Canteen Lore & Anecdotes: “Sam So” and the Three Treasures of University Hall, and the Quest for Midnight Custard Buns

# Canteen Lore & Anecdotes: "Sam So", the Three Treasures of University Hall, and the Quest for Midnight Custard Buns

Among HKU students, a folk rhyme lists the “Three Treasures of University Hall”: the chimera sculpture, the spiral staircase, and “Sam So.” The first two are inanimate objects; the third, “Sam So,” is a living, breathing cook. She worked in the University Hall canteen for over forty years. Decades after her retirement, successive generations of alumni still cherish her as the warmest figure in HKU’s culinary memory. This piece uses her story as a central thread, weaving through the green gowns and candlelight of High Table Dinners, and the collective memory of late-night food crawls in Kennedy Town.

# 1. The “Three Treasures of University Hall”: Sam So’s Forty Years

Sam So, whose given name was Yuen So-moy (袁蘇妹), was born in Dongguan, Guangdong in 1928^※. She earned the nickname “Sam So” (meaning “wife of the third son”) from her husband’s birth order, and HKU alumni almost universally know her by this name. According to her official HKU Honorary University Fellow page^※:

Yuen So-moy and her husband first took over the University Hall catering service as contractors in 1957. She served in roles including Cook IV, Assistant Cook, and Hall Attendant for over 40 years, retiring in 1998—meaning she started the year after University Hall opened and left on the eve of Hong Kong’s handover.

Multiple reports confirm that in her entire life, Sam So could only recognise five written characters, her childhood schooling having been cut short by war. She and her husband initially entered the University Hall canteen as contractors. When her husband later stepped back due to health problems, she stayed on, moving from assistant cook to canteen cleaner, until she finally left at 73, with the University organising a grand farewell party for her.

What truly elevated Sam So from a cook to a fixture of HKU’s collective memory was the deep web of human connection she wove with the hall’s residents over four decades. Alumni recall her care in vivid detail:

• Leung Nai-pang (梁乃鵬, HKU alumnus, former Deputy Executive Chairman of a television broadcaster) recalled: “It was Sam So who boiled chicken soup for me to nourish my brain”—during exam season, she would prepare special tonic broths for the students.
• A practising lawyer and alumnus, Chan Heung-wing (陳向榮), mentioned that when he was burning up with fever, Sam So “spent hours brewing herbal tea” to cool him down—a level of care far exceeding any standard canteen worker’s duties.
• Her signature desserts were large-sago red bean soup and yellow pea pudding. One old alumnus still marvels at the memory: “The sago pearls were so huge!”—reports say Sam So would stand at the stove for two to three hours, simmering the sago over low heat to achieve the perfect texture and granularity.
• Even if students “partied hard until two or three in the morning,” Sam So never complained. She would wait until the guests were completely done, clean the canteen until it was spotless, and only then go off duty.

In September 2009, at the age of 82, Sam So was awarded an Honorary University Fellowship by HKU. The nomination was reportedly driven by a petition signed by alumni, and it passed the Council vote unanimously. The University’s citation praised her for “contributing to higher education in the most fundamental way—nourishing, sustaining and strengthening the emotional well-being of generations of students.” This formal tribute perfectly encapsulates the essence of her story: she never lectured in a classroom, yet through four decades of steadfast congee, soup, and cleaning, she became the tangible embodiment of “home” in the hearts of countless HKU people.

Even after retiring, Sam So would return to University Hall from time to time to visit a new generation of residents. The reason the rhyme of the “Three Treasures of University Hall” continues to be passed down, class to class, without being lost, is precisely this emotional bond that spans generations—there have always been people willing to tell her story, and people willing to remember it.

# 2. High Table Dinner: Green Gowns, Candlelight, and a Hint of “Hogwarts”

If Sam So’s story is the most tender side of HKU’s dining culture, the High Table Dinner is its most ritualistic. This tradition, originating in the collegiate systems of Oxford and Cambridge, was transplanted and adapted by HKU’s various halls of residence, developing its own local character.

According to an experiential blog^※ written by an exchange student who studied at HKU, on the evening of the dinner, residents must first “descend to collect their green gown, symbolising their undergraduate identity,” and then walk down several flights of stairs to the dining hall. Once inside, the most striking spatial arrangement was “everyone seated in rows at long tables, while the most important people sit on an elevated long table at the head of the room.” The exchange student described this scene as something straight out of the feast in Hogwarts from the Harry Potter films: faculty seated high to denote status, students seated below looking up. The night featured a formal three-course dinner and lasted for several hours, with conversation and socialising as the main activities.

