Simon K. Y. Lee Hall: A Merchant Who "Held Fast to What Is Right" Makes His Foundation's First Gift

Simon K. Y. Lee Hall (nicknamed "SKY Hall" by its residents) opened on 24 November 1985^※, funded by the late businessman Dr Simon K. Y. Lee through the Simon K. Y. Lee Foundation he established — it was the Foundation's first project, and one of the earlier cases at HKU of a building named after a living businessman. This article belongs to the 00–12 reference zone (factual type): names are recorded as they are, and no credibility badge is attached.

# 1. Basic facts

# 2. How the hall got its name: a merchant who "held fast to what is right"

The naming of Simon K. Y. Lee Hall is a direct tribute by HKU to its donor, Dr Simon K. Y. Lee. According to HKU's official giving record^※, Lee was born and educated in Hong Kong; during the Japanese invasion of China, he moved with his family to mainland China at the age of 14 to escape the war, and the family returned to Hong Kong after 1945.

One point is worth clarifying: the business known as Sun Hing Hong was not built from scratch by Lee himself. The full text of his HKU honorary degree citation^※ records that Lee graduated from St Joseph's College in 1941 and had originally planned to study law. After the Second World War, it was his father, Mr Lee Chi Hung, who founded the shipping agency Sun Hing Hong — and it was his father who asked the young Lee to help run the business, which is why he never followed his original plan to pursue further study. After his father's death in the 1960s, Lee took over the family business and reorganised it as Sun Hing Shipping Company Ltd^※. Over the following forty years of his leadership, the company expanded from pure shipping agency into owning and operating its own warehousing and transport facilities at multiple ports in Hong Kong and mainland China. This trajectory — a son taking over the family business and rebuilding it — sits slightly at odds with the rags-to-riches shorthand of HKU's official giving page, but it is closer to the record of his actual career as documented in his citation.

Under his management, the family business gradually grew into the Sun Hing Group. The Group's official history describes it as nearly eighty years old, with a founding philosophy of "connecting goods, people and places", and operations spanning Asia and North America across property, financial investment, shipping investment, warehousing and logistics, and insurance^※. According to HKU's register of honorary graduates^※, Lee spent more than sixty years across shipping, banking, insurance, warehousing and transport. He served as a director of Wing Hang Bank and Pacific Basin Shipping among others, and as chairman of Pacific Canadian Investments Holdings Corp. in Vancouver — a business map that stretched from Hong Kong to North America.

Wing Hang Bank, where Lee sat as a director, was itself a long-established Chinese-family bank. Its predecessor, the Wing Hang money-changing shop, was founded in Guangzhou in 1937; after the war it re-established itself in Hong Kong in 1945 with a capital of HK$300,000 and a staff of 19^※, gradually developing into a licensed bank and listing on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong in July 1993^※. Lee's business career thus ran roughly in parallel with the whole arc of Hong Kong's Chinese-family banking sector, from money-changing shop to listed bank — a useful backdrop for understanding what "more than sixty years in the industry" actually meant (the bank was wholly acquired by Singapore's OCBC Bank in 2014, which is unrelated to the history of Lee Hall itself and noted here only as background).

Lee took "择善固执" — holding fast to what is right — as his personal creed in both life and business^※. The four characters double as a motto he often quoted in public and as a touchstone cited by HKU's official giving page for why he kept investing in educational philanthropy. Nor did this "holding fast to what is right" stop at donations; it also showed in the public service he sustained over many years. His citation records that he was a senior member and past international director of Lions Clubs International, helped found the Lions Eye Bank and served as its incumbent president; he was also a past chairman and incumbent president of the Hong Kong Society for the Deaf, founder and chairman of the Hong Kong Liver Foundation, and a founding director and current honorary treasurer of the Hong Kong Digestive Foundation^※. From an eye bank to a liver foundation, that public-service list spans medicine, disability support and social welfare — a direction that dovetailed neatly with his later, sustained giving to the HKU medical faculty.

