Yeung Kin Man Academic Building (Block P/Academic 1)—CityU’s Main Building and the Pivot of the Library

City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) Integrated Information Database · 05 Campus Module · Individual Building Archive

This is the archive for the single largest building on CityU’s main campus, focusing on its naming history, its role as a geometric hub, the five-colour zone system, and the Run Run Shaw Library housed within. For a horizontal comparison of the three landmark academic buildings and their external appearances, see the sister article “Landmark Buildings—Yeung Kin Man Academic Building, Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, and Lau Ming Wai Academic Building”; for building generations and green campus overview, see “Architectural Styles, Green Campus, and Net-Zero Carbon Infrastructure”.

Key findings in a nutshell: The Yeung Kin Man Academic Building (formerly Academic 1/AC1) is the largest main building at City University of Hong Kong, with a floor area of approximately 63,000 m²^※. Constructed in phases between 1989 and 1994, it was named in 2017 after Yeung Kin-man, founder of Biel Crystal. It houses the Run Run Shaw Library.

How big can a single building be? Big enough that you need to learn a colour code before you can find your classroom—Purple, Green, Blue, Yellow, Red. The first letter of each room number is the abbreviation of its colour zone. This vast main building on CityU’s Kowloon Tong campus is officially called the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building, yet to most students and staff it is simply a letter plus four digits: “P6309”, “G5301”. When it was completed in 1994 it was simply “Academic 1”, a bland sequential number; twenty-three years later, an industrialist who made his fortune making glass covers for mobile phones lent his name to the building. This entry deconstructs why it is called CityU’s “geometric centre” along three threads: the building’s space, its name, and the library inside.

# Why is this building called the “geometric centre” of the CityU campus?

The Yeung Kin Man Academic Building is neither the tallest nor the most photogenic structure on campus, but it is the hardest to bypass. CityU’s Kowloon Tong campus, in a high-density urban area, covers only about 15.6 hectares, with buildings tightly packed together. The former “Academic 1” sits squarely in the middle of the campus plan, extending connecting corridors, escalators and footbridges in every direction, linking the Administration Building, the Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, the Lau Ming Wai Academic Building, and the external shopping mall. Practically every pedestrian route a student takes will cut through it.

What truly makes it a “hub” is the University Concourse located within it. This is a multi-storey open public space that gathers most student service counters, society booths and pedestrian convergence points, and it also contains the densest concentration of “Gathering Points”^※ in CityU’s official wayfinding system. According to that official system, the entire system guides users with “alphanumeric characters and simplified graphics”^※; visitors first locate a Gathering Point marked with a large letter, then follow directional signs to their destination—and most of these Gathering Points are located in or around the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building and its Concourse.

This main building also acts as the “gate” between the campus and the shopping mall. The main campus is physically connected to Festival Walk, the shopping centre built atop the MTR Kowloon Tong station. A single escalator leads from the 4th-floor University Concourse level of the building directly into Festival Walk, making the mall almost feel like an extension of the campus. In informal student guides, the mall connected to campus is jokingly referred to as the “White Zone”^※—incorporating the shopping centre into the campus colour zone system. “White Zone” is a student-invented term and not an official zone; we record its source nature (unverified student usage). The symbiotic relationship between CityU and Festival Walk’s property rights and spaces is covered in “The History of the Festival Walk Connection”.

Taken together, the “geometric centre” identity of the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building is threefold: it is centrally located on the campus plan, it concentrates student services and the densest wayfinding nodes, and it controls the gateway to Festival Walk on the circulation route. It does not solely house the teaching and research of a single department or faculty; it sustains the circulation of the entire campus.

# How did “Academic 1” become the “Yeung Kin Man Academic Building”?

This building’s name has changed more than once, and in a manner that is characteristically CityU—number first, name later.

