Hong Kong and The University of Hong Kong are my intellectual birthplace" — Sun Yat-sen's 1923 Address at HKU

Module: 00 Overview · Sub-file: Sun Yat-sen 1923 Speech (sun-yat-sen-1923-speech) This page focuses on the most frequently quoted sentence in HKU's history, and the people, setting and text of the speech behind it. For the founding and naming of the University (including the absorption of the College of Medicine for Chinese), see history.md; for post-war reconstruction and the centenary, see history-2.md; for Loke Yew Hall (the venue of the speech), see ../05-campus/buildings-landmarks.md; for biographical sketches, see ../06-people/faculty-and-leaders.md.

# I. The backstory: outstanding graduate of the College of Medicine's first cohort (1887–1892)

Sun Yat-sen's ties with HKU began at a specialist medical school that predated the University itself by twenty-four years.

• According to the official HKU Dr Sun Yat-sen Historical Trail materials, Sun studied at the College of Medicine for Chinese, Hongkong from 1887 to 1892^※;
• Before coming to Hong Kong to study medicine, he had already received part of his secondary education in the city. According to the HKU alumni newsletter, he arrived in Hong Kong at 17, first attending the Diocesan Home and Orphanage (now Diocesan Boys' School), then transferring to the Central School (now Queen's College) to complete his schooling^※;
• Per the same official source, the College of Medicine for Chinese was absorbed into HKU in 1912 as its Faculty of Medicine^※ — which institutionally made Sun's alma mater "continue" as part of the University (for the full story of the merger, see history.md).

He graduated in the college's first ever cohort, and with distinction. According to compiled public historical records, in July 1892 the College of Medicine for Chinese held its first graduation ceremony; only two candidates who sat the examinations passed in full, Sun Yat-sen among them, and his top-ranking results earned him a prize presented by the then Governor of Hong Kong^※; he was awarded "honours" grades in several of his major subjects. The college was taught by, among others, James Cantlie, who formed a deep friendship with this student — in 1896, when Sun was abducted and detained at the Chinese Legation in London, it was Cantlie who campaigned tirelessly for his release (that belongs to Sun's personal biography and is not developed here). For full biographical sketches of the college's three founders (Patrick Manson, James Cantlie and Ho Kai), see ../06-people/faculty-and-leaders.md.

• According to speech materials compiled by the CUHK Research Centre for Translation, after graduating in June 1892 Sun went to Macau but, denied a medical licence by the Portuguese authorities, returned to Hong Kong in the spring of 1893^※; by this point, "his interest in politics had already exceeded his interest in medicine." That timeline dovetails neatly with his later self-narrative of "giving up medicine to save the nation."

# II. 20 February 1923: return to the Great Hall

Thirty years after leaving, the man who returned was no longer the medical student walking the colonial streets, but a fifty-six-year-old revolutionary leader who had only just founded a republic.

• According to the official HKU Dr Sun Yat-sen Historical Trail materials, on 20 February 1923 Sun Yat-sen returned to HKU and delivered a public address in the Great Hall (now Loke Yew Hall)^※;
• Per the HKU alumni newsletter, the lecture was arranged at the invitation of the HKU Students' Union; that day Sun, then fifty-six, wore a traditional Chinese long gown and mandarin jacket, and took the stage with the bearing of an elder scholar^※.
• According to the same official compilation, the Students' Union president declared in his welcome address that Sun's name was "almost synonymous with China," and that his life story, "if written down, would be one of the most fascinating legends ever told." That welcome set the tone of honour and reverence for the homecoming lecture.
• Per the official materials, Sun declared in his speech: "Hong Kong and The University of Hong Kong are my intellectual birthplace"^※. According to the text recorded in the alumni newsletter, his opening sentence in fuller form was — "I feel as though I have returned home, because Hong Kong and this University are the birthplace of my knowledge"^※.

According to official HKU Convocation speech materials: this address, titled "I Got My Ideas in Hong Kong," is recorded under the date of 20 February 1923^※; its thrust is to trace the origins of Sun's revolutionary and modern thought back to his experience of Hong Kong as a city. When Hong Kong newspapers reprinted the speech that day, they used a blunter headline: "Why I Became a Revolutionist." (The text survives in several different versions; see "Versions and transmission" at the end of this page. This site does not anchor itself to any single complete text.)

