Three Women Who Walked Into a Men's University in 1921 — HKU's First Female Students and the Daughters of the Hotung Family

This is one of the biographical chapters of the "University of Hong Kong (HKU) Database", covering the first cohort of female students admitted in 1921. The main text is a straightforward account based on verifiable public records; where the reliability is high but some details still rest on secondary sources, uncertainties are flagged nearby. For the founding fathers and institutional leadership, see faculty-and-leaders.md; for notable alumni, see notable-alumni.md.

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# Why did HKU wait until 1921 to admit women?

The University of Hong Kong formally opened on 11 March 1912^※ as an exclusively male institution. Official histories record that women were first admitted about a decade after its founding^※ — namely in 1921. That nine-to-ten-year gap was not written into the University's statutes; it was a matter of convention and unexamined assumption. HKU never actively reviewed whether its admission regulations contained any legal basis for turning women away, and it was precisely this loophole that Rachel Irving's father exploited. Even back in Britain, Oxford and Cambridge did not formally award degrees to women until the 1920s (Cambridge did not fully open its degrees to women until 1948). Hong Kong was far from the front lines of the suffrage movement, and the University's all-male status was treated almost as a given.

It is worth noting that Hong Kong before 1921 was not short of educated women — what it lacked was a route from secondary school to a university education. From the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, the churches had founded a growing number of girls' schools in the colony: Diocesan Girls' School, St. Stephen's Girls' College (founded 1906)^※ and others provided an English-language secondary education to the daughters of Chinese and Eurasian elite families. The top students of these schools completed their secondary studies with no local university willing to take them; their options were to travel to Britain or America, or stop there. In other words, when HKU lifted the ban in 1921, it was less a case of creating something out of nothing than of adding the final link to a chain of girls' education that already existed but had been deliberately severed at the university gate. That the first women admitted almost all came from these church schools is no coincidence.

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# Rachel Irving's rejected application and the legal opinion that broke convention

According to secondary sources compiled by the "Hong Kong's First" blog and similar sites^※, Rachel Mary Irving applied to HKU around 1921 and was turned down — the reasons were not recorded, but the substance was gender exclusion. Her father, Edward Alexander Irving, was Hong Kong's first Director of Education, serving from 1909 to 1924^※, making him a senior figure in the colonial government. He did not accept the rejection. Instead, he sought legal advice and discovered that no charter or regulation of the University provided any legal basis for excluding women. Faced with that legal challenge, HKU had no room to insist and conceded.

What changed the gender landscape of higher education in Hong Kong was not a social movement but a father's stubbornness, a legal opinion, and a loophole the University had left in its own constitution. Edward Irving's official position gave him the social capital to take on the University, but the legal argument itself was the substantive point — the gates of HKU had never actually been closed in law.

(Note: the above sequence — rejection, legal opinion, concession — comes from secondary accounts; no official archive record of the process has come to light in publicly available sources, and the details may be simplified.)

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# The three trailblazers: who were the first women admitted in 1921?

All three were admitted in 1921 but to different faculties: Rachel Irving and Irene Cheng entered Arts, while Lai Po-cheun chose Medicine — an exceptionally rare choice for a woman at the time. Each holds her own "first": Irving was the first female student and first female graduate in HKU's history (1923); Irene Cheng (daughter of Hotung's second wife Clara) was the first locally born Chinese woman to graduate (1925); and Lai Po-cheun was the first female medical student, although she did not graduate before Eva Hotung.

A point of clarification: "the three" refers to the 1921 cohort; women were admitted in a trickle over the following years, and the total number of female students in the early period remained in single digits. Across the sources, four of HKU's first ten female students came from St. Stephen's Girls' College^※ — the church girls' schools were both the cradle of these pioneers and, soon enough, their organisers.

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# Where they came from: St. Stephen's Girls' College and Diocesan Girls' School

Trace the backgrounds of the first and early female students and a clear pattern emerges: nearly all of them came from Hong Kong's English-language church girls' schools. Irene Cheng graduated from Diocesan Girls' School^※; and of the first ten women admitted, four came from St. Stephen's Girls' College^※. This is no coincidence: in an era when Hong Kong had no women's university, only these schools could bring the English and academic standards of Chinese and Eurasian girls up to a level that made university admission a realistic prospect.

Once HKU opened its doors, St. Stephen's quickly refashioned itself as the feeder school to match. A year after HKU began admitting women, headmistress Middleton-Smith added a matriculation class, making St. Stephen's the main channel through which female students reached the University^※. For a secondary school to set up a matriculation class specifically to send girls on to university was a strikingly bold step in the Hong Kong of the 1920s — it meant that the end point of girls' secondary education had, for the first time, shifted from "polish before marriage" to "enter university, earn a degree, enter a profession".

