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Lee Shau Kee Library, University Archives and Special Collections

Miscellany ~19,407 characters · 40 min read Updated
ScopeUniversity-wideEra1990sEra2000sEra2010sEra2020sGenreReportageGenreDataThemeHeritage CollectionThemeDigital EducationThemeUniversity origins

A library is the intellectual hub of any research university. HKUST's University Library was renamed the Lee Shau Kee Library in 2006 in honour of its donor (see History Timeline and Donations and Naming). This article focuses on two of its frequently overlooked dimensions — the University Archives and Special Collections — and the digital infrastructure that sustains them. It is a companion to Library and Digital Education, which deals with the library's modern services and IT; here the emphasis falls on archives, special collections and the preservation of historical materials.

1. The University Archives: HKUST's own "memory bank"

For a young university that only opened in 1991, systematically preserving its own institutional memory is work best started early. HKUST did not linger on this front.

According to the University Archives page of the HKUST Library, the University Archives were established in 1996, with the mission of "collecting, preserving, managing and providing access to University records of enduring value", covering documents of legal significance as well as materials of historical importance to HKUST and its regional impact.

In scale, the same page reports that the Archives currently hold over 1,200 linear feet of archival records and collections. A "linear foot" is the standard archival unit for measuring physical records; more than 1,200 linear feet means that if every document were laid end to end, the trail would stretch over 360 metres — a sizeable accumulation for a university barely past its third decade.

According to the "Digital Collections" section of the University Archives page, the holdings include internal administrative records, publications, newsletters, press releases and public videos. They serve both as primary sources for institutional history and as a vital reference point for a site like this one, which digs through the unofficial record to verify claims against original documents.

What is collected, and how it may be consulted

The University Archives do not take a catch-all "keep everything" approach; records are organised by type and nature. According to the official page, the Archives cover campus planning and construction files, governance records of the Court, the Council and the Senate, administrative materials from faculties and departments, and records of student, staff and alumni organisations. This list is, in effect, an archival map of HKUST's governance structure: from the minutes of the highest decision-making bodies, through day-to-day departmental administration, down to student society activities — all three tiers leave traces.

On access, open materials may be consulted by any user; restricted administrative records are available only to their originating departments during the closed period, and others require the permission of the originating department. This "open-restricted" dichotomy ensures that most materials can be consulted by researchers, while allowing a necessary closure period for sensitive administrative records concerning personnel and finance. Physical materials are consulted in the Reading Room, where the library also offers research assistance and records-management advice; enquiries may be sent to [email protected] or [email protected].

What actually sits in the Digital University Archives

The Digital University Archives are not a single vague search portal but a set of named sub-collections, namely:

Sub-collection Summary
HKUST Publications and Newsletters Digitised archives of campus periodicals and newsletters
Digital Images (1988–1999) Historical campus photographs from the pre-founding period up to the turn of the millennium
HKUST Posters Over 1,500 posters dating from the University's founding in 1991
Press Clippings Database Media coverage compiled from 1996 to 2023

The "Digital Images (1988–1999)" set deserves special mention. In 1988 HKUST was still in the planning stage (its first Vice-Chancellor, Woo Chia-wei, took office that year; classes began in 1991), so this body of images covers the whole journey from "a building site" to "first intake of students" — the most direct visual record of the University's beginnings (see History Timeline). The press clippings database, spanning 28 years, amounts to a "chronicle of HKUST's media image" compiled by the library — methodologically close to what this site does: gathering scattered public reporting into a systematic archive for later cross-checking and citation.

2. Special Collections: rare books and antique maps focused on China and its neighbours

Beyond documenting its own history, the HKUST Library also maintains Special Collections reaching into far broader scholarly territory. According to the official Special Collections page, the collections preserve a range of primary source materials, including antique maps, rare books, photographs and archival material, with a focus on China and its neighbouring regions.

The most distinctive of these is the Antique Maps of China Collection. The page notes that a substantial portion of the Special Collections have been digitised, the Antique Maps of China Collection being one example. Antique maps are at once historical-geographical sources and a rare window onto the history of China's encounters with the wider world and the evolution of territorial conceptions. That a university known for science and technology should build such a humanities-oriented collection says something about the place of the humanities and historical studies in its academic landscape.

