Lee Shau Kee's HK$400 Million: A Named Campus, Business School Building, and Institute for Advanced Study

Within HKUST's genealogy of named donations, the name of Lee Shau Kee (李兆基) appears with unusual frequency — a library, a campus and a business school building all bear his name. This article focuses on one pivotal gift: the HK$400 million donation from the Lee Shau Kee Foundation in 2007, and the three causes it named and supported. It is a companion to Donations and Naming^※ and Annual Income, Reserves and Endowment^※, zooming in on the destination of a single landmark gift.

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# One Gift, Three Causes

According to an HKUST announcement, on 20 March 2007 the Lee Shau Kee Foundation donated HK$400 million to HKUST^※ (see also the 2007 entry in the institutional chronology^※). The gift, the announcement said, was directed at three objectives: supporting HKUST's development into a global leader in education and research, enhancing the learning experience of students during the transition to a four-year undergraduate curriculum, and establishing an Institute for Advanced Study^※.

Accordingly, the donation named or supported three projects:

One gift, landing simultaneously as a "campus + building + institute" trio of projects — a measure of its weight. The naming of the "Lee Shau Kee Campus" is particularly distinctive: what carried his name was not a single building but a new campus above the main campus, opened in 2013 together with the Lee Shau Kee Business Building (see the institutional chronology^※).

# The Opening Ceremony: A Family Appearance in September 2013

Six years passed between the donation announcement (2007) and the completion of the campus. According to HKUST, construction of the new campus began in 2009 and was completed in September 2013^※; the opening ceremony was held on 10 September 2013^※.

It was a high-profile occasion. According to the announcement, attendees included Lee Shau Kee himself, then-Vice-Chancellor Professor Tony F. Chan, Council Chairman Dr. Chung Sein Kong, Chairman of the Academic Council Dr. Chen Tze-Bo, along with several vice-presidents and deans^※; Lee's sons Martin Lee Ka-shing and Peter Lee Ka-shing were also present^※ — the latter's name would later appear on another HKUST building, the Martin Ka Shing Lee Innovation Building (see next section).

As to the scale of the new campus, the announcement reports it covers about 10 hectares and sits above the main campus^※. Its specific buildings include the seven-storey Lee Shau Kee Business Building and the five-storey Lo Ka Chung Building of the HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study^※; both buildings feature lecture theatres seating 200, fully equipped classrooms, and multi-purpose meeting and seminar spaces^※.

Worth noting: the building of the "Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study" itself carries the additional name of "Lo Ka Chung" — which means that on this roughly 10-hectare new site known as "Lee Shau Kee Campus", at least two layers of named giving are superimposed: Lee Shau Kee's naming of the campus as a whole and of the business building, and Lo Ka Chung's naming of the IAS building itself. Multiple names stacked on a single space is a fairly common feature of HKUST's named-donation system (see also the survey of donations from the Jockey Club, Sir Run Run Shaw, Cheng Yu-tung and others in Donations and Naming^※).

According to more granular figures published on the Lee Shau Kee Foundation's website, the Lee Shau Kee Campus covers about ten hectares, roughly 15% of the HKUST campus's total area at the time^※, with a total building floor area of about 450,000 sq ft, of which the Lee Shau Kee Business Building itself accounts for over 258,000 sq ft; the key milestones of the entire construction period were: the donation cheque handed over on 20 March 2007, the campus groundbreaking on 17 November 2009, and the campus opening on 10 September 2013^※ — from cheque to groundbreaking, more than two and a half years of planning and preparation elapsed, a reminder of how long a major named donation can take from signing to physical reality.

At the ceremony, Lee Shau Kee left a frequently quoted aspiration: 「我衷心希望科大教职员及学生，以至世界各地学者，能充分利用这个新校园及其设施，追求学术卓越，造福社会大众。」^※ ("I sincerely hope that HKUST staff and students, as well as scholars from around the world, will make full use of this new campus and its facilities in the pursuit of academic excellence and for the benefit of society.") It echoes what he said at the time of his 2007 donation — "so that more talented people will have the opportunity to receive a quality education" — and shows the consistently broad "education for all" framing of his educational giving, rather than a simple building-naming transaction.

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# Timing that Converged with the Four-Year Reform and the IAS

The 2007 gift was closely coupled in time with two major developments at HKUST.

First, the four-year curriculum reform. The donation's stated purposes explicitly mention "enhancing the learning experience of students during the transition to a four-year undergraduate curriculum". Hong Kong's undergraduate programmes moved from three years to four in 2012 (see The Four-Year Curriculum Reform and the Common Core^※), with student numbers and demand for teaching space growing accordingly. The Lee Shau Kee Campus opened in 2012/2013, precisely providing space for the four-year expansion — in this sense the gift can be read as the reform's "material support".

