HKU School of Chinese Medicine — Integrating Chinese and Western Medicine Since 1998

The University of Hong Kong (HKU) integrated information database · Module 01: Academics This article traces the history and positioning of the HKU School of Chinese Medicine (HKUSCM). In a medical landscape where HKU "started with Western medicine," this is the school dedicated to teaching and research in Chinese medicine. For an overview of all faculties and departments, see faculties.md; for the institutional profile of the School of Public Health and the School of Chinese Medicine, see ../11-medical-hospital/school-of-public-health-and-chinese-medicine.md; for the Western-medicine lineage of HKU, see ../11-medical-hospital/li-ka-shing-faculty-of-medicine.md. The museum's Zones 00–12 are recorded faithfully as named.

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# 1. Why would a university "built on Western medicine" run a Chinese medicine school?

The HKU Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine traces its lineage to the 1887 Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese, making HKU the birthplace of Western medical education in Hong Kong (see ../11-medical-hospital/li-ka-shing-faculty-of-medicine.md). The very decision to establish a school of Chinese medicine within such a university is itself worth recording.

• According to the HKU School of Chinese Medicine's official introduction^※, the School was established in early 1998, initially offering part-time certificate, diploma and undergraduate programmes, with the aim of promoting interdisciplinary research in Chinese medicine.
• The timing (1998) came just after Hong Kong's handover, when local tertiary institutions were bringing Chinese medicine into the formal higher-education system one after another — the Chinese medicine schools at HKU, Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) and Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) all started at roughly the same time, jointly pioneering Chinese medicine higher education in Hong Kong (as compiled by Wikipedia^※).

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# 2. Restructuring and teaching focus (from 2002)

• According to the School's official introduction^※, the School was restructured in 2002 and given its own purpose-built teaching building, moving from part-time origins towards systematic full-time degree education;
• According to the official introduction^※, its distinctive teaching feature is an emphasis on clinical placement in Chinese medicine, integrated with training in the latest biomedical sciences;
• According to the official introduction^※ and the undergraduate programme page^※, the School offers undergraduate, taught postgraduate and research postgraduate programmes, aiming to produce professionals equipped in Chinese medicine, modern life sciences and medical practice — in short, "integrative Chinese–Western medicine" graduates.

Background: "Integrative Chinese-Western Medicine" is what sets HKU's School of Chinese Medicine apart from purely traditional Chinese medicine teaching — it does not set Chinese and Western medicine in opposition, but requires students to master both knowledge systems. This is spiritually in keeping with the University's self-image as expressed in its crest, with the dragon and lion standing side by side, East meeting West (see ../00-overview/symbols.md).

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# 3. Six years in one go: how the Bachelor of Chinese Medicine is structured

The School's flagship undergraduate programme is the Bachelor of Chinese Medicine (BChinMed, JUPAS code JS6482). According to the HKUMed undergraduate admissions page^※, this is a six-year programme whose modules span Chinese medicine fundamentals, Chinese medicine classics, clinical subjects, biomedical sciences, disciplinary electives, field study, clinical attachments and University Core and language enhancement — in a single phrase, it compresses "reading the classics" and "learning evidence-based practice" onto one timetable.

Clinical training follows a three-stage progression, translating the "integration" positioning into concrete placements:

The 40-week immersion in Chinese medicine hospitals in Shanghai and elsewhere during the sixth year is the most striking feature of the programme. It means that the clinical coming-of-age of HKU Chinese medicine students is completed not in Hong Kong but in the mature Chinese medicine clinical system of mainland China — a reflection both of the practical constraints on local Chinese medicine teaching resources (Hong Kong has long lacked public inpatient Chinese medicine facilities) and of how HKU's Chinese medicine education is tied into the mainland higher-education network. The Year 4 clerkship at the HKU–Shenzhen Hospital (see ../11-medical-hospital/teaching-hospitals.md), meanwhile, exposes students earlier to a modern general hospital offering both Chinese and Western medicine.

