This post chronicles my visit to Hong Kong for the 1st Asian Cities Primary Mathematics Contest in 1996, also known as ACPMC 96. This largely took place from Jul 20 to Jul 24 1996, though there are related snippets outside of that as well.
Introduction
Although this event took place a long time ago, it remains a fairly well-documented part of my history, in no small part due to my parents, who helped keep everything in a nice blue document folder with plastic slips to hold everything. They also cut out several newspaper articles and for the most part dated them, so I have those as well. In addition, I was extremely happy to find that the coordinators somehow gave us paper transcripts of the various speeches that were made as well, as that means that that unlikely bit of history was preserved and extended into the future too.
This event took place in 1996, when I was in Primary 6. Singapore sent four Primary 6 students to Hong Kong to take part in this mathematics contest, and out of the four students, two were from Nanyang Primary School — Calvin Lin and Julius Poh — while the other two were from Rosyth School — Alvin Foo and me. We also had one reserve member, Nicholas Tham, who was also from Rosyth School. All five of us were in the GEP, and we more or less knew each other — within our own schools, the GEP cohort classes from the same year were all very close to each other, and even between schools there weren’t that many of us, so we had met now and then during GEP-wide events, and during other math contests over the years.
This event was a major highlight of my life, as not only was it the first time I had gone overseas without my parents, it was also the first time I was officially representing Singapore, my home country, in an international contest, and I even ended up anchoring us to a team trophy. We even briefly ended up in the newspapers and TV. I never did transition all this into a math career in the end — University math was really boring and I only really enjoyed the puzzle aspect of things and not the formulae and theory — but this event gave me a huge shot of confidence that I probably carry with me to this day, and remains one of the Coolest Things that I can say that I’ve done in my life. Both my parents and school were very proud of me too.
Fun fact, this contest is now known as the Po Leung Kok Primary Mathematics World Contest, and both that Wikipedia site above as well as other online sources including scans of other people’s test papers clearly seem to show that the PMWC started in 1997. However, we attended this “1st Po Leung Kok Asian Cities Primary Mathematics Contest” in 1996, a year before that. Apparently, this 1st annual ACPMC was actually only ever held once, they then retooled it afterwards and called the 1997 one the 1st PMWC, and then started counting from there.
This means that because we won one of the team champion trophies for Singapore in 1996, we were never dethroned!
Technical Note
About half of these images are hosted on archive.org too, because they’re also documents that I wanted to put into the public domain. The WordPress tools I’m working with don’t embed them very well if they’re remote images instead of locally-hosted ones though, and archive.org servers often randomly choke up and go down for minutes at a time, so if images seem missing, try loading the page again in a few minutes.
This is the first article where I’m actually hosting some of the images offsite, but if it seems too unreliable for my liking then I’ll eventually mirror them all locally instead.
The following archive.org links were uploaded by me and I use their scans here as inline images too:
https://archive.org/details/19960406-riacpmc/ (RIACPMC 1996 Prize Presentation Ceremony Programme)
https://archive.org/details/19960713-acpmc/ (ACPMC 1996 Letter to School)
https://archive.org/details/19960715-acpmc/ (ACPMC 1996 Letter to Parents)
https://archive.org/details/19960720-acpmc/ (ACPMC 1996 Booklet)
https://archive.org/details/19960722-acpmc/ (ACPMC 1996 Opening Ceremony Schedule)
https://archive.org/details/19960722-acpmc-3/ (ACPMC 1996 Opening Ceremony Speech 1)
https://archive.org/details/19960722-acpmc-2/ (ACPMC 1996 Opening Ceremony Speech 2)
https://archive.org/details/19960723-acpmc-2/ (ACPMC 1996 Prize-giving Ceremony Speech)
https://archive.org/details/19960723-acpmc/ (ACPMC 1996 Results)
The RIACPMC
But before we get to the main story of the ACPMC, I have to talk about the RIACPMC first. The Raffles Institution Asian Cities Primary Mathematics Contest (RIACPMC) was held just once in Singapore in March 1996, when I was in Primary 6. This was Singapore’s local precursor qualifying contest round for the ACPMC in Hong Kong, which as mentioned earlier was also held for just 1 year in 1996. In 1997, the ACPMC renamed itself to the PMWC (Primary Mathematics World Contest), and it looks like this local one was also thus renamed to the RIPMWC (Raffles Institution Primary Mathematics World Contest) too.
