THROUGHOUT most of its half century of existence, the University of Hong Kong has had to live in an atmosphere of almost continuous international unrest. At the time of its birth the storm caused by the revolution in China had not abated, and when the distant disturbances caused by the First World War had died down, Hong Kong was swept by the cross-currents of the civil wars that raged on the mainland for years. Then came the disturbance due to Japan’s invasion of China, culminating in the attack on the Colony in 1941 with the Japanese entry into the Second...

The whole subsequent channel of my life was altered by a cable in July 1940 which I received shortly after I had handed in to the University of London a PhD thesis that involved, among many other things, the seventeenth-century English Civil War. It had been completed under severe difficulties, while Hitler’s panzer divisions crashed their uncivil way into one country after another, almost within earshot, beyond Britain’s insulating seas. The cable was from the University of Hong Kong, offering me a three-year lectureship in English, conditional upon my joining the Hong Kong Volunteers. Both the chance to teach once...

In December 1941 I was a student in my final year at the University of Hong Kong, preparing for the mid-sessional examinations, and eagerly looking forward to receiving my BA degree in Education the following June. However, as fate would have it, my own education was suddenly disrupted by the Japanese attack on Hong Kong, an event that dramatically changed my life, which until then had been a happy one.

At the time, I was living with my parents and three sisters in an apartment on Tin Hau Temple Road, on the side of a hill in Causeway Bay. One...

Entering the Arts Faculty of the University of Hong Kong as a Government Scholar from Jesuit-run Wah Yan College was for me a somewhat unnerving experience. When I turned up for the first of my lectures, I was overwhelmed by the sight of nearly twenty pretty young ladies already seated in the lecture room, chatting, joking, laughing, and creating almost a minor disturbance. There were of course many male occupants in the room too, but in the company of the flamboyant members of the fair sex, their presence became barely noticeable. As I looked for an obscure corner in which...

In control of Manchuria from 1933, Japan intensified its effort to increase its influence in China and establish what it saw as a protectorate. On the pretext of a chance exchange of shots between a Chinese garrison at the Marco Polo Bridge near Peking and a Japanese force engaged in manoeuvres in July 1937, the Japanese marched into Peking and war broke out.

Then began an exodus of people and officials in flight before the Japanese advance west and north. In November they took flight from Shanghai, in December from Nanking. The Chinese high command moved west, first to Hankow...

I count it a special privilege to have the honour of being invited to deliver the First Daphne W. C. Chun Lecture. My first meeting with Emeritus Professor Daphne Chun was some 35 years ago, when I arrived in Hong Kong from war-torn North China to take the Chair of Obstetrics and Gynaecology in this University. At that time she was just reaching the end of her student days and her one aim was to specialize in Obstetrics and Gynaecology, a goal which she has achieved, as we well know, with the highest degree of success.

My dictionary defines an...

I entered the Arts Faculty of the University of Hong Kong in September 1936 full of enthusiasm and keen anticipation. My elder sister had gone to Yenching University in Peking and had brought back tales of learned and caring professors and the pleasant social life of the campus. From my own general reading of English literature I had gathered a picture of university life in which there were both a meeting and a clashing of minds, with freedom of speech and honest opinions openly arrived at among teaching staff and students. Imagine then my deep disappointment at discovering that this...

As a Faculty of Science student from Kuala Lumpur entering the university in 1938, I was enrolled in the requisite courses of Biology, Chemistry, Physics and English. English and Biology posed no problems for me, Chemistry was somewhat of a challenge, but Physics struck fear in my non-mathematical brain. My favourite subject was Biology. Taught by Dr G.A.C. Herklots, a distinguished botanist and dynamic lecturer full of enthusiasm, his classes were eagerly awaited. Laboratory sessions were interesting and fun, supervised by Demonstrator Mr Ng Ching Sum who was later joined by Dr S. Hsu. I spent many happy and rewarding...

I joined the University of Hong Kong in September 1938, feeling a little out of place among my fellow students, as I came from a school which was off the mainstream of the prestigious government and aided schools and mission schools. Munsang College was a small, young, private school situated in a remote part of the colony, in the newly developed community of Kowloon City, next to the Kai Tak aerodrome by the sea, beneath the Lion Mountain. My father was the founding principal who insisted on giving us first a strong grounding in the Chinese language, including Mandarin, and...

When I first joined the university in September, 1937, it was a small school with about 600 students. There was no Faculty of Science but Chemistry and Physics were taught in the Faculty of Arts, Mathematics in Engineering and Biology in Medicine. Thus, a sort of protofaculty of Science was already in place. Having always wanted to specialize in Chemistry, I was advised to enroll in the Faculty of Arts in a programme designed for the training of future science teachers for the secondary schools in Hong Kong. The subjects required in the first and second years were English, Chemistry,...

