On June 18, 1974, warders at Stanley Prison were routinely opening the doors to a maximum-security hall to take inmates out in a working party. Suddenly five convicts - three murderers and two robbers - pulled out hidden clubs, attacked the prison officers and started to scramble up an interior wall.
Other inmates were working on the wall, adding extra layers of coiled barbed wire. The five escapees clambered across this obstacle, dropped into another courtyard, grabbed a ladder being used for the repair work and scaled the main six-metre outer wall.
One of the five fell and was injured too badly to move. The other four took off, running wildly towards the beach at the rear of the jail. Did they hope to steal a boat? Was there a rendezvous arranged to speed them away? Nobody knows. They never made it to the shore. The four jailbreakers ran straight into the arms of a group of prison officers.
The escape lasted only a couple of minutes, but the attempt made history: it was the only time anyone had managed to get over the walls of Hong Kong's toughest prison.
Stanley Prison, still Hong Kong's top maximum-security jail, opened 70 years ago. Today it's busier than ever, with new self-contained blocks rising behind its forbidding outer walls.
For 65 years people on the outside could see little of what lay inside the 64,000-square-metre compound behind high whitewashed walls. The six main cell blocks opened in 1936 were three storeys high. Each block had 82 cells per floor. The facility's 1,476 cells were designed to accommodate 2,000 prisoners.
Today, rising high above the wall is the smart stone facade of Category A Complex, a high-security block opened in 2002 at a cost of HK$145 million.