This was the programme and prize winners list from the 1996 version of the contest though. I actually won this country-wide contest — I guess since this contest was also only just held once, I was never dethroned either and technically am still the reigning, defending champion all these years later!
There were also newspaper articles covering this event, which my parents cut out and saved. Here’s the English one:
And the Chinese one:
Because I’m very curious as to what clues can be found randomly on the backs of papers, here’s the back of the English and Chinese newspaper cutouts too, just for future historians.
This was my award certificate:
And for some reason we even still have the envelope that I believe my certificate (but maybe it was my original invitation) was delivered in:
Cute. The English newspaper says that our school, Rosyth, bagged the top school honour by placing four students in the top 20 — and the Programme has names, so from that, Rosyth had 1st (me), 2nd (Nicholas), 6th (Alvin Foo), and joint 16th (I believe this was Hu Pei Lin, who was in the GEP cohort after us, so she was in Primary 5 at the time, I didn’t really know her if so though.) Nanyang was second, with Calvin in 5th, Julius in 16th, and likely one other person I’m not aware of, since that prize winners list doesn’t include school names. I’m not aware of who was from Chongzheng, that wasn’t a GEP school so we never really got a chance to interact with anyone from that school. The Chinese article has a picture of the three top scorers though, and from research I see that the third-placed winner on the right of the picture, Kenneth Gwee, is wearing a shirt with the Chongzheng school crest (local) on it.
I also learnt from the Chinese article that the Raffles alumni association (莱佛士校友会) not only sponsored the training that would follow over the next few months, but our eventual trip to Hong Kong as well. This alumni association would be part of Raffles Institution, an all-boys GEP secondary school and widely considered to be the “best” secondary school in Singapore. Or at least the one that all the other schools were always gunning to take down in competitions, heh. I’m not sure if this alumni association was the Old Rafflesians’ Association (local) or something else though, I don’t seem to have documentation one way or another and the association name in the Chinese article didn’t seem to resolve into anything concrete. The Chinese article also states that only three girls placed in the top 20 — Chua Mui Teng at #8 being the top one (my current status notwithstanding). Hu Pei Lin would have been another, but I’m not sure from the names who the third was.
Both the English and Chinese newspaper article also state that all 20 students were to receive training “from April 17th to Jun 06”, with “nine training sessions, of two hours each”. I do remember these, but I don’t actually remember all 20 students taking part in these. I feel like I would have actually remembered the other students and become somewhat friends with some of them if so. Instead, the only other name I recognize there outside of the few I’ve already mentioned is Selvam Vicknesh, and only once he was in Anglo-Chinese School for his secondary school years, when I met him in 1998 at another math camp or something when we were both in Secondary 2, and got his ICQ number from there.
Instead, what I do recall is that five of us got chosen for this training — both Alvins (1st, 6th), Nicholas (2nd), Calvin (5th), and Julius (16th), so in my memory, only three representatives from Rosyth School and two from Nanyang Primary School were pre-chosen for this training, which took place every Wednesday from 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm in a small meeting room with a whiteboard (or perhaps blackboard with chalk, I think it was whiteboard with markers though) in the Raffles Institution campus. We were all in the GEP, and I’m not sure if we were chosen because of that and our school pedigree, or whether everyone else had a chance but declined it or never even received the opportunity or were being trained elsewhere or something.
Because of the timing of this training, and the travel time needed to get to the school, this also meant that we got to miss some regular afternoon classes on Wednesdays, so that was always fun to look forward to. I still have a lot of practice quiz papers from this training session (unscanned for now) in my folders, and I know the exact time that this weekly training took place because of that English newspaper article, and because many of those quiz papers I have were dated to Wednesdays in 1996, and one was even nicely timestamped from 2:30 to 4:30 pm. We would shuffle into that room every Wednesday, and there’d be a coordinator and one or two professors or teachers or something who would be there and give us quiz problems to do or teach us some fancy math trick or other. I think our overall coordinator, Mr. Ng Boon Kiat, was usually there. Oddly, I have one practice quiz dated on a Monday and one on a Thursday too, and I’m not sure if I misdated those or if we just had “homework” sometimes, or if a couple of those were unrelated.
Near the end of the training session, I believe that we had another test, and I think this essentially determined who would end up going and who stayed. Even though Nicholas had finished 2nd in the original RIACPMC, he ended up being the reserve instead and didn’t end up going on the trip, so it was just Calvin and Julius from Nanyang Primary School, and Alvin Foo and me from Rosyth School. While Nicholas doesn’t feature in any pictures on this page, you can find a time-relevant picture of him on my Rosyth Memory Snippets page back in My Diary #058.
