A Happy Valley

At the Hong Kong Cemetery, Ken Nicolson raises his spectacles to his forehead, leans toward a century-old sarcophagus—his nose almost touching it—to read its faint inscriptions. The sky is gray; the cemetery is otherwise deserted. In almost any other circumstance, this would have been quite a bizarre scene. After all, who hangs out at the cemetery, let alone spends hours checking out every headstone?

But this is no ordinary cemetery—the Hong Kong Cemetery, located at Wong Nai Chung Road opposite Happy Valley Racecourse, is Hong Kong’s oldest existing western-style cemetery. Built in 1845, the cemetery is unavoidably an excellent testimony to our city’s colonial history—for one, some of the iconic figures in Hong Kong history are buried here. Yet despite this, the cemetery is hardly recognized as a significant place—chances are the only time you come across it is when you are stuck at the flyover near the Aberdeen Tunnel, where you can see the cemetery below. 

Due to the fact that our heritage laws only protect buildings, even a site like this cemetery, with a history of more than 165 years, is not protected at all. Today, although managed by the Food and Environmental Hygiene Department (FEHD), most of the graves in the cemetery are worn-out—some are even collapsed and crumbling—because maintaining the tombs and headstones is not the department’s responsibility.

And that’s where Ken Nicolson comes in. A landscape and conservation architect, Nicolson has recently published a book on the cemetery. “The Happy Valley: A History and Tour of the Hong Kong Cemetery” is a collection of his studies of the site over the past 10 years. The book does not just serve as a guidebook for your own little cemetery tour, but also as a way to bring awareness to this important cultural landscape that the city has forgotten and ignored, and is on its verge of being destroyed by time.

Nicolson visited the cemetery for the first time in 2001. “I knew of its existence but I had never stepped foot into it until then,” he says. “Once I stepped in, it reminded me of some of the old cemeteries in the UK—the abundance of trees, lush and green, birds singing, very quiet despite the traffic outside.” What he found was 10 hectares of land dotted with a garden-esque combination of graves that can be dated to more than 100 years ago. He believes that the Hong Kong Cemetery is a rare example of cultural landscape in the city where you can find both heritage and nature in one site, both of which in need of conservation. He wrote a dissertation about it, which eventually turned into a book.

The Hong Kong Cemetery is one of three cemeteries in the area, sandwiched by nearby Parsee Cemetery and Catholic Cemetery. But unlike them, Hong Kong Cemetery is a public cemetery that was built by the government 165 years ago and has been run by it ever since. The lack of religious affiliation and the fact that the graves are permanent means the cemetery has a colorful variety of people buried there. There are the city’s historical icons (Robert Hotung, Paul Chater, Ho Kai, to name a few), also people of different nationalities and religions (Polish, Nazi Germans, Japanese for example—yes there are two Nazi graves, see opposite page), and a variety of causes of death (war, blown up by a bomb, killed by a tiger, drowned due to intoxication). As the plots at the cemetery are permanent, families had a reason to spend a lot of money on the headstones. Marble and granite were imported and used liberally, with intricate carvings that were likely to have been done by stonemasons overseas rather than in Hong Kong. Because of this, Hong Kong Cemetery has a large variety of headstone styles and designs—anything from a simple tablet, to a granite anchor, an obelisk, a broken column or a marble angel.