About Tung Wah Group of Hospitals

Tung Wah Group of Hospitals

The Tung Wah Group of Hospitals, abbreviated TWGHs, is Hong Kong's longest-standing and largest charitable organisation. It was founded in 1870 as the Tung Wah Hospital — Hong Kong's and China's first charitable hospital established under Western law, created on government-granted land by Chinese merchant elites to serve Chinese residents who distrusted Western medicine. It is a purely charitable organisation with no political affiliation or religious background, and its history is widely regarded by scholars as an important part of Hong Kong's societal development.

The Group's official website is tungwah.org.hk. As of 31 March 2026 it ran 400 service units, including 5 hospitals, 44 Chinese and Western medicine service units, 60 education service units and 258 community service units, together with traditional services providing funeral, temple and ritualistic services. Its mission, expressed in sixteen Chinese characters, is to heal the sick and relieve the distressed, care for the elderly and rehabilitate the disabled, promote education and nurture the youngsters, and raise the infants and guide the youth.

Founding in 1870: the first Chinese hospital

The Tung Wah Hospital was established in 1870 as the first Chinese medicine hospital in Hong Kong offering free medical service for the healthcare needs of the local Chinese population. It is widely recognised as the first hospital in China having adopted the Western hospital mode in providing Chinese medicine services — a hybrid that let Chinese patients receive care from practitioners they trusted within an institution organised on Western lines and established under Western law on land granted by the government.

The hospital was founded by the most influential Chinese magnates of early colonial Hong Kong, and it quickly acquired a civic role beyond medicine. Tung Wah gradually replaced the Man Mo Temple's leading role in arbitrating disputes in the local Chinese community, and its directors became the recognised leadership of Hong Kong's Chinese population in dealings with the colonial government. Hong Kong's first medical and charitable organisation serving all Chinese residents thus became, in effect, a pillar of Chinese civic life under colonial rule.

The three hospitals and amalgamation in 1931

As the population grew, two further hospitals were founded: the Kwong Wah Hospital in 1911, serving the growing population on the Kowloon side, and the Tung Wah Eastern Hospital in 1929. Governance of all three hospitals was unified through the amended Tung Wah Hospital Ordinance in 1930, and in 1931 the three were amalgamated into the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals under what is now the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals Ordinance (Cap. 1051), amended in 1971 into its present form.

The Group's Chinese name, meaning three hospitals of Eastern China, preserves the memory of the three founding hospitals even though two more were added later: hospitals established in 1953 and 1965, subsequently named the TWGHs Fung Yiu King Hospital and the TWGHs Wong Tai Sin Hospital. The Group nevertheless remained the "three hospitals" in Chinese, a name known to every Hong Kong resident. The five hospitals together provide some 2,900 beds, managed through Hospital Governing Committees in which the Board of Directors takes an active role.

Plague, Western medicine and medical development

After the bubonic plague of 1894, which struck Hong Kong severely, the Group progressively integrated Western medical practice and inspection alongside its Chinese medicine services. Over the following century its medical and health services developed into a dual system offering both Chinese and Western medicine: as of March 2026 the Group counted 49 medical and health service units in one service summary, including the five hospitals and dozens of Chinese and Western medicine clinics, health screening and elderly health services.

Medical training accompanied treatment. Providing competent nurse education has been a mission of the Group since 1964, when the nursing schools of Tung Wah Hospital, Kwong Wah Hospital and Tung Wah Eastern Hospital were merged into a unified school of nursing. The hospitals' gallery in the Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences exhibits antiques of the organisation, reflecting its place in the territory's medical history from the plague era to the modern Hospital Authority era, within which its hospitals now operate.

Free education since 1880

Beyond medicine, Tung Wah built free education services from 1880, when the hospital established free schools for the poor. Those schools eventually adopted modern teaching methods in the 1920s and 1930s and were recognised as a leading provision of education for children in poverty. Education became one of the Group's three great fields, alongside medicine and community services.

Today the Group's education division operates, on its governance code figures, 18 kindergartens, 15 primary schools, 18 secondary schools, 3 special schools, five educational services centres and Tung Wah College, a self-financing degree-granting tertiary institution. Reference summaries give a similar picture of about 52 to 60 education service units. Tung Wah College extends the Group's nineteenth-century free-school mission into higher education, particularly in health and social care disciplines connected to its hospitals and community services.

