Biography | 马化腾 Ma Huateng — The Yuehai Campus That Graduated Tencent's Founder

People file Tencent as if it sprang from a finished tech park.

The degree behind it was taken on a campus that is only a few years older than the Special Economic Zone itself.

Ma Huateng was born in Chaoyang, Shantou, Guangdong, on 29 October 1971.

Bloomberg's profile of him dates the family's move to Shenzhen to 1984, after his father, Ma Chenshu, took work as a port manager there.

Shenzhen University opened on 27 September 1983 as a municipal university built for the new zone.

Ma enrolled in 1989 and read computer science and applied engineering on the original Yuehai, or Houhai, campus at 3688 Nanhai Avenue.

Tencent's leadership page records the qualification as a bachelor of science in that subject. Independent profiles, including Bloomberg, date the graduation to 1993.

The computer department was stood up with help from Tsinghua when the university opened.

The present College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, which lists Ma among its alumni, was only split out as its own college in 2008.

Three of the other Tencent co-founders — Zhang Zhidong, Xu Chenye and Chen Yidan — came through the same university.

The later Xili campus did not exist when he was a student.

The pin is the waterfront Yuehai campus, not the inland extension.

Photo: NAN LIU, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons