Sir Frederick Lugard, one of Britain’s most distinguished builders of paternal Empire, was serving in Hong Kong as its Governor and Commander of British Forces at a time when the Chinese Empire, confronted with the growing strength of revolutionaries conspiring to topple the Manchu Dynasty and replace it with a Republic, was in its death throes. High on the revolutionary agenda was the extensive reform of education, to be organized round the western science syllabus.

Lugard’s response was to found a secular, technological, English-language university, sited in Hong Kong but intended chiefly for students from the mainland, and in so...

In the October 1910 issue of the journal The Nineteenth Century and After, Sir Frederick Lugard published an article he had composed during his absence from Hong Kong on mid-term leave, while relieved of the immediate worries of office. It is as much an account of the ‘tendencies and forces’, as he called the considerations which shaped the public business of the colony generally at the time, as it is of its particular subject, ‘The Hong Kong University’. The founding of the University was his most satisfying achievement in what was a long and very distinguished career. From time to...

The son of missionaries in India, Frederick Lugard enjoyed a stable, enlightened early life. He developed ambition, firm moral principles within a framework of agnosticism, and the abiding belief that serving the Empire was the sole destiny possible to him. His service during the first half of his working life was that of a soldier in Africa, employed first by the British East Africa Company, and then in West Africa by the Royal Niger Company, a chartered company in which his civil connection was with the Foreign Office. His concern in Nigeria was the unifying of a vast, primitive country,...

The Lugards travelled out in the summer of 1907 across Canada to Vancouver, where they embarked for Japan, to spend a few days of peaceful preparation before leaving on the last leg for Hong Kong. The voyage enchanted Flora, with the excitement of a long journey in the company of her husband, the promise of new experiences together, and a long-sought finish to their separations. The alarm he felt, however, from the moment he set out for his future in Hong Kong, was not quelled by the official receptions at each stage of their journey. As they approached port, he...

While Lugard was on his way out to Hong Kong, Sir Charles Eliot, who five years later would take up office as founding Vice-Chancellor of Lugard’s new university, was touring China. In his Letters from the Far East (1907), he made observations on the new learning and the reform of education. ‘There is great talk in China at present of reforms’, he noted, and continued:

Boards and Commissioners are appointed to study foreign constitutions, armies, and systems of education. Every one is reporting on something or other … a conviction is spreading, or has spread, all over China that the...

‘The proof of China’s desire for Western knowledge’, said Lugard, ‘is found in the increasing number of young men who leave their homes to study in Europe, America, and Japan, and in the increasing number of institutions based on Western models which are springing up in China itself.’ And Eliot noted that an interesting feature in the educational movement was that about 13,000 Chinese students were being trained in Japan, partly at the expense of the Chinese government. Compared with this student army, the numbers in America and Europe were few. The movement had started earlier, in a very small...

During the five years of Lugard’s administration, the population of Hong Kong rose from about 355,000 to about 485,000. Less than 12 per cent were children aged from 5 to 15, and of these one in nine attended the classes of the seventy government and grant-aided schools; private Chinese institutions, mostly of low standard, accounted for the rest of those who were at school.¹ Most of the local Chinese population was thus more mobile than were the other national groups, for whom going home meant much longer and far less frequent journeys.

The unusual paucity of children, and of young...

Among Lugard’s duties was the occasional distribution of prizes in the schools, for which he was at particular pains to prepare good and relevant speeches, and at which he sometimes acted as Flora’s stand-in when she was too ill to take part. Flora had recovered sufficiently by 17 January to sit at his side that morning in 1908 during the first of these ceremonies at St Stephen’s College, when he and the newly installed Anglican Bishop both spoke.

Bishop Lander struck the first chord with hopes that the school might be affiliated with one of the universities and scholarships offered...

The members of the General Committee assembled at Government House on 29 October for a second meeting. The report of Chater’s sub-committee was before them and Lugard spoke at length on the main question raised in it: if it would be practicable to embark on the enterprise within the means expected to be available for it. He found it all so absorbing. ‘I have never before in my life had anything to do with education’, he wrote to Edward later, ‘and as a new subject it interests me immensely.’

Keswick had left Hong Kong. Bateson Wright had been back from...

The day before its third meeting, May offered the Committee some eighteen new resolutions broadly based on those presented by Lugard at the second meeting, with notes on each. He explained that there were four parties to be considered: Mody, the College of Medicine, subscribers to the endowment fund, and the government representing the taxpayers. His resolutions were designed to set out categorically the proposals as they touched the interests of each. He believed an adequate endowment to be essential and that Hong Kong should not commit itself to a university before there were enough funds and foresaw difficulty if...

