This mountainous terrain “ringed by hills on three sides, facing the sea on one” is also the physical foundation for HKUST’s thirty-plus-year energy-saving narrative.

4. CityU: The Only Campus “Growing Out of a Shopping Mall”

In a nutshell: CityU is the most “metropolitan” of the five and the one with the least sense of a conventional campus boundary—its main campus is layered above Festival Walk, a large shopping centre on Tat Chee Avenue in Kowloon Tong, linked by footbridge to Kowloon Tong MTR station, forming the only “university–mall–MTR station” trinity in Hong Kong.

How does the Festival Walk integration work?

Festival Walk was jointly developed by Swire Properties and CITIC Pacific, opening on 13 November 1998, comprising seven floors of retail and four office towers, directly connected to Kowloon Tong station (East Rail Line and Kwun Tong Line). The CityU campus is linked to the mall by a pedestrian walkway, and a visitor can reach the campus from Kowloon Tong station in about a five-minute walk through Festival Walk. “Kowloon Tong station → Festival Walk → CityU teaching blocks” is CityU’s most characteristic circulation route, and the covered walkway connecting mall to campus is colloquially known on campus as the “Time Tunnel.” The convenience is obvious, but it also means CityU lacks the “sense of territory” that a traditional university derives from perimeter walls and tree lines—no hills, no lake, no green space enclosed by walls, making it the most intuitive contrast to the other four.

The main campus is roughly 15.6 hectares, substituting high-density blocks for expansive green space; most academic, administrative, and living functions are compressed into a handful of large structures on one side of Tat Chee Avenue, connected by footbridges and podium-level walkways.

Colour-coded zones and a “vertical campus”

The main teaching block, the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building (formerly Academic 1), spans approximately 63,000 square metres of floor area, housing 116 laboratories and 18 lecture theatres—so vast that the University organises wayfinding using five colours: Purple, Green, Blue, Yellow, and Red. “Go to Purple Zone,” or “find P6309,” is the daily language of CityU students. CityU’s tallest structure, the 20-storey Lau Ming Wai Academic Building, demonstrates another “vertical campus” solution, placing the Indra and Harry Banga Gallery, a museum-grade exhibition space, on the 18th floor, effectively nesting a museum at the top of an academic high-rise.

Signature landmark: Libeskind’s Crystal

Amid these rectilinear functional megastructures, the Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre (completed 2011) is CityU’s most arresting visual signature—designed by the international architect Daniel Libeskind, it is a nine-storey crystalline structure of sharp, fractured planes erupting from the ground like a crystal, with a dramatic spiral staircase twisting through its core. It stands in stark contrast to utilitarian blocks like the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building, marking CityU’s move from “functional container” toward “architectural expression.”

Asia’s only dual-accredited veterinary school

CityU also possesses a disciplinary landmark unique among the five—Hong Kong’s only veterinary school (the Jockey Club College of Veterinary Medicine and Life Sciences, JCC), established in 2014 in collaboration with Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine; its six-year BVM programme became, in 2023, the first veterinary degree in Asia to achieve dual accreditation from the AVBC and the RCVS. This creates an interesting counterpoint to CityU’s ultra-urban “growing out of a mall” character—inside the most metropolitan campus, Hong Kong’s sole college for treating animals is housed.

5. PolyU: The Red-Brick Cluster by the Cross-Harbour Tunnel, Punctured by a Single White Curvilinear Building

In a nutshell: PolyU is the most “downtown” and the most compact of the five—its main campus, embedded on reclaimed land in Hung Hom, Kowloon, is approximately 9.46 hectares (the Chinese Wikipedia records about 9.2 hectares), smaller than half of Victoria Park, yet it unfurls roughly 20 red-brick-clad buildings, forming the most visually unified “red-brick city” of the five—until 2014, when a single white curvilinear building violently punctured that unity.

The red brick and the podium: who set the tone?

The overall appearance of Phase 1 of PolyU’s Hung Hom campus (1976, comprising Blocks CD, CF, DE, EF, and FJ) was led by the Japanese-born architect James Kinoshita (木下一) during his tenure at P&T Group. Kinoshita chose red-brick cladding to lend the institution “gravitas”, distinguishing PolyU starkly from his other contemporary works, such as the Hong Kong Hilton or Jardine House, which tend toward white concrete and aluminium. The campus’s second distinguishing feature is the raised podium—an entire layer of the ground plane lifted, with the space beneath used for logistics and parking, while the podium level is stitched together by footbridges and interspersed with courtyards large and small. This “red brick + podium” vocabulary continued with expansions for nearly 40 years, from Phase 1 in 1976 right through to Block Z in 2013.