# 3. 1985: the Foundation's first project is completed

The construction of Simon K. Y. Lee Hall was funded entirely from Lee's own donations, channelled through the foundation he had created. According to the Foundation's official website^※, the Hall was the first project the Foundation funded after its establishment, providing the University with a residential hall for 300 students. The building is thus more than a named-donation project; it marks the starting point of Lee's personal philanthropy. The Foundation's subsequent portfolio expanded to cover three broad areas — the elderly, children and youth: the elderly fund supports projects such as GrandMove and public education on dementia; the children's fund covers early-education programmes including FLY, 3Es and WISE; and there is Project MAGIC for university graduates^※. Among these, "Karen's Fund", set up in 2019 to support the career planning and development of young people, runs its flagship Project Careerpillar in partnership with City University of Hong Kong for university graduates aged 25 to 39^※. In a sense, Lee Hall, as the Foundation's very first project, is the origin point of this whole later philanthropic map.

The new hall was officially opened on 24 November 1985. The following year, in 1986, the Simon K. Y. Lee Hall Students' Association was established^※ and began organising the hall's activities and external exchanges independently. Around the same time, Lee himself joined the Court of the University of Hong Kong in 1986^※ — the founding of the hall and his appointment to the Court came back to back, and from then on his relationship with HKU was not a one-off donation but an ongoing institutional involvement.

The hall's location carries a certain "first by the water, first to the moon" advantage. Simon K. Y. Lee Hall sits on the HKU main campus, right beside the Composite Building, about a minute's walk from the core teaching area^※ — one of the closest residences to the main academic zone of any hall at HKU. The rooms are predominantly double rooms (about 13 m²) and four-person rooms (about 25 m²), standard fittings including bed, wardrobe, desk with reading lamp, bookshelf, chair, and Wi-Fi, with air-conditioning charged per use; common facilities include a multi-purpose hall, discussion rooms, a gymnasium, a music room and a rooftop terrace, with a shared pantry on each floor equipped with microwave, induction cooker, refrigerator and water dispenser, plus 24-hour security and daily cleaning of common spaces^※. The gym and music room, in a way, echo the hall's stated emphasis on a balanced programme of culture and sport.

It is also worth noting that the Lee family's giving to HKU did not stop there. The family also funded the construction of Lee Chi Hung Hall, named after Lee's father^※ — two generations of names successively entering the HKU hall system, a record of two-generation, relay-style giving. Lee Chi Hung Hall was founded in 1995 and is HKU's first and only co-educational non-residential hall^※. Unlike residential halls such as Lee Hall, which provide physical accommodation, Lee Chi Hung Hall has no residential places; it serves students who do not live in a residential hall but still want to take part in hall culture and activities, positioning itself as cultivating a sense of solidarity and belonging through cultural, sporting and social activities so that the university life of "non-residential" students is just as complete^※. Father and son, one real and one virtual, one "residential" and one "non-residential" — the two halls make up a rare family-donated pair in the HKU hall system.

# 4. Lee and HKU: from donor to honorary fellow for life

Lee's relationship with HKU deepened steadily in the decades that followed. He was a Founding Honorary Patron of the HKU Foundation and a long-serving member of the Court^※. The HKU Foundation itself was founded in 1995 as the University's core philanthropic platform for fundraising, and has since launched campaigns including Endowed Professorships, the First-in-the-Family Education Fund, and the Culture and Humanities Fund^※. Lee's 1985 hall donation predates the Foundation by a full ten years. In other words, he first gave directly as an individual to build a hall, and only later joined HKU's systematised fundraising architecture — which did not yet exist — as Founding Honorary Patron. That chronology in itself suggests his ties to HKU were earlier and more personal than the Foundation itself.

On the honours front, Lee was appointed a non-official Justice of the Peace in 1985, and was awarded an MBE by the British Crown in 1993^※. HKU's own recognition of him likewise came in two stages: in 1996, the University conferred on him an Honorary University Fellowship^※; ten years later, in 2006, HKU awarded him the degree of Doctor of Social Sciences, honoris causa, at its 173rd Congregation^※. From the 1985 hall donation to the 2006 honorary doctorate spans twenty-one years — a textbook case of HKU honouring the same donor in stages, step by step.

Lee's public engagement was not confined to HKU: he also gave long-term support to the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, Lions Clubs International, and a range of charitable and government bodies^※, engaging in public affairs with a mix of professional expertise and financial commitment.

