HKU UMAG: Beyond Fung Ping Shan — the Yuan-Dynasty Nestorian Crosses and the Stories in Hong Kong's Oldest Museum

This article belongs to the Miscellaneous module of the Wild History of HKU · a site of unofficial history about The University of Hong Kong (HKU). It focuses on the collection and academic positioning of the University Museum and Art Gallery (UMAG). For the architectural history of the museum buildings, see fung-ping-shan-library-museum.md. For an overview of the library system and museums, see libraries-and-museums.md. For a full institutional history of the library system, see hku-libraries-system.md. For an overview of journals published by HKU, see academic-journals.md.

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# In which year was UMAG actually founded? How did the museum's history unfold?

According to UMAG's official history page^※, the museum's roots go back to 1932, when a Chinese-language library building funded by the businessman Mr Fung Ping Shan was completed at HKU, designed by the architecture firm Leigh & Orange. In 1953 a dedicated exhibition space was created on the building's second floor, and under the aegis of the Institute of Oriental Studies the "Museum of Chinese Art and Archaeology" was formally established. It opened to the public on 4 April 1955.

After the Chinese-language book collections moved to the Main Library in 1962, the whole building was progressively converted to museum use. In 1964, at a ceremony officiated by Sir Kenneth Fung Ping-fan, son of the donor, the building was formally renamed the Fung Ping Shan Museum of Chinese Art and Archaeology. On 1 December 1975 the museum became an independent unit directly under the University. On 1 July 1994 it merged with the newly established University Art Gallery and adopted the name by which it is commonly known today: UMAG.

The key dates are set out below:

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# The museum's physical layout: two buildings, one bridge

UMAG occupies two connected buildings: the Fung Ping Shan Building (the old wing) and the T.T. Tsui Building (the new wing), linked by a footbridge, at 90 Bonham Road, Pokfulam, Hong Kong, next to the University's East Gate^※.

The Fung Ping Shan Building, built 1929–1932, is a three-storey red-brick structure in a blend of Neo-Georgian and Arts and Crafts styles, notable for its "Butterfly Plan": the convex curved facade on the south side forms what is today the Drake Gallery, whose octagonal skylight provides diffused natural light. The building's facade was declared a monument on 16 November 2018^※, having previously been graded a Grade I historic building in 2009.

The T.T. Tsui Building was formally opened on 8 November 1996^※, named after its generous donor Dr T.T. Tsui; it houses most of the contemporary exhibition spaces and the museum's administrative offices. The two-building arrangement lets UMAG present ancient collections and contemporary art side by side.

Admission is free; opening hours are Tuesday to Saturday 9:30–18:00 and Sunday 13:00–18:00, closed on Mondays and public holidays^※.

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# The world's largest collection of Yuan-dynasty Nestorian crosses: where do the 979 pieces come from?

This is UMAG's signature holding, the one most recognised in international scholarship. According to an official HKU press release^※, the museum holds 979 Yuan-dynasty Nestorian bronze crosses in total (comprising actual bronze crosses as well as rubbings and photographs of stone steles and architectural elements; the bronze crosses proper number over 900 pieces). This is the largest known collection in the world of Nestorian crosses from the Mongol era (the Yuan dynasty, 1271–1368)^※.

Jing Jiao (景教, literally the "luminous religion") is the Chinese name for Nestorian Christianity, which arrived in China in the 7th century from Persia along the Silk Road. In the Tang dynasty it left behind the celebrated "Nestorian Stele" of Xi'an (781). It declined after Emperor Wuzong of Tang proscribed foreign religions, then revived in 1289 under the Mongols' policy of religious toleration^※; historical records call its believers "Yelikeyun" (也里可温).

The crosses were excavated in the Ordos region of north-western China (present-day Inner Mongolia) and stand about 3–8 cm tall^※. Each has a high-relief cross motif on the front and a small loop on the back, allowing it to be strung on clothing or a belt. Scholars believe they served variously as personal markers of faith, family emblems or seals — some examples bear traces of red seal-paste.

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# Nixon — Lee Hysan — HKU: how did the crosses make their way to the University?

The crosses' journey into the collection spans half a century and can be told in three stages.

Stage one — the collector: according to an official HKU press release^※, the crosses were gathered by F. A. Nixon, a British postal commissioner stationed in China, during his posting in Beijing in the 1930s–40s; their origins trace back to early archaeological finds on the Mongolian plateau. The "F. A. Nixon Collection" thus represents an important sample of archaeological discoveries from the Sino-Mongolian borderlands in this period.

