Fung Ping Shan Building — From Chinese Library to University Museum, a Declared Monument (1932–)

The University of Hong Kong (HKU) Integrated Information Database · Module 12 · Miscellany This article examines the "library–museum" double life of HKU's Fung Ping Shan Building. For an overview of the University's libraries and museums, see libraries-and-museums.md; for campus buildings and the declared-monument cluster, see ../05-campus/buildings-landmarks.md; for the donor family behind the building's name, see ../08-finances/benefactors-and-donors.md; for the honorary-degree record of Mr. T.T. Tsui, who funded the Tsui Art Museum annex, see ../06-people/honorary-degrees-and-visitors.md. As in all reference sections (Modules 00–12) of this database, real names are recorded as they are.

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# 1. Origins: a library built for the "School of Chinese" (1932)

According to the HKU Libraries' official page^※ and the FPSL 90th-anniversary milestones page^※:

• The Fung Ping Shan Library was established in 1932 as the University's Chinese-language library, made possible by the generosity of the late Mr. Fung Ping Shan;
• Construction began in 1929, took three years to complete, and the building was officially opened by the then Governor on 14 December 1932^※;
• Its purpose was to support the newly established School of Chinese, with a focus on collecting China-related books, particularly in art, culture, history and literature.

According to the FPSL 90th-anniversary milestones page^※, in January 1933, some 31,000 Chinese-language volumes that had accumulated in the University's various libraries since 1912 were transferred into the Fung Ping Shan Library, including the "Zen Wing Collection" and the Tu Shu Chi Cheng (《图书集成》, a comprehensive imperial encyclopaedia) donated by Sir Cecil Clementi, a former Governor of Hong Kong.

According to HKU Giving's first-hand account of this donation^※, the whole story began with a letter: in 1929, Fung Ping Shan wrote to Sir William Hornell, then Vice-Chancellor of HKU, pledging HK$100,000 to build a dedicated Chinese-language library — a natural extension of the donations he had been making since he became a "permanent trustee" (永远值理) of the University in 1923. Work began on the building the same year, and three years later it stood as the Fung Ping Shan Building we see today.

# Who was Fung Ping Shan, the donor?

As compiled from the Chinese Wikipedia entry^※, Fung Ping Shan (1860–1931), born Fung Chiu-on, was a native of Xinhui in Guangdong. He began his career brokering commercial intelligence between Guangdong and Hong Kong through a self-devised telegraph code, and later ran his own merchant vessels plying freight between Chongqing and Hong Kong — a decade that proved highly profitable. Around 1918 he became a partner in several bank-note exchanges, among them the "East Asian Exchange," the direct forerunner of the Bank of East Asia; Fung was one of the founding shareholders of that important Hong Kong bank. He devoted his life to philanthropy, funding hospitals, schools, charitable cemeteries, parks and libraries across Canton (Guangzhou), Xinhui and Hong Kong. His connection to HKU, per the same source, began in 1923 when he became a permanent trustee and donated HK$50,000 to the University's endowment, plus HK$2,500 for book purchases; in 1927 he proposed that the University add a "Chinese language and literature" programme, and with his and other Hong Kong patrons' combined support the School of Chinese was formally established that year. He then pledged another HK$100,000 for a dedicated Chinese-language library — the University named it the "Fung Ping Shan Library" in his honour, and that ten-thousand-yuan (sic — HK$100,000) pledge was the direct source of funding for the building that is the subject of this article. Worth noting: Fung Ping Shan died of illness in 1931, just before he could see the library officially opened at the end of the following year — the building is thus, in a sense, a wish fulfilled posthumously.

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# 2. Architecture: Leigh & Orange's "Butterfly Plan"

• Per the UMAG official history page^※, the Fung Ping Shan Building was designed by Leigh & Orange — the same long-established firm behind the Main Building (see ../05-campus/buildings-landmarks.md) — and built by the "Han Yu Company"; the Antiquities and Monuments Office's declared-monument page^※ records the same architect.
• The same page also notes that the building bears witness to the early development of Chinese-language education and antiquities collecting at HKU, and that its form and materials are representative of the University's campus architecture of the 1930s.

On the architecture itself, per the UMAG website^※, the Fung Ping Shan Building is a three-storey red-brick structure in the Neo-Georgian style, laid out on a symmetrical "Butterfly Plan" (蝴蝶形), whose most iconic features are the octagonal glazed lantern at the centre of the roof and the building's curved southern façade. The Antiquities and Monuments Office's declared-monument description^※ and the 2018 government press release^※ add further detail: the front elevation follows a fan-shaped plan, curving gently inward at the middle; the exterior is primarily red brick trimmed with carved granite ornaments; the roof carries a striking glazed dome; and the façades feature giant pilasters, window cornices, pediments, cornices and balustrades among their classical decorative vocabulary. Inside, the atrium houses an upper-level gallery supported on octagonal columns, lit from above by the roof lantern — corroborating the UMAG website's "octagonal lantern + butterfly plan" description. The two official accounts describe the same plan in slightly different words (UMAG says "butterfly," AMO/press release say "fan"), and this article presents both: the two terms refer to the same symmetrical layout of a curving centre with wings spreading on either side.