According to a summary on the English Wikipedia^※, the building “was simply known as Academic Building before the completion of Academic 2^※”; after the second academic building was finished, it was numbered Academic 1 (AC1) to distinguish them. This numeric designation remained until the late 2010s. CityU’s three main buildings sequentially named “Academic”—Academic 1, Academic 2, and Academic 3—were later respectively named the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building, the Li Dak Sum Yip Yio Chin Academic Building, and the Lau Ming Wai Academic Building, forming a naming trajectory of “number first, donor name later”. The result of this dual naming is that formal documents use the donor names, but students and staff still colloquially refer to “AC1/AC2/AC3” today.

The naming dedication took place on 28 April 2017^※. The university officially renamed Academic 1 as the “Yeung Kin Man Academic Building” in appreciation of industrialist Yeung Kin-man’s support and donations. It is worth noting the time lag: the major donation had been made in 2015 (see next section), but the building naming was only finalised two years later—a common rhythm in university naming procedures, where the naming ceremony often trails the donation decision by some time; the two dates should not be conflated.

A note on the narrative behind the name: We have seen CityU’s official press release (28 April 2017) as primary evidence for the renaming from Academic 1 to Yeung Kin Man Academic Building, which is confirmed; the characterisation of the “number first, donor name later” tradition is a synthesis of the Wikipedia summary and multiple individual naming cases—a multi-sourced corroborated inference rather than an official policy statement.

# Who is Yeung Kin-man? Biel Crystal and that HK$200 million donation

The man who lent his name to this main building is Dr Yeung Kin-man, SBS, JP. According to the Chinese Wikipedia^※, he is a native of Nanhai, Foshan in Guangdong province, and is the Chairman of Biel Crystal (Hong Kong) Limited, which specialises in glass touchscreens and cover glass for mobile phones and smart devices, with business interests also in real estate and hotels. His share of the mobile phone screen glass market earned him the moniker “the king of mobile phone screens^※”. He has been awarded the Silver Bauhinia Star (SBS), appointed Justice of the Peace (JP), and served as a member of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference—these are neutral public identities on record.

His relationship with CityU revolves around a donation ceremony with a clever name. According to summaries in Sina Finance and other media^※, on 8 September 2015, a donation ceremony for Dr Yeung Kin-man and his wife was held at CityU under the name “Bole Yi Gu Enze Mancheng” (a Chinese wordplay roughly meaning “With a discerning eye, grace fills the city”)^※. At the ceremony, the couple donated HK$200 million to CityU. According to the same media summary, the donation was used for three purposes: helping to establish the veterinary school, supporting student overseas exchange programmes, and establishing named professorial chairs^※. He subsequently made additional cumulative donations of HK$18 million to the university. Together, the two sums exceed HK$218 million for CityU alone.

A note on statistical bases: The above “HK$200 million” was the single donation announced on the day of the ceremony on 8 September 2015; the “HK$18 million” is a cumulative subsequent addition. The two numbers refer to different points in time and measurement bases and should not simply be added to form a “total donation” at a single point. The amounts are sourced from a summary by a financial media outlet (secondary); CityU’s official naming press release in 2017 did not disclose a specific donation figure^※, instead describing it as a “generous donation”—hence the figures and the official characterisation come from sources of different strengths, which we present side by side.

Yeung Kin-man’s educational philanthropy extends beyond CityU. According to the Sina Finance summary^※, he made two donations to The Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 2017 and 2024 (HK$8 million and HK$4 million respectively), for the upgrading of a mechanics laboratory and the establishment of named professorships; he also donated to Wuhan University of Technology to support research on new glass applications in automobiles; and he set up youth industrial training programmes and related scholarships for the Vocational Training Council (VTC) through bodies such as the Hong Kong Professional Testing and Certification Institute. The summary states that his total educational donations “amount to several hundred million yuan”. These figures are relayed from mainland Chinese financial media; we note their source nature, presenting them as background rather than exact audited figures.

