A commemorative plaque will be installed at the end of next month at the grave of the first Hong Kong-raised martyr to die in the revolution against the Qing dynasty, more than six years behind the Hong Kong government's original schedule.
The long-awaited news of when it would be erected beside Yeung Kui-wan's unnamed tomb at the Hong Kong Cemetery in Happy Valley was revealed by the Antiquities and Monuments Office (AMO) in a letter to Ng Huen-yan, a writer who has been following the issue for a decade.
The AMO, which yesterday confirmed the timing, originally planned in 2004 to place a plaque beside the grave of Yeung, known as Yang Quyun on the mainland, who was assassinated in Hong Kong by killers sent by the Qing court in 1901.
This year in March, Permanent Secretary for Home Affairs Raymond Young Lap-moon announced that the plaque would be erected by the middle of the year as one of the activities to commemorate the centenary of the 1911 revolution.
In a letter to Ng on August 3, the office said it had resolved some technical problems relating to design and installation, and expected to complete the installation next month.
Yeung joined forces with Sun Yat-sen and Tse Tsan-tai, a founder of the South China Morning Post in 1903, to form the Revive China Society in 1895. Yeung was elected president of the society, which made its first attempt to capture Guangdong in 1895. He was elected president of a 'provisional government', but the uprising failed miserably, as did another to capture Huizhou in 1900. Sun subsequently led the revolution of 1911 and became the founder of modern China.
