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CARL T. SMITH
Cemetery in 1889 is June 1841 and the latest date is January 1845.
After the new cemetery was opened, the old was allowed to fall into neglect. An article in the China Mail of 23 November 1865 calls public attention to the desecration of the abandoned cemetery. "Part of it”, the writer says, “has been cut away for building lots, where now stand some tenantless houses, and day after day headstones are stolen by the Chinese to be refaced and sold to some newly-made mourners”.
The remaining stones were removed in 1889 and the ground was sold for development. Upon a part of it Hong Kong's first electric power plant was built.
The new cemetery at Happy Valley
A large tract of land on the hill on the west side of Happy Valley was designated in 1845 as cemeteries for Protestants and Roman Catholics. St. Michael Cemetery, administered by the Roman Catholic Church, lies to the north of the Colonial Cemetery.
In the same year that the cemetery was opened a mortuary chapel was built. The cemetery was placed under the charge of the Colonial Chaplain, who kept a register of burials. Maintenance costs were borne by the Government as a part of the Ecclesiastical Establishment. The first burial record book begins in 1853 with grave number 807. By the end of the century the cemetery was placed under the jurisdiction of the newly created Sanitary Board.
There were complaints about the state of the cemetery in 1865. An article in the China Mail (23 November 1865) stated that it was nearly full. At the time there had been some 3,100 burials. The writer expressed the hope that "Happy Valley will ever be sacred to the dead, and that we never again behold in Hong Kong a graveyard desecrated and as filled as was that to the south of Queen's Road East by St. Francis Hospital". He made some suggestions "so that the Happy Valley Cemetery be