Trip Preparation
I don’t remember much about the trip preparation, but this is a good place to attach two documents that were saved from back then anyway.
This first letter was sent from Raffles Institution to Rosyth School (and our parents via the school), excusing us from school for several days:
I have no idea who Mdm Yip was other than her name and that phone number were likely written for my parents as a contact person if needed. I don’t think she was someone from Rosyth, so she was probably someone from Raffles Institution. This letter was dated exactly a week before we flew off. Also, later on in the ACPMC booklet, Tan Mui Hong’s name is written as Teo Mui Hong instead. I have no idea which one is correct, or if they both are correct and it’s a maiden/married name thing, so I’ll refer to her as Mrs Mui Hong instead as both Mrs Teo and Mrs Tan actually already have hover text referring to different teachers in my life history. There’s also already a Mr Ng with hover text as well though. Whatever. I’ll merge hover texts for him! I do remember him more vividly.
I wasn’t familiar with what a DID number was before writing up this blog post, but apparently it stands for Direct Inward Dialing — some sort of forwarding number often used to route calls to internal company phones. Okay, I’m still not that familiar with it.
This second letter was sent from Raffles Institution to our parents (via our school as well):
There’s a lot of detail saved on this, which is very nice. Like our outgoing and return flights, Cathay Pacific CX 710 and CX 711 respectively. 6 of us went from Singapore to HK in total. The letter also mentions an assigned guide, her name’s actually written down later on in the main ACPMC booklet as well.
I like how near the top of page 2, they typed out accidental insurance instead of accident insurance and had to whiteout the -al to make the sentence make sense, teehee.
The reason for the time between the dates of the two letters (July 13th and July 15th) is because we had to confirm that we could go and submit our passports to them before they could buy the tickets for us. At that point, barring last minute sickness, the roster was pretty much finalized.
I also have a copy of the Travel Insurance that we purchased. It’s slightly redacted to remove sensitive ID numbers:
Apparently it was under a company called QBE Insurance, and this Travelon 10 Plus Three insurance policy had two tiers of travel insurance, the Regent Plan and the Deluxe Plan. I was on the cheaper Deluxe Plan! (According to the Letter to Parents above, this plan was likely the one bought by Raffles Institution for us.)
Lastly, although this technically was only published after we left, we were interviewed one last time before we left by the Straits Times, the main local newspaper in Singapore. This article was then published on the 21st of July:
Like before, I also scanned the back of the newspaper clipping, here.
Day 1 (Jul 20 1996)
The trip itself was a bit of a whirl. I don’t remember the flight there at all, except that we were split into two groups of 3 on the plane. Judging by the couple of photos I have, we were on the left side of the plane by the wing, and I likely was in the window seat.
What I do remember is a specific memory of being on the bus on the way to the holiday resort, and it hitting me that we were really in some foreign country, where everything was different and there were lots of Chinese (and some English) signs about, and were about to take part in this math competition with a lot of support from other people pushing us forwards from behind. That was cool. I also remember we had some food from either the local McDonalds or KFC. I don’t remember which one.
I remember nothing else about the day, but here are all the pictures I have from this day: This first one was taken at Changi Airport, early in the morning, before we flew off. In order of left to right, we had Julius, Alvin Foo, Calvin, and me.
My boarding ticket stubs from Cathay Pacific still exist too, somehow. Front and back:
My next two photographs are from the window on the plane:
As you can see, different people took different photos and they were pooled together at the end — the biggest indicator of this is that some photos have date stamps and some don’t. But we were all bad at it. I’m fairly sure that my photos were the ones with the M-DD-YY timestamp in the bottom right corner, as I’m in none of those photos myself, and our actual family photos (some of which are available elsewhere in my blog) also have the same sort of date format. I do remember that I had brought our family camera along with me on this trip.
This fourth picture was of Calvin and I in our rooms, and the guide says that the Singapore contingent had two rooms, room C022, which held 2 (and were likely taken by our two coordinators), and C023, which held 4 (and were taken by us four kids). Though it’s possible we split it 3-1 and 1-1 with the teachers too and I just forgot about it, but I don’t think we did. The woman in the picture would have to be Mrs Mui Hong.