University Hall was one of the earliest practitioners of this tradition. According to the Wikipedia entry for University Hall^※, when the hall officially opened in 1956, the original chapel had been converted into a dining hall, and the crypt into a common room—the religious spaces of this Victorian-era building were thus repurposed for student communal dining. The canteen’s rules were strict in the early years: residents had to wear green gowns to dinner, with a formal High Table Dinner held every Monday evening.

St. John’s College, according to its official website^※, holds a High Table Dinner every Monday evening at 7:30 p.m. on the 3rd floor of the Leung Chi Wo Centre. It blends “British collegiate traditions and Chinese cuisine”—the College defines this as an exemplary occasion where “East meets West.” Post-dinner, it arranges “High Table Talks,” inviting alumni and academics to conduct “confidential” closed-door discussions on various topics, encouraging candid exchanges between faculty and students, off-the-record and closed to the public.

According to another exchange student’s blog account^※, some halls have their own designated formal wear—like the “M Coat” of Morrison Hall. High Table Dinners are held roughly three times a semester, with the last one being a farewell to graduating students. The evening usually begins with an address by the Hall Warden or Master, introducing the guests and acknowledging students’ academic, sporting, or extracurricular achievements. This scene—“dressed in formal gowns, illuminated by candlelight, eating Chinese dishes in an English ritual”—is itself a microcosm of Hong Kong higher education’s colonial past merging with local culture.

# 3. The Midnight Custard Bun: Kennedy Town’s Extended “Campus Flavour”

The formality of High Table Dinners aside, HKU students’ culinary memory has a completely different branch: late-night foraging. Most campus canteens close their doors around ten at night, leaving the venerable tea houses and dessert shops of Kennedy Town and Shek Tong Tsui to feed this horde of “night owl” students.

According to numerous student food diaries and an HK01 guide for freshmen^※, Sun Hing Restaurant (新興食家) is the most legendary stop on this late-night food map. Located on Smithfield Road in Kennedy Town, it is a historic establishment with over 50 years of history, opening its doors at three in the morning. It is famed for its custard buns and crab roe siu mai. The custard buns are steamed to order, their molten core a mixture of salted egg yolk and butter. Quantities are limited, going to the swiftest, and it is considered a “must-try pilgrimage” in HKU circles. Late-night study sessions, final exam cramming, or simple post-hall-chatter—a room full of students still in pyjamas squeezing into Sun Hing to snatch the custard buns: this kind of unglamorous “campus flavour” is, in a sense, far closer to students’ true daily lives than the formal ceremony of a High Table Dinner.

According to a report by Hong Kong Economic Times’ TOPick^※, Sun Hing is not the only deep-night canteen in the Western District. Pan-fried rice noodle rolls (煎腸粉), sweet soups, and Taiwanese-style braised pork rice also form part of the skeleton of HKU students’ “supper map.” The common trait of these late-night eateries is that their operating hours mesh precisely with the campus schedule: most on-campus canteens close by nine or ten, and these old neighbourhood establishments fill the gap perfectly, becoming one of the few places where students can still gather after “hall lights out.”

# 4. Campus Self-deprecation: “Trapped U” and “Queue University”

In HKU’s campus culture, food topics are often intertwined with the self-deprecating nicknames students have for their own university. According to a compilation of campus nicknames^※ (an unofficial collection from a forum, with low credibility for fact-checking), HKU is often jokingly called “Trapped U” (坑U)—a Cantonese pun on “HongKongU” that carries a whiff of “springing a trap on you,” typically used to gripe about crushing academic pressure. There is also the plain alternative name “Pokfulam University” (薄扶林大學), simply derived from the main campus’s location in the Pokfulam area.

In recent years, with an expanding student intake, campus population density has risen, and HKU has earned yet another facetious title: “HK Queue University” (香港排隊大學): queuing for the MTR exit during morning peak, queuing to get a seat in the library, queuing at canteens for a meal, queuing for the campus shuttle bus, and sometimes even queuing for the loo. No authoritative source can verify the exact origin of these self-mocking nicknames, but they circulate widely in students’ daily conversations (especially on social media and platforms like LIHKG). They are noted here merely as an unverified profile of campus culture, gleaned from popular lore.

