A Century of the HKU Faculty of Engineering — One of the Three Founding Faculties and Its Swire Professorship

The University of Hong Kong (HKU) comprehensive information database · Module 01 – Academics This article traces the century-long history of the HKU Faculty of Engineering — one of the three founding faculties and the one with the largest first cohort of students. For an overview of faculties and departments, see faculties.md; for an in-depth look at the Faculty's strengths in engineering disciplines, see deepdive-engineering.md; for a survey of the three founding faculties, see ../00-overview/history.md; for the history of the Faculty of Law, see law-faculty-history.md. Where sources disagree on figures, this article presents the competing accounts side by side rather than adjudicating between them.

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# 1. One of the Three Founding Faculties (1912)

• According to the Wikipedia entry for the HKU Faculty of Arts^※, the University opened in 1912 with three faculties: Arts, Engineering and Medicine;
• According to the Faculty of Engineering's official history page^※, the Faculty's origins trace back to the founding of the University in 1911 and the establishment of the first chair in engineering in 1912; in its first academic year (1912–13) it had 37 students, out of 54 undergraduates across the University^※.

Of the three founding faculties, two had no institutional predecessor. The three founding faculties did not start from equal positions. According to the official history of the HKU Faculty of Medicine^※, the medical faculty traces its origins to the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese, founded in 1887 by the London Missionary Society with the involvement of Ho Kai and Patrick Manson among others — the College was absorbed into HKU in 1911 and became the Faculty's predecessor, so medical education had more than two decades of accumulated experience behind it by the time the University opened (Sun Yat-sen was an early graduate of the College). Engineering and Arts, by contrast, had no such predecessor institution: both were built from scratch when the University began teaching in 1912. This also explains why the Faculty of Engineering leaned so heavily on external funding from the likes of Swire to support its early chairs and laboratory equipment (see below).

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# 2. The Swire Professorship: An Early Named Chair at HKU

Engineering education at HKU has been closely tied to the British trading house Swire.

• According to the official history page of the Department of Mechanical Engineering^※ and related research, the University established a Taikoo Professorship of Engineering in its early years, named for Swire's endowment;
• Per the Department of Mechanical Engineering's official page^※, Professor C.A. Middleton Smith, the first Dean of the Faculty of Engineering (a mechanical engineer by background), taught from 1912 and held the title of "Taikoo Professor" until his retirement in 1939;
• According to an official HKU press release marking the "century of partnership" with Swire^※, the relationship between the University and Swire has spanned more than a century — from the endowment of the engineering chair at the University's founding to contemporary scholarships and programmes.

The same official press release^※ provides a more precise timeline. The Swire–HKU connection began in 1911, when Swire made an initial donation of £40,000 — one of the important sources of the University's founding endowment. In 1919, the Taikoo Professorship of Engineering was formally established; the press release explicitly calls it "the first named professorship at the University". This clarifies the "1912 vs 1919" discrepancy previously flagged in this article's "unverified" section: the professor himself (Middleton Smith) taught from 1912, but the named chair as an institution — the Taikoo Professorship of Engineering — was formally created in 1919. In 2019, the centenary of the chair's establishment, the incumbent was Professor Norman Tien, the eighth "Taikoo Professor".

The partnership subsequently extended into housing and scholarships. In 1967, to mark the centenary of Swire's operations in the Far East, the company endowed ten "Swire Scholarships and Research Studentships" for postgraduate students at Robert Black College (see ../08-finances/tang-family-donor-dynasty.md). According to the official press release^※, the scheme has since produced more than 350 "Swire Scholars"; notable recipients range across academia, film, law and public administration — including chemist Professor Vivian Yam Wing-wah, film director Ann Hui On-wah, senior counsel and former Legislative Council member Ms Margaret Ng Ngoi-yee, and Dr Stephen Frederick, a former Director of Social Welfare — evidence that the scheme's reach goes well beyond undergraduate engineering. In 1980, Swire funded the construction of Swire Hall, which houses 300 undergraduates and has accommodated over 6,000 students to date. Other Swire–HKU collaborations include the Swire Professorship of Japanese, the Swire Institute of Marine Science, and the Swire Visitorship programme for officials of mainland China's Ministry of Commerce.