# Academic 1, 2, and 3: Three main buildings, three donors

The naming logic for the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building becomes clearer when viewed alongside CityU’s three core buildings originally designated by the “Academic” serial number. CityU’s main campus has three parallel core buildings focused on academic functions, which were initially referred to entirely by sequential numbers and have since been named after benefactors—this is a concentrated expression of the university’s tradition of “writing the campus map with the names of donors”. The fact that each building’s room numbering syntax is different (see comparison table above) is itself evidence that they each form their own distinct “system”.

(Old names and current names synthesised from CityU’s official wayfinding system^※ and English Wikipedia^※; for a horizontal comparison of the three buildings, see the sister article “Landmark Buildings”.)

Among the three, Academic 1 (Yeung Kin Man Academic Building) holds the most prominent “main building” status: first, it is the largest; second, it houses the university’s sole main library; and third, it commands the gateway to Festival Walk. By contrast, Academic 2 leans towards teaching and research, and Academic 3 towards a “vertical campus” and exhibitions. To understand the names of these three buildings is almost to read a condensed directory of CityU’s benefactors—and the first entry in that directory is the colossal main building where you can only avoid getting lost by learning the colour zones.

# What did CityU officially say about this naming?

The official CityU press release of 28 April 2017 characterised the naming as a tribute to Yeung Kin-man’s sustained support. The release stated that the naming was:

in appreciation of the staunch support and generous donations given by Dr Yeung Kin-man, JP, for the University and students.

According to the same press release^※, at the time of the naming Yeung Kin-man held, among other roles, an honorary doctorate from CityU, the position of Co-Chairman of the Board of Directors of the CityU Foundation, and served as the Chairman of the Organising Committee for the 2016 CityU Foundation Annual Dinner—indicating that his ties to the university were already quite deep before the formal naming. In a quoted statement, he said that CityU was a vibrant and high-achieving university that deserved more community support, particularly in light of its international ranking performance and investment in talent development in recent years. This sentence is a personal view, which we paraphrase without commentary.

# What exactly is “Block P”? An examination of CityU’s five-colour zone system

At CityU, if you ask for directions and someone says “I’m in Block P”, the answer will often point not to a standalone building but to a zone within the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building. This colour-coded zone system is CityU’s most distinctive spatial institution, and also the one most easily misunderstood by outsiders.

According to a summary on English Wikipedia^※, the building is “divided by colour into Purple (P), Green (G), Blue (B), Yellow (Y) and Red (R) Zones; except for lecture theatres, all classrooms and laboratories are numbered according to the colour zone^※”. So-called “Block P” is simply the Purple Zone—rooms with a number starting with the letter P (like P4701) are located in the Purple Zone. When students refer to “Block P” or “Block G”, they are essentially describing internal subdivisions of this gigantic main building, not five separate buildings.

However, a discrepancy in usage emerges when cross-referencing the official CityU wayfinding system. The official wayfinding page narrows the colour zones: the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building (code YEUNG) is divided only into Purple, Green, Blue and Yellow zones, while the “Red Zone” is assigned to the adjacent Bank of China (Hong Kong) Complex^※. Meanwhile, the Run Run Shaw Library itself describes its entrance as located on the 2nd floor in the Yellow and Red Zones, and on the 3rd floor^※. That is to say, Wikipedia counts Red as one of the five colours within this building, the official wayfinding system attributes the Red Zone mainly to the BOC Complex, and the library describes the 2nd floor as “Yellow + Red Zone”—three accounts that do not perfectly match. A reasonable explanation is that this main building and the BOC Complex are interconnected on the lower floors, with colour zones bleeding across the boundary, and the “Red Zone” lies precisely at their interface. We present the three accounts side by side without adjudicating; the certain core fact is that Purple, Green, Blue and Yellow are indeed internal zones of this building, while Red is situated in the connecting belt between this building and the BOC Complex.

