Fung Shui Ridge, the One-World Fountain, and the Mystery of "Elevator as Address

Note: This page distinguishes verified content (with official/media sourcing noted) from campus-lore content (marked 【campus lore/apocryphal】 — hearsay circulating on campus, unverified).

Many pieces of lore circulate around HKUST's Clear Water Bay campus. This piece selects three that are both engaging and documented: the campus built along a Fung Shui Ridge, the One-World Fountain symbolising the five continents, and the maze-like circulation system that uses elevator numbers as addresses, routinely leaving visitors lost. The three pieces of lore may look unrelated, but they share a single topographical throughline — a "runner-up" competition entry set the terraced skeleton of the campus, and over the following decade-plus the university and students each added a fountain and a navigation system to decorate and manage the complexity that the terrain created. This piece supplements Landmark Legends and Campus Lore^※.

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# I. Fung Shui Ridge: Was HKUST "Built According to Fung Shui"? (Verified — Official Documentation Exists)

A fact that often surprises people: HKUST — a university named for "science and technology" — has a campus with a notable connection to fung shui, and this is documented in an article by HKUST's official Library.

According to an HKUST Library article titled "Science and Fung Shui, Side-by-Side"^※, near the bus stop at the campus's north gate lies a natural landform known as the "Fung Shui Ridge"^※. The article states explicitly: "HKUST was also built following fung shui principles. This ridge, along with the surrounding hills and forest, serves both as a barrier against the natural environment and as home to diverse ecosystems."^※

What is more interesting is the article's framing — it does not treat fung shui as superstition, but reinterprets it as observation-based environmental knowledge. As an example, the article notes that "a community near a lake may benefit, because a lake is both a source of food and water and a moderator of local temperature"^※, illustrating how earlier generations accumulated practical environmental knowledge over time. The article's central claim is: "The practice of fung shui is a way for people to coexist with, and find comfort within, their environment and way of life — not unlike what we try to achieve today through science."^※

This official "science and fung shui, side by side" framing is worth noting: a technology-focused university that decorates its campus with the Red Bird Sundial, an armillary sphere, and other "ancient Eastern science" pieces (see Landmark Architecture and Public Art^※), while also candidly acknowledging that the campus was "built following fung shui principles," and framing fung shui and science as connected through an observational lens. This unselfconscious attitude toward traditional knowledge is itself a notable detail of HKUST's campus culture.

Worth noting: the "Fung Shui Ridge" is not merely a passing line in the Library's article — according to publicly available material, the ridge itself appears in the architects' original campus design drawings^※, indicating that it is not a retrospective interpretation but an actual landform factored in during the site-selection and planning stage. The Library article further states that the original architectural drawings marking the Fung Shui Ridge were displayed in an exhibition titled "The Story of HKUST's Birth" on the Library's first floor^※ — meaning the "Fung Shui Ridge" is not just a textual record but is supported by physical drawings that were once publicly exhibited as part of campus history. This also corroborates the steepness of the Clear Water Bay campus's terrain — the sloped site on which the campus sits has an elevation difference of roughly 25 metres^※, and this pronounced vertical drop is the topographical root of the "elevator as address" phenomenon discussed in Section III: the Fung Shui Ridge, surrounding hills, and steep slope together shape the campus's natural barrier and dictate a circulation logic in which campus movement must run vertically through tiers of elevators and escalators.

# How a "Runner-Up" Entry Produced a Terraced Campus

The short answer first: HKUST's present-day campus form — built up the hillside in tiers and linked by elevators — traces back to an architecture competition, and what was ultimately built was, notably, not the winning entry. According to the HKUST Wikipedia entry^※, after the site at Tai Po Tsai was chosen, the planning committee held an architectural design competition during the preparatory stage; in the end, the joint submission by Simon Kwan & Associates and Percy Thomas Partnership — the competition's runner-up entry — was selected as the executed master-plan blueprint^※. This was because the planning committee was under no obligation to award the commission to the competition winner^※ — winning the judging and winning the commission were simply two different things.

