Then & Now | Changing face of Hong Kong is carved into its gravestones
At various times an importer and exporter of memorials, some of them highly elaborate, the city today attaches little value to the look of gravestones when most burials are only for seven years
Gravestones and cemetery memorials, like everything else in life, follow fashions and trends. Long-established cemeteries across the region, such as the colonial cemetery in Happy Valley, Hong Kong, allow us to follow the evolution of tombstone vogues.
Hong Kong’s oldest surviving European gravestones date from the early 1840s and, like almost everything else then, they were imported. From the mid-18th until the mid-19th centuries, sarcophagus-like “chest tombs” were popular. The body was interred in the ground in the usual manner, and the memorial, shaped like a box made from stone slabs, was placed on top once the grave had settled and subsided.
Most stone memorials came from Calcutta – then the Canton delta’s main trading partner – where they were usually manufactured in prison workshops. The basic design was formed and a memorial inscription, such as “Here Rests …” or “In Loving Memory of …”, was carved before export. The deceased’s name, dates and details were later traced on and incised by a stone cutter in Hong Kong, which explains significant variations in fonts on any given gravestone.
By the 1850s, most gravestones in Hong Kong were locally made granite slabs produced by indigenous stone-cutting village industries (which largely pre-dated European arrival) in Shau Kei Wan, Shek Tong Tsui and along the foreshores of Kowloon Bay.
With rising affluence as the city developed, there was a renewed demand for imported gravestones; memorials made overseas enjoyed a cachet the local product did not, whatever their true merits. Particularly status conscious were the fervently Catholic Portuguese. Heavily carved Italian marble creations swarming with weeping angels, dolorous Virgins and wreath-festooned crucifixes conveyed prestige.