More than 300 European antique maps: among East Asia's largest holdings of their kind

According to the Rare & Special e-Zone, the Antique Maps of China Collection specifically holds more than 300 maps, sea charts, views and atlases, making it the largest collection in East Asia devoted to European-printed maps of China. The collection covers the most representative maps of China drawn by European cartographers from the 16th to the 19th century, vividly documenting a long history of cross-cultural exchange between China and the West. Its formation and growth owe much to a named donor's sustained support: according to library materials, the generous contributions of Dr. Ko Pui Shuen enabled the collection to be digitised and continuously expanded; in 2016, Dr. Ko's donation funded a rigorous research programme that ultimately produced the first carto-bibliographic monograph on early European-printed maps of China. The trajectory — from "donated maps" to "subsidised monograph" — shows how a special-collections gift can extend beyond preserving artefacts into generating new scholarship.

This project, named after Dr. Ko and known as the Western Maps of China Project, has yielded more than the collection itself. According to the project's official page, the project runs a standalone online catalogue at mappasinica.hkust.edu.hk, providing high-resolution digital images of 127 maps for public searching and browsing. The research team's resulting monograph, Regnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735, reconstructs and verifies, one by one, every European-printed map of China produced between 1584 and 1735, tracing the lineage, impressions and publication dates of each version. It is regarded as the first systematic carto-bibliography in the field, and its publication was accompanied by a book launch and a donor appreciation ceremony. The most iconic item in the collection is the first European map dedicated to China, printed by the Dutch cartographer Abraham Ortelius in 1584 — the first time Europeans printed China as the subject of a single map, just a year before Matteo Ricci arrived in the country.

These maps, along with related treasures from the history of science, are displayed in the Ko Pui Shuen Gallery on the library's first floor. According to a university press release, the Gallery opened on 29 November 2013, funded by a HK$3 million donation from Dr. Ko Pui Shuen, and houses ancient maps of China and rare books on the history of science, including original works by Euclid, Galileo and Newton. In other words, Dr. Ko's giving was not a one-off purchase of maps but a staged chain running "donated maps — dedicated gallery — funded research — published monograph", a pattern quite representative of how major gifts work at HKUST (see Donations and Naming). This passage cross-references the corresponding section of Library and Digital Education; that piece focuses on the institutional framework of donations and naming, this one on the historical value of the holdings themselves.

Beyond the Antique Maps of China, the Special Collections comprise a series of named sub-collections with distinct themes: Ancient East Asian Maps; Maps of China, Late Qing Dynasty–1949; Rare Books on the History of Science; Western Books about China before 1949; the James Lee Collection; the Sha Fei Photographic Collection; the Paul Lin and Soong Ching-ling Correspondence; Paul T. K. Lin's Hsinhua Photo Collection; the Walter R. Kent Collection; and pre-1949 Chinese thread-bound books, pre-1949 Chinese books and the HKUST Library art collection — 13 digitised sub-collections in all, according to the official index of the Rare & Special e-Zone. The list sketches how a university known for engineering has quietly accumulated a substantial body of primary materials on modern Chinese history in its Special Collections.

The Sha Fei photographs and the Soong Ching-ling letters: two histories rediscovered

Of these named sub-collections, two deserve particular note for the historical weight their materials carry.

The Sha Fei Photographic Collection sits behind a story of considerable drama. According to the Rare & Special e-Zone, Sha Fei (1912–1950) was very possibly the most influential photographer of his era, capturing some of the most iconic images of China's War of Resistance in the late 1930s and 1940s; yet after his execution in 1950 he was erased from history, rediscovered only in the 1980s through the efforts of his daughter Wang Yan — who later donated 63 museum-grade vintage prints to the HKUST Library Archives, forming the present collection. That a war photographer once written out of history should have his surviving masterpieces end up in the special collections of a young technological university in Hong Kong is one of the more arresting turns in this material's journey.

The Paul Lin and Soong Ching-ling Correspondence, by contrast, is primary material for the study of contemporary Chinese history. According to the Rare & Special e-Zone, the exchange of letters and cards spans more than three decades, from 1950 to 1980, some 70 items in all, drawn from the "Paul T. K. Lin Papers", donated to the Library in 2016 by Lin's wife, Eileen. Paul Lin Ta-kuang (1920–2004) was a Chinese-Canadian political scientist and peace activist who first visited China with his family in 1950 and soon came to know Soong Ching-ling; according to the collection's introduction, most of the letters between the two were written between 1967 and 1976, and repeatedly discuss the Cultural Revolution and its impact on, and meaning for, Soong's family and acquaintances. The correspondence is therefore far more than private exchange — it is rare primary material for understanding the genuine state of mind of a Chinese political figure during the Cultural Revolution.