This "runner-up blueprint" directly determined today's campus skeleton: because the Clear Water Bay site is steep, buildings and facilities were constructed on a series of terraces cut into the hillside, with academic facilities on the upper terraces and undergraduate dormitories and sports facilities on the lower terraces nearer the sea^※. Linking these terraces, in addition to vehicle roads, is a network of pedestrian bridges and elevators officially called the "Bridge Link"^※. In other words, "elevator as address" is not an accidental by-product of campus planning but a necessary consequence of the "terraced campus" design logic itself — the ridge set the overall shape, the terraces created the tiers, and the Bridge Link supplied the vertical connective tissue.

Years later, this "built along the hillside" campus language was confirmed again in a different way: for HKUST's newly established sister campus in Guangzhou, the official design description states explicitly that the Guangzhou campus "continues the overall style of the Clear Water Bay campus and blends harmoniously with the surrounding natural environment"^※ — the Guangzhou site is comparatively flat and does not need to replicate Clear Water Bay's tiers of elevators, yet the design team still deliberately carried forward the "dialogue with the natural environment" ethos of Clear Water Bay. This corroborates that the site logic behind Clear Water Bay and the Fung Shui Ridge had already been internalised as part of HKUST's campus culture, rather than a one-off design coincidence.

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# II. The One-World Fountain: A Dialogue of Five Continents (Campus Lore)

Another symbolically loaded installation on campus is the fountain sculpture commonly known as the "One-World Fountain." According to a personal account^※, the fountain consists of five stones, each representing a continent; the "Asia" stone at the sculpture's centre communicates with the other continents through continuously flowing water^※, symbolising "harmony between nature and people, and the synergy of technology and global communication"^※.

The design's imagery — Asia at the centre, connected to the five continents by flowing water — echoes HKUST's international positioning of being "rooted in Asia, oriented toward the world" (see Association of East Asian Research Universities and Regional Alliances^※).

【Campus lore】Various "fung shui" claims about campus fountains and water features (e.g., regarding a fountain's orientation, or flowing water attracting/dispersing fortune) occasionally circulate among students at Hong Kong universities. This archive has found no reliable source supporting any specific version of such claims and does not record them; only the design symbolism of the One-World Fountain itself is recorded here. Readers who encounter such claims should treat them as unverified campus lore.

# Correction and Confirmation: The Sculptor and Exact Location, per an Official Page

For a long time, Chinese-language accounts of the One-World Fountain rarely went beyond the "five continents, five stones" symbolism, leaving the sculptor and exact location vague. According to the HKUST official "Campus Highlights" page^※, the sculpture is in fact the work of Austrian sculptor Professor Hans Muhr, and the official description matches the campus-lore account: "it is made up of five stones, each from a different continent"^※, symbolising the harmonious synergy of nature and people, technology and global communication. The official page also gives the precise location — the fountain sits outside the LG7 canteen^※, a different water feature from the entrance plaza where the Red Bird Sundial stands, though visitors often conflate the two.

This official confirmation matters: it upgrades the "five-continent fountain," previously known only from a personal travelogue (Ken Rahn's account), into a formal campus artwork documented by the university with a named creator, rather than mere campus lore. Readers who wish to visit should head to the area outside the LG7 canteen, not the entrance plaza — the latter is where the "Circle of Time" Red Bird Sundial stands.

# A Companion Water Sculpture: the "Circle of Time" Red Bird Sundial

HKUST's entrance plaza has another water sculpture with more extensive official documentation — the "Circle of Time" Red Bird Sundial Sculpture — which can be read alongside the One-World Fountain: both use flowing water as their formal language, yet carry different symbolic content. According to the HKUST Campus Management Office, the sundial sits in the pool at the centre of the entrance plaza and was designed by the Irish-born, Perth (Australia)-based sculptor couple Charles and Joan Walsh-Smith^※, and was installed and completed on 8 October 1991^※ — the same year HKUST opened, making it one of the campus's earliest landmarks.

According to the university's materials, the main sculpture stands 8.5 metres tall, and its relief wall depicting Chinese scientific achievements is 7.0 metres long and 1.5 metres high^※; the piece functions both as artwork and as a working sundial, recording time through sunlight and the movement of its shadow^※. The designers describe it as "a contemplative 'Circle of Time,' an oasis within the busy grid of campus life"^※; the water flowing around the sculpture symbolises "the flow of history," with the 39 Chinese scientific and technological inventions depicted on the relief telling, through shifting light and shadow, a narrative of human creative achievement^※.