New Year’s Day also carried the Fatshan affair to a violent crisis. The ferry was in, tied up at the company’s wharf at Canton with a head of steam, waiting for passengers to board. It had been no hard task to organize a demonstration at the wharfside; the pier was the property of an unwanted foreigner; the Cantonese were quarrelsome, the weather was dry and cool; the wharves teemed with life, with men ready to welcome any chance to relieve the daily tedium: longshoremen pulling trucks and trolleys, fetching and carrying merchandise to and from godowns and ships’ holds and...

Taotai Wu Kwang-yen called on Fox with an oral message for Lugard from the Viceroy, who was gratified that Lugard, alive to the danger of students in a university acquiring revolutionary ideas, would see to it that ‘no pernicious doctrines were encouraged or tolerated’ among them. He had chanced to notice, however, the names of two men, Kwan Sum-yin and Chan Siu-pak, among the members of the sub-committee, both reputed to be active participants in the revolutionary propaganda led by Dr Sun Yat-sen, a fact of which he knew Lugard could hardly be aware. Identifying Dr Kwan Sum-yin under his...

LUGARD: Some little time ago an article appeared in the North China Daily News in which it was stated that, by the courtesy of Lord William Cecil, the editor was able to publish the broad outlines of the scheme for a university of which he is a prominent advocate. The article contains a fair summary of a pamphlet marked ‘Draft scheme. For private circulation only’, a copy of which is before me. I have reproduced it below, and although its broad outlines have appeared in the public press I have, in view of the superscription it bears, headed this memorandum...

Scott was back in London soon after the China Association’s annual meeting. In his talks with Lugard as he passed through Hong Kong on the way home, it was suggested that a home committee should be formed. Scott’s account of an earlier experience, however, discouraged Lugard. ‘A Similar committee (I forget for what purpose) had failed miserably. He was then asked to take it in hand and collected (I think double) the sum required in a fortnight. He seemed to think it best to let him privately approach the wealthy men first, so I agreed, but that is no reason...

Tthe disorder created by the incident on board the Fatshan, Lugard believed, was now over. His impression was that Swire’s had at last settled on compensation for the family of the dead man ‘with the concurrence and cooperation of the Consul, and that the Boycott, whether of Messrs Butterfield and Swire or of Japan was rapidly being forgotten, and trade assuming its normal course.’ Even Law believed his troubles had subsided. Both had written of their relief to Scott in April. ‘I truly think we have left the dark ages behind us’, Law wrote. The large sum of the Swire...

Progress was made in the planning of the university buildings. ‘Protracted discussions and revisions’ took place in several meetings between the sub-committee and Mody’s supervising architect, Bryer; Lugard looked over the plans with Bryer and May ‘with a view to securing every possible foot of space for further extensions in the future’, and Mody offered his final agreement to them. Lugard worked tirelessly and to what appears to have been a strict timetable. With the endowment fund well on course at over $1,170,000, Mody had also agreed to raise his donation to $285,000, or however much above that might be...

Lugard thought the ceremony had gone off very well indeed. His speech had been delivered without notes ‘before an immense audience’ of nearly two thousand dignitaries. ‘I did my best’, he considered. The ordeal over, he relaxed at Government House and wrote all about it to Flora, sending her a copy of the speeches. ‘You will like dear old Mody’s reference to you,’ he said, ‘he almost worships you, dear old man — when he read that part in a voice of feeling and an almost reverential tone, there was great applause … I am in great spirits tonight. Physically...

The Court and Council were constituted and started regular meetings when Lugard had signed the first version of the University Ordinance. Their first meetings were held half an hour apart on the same afternoon at the end of April 1911. Some appointments were made: the members of a Finance Committee; solicitors, bankers, surveyors, and a corresponding committee in England composed of Sir Thomas Jackson, the founder of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank, Scott, Miers of London University, Cantlie, and Gershom Stewart, MP, who had been in business in Hong Kong, and twelve others;¹ and Irving was confirmed as temporary Registrar....

The opening took place just after lunch in good weather on 11 March 1912, after a weekend of furious, last-minute flurry. The local press spoke of the event as ‘one in which the entire community and in which many in the neighbouring country have taken the deepest interest, an interest which was manifested not only by the large representation of the European and Chinese residents at the ceremony itself, but by the thousands who gathered in the vicinity and who lined the approaches to the new seat of learning.’

The ceremony was to be in the Great Hall of the...

Plans for a congress of all the universities of the empire had been laid at the instigation of the University of London in 1909. The first of the assemblies, which were to be among the most enduring features of the Commonwealth, was held there in July 1912. The delegates arranged for a central bureau of information to be set up in London and for further congresses, convened at intervals of five years, to take place within universities, alternately in Britain and overseas. The only interruptions of this pattern have been during the two world wars. First incorporated as the Universities...