Yeung Kin Man Academic Building (Block P / Academic 1) — CityU's Main Building and the Hub of Its Library

City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK / 城大) Comprehensive Information Database · 05 Campus Module · Individual Building Dossier

This entry is the dedicated dossier for the largest single building on CityU's main campus, focusing on its naming history, its role as the geometric hub, the five-colour zoning system, and the Run Run Shaw Library it houses. For a comparative tour of the three landmark academic buildings and their exteriors, see the companion piece 《校园地标建筑——杨建文学术楼、邵逸夫创意媒体中心与刘鸣炜学术楼》 (in Chinese); for the generational development of buildings and the green campus overview, see 《建筑风格、绿色校园与净零碳基建》 (in Chinese).

The thesis in one sentence: The Yeung Kin Man Academic Building (formerly Academic 1 / AC1) is the largest main building on the CityU campus, with a floor area of about 63,000 square metres^※. It was completed in phases between 1989 and 1994, renamed in 2017 after Biel Crystal founder Yeung Kin-man, and houses the Run Run Shaw Library.

Just how big can a building get? Big enough that you have to learn your colours before you can find your classroom — purple, green, blue, yellow, red; the first letter of every room number is the abbreviation of its colour zone. The most massive building on CityU's Kowloon Tong campus is officially the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building, but staff and students alike usually refer to it as a single letter plus four digits: "P6309", "G5301". When it was completed in 1994, it was called "Academic 1" — a number as plain as could be. It was not until twenty-three years later that an industrialist who built his fortune on mobile-phone glass lent his name to it. This entry traces three threads — the building's space, its name, and the library within — to unpack why it is called the "geometric centre" of CityU.

# Why is this building called the "geometric centre" of the campus?

The Yeung Kin Man Academic Building is neither the tallest building at CityU nor the most photogenic, but it is the hardest to walk around. The Kowloon Tong campus sits in a dense urban district, the main campus covers only about 15.6 hectares, and the buildings are packed tightly against one another. This main block, formerly "Academic 1", sits precisely at the centre of the campus footprint, extending covered walkways, escalators and footbridges in every direction to link the administrative building, the Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, the Lau Ming Wai Academic Building and the adjoining shopping mall. Almost every daily student route passes through it.

What truly makes it the "hub" is the University Concourse inside. This is a multi-level open public space that concentrates most of the student-services counters, student-society booths and pedestrian meeting points, and is also where the densest cluster of "Gathering Points^※" in CityU's official wayfinding system is located. According to the University's official wayfinding guide, the entire system relies on "alphabetic characters and simplified graphics" to direct people^※: visitors first find a gathering point marked with a large letter, then follow the signage to their destination. Most of those gathering points fall in and around the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building and its concourse.

This main block is also the "gateway" between campus and mall. CityU's main campus is directly adjoined by Festival Walk, the shopping mall built on top of the MTR Kowloon Tong station; an escalator runs from the fourth-floor concourse level of the building straight into Festival Walk, making the mall almost an extension floor of the campus. In unofficial student guides for newcomers, students simply call the mall-linked part of campus the "White Zone^※" — folding the mall into the campus colour-zone system. Note that "White Zone" is student slang, not an official zone; this database flags it as unofficial (unverified). The intertwined ownership and spatial relationship between CityU and Festival Walk is treated separately in 《又一城连接史》 (in Chinese).

Taken together, the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building's "geometric centre" status rests on three superimposed roles: spatially central on the campus plan, functionally central as the gathering point for student services and the densest wayfinding nodes, and circulationally central as the choke point guarding the passage to Festival Walk. It does not house a single department's teaching and research; it sustains the circulation of the entire campus.

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

The building has been renamed more than once, and the sequence is quintessentially CityU — number first, name later.

According to the English Wikipedia overview^※, the building was "known simply as the 'Academic Building' until the completion of Academic 2^※". When the second academic building was completed, it was numbered Academic 1 (AC1) to distinguish the two. That numbering held until the late 2010s. The three CityU main buildings named with "Academic" numbers — Academic 1, Academic 2 and Academic 3 — were later renamed respectively the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building, the Li Dak Sum Yip Yio Chin Academic Building and the Lau Ming Wai Academic Building, forming a clear "number first, name later" trajectory. The result is a dual nomenclature: formal documents use the endowed names, while staff and students still habitually say "AC1 / AC2 / AC3".

