EDUCATION IS PRIZED in Hong Kong for the practical reason that it helps people get good jobs, and entry to the top schools can lead to getting the very best ones.
St Paul's Co-Educational College is the alma mater of Arthur Li Kwok-cheung, Secretary for Education and Manpower. Charles Kao, a pioneer in fibre optics and former vice-chancellor of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, attended St Joseph's College. Wah Yan College Hong Kong is where the Chief Executive, Donald Tsang Yam-kuen, studied.
As for Queen's College, now located in Causeway Bay, it has educated the largest number of academically brilliant students, accounting for a quarter of all students gaining 10 straight As in the HKCEE examination in the past 15 years. Alumni include Chief Secretary Rafael Hui Si-yan and Secretary for Justice Wong Yan-lung. Philanthropist Sir Robert Hotung (1862-1956) supported Queen's for decades and today, another alumnus, Henry Fok Ying-tung, supports it by way of donations and through personal contact with students and staff.
So greatly did Sir Robert respect Queen's and its first headmaster, Dr Frederick Stewart, that he maintained and visited Stewart's grave in Happy Valley to the end of his life. The Hotung family continues to do so.
Alumni became clerks and compradors, merchants and magistrates, legislators and philanthropists, revolutionaries and reformers, including Dr Sun Yat-sen, founder of the Chinese Republic, Tang Shaoyi, its premier, and Sir Kai Ho Kai, first Chinese general practitioner in Hong Kong.
There is controversy, though, surrounding what should be done with the original Queen's site between Hollywood Road, Aberdeen, Staunton and Shing Wong streets.
Not much remains except the boundary walls and a set of steps, easily recognisable from old photographs. Plans to develop the site mean that even they may soon disappear. The land was rezoned for residential development in 1998, but, following representations by Roger Ho Yao-sheng, conservation activist and chairman of the Mid-levels Concern Group, among others, at a Central and Western District Board meeting last month, the board is seeking a return to the previous zoning - for government and community use. The Antiquities and Monuments Office and the Antiquities Advisory Board are to meet on Tuesday to decide whether to keep the wall and main gate.