A second tension in the curriculum lies in the juxtaposition of "classics" and "evidence." On one side are the Chinese medicine classics courses — close study of texts such as the Huangdi Neijing (Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon) and the Shanghan Lun (Treatise on Cold Damage), bringing students back to the foundations of the Chinese medicine knowledge system. On the other are the biomedical sciences courses — anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, the same Western-medicine foundations any medical student must master. According to the HKUMed admissions page^※, the curriculum also includes field study, taking students into the wild to identify medicinal herbs and follow the chain from plant to prescription, grounding the "properties" of the pharmacopoeia in actual flora. This four-track arrangement — "read the classics, know the herbs, learn evidence-based practice, do clinical work" — is how HKU writes "integration" into the curriculum: students must be able both to diagnose and treat in the language of Chinese medicine and to ask "why does this work?" with the tools of modern science.

On admissions, according to the School's official undergraduate programme page^※, the BChinMed is taught bilingually in Chinese and English, admitting local students chiefly through the Joint University Programmes Admissions System (JUPAS, JS6482) on the strength of the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE), alongside non-JUPAS applicants and students from mainland China and overseas. Exact annual intakes and score thresholds vary from year to year and are set out in each year's admissions announcements; this article makes no claim to fixed figures.

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# 4. From an HKU degree to registration as a Chinese medicine practitioner: the licensing exam hurdle

Holding a BChinMed degree does not automatically confer the right to practise Chinese medicine — a point often misunderstood. As the HKUMed admissions page explains^※, graduates are eligible to sit the Chinese Medicine Practitioners Licensing Examination in Hong Kong, and only by passing it can they register with the Chinese Medicine Council of Hong Kong as registered Chinese medicine practitioners. In other words, the School is responsible for training and degree conferral, while the registration and examination gate is held by the statutory body — a clear division of labour.

This arrangement is the individual-practice-level expression of the regulatory framework of the Chinese Medicine Ordinance, discussed in Section 5: anyone wishing to practise as a "registered Chinese medicine practitioner" in Hong Kong must first clear this hurdle at the Council, and a university degree is merely one prerequisite for sitting the exam.

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# 5. Position within Chinese medicine higher education in Hong Kong

• According to the compilation on Wikipedia^※, Chinese medicine higher education in Hong Kong was pioneered around 1998 by HKU, HKBU and CUHK, among others; the HKU School of Chinese Medicine is one of these pioneers.
• The regulation of Chinese medicine practice in Hong Kong (registration, examination) rests with the relevant statutory bodies; an HKU School of Chinese Medicine degree is one pathway into the local profession (for the precise articulation with practice, the regulations of the relevant statutory bodies prevail).

The School's founding year of 1998 falls precisely within the legislative process that institutionalised the regulation of Chinese medicine in Hong Kong. According to the legislative history compiled in the Chinese Wikipedia entry on the Chinese Medicine Council of Hong Kong^※, a Chinese medicine incident in 1985 prompted the Hong Kong government to set up a Chinese Medicine Working Group in 1989, followed by the Preparatory Committee on the Development of Chinese Medicine in Hong Kong in 1995; in July 1999 the Legislative Council passed the Chinese Medicine Ordinance (Cap. 549 of the Laws of Hong Kong), and in September that year the Chinese Medicine Council of Hong Kong and its Chinese Medicine Board and Chinese Materia Medica Board were formally established; in June 2000 the Legislative Council passed subsidiary legislation on the registration and disciplining of Chinese medicine practitioners; at the end of 2001 the names of the first 7,707 listed Chinese medicine practitioners were gazetted; and from March 2002 the provisions of the Ordinance on unlawful practice came into effect — after which anyone practising other than as a listed or registered practitioner is committing an offence. The HKU School of Chinese Medicine began in exactly this window in which the regulatory framework moved from preparation to implementation (founded 1998, restructured 2002), and its curriculum design and "integration" positioning were, to some extent, a response to the broader demands of Hong Kong society in that period for the professionalisation and standardisation of Chinese medicine.

