Themes from Complex Landscapes: Chinese Cemeteries and Columbaria in Urban Hong Kong

Accommodating the dead in Hong Kong is more than a planning issue. A study of Hong Kong’s urban cemeteries and columbaria reveals that they are associated with a cosmography, or world view, suffused with fengshui . They are regarded by many Chinese people in Hong Kong as dangerous and powerful places that link earth, heaven and the underworld, i.e. the material and non‐material worlds. Their unique time‐geography involves year‐round desertion except at the appropriate time for graveside rituals related to ancestor veneration. The different forms of burial — either in coffins, or in urns for ashes or for bones — require different spaces. This paper summarises the historical development of the provision of such spaces in Hong Kong and provides a descriptive analysis of four of them. It emerges that Hong Kong’s cemeteries have a strongly, though not exclusively, secular significance. Furthermore, inscriptions on grave tablets indicate the position in the lineage, and the ancestral place, of those buried there.