Second, the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS). The donation's purposes include "establishing an Institute for Advanced Study", and the IAS had indeed been set up in 2006, thereafter developing with support from multiple parties (see the next section, and Key Laboratories and Institutes (Part I)^※). Lee Shau Kee's honour as the IAS's "Founding Patron" ties this gift to HKUST's most internationally prestigious academic institution.

According to the announcement, Lee Shau Kee himself said: 「科大志在成为世界一流的知识中心。我希望我的捐赠能帮助大学实现这一目标，让更多有才华的人有机会接受其优质教育。」^※ ("HKUST aspires to become a world-class centre of knowledge. I hope my donation will help the University achieve this goal and enable more talented people to have access to its quality education.")

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# Where the "Founding Patron" Lands in the IAS's History

Where exactly does Lee Shau Kee's "Founding Patron" status fall in the history of the Institute? The answer: almost at the very beginning. According to the IAS's milestones page^※, the Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study was officially established in June 2006, with former HKUST President Professor Paul Chu Ching-wu as its founding director^※; that same month, the renowned physicist Professor Stephen Hawking delivered its inaugural lecture, giving the Institute its first calling card of international renown^※. The Lee Shau Kee Foundation's HK$400 million gift of March 2007 fell within a window of less than a year after the IAS was founded — a time when the Institute had no building of its own and was still housed within existing premises.

Beyond Lee Shau Kee, public records show that in its early years the IAS also received donations or pledges from Dr. Larry Yung Chi-kin, the Lo Ka Chung Charitable Foundation, Dr. Helmut Sohmen and Professor Anna Pao Sohmen, among others^※ — which means Lee Shau Kee's "Founding Patron" title was not an exclusive naming right, but rather placed him among a cohort of Hong Kong business and shipping families who together formed the IAS's early "founding-panel" of benefactors. Collectively, these gifts supported the Institute's leap from "having an institute but no building" to "gaining its own physical space with the opening of the Lee Shau Kee Campus": in June 2013 the IAS moved into the building named after Lo Ka Chung; in November of the same year, on 27 November, the Institute was formally styled the "HKUST Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study", and three IAS named chair professorships were inaugurated the same day^※. Lee Shau Kee's early gift is thus better understood as a starting point on the IAS's timeline from "vision" to "physical reality" than a finishing line — the Institute's later international prestige (forming a partnership with the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, attracting Nobel laureates as professors) is covered in Key Laboratories and Institutes (Part I)^※.

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# Lee Shau Kee and the HKUST Naming Genealogy

The HK$400 million gift is only one strand of the Lee Shau Kee family's support for HKUST. Elsewhere on the campus, Lee Shau Kee's name appears on:

• Lee Shau Kee Library — the University Library was named in his honour in 2006 (see the institutional chronology^※ and The Library, University Archives and Special Collections^※);
• More recently, the Martin Ka Shing Lee Innovation Building^※ is also linked to the Lee family (Martin Lee Ka-shing being Lee Shau Kee's son).

Set side by side, the Lee family's support for HKUST spans a library, a campus, a business school building, an institute and an innovation building — making it one of the most prominent families in the University's named-donation genealogy (alongside the Jockey Club, Cheng Yu-tung, Sir Run Run Shaw, Henry Fok and others; see Donations and Naming^※). HKUST's library at the Clear Water Bay campus opened with the University itself in 1991^※, and only received the "Lee Shau Kee" name in 2006 — meaning Lee's support for HKUST actually predates the well-known HK$400 million gift by a year, with the library naming readable as a "dress rehearsal" for the larger donation that followed.

In the University's founding narrative, large named gifts of this kind matter to HKUST beyond the money itself: they bind Hong Kong's commercial-philanthropic strength to the growth of a young university — the Jockey Club laying the foundation, Lee Shau Kee naming a campus, Sir Run Run Shaw naming a performing arts centre… HKUST's physical campus is, almost literally, a spatial projection of Hong Kong's history of charitable giving.

