Okay, confession time: I came to Hong Kong for the skyline and the neon — and instead, I fell head over heels for the classrooms.
There's a version of Hong Kong everyone knows: the Peak, the Star Ferry, Causeway Bay at midnight. And then there's the Hong Kong nobody told me about — a city where a hundred-year-old red-brick university hides behind banyan trees, where hillside campuses spill down toward harbour water, and where the humidity makes even a casual student look like a movie still.
This is my love letter to the campuses of Hong Kong — maybe the most underrated campus city in all of Asia. And yes, I dressed the part.
I started my day at the University of Hong Kong, the city's oldest university, tucked into the leafy hills of Pok Fu Lam on Hong Kong Island. The Main Building is over a century old — deep red brick, white stone columns, arched cloistered walkways that belong in a period drama. Sunlight filters through the colonial arches and paints moving stripes across the courtyard floor, and every single person who walks through them looks like the lead in their own coming-of-age film.
I wore my knotted white tee and a tartan skirt — half student, half intention — and just wandered. Under the Eliot Hall arches, past the Great Hall, across courtyards where students argue about economics over bubble tea. There's a hush under those arches despite the city roaring just downhill. Hong Kong's genius is that contrast: jungle-green hills and ivory towers, five minutes from ferries and finance.
Fun fact I learned mid-photoshoot: a young Dr. Sun Yat-sen — the father of modern China — studied medicine here in the 1880s. Walk these cloisters long enough and you start to believe big ideas really do grow in old buildings.
Then came the plot twist: in Hong Kong, some universities are literally built into the mountains.
Up at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, perched on green slopes above Tolo Harbour, the "campus walk" is basically a hike. I climbed staircase after staircase between subtropical trees, my ponytail sticking to my neck, and was rewarded with the kind of view students here apparently take for granted — open sea, green headlands, ferries stitching white lines across the blue.
Sweaty, breathless, grinning — that's the campus cardio I can endorse. Forget the gym: give me a thousand stone steps and a harbour at the top, and I'll show you what "study hard" really means.
CUHK's hillside pavilions and garden bridges feel like a secret kept between the mountains and the water. Students nap on lawns with the sea as their white noise. I get it now. I get why people never really leave this city.
My final scene was the oldest cliché in the book — and it still worked on me. A historic university library, brass lamps glowing over long wooden tables, bookshelves tall enough to hide whispers. I put on the round glasses, let the cardigan slip off one shoulder, and pretended to study.
Pretended. Most of my "reading" was people-watching: the last students packing up, the lamps humming, the city lights flickering on outside the tall windows. Hong Kong has this way of making even a library feel cinematic.
Eight campus cities down, a whole continent to go. Hong Kong was supposed to be a stopover — instead it became the syllabus. Consider this your enrollment notice.
Class dismissed. 💋
— Cindy
