Walking HKU: Two Heritage Trails, Thirteen Monuments, and the "Most Haunted Campus" Claim

Wild-history section · Module 15. This piece treats the campus as an open-air museum to be "walked." The sourced portion (heritage trails, declared monuments) is recorded factually with official sources cited; the folklore portion is treated throughout as hearsay, physically separated, and labelled by credibility. Individuals are referred to as "Mr. Surname" where applicable; proper nouns are given as-is. Close readings of individual buildings appear in the corresponding files under Module 05.

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# I. Sourced, Part One: AMO's "HKU Heritage Sights and Sites" (13 monuments, two clusters)

According to the Antiquities and Monuments Office (AMO)'s official page^※:

• AMO operates the "HKU Heritage Sights and Sites" trail, with 13 declared monuments and historic buildings as nodes, distributed across two clusters on campus, with audio guides offered in Cantonese, Putonghua, and English;
• according to an HKU press release^※, the trail was launched on 11 November 2022, jointly officiated by Secretary for Development Bernadette Linn and then-HKU President Xiang Zhang, coinciding with HKU's 111th anniversary and the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the HKSAR; at the launch, Xiang Zhang said the significance of the digital guide was to let "those who cannot visit in person, including people with mobility difficulties," also appreciate the heritage.

These 13 are not evenly distributed but fall clearly into two clusters of a wholly different nature:

Cluster one: seven declared monuments on the main campus — the main thread of HKU's century-long building history, each with its own file (see Module 05):

according to the declaration dates listed on AMO's official page^※, these seven monuments were not declared all at once but in three waves — details in this piece's section "Why HKU's monuments are so dense" below.

Cluster two: six waterworks-related historic buildings — unrelated to the campus's own building history; see the next section.

This is a fully sourced route: every node is a monument or historic building declared under the Antiquities and Monuments Ordinance, walkable in person using AMO's guide.

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# II. The Waterworks Heritage Cluster: From "Pumping Station" to Bookshop and Visitor Centre

The half of the HKU heritage trail most easily overlooked has, in fact, nothing to do with "the university" — it is a survival of Hong Kong's early waterworks infrastructure that, by circumstance, ended up within the boundaries of HKU's century-old campus.

According to AMO's official page^※, six of the 13 nodes belong to the historic buildings of two waterworks facilities — "Elliot Pumping Station and Filters" and "West Point Filters" — with declaration years concentrated in 2009–2010: the West Point Filters Bungalow (caretaker's quarters) is a Grade 1 historic building (declared 21 December 2010); the two West Point Filters workers' quarters buildings and the Elliot Pumping Station senior staff quarters are Grade 2 historic buildings (declared 18 December 2009); the Elliot Pumping Station workers' quarters and treatment plant building are Grade 3 historic buildings (declared 22 January 2010). This waterworks system was built in the early 20th century as a pumping and treatment node in the network supplying water from Pok Fu Lam Reservoir (Hong Kong's first reservoir, completed 1863) to residents of Western District and Sheung Wan; its construction dates broadly overlap with HKU's main campus, yet it comes from an entirely different functional lineage — on one side, early colonial higher-education buildings; on the other, contemporaneous public-works infrastructure.

That these buildings survive to this day, and were folded into the same heritage trail, traces back to HKU's Centennial Campus expansion, completed in 2012 — the new campus site happened to sit directly atop this old waterworks cluster, and rather than demolish it, HKU chose in-situ conservation with adaptive reuse. According to HKU Estates Office's official "Heritage and Conservation" page^※, the two most intact of these buildings are:

