Donor-Named Buildings Archive: PolyU's Named Towers, Building by Building, and Their Naming Ceremonies

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) comprehensive information database · 05 Campus module

The Hung Hom campus of PolyU and its outlying sites now count more than thirteen buildings named after donors. Leading the roster is the Li Ka Shing Tower (Block M), completed in 2001, whose naming followed a HK$100 million gift from the Li Ka Shing FoundationHK$100 million^※ in 2000 — the largest personal donation the institution had received since its founding. Walk the campus today and you are traversing a living "charity map of Hong Kong". This article goes through each named building by year of completion, setting out donation amounts, naming ceremonies and the donors' stories. For the buildings' architectural features and the block-letter system, see〈Signature Buildings and Landmarks〉; this piece keeps its focus on the donation story rather than the architecture.

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# 一、How the Li Ka Shing Tower came to be

On 1 June 2000^※, the Li Ka Shing Foundation presented PolyU with a gift of HK$100 million. The University announced it as "the largest personal contribution ever received by PolyU since its inception". The Council resolved immediately to name the tallest building then under construction the Li Ka Shing Tower, in recognition of the donation and of Mr Li's contribution to higher education in Hong Kong.

Li Ka-shing himself came to campus to present the cheque. According to**the Foundation's record^※**, he remarked: 「理大具有清晰的目标——培养能将知识付诸实践的专业人才……我热爱香港，衷心希望能为香港教育的进一步发展作出贡献。」 ("PolyU has a clear mission — to nurture professionals who can put knowledge into practice… I love Hong Kong and sincerely hope to contribute to the further development of its education.") The remark chimes neatly with PolyU's applied, practice-led identity, and it also captures the enduring logic of business donations to Hong Kong universities: what matters is practical talent, not abstract scholarship.

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# 二、What kind of building is the Li Ka Shing Tower?

The Tower was formally named on 19 September 2001^※. Designed by Wong Tung Group, it has a gross floor area of approximately 25,000 square metres according to**Wong Tung's project page^※** — a 19-storey main tower plus a two-storey podium; Chinese Wikipedia^※ gives a net floor area of around 22,500 square metres and its block letter as M. The design concept is "three geometric volumes interlocking"; the exterior is banded with pink brick cladding in deference to the campus red-brick tradition, and the drum-shaped crown makes it the highest point on campus. The building was the centrepiece of PolyU's Phase 6 campus development plan, housing student computing facilities, classrooms, lecture theatres, administrative offices and the Senate Chamber — physically and institutionally the heart of the University.

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# 三、Which other campus buildings carry donors' names?

The Li Ka Shing Tower is not an isolated case. Since the 1970s, PolyU's Hung Hom campus has named buildings after business leaders and charitable institutions in a steady succession, forming a "donor-naming system" now half a century old. The principal named buildings, listed by year of completion:

Table notes: "Year of completion" and "year of naming" sometimes differ (the Pao Yue-kong Library building was finished in 1976 but only named for Sir Yue-kong in 1995). "No public figure" means the sources traceable so far do not state an amount — not that no donation was made. Block letters follow PolyU's official campus map; some buildings (such as the Ho Iu Kwong Building) are still commonly called by their old names ("Block W / Industrial Centre") even after naming. The Mr and Mrs Chan Chak Fu Building stands in East Tsim Sha Tsui, outside the Hung Hom block-letter system, hence no letter.

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# 四、Who were the people behind the names?

Reassembled, the names in that table sketch a post-war history of Hong Kong commerce. Sir Run Run Shaw (1907–2014) was the driving force behind Shaw Brothers Studio and TVB; in later life his Run Run Shaw Foundation supported more than a thousand educational institutions in Hong Kong and mainland China, of which PolyU's VA and VS blocks are one small part. Sir Yue-kong Pao (1918–1991), the "world king of shipping", spread the wealth of his World-Wide Shipping Group across Hong Kong's public causes; the University's library was formally named for him on 20 December 1995^※, after his death.

Lee Shau Kee (b. 1928) founded Henderson Land Development. According to a South China Morning Post report of 2006^※, his HK$45 million gift, doubled by government matching funds to roughly HK$90 million, went toward the 14-storey Lee Shau Kee Building (Block Y) at the campus's north-eastern corner. Ho Iu Kwong (1906–1997) founded the Fook Lee Group and was a noted collector of paintings and calligraphy; PolyU named Block W and the adjoining square for him, with the ceremony on 14 October 2014^※ jointly unveiling the memorial attended by his eldest son Ho Sai-chu and the other eight siblings. The Hong Kong Jockey Club is the University's most important institutional donor, lending its name first to the Jockey Club Auditorium (2000) and then to the Jockey Club Innovation Tower (2014; for a deep reading of its design, see〈The Jockey Club Innovation Tower〉) — the latter a single HK$249 million^※ gift that remains among the largest institutional donations PolyU has ever received.

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# 五、Which named buildings are less often mentioned?