Placing the One-World Fountain (water connecting five continents, symbolising global cooperation) alongside the "Circle of Time" Red Bird Sundial (water symbolising the flow of history, inscribed with ancient Chinese scientific and technological achievements) side by side shows that the water-feature design of HKUST's entrance area intentionally presents a double narrative of "spatial globality" and "temporal historical depth" — one fountain faces outward to the world, one sundial looks back at history, mirroring HKUST's own positioning of being "rooted in China, oriented toward the world" at the level of landscape design. The origin of the Red Bird Sundial's "turkey" nickname and how it formally entered the school anthem's lyrics in 2023 are covered in a separate piece, The Red Bird Emblem and the School Anthem^※.

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# III. "Elevator as Address": A Survival Guide to the Maze-Like Campus (Verified — Supported by an Official Tool)

For newcomers to HKUST, what causes the most headaches is usually not failing to find a place, but the fact that "the same place can be reached by several different routes and several different elevators." According to a guide aimed at exchange students^※, the HKUST campus has a convoluted layout, where multiple elevators and corridors all lead to the same area, making classrooms difficult to find^※.

HKUST's "official solution" to this is distinctive: using elevator numbers as addresses. According to the same guide, the university provides a digital map called "Path Advisor," in which elevator (lift) numbers function as an "address" to narrow down where a classroom is located^※. HKUST does indeed have an official Path Advisor navigation tool^※ that supports this account.

In other words, at HKUST, "I'm at Lift XX" is a standard way of stating one's location — elevator numbers have become the campus's common "street address." The root of this distinctive phenomenon lies in the campus being built along a hillside with a large vertical drop (see Landmark Architecture and Public Art^※), where floors at different elevations are mainly linked by strings of elevators and escalators; so "which elevator number you're near" pins down a location better than "which floor you're on."

【Campus lore/consensus】"Getting lost at HKUST" is close to a shared experience for nearly every new student and visitor, and "navigating by elevator number" has become an unspoken campus survival skill. While this phenomenon is hard to find recorded verbatim in "authoritative documentation," it is both described in an exchange-student guide and corroborated by the official Path Advisor tool, so it can be treated as a documented campus feature. This archive records it here as lore of the "maze-like campus."

# Tracing Path Advisor's Origins: How an Undergraduate Capstone Project Became a Campus-Wide Standard

A little-known fact: the official tool that resolved the "elevator as address" problem did not start as a top-down IT project from the university administration — it began as a student's undergraduate capstone (Final Year) Project. According to the Path Advisor history page officially published by HKUST's Information Technology Services Office (ITSO)^※, Path Advisor 1.0 was born in the 2009–2010 academic year, developed by four undergraduates — LIU, Hung Ho (Henry, team lead), CHOW, Kwan Wang, NG, Wai Ying, and SO, Siu Wing — under the supervision of Professor Raymond Wong of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering^※. According to the same page, the project's original motivation was Professor Wong's judgment that "a map-assistance system could help users find locations on campus more easily"^※ — this plain rationale for the project happens to be the most direct official footnote to the "elevator as address" campus problem.

After the student project proved its practical value, Professor Wong worked with ITSO to bring the system to a formal, campus-wide launch in 2010^※, and it quickly became popular; in the following 2010–2011 academic year, another four students, again under Professor Wong's supervision, added features such as classroom seating maps and facility details. Nearly a decade later, Path Advisor 2.0 was launched in 2019, led by original contributor Henry Liu together with ITSO's Samuel Kwan and Michael Tang^※, adding a "plug-and-play" architecture that let later students and developers continue adding features without heavily modifying the original system — the bus-queue headcount feature (based on research from Professor Gary Chan's team, integrated and launched by intern Kong Ming Hin) and the 3D view (models generated by Professor Jack Cheng's team, with visualisation handled by one of Professor Wong's PhD students) are both products of this relay of contributions by students and professors.

On mobile, the iOS and Android Path Advisor apps were developed and launched by student project teams and ITSO interns with the assistance of ITSO staff^※, with plans to integrate indoor-positioning technology developed by Professor Gary Chan's team^※ — a technology that fuses Wi-Fi signals, the geomagnetic field, Bluetooth, and step-count/accelerometer/gyroscope/barometer data for indoor positioning, and is described as the first deployment of its kind in Hong Kong, aimed at improving the campus navigation experience^※.