The pipeline produced results quickly, and along a surprisingly diverse set of paths. By 1924 the college had sent five students to HKU — three to medicine, one to education and one to engineering^※; in 1929 it built its own science laboratory and established a hostel for university women, cementing its status as HKU's premier supplier of female students^※. The distribution of subjects is telling: not a uniform run of arts students, but medicine, education and engineering alike — women's higher education, from its very first cohort, refused to confine itself to "suitable" disciplines.

Behind this lay a particular philosophy. Scholars have noted that in the 1920s and 30s St. Stephen's Girls' College deliberately styled itself as a place for producing "the useful New Woman": science curricula for academic preparation on the one hand, and charity work — free schools for street children, wartime relief — to shape women's social role on the other^※. Tying "going to university" to "being useful to society" was precisely the pitch that persuaded affluent Chinese families to let their daughters pursue degrees — and HKU's opening in 1921 coincided neatly with the Republican era's "New Woman" discourse and the expansion of education.

The other equally vital feeder line ran through Diocesan Girls' School. Hotung's two daughters — Irene and her elder sister Eva, both students there^※ — walked from its gates into HKU, one into Arts and one into Medicine. The two church girls' schools, one on Bonham Road and one in Ho Man Tin, each supplied the University with its own first generation of women graduates; they were allies, but also quietly competed over who could send more students on to university. For affluent Chinese families of the time, enrolling a daughter in one of these two English-language schools was often the first step towards giving her the chance of a university education.

In other words, what prised open HKU's gates in 1921 was the Irving family's legal opinion, but what kept women streaming through them afterwards was the groundwork laid in advance by these church girls' schools. Remove any one link, and the "three trailblazers" would never have become a whole generation of HKU women.

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# Rachel Irving: 1923, Hong Kong's first female university graduate

According to secondary sources^※, Rachel Mary Irving read Arts and earned her BA in 1923^※, becoming the first woman in Hong Kong's history to graduate from a university. Existing public Chinese-language sources say little about her subsequent career; the details await further archival research. Her historical significance lies first in that rejected application and her father's legal pressure, and only secondarily in her being the first name with a "Miss" prefix on the 1923 graduation list.

Some sources date the first women's admission to 1920 (by academic year) or 1921 (by calendar year). This article uses 1921, consistent with the wording of Irene Cheng's Wikipedia entry, the academic article in the Hong Kong Medical Journal, and HKU's official history pages.

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# Irene Cheng: 1925, the first locally born Chinese woman to graduate

Irene Cheng (1904–2007)^※ was the daughter of Sir Robert Hotung^※, the Hong Kong tycoon and philanthropist, and his second wife Clara Cheung. She entered HKU's Faculty of Arts in 1921, majoring in English^※ at the age of sixteen or seventeen. In 1925 she graduated with a BA in English, the first woman born in Hong Kong to earn a university degree^※ — a distinction distinct from Rachel Irving's: the former emphasises "locally born" and "Chinese", while the latter is earlier in time.

Her academic career was long. She took a master's in education at Columbia University's Teachers College in 1929^※ and a doctorate at the University of London's Institute of Education in 1936^※. Her professional life spanned mainland China and Hong Kong: in the early 1930s she taught at Lingnan University in Canton (Guangzhou), and after 1936 worked in the Ministry of Education of the Nationalist government in Nanjing^※; in 1948 she joined the Hong Kong Education Department, eventually rising to the most senior female officer in the department^※. On her retirement in 1961 she was awarded the OBE^※. Retirement did not stop her — she went on to serve as principal of the Confucian Tai Shing School in Wong Tai Sin; in 1967 she moved to the San Diego area of the United States, where she founded the Chinese school there in 1970^※. She died in 2007 at the age of 102^※.

The "Cheng" in her name came from marriage: in 1940 she married the engineer Cheng Hsiang-hsien; the couple had one daughter, but her husband died two years later^※. Thereafter she went by "Irene Cheng (née Hotung)", with education running through almost her entire life.

Remarkably, Irene Cheng left a first-hand record in her later years, so that the story of the "first female graduate" is more than a one-line title. She wrote a biography of her mother, Clara Ho Tung: A Hong Kong Lady (1976)^※, and a personal memoir, Intercultural Reminiscences (1997)^※, looking back on growing up and studying in colonial Hong Kong from the multiple vantage points of a woman, a Chinese person and a member of a cross-cultural family. For anyone researching the early women of HKU, these two books are rare primary sources — they take the door prised open in 1921 and restore it from institutional record to the lived reality of one particular woman.

