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Before 1949, burial customs in China were largely geared to the
traditions of a predominantly agricultural country. Except in the New
Territories, however, Hong Kong was not in a position to follow the
same rural traditions of burial procedure and therefore was forced
to evolve a pattern more or less of its own. The post-War change of
government in China has led to even further changes in local burial
customs.
For non-Christian Chinese in Hong Kong, the focus of burial
practices is the veneration of family ancestors. In its extreme form,
this can be taken to mean the belief that, if surviving relatives and
descendants pay sufficient respect to their dead, the dead in their turn
will exercise a benevolent influence over the lives and prosperity of
their family.
The deceased is considered to be in a better position to watch over
his earthly descendants if buried close to his native place, where it is
also, of course, easier for his family to pay their respects to him. This
has led to the practice of conveying the deceased back to the place in China whence he came and interring him in a traditional burial
ground. It is well known that, no matter where they die, the bodies of
overseas Chinese have, where possible, usually been conveyed back
to their homes for burial. When they could afford to do so, relatives
have followed this same principle where death occurred in Hong
Kong.
Coffins and remains of Chinese who died in various parts of the
world, e.g. Borneo, the Philippines, Indonesia, the USA, have been
shipped to China via Hong Kong, which in pre-War and immediately
post-War days enjoyed a certain pre-eminence as a transit centre for
the onward movement of human remains.
The trans-shipment was not always immediate. Circumstances
often imposed some delay. To meet the difficulties of holding the
coffin temporarily, the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals in pre-War
days set up in Hong Kong a coffin repository in Sandy Bay where
remains could be stored on payment of a monthly fee. This repository
served its original purpose well until 1949 when difficulties arose
in the way of transferring bodies into China. At present, there is
virtually no movement of coffins into China, with the result that the
repository has gradually accumulated nearly 10,000 coffins, urns and
containers. The accommodation ranges from single rooms, where one
or more coffins rest on trestles, to larger rooms holding hundreds of
coffins, together with exhumed remains in a variety of receptacles,
e.g. earthenware urns, rattan baskets, wooden boxes and even secondhand
tin containers. In some cases, all trace of the relatives of the
deceased has been lost and it is proposed to re-inter such remains in a
special Tung Wah plot at the Sandy Ridge Cemetery, to which further
reference will presently be made.
A clear pattern is now emerging, whereby Hong Kong has almost
ceased to be a transit centre for the conveyance of deceased Chinese
to their native place. The next best alternative, both for overseas dead and C~inese residents of Hong Kong itself, is to bury them in Hong
Kong Instead, though that is not to imply that local cemeteries are
doing a brisk business in snapping up overseas trade.
In examining the details of current burial procedure, a distinction
must be drawn between the urban areas and the New Territories. In
the congested urban areas, where land is needed for development and
health measures assume greater importance, there is not the same
freedom in choice of burial grounds. Relatives must decide whether
to bury the dead in a private cemetery, with higher fees, or in a public
cemetery, with lower fees and compulsory exhumation of remains
after a period of years.
Taking the urban areas first, let us trace the events of a typical
funeral. Unlike the earlier traditional habits of mainland China, where
preparations for burial were largely carried out by members of the
family, the current practice in Hong Kong is for the relatives, on death
occurring in their midst, at once to call in an undertaker or someone
from a funeral parlour. The undertaker provides a coffin, encoffins the
body and conveys it thus to a cemetery for burial, but he is debarred
by law from bringing dead bodies on to his own business premises.
A funeral parlour, on the other hand, has wider scope. Its staff will
enter the home of the deceased and remove the body to the parlour
either in a basket-woven container coloured silver, blue or yellow, or
on a plain canvas stretcher. The advantage of using a funeral parlour
Instead of an undertaker lies in the fact that, with the body actually
held temporarily on the premises of the parlour, it is possible there to
carry out funeral rites which would be otherwise inconvenient where
an undertaker conveyed the encoffined body direct from the home to
the cemetery.
Chinese in Hong Kong dislike holding a dead body overnight
in the private home. They much prefer its immediate removal after
death. Neighbours too are far from happy at the thought of death in the near vicinity, nor in earlier days did they use to be in favour of
allowing the body to be removed in a coffin past their particular floor
in a two-or three-storeyed tenement building. Chinese coffins usually
consist lengthwise of four sections of tree trunk and are therefore
bulky, irrespective of whether the coffin is cheap or one of the
expensive polished varieties. Manoeuvring these coffins up and down
narrow tenement staircases, with inevitable banging against walls,
might be likened to death tapping at the door; a harbinger of bad luck.