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# 6. Eight teaching and research clinics: self-run clinics and a "HA + NGO" tripartite network

The HKU School of Chinese Medicine is not a purely classroom-based unit; it operates a clinical service system alongside its teaching, and students' early clinical attachments are completed here. According to the School's official "Clinical Services" introduction^※, the School runs a number of "Clinical Centres for Teaching and Research," of which two are operated directly by the School and six are set up in partnership with the Hospital Authority and non-governmental organisations, spread across locations including Central on Hong Kong Island, offering outpatient services in general practice and internal medicine, acupuncture, and orthopaedics and traumatology.

One strand — the "tripartite collaboration" — is a university + Hospital Authority + NGO co-venture model, embedding Chinese medicine teaching and research clinics within the existing networks of public hospitals and charitable bodies. As compiled from the School's official page on tripartite-collaboration clinics^※, the six clinics are distributed as follows:

This co-venture network — "the university supplies teachers and research, the Hospital Authority and NGOs supply premises and patients" — makes the clinics both a training ground for students and public-facing Chinese medicine outpatient services for the community. Together with equivalent clinics at HKBU and CUHK, they constitute a territory-wide network of "Chinese Medicine Clinics cum Training and Research Centres" covering all 18 districts — one per district, each run by one of the three local universities on a zonal basis, with HKU responsible for six. According to published Hospital Authority information^※, these clinics were, around 2026, renamed uniformly as "[District name] Chinese Medicine Clinic cum Training and Research Centre," dropping individual institutional names to reinforce their role as zonal public healthcare facilities.

The other two clinics, operated directly by the School and hence outside the tripartite arrangement, belong to HKU outright; of these, the clinical teaching centre that carries the core teaching function moved in 2023 into the HKUMed Academic Building in Pok Fu Lam (see next section). A patient at these clinics thus accumulates three overlapping roles: they are a patient seeking treatment, an observed subject for students' clinical training, and a source of evidence-based data for the research clinic.

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# 7. Next door to Queen Mary Hospital: the 2023 relocation of the clinical centre

According to a 2023 HKUMed press release^※, the School's clinical teaching centre moved into the HKUMed Academic Building on Sassoon Road in Pok Fu Lam, separated from the Faculty's teaching hospital — Queen Mary Hospital — by a single bridge, with an accessible footbridge allowing patients to travel directly between the two sites. The spatial arrangement carries a certain symbolism: a Chinese medicine outpatient clinic and a Western medicine teaching hospital standing side by side, physically connected by a bridge, showing that HKU's "integration" positioning is not merely a slogan in the curriculum but extends to the physical layout of clinical services — Chinese medicine practitioners and Western medicine teams have a convenient setting for referral and collaboration. For the evolution of HKU's Western medicine teaching hospitals, see ../11-medical-hospital/teaching-hospitals.md.

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# 8. The Chinese Medicine Hospital of Hong Kong (2025): a new placement platform for students of all three universities

A long-standing weakness in HKU Chinese medicine education has been the absence of public inpatient Chinese medicine facilities in Hong Kong — the very reason BChinMed students must travel to Shanghai to complete their final-year clerkship. That gap began to close at the end of 2025.

According to an announcement from the HKSAR Government Information Services in October 2025^※, the Chinese Medicine Hospital of Hong Kong at 1 Pak Shing Kok Road, Tseung Kwan O, began phased commissioning on 11 December 2025: built by the government, its operation was awarded through open selection to an operating body established by Hong Kong Baptist University, and it adopts an "Integrated Chinese-Western Medicine" (ICWM) service model; around 22 beds will be provided in the first year, reaching the full inpatient capacity of 400 beds by the end of 2030^※, and it will carry multiple functions in medical services, training and education, research and collaboration. According to the Wikipedia entry, construction began in 2021, with the government funding the project at roughly HK$8.62 billion^※.

Although operated by HKBU, this hospital — the first public Chinese medicine hospital in Hong Kong — is planned as a clinical placement platform for students of the three local Chinese medicine institutions (HKU, CUHK and HKBU)^※. For the HKU School of Chinese Medicine, it means that in future students may be able to receive inpatient-level clinical training in Chinese medicine in Hong Kong itself, gradually filling the gap that previously could only be met by mainland teaching hospitals — and the "40 weeks in Shanghai for the final-year clerkship" described in Section 3 may likewise shift in the medium to long term. For the three schools of Chinese medicine placed side by side, see ../11-medical-hospital/school-of-public-health-and-chinese-medicine.md.

