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The spark that set off the uprising occurred on February 27, 1947, when a police agent attempted to confiscate black market cigarettes from an elderly Taiwanese woman, Lin Jian-Mai. She resisted and, as accounts allege, was then pistol-whipped by the agents. An angry crowd soon gathered around the agents and the woman. After a warning shot fired by one of the agents went astray and killed an onlooker, the crowd pursued the agents to a nearby police station. The crowd surrounded the building, and demanded that the officer be given to them. The captain refused and the anger of the crowd heightened when it was discovered that the agents had been spirited out of the building via a rear entrance. Violence finally flared the following morning on February 28.