# Beyond HKU: the Simon K. Y. Lee House in Vancouver

Lee's educational giving did not end on the HKU campus. In 2006, he pledged CAD$4 million to the University of British Columbia (UBC) for the construction of an international student residence and cultural centre on its Vancouver campus^※. The project, named the Simon K.Y. Lee HKU-UBC House, officially opened in October 2010. Located within UBC's Marine Drive residence complex, it offers 100 places reserved for exchange students between HKU and UBC — 100 HKU students and 100 UBC students, half and half — and houses the Simon K.Y. Lee Global Lounge and Resource Centre and the Simon K.Y. Lee Hong Kong Room as hubs for cross-cultural exchange^※. This project carried the "Simon K. Y. Lee" name from Pok Fu Lam to the west coast of North America. The Hong Kong hall serves traditional first-year undergraduates in a residential setting; the UBC house serves exchange students from two universities in an international setting — the same name, but two eras and two very different student ecologies. Lee's philanthropy in Vancouver went beyond university residences too. The Simon K.Y. Lee Seniors Care Home, operated by S.U.C.C.E.S.S., opened on 24 September 2001 in Vancouver's Chinatown: a three-storey care facility with five residential units and a 23-bed special-care ward, providing culturally appropriate professional care mainly for seniors who can no longer live independently at home. Of the construction cost, the Government of British Columbia contributed CAD$14.52 million^※. This care home, on the far side of the Pacific from Simon K. Y. Lee Hall, serves the elderly where the Hall serves undergraduates — yet both share the same philanthropic model: one donor, one major gift, and an institution named in gratitude.

# Beyond the hall: sustained giving to the HKU medical faculty

Lee's giving to HKU went beyond the 1985 hall donation. Through the Simon K. Y. Lee Foundation and in his capacity as Founding Honorary Patron of the HKU Foundation, he subsequently gave on a sustained basis to the HKU medical faculty, supporting the construction of the medical faculty building and endowing a professorship in gastroenterology^※. The Simon K Y Lee Professorship in Gastroenterology has been held by Professor Lam Shiu-kum (from 2005), Professor Wong Martin Chi-sang (from 2008) and Professor Lai Ching-ching (from 2011); the current incumbent is Professor Szeto Chi-hang, whose liver-disease research papers have long ranked in the top 1% of citations worldwide^※. From a building donation to the long-term endowment of an academic chair, Lee's support for HKU extended from one-off hardware to the ongoing cultivation of talent. He himself once said of this gift: 「医学是一门追求造福人类的学问，我很荣幸能支持这项事业，其成果将延续在我们每一个人身上」 ("Medicine is a discipline devoted to the benefit of humanity. I am honoured to support this cause, whose fruits will carry on in each and every one of us")^※. The University's giving office has quoted that line often since, as a gloss on his philanthropic philosophy. In wording, it echoes his "hold fast to what is right" motto: one speaks to a principle of conduct, the other to a motive for giving — together they form the pair of "standard quotations" the hall and the HKU giving office repeatedly invoke to sum up Lee. The Hong Kong Liver Foundation, which he founded and funded, was itself closely tied to the HKU medical faculty, working to save the lives of hepatitis B patients^※. The hall donation, the professorship and the liver foundation together trace a complete arc of giving to the HKU medical faculty.

# 5. Hall culture: SKYers and "Active and Sincere"

Residents of Simon K. Y. Lee Hall call one another "SKYers" — from the abbreviation SKY (the initials of Simon K. Y. Lee, which happen to spell the English word "sky"). It is one of the few HKU hall nicknames where the donor's initials coincidentally form a word of their own. The hall's official website sums up its values and identity with "We are SKYers, Active and Sincere"^※; "active" and "sincere" are the two key words of the resident spirit.

By its own account, after more than forty years the hall has grown into "a vibrant and diverse" community^※, with residents actively involved in hall affairs and community life. There is a floor-based residential structure and a range of officer posts covering culture, sport and more. Around 2025 the hall ran a "40th Anniversary Photo Album" project revisiting its historical archive — a sign of the hall's ongoing effort to document and commemorate its own past.