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# Eva Hotung: 1927, the first female graduate of the Faculty of Medicine

Eva Hotung was Hotung's daughter and Irene's elder sister, entering HKU's Faculty of Medicine in the spring term of 1922^※ — a year after the first three. Although she entered the medical faculty a year later than Lai Po-cheun, Eva completed her medical degree first, graduating in 1927 as the first woman in the faculty's history^※. The HKUMed page on its official milestones records it plainly: "Eva Hotung becomes the first woman to graduate with a medical degree from HKU."

Getting into medical school had itself been a long wait. Like her sister, Eva came from Diocesan Girls' School; she had passed the Senior Local Examination — the equivalent of a university entrance exam — as early as 1918, but with HKU closed to women she had to wait four years before the chance to study medicine came in 1922^※. That timeline neatly confirms the point made earlier: the obstacle lay not in women's abilities but in the opening and closing of institutional doors.

Once inside the faculty, her record was formidable. Eva won both the Ng Li Hing and Chan Kai Ming scholarships in anatomy and physiology in her third-year examinations, and in the final MBBS examinations of December 1926 was the only candidate to pass all papers at the first sitting^※. After graduating she went on to specialise in Europe, earning diplomas in tropical medicine and hygiene in London and in obstetrics and gynaecology in Dublin, and becoming the first Chinese person admitted as a Member of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (MRCP, Ireland)^※. Her significance thus goes beyond being "the first Hotung daughter to storm the medical faculty": she is the proof that, in the 1920s, a Hong Kong woman could hold her own in a male-dominated profession on purely academic merit.

Eva and her sister Irene both walked out of the Hotung household as pioneers, but each claimed a different "first": one in medicine, one in arts; one the first female graduate of the Medical Faculty (1927), the other the first locally born Chinese woman to graduate from the Faculty of Arts (1925). Between them, two daughters of one family laid claim to the first "female firsts" in both Arts and Medicine at HKU.

(Note: the Hong Kong Medical Journal describes Eva as Irene's elder sister, both daughters of Clara Cheung Lin-kok; the public record on Eva's exact year of birth remains inconsistent, and this article records only verifiable facts of education and graduation.)

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# Lai Po-cheun: first into the medical faculty, but not the first female doctor out

Lai Po-cheun was the only one of the three women admitted in 1921 to choose Medicine^※, making her the "first female medical student" in the faculty's history. But the medical curriculum normally took five or six years, and for various reasons she graduated later than Eva Hotung, who enrolled in 1922 and claimed the "first female graduate of the Faculty of Medicine" title in 1927. No exact year of graduation for Lai Po-cheun has been established in publicly available Chinese-language records.

After qualifying, Lai Po-cheun entered the Hong Kong government medical service^※; in 1939 she was appointed health officer, secretary of the Midwives Board and supervisor of midwives, and concurrently served as a school inspector^※. By 1941 her title was "Chinese Lady Assistant Medical Officer (Schools)"^※, indicating a long career in public health and school medical services. Of the three pioneers, she left the clearest career record in public-health administration.

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# Who exactly was "first"? Five easily confused titles

Popular accounts frequently muddle the various "firsts" surrounding early women at HKU — "first female student", "first female graduate", "first Chinese woman graduate" were not the same person. They belong to different people, different years and different faculties, and are worth disentangling one by one:

Read this table and several common confusions resolve at once: Lai Po-cheun's "first female medical student" refers to being the first to enter the faculty, not the first to graduate — the first to graduate was Eva, admitted a year later; Irene Cheng's "first" is boxed in by the qualifiers "Chinese" and "locally born", and does not predate Rachel Irving. In other words, each of these titles stands on its own by virtue of its qualifiers, not in contradiction with the others. When citing them in institutional history, keeping the qualifiers attached is what keeps the record straight.

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# In a wider frame: HKU in 1921 and Peking University in 1920

HKU's opening to women was no isolated case; set against the coordinates of higher education in mainland China at the time, its position becomes clearer. Just a year before HKU admitted its three women, in February 1920 Peking University under President Cai Yuanpei admitted three women — Wang Lan, Xi Zhen and Zha Xiaoyuan — as auditing students in the Faculty of Arts, the first instance of coeducation in a Chinese national university; in the autumn of that year, nine women were formally admitted^※. Peking and Hong Kong thus crossed the same threshold almost in lockstep — one in 1920 in the northern cradle of the New Culture Movement, the other in 1921 in a southern British colony.