A challenge when building these blog posts was figuring out what date the undated pictures actually took place on. I eventually figured it out in a very interesting way — by grouping the pictures based on what clothing we wore that day, and cross-checking some remaining pictures with the event schedule that we were given, I believe that I was able to accurately date every single picture I had.
Talking about the event schedule, it’s posted on archive.org as well I’ve linked them here too:
At the bottom of Page 5 (the 4th sheet) is where I pointed out earlier that they listed our Mrs Mui Hong teacher/chaperon with a Teo surname instead of Tan. I do like that they posted a lot of names and even some pictures on this sheet, but I wish that they had included the participants’ names as well and not just the teachers.
They wrote Singapore’s Chinese name as 星加坡 instead of 新加坡 — while apparently technically an old name according to Wikipedia, this is actually quite wrong. The first part of the name, the xin(Sin-), means new (新) in the correct version of the name, but they used star (星) here instead. But then the entire book has a bunch of weird mistakes anyway if one takes time to look for them, like calling a barbeque/barbecue pit a “Barbarcue” pit, or calling their City Plaza a “City Palza”.
Day 2 (Jul 21 1996)
According to the schedule, we went to “Ocean Peak” on Day 2, but they actually meant Ocean Park, a marine/waterside theme park and amusement park. I don’t remember anything from this visit at all, but do still have some pictures to share nonetheless.
These first 3 look like lousy photos of the area outside our building (Camp C) that I took:
The next few are all pictures at and around Ocean Park itself:
The “best” pictures, the fifth and sixth overall ones above, were the ones not taken by me, since they don’t have that little date timestamp. I see I was already repping a Canada shirt even at that age too.
Day 3 (Jul 22 1996)
Day 3 was the actual contest day, and according to the schedule in the booklet, this started with an Opening Ceremony in the morning, followed by a 45 minute Calculation Contest, then a 1.5 hour Mathematics Contest, then a 1 hour Team Contest. We were actually given our quiz papers back the next day as well, so I have them scanned and uploaded here too.
We not only received a schedule of the Opening Ceremony, but also copies (In Chinese and English) of the actual speeches, and 25 years later I thought that that was very cool of them to preserve that bit of history. I put the schedule and speeches on archive.org too, and they are linked below as well, starting with the schedule:
And then the first speech:
And second speech:
Both the Calculation Contest and Mathematics Contest were individual quizzes, and I don’t remember much about them so I’ll get their papers and segments out of the way as well.
Calculation Contest
Here’s my scans of my Calculation Contest paper and results:
It was a 45 minute quiz and I got 15/20. This was only good for a “3rd Honour”, which is the certificate I got the following day.
Mathematics Contest
This next set is for the Mathematics Contest:
I flunked this one didn’t I? An hour and a half for 10 questions and I only scored 3/10. Yet, this was *also* somehow good enough for a “3rd Honour” certificate the following day. It’s scaled between everyone that did the tests, so many people apparently didn’t do so well.
Of interest is that last sheet above. I apparently wrote down the name and address of someone I had met there: Zhou Peigeng, from… the way I wrote down the name of the school is a bit ambiguous, but it was likely the Primary School (北京大学附属小学) or High School (北京大学附属中学) affiliated with/attached to Peking University. Neither one exactly corresponds to a postal code of 100080 though, these days at least, a quick round of Googling tells me that the first school has a postal code of 100084 and the second 100086. Close enough though.
I have no idea who this person is! And I never talked to them again. Oddly enough, Google does give one single result on archive.org of a “Mr. Zhou Peigeng, a star math teacher in China, whose students had won multiple gold and silver medals in International Math Olympics (Wang & Lin, 1994).” Coincidence? Or is that the person? He would have been a teacher at that time then, but the Math competitions thing and the timespan does match up rather well. Why would I have his contact info though? I cannot fathom.
Team Contest
Lastly, the Team Contest is interesting because for that one, we had 3 of us (I believe it was 3 participants… I don’t remember who sat out though) seated around a small table as a team, and we were given 10 questions to do as a team. The way that this worked, each team had to submit 10 questions, but I think we had to more or less work on them individually, at least I don’t remember us being allowed to do more than very basic talking to figure out who got what. We’d instead pick what questions we wanted to do and split up the work that way to ensure all 10 questions got done within the alloted hour.
