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Introduction
The purpose of this short paper is to introduce the research that I have carried out since 1995 on deathspaces, first of all in Hong Kong and later in Guangzhou and Seoul. My interest in this topic arose from a visit that I made to Wo Hop Shek Cemetery at Chung Yeung, 1995. I had just arrived in Hong Kong to join my husband, David, for what was meant to be a year's leave of absence from my position as a geographer at the University of New England in New South Wales, Australia. I needed to find a nice, tidy topic of research that I could undertake in a few months of field work while in Hong Kong.
We were taken aback by the festival mood at Wo Hop Shek. It was a sunny day. There were endless streams of cheerful family groups going up and down the steep road. Stalls selling flowers, food and sunhats, or marketing tombstones and urns, were staffed by smiling men and women. There was a strong but low key police presence. Clouds of pungent incense floated around the columbarium, and ash fluttered down, settling on our shoulders. Late in the afternoon, flames crackled somewhere out of sight up in the hills and a fire engine raced up the road. No-one seemed to mind our presence or even notice us except to offer an occasional courteous nod.
I realised that this was a unique manifestation of time-space and one I wanted to know a lot more about. Fortunately, my time in Hong Kong has not been limited to that first year! When you begin researching issues relating to death in Chinese culture, you go right to the heart of beliefs and customs. I feel fortunate that I chose such an intriguing and fundamentally important topic.
In the research I eventually undertook, I concentrated on Hong Kong's municipal cemeteries, provided by public and private organisations, and not on rural graves and graveyards. This made sense because of my background as a geographer teaching on a degree programme in Urban and Regional Planning. There are sensitive and important issues involved in planning for the provision of space for the dead. As a geographer rather than an anthropologist, I have been more interested in broad spatial issues than in the practices associated with funerals and burial. However, this does not mean that I see place as a passive object. Indeed, place is dynamic: it is a context for the activities