# III. What he actually said: from "order" to "governance"

The golden phrase "intellectual birthplace" is often quoted in isolation, but it was in fact the opening of a much longer argument. According to the speech reconstructed by the CUHK Research Centre for Translation from contemporary newspaper accounts, Sun built a clear chain of reasoning that step by step carried his personal observations towards the conclusion of "revolution."

It began with a contrast of streets. He asked himself: "Where did my revolutionary and modern ideas come from?" The answer was Hong Kong. According to the reconstructed text, he said that while studying in Hong Kong more than thirty years earlier, he had spent much of his leisure walking the streets of the colony, which had made a deep impression on him because everything was "orderly and tranquil," and all kinds of construction proceeded "without interference"^※. Yet on his twice-yearly visits home to Heungshan (香山, Xiangshan), he "could immediately perceive a vast difference" — there he found disorder rather than order, unrest rather than tranquillity.

"I had to be my own policeman." According to the text, he said that back in the countryside he "had to be his own policeman," his first task being to check that his rifles were in good repair and his ammunition sufficient^※. Setting Heungshan and Hong Kong, barely fifty miles apart, side by side, he marvelled that "foreigners had been able in seventy or eighty years to turn this barren rock into what it was, while China, with thousands of years of civilisation, had not a single place to compare with Hong Kong."

The frustration of village governance. He recounted a personal episode: he had once tried to persuade the village elders to undertake modest improvements, such as paving streets and building a road to the neighbouring village; the elders agreed in principle but said there was no money. He then proposed that "we young men should contribute our labour," and during holidays he swept streets and repaired roads himself, drawing a group of young men to join him. But as soon as the work reached the boundary of the neighbouring village, a dispute arose and the project was abandoned. He later appealed to the local magistrate, who was sympathetic and promised to help on his next holiday; by the time the holiday came, the magistrate had been replaced — according to the text, the new official was "a man who had bought his position for fifty thousand dollars," having ousted his predecessor^※.

From village to nation, disappointment at every level. After repeated setbacks, he "returned to Hong Kong and, instead of studying streets, began to study governments." His conclusion: in Hong Kong, among officials "corruption was the exception, honesty the rule"; in China, the exact reverse held^※. He moved up the scale to the provincial capital Canton, where he found that "the higher the official, the greater the corruption"; then to Peking, where "the situation was a hundred times worse than in Canton." Working his way down again, he instead concluded that "village-level government was the cleanest government in China."

The inspiration of Britain, and "abandoning medicine to save the nation." According to the text, an elder had told him that good governance in Britain and Europe had not arisen naturally — those places had once been equally corrupt, their judiciaries equally venal; it was just that the British "loved liberty" and were determined "to tolerate this no longer, and to change it." Sun reflected: "Why can we not change it in China too?" His conclusion was that institutions came first — "the urgent task is to change the government first; only then does everything else become possible"^※. And so he delivered the pivotal turn of the whole address: "as soon as I graduated, I decided to give up my profession of healing the bodies of men, and to take up the heavy task of healing the nation"^※. The oft-summarised idea of "abandoning medicine for politics" has its own first-hand origin in this HKU speech.

# IV. Why this sentence became HKU's signature quotation

• It connects the University directly to one of the most significant figures in modern Chinese history — a revolutionary who overthrew the monarchy and founded a republic publicly attributing his "intellectual birthplace" to HKU and Hong Kong. For a university established only in 1911 and still young at the time, that is a historical endorsement of enormous weight.
• The venue, Loke Yew Hall (the Great Hall in the Main Building, named in 1956; see ../05-campus/buildings-landmarks.md), has since become HKU's most symbolically significant ceremonial space; and the sentence has become a core text repeatedly invoked in the University's external narrative, historical exhibitions and centenary celebrations (see history-2.md).
• It has also been written into HKU's self-conception. According to the alumni newsletter, HKU treats the 1923 visit as part of the "University's permanent memory," guarding the statement of mission "The University of Hong Kong for China"^※. That founding-era slogan echoes Sun's own self-description of "studying to heal the nation."
• The Dr Sun Yat-sen Historical Trail on campus and related memorials carry this tie forward. According to the Hong Kong Tourism Board, the Trail links sixteen locations across the city connected with Sun Yat-sen's life, the HKU Main Building being one of them^※.

# V. Commemoration: the Lily Pond statue and the Faculty of Medicine statue

HKU's commemoration of this connection goes beyond a single quotation — it is also embodied in two bronze statues on campus.

