MORRISON CENTENARY,
LINK OF FAMOUS MISSIONARY WITH OLD ENGLISH CEMETERY AT MACAO.
1276950
LIST OF TOMBSTONE INSCRIPTIONS,
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The association of the name of Robert Morrison with the old English Cemetery at Macao, an association which will be recalled by the ceremonies scheduled to take place there on August 1, recalls the history of the Cemetery of the English East India Company at Macao. The history of its origin was in some doubt, but can be cleared up by references to the Chinese Repository, a journal published at Macao and Canton, inaugurated by Mr. S. Wells Williams, and in the Indo-Chinese Gleaner, a contemporary journal, in its number of October, 1821, and, finally, Morrison's Memoirs shed a great deal of light on what was a doubtful date, the date of the establishment of the cemetery.
A marble slab over the entrance to the century-old cemetery bears the date 1811, and the Right Reverend Bishop Dupuy, Bishop of Victoria, said that the first person to be buried in the cemetery was interred there in the year of Waterloo. The mistake in the first instance arises from the fact that the slab was of very recent origin, and the person responsible for its preparation was probably guided by the fact that the date on the earliest tombstone bears the date 1811. No explanation can be given for the date noted by Bishop Dupuy. The actual date of the origin of the cemetery would appear to be that of the death of Mrs. Mary Morrison, in 1821.
In Morrison's Memoirs, the following extract from a letter of the 12th June to his wife's parents, Dr. and Mrs. Moreton, may be seen: "On Monday I wished to inter Mary out at the hills, where Our James was buried, but the Chinese would not let me even open the same grave. I disliked burying under the town walls, (outside, within the limit of the Fosse, the only place allowed) but was obliged to resolve on doing so, as the Papists refuse their burying ground to Protestants. The want of a Protestant burying ground has long been felt in Macao, and the case brought it strongly before the Committee of the English Factory, who immediately resolved to vote a sum sufficient to purchase a place of ground, worth between three and four thousand dollars, and personally exerted themselves to remove the legal impediments and local difficulties; in which they finally succeeded. This enabled me to lay the remains of my beloved wife in a place appropriated to the sepulture of Protestant Christians, being denied a place of interment by the Romanists. Mr. Livingstone, Mr. Pearson, the President and Committee of the English Factory, Mr. Urmston, Sir W. Fraser, &c., bore the pall. All the gentlemen of the factory, also Counsellor Pereira, Sir A. Ljungstedt, the Russian Consul, and other foreigners in Macao, attended the funeral. Mr. Harding, Chaplain to the factory, read the funeral service at the grave. Rebecca, John and I attended their dear mamma to the tomb; we were loath to forsake her remains. Our Chinese domestics and teachers also voluntarily accompanied the funeral. Our Mary was much esteemed by all who ever conversed with her. Sunday, June 17th. To-day every person in the English Society, on account of Mary's death, appeared in mourning at Church."
As has been shown from the quotation from Morrison's own letters, prior to the year 1821 there was no burial place at Macao within the city walls for foreigners. The remains of those who died at Macao were either carried out to a hillock, known as Meesenberg Hill, or were interred just outside the old city walls, on the hillside between the Campo Gate and the Monte Fort, known as the Fosse.