The fact that canteen queues are so often mentioned by students has much to do with the outsourcing system discussed in previous articles. The number of food stalls is fixed, and peak dining periods are concentrated in a narrow lunch and dinner window. As the student population grows while stall capacity sees limited expansion, “queuing” is practically a structural constant of the outsourced fast-food model, not simply a management flaw in any one canteen.

# 5. The Origins of Colloquial Names: How “Chong Kee” and “Taikoo” Came to Be

HKU students rarely use the full official names for canteens. Instead, they improvise, using the building or the floor as a shortcut. The logic behind these colloquial names is itself a living fossil of campus culture.

Based on multiple student food guides, the canteen in the Chong Yuet Ming Amenities Centre is simply shortened by students to “Chong Kee” (莊記). It takes the first character of the building’s name and adds “Kee” (記)—a classic Hong Kong vernacular suffix for a shop. The canteen in the Fong Shu Chuen Amenities Centre is operated by the Fairwood restaurant group and sits on the third floor of “Swire Hall” (太古樓). Students directly shorten this to “Taikoo” (太古). Strictly speaking, “Taikoo” is neither the official venue name nor the name of the catering brand; it is purely a geographical byname, yet it is far more common in student parlance than the formal title. This naming habit is identical in logic to the origin of “Canteen 64” mentioned earlier (so named because it is on the fourth floor of the Haking Wong Building). HKU students seem to have a strong preference for the most direct and colloquial way of referring to their canteens, rather than memorising their unwieldy official names.

Beyond the three main canteens on the main campus, HKU also hides a tiny but warmly human spot. According to scattered online sources, the Women Workers’ Co-op runs a small kiosk by the swimming pool, selling traditional Hong Kong snacks like egg waffles, noodles, congee, and Malay sponge cake. This small shop, independently run by grassroots labourers, falls outside the formal CEDARS-coordinated tendered stall system. Yet its operating model echoes that of the “Female Workers’ Cooperative” at CUHK—a low-profile corner of HKU’s dining ecosystem that carries a different narrative of labour.

# 6. The Three Faces of Dining Memory

Look at Sam So’s story, the ritual of High Table Dinner, and the bustle of the midnight custard bun side by side, and HKU’s “campus flavour” reveals three distinct yet complementary faces:

1. Human Warmth — Through four decades of congee, soup, and cleaning, Sam So proved that a canteen is not just a place to eat, but can also be a hub for a hall community's emotional bonds. Her Honorary Fellowship is a rare official acknowledgement of a “non-academic contribution” by HKU.
2. Ritualistic Formality — The High Table Dinner elevates “eating” into a formal social occasion of robed, seated ceremony, carrying the historical imprint of HKU’s British colonial heritage and its fusion with Chinese culinary culture.
3. Animated Bustle — The custard buns and dessert shops of late-night Kennedy Town are a raw, unfiltered extension of students' daily lives, filling the void left when campus canteens close for the night.

These three faces appear unrelated, but together they make up the part of “reading at HKU” that is harder to quantify than course credits—yet it is often the first thing alumni find themselves remembering, years after graduation.

Further reading: Canteen System Overview; Contractors, Outsourcing, and Pricing Disputes; Food Safety Watch: Regulatory Mechanisms and the Absence of Major Cases.

# Sources

• Ms Yuen So Moy · HKU Honorary University Fellows (official) — Official
• A Cleaner Who Knew Only 5 Characters, Awarded a Fellowship at 82, Became a Treasure of HKU · 163.com — Secondary
• University Hall, University of Hong Kong · Wikipedia — Secondary
• Blog 3: High Table Dinner - A HKU tradition · Fund for Education Abroad — Secondary
• Hong Kong University – High Table Dinner · Rosey Hampton — Secondary
• St. John’s College · Dining (official) — Official
• HKU Freshmen Take Note: 6 Must-Try Foods · HK01 — Secondary
• What You Need to Know About HKU | Tales from the Canteens · offerhk — Secondary
• 5 Supper Spots in the Western District: HKU Students Must Try the Pan-fried Rice Noodle Rolls · Hong Kong Economic Times TOPick — Secondary
• Uncovering the Quirky Nicknames of Hong Kong Universities · Zhihu — Forum (Low Credibility); campus nicknames are unverified, take with a pinch of salt