VAZIOA HONG KONG UNIVERSITY ONE MONONONOVOROJEN
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THE FIRST PRECARIOUS YEARS.
HE University started with an annual income of £9,000, the main University building and a house for the Vice-Chancellor. The School The school had been built and of Anatomy was opened in 1913.
equipped out of the Ng Li Hing donation of $50,000 to the College
of Medicine.
When the War was over the question of the University's future had obviously to be reconsidered. What was needed was an increase in the general endowment by at least $9,000,000. The air was full of general optimism. New, but urgently needed, appointments were made. But Mr. Cheung Pat Sze The financial was dead and his annual donation to the Arts Faculty had ceased. position of the University was critical,
Up to 1919 physiology and biology were taught in the main University building and by the same teacher. The Board of the Faculty of Medicine had Mr. Ho in 1910 reported that the teaching of physiology was unsatisfactory. Fook came to the rescue with a gift of $50,000 which enabled the Council to In 1917 Mr. Chan Kai Ming gave great and equip the School of Physiology. $50.000 and with this money the School of Pathology was erected and equipped. In the same year Mr. Ho Kom Tong gave $50,000 for the erection and equip- ment of a School of Tropical Medicine. The Schools both of Pathology and of Tropical Medicine which were opened in 1919 are housed in the same building.
In February 1925 Sir Robert Ho Tung gave $50,000 towards the cost of the teaching staff with the proviso that not less than $2,000 per annum of the interest was to go towards the remuneration of the incumbent of a chair ten- Able at the Government Civil Hospital which was to be called the Ho Tung Chair of Clinical Surgery. At the same time Sir Robert gave $50,000 towards the University Endowment Fund. This gift was made payable by ten annual instalments of $5,000.
The Court of the University realising that the University was insolvent refused on the 29th April, 1920, to adopt the income and expenditure account for 1919-20. Instead, they asked the Governor-in-Council to inquire into the whole position and working of the University. The Governor appointed a Com- mission, but before the Commission had ever met, three professors and one lecturer of the Faculty of Arts had resigned.
K.C.. O, B. E.,
The Commission was presided over by the Honourable Mr. Ernest Hamilton Sharp, R.C., O.B.E..--a leading barrister of the Colony-and is Its members were the Hon. Mr. popularly known as the Sharp Commission. Joseph Horsford Kemp,
then Attorney General of Hong Kong, now Sir Joseph Kemp, the Colony's Chief Justice, the Honourable Mr. Edward Alexander Irving, then Director of Education for the Colony, the Honourable Mr. John Johnstone, then Managing Director of Messrs. Jardine, The University's Registrar Matheson & Co., Ltd. and Mr. T'so Seen Wan. acted as the Commission's Secretary.
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