Coffin home, funeral services and bone repatriation

One of Tung Wah's most distinctive services grew from death rather than healing. The Tung Wah Coffin Home developed from an 1875 coffin home, providing funeral and burial services for the poor and, distinctively, repatriating the bones of overseas Chinese to their home villages. For Chinese who died abroad in the great age of emigration, Tung Wah's bone repatriation service ensured their remains could return to their ancestral places, a service that gave the Group a reputation enjoyed worldwide among the Chinese diaspora.

Traditional services remain part of the Group today: its March 2026 count included 25 traditional service units providing funeral, temple and ritualistic services, and the Group is responsible for the management of the Man Mo Temple, once an important cultural centre of colonial Hong Kong. Scholars of diaspora studies treat the coffin home literature as evidence of how a Hong Kong charity served a transnational Chinese community, linking emigrants in Southeast Asia and the Americas to their home villages through Hong Kong.

Community services and disaster relief

From its early decades Tung Wah provided the welfare services the colonial community needed: free medication, education and burial for the underclass, and relief for victims of natural calamities. Disaster relief — after fires, typhoons and other calamities — was a recurring duty, and the Group's fundraising for relief extended to disasters on the mainland as well as in Hong Kong.

Community services are now the Group's largest field by unit count: 258 community service units as of March 2026, covering elderly services, youth and family services, rehabilitation, social enterprises and social innovation, together with transitional housing projects, a geospatial laboratory operated with partners and recycling stores. Total recurrent expenditure ran into billions of Hong Kong dollars annually in recent published summaries, with a staff strength of well over 13,000 including the hospitals recorded in earlier counts — figures that have grown with the expansion to 400 units.

Heritage: the Tung Wah Museum and archives

The Group preserves its own history as part of its charitable mission. The Tung Wah Museum was established in 1970, the Group's centenary year, and is located inside Kwong Wah Hospital; together with the TWGHs Maisy Ho Archives and Relics Centre, it is responsible for preserving the archives of the Group and promoting awareness of its place in Hong Kong history. The Hong Kong Museum of History has drawn on this record for exhibitions on the Group's history.

Heritage work expanded around the 150th anniversary in 2020, when the Group collaborated with the Hong Kong Heritage Museum on the exhibition "Hand-in-Hand for Benevolence: Tung Wah's Fund-raising Culture and Social Development", published a 150-year history, and co-organised a heritage conservation exhibition with the Antiquities and Monuments Office. The Group's records and heritage service units aim to protect and preserve local traditional culture as well as the institution's own memory. This profile concerns the Group as a whole and is distinct from the separate profile of the Tung Wah Museum.

Governance and mission

The Group is governed under its ordinance by a Board of Directors drawn from Hong Kong's business and community leadership, serving on a voluntary basis in the tradition of the merchant elites who founded it. Its code of corporate governance restates the history and the mission: the sixteen-character formulation — healing the sick and relieving the distressed, caring for the elderly and rehabilitating the disabled, promoting education and nurturing the youngsters, raising the infant and guiding the youth — that has encapsulated Tung Wah's purposes across its medical, education, community and traditional domains.

Scholars note that Tung Wah transcended the limitations of traditional social practices such as indigenous norms, ancestral roots and dialects, developing the organisational features of a modern charitable body within a colonially ruled territory. It has no political affiliation or religious background, which its own materials emphasise, and it has adapted its services to the times for more than 150 years while holding to that founding mission.

The Group today

Today the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals operates 400 service units as of 31 March 2026: 5 hospitals with about 2,900 beds, 44 Chinese and Western medicine units, 60 education units including Tung Wah College, 258 community service units, traditional service units for funeral and temple services, and its museum and archives. It describes itself, accurately on the record, as the largest charitable organisation with the longest history in Hong Kong, witness to the development of the Hong Kong community since 1870.

For a directory of Hong Kong charitable organisations, Tung Wah is the foundational entry: founded in 1870 as China's first charitable hospital under Western law, amalgamated in 1931 from three hospitals, provider of free education since 1880 and of bone repatriation through its coffin home since the nineteenth century, and today a 400-unit provider across medicine, education, community and traditional services. Its history, as the scholars cited in its own literature observe, forms an important part of Hong Kong's societal development itself.