The walking statue by the Lily Pond (2003). According to the HKU alumni newsletter, the University set up a "Working Group on the Statue of Dr Sun Yat-sen," convened by Professor David Lung, and erected a statue beside the Lily Pond at the heart of the campus. The statue was cast by Professor Szeto Kwong-chiu (司徒兆光) of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, and took about three years to complete; it depicts Sun as he appeared on his 1923 visit, aged fifty-six — in a long gown and mandarin jacket, holding a walking stick, like an elder strolling through the campus^※. This was also HKU's first collaboration with the Central Academy of Fine Arts. In March 2003, representatives of HKU and of the two secondary schools Sun had attended (Diocesan Boys' School and Queen's College) planted trees together by the Lily Pond in commemoration^※. The sculptor Szeto Kwong-chiu himself was born in Hong Kong and grew up in the area around HKU — that a "master of Hong Kong origin" should fashion Sun's likeness is itself a fitting echo.

The Faculty of Medicine memorial statue (2010). According to an official HKU press release, on 20 December 2010 Dr Lily Sun Sui-fong (孫穗芳), granddaughter of Sun Yat-sen and chair of the Dr Sun Yat-sen Foundation for Peace and Education, donated a bronze statue of Sun to HKU, placed in the lobby of the Cheung Kung Hai Conference Centre in the Faculty of Medicine^※. HKU said the donation symbolised Sun's "return" to the University, coinciding with roughly the centenary of his enrolment at the College of Medicine for Chinese, and strengthening the bond between the "Father of the Nation" and this more-than-century-old institution^※. Two statues — one at the centre of the campus, one in the Faculty of Medicine — corresponding respectively to his "homecoming lecture" and his "years studying medicine."

# VI. Versions and transmission: how a speech delivered without a script was recorded

Sun "had not prepared a script" that day (by his own account in the speech), which has left posterity with a textual problem — every "full text" we read today is in fact compiled or reconstructed from contemporary records.

• The earliest records are the reports in Hong Kong's English-language newspapers of the day. The English text carried in the HKU alumni newsletter is noted as "Reprinted from The Hongkong Daily Press, 20th February 1923," under the headline "Why I Became a Revolutionist"^※. These reports preserve the interruptions of the occasion ("(Laughter)", "(Applause)"), which makes them read vividly.
• The scholarly reconstruction comes from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. According to CUHK publishing materials, the lecture was reconstructed by the CUHK Research Centre for Translation under the title "Address to the Students of Hong Kong University," first published in Renditions Nos. 29 & 30 (spring/autumn 1988)^※; it was later collected in the anthology The Best China under the title "I Got My Ideas in Hong Kong."
• The gist is stable; the details differ. The various records differ slightly in wording and in what is included or omitted (the newspaper version preserves more of the live interruptions; the reconstruction is more polished in style), but the core argument — street order, frustrated village governance, corruption rising with each level, abandoning medicine to save the nation — is highly consistent throughout. This page presents the gist by setting the official Historical Trail account alongside the two versions above, without anchoring itself to any single complete text.

# Unverified / to be checked

• Full text and variant versions of the speech: the text survives in the newspaper report version and the scholarly reconstruction, among others; this page presents the gist by setting the official Historical Trail, the alumni newsletter and the CUHK Research Centre for Translation materials side by side, without anchoring to any single complete text.
• Whether an honorary degree was conferred in 1923: the official sources used for this page do not explicitly record an honorary degree being conferred that day, so no such claim is made here; this awaits verification against official archival records.
• Exact details of the 1892 graduation (number of candidates, class ranking, name of the Governor who presented the prize): this page summarises from public historical records that Sun graduated in the first cohort with distinction and received a prize from the Governor; item-by-item details are subject to the Historical Trail and the Faculty of Medicine's own archival records.
• Official unveiling date of the Lily Pond statue: the alumni newsletter records the casting and erection process (circa 2003) but does not give the exact date of an unveiling ceremony; this awaits verification against HKU archives. The Faculty of Medicine statue is clearly dated 20 December 2010.
• Biographical details such as "arrived in Hong Kong at 17, stayed nine years": these belong to Sun's personal biography; this page records only the periods relevant to HKU (1887–1892), his secondary schools, and the 1923 speech. For fuller biography, see dedicated biographies.