Rosaryhill School Yearbook May 2026

Founded in 1959 by the Marianist brothers, Rosaryhill School was one of Hong Kong’s first co-educational Catholic schools. Located on Stubbs Road, overlooking Happy Valley, the school quickly earned a reputation for academic excellence, debate, drama, and sportsmanship.

For over six decades, the yearbook—traditionally titled "The Rosary" or variations of "RHS Annual" depending on the decade—has served as the official record of this journey. In an era before social media, the yearbook was the only place where a shy Form 2 student could see their face printed next to the Head Prefect. It was where secret crushes were confessed in tiny handwritten font under the "Autographs" section.

Rosaryhill’s yearbook has always been more than a glossy record; it’s a living archive stitched from the small, accidental moments that define a school year. Flipping through its pages is like stepping into an intimate memory house where laughter echoes from candid photos, rivalries and friendships are immortalized in student quotes, and the formal portraits hide whole untold stories.

Origins and Purpose

Structure and Style

Editorial Voice and Choices

Cultural Significance

Notable Themes Over Time

The Politics of Inclusion

Errors, Omissions, and Memory Work

The Yearbook as Primary Source

Practical Notes for Future Editors

Closing Thought A Rosaryhill yearbook is a communal artifact—part scrapbook, part manifesto, part fragile time capsule. Read with attention, it teaches how a community understood itself at a given moment: its joys, its blind spots, and the small, stubborn traces of everyday life that survive in print.

The yearbook committee had a rule: no empty spaces. Every corner of every page had to tell a story. So when Emily, the editor, flipped through the final digital proofs of the Rosaryhill School Yearbook 1997 at 2 a.m., her heart nearly stopped.

Page 34. “Clubs & Societies.”

There, under the “Rosaryhill Environmental Society” photo, was a ghost.

Not a blur or a lens flare. A girl in the back row, wearing the old pre-1994 plaid uniform—the one with the wide lapels and the red tie. She stood perfectly still while the other students smiled. Her eyes looked straight into the lens. And next to her, in the caption, it read: Isabella Marie Chan, Grade 12 (In memoriam).

Emily didn’t remember taking that photo. She didn’t remember editing that caption. She called the faculty advisor, Mrs. Alvero, who answered groggily.

“Did you add a memorial student to the environmental club shot?” Emily asked. rosaryhill school yearbook

A long pause. Then: “Emily, we haven’t used the old uniform in four years. And there’s no Isabella Chan in the school registry. Not this year. Not ever.”

The next morning, the yearbook team met in the print lab. They scrolled through the original digital files from the camera. The photo was clean—no extra girl, no caption. But the layout file, saved on the school server, still showed her. Same pose. Same sad eyes.

Ryan, the tech lead, checked the file’s metadata. Last modified: 3:33 a.m. The same time Emily had been working. But the server log showed no one logged in after midnight.

Mrs. Alvero went pale. “When I first started teaching here, twenty years ago, the old-timers told a story. In 1977, a girl named Isabella Chan died in a fire in the old science building. They said she’d been trying to save her ecology project—a tree planting map for the hills behind the school. They never found her yearbook photo. It was just… missing from the proofs that year. She was erased.”

Emily looked at the ghost girl again. She wasn’t haunting. She was waiting.

So the team made a choice. They printed the yearbook with Isabella Chan on page 34. No note, no explanation. Just her face, her name, her old plaid tie. And underneath, they added a small subtitle to the club’s name: Rosaryhill Environmental Society — Founded in memory of Isabella Marie Chan, 1977.

When the yearbooks arrived in May, students flipped through and didn’t notice anything strange. But the old alumni, the ones who came back for the reunion, stopped at page 34. Some cried. Some crossed themselves. One old man in a faded green jacket—the school’s first environmental club president from 1978—whispered, “We never forgot you, Bella. Took them long enough.”

That night, Emily opened her editor’s copy. The ghost was gone. But where Isabella had stood, a single pressed rosary pea seed—red and black, like a tiny eye—lay flat against the page, as if it had grown right out of the paper.

The yearbook committee never told the full story. But after that year, every single Rosaryhill School Yearbook left one small, intentional empty space somewhere in the club section. Just a blank square. Just in case. Founded in 1959 by the Marianist brothers, Rosaryhill

There is a specific sound that defines the end of the school year at Rosaryhill School. It isn’t the ring of the final bell, nor the chatter in the corridor. It is the sound of hundreds of glossy pages turning at once—the collective rustle of students hunting for their own faces in the freshly printed Rosaryhill School Yearbook.

For decades, this annual publication has been more than just a record of attendance. It is a time capsule. It is a canvas for memories. For students past and present, receiving the yearbook is a rite of passage, marking the end of one chapter and the beginning of another.

Unlike many international schools, RHS operates a fierce House System (e.g., St. Joseph’s, St. John’s, St. Patrick’s, etc.). The yearbook is where the annual Sports Day results are immortalized. Finding a yellowed page showing your house winning the relay is a dopamine hit no Facebook memory can replicate.

The unwritten rule of the Rosaryhill yearbook: The last 10 pages are reserved for "Signatures." Alumni fondly recall the May scramble to get the strictest math teacher, Brother Felix, to sign their book with a blessing—or to get the cool art teacher to draw a cartoon.

There is a growing movement among RHS alumni from the 1970s and 1980s to digitize their yearbooks. Many of these books are disintegrating due to Hong Kong’s humidity. If you have a pre-1990 Rosaryhill School yearbook sitting in a box in your flat, consider doing the community a service:

You could be the bridge that reunites a 65-year-old former prefect with their forgotten speech from the 1975 graduation dinner.

Rosaryhill School, with its rich history and unique heritage, has always understood the value of documentation. The yearbook serves as a chronological history of the school’s evolution. Flipping through volumes from years past is like watching a film reel of Hong Kong’s educational history. You see the evolution of the uniform, the changing hairstyles, and the modernization of the classrooms.

But amidst the changes, the spirit remains the same. The yearbook captures the ethos of the school—the values of discipline, community, and faith that have been the bedrock of the institution since its founding.