However, the very weird thing with this was the tiebreaker — the tournament organizers said that ties would be broken based on the highest number of questions that one single person on the team did. So a team that scored 10/10 and split then 4-3-3 would lose to a team that scored 10/10 and split then 5-3-2, for example, as the second team would have an “individual” score of 5. I realized that this meant that all the winning teams would score 10/10 and the tiebreaker was what was important.
I don’t think we were told about the scoring tiebreaker beforehand, though I’m not certain. We were definitely told about at least the split though, and the way that our Singapore team had planned to handle this was that we were going to spend the first 5 minutes with all of us looking through all the questions, and then we’d each fold a corner of the paper depending on whether we could do it or not. We’d then split it based on that.
In practice though, once we were all sitting down at the table and had 10 sheets, one per question, in front of us, I don’t think we all looked through all the questions. We just started folding them and I started to quickly and selfishly snipe the papers that I knew I could do, and I think at one point I asked someone for one of his as well before we started working on any of them, because I could do that one too and had the tiebreaker in mind. In the end, I ended up with 6 of the 10 sheets, and completed them all within the hour, while leaving the ones I wasn’t as comfortable with to the other two, who did 2 each.
But I got one question wrong.
But thankfully, I caught that error before our time was up. I remember this very clearly, a thrill of horror running through me as I realized that one question (I believe it was the cube one) had a better answer than the one I put. I corrected it with that better answer, then checked and rechecked all the other sheets to make sure that there were no errors that I could see. I then submitted them all with the rest of the team and a prayer on my lips.
Even though we were allowed to keep our papers, I only ended up with four of the ones I had done for the team competition. I don’t know where the other two went, perhaps the teachers took them as souvenirs, heh. Either way though, I did get to keep the sheet with my actual score (6) on it, as well as the one that I almost got wrong (the cube one), and they’re both scanned below along with the other two that I still have.
After that long day of quizzes, we returned to our hostel room, with still no idea at all how well or poorly we had done, outside of exchanging answers with each other. From here, I have a number of photos from the day to share to round out this part of the post.
This first one is from either when we were walking to the opening ceremony at the start of the day, or back towards our room at the end of the day. I suspect it’s the former, since it looked like there were other activities after the contest portion of the camp had concluded, but who knows for sure. We were all in our school uniforms except for Calvin, which makes sense I guess since this was the “main event”, but thanks to him wearing the same shirt and pants through the day, I was able to accurately date this and several other pictures.
This second picture.. all I can say is that apparently even back then, I was already trying to take pictures of other people taking pictures, a hobby that I still have to this day.
All the other pictures are of our shared rooms as well:
Day 4 (Jul 23 1996)
Day 4 of our Hong Kong trip started off with a “Visit to Science Museum and City Palza” (sic) from 8:30 am to 1:00 pm, then a prize-giving ceremony at 3:00 pm to 4:00 pm, and then a “Visit to the Peak” from 6:30 pm to 7:15 pm, with meals in between. I don’t remember which museum/plaza and which peak we visited, and thus I’m not sure what pictures go where, but I do have two sets of pictures from the day and I assume the ones with a nice high-up view of scenery were the ones from the peak, so I divided them accordingly that way. Most of my scenery pictures were dreadful though! For example, these are the ones that I categorized as being from the museum/plaza trip, but one of them is completely indecipherable and the other three pictures I took were of some sort of water fountain, and that was it:
And what I think were the peak pictures from later on that day were largely scenic views of a cloudy Hong Kong skyline:
In between, we had the prize ceremony. Because we carried no trophies or certificates in this picture, this was us likely arriving at the venue (upon returning from the museum/city plaza):
I remember Mr Ng asking us to wait there for a picture instead of running off once we had all alighted.
For the prize-giving ceremony itself, we had no idea if or what we had won until we went into the hall itself and saw that there were three columns of chairs in the hall, each one for each “group” of teams that were competing for one of three team trophies. The columns were sorted by score, so our row of seats were on one end (I think the back, but it could have been the front) of the column, and there were handouts showing the team competition winners as well as containing copies of the speech that was about to happen. This speeches were apparently only in English for some reason, that or they never gave us a Chinese version of the speech transcripts:
And the contest result sheet looked like this:
I’m not sure who highlighted the Singapore bit, it certainly wasn’t me. Singapore prevented a Hong Kong sweep of the Team Contests though, and we also apparently defeated a strong Tianmen team in our group, even though Tianmen took a lot of the individual contests (the Group Prizes for those ones were similar to the school prizes in the RIACPMC at the very top of this page — best aggregate score among the students representing the schools/countries in those individual tests). From all that, I can only conclude that basically all the top teams had a perfect 10/10 score on the Team Contest segments as well, and we won it on the tie-breaker because I had realized what was going on and taken 6 of the 10 sheets to do for myself! (But still, we needed a perfect combined score from all the others as well, which we did get.)
