The Red Bird Sundial "Circle of Time" — HKUST's First Icon, Standing in the Entrance Piazza Since 1991

The short version: The "Red Bird Sundial" (Circle of Time) is an 8.5-metre steel sundial that has stood in the centre of HKUST's Entrance Piazza since 8 October 1991. Commissioned by the Hong Kong Jockey Club and created by the husband-and-wife team Walsh-Smith, its base bears a relief of 39 achievements of ancient Chinese science and technology. Today it is HKUST's foremost brand symbol.

A university that puts the word "technology" in its name picks as its first piece of public art — not a robot, not a microchip — a red steel sundial paying homage to 39 ancient Chinese inventions. It is the totem HKUST staff and students print on postcards, anniversary logos and 3D souvenirs, yet it is also a "showpiece" almost no one actually uses to tell the time. It has an official name, "Circle of Time"; a brand name, the "Red Bird"; and a nickname that circulates most widely in Cantonese but has no official trace — 「火雞」 (turkey). This article is devoted to the sculpture alone: its commission, creation, relief, sundial workings and branding. For a horizontal survey of the campus's other landmarks (the armillary sphere, the Central Piazza, the Shiu Kin Cultural Centre and its named buildings), see Landmarks & Public Art: The Complete Record.

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# Who commissioned this sundial, and when did it go up?

The "Circle of Time" Red Bird Sundial stands in the centre of the Entrance Piazza of HKUST's Clear Water Bay campus. According to the university's Campus Management Office (CMO) official page, the installation was commissioned and donated to HKUST by the Hong Kong Jockey Club^※, part of a series of Jockey Club donations during the campus construction phase. The Club's Charities Trust was a decisive source of funding in the university's founding years — the money that made it possible for HKUST to rise from nothing at Clear Water Bay — and this sundial in the Entrance Piazza is the most visible "investment in kind" of that support.

The date of installation is recorded precisely: according to the CMO official page, it was installed on 8 October 1991^※. That date is almost synchronous with the birth of the university itself — by the public record, HKUST officially opened for classes in October 1991, holding its inauguration ceremony the same month^※. In other words, when the first cohort of students walked into a campus still smelling of construction, the 8.5-metre red sundial was already there in the middle of the piazza to greet them. It was not a decorative afterthought but a landmark born with the university. Over the following three-plus decades, as the campus expanded and new buildings rose, it has stayed in its original spot, its symbolic status never displaced by any new construction.

The institutional context behind the fact that the Jockey Club was the commissioning party is worth pausing on. The Hong Kong Jockey Club (and its Charities Trust) has long been a major funder of local higher education and public works. During HKUST's construction from scratch at Clear Water Bay, its donations were one of the foundational sources of money. The sundial in the Entrance Piazza is the most outward, concentrated "landmarking" of that donation on campus — it condenses an abstract charitable grant into a piece of public art that everyone sees and walks past every day. The "Red Bird" so familiar to later generations of HKUST staff and students was, in origin, a gift from the Jockey Club.

For a young university that only opened in 1991, the choice of "the first public art at the entrance" was itself an act of self-definition. The administration did not reach for a sci-fi image pointing to the future; it looked back two millennia and put "the science and technology of ancient China" front and centre. That orientation is the key to understanding the whole sculpture: it is not about how new HKUST is, but about how long the longer Eastern lineage of science it inherits has been running. And because of the sundial, the Entrance Piazza itself acquired a ceremonial weight — it is not merely a transit corridor but HKUST's public face to the world and an anchor of collective memory for staff and students alike.

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# Who made it? The Walsh-Smiths and the art-plus-science division of labour

The Red Bird Sundial is the work of a husband-and-wife sculpting team. Per the CMO official page, the creators are the Irish-born, Perth-based (Western Australia) Charles Walsh-Smith and Joan Walsh-Smith^※. The couple started out in Ireland, based themselves in Australia, and have long taken on large public sculpture commissions under the studio name Smith Sculptors.

Joan Walsh-Smith's biography is corroborating evidence. According to English Wikipedia, she was born in Ireland in 1946, graduated in 1971 from Dublin's National College of Art and Design, where she met her future husband and creative partner Charles Smith^※. Her first public commission dates to 1972, a stone sculpture titled Gryphon completed in Waterford, Ireland; in 1974 a 30-metre bas-relief, City People, won a competition run by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland^※ — that early track record already foreshadowed her signature skill for large-scale bas-relief narrative, and the 7-metre relief of 39 inventions on the HKUST base is a continuation of the same craft. The couple moved to Western Australia with their three children in 1984, setting up their studio in Gidgegannup and specialising in large public commissions^※.

