Canteen Culture and Anecdotes: "Sam So" of the University Hall "Three Treasures", and Late-Night Custard Buns

A rhyme-like saying circulates among HKU students — "The three treasures of University Hall: the chimaera sculptures, the spiral brass staircase, and Sam So." The first two are inanimate objects; only "Sam So" was a living, breathing cook. She wielded the ladle in the University Hall canteen for over forty years, and long after retirement she remained, in the memories of generations of alumni, the warmest chapter in HKU's food lore. This article takes her story as its thread, weaving together the green gowns and candlelight of the High Table Dinner, and the collective memory of late-night foraging in Kennedy Town.

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# I. The "Three Treasures of University Hall": Sam So's Forty Years

Sam So, whose given name was Yuen So Moy (袁苏妹), was born in Dongguan, Guangdong in 1928^※. She acquired the name "Sam So" (Cantonese for "Third Sister-in-Law") because her husband was third in his family's birth order; HKU alumni also commonly call her "Sam So." According to the HKU Honorary University Fellows official page^※:

Yuen So Moy took over University Hall's catering services together with her husband as contractors in 1957, and served successively as Cook IV, Assistant Cook, and Hall Attendant for over 40 years, retiring in 1998 — that is, from the year after University Hall opened until the eve of its handover.

According to multiple compiled reports, Sam So knew only five Chinese characters in her entire life, her schooling having been cut short by wartime turmoil in her childhood. She and her husband first entered the University Hall kitchen as contractors; when her husband later withdrew due to ill health, she stayed on, working her way from assistant cook to canteen cleaner, until she left at 73, when the University hosted a grand farewell gathering in her honour.

What truly elevated Sam So beyond the role of cook and made her part of HKU's collective memory was the forty years of human warmth she exchanged with residents. As alumni recollections compiled:

• Leung Nai-pang (HKU alumnus, former deputy executive chairman of a television broadcaster) recalled: "It was Sam So who boiled chicken soup to nourish my brain" — during exam season, Sam So would specially prepare nourishing soups for residents.
• A practising solicitor and alumnus, Chan Heung-wing, mentioned that when he had a fever, Sam So "spent several hours brewing herbal tea" to bring it down — care of a kind far beyond the duty of an ordinary canteen worker.
• Her signature desserts were large-sago red bean soup and horse-bean cake; an old alumnus still couldn't help marvelling when recalling it: "Those sago pearls were enormous!" — reportedly, to get the sago to just the right texture and bite, Sam So had to stand at the stove for two to three hours, simmering over a low flame and watching the heat closely.
• Even when residents "partied into the small hours, two or three in the morning" after events, Sam So never complained; she would always wait until the guests had had their fill, then clean the canteen thoroughly before clocking off.

In September 2009, at 82, Sam So was conferred the title of Honorary University Fellow by HKU — reportedly at the urging of a petition signed by alumni, and passed unanimously by the Council. 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." That citation captures the essence of Sam So's story with precision: she never stood at a lectern to teach, yet through four decades of soup, porridge and cleaning, she became, for countless members of the HKU family, the embodied image of "home."

After retirement, Sam So continued to visit University Hall from time to time to see the new generation of residents — the reason the "Three Treasures of University Hall" rhyme has been passed down by word of mouth through cohort after cohort without fading is precisely this emotional bond across generations, which someone has always been willing to tell, and someone has always been willing to remember.

The other two "Treasures," being inanimate, each have their own origin story. According to the Chinese Wikipedia entry "University Hall, University of Hong Kong"^※, the spiral brass staircase was cast in Paris when the Paris Foreign Missions Society acquired the castle that preceded University Hall, the "Bethanie" sanatorium, then shipped by sea to Hong Kong for installation; and flanking the stone steps at the entrance are three "chimaera" sculptures — two large and one small — with "heads and noses like an elephant, bodies and tails like a qilin, and claws like a lion." Their composite features are precisely what earned them the name "四不像" (si bu xiang, literally "resembling none of the four"). That Sam So could rank alongside these two relics of blended European and local imagination as one of the "Treasures" says it all: in the residents' ordering of things, a person with warmth weighs no less than a piece of architectural history.

