Hong Kong had become a British colony only three years earlier. The cemetery opened at its current location in 1845 after its former spot – just east of where the office tower Pacific Place 3 now stands – overflowed beyond capacity. You knew you were sacrificing, that you’d probably die.” But that was maybe why they were so wealth-conscious. Hong Kong was “a hard, unhealthy place to live,” Lim said. “They weren’t trusted, and they weren’t accorded respect of other nationalities here.” Although some 225 Chinese are buried in the Hong Kong Cemetery, Chinese didn’t get their own permanent cemetery – in Aberdeen, on the south of the island – until 1915, decades after other groups got theirs. The Chinese, on the other hand, “were always at the bottom of the pile” despite being the majority, said Lim. Out of it emerged a social history of, if not Hong Kong, then of the cemetery whose names have included the “Protestant Graveyard” and the “Colonial Cemetery.” Adjacent to it are separate cemeteries for Catholics, Jews, Parsees, and Muslims, while Hindus were given land for their temple. ![]() Patricia Lim, author of "Forgotten Souls" ![]() It seemed such a waste of opportunity – and stories – not to link them It seemed imperative to link, if people were going to get to know them.” “If you just go through the cemetery, plot-by-plot…no one would have taken any interest. “It seemed such a waste of opportunity – and stories – not to link them,” Lim said. Then she pored through now-defunct newspapers – like The China Mail, the Friend of China, the Daily Press – personal and travel accounts, histories and every book on Hong Kong she could get her hands on. With inscriptions as a starting point, Lim and a host of volunteers recorded each grave into a database, assigning it a section, row and number. “Since I was in it, I might as well finish,” she explained. ![]() The friend was none other than Susan Farrington who has recorded graves in the Himalayan foothills of Pakistan. The cemetery had only a record of graves – which date from 1841 to 2007 – identifying them by section but not with precise locations, while the earliest graves had no information, Lim said.Ī “fanatical friend” from the UK spurred her on to the cemetery project after Lim had dedicated a chapter of her last book, “Discovering Hong Kong’s Cultural Heritage: Hong Kong and Kowloon” to the Happy Valley cemeteries. It’s a far cry from the highway overpass outside the gates.Ĭharting the 8,500 or so names and weaving their stories together into a 624-page book, “Forgotten Souls: A Social History of the Hong Kong Cemetery,” is Patricia Lim, who spent about a decade on the project. Amid exotic trees in a garden setting rest Hong Kong’s extraordinary and ordinary, those who died heroically in wars, ignominiously in drunken brawls, or suicide victims of accidents, pestilence, and pirates barkeepers, prostitutes, children, and luminaries whose names are today borne on street signs.
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