In other words, when today's visitors step onto HKU's Centennial Campus and pick up a map at the Visitor Centre to begin "walking" the campus, the building beneath their feet housed, a century ago, waterworks pumping-station workers — not any professor or student. According to HKU's official history page for the Visitor Centre^※, this single-storey red-brick building was constructed around 1918–1919, originally serving as "workers' and watchmen's quarters" for the Elliot Pumping Station and Filters, housing Chinese labourers and watchmen of the time in just three rooms; it has since been converted into a gift shop, publications reading room, and exhibition space where visitors can pick up maps and learn campus history — a use almost the exact opposite of its original function, from "obscure workers' quarters" to "starting point of the heritage trail." This is the least "university-monument-like" stretch of the trail, yet it best illustrates a common path of heritage conservation in Hong Kong: not because a building was grand, but because it "happened not to be demolished," and was then folded into conservation by a later land user. Another coincidence on this same hillside is that it shares Pok Fu Lam with the discovery site of the Hong Kong Orchid Tree, the city's regional flower — the university, the waterworks infrastructure, and the regional flower's origin all trace back to the same hillside.

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# III. Sourced, Part Two: The Dr Sun Yat-sen Historical Trail

• According to the official page of the Dr Sun Yat-sen Historical Trail^※, the trail comprises 16 stops in total, taking HKU (and its predecessor, the College of Medicine for Chinese) as a key starting point, and linking multiple sites tied to Sun Yat-sen's studies in Hong Kong from 1887–1892 and his later footprints in the city, spanning several locations across the Central and Western District, including the Central School (predecessor of today's Queen's College), the former headquarters of the Furen Literary Society [sic, see table], and the site where Yeung Ku-wan was assassinated;
• Two stops relate directly to HKU: Stop 1, "The University of Hong Kong" — the site of Sun Yat-sen's 1923 return speech; and Stop 10, "Alice Memorial Hospital and the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese" — where he studied from 1887 to 1892. According to the official page of the Dr Sun Yat-sen Historical Trail^※, this College of Medicine was merged into HKU's Faculty of Medicine in 1912, becoming one of the founding lineages of the university (details in the school-history files under ../00-overview/);
• Its point of intersection with HKU's institutional history is Sun Yat-sen's celebrated 1923 return address at the Great Hall (today's Loke Yew Hall) (details in ../00-overview/sun-yat-sen-1923-speech.md).

According to the full list of 16 stops on the official page of the Dr Sun Yat-sen Historical Trail^※, the remaining stops are spread across the Central and Western District, tracing Sun Yat-sen's path in Hong Kong from student to revolutionary organiser; only the two stops noted above relate directly to HKU. The full list is given below, to place HKU within the trail as a whole:

This shows that, of the 16 stops, only Stops 1 and 10 genuinely overlap with HKU directly — yet these two are, by his own account, the two most pivotal sites of his "intellectual birthplace": one marks the start of his nine years of study (the College of Medicine); the other marks the point, mid-way through his revolutionary career, at which he returned to his alma mater to publicly explain the origins of his revolutionary thinking (the 1923 speech).

According to the full text of the speech held in HKU Convocation's archive^※, Sun Yat-sen returned to HKU on 20 February 1923 and delivered, at the Great Hall (today's Loke Yew Hall), a public address titled "Why I Became a Revolutionist?" He opened, in a line widely applauded, by saying: "I feel as though I have returned home, because Hong Kong and this university are my intellectual birthplace." He closed by urging HKU students to "learn the good example of British good government, and take it to every corner of China." This speech is the key intersection between the Dr Sun Yat-sen Historical Trail and HKU's institutional history because it clearly identifies HKU (and its predecessor, the Hong Kong College of Medicine for Chinese, where he studied from 1887–1892) as a formative influence on his revolutionary thinking — he himself said that his nine years living and studying in this British colony in his youth was among the important sources of his revolutionary and modern ideas. According to an HKU press release^※, HKU subsequently erected a bronze statue of Sun Yat-sen on campus to reinforce the century-long connection between "the Father of the Nation and HKU" — a physical extension of the memory of this speech.

This, too, is a sourced route: established by an official body, with verifiable historical facts as its nodes.

