August 13 — Students begin three-day festival at Yonsei University, calling for unification with North Korea. Hundreds of radicals, who also demand the withdrawal of 37,000 US troops stationed in the South, are blocked from leaving Seoul to march towards the border. The festival is outlawed.
August 14 — Riot police backed by helicopters and armoured vehicles firing tear gas storm Yonsei to break up the festival. Students shelter at a classroom complex and a science block. Police ring the campus.
August 15 — About 6000 students gather at Yonsei to mark the 51st anniversary of the end of World War II, which liberated Korea from 35-year Japanese colonial rule but divided the peninsula into communist North and the capitalist South. Police storm Yonsei again.
August 16 — Police raid the campus again to try to arrest about 3600 students continuing violent protests. They pull back after failing to seize the students. Some students sneak off the campus into surrounding hills.
August 17 — More than 10,000 riot police storm the university for the fourth straight day and mass around the two buildings. More than 2000 students hole up inside.
August 18 — Police step up pressure on students by stopping parents from delivering food and medicine. Police seek to cut power supply to the buildings but the university refuses permission because a blackout could spoil costly projects under way in laboratories.
August 19 — Weary students begin fainting and ambulances rush about a dozen of them, some unconscious, to hospital. More than 10 students surrender. Police warn they could use firearms to break up violent protests. Prime Minister Lee Soo-sung vows severe punishment for radical leaders but promises leniency for students who have simply taken part in occupation.
August 20 — Crack police units backed by helicopters storm the classroom building to end occupation. Hours later, students at the science block escape into narrow alleyways and hills surrounding Yonsei. Police arrest more than 1000 students from the captured complex and more than 700 fleeing from the science block. The police smash through a bonfire of wooden desks and chairs engulfing the main entrance of a teaching block and flush out about 1000 mostly female students after a pitched battle. Hours later, a further 1000 or so terrified students holed up in a nearby science block fled into alleys and hills surrounding the campus, where they were hunted down. They had earlier threatened to explode gas canisters and dangerous chemicals seized from laboratories.