Sam So passed away peacefully at home in November 2017, aged 90. According to an article by 21st Century Business Herald^※, the then Vice-Chancellor and President, Peter Mathieson, issued a message of condolence, saying she "left a glorious legacy for HKU"; the report also noted a fact that had perhaps not been widely known — since HKU began conferring Honorary University Fellowships in 1995, the title awarded to Sam So in 2009 was the first ever given to a frontline worker. In other words, Sam So's fellowship was not merely a heartwarming tale; it was a rare departure from precedent in the history of HKU's honours system. Her image was later written into the "Hall History" session that new University Hall residents are required to take, and together with the rhyme "University Hall has three treasures — the spiral brass staircase, the chimaera sculptures and Sam So," it became the first lesson through which new residents come to know their hall during orientation week each year. Sam So may be gone, but the ordering and the singing of the "Three Treasures" have not stopped on that account.

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# II. The High Table Dinner: Green Gowns, Candlelight, and Hogwarts Vibes

If Sam So's story is the softest side of HKU's food culture, the High Table Dinner is its most ceremonial. A tradition inherited from the Oxford and Cambridge college system, it was transplanted into HKU's halls and developed its own local variant.

According to an experience blog^※ by an overseas exchange student who spent time at HKU, on the night of the dinner residents must first "go downstairs to retrieve their own green gown, symbolising undergraduate status," then make their way down flight after flight of stairs to the dining hall. Once there, the most striking spatial arrangement is that "everyone sits on either side of long rows of tables, while the most important figures sit at a raised table at the top of the room" — the exchange student likened the scene to the opening feast at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films: the masters seated on high to mark their status, the students below looking up. That evening a formal three-course dinner was served, and the whole event ran for several hours, centred on conversation and socialising.

University Hall was one of the earliest practitioners of the tradition. According to the Wikipedia account of University Hall^※, when the hall formally opened in 1956, the former chapel was converted into a dining hall and the cellar into a common room — the religious spaces of the Victorian building thus transformed into a place for students to dine together. The hall's early rules were strict: residents had to attend dinner in green gowns, and a formal High Table Dinner was held every Monday.

St. John's College, according to its official website^※, holds its High Table Dinner at 7:30 pm every Monday on the 3/F of the Leung Chi Ho Centre, blending "English collegiate traditions with Chinese cuisine" — the College frames the occasion as the exemplar of "East meets West," and after dinner hosts "High Table Talks," confidential closed-door discussions in which alumni and scholars address various topics, encouraging frank exchange between teachers and students, with no records kept and nothing made public.

According to the blog account^※ of another exchange student based in Hong Kong, some halls maintain their own formal attire — such as the "M Coat" of Morrison Hall — and typically hold three High Table Dinners per semester, the last of which farewells graduating students. The dinner usually opens with an address by the warden or head of hall, introducing the guests and the academic, sporting or co-curricular achievements of the students present. This scene — formal gowns, candlelight, and Chinese dishes served in an English ritual — is itself a microcosm of the entwining of Hong Kong's colonial higher-education history with local culture.

Where did the tradition first begin? According to the English Wikipedia entry "Accommodation at the University of Hong Kong"^※, the only hall of residence completed and available when HKU was founded in 1912 was St. John's Hall — the predecessor of today's St. John's College; the entry further states that "since its introduction in 1916, the hall has had a tradition of holding a weekly high table dinner," a practice gradually emulated by other halls. In other words, the High Table Dinner was not a ritual that each HKU hall developed independently, but one that spread from the single source of St. John's Hall to the whole University over the course of a full century. According to additional detail from the student-curated page for HKU common core course CCCH9051^※, St. John's College to this day maintains a weekly frequency, a rarity among the halls — most halls have narrowed the High Table Dinner to two or three highlight occasions per semester, whereas St. John's College stays closer to the original Oxbridge form of a fixed weekly ritual.