# The Donor's Business Roots: From Goldsmith's Apprentice to "King of Property"

To understand how Lee Shau Kee could repeatedly make donations of hundreds of millions of Hong Kong dollars in education, one has to return to the start of his business career. Reports say Lee began as an apprentice at a money-changing shop in Shunde, before moving south to Hong Kong in 1948^※, then went into property in partnership with others, founding Henderson Land Development in 1975 on his own account, and taking the company public in 1981^※. One of his distinctive methods in property was to avoid bidding wars in government land auctions, preferring instead to assemble sites over the long term by persuading the owners of old buildings to sell, and to advertise in overseas Chinese-language newspapers to buy old buildings from elderly overseas Chinese^※, building up his land bank at relatively modest cost; at the same time, Henderson Land long kept about 30% of its properties for long-term rental, using steady rental income to hedge against the cyclical swings of the property market^※. This business philosophy of "trading time for space" reportedly made him the wealthiest Chinese and Asian person on the Forbes global rich list for three consecutive years from 1995 to 1997^※ — and was also the material foundation that allowed him, through his foundation, to sustain nine-figure donations to HKUST and other universities. Educational giving and the property business formed, in his case, a coherent logic of "accumulation, then giving back" — not two isolated strands of narrative.

# Educational Giving as the Long-Term Mainstay of Lee Shau Kee's Philanthropy

Stepping back beyond HKUST, educational donation held a long-term, central place in Lee Shau Kee's charitable work — it was not an isolated act prompted by a single university. Public records show Lee was already helping the Chinese University of Hong Kong launch its MBA programme in 1977 — the first such programme in Hong Kong^※; from 1979 he established the "Lee Shau Kee Scholarship" to fund outstanding Hong Kong students to study for undergraduate degrees at the University of Oxford^※; and in 1982 he founded the "Hong Kong Pei Hua Education Foundation", focused on nurturing talent and providing education and training opportunities in mainland China^※. Reports indicate Lee made pledges to all nine universities in Hong Kong, including a large HK$500 million gift to the University of Hong Kong^※.

Placing HKUST's HK$400 million in this longer genealogy, it is not an isolated "one-off naming transaction" but a specific instance, on the Clear Water Bay campus, of Lee Shau Kee's long-term philanthropic conviction that "education is the investment with the deepest returns" — sharing the same logic as his support for CUHK's MBA, the Oxford scholarships and the Pei Hua Foundation.

# 2025: The Donor Passes, the Name Endures

This donation story also has its final chapter. Lee Shau Kee passed away on 17 March 2025, surrounded by his family, at the age of 97^※, with the Henderson Land group he founded now jointly led by his sons Martin and Peter Lee. Reports note he had appeared on the Forbes global rich list for three consecutive years from 1995 to 1997, as the wealthiest Chinese and Asian person at the time^※.

The donor's death does not erase the names. "Lee Shau Kee Campus", "Lee Shau Kee Business Building" and "Lee Shau Kee Library" continue to operate under his name, carrying nearly two decades of relationship between him and HKUST: from the library naming in 2006, the HK$400 million gift of 2007, his personal appearance at the campus opening ceremony in 2013, to his passing in 2025 — this naming genealogy has now spanned, in full, the lifetime of one donor, becoming a traceable chapter of HKUST's physical campus with a beginning and an end.

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# Summary

Placing Lee Shau Kee's 2007 HK$400 million gift in the University's narrative:

1. One gift, three uses — simultaneously naming/supporting "Lee Shau Kee Campus + Lee Shau Kee Business Building + Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study";
2. Timing that converged — closely coupled in time with the four-year curriculum reform (campus expansion) and the IAS's establishment (academic prestige), landing in an early window less than a year after the IAS was founded;
3. One link in a genealogy — a pivotal gift in the Lee family's support for HKUST (library, campus, building, institute, innovation building), foreshadowed as early as the 2006 library naming;
4. Business foundations — behind the gift sat a fortune built from a money-changing apprenticeship and prudent property development, with educational giving as the long-term return on that wealth;
5. A complete lifecycle — from the 2006 library naming to the donor's death in 2025, the relationship spanned nearly two full decades; the names endure while the man has passed.

Note: The donation date (20 March 2007), amount (HK$400 million) and named projects cited in this article follow the source pages cited and are time-sensitive; please refer to official HKUST announcements before citing.

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# Related Reading

• Donations and Naming^※ — an overview of HKUST's major donation events and named buildings, with cross-comparison of the Jockey Club, Cheng Yu-tung, Sir Run Run Shaw and other families
• Annual Income, Reserves and Endowment^※ — beyond individual named gifts, the overall scale and investment returns of HKUST's endowment
• Key Laboratories and Institutes (Part I)^※ — the history of the Jockey Club Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Stephen Hawking's inaugural lecture and its international advisory committee
• Institutional Chronology^※ — where the 2006 library naming, the 2007 donation and the 2013 campus opening sit on the University-wide timeline
• The Library, University Archives and Special Collections^※ — the collections and current operations of the Lee Shau Kee Library

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