Background note: Swire's endowment of the engineering chair reflects both the founding pattern of HKU — "British capital plus local Chinese merchants jointly funding the University" (see ../00-overview/history.md) — and the practical needs of engineering education in a Hong Kong that was then an entrepôt and industrial base. This early corporate–university bond is one of the roots of HKU's culture of named donations (see ../08-finances/benefactors-and-donors.md) — from the founding donation of 1911, to the named chair of 1919, to the postgraduate scholarships of 1967 and the hall of 1980, Swire's century-long relationship with HKU is almost a complete template for the University's model of "institutionalised long-term partnership" with British business houses.

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# 3. The Departments Take Shape: Civil · Mechanical · Electrical

• According to the Department of Mechanical Engineering's official page^※, from 1913 onwards, civil, mechanical and electrical engineering were confirmed as distinct resource streams, with corresponding B.Sc.(Eng.) programmes offered;
• Per the same page^※, between 1913 and 1920 civil and mechanical engineering formed a single department (led by Professor Middleton Smith); from 1920, with the arrival of new professors, the mechanical department split from civil and operated alongside electrical engineering.

From a basement to dedicated workshops: cramped early teaching quarters, and their improvement. When the Faculty was founded, teaching was squeezed into the basement of the Main Building, under very trying conditions. According to the Department of Mechanical Engineering's official history page^※, as student numbers grew and the basement became inadequate, the Faculty built two dedicated laboratory buildings along Pokfulam Road: the Ho Tung Engineering Workshop, opened in 1925, and the Peel Engineering Laboratory, opened in 1934. Both focused on hands-on training in mechanical and electrical engineering, and were the first dedicated spaces commensurate with the Faculty's teaching scale. These two pre-war buildings were damaged during the Japanese occupation, repaired after the war (see below), and remained in use until the 1980s, when the Faculty moved to its present home at Haking Wong Building and William M.W. Mong Engineering Building; they were demolished in the 1990s.

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# A Governance Trajectory, Dean by Dean

According to the Faculty of Engineering's official list of deans^※, the deans from the Faculty's founding in 1912 to the present show a clear pattern: in the early period (1912–1950s) the post was held mostly by British-trained engineers (Middleton Smith, Redmond, Roffey and others), while after the war it passed progressively to local and Chinese scholars (such as Wang Yun, Cheung Yau-kai, Joseph Lee Hang-wai, Cheung Yau-sang, Christopher Chao Yu-hang and others). This localisation of governance broadly tracks the University-wide "decolonisation" trend; for the full list and terms of office, see deepdive-engineering.md. This pattern — "foreign scholars founding the faculty, local scholars succeeding them" — is not unique to Engineering: most of HKU's founding faculties (Medicine, Arts) show a similar localising trajectory. It reflects a common structural feature of Hong Kong higher education's overall "decolonisation" in the mid-to-late twentieth century, rather than the idiosyncratic experience of any single faculty.

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# 4. A Century of Professional Accreditation: From the IMechE in 1918 to the Civil Accreditation of 1955–56

Whether a degree actually qualifies its holder to practise often says more about an engineering faculty than the degree itself. According to a centenary chronicle assembled by the Hong Kong Institution of Engineers' (HKIE) journal The Hong Kong Engineer^※:

• On 13 December 1918, the Council of the UK's Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) resolved to recognise HKU's entrance examination and its mechanical engineering degree examinations, meaning graduates were exempted from the corresponding IMechE examinations. This was the first engineering degree in Hong Kong to receive professional recognition, a mere year before the Taikoo Professorship of Engineering was formally named (1919);
• Electrical engineering likewise received recognition from the UK's Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) at roughly the same time before the war, coinciding with the tenure of Professor M.H. Roffey (Professor of Electrical Engineering, 1921–1941, himself an IEE member);
• Civil engineering took nearly four decades longer — per the same HKIE chronicle^※, before the war no HKU staff member held professional qualifications from the UK's Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) or the Institution of Structural Engineers (IStructE). Only in 1955 did the civil engineering degree gain ICE recognition, followed by IStructE recognition in 1956 — the first time it achieved professional accreditation.

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# 5. A Profile of the First Dean: C.A. Middleton Smith

The first Dean of the Faculty deserves a section of his own. According to the official citation in the HKU honorary graduates list^※, his full name was Cades Alfred Middleton Smith. Before joining HKU he was an assistant professor at East London College in England (the forerunner of today's Queen Mary College, University of London) and an associate member of the IMechE. In May 1912 he was appointed Dean of the newly created Faculty of Engineering, making him one of the University's first two full-time teaching staff, arriving at the same time as A.G. Warren.

