Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine (Part 1): The 1887 Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese and Sun Yat-sen's Student Years

The medical lineage of the University of Hong Kong reaches back to a college founded a full 25 years before the University itself. In 1887, a group of Western-trained doctors practising in colonial Hong Kong, together with members of the Chinese elite, established the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese — not a faculty that was later "bolted on" after HKU's founding, but the reverse: an independent college existed first, and later became the new university's founding faculty. The College is also known to the world through one of its graduates: Sun Yat-sen, who completed his Western medical studies here, obtained his licence to practise, and then set out on the path of political revolution. This article traces the College's full arc, from its founding and operation to its incorporation into the University of Hong Kong.

This is the upper half of the main article on the Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, focused on the College's origins from 1887 to 1912 and on Sun Yat-sen's student years. The Faculty's current five-school structure, the MBBS curriculum and the 2005–2006 naming episode are covered in the second half at li-ka-shing-faculty-of-medicine-2.md. Teaching hospitals are covered in ./teaching-hospitals.md; the research strengths of each clinical department in ./departments-and-strengths.md. This module belongs to reference zone 00–12 (factual, verified history); neutral facts are recorded with real names, and every figure, date and personal name carries an in-place citation.

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# 1. How Was the College Founded? Who Really Drove It?

# 1.1 The Three Founders and Their Respective Roles

The College was officially founded in Hong Kong by the London Missionary Society on 1 October 1887^※, and in the same year the Alice Memorial Hospital^※ opened to provide students with a place for clinical training. Three core founders each played a distinct part:

The three men came from very different backgrounds but shared one goal: to establish in colonial Hong Kong an institutional system capable of training Chinese doctors in Western medicine.

Patrick Manson (1844–1922) was already a heavyweight in tropical medicine. Between 1877 and 1879 he demonstrated that mosquitoes could serve as vectors for the parasites of filariasis (elephantiasis) — one of the first confirmations of insect-borne transmission in medical history^※, earning him the later title of the "Father of Tropical Medicine"^※. He had practised in Hong Kong since 1883^※; after the College opened he served as its first Dean of Studies and taught medicine in person, before leaving Hong Kong for England in 1889^※, where he went on to found the London School of Tropical Medicine.

James Cantlie (1851–1926) was a Scottish surgeon who came to Hong Kong in the same year as Manson (1887) to help establish the College^※, teaching surgery and anatomy. He was Sun Yat-sen's direct teacher and a lifelong friend — when Sun was abducted by the Qing legation in London in 1896, it was Cantlie who lobbied the press and the British Foreign Office, eventually securing his release^※.

Ho Kai (1859–1914) was a rare figure in Hong Kong's elite class, at home in both Chinese and Western worlds — he obtained qualifications in both medicine and law in Britain before returning to practise law in Hong Kong. He donated the funds to build the Alice Memorial Hospital in memory of his late wife Alice Walkden^※, providing clinical training space for the College's students, and used his social influence to persuade the Chinese community of Hong Kong to accept Western medicine^※.

# 1.2 Why "for Chinese" in the College's Name?

The "for Chinese" in the English full name "Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese" states plainly who the College was for: medical students of Chinese ethnicity. This was unusual in late-19th-century Hong Kong. At the time, the Chinese community harboured considerable suspicion of Western medicine and uptake was low; many of the College's early graduates could initially neither register to practise nor enter the government medical service^※.

The College's founding therefore carried a strong sense of mission: its founders hoped that systematic, institutionalised Western medical education could break down cultural barriers, enabling Chinese doctors to serve their own communities with properly trained Western skills.

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# 2. Curriculum and Daily Life: What Did Five Years of Study Cover?

The College ran a five-year medical programme. The first class, taught personally by Cantlie, was anatomy, and the final examination required passing a comprehensive test across 12 subjects. Records for the period from 1887 to the 1912 merger show the College admitted approximately 128 students in total^※, which indicates how small the annual intake was.

The table below lists the main subject areas covered in the College's graduation examinations (using Sun Yat-sen's 1892 examination subjects as a reference):

English was the primary language of instruction, and clinical training took place at the Alice Memorial Hospital — which opened in the same year the College was founded (1887) and served as the core venue where students encountered real cases.