The renaming took place on 28 April 2017^※. CityU formally renamed Academic 1 the "Yeung Kin Man Academic Building" in recognition of the industrialist's support for and donations to the University. The timing is worth noting: the major donation had already been made in 2015 (see next section), while the building's renaming was not finalised until two years later. Naming ceremonies often lag behind the donation decision — a common rhythm in university naming procedures — and the two years should not be conflated.

A caveat on sourcing: this database notes that the "Academic 1 → Yeung Kin Man Academic Building" renaming is directly attested by CityU's official press release (28 April 2017) and is therefore verified; the generalisation of a "number first, name later" naming tradition, by contrast, is an induction drawn from the Wikipedia overview and the individual naming cases of several buildings — cross-corroborated inference, not an officially stated policy.

# 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 entry^※, he is a native of Nanhai, Foshan, Guangdong, and chairman of Biel Crystal (Hong Kong) Limited, whose main business is glass touch screens and cover glass for mobile phones and smart devices, with side interests in property and hotels. His share of the mobile-screen glass market has earned him the epithet "king of mobile phone screens^※". He holds the Silver Bauhinia Star (SBS), is a Justice of the Peace (JP), and served as a member of the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) — these are neutral public records of his titles and roles.

His relationship with CityU centres on a donation ceremony with a deliberately punning name. According to reports aggregated by Sina Finance and other outlets^※, on 8 September 2015, a donation ceremony for Mr and Mrs Yeung Kin-man, titled "伯乐一顾 恩泽满城" ("A discerning patron's glance, grace filling the city"), was held at CityU^※, at which the couple donated HK$200 million to the University. According to the same report, the funds had three purposes: helping establish the veterinary medicine school, supporting student overseas exchange programmes, and setting up endowed lecture chairs^※. He subsequently made further cumulative donations of HK$18 million to CityU. In total, his donations to CityU alone exceed HK$218 million.

A note on statistical scope: the "HK$200 million" figure above is the one-off donation announced at the September 2015 ceremony; the "HK$18 million" is the cumulative additional amount that followed. The two figures refer to different points in time and different scopes, and should not be simply added together as a single "total donation" at any one point. The amounts come from financial-media summaries (secondary sources); CityU's own 2017 naming press release does not disclose specific donation amounts^※, describing the gift only as "generous donations". The figures and the official characterisation thus rest on different levels of sourcing, and this database presents them side by side with that distinction flagged.

Yeung's educational giving extends beyond CityU. According to the Sina Finance report^※, he donated to the Hong Kong Polytechnic University twice, in 2017 and 2024 (HK$8 million and HK$4 million respectively), for upgrading a mechanics laboratory and establishing an endowed professorship; he also funded research at Wuhan University of Technology into new automotive applications of glass; and through channels including the Hong Kong Institute of Industry Professionals and the Vocational Training Council (VTC), he set up a youth-industry training scheme and related scholarships. The report puts his total educational donations at "several hundred million yuan". These figures come from mainland-Chinese financial media and are presented here as background with their source nature flagged, not as precisely audited numbers.

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

The naming logic of the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building becomes clearer when set against CityU's three "Academic"-numbered main buildings. The main campus has three core buildings whose primary function is academic; in the early years they were known strictly by number, and only later were each given a donor's name — a concentrated expression of the CityU tradition of "writing the campus map with donors' names". The fact that the three buildings each have a different room-number syntax (see the comparison table above) is itself evidence of how each operates as its own self-contained system.

(The old and current names of the three buildings are compiled from the CityU official wayfinding system^※ and English Wikipedia^※; for a horizontal comparison of all three, see the companion piece "Campus Landmark Buildings" (in Chinese).)

Among the three, Academic 1 (the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building) most deserves the "main building" label, for three reasons: it is the largest; it houses the University's only main library; and it guards the gateway to Festival Walk. By contrast, Academic 2 leans toward teaching and research, and Academic 3 toward the "vertical campus" and exhibitions. Read the names of these three buildings and you have read a condensed directory of CityU donors — and the first entry on that list is the giant main building you need a colour code to navigate.

# What did CityU officially say about the renaming?

CityU's official press release of 28 April 2017 framed the renaming as a gesture of gratitude for Yeung's long-standing support. The statement described the naming as:

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 renaming Yeung's roles at CityU included Honorary Doctor of the University, Co-Chairman of the Board of Directors of the CityU Foundation, and Chairman of the Organising Committee for the Foundation's 2016 Anniversary Dinner — by which point his ties with the University were already deep. In his own remarks, he said that CityU is a dynamic and distinguished university deserving of greater community support, especially given its recent international ranking performance and its investment in nurturing talent. This is a statement of his personal view; this database conveys its gist without endorsing it.