The two paths, however, differed completely in origin. Peking University was a proactive reform championed by President Cai Yuanpei, inspired by coeducation in Europe and carrying the idealism of the "New Culture" movement; HKU was a reluctant concession forced out of it by a father's legal opinion, with far less idealism in the mix. Placed in the wider context, HKU's opening in 1921 coincided with the Republican era's "New Woman" discourse and the general expansion of education^※ — women's higher education in north and south emerged from nothing at almost the same moment. For Hong Kong, the added significance was this: Chinese and Eurasian women no longer had to travel north or abroad to earn a university degree — they could do it at home.

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# The Hotung family and HKU: two generations of "firsts" in one household

Sir Robert Hotung (1862–1956) was one of the most influential Eurasian businessmen in Hong Kong in the early twentieth century and a major supporter of the University — he appears, indeed, among the University's honorary graduates^※. The family's relationship with HKU was thus both "donor" and "graduate parent". That both daughters came from Diocesan Girls' School shows a consistent family commitment to girls' education. Eva and Irene's mother was Hotung's "parallel wife" Clara Cheung Lin-kok (1875–1938), whom Hotung married in 1895 and who bore him three sons and seven daughters^※. Clara herself was a devout Buddhist and philanthropic patron of girls' education. In such a household, the daughters' path to university was not a whim of the father but rested on a mother's lifetime commitment to educating women. That Hotung's two daughters became the first women in their respective fields at HKU was no accident — deliberately grooming daughters for higher education was itself, within the upper reaches of 1920s Hong Kong society, an unusually progressive family choice. After the war, Sir Robert donated HK$1 million to the University in memory of his late wife, leading to the founding of Lady Ho Tung Hall in 1951^※ — an important women's hostel in HKU's history, though not the first (see below). The family's connection with women's education at the University thus continued for decades.

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# Living at university: St. Stephen's Hall, HKU's first women's hostel

Once there were female students, a practical question followed: where would they live? The hostels of the 1920s had been built for men; a women's hostel appeared the very year after the first women arrived. In 1922 the Church Missionary Society established St. Stephen's Hall near Bonham Road as HKU's first women's hostel, operated by St. Stephen's Girls' College^※. That was nearly three decades before Lady Ho Tung Hall in 1951 — the first female students found their lodging still within the church girls' school that had sent them to the University.

In its early years St. Stephen's Hall was plagued by funding problems and lease disputes, and it was not until 1933 that the Mission acquired permanent premises at 13 and 15 Babington Path^※. With the expansion of higher education after the war, in 1955 St. Stephen's Hall merged with the men's St. John's Hall to become HKU's first co-residential hall, St. John's College^※. From a hastily arranged hostel for a handful of women to a modern co-residential hall, the arc of St. Stephen's Hall is itself a miniature of women's passage at HKU from "special case" to "the norm".

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# After 1921: the trajectory of women's expansion at HKU

From three women in 1921 to one in five undergraduates by 1941, the growth over two decades reflected a broader expansion of educational opportunity for women in Hong Kong. Another half-century on, the picture had been completely inverted: women made up more than half of the MBBS graduating class of 2019^※ — from Eva Hotung's solitary success to women in the majority took under a century; and by the 2020s women were long-term in the majority of HKU's overall student body, with breakdowns available in the public statistics of the University's Planning Office^※.

At the apex of this ascending curve stand figures such as Rosie Young: appointed Dean of the Faculty of Medicine in 1983, the first woman in the post, and promoted to Deputy Vice-Chancellor in 1985^※, having trained more than six thousand medical students over her career. An endocrinologist by specialty, she also served long stints as chair of the Medical Council of Hong Kong and the Education Commission, and was later awarded the Grand Bauhinia Medal — the emblematic figure of women at HKU moving from "being let in" to "taking charge". From Lai Po-cheun and Eva Hotung to Rosie Young, women at HKU took sixty years to travel from "first into the medical faculty" to "running the medical faculty". For Young's academic biography, see faculty-and-leaders.md.

And the starting point of it all — a rejected application, a legal opinion a father went and got, a few church girls' schools that had laid the tracks in advance — is a reminder that institutional doors are usually prised open by a specific person applying specific force, and then held open by an entire apparatus of groundwork.

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# Unverified / pending

• The detail that "the father sought a legal opinion": currently found only in secondary accounts; no first-hand record of the full process has been located in HKU's official archives.
• Lai Po-cheun's exact year of graduation: unconfirmed in any public source; the claim that "she graduated later than Eva Hotung (1927)" likewise rests on secondary narrative.
• Eva Hotung's year of birth: public sources differ; on her mother, the Hong Kong Medical Journal states that Eva and Irene were sisters, both daughters of Clara Cheung Lin-kok, and this article follows that, while the family's concubinage structure remains complex and no further inference is offered.
• Rachel Irving's career after graduation: no adequate public Chinese-language sources exist.

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