Stage two — the intermediary and the gift: according to an HKU press release^※, in the late 1950s Dr F. S. Drake, then a scholar at the University's Institute of Oriental Studies, recognised the collection's scholarly significance and helped arrange its donation. The Lee Hysan Foundation acquired it and, in 1961, presented the entire collection to the University of Hong Kong.

Stage three — scholarly cataloguing and the first major exhibition: according to UMAG's official collection page^※, the collection's accession number is HKU.B.1961.0243, the objects being Yuan-dynasty bronzes (1279–1368). On 10 June 2015 UMAG mounted its first major permanent exhibition devoted to the Yuan-dynasty Nestorian crosses^※, with over 700 crosses displayed at once, alongside a three-day "International Conference on Jing Jiao" (10–12 June) and associated public lectures — marking the collection's passage from "accessioned special collection" to "internationally visible scholarship".

One precise figure from the museum's own accounting is worth adding: according to an in-depth report in the Asian Art Newspaper^※, of the 979 registered items, 935 are held in storage or on permanent display, the remainder being rubbings, photographs and other research materials. The bronze crosses themselves were mostly excavated in the Ordos region of Inner Mongolia in early-20th-century archaeology^※, confirming the typical colonial-era trajectory of "bought on site, assembled into a collection" that followed Nixon's years of service in China.

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# The 2015 International Conference on Jing Jiao: why "double commemoration"?

According to the official conference page of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (HKIHSS)^※, the "International Conference on Jing Jiao" of 10–12 June 2015 was co-organised by HKIHSS with the School of Chinese at HKU and the Divinity School of Chung Chi College^※. The choice of year was no coincidence: it deliberately marked two anniversaries — 1,380 years since the arrival of Jing Jiao in China, and the golden jubilee (fiftieth anniversary) of the late HKU professor Lo Hsiang-lin's seminal work Jing Jiao of the Tang and Yuan Dynasties. Lo, a senior scholar in HKU's School of Chinese, produced in 1965 a foundational study of Jing Jiao in the Tang and Yuan periods for the Chinese-speaking academic world. By taking that work as its scholarly point of departure, the 2015 conference embedded UMAG's first major display of the crosses in a research lineage spanning half a century, rather than treating it as an isolated curatorial event.

According to official coverage in HKU News^※, the conference opened with a formal ceremony; the keynote address was delivered by Professor Samuel Lieu of Macquarie University in Australia, a historian of antiquity, alongside 19 scholars from Hong Kong, mainland China, Japan, Europe and the United States, whose papers examined Jing Jiao belief in the Tang and Yuan periods and its religious and cultural influence across East Asia. The participants' transnational, cross-period composition says something about the pivotal position these seemingly "local" Yuan-dynasty crosses occupy in international Jing Jiao studies and research on religious exchange along the Silk Road. The collection itself matters, of course — but what makes it "citable" is precisely an international conference of this kind, one that links objects, archaeological provenance, religious history and local academic tradition into a single thread.

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# What is distinctive about the crosses' design? Why is every one different?

According to the Asian Art Newspaper's in-depth report on the collection^※, what most fascinates scholars is the extreme diversity of design. Although bronze-casting with moulds would naturally lend itself to mass reproduction, virtually none of the 900-plus crosses in the collection is identical to another, and scholarship has yet to reach a definitive explanation. Existing research groups the decorative styles into four broad types:

According to an HKU press release^※, "the swastika, as the central element of the cross, gives these objects a hybrid character and makes them a particular symbol of Chinese Nestorian Christians." This visual syncretism reflects the historical reality of Christianity, Buddhism and Mongol shamanic traditions converging in Central and East Asia under the Yuan dynasty's religious tolerance. The researcher Andrea Chen notes that the bronze-casting technique was demanding — the moulds had to withstand the heat of molten metal — and that the uniqueness of each cross suggests to scholars that they may have been personal markers identifying their individual owners, families or communities.

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# How large is UMAG's overall collection?

According to UMAG's official documentation and materials from the HKU Museum Society^※, the museum's collection of ancient Chinese art now exceeds 2,000 objects, spanning from the Neolithic period (c. 7000–2100 BCE) to the 21st century. The principal holdings are summarised below:

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# Academic function: why is UMAG a "teaching museum"?