Beyond the main roster above, three buildings tend to drop out of the simplified retelling — each representing a distinct route of giving: the industry association, the individual industrialist, and the multi-generational family.

The CMA Building is the deepest-rooted link between PolyU and a commercial body. According to the official release carried by Asia Research News^※, the Chinese Manufacturers' Association had already given HK$1 million toward the Hung Hom campus when it was first planned for the University's predecessor, the Hong Kong Technical College. Then on 25 February 2014 the Association gave a further HK$30 million for whole-person development programmes for students, and PolyU in return named an eight-storey teaching block — roughly 5,500 square metres of classrooms, laboratories and departmental offices — the CMA Building. The naming ceremony was jointly officiated by Eddie Ng Hak-kim, then Secretary for Education; Shih Wing-ching, the CMA's 39th-term president; Pan Sancheng, PolyU Treasurer and Chairman of its Fund-Raising Committee; Chung Chi-ping, Council Chairman; and President Timothy Tong. That early HK$1 million record pushes the starting point of commercial giving to PolyU back decades — before the 1994 university title, before even the Polytechnic's formal establishment in 1972. See section 九 below for the correction to the convenient narrative that PolyU "relied mainly on government funding and only courted business after elevation".

The Yip Kit Chuen Building (Block U) is a second case of the individual industrialist. Yip Kit Chuen founded the home-appliance maker GEW Group and chairs Shanghai General Electric (Group) Co.; he is a native of Ningbo. In 2008^※ he gave more than HK$30 million for PolyU's long-term development and had a teaching building named for him; he was also the top sponsor of the University's 2007 "One Heart, One Million" charity flag day, which entered the Guinness World Records, and has funded schools and scholarships in his hometown of Ningbo. On 11 November 2024^※ PolyU carried the gesture one level down, naming classroom U208 inside the same building the "Yip Yuen Yuk Hing Classroom" in gratitude to Mr and Mrs Yip's sustained support over the years — the same donor, the same building, progressing over sixteen years from "naming an entire tower" to "naming a single room". It is a concrete specimen of the "naming granularity" trend examined in section 八.

The Mr and Mrs Chan Chak Fu Building is the only named building outside the main Hung Hom campus. It stands at 17 Science Museum Road in East Tsim Sha Tsui — the separate premises of the School of Hotel and Tourism Management (SHTM), about 6,400 square metres accommodating some 3,000 students. On 15 December 2017^※ PolyU named the premises for the late Mr Chan Chak Fu and his wife Mrs Chan Wong Chi-lan, in thanks for the family's long contribution to PolyU's hotel and tourism education. As the companion piece〈The Li Ka Shing Tower and the Economics of Naming: donation metrics, government matching and the post-war business giving network〉recounts, the Chan family's ties to SHTM reach back to the 1980s; the next generation took over the family foundation and carried the relationship forward to the Seal of Love Foundation Building named in 2023 — thirty-plus years of across-the-generations companion giving that says more about "donor relationships" than "donor transactions" ever could.

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# 六、What exactly does "largest personal donation since inception" mean?

The adjective "personal" deserves scrutiny. The metric: both PolyU and the Li Ka Shing Foundation use the phrase "personal donation". The Jockey Club's HK$249 million (pledged in 2011) is larger, but it is an institutional gift and sits in a different comparison class. The benchmark date: the record is set against 2000, the year of the donation; whether PolyU has since received a larger personal gift is not recorded in any public source. With those two qualifications, the "largest personal donation since inception" claim is accurate within its own terms.

President Poon Chung-kwong said at the**naming ceremony^※**: 「在全球化经济加速之际，人才需求已成为国际性议题……像李博士这样富有远见的社区领袖给予我们巨大鼓舞。」 ("As the global economy accelerates, the demand for talent has become an international issue… visionary community leaders like Dr Li give us immense encouragement.") The remark ties the naming directly to a talent strategy: a naming ceremony is not mere protocol but a public pledge binding donor and university mission together.

That title met a challenger of equal scale in 2021, when engineer Otto Poon Lok-to gave the same HK$100 million through the Otto Poon Charitable Foundation, endowing two research institutes in his name. Official phrasing subsequently softened to describe the gift as "the largest personal donation in the past decade" — a different time window that sits alongside the Li Ka Shing Tower's title without contradiction. The full mechanics of how that title was re-framed, and how a single donation gets "doubled" into a building through the government matching grant scheme, are set out in the companion piece〈The Li Ka Shing Tower and the Economics of Naming〉; this article does not repeat them.

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# 七、How do the twin systems — block letters and donor names — work together?

PolyU runs two parallel naming systems. The first is the functional letter code: buildings are numbered A to Z (skipping I, K and O), and staff and students navigate by block letter in daily life. The second is the honorific donor name: it appears in official communications and on building plaques. The two are not mutually exclusive — the Li Ka Shing Tower is also "Block M", the Pao Yue-kong Library also "Block L", the Jockey Club Innovation Tower also "Block V". Undergraduates typically navigate by letter and introduce buildings to outsiders by donor name; each system does its own job in campus culture.

