In contemporary mainland folklore, there is a mythical place that guarantees academic excellence, lifelong success and everlasting respect and prestige. Its name is Harvard.
This great American institution of higher learning looms large in the collective imagination of mainland students - ambitious ones, anyway.
A whole generation has therefore drawn inspiration from an apparent hoax known as "the allocutions on the wall of a Harvard library", which has been circulating on the mainland internet and which is the subject of a hilarious Wall Street Journal article by Harvard professor and librarian Robert Darnton.
The professor has, once and for all, dispelled the existence of the allocutions. However, he does confirm there are many messages in the toilets of Harvard's 73 libraries - 73! - but they don't remotely approach the sagacity and wisdom imagined in those fictional allocutions.
An allocution is a formal address, like Address to the German Nation by philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. But unlike the stirring rhetoric in these addresses, the fake allocutions are written mostly in broken English, which Darnton likens to fortune cookie messages.
"Happiness may not be ranked, but success will at the top."