About 2,800 men, women, and children were held at the non-segregated camp for 44 months from early January 1942 to August 1945 when Japanese forces surrendered.

[3] According to historians Bernice Archer and Kent Fedorowich, the local Chinese population were angered by their exclusion from the evacuations and condemned the plans as racist.

Existing evacuations already ordered were cancelled provided evacuees volunteered for auxiliary roles, such as nursing or administrative work.

On 4 January 1942, a notice appeared in an English-language newspaper that all "enemy nationals" were to assemble on Murray Parade Grounds.

[4] The people assembled were marched to and initially interned in hotel-brothels on the waterfront near the present-day Macau Ferry Pier.

The rooms were soon overcrowded with random assortments of people unrelated to each other, and with little attention paid to hygiene or public health.

[8] The Stanley site was chosen by the Japanese through consultation with two Hong Kong government officials – Dr. P. S. Selwyn-Clarke, Director of Medical Services, and F. C. Gimson, the Colonial Secretary.

Prior to Japanese occupation, St. Stephen's was a secondary school whose facilities, in addition to classrooms, included an assembly hall, bungalows for teachers, and science laboratories.

[18] The women and children contributed to a sense of normality as their presence provided conventional social, family, and gender relations.

Additionally, extensive educational opportunities were available for the adults: language courses for Chinese, Malay, and French, and also lectures on photography, yachting, journalism, and poultry-keeping.

[22] In addition to the personal diaries kept by internees, many of them now held by the Imperial War Museum, a record of life in the camp was created using a double bed sheet.

The Day Joyce Sheet was embroidered and appliquéd with 1100 names, signs and figures including a diary in code.

The worst accident occurred during the large US Navy attack against Hong Kong on 16 January 1945, when a plane accidentally bombed Bungalow 5 at St. Stephen's College, killing 14 internees.

[4] Military trials were subsequently held and on 29 October 1943, some of the internees were executed by being shot and at least one, John Fraser, was beheaded.

[28] Aside from this, the Japanese authorities had executed by decapitation three Chinese policemen for bringing cigarettes and tobacco to the camp's internees.

They would have to navigate through Japanese-occupied territory, find food, and as few internees spoke Cantonese, they would also have to deal with the language barrier if they succeeded in escaping.

Japanese treatment of the American internees improved during this period before the actual repatriation took place; more and better food was given to them, and they were allowed contacts with Chinese friends outside of camp.

[40] The internees were freed on 16 August 1945, the day after Emperor Hirohito broadcast his acceptance of the Potsdam Proclamation in surrender.

[41] Historian Geoffrey Charles Emerson wrote the "probable" reason the British internees were not repatriated before the end of the war was related to the Allied forces refusing to release Japanese nationals held in Australia.

Payments for American and British internees were made from the proceeds of Japanese assets seized per the Treaty of San Francisco.

[44] The rise of Japan as an economic power and the opening of World War II files at the UK's Public Record Office created a sentiment in the 1990s that not enough had been done to redress the suffering of internees and prisoners-of-war.

This allowed for hundreds of surviving civilian internees to collect the compensation earlier denied to them by the "bloodlink" distinction.

[45] St. Stephen's Chapel was built on the grounds of the school in 1950; the memorial window over its west door was a donation, serving to remember the suffering at Stanley Internment Camp.