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4-8 October 1998: 104-109.
Hong Kong's urban cemeteries are of considerable historical significance, despite only a handful of existing cemeteries being over a hundred years old. They house the remains of many who came to establish their sub-lineages in Hong Kong in the twentieth century, some willingly and some reluctantly. As Tim Ko said about the Aberdeen Chinese Permanent Cemetery when we were interviewed there by Annemarie Evans of RTHK in June 2002, "These graves represent a Who's Who of early twentieth century Hong Kong!"
I look at Hong's Chinese cemeteries in this short paper as, first, places of tribute; secondly, as a material part of social history and of contemporary social fabric; thirdly, as a material form of 'memory palace'; and finally as material representations of the geomantic relations between humans and their physical world, through fengshui. The crowds that pay respects at Ching Ming and Chung Yeung are reaffirming relations between the living and the dead, the spirit and material worlds, and humans and their cosmos.
I think consideration could be given to erecting explanatory plaques and publishing informative leaflets about Hong Kong's urban cemeteries. Schoolteachers would find these invaluable. Are school field trips to cemeteries too much to expect in a Hong Kong where people are still wary, to put it mildly, of setting foot inside a cemetery except at funerals and the appropriate festival times? Cemeteries are packed with history and rich in the ancient symbols of Chinese culture - a unique resource, and readily accessible.
E.K. Teather (2002). The Road Home: Repatriating Chinese Emigrants after Death, The New Zealand Geographer 58(1): 10-19.
This paper traces the return to China of remains of nineteenth-century and early twentieth century Chinese sojourners from Australia and New Zealand, through the agencies of relatives, friends, Regional Associations and the Tung Wah Hospital. An early version of this paper was delivered at the conference The Chinese Heritage of Australian Federation in Melbourne in July 2000 and is currently being considered for inclusion in the book that is to result from this conference. It got what can almost be described as a rapturous reception by a seventy-strong, predominantly Australian-Chinese audience, who clearly felt I was telling a history that belonged to them.