Different halls have developed their own variants of the framework. Lady Ho Tung Hall — HKU's only traditional all-female hall, established in 1951 with a donation from Sir Robert Ho Tung in memory of his late wife — alongside the High Table Dinner preserves two other traditions tied to dining and socialising: the "Superpass Dinner" (an orientation dinner for senior and new students to dine together) and a ritual activity known as the "Gong Fight," both markers of the hall's distinct identity. Ricci Hall is HKU's only Catholic men's hall, founded by the Jesuits in 1929; its High Table Dinner sits alongside inter-hall competitions, occasions the hall defines as strengthening a "Jesuit tradition of excellence and hospitality." This phenomenon — one institutional framework, each hall developing its own variant — exactly bears out the point that once the High Table Dinner spread out from St. John's Hall, it was not replicated as a single template, but re-endowed by every hall with its own character.

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# III. Late-Night Custard Buns: The "Campus Flavour" Extension Line in Kennedy Town

Beyond the formality of the High Table Dinner, HKU students' food memories run along a completely different track — late-night foraging. Campus canteens mostly close around ten in the evening, and it is the old-established tea houses and dessert shops of Kennedy Town and Shek Tong Tsui that catch the stomachs of these night-owl students.

According to several student food reviews and an HK01 guide for new students^※, Sun Hing (新興食家) is the most legendary stop on this late-night trail — located on Smithfield in Kennedy Town, it opens at three in the morning, is famed for its custard buns and crab-roe siu mai, and has more than 50 years of history. The custard buns are steamed to order, the molten egg-custard centre made with salted egg yolk and butter; quantities are limited and it is first come, first served, making them a "must-try for the photo" among HKU student circles. After late-night cramming, a final push before exams, or simply a long hall chat, a roomful of residents still in their pyjamas squeezes into Sun Hing to grab custard buns — this kind of unceremonious "campus flavour" is, in a sense, closer to students' real daily life than the formal ritual of the High Table Dinner.

This old shop's link with HKU has even drawn an official response from the University. Compiled from various restaurant reviews, Sun Hing has been in business since 1973 — over half a century — with fixed opening hours from three in the morning to four in the afternoon, all fifty-odd dim sum items made by hand, and a signature old-school trolley service: servers push trolleys laden with dim sum between the tables, and diners pick their dishes straight from the trolley — a method of service that is dying out in Hong Kong tea houses. Multiple reports also mention that local celebrities such as Chow Yun-fat are regulars, adding a touch of neighbourhood legend to this "students' late-night canteen."

According to a report by HK Economic Times TOPick^※, the late-night eateries of the Western District are by no means limited to Sun Hing alone — fried rice rolls, tong sui (sweet dessert soups), Taiwanese braised pork rice and more together form the backbone of the HKU student "supper map." What these late-night eateries share is operating hours that mesh tightly with the campus daily rhythm: most on-campus canteens close at nine or ten in the evening, and these old streetside shops happen to fill the gap in the small hours, becoming a rare place where students can still gather after "lights out in the halls." Beyond this late-night trail, the daytime food landscape on campus is equally diverse in its own way — the specifics of the coffee, vegetarian and halal options can be found in From the University Hall Kitchen to a Takeaway Coffee.

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# IV. Campus Self-Deprecation: "Hang U" and "The Queueing University"

In HKU's campus culture, food talk is often intertwined with students' self-deprecating nicknames for their own University. According to various round-ups of campus nicknames^※ (compiled informally; credibility is of forum-level low reliability), HKU is jokingly called "Hang U" (坑U) by students — a Cantonese homophone play on "HongKongU" carrying the complaining undertone of "hang" (坑, to rip off), used mainly to gripe about the crushing academic workload; there is also the plain "Pokfulam University," so called simply because the main campus occupies the Pokfulam area.

