The scandal rocked the local education sector and closed a secondary school two decades ago. The 'Jubilee Incident', as it was called, had all the elements of a good drama: corruption, anarchy, and Catholic nuns.
Playwright Anthony Chan Kam-kuen certainly agrees. During the spring of 1977, the principal of Precious Blood Golden Jubilee Secondary School, Sister Beatrice Leung Kit-fun, was suspected of meddling with school accounts.
The event took a drastic turn when hot-blooded students staged mass demonstrations outside classrooms, demanding 'the truth'.
Sister Leung was subsequently convicted on 10 counts of false accounting and the school, an all girls' college run by a Catholic mission, was closed down.
However, what inspired Chan, head of directing and playwriting at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, was not the chain of events that led to the school's closure but how it affected the students, their ages ranging between 15 and 17.
Without making any direct references to the event itself, The Call Of White Orchid, to be staged at the academy from Wednesday to Saturday, is a drama written and directed by Chan based on the Jubilee Incident. The playwright says he has not used any real names in this production because he knows many of the people who were involved in the demonstrations, including his wife Chan Wai-lin, who was a student at the school.