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This paper focuses on the material objects of cemeteries: grave forms and furnishings. We looked in some detail at a new private grave in Junk Bay Cemetery, at the grave in the Aberdeen Chinese Permanent Cemetery (CPC) of the founder of what is now a Hong Kong-based sub-lineage, at a columbarium niche in the CPC older columbarium in Cape Collinson Cemetery, at a symbolic grave, and finally at a charitable grave, the last two both in the Sandy Ridge Cemetery. We pointed out that in Chinese culture, death is regarded as polluting; and that landscapes of death are regarded as potentially powerful, and are avoided except at festivals or on other appropriate occasions.
The paper was written for the very specialised Journal of the American Association for Gravestone Studies. Americans have for decades been fascinated by gravestones. Is this because it's a settler society, much of whose history is told in its graveyards and cemeteries? If so, it's an interesting cultural contrast that there isn't the same public acknowledgement of the contribution that graveyards and cemeteries make to clarifying the identity of Hong Kong as a community as there is to the parallel contribution that the same type of spaces make regarding the identity of American communities. In both places, those who now reside in cemeteries and columbaria are, for the most part, immigrants. Note that one of the USA's most respected human geographers, Wilbur Zelinsky, has written a couple of well-quoted papers on American cemeteries.
Where Chinese grave forms are concerned, Eddie Chow made an unexpected find in a bookshop while preparing this paper: a book on the different types of grave shapes in southern China: Bin He, Jiang Zhe Han Zu Sung Zong Wen Hua (The Death and Burial Culture of the Han Nationality in Jiangsu and Zhejiang), Beijing, 1995. The scarcity of such material implies that the Chinese awe of death may well be hindering research into a field that is potentially of deep cultural significance in Chinese society.
Teather, E.K. (2000). High rise homes for the ancestors: cremation in Hong Kong, Geographical Review 89(3): 409-430.
The decision in the late 1950s to encourage Hong Kong residents to consider cremation rather than coffin burial, and the gradual acceptance of the policy over the succeeding decades, is intriguing. Over ninety per cent of Hong Kongers are cremated now, if we include
333
This paper focuses on the material objects of cemeteries: grave forms and furnishings. We looked in some detail at a new private grave in Junk Bay Cemetery, at the grave in the Aberdeen Chinese Permanent Cemetery (CPC) of the founder of what is now a Hong Kong-based sub-lineage, at a columbarium niche in the CPC older columbarium in Cape Collinson Cemetery, at a symbolic grave, and finally at a charitable grave, the last two both in the Sandy Ridge Cemetery. We pointed out that in Chinese culture, death is regarded as polluting; and that landscapes of death are regarded as potentially powerful, and are avoided except at festivals or on other appropriate occasions.
The paper was written for the very specialised Journal of the American Association for Gravestone Studies. Americans have for decades been fascinated by gravestones. Is this because it's a settler, society, much of whose history is told in its graveyards and cemeteries? If so, it's an interesting cultural contrast that there isn't the same public acknowledgement of the contribution that graveyards and cemeteries make to clarifying the identity of Hong Kong as a community as there is to the parallel contribution that the same type of spaces make regarding the identity of American communities. In both places, those who now reside in cemeteries and columbaria are, for the most part, immigrants. Note that one of the USA's most respected human geographers, Wilbur Zelinsky, has written a couple of well-quoted papers on American cemeteries.
Where Chinese grave forms are concerned, Eddie Chow made an unexpected find in a bookshop while preparing this paper: a book on the different types of grave shapes in southern China: Bin He, Jiang Zhe Han Zu Sung Zong Wen Hua (The Death and Burial Culture of the Han Nationality in Jiangsu and Zhejiang), Beijing, 1995. The scarcity of such material implies that the Chinese awe of death may well be hindering research into a field that is potentially of deep cultural significance in Chinese society.
Teather, E.K. (2000). High rise homes for the ancestors: cremation in Hong Kong, Geographical Review 89(3): 409-430.
The decision in the late 1950s to encourage Hong Kong residents to consider cremation rather than coffin burial, and the gradual acceptance of the policy over the succeeding decades, is intriguing. Over ninety per cent of Hong Kongers are cremated now, if we include
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