Signature landmark: Zaha Hadid’s “wrong architect”

The contemporary landmark that creates the most dramatic contrast on the PolyU campus is the Jockey Club Innovation Tower (Block V), which opened in 2014—designed by Pritzker Prize laureate Zaha Hadid, a fluidly curvilinear form devoid of right angles that houses the School of Design. From winning the competition in 2007 to its inauguration in March 2014, it took around seven years and remains Hadid’s only permanent university building in Hong Kong. James Kinoshita, who orchestrated the campus’s original design, once remarked of this building that they had “picked the wrong architect” and that it would force the campus to “take on a different character”—a side-by-side criticism that perfectly encapsulates the outright clash between the campus’s “red brick” and “fluid” architectural languages. The Innovation Tower later won a 2016 RIBA Award for International Excellence.

A campus identified by alphabetical codes

Beyond their donor names, all PolyU blocks are numbered with letters from A to Z (excluding I, K, O)—“meet you in M Core,” “School of Design is in V”—is the daily campus language of PolyU, forming a neat counterpoint to CityU’s colour-coded zoning: one uses colour to subdivide a single giant block, the other uses alphabet letters to index a whole campus. The most conspicuous geographical marker at PolyU in recent years is the redesigned Main Entrance, unveiled for the University’s 85th anniversary in 2022, “blending PolyU’s iconic red-brick architectural style with a classical colonnade,” drawing the half-century-old red-brick vocabulary into a contemporary gateway through the syntax of columns and water features.

6. A Side-by-Side Comparison of Five Campus Characters and Landmarks

Lay out the “character keywords” and “signature landmarks” of the five universities side by side, and the distinctions become self-evident:

University	Campus Character in One Sentence	Land Area	Signature Landmark	Architectural Keynote
CUHK 中大	An independent mountain city hugging hillsides and overlooking the sea	Approx. 138.4 ha, the largest in HK	Pavilion of Harmony (unity of water and sky), Lake Ad Excellentiam, University Mall, Gate of Wisdom (“仲門”)	Modernism + three artificial terraces (Szeto Wai)
HKU 港大	A century-spanning museum of architecture on a city hillside	Main campus ~14 ha (total land ~54.8 ha), smallest of the five	Main Building (1912 red brick), Lily Pond, Sun Yat-sen Statue	Edwardian Baroque red brick → Modernism → Modular Integrated Construction (century-spanning)
HKUST 科大	A seaview newcomer on land nearly used for an army barracks	Approx. 60 ha	Red Bird Sundial (Circle of Time), Armillary Sphere	Hillside-and-sea-facing layered platforms (completed 1991, the youngest)
CityU 城大	An urban “conjoined” campus growing out of a shopping mall	Approx. 15.6 ha	Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre (Libeskind’s Crystal), Festival Walk walkway	1990s functional megastructures → 2010s crystalline landmark → five-colour zone wayfinding
PolyU 理大	A red-brick cluster by the Cross-Harbour Tunnel entrance	Approx. 9.46 ha, one of the smallest among the five	Jockey Club Innovation Tower (Zaha Hadid), Red-brick colonnade at the Main Entrance	Red-brick Modernism + raised podium (Kinoshita) + one singular curvilinear building

7. Which Is the Largest, the Most Beautiful, the Most Convenient, and the “Least Like a University”?

Which is the largest? Uncontroversially, it is CUHK—roughly 138.4 hectares is the figure officially declared as “the largest in Hong Kong.” Even against the 54.8 hectares claimed in HKU’s 2024 annual report counting all scattered parcels, CUHK’s undivided main campus is still well over double HKU’s total.

Which is the “most beautiful” (in terms of scenery)? This question has no standard answer, but the claims can be divided by “scenery type”: for a symphony of mountain and sea, CUHK’s Pavilion of Harmony merging water and sky, with the distant prospect of Tolo Harbour, is singular; for pure seascape, HKUST, ringed by hills on three sides and opening onto Port Shelter, offers the broadest “seaview newcomer” vista; for the texture of history, the century-plus colonial classicism of HKU’s Main Building red-brick cluster is something none of the other four can replicate.

Which is the most convenient? CityU and PolyU are tied—CityU relies on the “MTR station–shopping mall–campus” trinity, reaching the teaching blocks from Kowloon Tong station in a five-minute indoor walk; PolyU, wedged right next to Hung Hom station and the Cross-Harbour Tunnel portal, equally belongs to the “downtown core, opening directly onto the street” category. By contrast, both CUHK and HKUST require shuttle bus/bus connections, and even with MTR University Station (opened in 2014), HKU’s campus remains an uphill, hillside topography.

Which is “least like a university”? CityU claims this title without contest—no mountain, no lake, no green space enclosed by walls; the university’s physical boundary is nested within a shopping mall and an MTR station. It is the only “university–shopping mall–MTR station” superposed campus in Hong Kong, and the one most likely to prompt a visitor to ask, “Where exactly is the lecture block?”