Hall activities run on two tracks, formal tradition and relaxed sociability. In the 2025–26 academic year, the hall held its first high table dinner on 3 November 2025, with former Warden Dr Max Hui-Bon-Hoa as guest; the second high table dinner later in the year featured Dr Jason Wong Chi-chung speaking on "Music as a companion through difficult times", alongside awards for academic achievement and service^※. The high table dinner continues the ritual form inherited from the HKU hall system: formal dress, staff and students at table together, and a guest speaker. The hall also runs lighter events, such as "Superpass Chill Night" before exams, with a Chinese calligraphy couplets stall, professional photo booth, games area and karaoke corner; an international food festival every February with eleven stalls of cuisines from around the world; a "Warehouse Workout" volunteer day in October with Feeding Hong Kong sorting donated food; a Tea Meditation session; and a Freshmen Welcoming Night at the start of the autumn term^※. From high table to international food festival, the programme spans formal ritual, food culture and community volunteering. On 22 November 2025, the hall held its "40th Anniversary Alumni Dinner" with a photo booth, hall song singing, a performance by the Lee Hall Band Team, and a retrospective of photos from past years^※ — the finale of the fortieth-anniversary series. The hall has also opened its doors to secondary-school students in recent years: the "HKU Immersive Experience: Interdisciplinary and Community Exploration" programme recruits batches of secondary students each summer to stay at the hall for several days, with interactive classes across medicine, dentistry, science, engineering and law, plus a private Victoria Harbour boat ride, a high table dinner experience, team sports, dance and drama performances, and interdisciplinary project work^※ — one of the few HKU halls that proactively opens up an immersive experience to secondary students.

# 6. Governance

Simon K. Y. Lee Hall is administered directly by HKU. Accommodation applications are handled centrally through CEDARS (the Centre of Development and Resources for Students); day-to-day activities are planned autonomously by the Hall Students' Association; the hall keeps in touch with the Simon K. Y. Lee Foundation, and scholarship programmes later established continue the donor's original intent of supporting students.

# 7. In the coordinates of the HKU hall system: one of thirteen, and a sample of "quick recognition for donors"

HKU currently has thirteen residential halls — Ho Tung Hall, Lee Hysan Hall, Lee Ming Chak Hall, Ricci Hall, Simon K. Y. Lee Hall, St John's College, Stardt's Hall, Swire Hall, University Hall, Wei Lun Hall, Morrison Hall, Lee Shau Kee Hall and Suen Chi Sun Hall^※ — plus three non-residential halls: Hornell Hall, Duchess of Kent Hall and Lee Chi Hung Memorial Hall. Among the thirteen residential halls, Lee Hall is one of the few built entirely from a one-off donation by a single living businessman (as distinct from the collectively funded, church-backed St John's College and Ricci Hall, and from Morrison Hall, which alumni rebuilt through years of piecemeal fundraising — see morrison-hall.md), and where the donor went on to receive successive honours within the HKU system after the hall was built.

The HKU hall system itself inherits the college tradition of Oxford and Cambridge, but from the outset it never had the academic teaching or independent admissions function of a college; it evolved instead into the "hall", devoted to extracurricular and social education^※, which the University officially calls "whole-person education". At most halls, residency is subject to annual re-admission, with renewal tied to participation in hall activities^※. This is the institutional backdrop against which hall rhetoric keeps emphasising the SKYer identity: hall membership is not yours for life after one move-in, but has to be earned through sustained participation in hall affairs.

On a timeline, the build-then-honour rhythm at Lee Hall is also fairly representative: the hall was donated in 1985, Lee was appointed to the Court of HKU the very next year in 1986, awarded an Honorary University Fellowship in 1996, and an honorary Doctor of Social Sciences in 2006 — four stages across twenty-one years, each building on the last. This path — first a substantial material contribution to gain institutional standing, then decades of continued involvement to gain the highest honours — is quite representative in HKU's record of recognising business donors, and stands in contrast to halls like Ricci Hall or St John's College, which were donated in whole by religious bodies and cannot be credited to any single individual.

As of 2026, Lee Hall has been in operation for over forty years. The hall's recent "40th Anniversary Photo Album" project^※ is, in a way, the hall-level narrative summing up of that full cycle of give, be honoured, keep participating. A hall fully donated by a single businessman has now run for four decades: it has neither been closed and reborn as Morrison Hall was, nor acquired independent legislative status as St John's College did. Instead it has simply kept going in the most unglamorous way — admitting new students year after year, organising activities, sustaining the SKYer identity. That very steadiness is another kind of normal worth recording in the HKU hall system. Not every hall's history needs a closure or a rebuilding to be interesting; four decades of uninterrupted operation in itself is the everyday foundation on which HKU's "whole-person education" keeps turning.