# What exactly is "Block P"? An investigation of CityU's five-colour zoning system

At CityU, when someone says "I'm at Block P" when giving directions, they do not mean a standalone building — they mean a zone inside the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building. This colour-zoning system is one of the most distinctive and most easily misunderstood spatial conventions on campus.

According to the English Wikipedia overview^※, the building is "divided by colour into the Purple (P), Green (G), Blue (B), Yellow (Y) and Red (R) zones; all classrooms and laboratories, except lecture theatres, are numbered according to their colour zone^※". So "Block P" is the Purple Zone: rooms whose numbers begin with the letter P (e.g. P4701) are in the purple zone. When students say "Block P" or "Block G", they are referring to internal zones of this one giant building, not to five separate buildings.

However, when checked against CityU's official wayfinding system, a discrepancy emerges that is worth recording. The official wayfinding page narrows the colour zoning: the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building (code YEUNG) is divided into only four zones — purple, green, blue and yellow — while the "Red zone" is assigned to the neighbouring Bank of China (Hong Kong) Complex (BOC)^※. At the same time, the Run Run Shaw Library describes its own entrance as located in the yellow and red zones on the second floor of the building, and on the third floor^※. In other words, English Wikipedia counts the red zone as one of this building's five colours, the official wayfinding system attributes the red zone mainly to the BOC Complex, and the library describes its second floor as "yellow + red" — three accounts that do not fully agree. The most plausible explanation is that this main building and the BOC Complex are joined at the lower levels, their colour zones bleed into one another, and the "red zone" sits exactly at their boundary. This database presents all three accounts side by side without adjudicating. What is certain at the core: purple, green, blue and yellow are indeed the building's internal zones, and the red zone lies in the connecting band between this building and the BOC Complex.

Beyond zoning, the room numbers themselves form a kind of "grammar". Room-numbering rules vary from building to building at CityU, and learning this grammar is every new student's first lesson in finding their classrooms:

(Source: CityU official wayfinding system^※.)

This table makes one thing clear: CityU has no university-wide room-numbering rule; each main building does its own thing. The Yeung Kin Man Academic Building's "letter + four digits" system, precisely because the building is the largest and has the most rooms, has become the most widely used — to the point that expressions like "Block P" or "the Y zone" amount to common vocabulary in CityU campus speech. The five-colour zoning was devised to solve the problem of getting lost in a 60,000-square-metre building; its by-product is a set of code words that only CityU people understand.

# What fills 63,000 square metres? A functional breakdown

The sheer size of the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building means it acts more like a "city within a city" than a building. According to English Wikipedia^※, its floor area is about 63,000 square metres (about 680,000 square feet), containing 116 laboratories, 18 lecture theatres, together with classrooms, canteens and other facilities^※. This scale covers the everyday 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 step with the University's move to its present Kowloon Tong site. The City Polytechnic of Hong Kong, founded in 1984, built its permanent campus around Tat Chee Avenue in Kowloon Tong; Academic 1 was the largest core building of this campus, the foundation of the "first generation" of main buildings. In 1994 the Polytechnic was formally upgraded to become the City University of Hong Kong, and this main building has witnessed the institution's transformation from "polytechnic" to "university". The building and the main campus sit at Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon Tong, Kowloon^※, in the same dense block as the MTR Kowloon Tong station and Festival Walk — a location that is the geographical premise for its later ability to "share floors" with the mall and to serve as a commuting hub. Over more than three decades, student numbers and faculties have kept expanding, and yet this first-generation main building remains the one with the most rooms and the heaviest foot traffic — its triple identity of "built first, largest, most central" keeps it in the position of "main building" even among the newer landmark blocks that came later.

The following is a structural overview of the building's functional layers, based on public records (specific room assignments shift from year to year):

(Sources for laboratory and lecture theatre counts: English Wikipedia^※; for library floors: CityU Wayfinder venue page^※.)

Stack these layers together and the reason the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building is the "main building" becomes clear: it is not that it belongs to some star faculty, but that it compresses teaching, knowledge, circulation, gateway and amenities into a single block. It is the ultimate specimen of the "stack upward and inward" logic of CityU's high-density urban campus — one building packing in most of the daily operations a university needs to function.

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

If the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building is CityU's body, then the Run Run Shaw Library within it is its intellectual heart. Placing the University's only main library in the largest, busiest main building is itself a spatial statement: "put knowledge at the centre of the campus".

