President Xi Jinping sends floral tribute to funeral of Lu Ping, architect of Hong Kong handover
Officials offer condolences at funeral of Hong Kong handover's negotiator
All seven members of China's supreme Politburo Standing Committee, along with former presidents, sent condolence wreaths to the funeral of Lu Ping , a key architect of Hong Kong's handover, in Beijing yesterday.
The flowers were placed around Lu's coffin inside the assembly hall of Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, where the nation's heroes, martyrs and Communist Party cadres are honoured.
About a dozen of his relatives stood nearby receiving mourners, both officials and members of the public, as speakers played the military's funeral march.
Hong Kong Chief Leung Chun-ying and his counterpart in Macau, Fernando Chui Sai-on, attended the ceremony, Xinhua reported.
In addition to the flowers from President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang , wreaths were sent by former president Jiang Zemin , and Hong Kong tycoons Li Ka-shing and Stanley Ho Hung-sun.
Lu died aged 87 in Beijing last Sunday. He was among a handful of officials who oversaw negotiations on Hong Kong's handover from the earliest days to the lowering of the Union Jack near midnight on July 1, 1997. "Hong Kong owes Lu a lot …," said the city's former secretary for justice, Elsie Leung Oi-sie, on the sidelines of the funeral. "The great consolation for Lu would be the passage of Hong Kong's political reform."
Lu served as director of the State Council's Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office from 1990 to 1997. Those who knew him remembered Lu as a gentle, easy-going man, but he did not always hold his tongue; he labelled Hong Kong's final British governor Chris Patten, a "sinner for a thousand years".
About 150 members of the public, dressed mostly in black, had gathered outside the hall by 10am. Visitors were guided to a reception desk where staff asked them to sign their names in a book, then handed them a booklet about Lu and a white fabric flower to wear on their chest.
Staff asked the crowds to form three lines on the right-hand side of the entrance.
Bouquets of white roses were arranged above the coffin and red ones placed below it. Lu's body was dressed in a black suit and white shirt. His face was thin - a source that knew Lu said he had died from cancer.
Mourners were asked to bow three times before the body, circle around the right side of the casket, and greet the waiting relatives, including his children and grandchildren, and daughter-in-law Yao Jue.
