‘Know your country, know the world, and know yourself. In that order.’

Those were the words of Prof Vincent CHEUNG, Associate Master and Dean of Students of CW Chu College, when asked about his hope for students’ takeaways from the College’s recent study tour to Jiangsu Province and Shanghai. They might have sounded like a slogan, had he not just spent five days watching that hope come true. Twelve students moved through Wuxi, Suzhou, and Shanghai from 12 May to 16 May. By the time the group flew back to Hong Kong, those three things had acquired something more than a wish list. They had acquired flesh and weight.

The trip had been a long time coming. Prof CHEUNG and the College’s Master Prof Suk Ying WONG had wanted to establish regular exchange visits to the Mainland, and this tour, co-organised with Fudan University, was the realisation of that ambition. Its purposes were threefold: to help students know their country, to deepen their understanding of its history, and to pay respects to Dr CHU Ching-wen—the philanthropist in whose honour the College was founded—at his grave in Suzhou. Each day of the itinerary was built around them with an almost architectural care.

About half the students had Mainland backgrounds, but only two were from Shanghai, meaning that even for those who considered themselves familiar with China, much of what lay ahead was genuinely new and exciting. Most were studying computing or data science. Prof CHEUNG, himself a neuroscientist, had insisted on Fudan University giving them a lecture in geopolitics rather than the more predictable offerings of artificial intelligence or robotics. Hong Kong students encountered those subjects in abundance; what they encountered less often was a rigorous framework for understanding regional power. The Fudan speaker traced the geopolitics of the region through an ‘Asia as a Mediterranean’ framework, examining the calculations small states in Southeast Asia must make amid major-power competition. The students were, Prof CHEUNG noted, ‘genuinely stimulated’.

At Qingming Bridge and Nanchang Street in Wuxi, the group walked through historic streets and alleys. At Huishan Ancient Town and Song Brocade workshops, some students tried their hands at traditional looms, a slow, deliberate encounter with craft. The National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi, home of Sunway TaihuLight, once ranked the world’s fastest supercomputer, gave another ‘Wow’ moment to computer majors and non-majors alike. The facility is vast: underground pipes cool the machines, so walking across its floor means walking above a hidden grid of channelled water. For students who had studied high-performance computing in lecture theatres, standing inside a live installation of this scale—somewhere they could not have visited on their own—was simply mind-boggling.

The group also received the first-ever guided tour of the city’s new Wuxi Symphony Hall, acoustically tuning the auditorium through live performance, because only living music can reveal what a concert hall truly sounds like. For Prof CHEUNG, who is an accomplished musician himself, this stirred a precious memory of taking parts years ago in a similar ‘Tuning the Hall’ for a concert venue in the US, a reminder that behind every performance lies a careful calibration of sounds beforehand.

Wonderments from touring the Wuxi Symphony Hall did not stop there. The group was also shown a full-scale replica rehearsal space along the main hall, every dimension and surface mirrored exactly so that orchestras could rehearse in conditions identical to those of performance. Standing in the twin space, they understood that Wuxi’s resolve to become a classical music hub of China is neither casual nor passing: it is being built into the very fabric of the city.

In Suzhou, the tour met ZHAO Hongyu, a living bearer of intangible cultural heritage in the art of embroidery, who gave them a live demonstration at Ji Chang Garden. Working with silk thread of extraordinary fineness, she re-created classical and contemporary Chinese paintings with this traditional craft, her needle weaving the ancient and the modern together on a single surface. The students were moved by seeing ‘a deeply traditional medium being used to express contemporary art’, Prof CHEUNG recalled. The visit prompted his own reflection: ‘Real preservation means integrating these traditions into the lives of modern people’, not replicating old techniques in amber, but finding what in them is still alive to speak to the present.

Shanghai brought the most formally historical moments. The group visited the Site of the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China and the National Anthem Exhibition Hall. Hong Kong students, Prof CHEUNG observed, tend to arrive with a limited understanding of the Chinese Communist Party: ‘To understand modern China, I believe it is essential to know the Party’s role in shaping our nation’s contemporary development.’ By day four, the cumulative weight of these encounters had produced what he described as cognitive saturation in some students. He did not see this as a problem. ‘That feeling of overload was itself meaningful,’ he said. ‘It reflected just how much is happening in the Yangtze River Delta region right now.’

It was in the Suzhou Overseas Chinese Cemetery, however, that the trip’s emotional centre revealed itself. The cemetery is remote but immaculately maintained. Prof CHEUNG was visiting the grave of Dr CHU Ching-wen for the first time himself. He drew a parallel to standing, years earlier, at the graves of Schubert, Mozart, and Beethoven in Vienna, ‘not just an appreciation of what they created, but a sense of proximity, of genuine closeness to those individuals.’ A large stone tablet before Dr CHU’s grave set out his life and achievements, and the students gathered around it and read in silence. The group also paid their respects at the nearby grave of QIAO Guanhua—former foreign minister and one of the most famed and highly visible diplomats in modern China—before departing across the quiet grounds.

The tour closed with an evening cruise along the Huangpu River. On the water, with Shanghai’s lights gathered on both banks, the pace that had governed five days of briefings and visits finally slackened. These unscheduled hours—bus journeys between sites, shared dinners, a conversation begun when someone’s guard comes down—were, he insisted, the point. ‘The greatest value of any trip like this is what happens when you spend five days doing different things together with the same group of people. That is the most valuable thing about informal education.’ For the science and engineering students in particular, the historical and cultural encounters had offered something no syllabus provides.

Prof CHEUNG set out with three aims and came back having watched them fulfilled, not as checkboxes, but as lived experience. To stand at a founding figure’s grave. To walk the floor of a supercomputer. To watch a master embroider the present onto silk. To know your country is the first step. To know the world comes next. And then, somewhere in the space between, you begin to know yourself.