To meet this problem of removal from upper floors in the urban
areas, it used to be the custom up until the 1960s to construct a bamboo
staging outside the building, so that the coffin could be taken out of
the window and be brought down the staging to the hearse in the
roadway. The custom has now disappeared for a number of reasons,
largely economic: new buildings have grown too high for stagings to
reach most upper storeys; the cost of long bamboo from China has
risen enormously as a result of its use for scaffolding in the current
building boom; the practice of glassing-in verandas and balconies has
made windows too small for coffins to fit through; traffic congestion
in the streets makes the authorities chary of allowing even more
obstruction in the form of these stagings on roads and pavements.
To take their place as a means of removing the body from the private
premises, basket-woven containers or stretchers have come to be
used, and they are far less expensive.
If an undertaker is engaged, he will prepare the body in the
deceased's home, encoffin and remove it either direct to the cemetery
or to a government cemetery depot in Hong Kong or Kowloon, where
it can be held overnight pending government conveyance to a public
cemetery. A farewell pavilion at each depot provides free facilities
for the relatives to hold services of any denomination or to perform
other last rites.
If a funeral parlour is engaged, the body is conveyed in the
basket-woven container or stretcher to the parlour for preparation,
encoffining and almost invariably a service. In a few cases, embalming
is carried out but this is a refinement that seems to hold no particular
significance since burial takes place normally within the forty-eight
hours allowed by law for the body to remain on the premises. In
parts of China, it apparently used to be the custom to delay burial for
periods of up to seven weeks. But the more tropical climate of Hong
Kong and the ever-present risk of disease have made it necessary to
insist on a forty-eight hours limit in funeral parlours.
When encoffined in a funeral parlour, the body is placed in a
farewell room where it is customary for the immediate relatives
to maintain a vigil (overnight, if necessary) until the time comes
for conveyance to a cemetery or crematorium. During the vigil
and funeral, the close relatives (i.e. widow and widower, sons and
daughters, daughters-in-law and grandchildren) are often dressed
in the traditional mourning colour of white, usually in a costume
provided by the funeral parlour and consisting, for women, of a white
skirt and an upper garment resembling half a sack with one corner
placed over the head. Men tend to wear white gowns, with a white
band tied around the forehead. A thin surcoat of sackcloth (haau
ma po) may be worn over the white mourning clothes by
a widow, daughter and daughter-in-law of the deceased; a son may
wear a smaller square of sackcloth over his head.
Friends and relatives will pay their respects to the deceased by
bowing towards the coffin three times and once towards the chief
mourners, who are usually ranged to one side and may be kneeling
with their heads towards the ground. For this public lying in state,
the deceased is sometimes placed in a special coffin that leaves
the upper portion of the body temporarily exposed. Before burial,
the missing portion of the coffin lid will be replaced. The farewell room throughout the vigil and lying in state may be lit with candles
and incense sticks, often making the atmosphere uncomfortably
heavy and oppressive. In the past, it was customary to bang gongs
throughout the vigil, to keep away evil spirits, but this practice is
now prohibited to avoid nuisance to neighbours. It is also customary
amongst the less well-to-do for the female relatives of the deceased,
particularly a widow, to give a public demonstration of grief in the
form of wailing, weeping and loud cries. Mute grief would neither
satisfy custom nor perhaps offer adequate incentive to the spirit of
the deceased to exercise a benevolent influence on his descendants.
In practice, the last rites at a funeral parlour usually continue until
midday, for the practical reason that it may take the whole morning
to complete formalities such as registering the death and making
arrangements with the relevant authorities for burial or cremation. The
body is then taken by motor hearse to the cemetery or crematorium,
accompanied by relatives. Friends may also accompany the hearse if
they wish, but there is no objection to their departing earlier after the
last rites have been performed. For a particularly large funeral, the
journey to the cemetery may be preceded by a ceremonial procession
in the neighbourhood, with funeral bands, mourners on foot, the
hearse with the coffin, and large wicker framework plaques covered
in silver and blue paper describing the deceased. The writer once
saw a one-quarter mile procession, with no less than sixteen separate
bands, complete an entire circuit of the Happy Valley racecourse
before departing for the cemetery. Some of the funeral bands may be
hired by the descendants of the deceased; other bands may be hired
by friends wishing to offer condolences.
At the cemetery, the coffin is normally lowered into the grave
without further ceremony and the hole filled. Just before the hole is
filled, it is customary for each member ofthe family present to throw
in a handful of earth. After filling, two candles are usually lit and placed near the head of the grave and three incense-sticks nearer the
foot. Sometimes, absent members of the family may depute other
relatives to set out candles and incense-sticks on their behalf in
which case the proportions are still observed. An offering of oranges
may be peeled and placed on the grave, together with paper money.
Finally, crackers are let off.
Occasionally, after the coffin has been lowered and before the
earth is thrown in, a male descendant present will make a cut in a
live cock so that blood flows out. The cock will then be held over the
grave to allow its blood to drop on the coffin and sides of the hole in
the traditional hope that the breeding properties of the cock will' be
transmitted to the deceased. Provided that the deceased is over middle
age, sex normally makes no difference. A more modern version of
this practice omits the incision on the cock, which is simply swung
over the hole on the end of a piece of string.