According to UMAG's official introductory document^※, the museum has been defined from its very founding by its core positioning as a "teaching museum", supporting the HKU Department of Fine Arts in teaching on ancient Chinese art and museology. The collection is not merely open to the public; it serves as material for object-based classroom study, giving students direct access to original works. This positioning distinguishes UMAG from purely public-service museums and makes it institutionally representative among university museums in the Asia-Pacific region.

Another major force supporting UMAG's daily operations and collection growth is the HKU Museum Society. Founded in 1988 by Margaret Wang, wife of Professor Wang Gungwu^※, it now has over 600 members. The Society raises funds through lectures, visits and international study tours, and the donations it generates support UMAG acquisitions, special exhibitions and HKU arts-education programmes.

In 2020, UMAG launched the cross-disciplinary programme UMAG_STArts, exploring the connections between science, technology and art, and further extending its teaching and research reach.

The "teaching museum" positioning is not just a slogan; in recent years it has taken concrete institutional form in degrees and programmes. According to the official newsletter of the HKU Graduate School^※, UMAG marked its seventieth anniversary by launching a new postgraduate degree in Museum Studies, directly linking humanities training with professional museum practice; a continuing undergraduate internship programme meanwhile lets students take part in research and public engagement for real exhibitions while still at university, rather than stopping at classroom theory. The Graduate School newsletter notes in particular that, thanks to HKU's established standing in Asian studies, its Museum Studies graduates enjoy strong career prospects in the region.

UMAG's Knowledge Exchange function is also worth recording. According to HKU's Knowledge Exchange Office^※, UMAG has worked with the University Libraries to make 58 historical Hong Kong photographs from the 1900s publicly searchable through the Hong Kong Image Database; the museum has also co-organised a transnational cultural exhibition with the Consulate General of Austria in Hong Kong and Macau, and in the project "A Night at the Museum of Art with Andy Warhol" hosted some 600 secondary-school students from 56 local schools in a single evening — a concentrated opening of the University's art collection to the secondary-school system. Activities like these show that UMAG's "teaching" radius extends well beyond current HKU students, reaching both local schools and international cultural institutions.

UMAG has also taken on a number of international loan exhibitions in recent years. According to the HKU Graduate School's official newsletter^※, the museum has previously staged international special exhibitions featuring works by Botticelli, Boucher and Picasso, running in parallel with its permanent Chinese antiquities as two curatorial tracks — "permanent collection plus loan exhibitions". In addition, the museum offers a 360-degree virtual gallery on its website, allowing audiences who cannot make it to Bonham Road to view parts of current exhibitions online.

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# Visitor numbers: from "collection size" to "voting with their feet"

Collections and academic positioning matter, but whether a museum is truly alive ultimately shows in its visitor figures. According to official data from HKU's Centre for Planning, Analytics and Operations (CPAO)^※:

These figures reveal two things. First, "424 exhibitions since 1976" means UMAG has curated on average more than eight exhibitions a year — a far higher exhibition density than the typical university-affiliated museum. Second, a single academic year reaching roughly 90,000 people in person and online is a substantial measure of public cultural impact for a free campus museum that nobody is required to visit. It also lends data-side support to the earlier observation that UMAG behaves more like a municipal museum than a purely campus facility.

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# Is the "oldest" claim accurate? The wording needs to be unpacked

UMAG's official page puts it as^※: "the oldest continuously operated museum in Hong Kong". The qualifier is "continuously operated", which is not the same as "the first museum to be founded". This site reproduces the official wording faithfully and does not simplify it to "Hong Kong's first museum".

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# See also

• Architectural history of the Fung Ping Shan Building → fung-ping-shan-library-museum.md
• Overview of the library system and museums → libraries-and-museums.md
• Full institutional history of the library system (eight libraries, special collections, JULAC/HKALL) → hku-libraries-system.md
• HKU Press and academic publishing → hku-press-and-flagship-works.md
• Academic journals published and edited at HKU → academic-journals.md
• Campus buildings and historic architecture → ../05-campus/buildings-landmarks.md
• Benefactors and named gifts (Fung Ping Shan, T.T. Tsui, etc.) → ../08-finances/benefactors-and-donors.md
• Honorary degrees and distinguished visitors → ../06-people/honorary-degrees-and-visitors.md

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