University of Chicago opens Hong Kong campus on former prison site

The University of Chicago opened a 53,000-square-foot business school facility on the site of a former prison in Hong Kong.

The glassy $75 million Hong Kong Jockey Club building opened to more than 100 graduate students in the coastal town of Pok Fu Lam on Tuesday, according to the South China Morning Post.

The campus will be open to faculty as well as students of the university’s Booth School of Business and undergraduates studying abroad. It will host “academic workshops, conferences, public lectures” and become “a venue for alumni from all throughout Asia to convene,” according to the university’s website.

The Victoria Road Detention Centre was built in the 1950s on the site of a coastal military fort left over from World War II. Police in Hong Kong used the facility to jail political dissidents.

The new facility includes a “heritage museum” to illuminate the site’s past, according to the Post.

In Chicago, the university landed a permit earlier this year to build a 1,309-bed dormitory complex where the Hyde Park campus abuts the Woodlawn neighborhood. [South China Morning Post] — Alex Nitkin