Hong Kong pushing ahead with massive cemetery complex near mainland China border, amid pro-establishment party’s ‘major blunder’ warning

Hong Kong officials are pushing ahead with a long-delayed scheme to build a massive columbarium complex near the border with mainland China, but the city’s largest pro-establishment party has warned the move would be a “major land-planning blunder”.

Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB) vice-chairman Gary Chan Hak-kan on Friday said the Lo Wu site for the Sandy Ridge project – which would yield more than 200,000 niche plots and stage 17,800 annual cremations in a space-starved city – should be used instead for other industries that could promote collaboration with neighbouring cities such as Shenzhen.

But campaigners for the project have called on the administration to proceed with the development to address critical shortages of cemetery facilities in the city, urging officials not to bow to political pressure from the party.

Eddie Tse Sai-kit, of the Alliance for the Concern over Columbarium Policy, said: “Even though the government has identified 24 sites across the city for columbaria, it is still not sufficient to solve the shortages.

“Among those projects, Sandy Ridge is the largest, providing hundreds of thousands of niche spaces. The other projects will only offer tens of thousands, thousands, or even just hundreds.”

The government reiterated on Friday the development was necessary to avoid a serious scarcity of cemetery-related facilities in Hong Kong over the medium to long term.

Officials decided in 2012 to build a new complex at the Sandy Ridge Cemetery in Lo Wu to house funeral parlours, a crematorium and a columbarium.