After the move, Smith Sculptors' output leaned heavily toward monuments and public sculpture. Per English Wikipedia, they were commissioned in 1988 to create the National Australian Army Memorial in Canberra and have since completed more than twenty commemorative works across Australia, including the Pearl Diver Memorial in Broome^※; their most celebrated piece is the HMAS Sydney II Memorial in Geraldton, Western Australia, completed in 2001 for the 60th anniversary of the ship's sinking^※. Joan Walsh-Smith herself has received the 2001 Australian Centenary Medal, the 2012 Rotary International Paul Harris Fellow award, and in 2024 the Medal of the Order of Australia, honouring her contribution to the visual arts^※. Placed in that chronology, "Circle of Time" is Smith Sculptors' best-known work in Asia and one of their early international commissions — taken on in 1991, only seven years after settling in Australia — and within a long career otherwise famous for war memorials, this Hong Kong red bird stands out as a rare large-scale piece themed on "science and time" rather than "war and memory".

The work was not a solo flight of artistic fancy but a collaboration between "art" and "science". According to the project background page on Smith Sculptors' website, the piece was commissioned after winning an international art competition (International Art Competition), is recorded as steel and concrete, and was completed in 1991^※ — in other words, HKUST did not appoint the artists directly but selected them through an open competition. For a university just founded and urgently needing a visual identity, choosing the first public art at its entrance by international competition rather than private commission was itself an "open-to-the-world" gesture.

Even more worth recording is the line of division between art and science. According to the same project page, the astronomical timekeeping scheme of the sundial was designed by the gnomonist (sundial expert) Margaret Folkard of Sundials Australia^※. Gnomonics is a highly precise, ancient discipline: for a sundial to actually tell the time, its gnomon must be aligned to the celestial pole at the local latitude, and the hour markings must be calculated from local longitude, latitude and projection geometry, one by one. Clear Water Bay sits at roughly 22°N, and that computation was not something a sculptor could fudge by eye. The piece thus has a telling structure: the Walsh-Smiths handled "form" and "meaning" — the red bird silhouette, the water metaphor, the narrative relief — while Folkard handled "accuracy", making the shadow cast by the steel structure genuinely correspond to the hour. Artistic form and scientific function were welded together by two specialist groups working in collaboration, and that very division of labour is exactly what the sculpture is saying: utility and aesthetics were never two separate things.

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# What are the 39 achievements of ancient Chinese science and technology carved on the base?

Beneath the sundial proper sits the densest narrative part of the work. According to the CMO official page, the side of the base carries a bas-relief mural 7.0 metres long and 1.5 metres high, carving 39 ancient Chinese scientific and technological achievements across various fields^※ (some sources give the full narrative relief as about 9 metres long). Per the official itemisation, the 39 inventions span from the 13th century BC (lacquerware, the abacus) to the 13th century AD (the equatorial armillary and astronomical instruments) — roughly twenty-six centuries of Eastern technological history.

The 39 items are not a random pile but cover agriculture, transport, navigation, astronomy, metallurgy, mechanics, printing, music and even philosophy. Grouped roughly by field:

The table above is a field-based grouping for easy reference; the complete 39 items with their individual dates are as listed on the CMO official original list^※.

Among these entries, a few are deliberately labelled by the relief with modern histories of science, which makes for intriguing reading. The "south-pointing carriage", for instance, is marked "First Cybernetic Machine: South Pointing Carriage" — a differential-gear mechanism keeping a wooden figure's arm pointing in a fixed direction, and the relief uses "cybernetics", a discipline that only took shape in the twentieth century, to look back at this 3rd-century machine. Likewise the escapement wheel is called a precursor of the "First Mechanical Clock", echoing the whole work's "time" motif. Entries such as the "multi-stage rocket", "seismograph", "rudder" and "fore-and-aft rig" fold ancient Chinese achievements in military, geological and nautical technology into the same "long river of Eastern science". By placing these inventions alongside a timekeeping sundial, the relief is not simply nostalgic; it asserts a continuity: the scientific spirit existed long ago.

The most intriguing items in the list are those with a strongly "cross-disciplinary" flavour — ancient Chinese figures or concepts directly renamed in modern scientific vocabulary. The relief labels the "yin-yang symbol" as "Essence of Matter — Particle Wave Duality Theory", the "hexagonal structure of snowflakes" as "Cosmic Scheme of Nature", and lists Traditional Chinese Medicine's observations of bodily rhythms as "Circadian Rhythms" and even "Science of Endocrinology". These naming gestures place ancient experience beside the terminology of twentieth-century physics and physiology, going well beyond an "inventions list" and reading more like a claim: that a continuity worth conversing with exists between ancient Eastern wisdom and modern science. Whether that interpretation is rigorous is a matter for scholars to debate; but as the manifesto of a founding sculpture, it clearly says what the creators and the university wanted to say — the "technology" in HKUST's name draws on a river that runs from before the Common Era to today.