The last rites sometimes involve the assistance of Taoist or
Buddhist monks, even though neither the relatives nor the deceased
may necessarily profess complete belief in either of those religions.
The monks normally appear in a team of five, the leader with the
other four ranged in pairs. Their form of service usually follows the
pattern of Taoist and Buddhist chanting, accompanied by music, the
striking of bells, small brass ringing bowls and wooden sound-boxes
(muk ue). In major funerals, where the body is held elsewhere
than in a funeral parlour, the last rites may continue for seven full
days before burial, with further services every seventh day for a
total of forty-nine days. If expense proves too much, some of the
weekly services may be omitted but it is customary to include the
fifth one, when married daughters and granddaughters are expected
to contribute either wholly or in part; the final service is also required.
At these weekly rites, the next-of-kin may sometimes cook rice and beans (red and green) which are then eaten by relatives in the hope of
attaining long life (chue shaufaan).
Another custom still often encountered is the placing of several
pairs of trousers on the deceased, whether male or female. Half a
dozen pairs of trousers is not uncommon. Based on a pun between
the Cantonesefoo (trousers) andfoo (riches), the object is to
provide wealth for the spirit of the deceased. Including jacket and
underwear, an even number of garments is normally placed on a
male; an odd number on a female.
In the New Territories, there used to be no funeral parlours and
few undertakers. As in the agricultural interior of China, practical
responsibility still falls mainly on the kinsmen of the deceased. The
customary burial of villagers is in two stages: initial coffin burial,
and subsequent exhumation and re-interment of remains. Having
encoffined the body, the relatives normally sustain the vigil directly
outside the home under a temporary shelter. Burial then takes place
in a traditional village area, but no monument is erected beyond a
small unshaped stone at the head of the grave. After five years or
more, the body is exhumed. The bones will be cleaned by the family
and be placed either in a funerary urn (kam t'aap) or in a
formal masonry grave (shaan fan) shaped like a horseshoe. In
the funerary urn, the bones will be arranged in a manner as if the
deceased were sitting in the Buddhist lotus posture.
The siting of the funerary urns and horseshoe graves is of
particular importance. Relatives will go to great lengths to ensure that
the fung shui of the site is propitious. In other words, they
wish to ensure that the benevolent influence of the site will protect
the deceased, as a member of the family, so that he in turn will look
kindly upon his relatives. The site is usually high up, commanding a
view of water and on a ridge or spur which represents, for instance,
a dragon, snake, shrimp or crab in its formation. Standing with one's back to a horseshoe grave, one sees a half circle within a radius of ten
yards, which is normally regarded as sacrosanct. Disturbance of the
ground is regarded with strong disfavour. Traditionally, the left arm
of the panorama in front should consist of a long ridge (containing
a 'green dragon') and the right arm of a shorter ridge (containing a
'white tiger'). In a horseshoe grave, the exhumed remains are buried
in a jar in the centre, just in front of a stone plaque (pei shek)
that records the name of the deceased, the date of his death, and other
details. Important graves of recorded ancestors or founders of a clan
are often flanked by a small shrine (hau t'o) on either side and
sometimes another behind, at a distance of ten to twenty feet from the
main grave. The object of the shrines is to persuade the earth god to
look after the grave.
Whether the exhumed remains are to be placed in a funerary urn
or in a horseshoe grave seems to be governed by the sex and general
standing of the deceased in the clan, or even by the financial state of
the relatives at the time of exhumation. The remains are normally
fit for exhumation after a minimum of five years of burial, but, even
so, exhumation should not strictly take place unless there has been
no pregnancy amongst the deceased's close female relatives in the
immediately preceding nine months. This requirement, which would
tend to impose some hardship on the male relatives, can be got around
by omitting pregnant wives from the ceremony. There is a belief that
exhumation should not take place during the years on which fall the
fifty-first, sixty-first, seventy-first and other such birthdays of the
male head of the family.
In Chinese public cemeteries, the same principle of exhumation is
practised. At the end of each year, the particular coffin section where
burials have been taking place is closed and left untouched for at
least five years. At the end of that time, an official notice of intention
to clear graves is published, giving relatives six months in which to exhume remains privately and re-inter them in the urn section. Any
remains not exhumed privately on the expiry of the period of notice
are then exhumed by Government and the remains re-interred in an
urn section. The cleared coffin section is then eventually used again
for coffin burials.
Applying equally to urban and New Territories burials are the
two important grave worshipping festivals of Ching Ming 105
days after the winter solstice, i.e. either 5th or 6th April) and Chung
Yeung (ninth day of the ninth moon, i.e. in October). The
first is the more important. The second was originally not a graveworshipping
festival at all, but an occasion for climbing to the top of
a mountain to avoid evil spirits. Since so many graves are situated on
hills, the practice of combining the hill climb with an opportunity of
worshipping at graves has been developed.