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# 3. Wartime requisition: the Japanese occupation (1941–1945)

Per the UMAG official history page^※, after Hong Kong fell at the end of 1941, the Fung Ping Shan Building was briefly requisitioned as dormitory quarters during the Japanese occupation (1941–1945), and its collections were taken over by the Japanese authorities. The official record notes in particular that the occupation authorities "expanded the library's holdings by merging in other confiscated private collections" — in other words, a library built to preserve Chinese books ended up, in a rather ironic wartime interlude, growing rather than shrinking in size, albeit at the price of wartime confiscation. This episode, rarely mentioned in this site's earlier entries, adds a layer of war memory to the building's twin identity as a keeper of both books and treasures.

Background note: The University as a whole ground to a halt under the Japanese occupation, and facilities such as the Main Building also suffered damage (see ../05-campus/buildings-landmarks.md); that the Fung Ping Shan Building survived the war and carried on its function is itself part of the material basis for HKU's rapid resumption of academic life after liberation.

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# 4. The turn: from library to museum (early 1960s)

• Per the HKU Libraries' official page^※, the Chinese-language collections moved into the newly built Main Library in 1961;
• Per the UMAG official history page^※, the same move is dated 1962 — the University's own two official pages disagree on the precise year by one, and in line with this site's convention we present both without adjudicating, deferring to the latest record on each page;
• Per the HKU Libraries' official page^※, with the Fung family's consent, the former Fung Ping Shan Library premises were converted into the Fung Ping Shan Museum;
• The museum was later merged with a new wing to become part of today's University Museum and Art Gallery (UMAG) — one of the longest continuously operating museums in Hong Kong (see libraries-and-museums.md).

Background note: One building, two successive missions — "Chinese library" first, then "university museum" — and at the moment of functional conversion the donor family was still consulted for consent. This speaks both to the University's respect for its naming-donation tradition and to the Fung Ping Shan Building's rare status as a dual memory-holder for books and artifacts alike.

It is also worth adding that, per the full milestone list on the UMAG official history page^※, the museum's embryo actually predates the move of the books: in 1953, a "Museum of Chinese Art and Archaeology" was already established on the building's second floor, opening to the public on 4 April 1955^※. In other words, for nearly a decade before the collections were fully moved out in 1961/1962, library and museum functions coexisted in the same building. This also explains why the University generally treats 1953 as the museum's founding year, even though the building would not become a dedicated museum space until the books had gone.

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# 5. Expansion and renaming: from "Fung Ping Shan Museum" to UMAG (1964–1996)

Per the full milestone list on the UMAG official history page^※, after the books moved out, the building went through several further changes of identity:

The T.T. Tsui Building, completed in 1996, takes its name from its donor, Mr. T.T. Tsui. Per the Chinese Wikipedia entry^※, Tsui Tsin-tong (1940–2010), a native of Yixing, Jiangsu, fled to Hong Kong with his family in his youth, working as a bank messenger and a restaurant kitchen-hand before starting his own business in 1957. During the recession of the early 1970s he bought heavily into stocks and property, and later seized two further dips in the real-estate market, steadily building a fortune to become an industrialist spanning Hong Kong, Singapore and mainland China. He was one of the world's five leading private collectors of antiquities, founded the Tsui Museum of Art, served as chairman of the HKU Museum and Gallery Management Committee, and endowed nine "T.T. Tsui Galleries of Chinese Art" worldwide (including the ceramics gallery at the Shanghai Museum, the Ming-Qing porcelain gallery at the Nanjing Museum, and Chinese-art galleries in museums across England, the United States and Australia) — the one at HKU among them. In 1993 he was elected a standing committee member of the Eighth National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the youngest Hong Kong member of that body at the time; in 2001 the Hong Kong SAR government awarded him the Grand Bauhinia Medal; he died of a cerebral haemorrhage in Beijing in April 2010. Fung Ping Shan and T.T. Tsui — one who built his reputation on collecting books, one famous for collecting treasures — shaped this building's knowledge-and-antiquities identity across more than sixty years, in the forms of a library and an art museum respectively.

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# 6. Declared-monument status: the official "promotion" in 2018

Per the Antiquities and Monuments Office (AMO) declared-monument page^※, the Fung Ping Shan Building is a declared monument protected under the Antiquities and Monuments Ordinance. This status was reached through a clearly staged process:

• As early as 1981, the building had already been rated a Grade II historic building;
• In 2018, the Antiquities Advisory Board voted unanimously^※ to recommend that the Fung Ping Shan Building, together with two other early HKU dormitories — Eliot Hall and May Hall — be declared monuments;
• The Secretary for Development then formally declared the (exteriors of the) three buildings monuments under the Antiquities and Monuments Ordinance, with the notice gazetted on 16 November 2018^※.