The library predates the building's renaming by a wide margin. According to English Wikipedia^※, the CityU (formerly City Polytechnic) library was founded in 1984^※ and moved to the present Kowloon Tong site in 1989 with the University^※. The turning point came in 1990 — "in 1990, following a major donation to the City Polytechnic by Sir Run Run Shaw, the library was renamed the Run Run Shaw Library"^※. In other words, the library's naming (1990) came twenty-seven years before the building's (2017), yet both follow the same logic of "writing the campus with donors' names".

In spatial terms, the library occupies the second floor (yellow and red zones) and the third floor^※ of the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building, providing a total of about 2,700 seats^※ across two floors — the core venue for CityU students' exam preparation, self-study and research. According to the current English Wikipedia figures^※, its collection totals about 3.25 million items (comprising roughly 1.04 million print books, 2.22 million e-books and 179,000 bound periodicals)^※, with annual circulation exceeding 350,000 transactions, serving around 25,000 staff and students. These figures come from the Wikipedia overview (secondary source); their scope and reference dates follow that entry.

The library has also been expanding physically. According to the same entry, a 2013 expansion added 125 individual study carrels, rare-book special collections facilities and shelving space^※; it also houses a learning commons called "The Oval", equipped with advanced computers and IT support to encourage collaborative learning. The library has twice received recognition from the American Library Association (ALA) — a 2021 "Presidential Citation" and the 2022 "Presidential International Library Innovation Award"^※ — for its work in connecting heritage studies and its calligraphy heritage project.

Sir Run Run Shaw, after whom the library is named, was a pioneer of Hong Kong's film and television industry and a renowned philanthropist. He built his media empire through Shaw Brothers Studio and Television Broadcasts Limited (TVB), and in later life became known for "Run Run Shaw buildings" and the "Shaw Prize" dotting universities across the Chinese-speaking world. The CityU library bears his name because of his major donation to the City Polytechnic in 1990. Set side by side, the building's shell (Yeung Kin-man) and its inner library (Run Run Shaw) represent two donors — one from manufacturing, one from film and television, separated by a generation — who each left their name at the same campus coordinate. It is a miniature of Hong Kong universities' "endowed naming" culture.

As for opening hours, according to the CityU library's official opening-hours page^※ and student handbooks, during term time the library is generally open daily from 8:30 am to 11:00 pm, closing on certain days (such as Christmas, New Year and around the Lunar New Year). Entry requires a student ID; food is not permitted inside, though drinking water is. Opening hours are adjusted according to demand and staffing, and the official page is authoritative for current times; this database does not treat any particular schedule as a permanent fact. For the library's collections, special collections and the exhibition programmes of the Indra and Harry Bang Gallery, see 《图书馆与般哥展览馆》 (in Chinese).

Place the library back into the building's coordinates and a clear thread emerges: the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building is CityU's physical hub; the Run Run Shaw Library is its intellectual hub; the two are nested — a library within a building. An industrialist from the mobile-glass business (Yeung Kin-man) and a film-and-television pioneer and philanthropist (Run Run Shaw) each left their name on the shell and the core of this building — one naming the whole block, the other the library inside it, twenty-seven years apart, yet meeting at the same campus coordinate.

# Institutional summary: how one building became a "city within a city"

Pulling the three threads together, the dossier on the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building can be distilled into three points:

1. Spatially, it is CityU's geometric and circulation hub — sitting at the centre of the campus plan, housing the University Concourse and the densest wayfinding gathering points, and guarding the escalator gateway to Festival Walk. It serves not a single faculty but the daily flow of the entire campus.
2. Nominally, it followed the CityU path of "number first, name later" — called Academic 1 (AC1) when completed in 1994, renamed the Yeung Kin Man Academic Building in April 2017 in gratitude for Biel Crystal founder Yeung Kin-man's donations totalling over HK$200 million since 2015; the two-year gap between the main donation and the building's naming is a common rhythm in university naming procedures.
3. Internally, it is a functionally compressed "city within a city" — over 60,000 square metres stacking 116 laboratories, 18 lecture theatres, a concourse connecting to Festival Walk, and the Run Run Shaw Library occupying the second and third floors with a collection of over three million items. The five-colour zoning (purple, green, blue, yellow, with the red zone at the boundary with the BOC Complex) and the "letter + four digits" room-number grammar are the navigation system unique to this city within a city.

Weak sources (such as student slang like the "White Zone") are flagged as such; where cross-source accounts differ (the red zone's attribution in the five-colour system, the donation figures versus the official characterisation), the discrepancies are presented side by side without adjudication. For a horizontal comparison of the three landmark academic buildings, see the companion piece 《校园地标建筑》 (in Chinese).

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