From Midnight-Blue Gowns to Red-Brick Photos: PolyU's Congregation Dress Code and Photo Rituals

Module: 15 Campus Wild History (Wild History section) Reading note: This module belongs to the 13–16 wild-history sections — sourced material is marked with citations and a credibility rating, folk tradition is marked "unverified folk account" and kept separate; politically sensitive symbols/memorials, where relevant, are routed under separate review rules. This article focuses on the official dress code for Congregation and folk photo-taking customs, and does not evaluate any named living individual.

Whether a doctoral gown is royal blue with wine-red silk trim, or plain black with a coloured hood, is spelled out in PolyU's official documents. But where on campus graduates should take their photos on the day has never been written down anywhere — that is a route generations of graduates worked out for themselves. This article covers both: first the documented dress code, then the folk photo-taking customs.

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# 1. Who sets the rules: PolyU's ceremonial dress system

Like most universities in the British academic tradition, PolyU has a full system of Ceremonial and Academic Dresses graded by status and degree, recorded on the official Academic Registry page^※, a standing appendix to successive editions of the University Calendar.

The system has two main tiers: ceremonial gowns (worn by the Chancellor, Council Chairman, President and other senior office-holders at Congregation) and academic gowns (worn by graduates according to degree level).

credibility: verified (official) — the gown colours and colour-coding rules above are set out in official Academic Registry documents, as a formal part of the University Calendar appendix.

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# 2. How Congregation runs: from "one ceremony" to "staggered sessions"

PolyU's formal graduation ceremony is called "Congregation", numbered by year — the ceremony held from November 2025 is the 31st Congregation^※ (the November sessions).

According to the Academic Registry's FAQ page for the 31st Congregation^※, PolyU's recent Congregation arrangements are run in staggered sessions:

• The main session (conferring honorary doctorates and PhDs across all faculties): held Saturday, 1 November 2025;
• All other degree levels (from sub-degree through professional doctorates and master's degrees, including research master's degrees): scheduled separately by faculty/department, spread across the whole of November;
• Congregation runs in a hybrid format: graduates may choose to attend in person (held on campus at the Jockey Club Auditorium) or to join online (uploading a personal photo by a set date, which is projected on stage on the day to represent their "virtual attendance");
• The ceremony is livestreamed simultaneously on YouTube and via a WeChat mini-program.

credibility: verified (official) — session arrangements, dates and attendance modes are all set out on official Academic Registry pages and press releases, and can be checked item by item.

PolyU's arrangement of "one Congregation spread across a whole month, staggered by faculty" is, to some extent, a direct reflection of student body size — a university with more than 27,000 students overall (see 00 Overview · Key Numbers for the full figures) cannot fit every graduate into a single ceremony; staggered sessions and a hybrid format are a structural response to that scale problem.

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# 3. The venue: roughly two thousand ceremonies in one building

PolyU's Congregation has in recent years been held at the Jockey Club Auditorium—this venue opened in February 2000, has stalls and a circle seating level, seats approximately 1,084 people, and has a stage area of about 330 square metres^※. On ordinary days it hosts opera, musicals, dance and chamber-music performances for PolyU staff and students, and is also open externally for seminars and international conferences; graduation ceremonies are one of its regular large-scale uses.

credibility: multiply corroborated — the venue's opening year and specifications come from a filming-locations information platform and can be cross-checked against PolyU's own pages (see 09 Internationalisation and the official CPEO link cited above).

This venue, which seats over a thousand, is in a sense the physical basis for PolyU's arrangement of splitting one Congregation into dozens of sessions — precisely because a single session has a fixed capacity, sessions must be split by faculty and spread across the whole month (see section 2 above).

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# 4. Honorary degrees: who wears the raspberry-red gown

Section 1 above noted that a University Fellow is one of the highest honorary titles, marked by the raspberry-red gown. PolyU's official pages show that its list of honorary doctorate recipients spans more than three decades: the earliest traceable honorary doctorate on record is the 1989 Honorary Doctor of Engineering conferred on Chung Sze-yuen^※ — Chung Sze-yuen was a veteran figure in Hong Kong's business and industrial sector, and served as the first Chairman of the Council after the Hong Kong Polytechnic Ordinance took effect in 1972 (see 13 Governance · Module Guide); this honorary doctorate list therefore links directly to PolyU's own governance history from the founding era onward.

