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Hong Kong has six universities. I was surprised to learn that all of them are English-language universities, since while most educated people here speak at least some English, the lingua franca is certainly Cantonese. I am working at City University, which is in Kowloon, a few kilometers north of the main commercial/tourist area (although, to be honest, all of urban Hong Kong is commercial). Last week I visited Chinese University (CUHK), which is located about four subway stops north-westish of City U. The physics department there has the reputation of being the best among those at the six local universities, and in fact it has two Nobel Prizewinners associated with it – 1957 Laureate C. N. Yang, of Yang-Mills theory, is a “Distinguished Professor-at-Large,” and Charles Kao, who won in 2009 for the development of fiber optics, was a professor at CUHK for a while, and later the president of the university. Leo Lau, who spent some time at Western, was Chair of the physics department there, and later Dean of Science.

I didn’t know anyone there, however, so I resorted to perusing their web pages. I was pleased to find a prof there named Lei Xu, whose research interests were very similar to mine. I emailed him and politely invited myself for a visit. I spent a morning talking to him, looking around his lab(s), learning about his research and telling him about mine. I learned some useful things, which I’ll get a grad student to think about when I get home! I then went for lunch with several members of the department and a rather overwhelmed-looking young fellow who, it turned out, was there for a job interview.

There are other people in the department that I should also talk too, but they were busy with the job candidate the day I visited. It’s easy for me to go there again before I come home, though.

As an aside, I was interested to see a large statue of the “Goddess of Democracy,” who was made famous at Tienanmin Square twenty-three years ago, standing outside the University subway station. A sign next to it documented the problems experienced by this poor statue. Apparently she was a bit too controversial, and no-one, including the current University president, wanted to upset the Beijing government by hosting the statue. Eventually – with large support from the CUHK students and faculty, if not the senior administration – she was placed at the train station, where she is an impressive sight.