In recent years, as intake numbers have grown and foot traffic on campus has risen, HKU has picked up another jocular nickname — "Hong Kong Queueing University": queueing to exit the MTR station in the morning rush, queueing for library seats, queueing for canteen meals, queueing for the campus shuttle, and even queueing for the toilet. No authoritative source has traced the origins of these self-deprecating epithets one by one, but they circulate widely in student conversation — especially on social media and platforms like LIHKG — and are recorded here as an unverified, folkloric side of campus culture.

The frequency with which students complain about canteen queueing is not unconnected to the outsourcing system discussed in the previous two articles — the number of stalls is fixed, and peak dining is concentrated in a limited lunch and dinner window; when student numbers keep growing while stall capacity expands little, queueing is almost a structural constant of the outsourced fast-food model, not a management failure specific to any one canteen.

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# V. How the Colloquial Names Came About: "Chong Kee" and "Taikoo"

HKU students rarely call a canteen by its official full name; instead they improvise, abbreviating by building or floor. The logic behind these colloquial names is itself a living fossil of campus culture.

Compiled from various student food guides: the Chong Yuet Ming Amenities Centre Restaurant is abbreviated by students to "Chong Kee" (莊记) simply because it is located in the Chong Yuet Ming Amenities Centre — taking the first two characters and adding "kee," the suffix routinely used for shops in Hong Kong vernacular; the Fong Shu Chuen Amenities Centre Restaurant, run by the Fairwood group and situated on the third floor of "Taikoo House," is referred to by students simply as "Taikoo" — strictly speaking, "Taikoo" is neither an official venue name nor the brand of the group operating it, but purely a stand-in for the location; yet it is more common in students' mouths than the formal name. Such naming habits are cut from the same cloth as the "64 Restaurant" of an earlier article (so called because it sits on the fourth floor of the Haking Wong Building) — HKU students seem to prefer the most direct, most colloquial way of referring to the canteens around them over memorising long official names.

Beyond the three main canteens of the central campus, there is also a tiny but personable outpost hidden on the campus — compiled from informal sources, the Women Workers' Cooperative runs a small shop by the swimming pool selling egg waffles, noodles, congee and ma lai go (steamed sponge cake) among other traditional Hong Kong snacks. Though not part of the formal tendered stall system coordinated by CEDARS, such small shops run by grassroots women workers echo, in their mode of operation, the "Women Workers' Cooperative" of CUHK — an unassuming corner of HKU's food ecosystem that carries a different kind of labour story.

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# VI. The Three Faces of Food Memory

Placing Sam So's story, the ritual of the High Table Dinner, and the mortal tang of late-night custard buns side by side, the "campus flavour" of HKU reveals three faces that are entirely distinct yet mutually complementary:

1. Human warmth — Sam So proved, through four decades of soup, porridge and cleaning, that a canteen need not only be a place that serves food, but can also be a hub of emotional connection for a hall community; her Honorary Fellowship is a rare formal recognition by HKU of such "non-academic contribution."
2. Ritual — the High Table Dinner elevates "eating" into a formal social occasion with gowns and fixed seating, carrying the historical imprint of HKU's British colonial inheritance intertwined with Chinese dining culture.
3. Mortal tang — the custard buns and tong sui shops of Kennedy Town in the small hours are the unadorned, authentic extension of students' daily lives, filling the gap after the campus canteens close.

The three faces seem unrelated, yet together they form the part of "reading at HKU" that is hardest to quantify in credits, and that alumni, years after graduation, tend to remember first.

Related reading: An Overview of the Dining System, Contractors, Outsourcing, Price-Hike Disputes, Food Safety in Focus: Regulation and the Absence of Major Scandals, From the University Hall Kitchen to a Takeaway Coffee.

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