After the speech, we had certificates and prizes given out, and I think they did them by team so everyone had their time up on stage in some form or other. Photos of us up on stage were taken by other people (perhaps our guides) and given to us afterwards:
And we had one of us just posing with our certificates and trophies too:
I think Raffles Institution kept the team trophy in the end as they had sponsored us, I don’t think any of us ever saw the trophy again after the trip was over. We did get some certificates though. With my 15/20 and 3/10 score in the individual rounds, I picked up three of them:
I assume the third one had to do with the combined aggregate score.
Day 5 (Jul 24 1996)
On Day 5, we had some unspecified Camp Activities in the morning, and then we went to the airport to catch our plane back to Singapore!
I have six pictures from the day to share. The first is from the holiday camp itself, where we were waiting for the shuttle bus to pick us up and fetch us to the airport:
The next one is at the airport itself, where Alvin Foo was photographed charming some random girl and chatting to her — we teased him a bit for that afterwards:
The next two are some random airplane window pictures that I did, because why not:
The fifth was us posing at Singapore’s Changi Airport after we had arrived back home:
And the last one is probably the only picture I took on the entire trip that I actually sort of liked — I was standing off to the side and photographed a bunch of people. On the right there’s Calvin and Julius laughing, with a partial short of Alvin Foo between them. In the middle of the picture is my dad, he’s talking to Mr Ng on the left. Also joining them in that conversation was Mr Shah, our Rosyth form teacher and math teacher who came all the way to the airport to meet us as well. That’s the only other picture I have of him besides the one in my Rosyth class photo that year, since I don’t have Rosyth yearbooks (if they even ever existed). I don’t know who the other woman or the kid were, the kid seemed related to Mr Ng and the woman was probably either his wife, or the mother of one of my other teammates.
Finally, here’s the return ticket stub from Cathay:
The back of this stub is exactly the same as the outgoing one from the 20th.
Aftermath
Pun entirely intended.
Singapore (or at least Raffles Institution) must have really, really wanted to win something at this contest. With one other notable exception, that of the Singapore/Asian Math Olympiads, I’d never heard of “training” sessions being given for any other math contest before. But at the time, this was a new contest, without much pedigree or history behind it even though it was an inter-country one. I’m glad they did put all this effort and money into it though since it gave me the experience of a lifetime in the end, and I’m glad we sort of delivered in the end.
We didn’t get the day off after we returned, as I remember — we were right back to school on the very next day, July the 25th, which was a Thursday. Our teachers, especially my form teacher/Math teacher, Mr Shah, were very proud of us. I think our classmates were largely.. whatever! What even happened? You got three days off! Lucky! We were all 11-12 years old after all, but that was the way I liked it too.
We were interviewed at the airport by a few reporters and a cameraman or two, and we even made it onto the evening news on the TV after our win. Some newspaper articles would follow as well, though they took a couple days to show up in the papers.
This first one is undated but I know that it preceded the second one as it was just a shorter blurb, so I dated it as the day before the second one, July 31 1996:
The back of that newspaper cutout is here. Singapore had two versions of the main Chinese newspaper, one is the Lianhe Zaobao, or the Lianhe Morning Newspaper, and the other one is the Lianhe Wanbao, or the Lianhe Evening Newspaper. The longer article that follows was in the Zaobao, the morning newspaper, on August 01 1996, which is why I believe, according to my memory anyway, the above undated one was likely from the Wanbao on the previous day, July 31 1996. In reality though it could have been in either newspaper on any of the preceding days as well, since it took so long for them to get the story to print!
Anyway the longer, Aug 01 version looked like this:
Back of snippet here.
Lastly, there was an English newspaper article as well that came out the day after that, Aug 02 1996:
And the back of that snippet is here. Our team actually only picked up 11 certificates in all, as that last newspaper article stated, but I’m not sure who out of the 4 only ended up with two certs instead of 3, or what the random cutoff was. In the last group picture in the Day 4 segment, Julius clearly has three certs as well, so it was one of the other two boys. One of us apparently won Second Honours certs too though, and I’m not sure who that was either.