The attack on and the capture of Hong Kong in December 1941 came a few months after I had graduated from the University of Hong Kong and started teaching in Queen’s College. Like many others, I found myself in a quandary as to what I should do next. During the siege, we had been told on the radio that Chinese armies were coming to our aid and would drive off the Japanese, but in the ensuing weeks it became obvious that such a happy event would not materialize. With no home and no income or prospect of income in Hong...

I was born in Swatow but my parents moved to Hong Kong when I was a year old. Thus I grew up in Hong Kong and received all my elementary and middle school education there. When I was at King’s College, my father became involved in business overseas in Singapore and Indochina and my mother and two younger brothers moved back to Swatow. An elder sister and I remained in Hong Kong with an uncle and the two of us led a pretty independent life. In the spring of 1937 I was fortunate to pass my Hong Kong University matriculation...

The University of Hong Kong alumni share a common bond in their admiration of, and respect for, their alma mater, which has helped shape their lives for useful work as graduates in Hong Kong, China, and throughout the world. The university is in our blood. Pre-war Hong Kong University was particularly alive and flourishing, attracting many young men and women from China, Shanghai especially, and from Singapore, Malaya and other south-east centres of population and wealth.

I had my first awe-struck glimpses of the campus when my brother Donald Anderson enrolled as an undergraduate in the Faculty of Arts in...

Chapter Six of The First Fifty Years was written by Sir Lindsay Ride, then Professor of Physiology. It was entitled ‘The Test of War’ and dealt generally with the impact on the University of the disaster which struck Hong Kong when the Japanese invaded and conquered the colony in December, 1941. It also tells of the manner in which the University was able, albeit in times of adversity, to go some way towards fulfilling the high ambitions of service to China which had been so cherished many years earlier by Lord Lugard, ambitions which had largely been frustrated.

Sir Lindsay’s...

After the surrender, on 29 December some 2000 POWs marched via Shaukiwan to North Point camp on the island. There I managed to acquire, from books brought in from a neighbouring school and the Hong Kong Electric Club, a Complete Works of Shakespeare in 1312 pages of cramped print: I later resolved to read it through five times while a POW, and to memorize long passages. I still have that volume as a memento. I also found a copy of the celebrated verse anthology, Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, for use in giving lectures in English Literature, and some blank exercise books...

I was born in Russia in 1916. Following emigration to China with my family I went to an English school in Shanghai in 1932/3, sat examinations for entry to the University of Hong Kong, and embarked on medical studies there in January 1934, at the age of 17. During my six-year medical course, I lived in a university hostel (Lugard Hall); of the summer vacations, the first three (1934–1936) I spent with my family either in Harbin or in Shanghai. It was in my final year, when I was three months short of graduating, that the war began in...

Born in Hong Kong on 5 November 1911 to Luiz Gonzaga Rodrigues and Giovannina Remedios, I was unfortunately orphaned at the age of nine when my father died. My mother had succumbed to puerpural fever a few weeks after my birth. So my subsequent family life was with one of my uncles, who had seven children and lived near the Racecourse in Happy Valley. One of my happy memories as a young boy was swimming in the natural pool nearby from which Blue Pool Road got its name. Another less pleasant recollection was that of seeing the fire at the...

The Christmas of 1942 was approaching and in Sham Shui Po Camp many prisoners were sick with beri-beri and pellagra which were the scourge of long-standing malnutrition and lack of vitamins. In my free time from forced labour and other work, I often visited my sick friends and acquaintances at the main hospital. It has to be pointed out that those prisoners sick with pellagra were often out of their minds prior to death and could not account for their behaviour. To look at these suffering people and know that you could not help them was just unbearable.

An incident...

I was born in Russia in 1915, leaving with my family when I was about five years old. I spent my youth in Harbin, Manchuria, North China, graduating from the Russian/American YMCA School in 1932 when I left for Hong Kong to enroll in the matriculation class of the Diocesan Boys’ School, taking my London Matriculation Examination at the University of Hong Kong a year later. Two years of study at the university followed, where I was a student of Economics in the Arts Faculty. The changing political situation in North China with the occupation of Manchuria by the Japanese,...

What started all this was a letter from the University of Illinois popping through my door on a hot July morning in 1995, at my home in Lewes in England reminding me of the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the liberation of Hong Kong taking place in September. My name was on a Volunteers’ list and would I be going? asked Clifford Matthews, recalling that we had been students together many years ago at the University of Hong Kong.

Later, after we met at Robert Black College where we were staying during the celebrations, he asked me if I’d contribute a...

My student days at the University of Hong Kong began in 1938 with two events, quite ordinary in themselves, that I now see established the pattern of my whole subsequent life. The first of these — registration — started me off on my career as a student and teacher of science with a deep interest in the humanities, while the second — the Vice-Chancellor’s welcoming speech to all newcomers — invited us not only to study hard but to seize the opportunity to read widely and to socialize broadly. I liked the warmth and accessibility of Duncan Sloss, our Vice-Chancellor,...