In other words, the Fung Ping Shan Building, Eliot Hall and May Hall are a "three brothers" group that received declared-monument status on the same day, in the same batch — joining the earlier cluster of the Main Building, University Hall, the Hung Hing Ying Building and the Tang Chi Ngong Building, most of which were rated around 1995, to form two waves of grading for HKU's red-brick monument group some twenty years apart (see the full quick-reference table in ../05-campus/buildings-landmarks.md). Together they constitute part of what makes HKU home to the densest concentration of heritage buildings at any tertiary institution in Hong Kong.

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# 7. Treasures of the house: bronze mirrors, blue-and-white, and Nestorian crosses

UMAG's current holdings number over 1,080 Chinese works of art, spanning bronzes, ceramics, paintings, furniture and lacquerware, with dates running from the Neolithic period (c. 7000–2100 BCE) through the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and into twentieth-century traditional and modern painting — a collection system built up through more than sixty years of acquisition and donation. Per the UMAG official history page^※ and the Chinese Wikipedia summary of the collection^※, the holdings can be roughly divided into three categories:

• Bronzes: ritual vessels from the Shang through Western Zhou dynasties, plus a mirror series from the Eastern Zhou through Tang periods — one of the categories with the greatest chronological span in the museum;
• Ceramics: from Neolithic painted pottery, Han and Tang funerary wares, celadons and celebrated Song-dynasty kilns, through to Ming and Qing blue-and-white and polychrome wares. Among them, a Tang-dynasty three-legged water dropper with blue dots under a clear glaze is presented as one of the earliest known examples of blue-and-white porcelain in China — an object of considerable scholarly weight among the museum's unique pieces;
• Paintings: Chinese ink painting from the Ming dynasty to the twenty-first century, modern paintings, plus twentieth-century Chinese oil paintings.

The single most internationally recognised special collection is the world's largest collection of Yuan-dynasty Nestorian crosses^※ — a field of considerable weight in the study of Christianity in China and of religious pluralism under the Mongol empire, little known to the general public yet of real international standing among specialists.

Underpinning the collection's continued growth is a little-known voluntary body: per the Chinese Wikipedia entry^※, the University of Hong Kong Museum Society was founded in 1988 as a non-profit organisation; for decades it has supported UMAG through fundraising, educational programmes and acquisitions. That the collection could keep growing for over sixty years owes much to this behind-the-scenes society.

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# 8. Recent developments: from STArts to The Little Prince

UMAG, comprising the Fung Ping Shan Building and the T.T. Tsui Building, has in recent years been working to converse with contemporary themes while preserving its heritage identity:

• Per the UMAG official history page^※, in 2020 the museum launched the STArts project, exploring the intersection of Science, Technology and the Arts through interdisciplinary research spanning art history, artefacts conservation and emerging technologies — a response to the question of "how an old collection talks to new technology";
• Per the events listing on the UMAG website^※, 2026 marks the eightieth anniversary of the French publication of The Little Prince (《小王子》), and UMAG is holding a special exhibition, "The Little Prince and the Pilot" on the first floor of the T.T. Tsui Building from 26 June to 18 October 2026, free of charge, showing rare photographs, letters, maps, manuscripts and first editions that present the author Saint-Exupéry in his multiple roles as family man, friend, writer, painter, aviation pioneer and explorer. Cross-disciplinary special exhibitions like this are one of the ways this old building, completed in 1932, continues to draw the public in nearly a century on.

Taken together, these two examples show that the Fung Ping Shan Building's trajectory — from Chinese library to declared-monument museum — did not end in 2018. It is still finding new ways to curate, extending the public life of a building now nearly a century old.

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# Unverified / to be checked

• Full contents of special collections such as the "Zen Wing Collection": official pages mention it only as an example; the complete bibliography would require consulting the HKU Libraries' special-collections catalogue.
• The two descriptions of the plan in UMAG's own official account ("butterfly" vs "fan"): this article presents both, from UMAG on one hand and AMO/government press release on the other, without forcing a single wording — readers may compare the two original descriptions themselves.
• The exact year the Chinese-language collections moved to the Main Library (1961 vs 1962): the HKU Libraries website and the UMAG website differ; this article presents both, deferring to the latest record on each page.

Note: two items previously listed here as "to be checked" — the precise date of declared-monument status and the amount of Mr. Fung Ping Shan's donation — have been confirmed in this round of research by the 16 November 2018 government press release^※ and the 1929 donation letter (HK$100,000) recorded on the HKU Giving page^※ respectively; the cross-verified results have been incorporated into sections 1 and 6 above, and they are no longer listed as unverified here.

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# Related reading

• The Library System and Museums — an institutional overview of HKU's eight libraries and UMAG
• Campus Buildings and Landmarks — building-by-building close reading of the declared-monument cluster to which the Fung Ping Shan Building belongs
• University Benefactors and Named Gifts — the full lineage of donors including Fung Ping Shan and Tang Chi Ngong
• Honorary Degrees and Distinguished Visitors — the honours connections between donors such as T.T. Tsui and the University

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