Beyond the zones, the room numbers themselves follow a kind of “grammar”. Different buildings on campus follow different numbering rules; understanding this grammar is the first lesson for new students trying to find their classes:

(Source: CityU official wayfinding system^※.)

This comparison table illustrates one thing: CityU does not have a single university-wide room numbering rule; each main building follows its own. The “letter + four digits” system of the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building, owing to its sheer size and the number of rooms, has become the most widely recognised—so much so that terms like “Block P” and “Y Zone” practically function as common vocabulary in CityU’s campus language. The five-colour zoning was designed to solve the orientation chaos of a 60,000 m² building, and its by-product was a kind of “shibboleth” that only CityU people understand.

# What is inside 63,000 m²? An overview of functional zones

The sheer volume of the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building makes it more like a “city within a city” than a single building. According to English Wikipedia^※, its floor area is about 63,000 m² (approximately 680,000 square feet) and it contains 116 laboratories, 18 lecture theatres, as well as classrooms and canteens^※. This space covers practically all the daily teaching and research needs of most of CityU’s science, engineering and business departments, and also accommodates a large number of administrative and student service units.

The building was completed in phases between 1989 and 1994^※, in parallel with the institution’s relocation to its current Kowloon Tong site—the City Polytechnic of Hong Kong, founded in 1984, built its permanent campus along Tat Chee Avenue, and Academic 1 was the largest core building among that first batch, arguably the foundation stone of CityU’s “first-generation” main building cluster on the Kowloon Tong campus. In 1994, the City Polytechnic was formally upgraded to the City University of Hong Kong, and this main building has thus witnessed the identity shift from “polytechnic” to “university”. The building and the main campus are located along Tat Chee Avenue in Kowloon Tong, Kowloon^※, in the same high-density block as MTR Kowloon Tong station and Festival Walk—a site selection that is the geographical precondition for it later being able to “share a floor” with the shopping mall and become a commuting hub. Over three decades, the student population and academic units have expanded continuously, yet this first-generation main building has always been the one with the most rooms and the densest human traffic; its triple identity of “built first, largest, and most central” ensures it retains the title of “the main building” even amidst a cluster of later architectural landmarks.

The following table, based on public records, maps out the building’s functional layers (exact room allocations may be adjusted over the years; this is a structural overview):

(Laboratory and lecture theatre numbers sourced from English Wikipedia^※; library floors from CityU Wayfinder venue page^※.)

Viewed altogether, what makes the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building the “main building” is not that it belongs to a star faculty, but that it compresses teaching, knowledge, circulation, gatekeeping and living into a single structure. It is the ultimate exemplar of CityU’s high-density urban campus logic of “inward stacking”—using one building to hold the vast majority of the daily operations needed to run a university.

# Why is the Run Run Shaw Library located in this building?

If the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building is CityU’s torso, then the Run Run Shaw Library within it is its knowledge nerve centre. Placing the sole main university library inside the campus’s largest and busiest building is itself a spatial arrangement designed to put “knowledge at the heart of the campus”.

The library’s history predates the naming of this building by many years. According to English Wikipedia^※, the library of CityU (then City Polytechnic of Hong Kong) was established in 1984^※ and moved to the current Kowloon Tong site in 1989^※. The turning point came in 1990: “In 1990, the library was formally renamed the ‘Run Run Shaw Library’ as a result of a major donation by Sir Run Run Shaw to the City Polytechnic”^※. In other words, the library’s naming (1990) long predates the building’s naming (2017); separated by twenty-seven years, both nonetheless follow the same logic of “writing the campus with the names of donors”.

Spatially, the library occupies the second floor (Yellow and Red Zones) and third floor^※ of the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building, providing around 2,700 seats^※ across two floors, making it the core venue for exam preparation, self-study and research. According to current statistics on English Wikipedia^※, its total collection amounts to approximately 3.25 million items (including around 1.04 million printed books, 2.22 million e-books, and around 179,000 bound periodicals)^※, with an annual circulation of over 350,000 and serving about 25,000 students and staff. These figures are from Wikipedia (secondary); the exact scope and timing follow that entry’s conventions.

