Green Campus, City of Ideas

The opening ceremony had barely finished before our hosts at Guangzhou College of Commerce swept us straight back outside, and we were glad of it. After the speeches and the introductions, the best way to understand a campus is simply to walk it, and so we did, in a loose and cheerful line, alongside our new Chinese and Korean classmates.

June in Guangzhou is generous with its heat. By mid-morning the light was heavy and the cicadas were loud, but the campus had planned for exactly this: nearly every path we took ran under a roof of leaves. We learned quickly to walk where the trees walked.

Walking the Campus in the Heat

Our guides led us down long, tree-lined avenues, pointing out the buildings we would come to know over the following days. We stopped often, partly to catch our breath in the shade and partly because there was so much to look at: flowering shrubs, students cycling past with umbrellas raised against the sun, and the quiet, well-kept green that ran through everything.

The library was the natural heart of the walk. We gathered on its steps for a photo, a red-and-orange building framed by palms, the whole cohort squeezing together and squinting into the bright sky. It is the kind of picture you do not think much about while taking it, and then find yourself grateful for later.

On the Library Steps

For a group that had only just met, we posed on those library steps as though we had known each other for years. BU, GCC and DSU students shoulder to shoulder, the palms leaning in behind us, someone counting down in three languages before the shutter. It was our second day, and already the seams between the three groups were beginning to blur.

We lingered a while in the cool of the entrance before moving on. There is a particular comfort in a university library, familiar and foreign at once, and it made this campus on the other side of the world feel, briefly, like somewhere we belonged.

A City on the Table

In the afternoon we crossed into the Science and Innovation Zone to visit the Sino-Singapore Guangzhou Knowledge City planning-exhibition hall. A guide met us at the door and walked us through the story of the place: not a city as it stands today, but a city as it is being imagined, laid out in glowing screens and a vast, precise scale model spread across the floor.

We stood at the edge of that model for a long time, following our guide's hand as it moved over districts, transport lines and green corridors, all part of the wider ambition of the Greater Bay Area. Then we gathered for a photo, holding the BU banner in front of a sculptural tree and the bright letters spelling out "GZ & SINGAPORE", two cities and three universities briefly sharing one frame.