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# 9. Research strengths: from evidence-based clinical studies to Chinese medicine in the laboratory

The HKU School of Chinese Medicine positions itself beyond teaching alone; one of its official missions is to promote interdisciplinary research in Chinese medicine. According to the HKUMed research postgraduate page for the School^※, the School's research focus can be grouped into several main strands:

• Cancer and metabolic disease research in Chinese medicine, clinical and experimental side by side — clinical trials and experimental studies of Chinese medicine in cancer and metabolic diseases, using modern molecular biology and immunology techniques^※;
• Standardisation and safety of Chinese medicine — focusing on the standardisation of Chinese medicinal materials, quality control, and pharmacological screening and safety evaluation^※, putting the evidence-based questions — "what exactly is in this medicine, what are the active components, is it safe" — squarely on the table;
• Omics and immune modulation — using omics and other multidisciplinary approaches to analyse the gene and protein expression profiles affected by Chinese medicine extracts or plant compounds^※, and exploring the immunomodulatory effects of Chinese medicine;
• Beyond these, research extends to stem-cell repair after stroke, AI-assisted pulse diagnosis, and the mechanisms of gastrointestinal tumours and kidney disease.

This research agenda shows that HKU's "integration" is not merely teaching two curricula side by side; it is about using the methodology of modern biomedicine to test, explain and improve the efficacy of Chinese medicine — this is what "evidence-based Chinese medicine" means in practice at HKU. The School also offers MPhil and PhD research degrees, with research postgraduate students supervised by the School's research degree supervisors, recruiting postgraduate researchers in Chinese medicine^※, forming a complete training chain from bachelor's to doctorate. For the University's overall research profile, see ../04-research/.

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# 10. Three universities side by side: HKU's coordinates on the Chinese medicine undergraduate map

The universities entitled to award Chinese medicine bachelor's degrees in Hong Kong have long been the three — HKU, Hong Kong Baptist University and Chinese University of Hong Kong^※ — all starting at roughly the same time around 1998, each with its own emphasis. For HKU, the distinguishing marks are three: a six-year curriculum, bilingual Chinese–English teaching, and a 40-week final-year clerkship on the mainland (chiefly Shanghai), together with the fact that the School of Chinese Medicine sits directly under the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, a faculty built on Western medicine — this organisational belonging, a "school of Chinese medicine within a Western-medicine faculty," is itself a structural feature that sets HKU apart from the others.

This article passes no judgment on "which university is stronger" — the three schools each have their own merits in historical depth, research directions and student calibre, and a comparative ranking is not the business of the facts zone. For the side-by-side institutional profiles and histories of the three schools of Chinese medicine, see the faculty-group article ../11-medical-hospital/school-of-public-health-and-chinese-medicine.md.

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# Not found / to be verified

• First-year intake numbers and programme list: the official introduction records its 1998 founding and 2002 restructuring; year-by-year intake figures and programme history require the School's annual reports.
• The specific building and commissioning date of the "purpose-built teaching building": the official record notes a dedicated teaching building in 2002; the specific building name and location are given on the School's official pages; the clinical teaching centre moved to the HKUMed Academic Building in 2023.
• Articulation between degree and Chinese medicine registration: this article gives only an overview; specific registration/examination requirements are governed by the regulations of the Chinese Medicine Council of Hong Kong and other statutory bodies, and the HKU degree itself does not equate to automatic registration as a Chinese medicine practitioner.

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# Related reading

• The four non-clinical schools of the Faculty of Medicine placed side by side (including the institutional profile of the School of Chinese Medicine): ../11-medical-hospital/school-of-public-health-and-chinese-medicine.md
• HKU's Western medicine lineage and teaching hospitals: ../11-medical-hospital/li-ka-shing-faculty-of-medicine.md · ../11-medical-hospital/teaching-hospitals.md
• Overview of all faculties and departments: faculties.md

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