According to the same official page, PolyU's honorary doctorates span nine discipline categories — business administration, design, engineering, humanities, law, letters, science, social science and technology — and its list of well-known recipients over the years includes the late film/television magnate Sir Run Run Shaw (1991), Nobel Chemistry laureate Dan Shechtman (2017), mathematician John F. Nash, Jr. (2011), and Olympic gold medallist Cheung Ka-long (2022), among others, with the list updated through 2026.

credibility: verified (official) — the list of honorary doctorate recipients and their years is set out on PolyU's official "Honorary Degrees and Fellowships" page, and can be checked item by item.

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# 5. Rites beneath the red brick: folk graduation photo customs

Official documents specify who wears which coloured gown, and on what day and at what venue the ceremony is held — but not where on campus graduates should take photos. This part of the story is entirely a folk tradition that generations of students worked out for themselves.

# 5.1 "Red-brick photos"

PolyU's main campus is known for its red-brick facades — according to PolyU's own publication Excel@PolyU, this was the design language set after 1972 by a team led by architect James Kinoshita for the campus's first phase of development^※ (see 15 Campus Wild History · Red Brick and Lettered Cores for more detail). This stretch of red-brick wall naturally became a default backdrop for graduation photos.

According to a widely observed campus custom: every November graduation season, groups of graduates in academic gowns are commonly seen taking photos along the red-brick walkways and near the campus entrance in Hung Hom — organised informally by department, with no officially designated "photo spot". Such scenes recur repeatedly in PolyU students' social-media posts, forming what appears to be an unorganised but highly consistent collective pattern of behaviour.

credibility: unverified folk account. The red-brick buildings themselves and their design date are verifiable (see table above); "graduates prefer to photograph in front of the red brick" is a folk observation of a collective behaviour pattern, and this site has not found any official guidance or statistics from the university on photo locations.

# 5.2 The practical tradition of "photos with professors"

According to accounts circulating among alumni, PolyU's staff-student relationships are said to be relatively informal, and a number of graduates reportedly seek out their supervisor or department head for a photo after the ceremony ends — this custom is said to be particularly common in departments with heavier small-group or mentorship structures, such as engineering and design.

credibility: unverified folk account (alumni oral accounts). This description belongs to circulating folk impressions; this site has not found systematic data to support the comparative claim that "graduation photos with staff are more common at PolyU than at other institutions" — it is recorded here only as an existing folk account.

# 5.3 The mismatch between "virtual attendance" and red-brick photos

Since PolyU's Congregation adopted a hybrid format (see section 2 above), a new topic of folk discussion has emerged: how do graduates who choose to attend online complete the "red-brick photo" step? By observation, a number of graduates who attend the ceremony online reportedly still return to campus on a separate day specifically to take graduation photos at the red-brick walkway or campus entrance — meaning that, in some graduates' experience, "attending the ceremony" and "completing the red-brick photo ritual" have become two things that can be scheduled separately.

credibility: unverified folk account. The above is an observational description of a behaviour pattern, without systematic data support, recorded here as an emerging phenomenon.

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# 6. Where system ends and custom begins: what can be trusted, what to take with a grain of salt

Read together, the sections above show that PolyU's graduation season has two layers:

• The first layer is set out in official documents: gown colours, sessions, dates, venue, the honorary degree list, livestream arrangements — all recorded on the Academic Registry's and honorary-degrees pages, checkable item by item by any graduate or reader, with no grey area;
• The second layer is one graduates worked out for themselves: where to take photos, who to photograph with, when to do it — none of this is set out in any university document, yet it has become something close to a "default" practice across successive cohorts of graduates.

This two-layer structure can be seen at many universities' graduation seasons, but what stands out at PolyU is that its official layer (gown grading, honorary-degree register) is extremely detailed and formalised, while its folk layer (red-brick photos) is almost entirely absent from the official record — nowhere on PolyU's website or the Academic Registry's pages is there a single line recommending that graduates photograph themselves at the red-brick walkway. The red-brick photo has become a tradition not because the university recommended it, but because generation after generation of graduates chose it with their feet and recorded it with their cameras.

credibility note: Sections 1 through 4 (gown system, session arrangements, venue, honorary-degree register) are all verified/multiply-corroborated official records; section 5 (photo customs) is marked throughout as unverified folk account and is not presented as an official tradition.

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