For students and teachers at Belilios Public School in Tin Hau, November 7, 1967 at first appeared to be just another, uneventful day. Yet an incident later in the morning upset the calm and changed the fate of 14 girls.
At 8.20am, Lo Wai-king, a student who had been expelled from the school, appeared there when students assembled at the covered playground. Lo had spearheaded a fund-raising programme for a fellow student whose scholarship had been suspended after she wrote a sarcastic poem about a teacher, which was published in Youths' Garden Weekly, a left-leaning magazine.
'The school unreasonably expelled me,' Lo, a Form Five student at the prestigious government-run school, told students assembled at the covered playground. 'I won't accept it and will definitely return to the campus to carry on my study.'
Thirteen students, including Janet Tsang, attempted to block teachers from taking Lo away.
'We chanted slogans such as 'oppose unreasonable expulsion'. But we didn't chant any political slogans at that time,' said Janet Tsang, the younger sister of Tsang Yok-sing, who is now the president of the Legislative Council, in her first media interview on the incident.
Other students were told to go to their classrooms after the incident.
'We intended to follow suit but we were intercepted by policemen who were already waiting near the staircases,' Janet Tsang said. 'We were surprised by the swift actions taken by police.'