For a university strong in science and engineering, carving "ancient Eastern science" rather than "future technology" at the most visible point of its entrance is a deliberate "using the past to speak of the present". It answers the sculptors' own idea that a work should be closely tied to its context, and it plants an Eastern cultural root in an international university that sits in Hong Kong and recruits worldwide.

A note on the relief's date span: official and archival sources do not entirely agree, and it is worth a little investigation. If one takes the 39 individually dated items strictly, the earliest (lacquerware, abacus) are marked 13th century BC and the latest (equatorial armillary and astronomical instruments) 13th century AD, giving a span of about twenty-six centuries. But some official summary passages describe the range loosely as "6th century BC to 13th century AD" or narrower. The discrepancy comes down to whether one takes the earliest and latest entries of the whole relief or the concentrated period of the main items. This article follows the dates marked item by item on the CMO official list^※ and takes the full span of "roughly 13th century BC to 13th century AD"; if you see different figures elsewhere, it is usually a difference of scope, not a factual contradiction.

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# Is it a sundial or a sculpture? And why does almost no one actually use it to tell the time?

The official positioning of "Circle of Time" is that of a genuinely functioning sundial. According to the CMO official page, the work takes as its prototype the sundial — one of humanity's earliest scientific instruments — and measures time by the sun's shadow; the main body is made of steel, standing on a stepped base, surrounded by a moat of flowing water^※. The water and cascading steps carry an explicit metaphor: per the same page, the flowing water symbolises the passage of time and the "flow of history", while the shadow cast by sunlight is the sundial's evidence for telling the hour.

In practical use, though, it is nearly a "sundial you cannot read". According to a student-compiled campus locations page, although the sundial is operable, it is highly inconvenient for everyday time-telling — on a clear day one must go up to an upper floor and look down through an office window to make out the shadow's indicated time with any clarity^※. Standing at ground level in the piazza, parallax and the shadow ratio work against reading it. The result is an almost ironic sight: an instrument built for precise timekeeping, placed at the most central spot on campus, which almost nobody actually uses to check the hour.

Interestingly, the artists were aware of this layer of irony. As recorded on the CMO official page, the Walsh-Smiths' artist statement says they chose to create "a contemplative 'Circle of Time', an oasis within the bustling matrix of this vast complex of buildings"^※. In other words, what the creators wanted from the start was not a convenient clock but a spiritual space where one stops to contemplate time. That the sundial is "not user-friendly" is, to a degree, part of the design intent — it asks you to look up at the sun, at the water, at the two-thousand-year relief, not down at your watch.

The creators were equally explicit about the work's relationship to its environment. Per the artist statement recorded by Art@Site, the Walsh-Smiths held that the theme should be firmly "in context" with its setting, in some way reflecting the atmosphere of its location, and that light and shadow should trace out both the sundial and the relief^※. That statement also explains why the 39 achievements are not neatly arranged in chronological order but flow around the base — what the creators wanted was not a linear "technology timeline" but a sense of history as memory: wayward and streaming, so that as the viewer walks a full circle, ancient Eastern inventions overlap and echo one another in light and shadow.

Between function and art, the work refuses to choose one. It is simultaneously a functioning sundial-sculpture and a sculptural sundial; it welds the "use" of timekeeping and the "beauty" of contemplation onto a single steel structure. That, too, is what HKUST wants it to say: an object's usefulness need not sacrifice its artistry. Water, shadow, relief and red steel here together form a device for "stopping to think about time" — what it offers is less "what o'clock is it" than a meditation on "where time flows from, and where it flows to".

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# Where does the name "Red Bird" come from, and how did it become HKUST's number-one brand symbol?

The sundial has a name that circulates far more widely: the Red Bird. The name has two sources, one in form and one in colour. According to the official campus highlights page, this sundial sculpture in the piazza has become an icon of HKUST, its steel structure painted in a vivid red^※ that contrasts sharply with the campus's grey-white buildings; and the steel arc at the centre of the sundial, seen from the side, has a line suggesting a bird spreading its wings to take flight. Because it looks like a bird in flight and is the colour of fire, people took to calling it the "Red Bird".

In official brand narrative, the Red Bird is further endowed with mythic meaning. According to the HKUST Brand Guidelines, the red bird symbolises the Chinese "Feng-huang" — a bird of good omen endowed with spiritual power — while also echoing the Western myth of the phoenix, reborn from fire^※. The brand document says the form "merges technology and nature into a seamless whole, which is the persona of the university as an institution"; its minimalist lines both inherit the past and point to the future, while the red form is "immediately recognisable as fire". Phoenix, fire, soaring flight, rebirth — a whole set of symbols stacked onto a steel sundial, lifting it from campus decoration to the university's spiritual totem.

From "a piece of public art commissioned by the Jockey Club" to "the university's number-one brand symbol", the Red Bird Sundial went through a process of repeated institutionalisation:

The items in this table are scattered across official HKUST brand and campus materials; together they form a textbook case of "how a sculpture is systematically converted into a university's visual identity". Over thirty-odd years, the Red Bird Sundial went from a steel installation in the middle of a piazza to the HKUST symbol printed on postcards, logos, souvenirs and countless graduation photographs. It is no longer just "there is a sundial on campus", but "see the red bird, know it's HKUST".

Once elevated to totem, the name "Red Bird" began to spread across campus, becoming a naming root available for borrowing: many student organisations and teams call themselves "Red Bird", carrying the visual identity into club culture. One clarification: "Red Bird" and "Firebird" are often conflated in the HKUST context, but per campus materials, no separate "Firebird" sculpture distinct from the Red Bird Sundial exists on the Clear Water Bay campus — the two names refer to the same "Circle of Time". HKUST(GZ), the Guangzhou campus, does have a separate installation called "Firebird" at its entrance; that is a different campus and should not be conflated with the Clear Water Bay Red Bird. This disentangling of "same name, different object", along with cross-references to other campus landmarks, can be found in Landmarks & Public Art: The Complete Record.

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# Why do students call it 「火雞」 (turkey)? And can you climb it?

If "Red Bird" is the official name, 「火雞」 is the students' own nickname. According to a student-compiled campus locations page, this sundial, officially "Circle of Time", is widely known across the campus community as 「火雞」^※. Official sources offer no explanation for the exact origin of this Cantonese nickname; the common guess among students is that the sharp metal components at the top of the sundial, combined with its overall red form, make many people think of a turkey. The same shape the administration reads as a soaring phoenix, students read as a dinner-table turkey — that gap between high and low is itself a small footnote to campus culture. This is no more than student folklore passed by word of mouth, backed by no literature; recorded here for what it is, not as fact. In sum: "Circle of Time" is the official name, "Red Bird" the brand nickname, 「火雞」 the student nickname. Three names, three perspectives — the administration sees time and phoenix, the brand sees identity and heritage, and the students see a big red bird they walk past every day and can tease at will.

Around the sculpture runs another campus rule, repeated often: you may stand on it, but not climb it. According to the HKUST FYS campus locations page, visitors may step onto the stepped base for photos, but climbing the main structure of the sundial is against the rules^※. By student accounts, despite the ban, graduates or first-years occasionally still scramble up to the top tier for a keepsake photo; such boundary-crossing is said to be one of the "standard attempts" of every cohort, though not always promptly stopped. For anyone who wants to study the relief seriously, a slow walk around the base is recommended — some panels show sharper shadow detail in the slanting midday sun, which matches the sculptors' design intent of making light and shadow part of the narrative. If you genuinely want to try reading the time, student experience suggests a clear day and a view down from an upper-floor window works best. The Entrance Piazza sits at the heart of the main building complex and is open year-round, no appointment or ticket needed.

For most people at HKUST, the Red Bird Sundial's more practical identity is campus life's "default meeting point" and "default backdrop". Per HKUST FYS, it stands in the Entrance Piazza as the landmark of the HKUST campus^※; orientation, graduation, club stalls, visiting friends — there is always someone arranging to meet "at the turkey", always someone pressing the shutter in front of this red bird. The sundial itself says nothing, yet it has borne the most everyday gatherings and farewells of cohort after cohort — returning the abstract theme of "time" into a stack of photographs taken in different years against the same background. In a sense, those photographs are what this sundial really measures: not the hour, but the years each generation spends from enrolment to graduation.

A sundial that cannot reliably tell the time, a "turkey" nickname with no traceable origin, a climbing ban broken as often as it is enforced — it is precisely these imperfect details that let the Red Bird Sundial grow back from a cold brand symbol into a "thing of one's own", lived with daily and teased by staff and students alike. It is HKUST's first face to the outside world, and a shared code word between the people of HKUST.

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# Quick reference: key facts about the Red Bird Sundial

To place this sundial back in the overall layout of campus landmarks (the armillary sphere, Central Piazza, Shiu Kin Cultural Centre, named buildings and so on), see the companion Landmarks & Public Art: The Complete Record; this article focuses on the full arc of "Circle of Time" alone. One-sentence summary: a steel sundial funded by the Jockey Club, selected through an international competition, completed by a sculptor–gnomonist partnership, and solemnly adopted as a totem by a young university — it measures both the sun's shadow and the time that has passed since the university's founding.

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