📖 About the university

The Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts (HKAPA) is a specialist public tertiary institution established in 1984, following a 1981 funding offer from the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club that gave Hong Kong its own dedicated conservatoire for the performing arts. It occupies a landmark campus on Gloucester Road in Wan Chai, opened in 1985-86, together with a purpose-built Bethanie campus in Pok Fu Lam that has housed the School of Film and Television since 2006 inside a converted 19th-century heritage building. The Academy enrols roughly 750 full-time students each year across six schools: Chinese Opera, Dance, Drama, Film and Television, Music, and Theatre and Entertainment Arts, and it also runs junior and gifted-education programmes for several hundred more young performers. It became a degree-granting institution in the early 1990s and now offers a full spectrum of qualifications from diplomas to postgraduate degrees, taught by faculty drawn largely from Hong Kong's professional arts scene, with teaching that mixes Cantonese, Putonghua, and English depending on discipline. HKAPA is widely regarded as the leading performing-arts institution in Hong Kong and one of the strongest in Asia, ranking 10th in the world and 1st in Asia for Performing Arts in the QS World University Rankings by Subject 2026. It is best suited to students seeking intensive, practice-based professional training for careers as performers, directors, musicians, or film and television practitioners.

🎯 Fields of study

🏛️ Colleges & schools

🌆 About Hong Kong

Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region on the southern coast of China and one of the world's leading financial, trading, and logistics hubs, where Cantonese Chinese culture blends seamlessly with a British-influenced international outlook. Built around one of the finest deep-water harbours in the world, the territory packs a dramatic skyline of skyscrapers against steep green mountains and outlying islands, with Victoria Harbour at its heart. Its climate is humid subtropical, bringing hot, humid summers with occasional typhoons and mild, dry winters. English and Chinese are both official languages, and the city is famous for its efficient MTR metro, double-decker trams and buses, and Hong Kong International Airport, one of the busiest in the world. Everyday life mixes Michelin-starred dining and dim sum teahouses with street markets, temples, hiking trails, and beaches, all within easy reach. For an international student, Hong Kong offers a concentration of world-ranked universities, a genuinely global environment, and easy travel across Asia, though living costs and rents are among the highest in the region.

💰 Fees & costs

💡 General estimates for international students in China; they vary by major and university, and the official figure is always on the university website.

🛂 Visa requirements by nationality

These are the general steps for the China student visa (X1/X2); details vary by the Chinese embassy in your country.