The year after his arrival, Middleton Smith and Warren co-wrote The New Steam Tables — together with their Derivation and Application (London: Constable & Co., 1913). According to the same official citation^※, this is very likely the first academic publication in HKU's history to bear the University's name — giving the Faculty of Engineering an early lead in the University's record of scholarly publishing. He remained a prolific writer thereafter, leaving behind several accounts of the University's early years that are important primary sources for the study of HKU's early history.

On 9 February 1939, Middleton Smith retired, by then the University's "most senior professor". HKU promptly conferred on him an honorary Doctor of Laws (LLD honoris causa), in recognition of his "long and valuable service". According to the official citation, he departed immediately after retiring for a holiday in "a more temperate climate" — a relatively quiet but fitting full stop to the Hong Kong career of a Taikoo Professor who had taught at the University for twenty-seven years.

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# 6. War and Closure: Destruction under the Japanese Occupation (1941–1945)

The Faculty's century has not been a smooth ascent; the Japanese occupation's three years and eight months were its deepest rupture. According to the Department of Mechanical Engineering's official history page^※:

• In December 1941, Japanese forces captured Hong Kong, and teaching at HKU and the Faculty of Engineering came to a complete halt;
• The Faculty's equipment and experimental records were confiscated by the Japanese — including instruments Middleton Smith himself had accumulated over the years; the Steam and Hydraulics Building and the Heat Engine Laboratory were destroyed outright in the fighting;
• The Great Hall of the Main Building was also ransacked, and after the war was reduced at one point to little more than its roof's skeleton — the teaching spaces on which the Faculty had built itself were nearly wiped out.

Post-war reconstruction was not a matter of "restoring things as they were". When HKU reopened in 1946, the Cox Committee, weighing resources and the availability of staff, recommended suspending the mechanical and electrical engineering programmes and concentrating limited resources behind the civil engineering-led effort of post-war reconstruction. This meant two of the Faculty's three departments effectively lay dormant for more than a decade. Only in 1958 did the Kadoorie Committee re-assess labour-market demand, conclude that employment prospects for mechanical and electrical engineering graduates now justified reopening, and the two departments formally reopened in 1960. This decade-plus hiatus is key to understanding why the electrical & electronic and mechanical engineering departments, though early in origin, are institutionally young: strictly speaking, their present institutional history dates from 1960, not 1913 (see the departmental origins table in deepdive-engineering.md).

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# 7. Post-War: Participation in Hong Kong's Reconstruction and Industrialisation

• According to the Faculty of Engineering's official history page^※, the Faculty remained relatively small for a long time after its founding, only becoming significantly larger during the University's overall expansion of the 1960s–70s;
• Per the same page^※, its civil engineering department was deeply involved in Hong Kong's post-war reconstruction, supplying trained professionals for Hong Kong's rise as a "dynamic industrial centre" in the 1960s–70s — echoing the point above that civil engineering was the only department never to close, and therefore the only one able to contribute immediately in the early post-war years;
• Per the page^※, large numbers of senior engineers and managers in Hong Kong's public utilities, government and industry came from the Faculty; it now has about 40,000 alumni, admitting roughly 500 undergraduates and over 1,000 postgraduate students a year. For the Faculty's present four-department structure, research scale and innovation infrastructure, see deepdive-engineering.md.

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# 8. A Century in a Timeline

Setting the key years from the seven sections above side by side makes plain the Faculty's overall rhythm — "early start, deep rupture, swift revival":

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# Unverified / To Be Checked

• First engineering cohort size (31 vs 37): the founding survey and the Faculty of Engineering's official page differ; this article presents both. The precise figure awaits the original matriculation registers in the HKU Special Collections.
• Exact year the Taikoo Professorship was established (1912 / 1919): per the official HKU–Swire "century of partnership" press release, the professor himself arrived in 1912, but the named chair — the Taikoo Professorship of Engineering — was formally established in 1919 (the University calls it the first named professorship in its history). This is the position this article has adopted following the latest research.
• Department-by-department history: this article summarises per the official pages; full histories of each department are in deepdive-engineering.md and the departments' own official pages.
• Full list of the second through seventh Taikoo Professors of Engineering: the official press release confirms only that Professor Norman Tien is the "eighth"; the names and terms of the others have not been published in any complete list we have found. The list overlaps only partially with the list of deans (the Taikoo Professor is not necessarily the Dean). Pending the Taikoo Professorship's official page or a university history monograph.
• Middleton Smith's full biography before and after HKU: the official honorary graduates citation records only the circumstances around his arrival and retirement; his year of birth and details of his life after returning to England are not given. British biographical or obituary sources would be needed.

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