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# IV. Folk Claim: "The Most Haunted Campus" (Hearsay · Isolated)

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# V. A Narrative Difference Between the Two Routes

Placing the AMO trail and the folk "ghost-story map" side by side reveals two entirely different "mechanisms for producing campus narrative": the former is led by an official conservation body, with nodes selected through the statutory monument-declaration process, emphasising the historical, architectural, and heritage value of the buildings themselves; the latter is transmitted orally among students and later fixed through secondary media coverage (compilation websites, television adaptations), with nodes selected by the folk logic of "where something frightening reportedly happened" — a logic with no bearing on the buildings' heritage value. The lotus pond, the University Hall statue, and the medical school mortuary may, on the AMO trail, also be part of a declared monument or historic building, but the folk narrative concerns an entirely different system of meaning. This is the methodological basis for this piece's insistence on keeping the two physically separate: the same physical space can carry both "verifiable architectural history" and "unverifiable urban legend" at once — the two are not mutually exclusive, but must never be presented conflated within the same passage, or the reader cannot tell which kind of content they are reading.

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# VI. Beyond Walking: A Third "Path" — the History of Hall Life

Beyond the AMO trail and the Dr Sun Yat-sen Historical Trail — both organised around "buildings" and "historical sites" — HKU's century-old campus carries a third, less formal but equally well-documented "path": the evolution of the hall system itself. University Hall developed from Douglas Castle (1861) into a men's hall from 1954 onward; Eliot Hall and May Hall merged in 1969 into the "Old Halls," then split and reverted to their separate names in 1992 — these changes largely track the same buildings and years as the monument declarations, only with the emphasis shifted from "the building itself" to "who lived there, and how." The full account of this thread appears in ../05-campus/buildings-landmarks.md and Part Two of Campus Legends and Hall Traditions; this piece does not repeat it, and notes it only as a third way of "walking" HKU: the same building can be walked by declaration year, or by the memory of residential life.

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# VII. Why HKU's Monuments Are So Dense: Three Waves of Declaration and an Accidental Conservation Through a Waterworks Project

The density of monuments on HKU's main campus did not form all at once; it is the layered result of three declaration waves spaced roughly a decade apart, plus one unrelated waterworks conservation project that "hitched a ride":

• HKU is the oldest university in Hong Kong (1911/1912), and most of its main-campus buildings were built in the 1910s–1930s, surviving a century — providing the material basis of being "old enough" for declaration;
• but "old enough" is not the same as "declared immediately" — according to the declaration dates listed on AMO's official page^※, the Main Building was declared a monument as early as 1984, while the Fung Ping Shan Building, Eliot Hall, and May Hall, of similar age, were not declared until 2018 — a gap of thirty-four years — indicating that heritage grading has its own administrative rhythm and priorities, and is not simply "older buildings declared first";
• the declaration of the waterworks historic buildings (2009–2010) followed an entirely separate, independent track — driven by waterworks-infrastructure grading, unrelated to HKU's educational history, and folded into the same heritage trail only because the Centennial Campus project happened to be sited over this cluster and conserved it "along the way" — the only stretch of "walking HKU" unrelated to "the university" itself;
• as a result, HKU's main campus has become one of the densest clusters of higher-education heritage in Hong Kong (see ../05-campus/buildings-landmarks.md) — the material basis on which "walking HKU" rests, and, behind the "thirteen monuments" in this piece's title, a declaration history more convoluted than it first appears.

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# Unverified / Pending

• Official basis for each monument's declaration year: this piece follows the dates listed on AMO's official page; where secondary sources (e.g. Wikipedia) differ slightly, the latest version of AMO's official page takes precedence.
• Original designers and engineering archives of the waterworks historic buildings: no complete original engineering archive has been located; this piece relies solely on the grading and use descriptions published by AMO and HKU Estates Office.
• Source of the "most haunted campus" claim: this is a formulation from folk-oriented media, with no quantitative basis; this piece mentions it only as a cultural phenomenon and does not endorse it.

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