# 2.1 The Alice Memorial Hospital: Where Students First Met Real Patients Across a Hospital Bed

The College had no wards of its own; students' clinical training depended entirely on the Alice Memorial Hospital — a relationship of dependency worth spelling out. The hospital was located at 77–81 Hollywood Road, at the corner of Hung Fook Street, and began admitting patients on 17 February 1887^※ (the opening ceremony was held the day before). The building was a basement plus two storeys: patients entered through the basement entrance on the Hung Fook Street side, while doctors came in through the front door on Hollywood Road and went straight up to the first floor^※ — a circulation design of "patients in the basement, doctors on the first floor" that in its own way reflected the patient–doctor hierarchy of the colonial era. A marble monument in the hospital lobby bore the inscription "In memory of Alice — this hospital was built by her loving friends," commemorating Ho Kai's late wife Alice Walkden. Sun Yat-sen and his fellow students posed for a photograph here in 1898, one of the few surviving images linking him to his alma mater's clinical base. The hospital was subsequently operated by the London Missionary Society, and closed its Hollywood Road site on 31 December 1921, relocating to Bonham Road — one of the precursors of what is today's Alice Ho Miu Ling Nethersole Hospital system (see the evolution of HKU's teaching hospital cluster in teaching-hospitals.md).

The relationship between College and hospital also goes some way toward answering the question of "how did the College run without a campus of its own": most of the teachers were simultaneously private practitioners, government medical officers or military surgeons, and teaching at the College was unpaid, performed on a voluntary basis — they still had to earn their living from their main posts^※. This is also why the College could sustain itself for 25 years on extremely low running costs, yet could only ever maintain a single-digit annual intake.

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# 3. Sun Yat-sen's Student Years: How Was "Top of the Class" Achieved?

# 3.1 Admission: 3 October 1887

Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925) began classes at the College on 3 October 1887^※, in a cohort of about 12. His very first class was Cantlie's anatomy lecture.

According to historical records, during his time at the College Sun and three fellow students — Chan Siu-bak, Yu Lie and Yeung Hok-ling — were nicknamed the "Four Bandits" (四大寇)^※ by their peers for their constant discussions of political reform. His medical studies and the germination of his political thinking thus proceeded in parallel. He himself later recalled that his years of study in Hong Kong had a significant influence on awakening his revolutionary ideas. This history documents only his student record as given in official and standard accounts, without venturing into political narrative.

# 3.2 Academic Performance Across Five Years

Under the guidance of Cantlie and other professors, Sun demonstrated outstanding academic ability. Records show that in his first year (1888) he ranked third in his cohort, and rose to first from the second year onward^※.

# 3.3 23 July 1892: The First Graduation Ceremony

On 23 July 1892, the College held its first graduation ceremony^※, presided over by the Governor of Hong Kong, Sir William Robinson^※, who personally presented the certificates.

The graduation examination figures were as follows:

At the graduation ceremony, Governor Robinson presented Sun with a certificate of "with distinction" in medicine, surgery and midwifery^※, confirming he had achieved the standard for licensure in medicine, surgery, obstetrics and gynaecology, and paediatrics.

Official quotation (HKUMed 135 milestones page): "Two students from the initial intake, Dr Kong Ying-wa and Dr Sun Yat-sen, graduate from the College." — HKUMed 135, Our Milestones^※

# 3.4 The Dilemma After Graduation: Medical Licensure and Professional Dead Ends

Despite his outstanding results, as a Chinese national Sun could only practise in Hong Kong under the designation of "herbalist", unable to obtain formal medical registration on a par with European doctors^※. This institutional barrier pushed him to move his practice to Macau and Canton (Guangzhou).

This gap between qualification and licensure faced by the College's graduates was a structural problem of colonial Hong Kong's medical system in the late 19th century: many Chinese graduates could not attain professional standing within the government system commensurate with their education^※. The College's founders, including Ho Kai, later lobbied for reform; and although many graduates encountered institutional obstacles to licensure, they nonetheless built up "flourishing private medical practices" and founded institutions such as the Hong Kong Chinese Medical Association and the Tsan Yuk Hospital, becoming pioneers of Chinese medical services in Hong Kong. The companion article hong-kong-college-of-medicine-1887.md offers a fuller dissection of the nature of the College's diploma (the LMSH licence) and the practice trajectories of a later generation of alumni including Wang Chung-yik, Li Shu-fan and Kwan King-leung, so this is not repeated here.

# 3.5 Four Years After Graduation: The 1896 London Ordeal, an Unexpected Test of the Teacher–Student Bond

After leaving the College, Sun took up the path of revolution, and in 1896 found himself in grave danger in London — an episode directly connected to the College, because the man who came to his rescue was his old teacher Cantlie. On 11 October 1896, Sun was lured into the Qing legation at Portland Place in London and detained^※; the legation, invoking diplomatic immunity, refused outside intervention and planned to smuggle him back to China for punishment. Sun managed to pass notes out through the legation's English maidservant and servants, which eventually reached Cantlie; Cantlie then lobbied journalists, the police and the British Foreign Office, and on 21 October led The Globe to publish a report headlined "A Chinese Conspiracy in London". Under press pressure, the legation released Sun on 23 October^※, after a total of 12 days in captivity. Sun later wrote up the episode as a memoir, and Kidnapped in London was published in 1897 jointly by J. W. Arrowsmith of Bristol and Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent of London^※, making him instantly famous in British public opinion.