The James Lee and Walter R. Kent Collections: fan paintings and aviation maps, two further strands

If the Sha Fei photographs and the Paul Lin letters represent primary sources on modern Chinese history, the James Lee Collection and the Walter R. Kent Collection stretch the collections' chronological reach in opposite directions — one back to the calligraphic and pictorial traditions of the Ming–Qing transition, the other out to twentieth-century Asian aviation and map collecting.

The James Lee Collection is small. According to the Rare & Special e-Zone, it comprises 11 items in all: two manuscripts by the early-Qing scholar-officials Wang Shizhen (1634–1711) and Yu Minzhong (1714–1779), and nine fan paintings and album leaves by late-Ming artists including Dong Qichang, Chen Jiru, Li Liufang, Wang Duo and Cheng Sui, of which five are landscapes and four are calligraphy. Eleven objects, six masters of Ming–Qing painting and calligraphy — a high density indeed. For a university library known for engineering to take in genuine leaves by first-rank artists such as Dong Qichang is a demonstration that the Special Collections can compete on quality as well as quantity.

The Walter R. Kent Collection, meanwhile, is a collecting history with a distinctly personal character. According to the Rare & Special e-Zone, Walter R. Kent was a banker, map and photograph collector, born in Brooklyn, New York, who lived in Asia for 49 years and settled in Hong Kong upon retirement; the collection, donated to the HKUST Library by his estate, comprises more than 250 maps from the 18th to the 20th century, together with posters, books and aircraft models, covering Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Taiwan, Shanghai and Hong Kong, with aviation and cartography as its main subjects. A Western banker who spent nearly half a century living and working in Asia left the maps and aircraft models he had collected over a lifetime to this young Hong Kong university's library. The collection is thus primary material for the study of twentieth-century Asian aviation history and of expatriate collecting in Asia — a counterpart to the Western Maps of China Project in cartographic terms, yet focused on altogether different regions and subjects.

3. Digital infrastructure: making the materials searchable

The HKUST Library has invested heavily in the digitisation and open access of its Special Collections and Archives, consistent with its wider positioning as a "digital education pioneer" (see Library and Digital Education).

4. Why archives and special collections deserve their own entry

Among a university's facilities, archives and special collections are often the quietest corner. They do not produce the gleaming outputs of a laboratory, nor do they serve students directly in the way classrooms do. But for a site devoted to the unofficial record, they matter enormously:

  1. Traceable roots. This site's rule — "every claim sourced" — ultimately rests on primary materials. The press releases, annual reports and newsletters preserved in the University Archives are among the key sources for verifying crucial facts of institutional history.
  2. A hedge against institutional amnesia. Systematic archival preservation is the fundamental remedy for "institutional memory loss" — it ensures that three decades of decisions, controversies and achievements of a young university are not swept away.
  3. A sign of the humanistic substrate. The Special Collections, with the Antique Maps of China at their core, are a reminder that HKUST, though founded on science and technology, is not only engineering and business: its intellectual map has depth in history and the humanities as well.

Note: The dates and figures in this article (the Archives' founding in 1996, holdings of more than 1,200 linear feet) follow the HKUST Library's official pages and are time-sensitive; the collections continue to grow and digitisation proceeds apace. Consultation of physical special collections and archives requires an appointment; the specific rules as announced by the Library govern.

For a young university like HKUST, built "from a bare site with no predecessor", there is one further contrast worth drawing. The special collections of long-established comprehensive universities typically accrete naturally over decades or centuries; HKUST has had to "catch up" deliberately — through donor relationships and systematic acquisition — amassing in just over thirty years a body of modern Chinese historical materials that would not shame far older institutions. This logic of late-start catch-up echoes the University's broader narrative of "a young institution chasing its elders" in international rankings and research assessments (see The Hong Kong Tertiary Landscape Compared); and the digitisation of these collections and archives is a natural extension, in the realm of historical preservation, of HKUST's self-positioning as a "digital education pioneer" (see Library and Digital Education and Learning Commons and the "Third-Generation" Library).

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