When the Second World War broke out in Europe in 1939, it did little to disrupt Hong Kong’s normal routine, but after the Allied retreat from Dunkirk in May 1940, the realization came that if, or rather when, trouble reached the colony no help from Britain could be expected.

Preparations against such an emergency, begun in a somewhat desultory fashion after the Munich crisis and the fall of Canton in 1938, assumed a more urgent note. Four regiments of regular troops were stationed in the colony but many of its residents, eager to help in the defence of their home...

Long before the threat of the Japanese invader many of our graduates had taken up post, temporary or permanent, in China to help her become a modern nation. The first product of Hong Kong higher education to serve modern China was of course Sun Yat-sen himself. The next graduate of the Hong Kong College of Medicine to serve with distinction in China was Dr Li Shu-fan, who was from 1923 to 1924 dean of the Medical Faculty in the Canton Kung Yee University Medical School and later Minister of Public Health in Sun Yat-sen’s cabinet.

From 1930 to 1932 Dr...

Born in 1921 and educated in Hong Kong so that I speak both English and Cantonese, I joined the Medical Faculty of the University of Hong Kong in September 1938, and soon after enrolled in the Field Ambulance of the Hong Kong Volunteer Defence Corps (‘the Volunteers’), a unit commanded by Colonel L. T. Ride, who was also the professor of physiology at the University of Hong Kong.

We were mobilized on 8 December 1941, a few hours after the Japanese embarked on an invasion across the border into the New Territories. A few days later I was commissioned as...

My father as head of the family was probably the one hardest hit by the outbreak of war. The almost complete destruction of the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour followed by the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse off the Malayan (now Malaysian) coast must have convinced him, and, indeed, even the most optimistic believer in the Allied cause, that the war with Japan was going to last a long time, and that there would be no immediate foreseeable relief for the people of Hong Kong. News broadcasts over the radio seemed to report little else...

In August 1942 my family ran out of money. In Hong Kong my father, who had worked for Shell since he graduated from the university, found himself out of a job. As for money in the bank, the Japanese allowed withdrawals of one quarter of deposits. Matters were made worse by a 50% devaluation of the Hong Kong dollar, and later by another 25%, leading to a rate of four dollars to one military yen. My father decided we should leave Hong Kong for Kwang Chow Wan, where Shell had an agent whom he thought would help us.

We had...

The editors of this compendium have stretched their guidelines a bit in order to let me write a piece for them about my wartime life and meetings with students and graduates of the University of Hong Kong, and its teachers and prospective teachers, during the war in China. I had no qualifying connection at the time — not long out of Oxford, a raw young man faced with a global war — but was fortunate enough to join its staff in 1946 and its prestigious list of honorary graduates in 1974. So I seem more or less qualified, though in...

At the conclusion of his chapter entitled ‘The Test of War’ in The University of Hong Kong — the First Fifty Years, Sir Lindsay Ride wrote that the phoenix had arisen from the ashes, and the University was no longer at war. In thus expressing his feelings, one wonders whether he was aware that, in China, the phoenix is seen as a symbol of longevity and prosperity.

Be that as it may, but neither Hong Kong nor the University could ever be the same again — not merely because of the traumatic aftermath of physical destruction, the incalculable change wrought...

On 8 December 1941, the medical and health services in Hong Kong were thrown into disarray. It was the beginning of the winter holidays and at 8 a.m. Japanese war planes could be clearly seen bombing Kai Tak Airport. Queen Mary Hospital, the main hospital for the general public, was not adequate to take in all the expected casualties. The Great Hall of the University of Hong Kong was therefore pressed into service. Even this was not considered to be sufficient and a university hostel, Eliot Hall, as well as the Tang Chi Ngong School of Chinese were quickly converted...

Less than two months after the fall of Hong Kong to the Japanese, a letter appeared in the newspaper which served as one of the principal mouthpieces for the occupying forces ‘to express the common wish that the Hongkong University may be re-opened.’ The University was described as ‘the most gentle and civilized place in Hong Kong’, and the writers, signing themselves ‘Undergraduates’, queried somewhat plaintively, and perhaps naively, ‘What harm is there teaching English, Japanese and Chinese together, when the languages are not concerned with politics?’¹ A few days later, the newspaper responded with an editorial on ‘The University’....

On the 6th August 1945 the Americans dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima; two days later Russia entered the Far Eastern war against Japan and the Americans dropped another bomb on Nagasaki. After the interval of shock and the counting of dead and dying, the Japanese capitulated on the 14th August. The University began reassembling immediately, from internment and prisoner-of-war camps, and from China.

Duncan Sloss made for Pokfulam forthwith to take preliminary stock of the situation. However prepared he was for the sight, his impression mush have been one of desolation as he toured the looted buildings, except certainly...