This episode is not itself part of the College's institutional history; this article simply records the later course of this teacher–student bond on the basis of reliable historical sources, without political commentary or extended narrative.

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# 4. 1887 to 1912: How Did the College Move Step by Step Toward HKU?

# 4.1 A Chronology of Key Milestones

# 4.2 1907: Why Drop "for Chinese" in the Renaming?

In 1907 the College was renamed the "Hong Kong College of Medicine"^※, dropping the qualifier "for Chinese" from the original name. The renaming came about five years before the College's incorporation into HKU and carried several layers of meaning: on one hand, the College's Western medical education had gradually gained broader acceptance in Hong Kong society, so the specific identity of being "for Chinese" no longer applied; on the other, the more generic name also prepared the institutional ground for incorporation into a university.

# 4.3 1912: From Independent College to Founding Faculty

From initial conception to formal opening, the University of Hong Kong took roughly a decade to materialise. When HKU formally opened on 11 March 1912, medicine, together with arts and engineering, became one of the three founding faculties^※ — a "founding faculty" status built on the 25 years of groundwork the College had laid since 1887.

HKU's official history page puts it this way: "The Faculty of Medicine evolved from the Hong Kong College of Medicine, founded in 1887."^※

This sentence makes plain an important institutional relationship: the HKU Faculty of Medicine was not created from scratch in 1912, but rather "elevated" and absorbed an existing institution that had already operated for 25 years and trained scores of Chinese Western-medicine practitioners — the College's teaching staff, students and clinical base (the Alice Memorial Hospital) all came along with it, forming the foundation of the new university's medical education. The Faculty's subsequent structural expansion, the MBBS curriculum in detail, and the 2005–2006 naming episode are covered in the second half at li-ka-shing-faculty-of-medicine-2.md.

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# 5. Where Does the College Stand in Hong Kong Medical History?

# 5.1 In the Asia-Pacific Context: Was the College "Early" or "Late"?

The description "one of the oldest Western medical institutions in the Asia-Pacific" is not empty praise; it becomes clearer when set against the starting points of comparable institutions:

The College thus occupies a middle position: later than the Tokyo University Faculty of Medicine, which was state-run and Westernised after the Meiji Restoration, but a full 30 years earlier than the later, more celebrated Peking Union Medical College. A retrospective article in the Hong Kong Medical Journal argues that the College's distinction lay not in being first or early, but in its independent institutional form, English as the medium of instruction, a steady supply of students and qualified teachers, and access to cadaveric dissection — whereas Western medical education in mainland China at the end of the 19th century was still largely master-apprentice in style and lacked a formal curriculum^※. In short, the College's real place in history is not "the earliest" but "the earliest to run a complete formal system of medical education end to end".

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# 6. Unverified / Open Questions

• Number of candidates in the first graduation examination: Chinese-language historical accounts give 17, which differs in scope from the official "128 registered students across all cohorts" (the former counts one cohort sitting the examination; the latter counts cumulative registrations from 1887 to 1912). This article presents both figures side by side rather than conflating them.
• Details of the College's early finances and teaching resources: public historical sources say little about the financial relationship between the Alice Memorial Hospital and the College; this article records only the hospital's clinical-training function, based on reliable sources.
• The exact year Cantlie stepped down as Principal: secondary accounts differ in minor details; this article records only the established facts that he arrived in 1887 and presided over the College's affairs for a long period, without pinning down a single departure year.
• Whether the College had a formal Senate: some material circulating online claims the College had a Senate, with the Colonial Secretary Frederick Stewart as Rector, the Rev. Chalmers as chairman, and Cantlie as secretary; as no directly accessible primary or authoritative academic source could be verified, this article does not incorporate the claim into the main text, noting it here only for future verification.
• Biographical details of Kong Ying-wa: apart from the fact that he graduated in the same cohort as Sun Yat-sen, publicly available Chinese and English sources record very little of his subsequent career; this article does not elaborate, to avoid building a case on a single source.

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# 7. Cross-references

• The Faculty's current five-school structure, MBBS curriculum, and the 2005–2006 naming episode: li-ka-shing-faculty-of-medicine-2.md (second half)
• Institutional anatomy of the College (the LMSH licence, admissions scale, alumni portraits of Wang Chung-yik / Li Shu-fan / Kwan King-leung and others): hong-kong-college-of-medicine-1887.md (companion article)
• Teaching hospitals (Queen Mary Hospital, the Alice Ho Miu Ling Nethersole Hospital system, and others): ./teaching-hospitals.md
• Research and clinical strengths of each clinical department: ./departments-and-strengths.md
• The Faculty of Dentistry: ./faculty-of-dentistry.md
• History of the School of Nursing: ./school-of-nursing-history.md

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