The library’s space has also expanded. According to the same entry, an extension project in 2013 added 125 individual study spaces, rare book and special collection facilities, and stack space^※; the library also houses a Learning Commons called “The Oval”, equipped with advanced computer facilities and IT support to encourage collaborative learning. It has twice received recognition from the American Library Association (ALA)—a 2021 Presidential Citation and a 2022 Presidential Recognition for International Libraries, for its work on cultural heritage research connections and a calligraphy heritage project^※.

The library’s benefactor, Sir Run Run Shaw, was a Hong Kong film and television pioneer and renowned philanthropist. He built his media empire through Shaw Brothers film studio and Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB), and in his later years was known for endowing “Run Run Shaw Buildings” and the “Shaw Prize” across universities and research institutions in the Chinese-speaking world. The reason the library was named after him in 1990 was precisely because of his major donation to the City Polytechnic. If we juxtapose the building’s outer shell (Yeung Kin-man) with its inner core library (Run Run Shaw), two donors from different eras and industries—one from manufacturing, one from film and television—have each left their names on the same campus coordinate, a microcosm of Hong Kong’s “donation naming” culture in higher education.

As for opening hours, according to the library’s official opening hours page^※ and student handbooks, during term time the library is generally open from 8:30 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. daily, with closures on certain days (such as Christmas, New Year’s Day and the periods around Lunar New Year); a student card is required for entry, and food is not allowed but sealed water bottles are. Opening hours are subject to adjustments based on usage and staffing; for the most up-to-date information, refer to the official page. We do not freeze any specific schedule as a permanent fact. For details on the library’s collections, special collections and the exhibition trajectory of the Pangkor Exhibition Gallery, see “Library and Galleries”.

Placing the library back in the context of this building’s coordinates, a clear thread emerges: the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building is the physical hub of CityU, and the Run Run Shaw Library is its knowledge hub; spatially, they form a nested relationship of “a library within a building.” An industrialist from the mobile phone glass industry (Yeung Kin-man) and a film magnate and philanthropist (Run Run Shaw) each left their names on the building’s exterior and interior respectively—one on the entire main building, one on the library inside. Twenty-seven years apart, their names meet at the same campus coordinate.

# Institutional summary: How one building becomes a “city within a city”

Bringing the three threads together, the archive of the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building can be summarised in three points:

1. Spatially, it is CityU’s geometric and circulatory hub—centrally located on the campus plan, containing the University Concourse and the densest wayfinding Gathering Points, and controlling the gateway to Festival Walk via an escalator. It supports not a single faculty, but the daily pedestrian flow of the entire campus.
2. In its naming, it followed the CityU path of “number first, donor name later”—completed in 1994 as Academic 1 (AC1), it was named the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building in April 2017 in recognition of over HK$200 million in donations from Biel Crystal founder Yeung Kin-man since 2015; the two-year gap between the major donation and the building naming is a common rhythm in university naming procedures.
3. Internally, it is a functionally compressed “city within a city”—stacked within over 60,000 m² are 116 laboratories, 18 lecture theatres, a concourse that connects to Festival Walk, and the Run Run Shaw Library, occupying the second and third floors with a collection exceeding three million items. The five-colour zoning (Purple, Green, Blue, Yellow, with Red at the interface with the BOC Complex) and the “letter + four digits” room number syntax are this city-within-a-city’s unique wayfinding system.

Weak sources (such as the student-invented “White Zone”) have had their nature noted; where accounts across sources diverge (the affiliation of the Red Zone in the five-colour system, the donation amount vs. the official characterisation), we have presented them side by side and not adjudicated. For a horizontal comparison of the three landmark academic buildings, see the sister article “Landmark Buildings”.

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