Hong Kong governorCecil Clementi had a profound interest in the Chinese language and decided to establish a school using Chinese as the main medium of instruction. In 1926, Government Vernacular Middle School (官立漢文中學) was founded.[1] Government Vernacular Middle School was the first government school to use Chinese as the principal language of instruction.[2] Li King Hong, the then-Chinese language inspector of schools, was appointed as the first principal of the school.
During World War II, the school suspended its operations under the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong. After the war, the school was renamed Government Vernacular Senior Middle School (官立漢文高級中學). It was renamed again in 1951 to Clementi Middle School (金文泰中學)[2] and in 1988 to Clementi Secondary School, after the governor.
The school has been relocated several times:
1926–1927 26–28 Hospital Road (now site of Lok Sin Tong Leung Kau Kui College)
Prof. Daniel Chee Tsui, physicist, a graduate of the university preparatory class of Clementi. Nobel Physics Prize Laureate for his contributions to the discovery of the fractional quantum Hall Effect.
Prof. Sau Lan Wu, physicist. Enrico Fermi and Vilas Professor of Physics at University of Wisconsin-Madison and winner of 1995 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society for "the first evidence of three-jet events in E+E-collisions at PETRA"