One outlier worth mentioning is the Chiang Chen Studio Theatre: Chiang Chen (1923–2022) founded Chen Hsong Holdings, and his Chiang Chen Industrial Charity Foundation has long funded industrial talent training at PolyU. The theatre named for him, tucked into the ground floor of the Chung Sze Yuen Building, seats 247. A space rooted in "industrial charity" rather than the usual property or shipping dynasties, it is an unusual entry in PolyU's naming landscape.

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# 八、How has naming changed since the 2000s?

Entering the 2020s, PolyU's building naming shows three new trends, each operating at a finer grain than the last. The first: naming targets have extended from "whole buildings" to "research institutes". The Otto Poon Charitable Foundation donated HK$100 million^※ in 2021 to name the Research Institute for Sustainable Urban Development (RISUD) — a gift on the scale of the Li Ka Shing Tower's, but applied to a research entity rather than a physical building (for other institute namings, see the "Research institutes and special named spaces" section of〈Signature Buildings and Landmarks〉). The second trend: the purpose of giving has shifted toward services. The Seal of Love Foundation Building (Block BC), named in December 2023, came with a HK$45 million^※ gift from the Seal of Love Charitable Foundation (the Lawrence Chan family) to endow a Health and Service Impact Fund whose first project is a five-year programme of mental-health training for university students — the donation's purpose moving from "hardware" to "services".

The third trend pushes the naming unit down to "student life spaces" and even "single classrooms". On 11 October 2023^※ PolyU named a campus leisure space of over 420 square metres, seating more than 200, the "Wong Man and Tang Kit Wah Global Student Hub" — a gift from Mr Wong King, an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Construction and Environment, and his family, honouring his late parents. The named object here is not a teaching or research space but a place where students hang out day to day. By 11 November 2024^※ the granularity had shrunk to a single classroom: U208 in the Yip Kit Chuen Building became the "Yip Yuen Yuk Hing Classroom" (see section 五 above). Taken together, the three trends trace a clear arc in PolyU's naming history: building → research institute → student space → single classroom. The sums involved may not be shrinking year by year, but the physical and institutional units the University can put a name to are being carved ever finer — a reflection of the structural reality that the main campus has run out of land and large-scale new construction is nearing its end.

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# 九、What do named buildings do for PolyU's public image?

PolyU's predecessors — the Government Trade School (1937) and the Hong Kong Polytechnic (1972) — relied chiefly on government funding, but commercial giving actually arrived earlier than that. As the Asia Research News release cited in section 五 records, the Chinese Manufacturers' Association donated HK$1 million to help build the Hung Hom campus while it was still being planned for the Hong Kong Technical College — before the Polytechnic's formal establishment in 1972, and well before elevation to university status in 1994. "Government-funded for most of its history, with business giving arriving only after elevation" is a convenient simplification; the CMA's six-figure cheque reminds us that commercial philanthropy reached PolyU's forebears decades earlier. What is true is that after 1994 the University pursued corporate partnerships far more energetically, and building naming was the most visible fruit of that strategy. The Li Ka Shing Tower, the Lee Shau Kee Building and the Jockey Club Innovation Tower cluster in the 2001–2014 window — precisely the years of PolyU's rapid climb in international rankings and its last great campus expansion. Large donations in exchange for naming rights raise money for the University while conferring a durable public honour on the donor — a reciprocal bargain that has made the PolyU campus a physical archive of Hong Kong's post-war commercial philanthropy. For the funding sources, matching mechanisms and PolyU's overall fundraising strategy, see〈08-finances · Directory of Benefactors and Donors〉 and〈The Other Face of Giving at PolyU: how donations reach students〉; this article deliberately leaves the financial detail to those pages and follows the single physical thread: how a donation becomes a building you walk into for class.

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# 十、From donation cheque to door plaque: the common ritual of naming ceremonies

Read through the ceremonies above and a remarkably fixed pattern emerges: donation agreement → construction or identification of the building → naming ceremony → plaque unveiling. Almost every ceremony contains the same three elements — the University's vote of thanks (usually invoking what the gift means for students and the discipline), remarks by the donor or family representative, and the unveiling itself (ribbon-cutting, curtain-pull, or a button that lights up the plaque). The Ho Iu Kwong Building was unveiled by all eight of the founder's children; at the Li Ka Shing Tower the President quoted the donor's own words. Both are instances of the same rite: a naming is not so much a one-off administrative decision as the ceremonial signing of a public "social contract" between the University and its donor.

The matching of building to donor is itself worth a moment's thought: whole teaching blocks (Li Ka Shing, Lee Shau Kee) for the large personal gifts; a sports hall (Sir Run Run Shaw Sports Hall) for a donor associated with sport; a library (Pao Yue-kong) marrying the "temple of knowledge" to a shipping magnate's posthumous honour. There is usually an implicit resonance between what the building does and who it is named for — rather than a bare "highest bidder gets the name".

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