In other words, HKUST's answer to its own campus's "maze-like" nature started from a single student's capstone project and, over more than a decade of relay iteration by successive cohorts of students and professors, grew into a multi-sensor indoor-positioning system — itself the most distinctly HKUST-flavoured sequel to the "elevator as address" piece of lore: a university of science and technology, in the end, uses "technology" to solve the "maze" problem of its own making.

Incidentally, the real-world basis for "elevator as address" can also be glimpsed in the university's public floor numbering: taking the HKUST Library as an example, the official floor-plan tool lists the selectable floors as 1/F, G/F, LG1, LG3, LG4, LG5, in that order^※ — LG2 is conspicuously missing, so the numbering is not consecutive. For newcomers, this gives a glimpse of the experience of "floor numbers that skip, requiring navigation by elevator number"; it also explains why "which Lift number" rather than "which floor" is the more useful way of stating a location on the HKUST campus.

# One Library, Three Entrances: How Terrain Forced a "Multiple-Entrance" Design

"Elevator as address" is not an abstraction — the HKUST Library itself is a concrete, small-scale example: the same building, being built into a hillside, was forced to open a separate main entrance at each of several elevations. According to an official HKUST Library announcement^※, the Library has three entrances on three different floors: G/F (the main entrance beside the atrium, leading to the exhibition gallery and the circulation counter), LG1 (the entrance to the Learning Commons, open 24 hours during the fall and spring semesters), and the LG5 entrance newly opened in early March 2024 (serving mainly residential-hall students)^※. The announcement explains that the multi-floor entrances exist specifically to accommodate the campus's complex terrain, so that students can take the nearest route regardless of where on campus they are^※.

These figures illustrate that "elevator as address" is not hyperbole: according to the same announcement, the LG1 entrance recorded over 107,000 entries and exits between 6 and 31 March, making it the busiest of the three^※; while the newly opened LG5 entrance saw as much as 84% of its traffic coming from undergraduates, reflecting its heavy use by students living in the residential halls^※. In other words, "one library" forms independent entrances with markedly different traffic patterns at different elevations, with students choosing an elevator and entrance based on which terrace they are on rather than defaulting to a single "main entrance" — a microcosm, within a single building, of the terraced campus's overall circulation logic.

# The Three Pieces of Lore at a Glance

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# Summary

These three pieces of lore correspond to three facets of the HKUST campus:

1. Fung Shui Ridge — a technology-focused university's unselfconscious acceptance of traditional environmental knowledge, documented by an official Library article, with the ridge itself already present in the architects' original design drawings; the campus's "built up the hillside" skeleton in fact grew out of a competition's runner-up entry — one that did not win the judging but did win the commission — and the design description for the Guangzhou sister campus carries this same lineage forward;
2. The One-World Fountain and the Red Bird Sundial — two water sculptures, one connecting five continents around Asia, the other using flowing water to symbolise the sweep of history, echoing HKUST's international positioning and historical depth respectively; the fountain's sculptor and location, once confirmed by an official page, have been upgraded from campus lore to a documented campus artwork;
3. Elevator as address — a vertically intricate circulation system, built along a hillside with roughly a 25-metre elevation difference, gave rise to the distinctive survival knowledge of "navigating by elevator number," and Path Advisor, the tool that resolves this problem, itself originated as a student's capstone project and, over more than a decade, evolved into a multi-sensor indoor-positioning system.

Taken together, the three sketch a distinctive campus that is at once "scientific" and "mysterious," both international and disorienting, yet one that keeps drawing on its own technological resources to answer that disorientation.

Note: This piece has labelled the source status (official/lore) of each item. Content involving "fung shui" is treated by this archive as observational, cultural narrative, with no claims made regarding fortune, misfortune, or the supernatural; campus-lore claims are clearly marked, and readers should judge their veracity from the cited sources themselves.

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# Related Reading

• Landmark Legends and Campus Lore^※ — more campus lore, including the mystery of the Red Bird Sundial's name, the "Frog Road" slogan, and the site's past as a Kohima British Army camp
• The Red Bird Emblem and the School Anthem^※ — the origin of the Red Bird Sundial's "turkey" nickname and how it formally entered the school anthem in 2023
• Landmark Architecture and Public Art^※ — an overview of campus architecture and public art
• Association of East Asian Research Universities and Regional Alliances^※ — the institutional context of HKUST's international positioning

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