Strict Cantonese belief also requires that, at ch'un she,
which falls annually about two weeks before the Ching Ming
festival, relatives should pay their respects to persons who have died
within the past year. This ceremony usually takes place at home and
its participants are restricted to older persons.
At the Ching Ming and Chung Yeung festivals, it
is customary for whole families to make an outing to their relatives'
graves. There, offerings of pork, fruit and flowers are presented;
incense and candles burnt; prayers offered; crackers let off. Minor
repairs to the graves may be carried out and undergrowth cut back.
Coffin graves in the New Territories may be marked with lime at
the end and all types of graves usually have a piece of red paper and
another piece of white paper underneath the red tucked under a stone
beside them. Exhumations will often be carried out at the Ching Ming
festival. At the Tung Wah coffin repository, caskets of remains
are opened and the bones spread out to air on sheets of paper.
Chinese believe that the spirit of a person leaves the body on
death. In Hong Kong the general belief is that it descends into hell
where the judge decides on the basis of the earthly merits of th~
deceased whether it may be allowed to return to earth by reincarnation
as a child or, if very evil, as an animal. The main fear of the dead
consists rather of the belief that to touch the dead is to run the risk
of becoming infected by an aura of ill-luck (Sz yan fung)
whereby all the misfortunes of the deceased will be transmitted.
Amongst fishermen, fear of the dead and of ill-luck is particularly
pronounced. At Tai 0 on the north-western end of Lantau, fisherfolk
on their deathbed used to be taken from their boats to die in a special
house maintained for the purpose near the cemetery.
During funeral processions in both the urban areas and the
New Territories, it is the practice to scatter different types of paper,
representing money, along the route to the burial ground, particularly
at crossroads where traditionally malevolent spirits tend to congregate.
It is hoped that, in the confusion caused by the evil spirits grabbing
the money, the spirit of the deceased will be able to pass unscathed.
The remainder of the paper money thrown out at points other than
cross-roads is for the use of the spirit of the deceased in making his
way back to his home three days after the death (saam ch'iu ooi wan). In many homes, a corner in a hall or passage may be
reserved for a tablet and memorial, to house the spirit on its return
to the home. This return of the spirit may at first sight be difficult to
reconcile with the belief that the spirit descends into hell. The answer
is that, according to Chinese belief, each dead person has a number of
spirits. The descent of one of these spirits into hell is often assisted at
the burial by the scattering and burning of specially printed hell bank
notes (meng t'ung chi pai), together with paper effigies of
clothes, suitcases, motor cars, steamships, aeroplanes etc., often of
most elaborate and detailed construction.
The impact of crowded living conditions, economy and improved
public health have had their gradual effect in changing the pattern
of Hong Kong burial custom. Except for paupers, by far the greater
proportion of Chinese dead from the urban areas (numbering some
10,000 a year) are now buried in the public cemetery at Wo Hop Shek,
near Fan Ling in the New Territories. Coffins may be conveyed by
rail from Kowloon daily as a service included within the burial fees
that are $5 or $15 according to size of coffin. Only some 20% of the
coffins are carried to the cemetery by private hearses at the expense
of the relatives. Of the balance brought by rail, not more than half are
attended by relatives. It is obviously not possible in a public cemetery
to site graves in accordance with individual interpretations of fung
shui. The fact that each coffin is simply allotted the next
vacant space in the burial terrace is readily accepted, although it must
be admitted that the majority of terraces are well up the hillside with a
commanding view of distance and water. Similarly, when the routine
six months' notice of intention to exhume remains from the coffin
section is given, it is unusual for relatives to clear the graves privately
in more than half the cases. The balance is left to the Government to
clear. The deduction might be drawn that, although there may well
be relatives still at hand in Hong Kong, they accept the government
service in clearance as perfectly adequate for the purpose and as a
useful means of saving themselves expense.
Every year, in addition to Chinese dead mentioned above, the
bodies of nearly 10,000 paupers are left to the Government to dispose
of. The term 'pauper' does not imply that the deceased were homeless
and abandoned. Most of the deaths occur in charitable institutes and
hospitals. In most cases, there were relatives available but for one
reason or another, usually economic, they preferred not to claim the
body, being satisfied that the free burial (at the Sandy Ridge Cemetery, Lo Wu) and subsequent exhumation provided by the Government
would be sufficient to meet changed conditions.
Where possible, attempts are made at public Chinese cemeteries
to meet burial customs. Facilities are provided at the Ching Ming and Chung Yeung festivals, in the form of special
trains with reduced fares for relatives, crowd control, temporary
latrines etc. Trees and plants with flowers in the traditional
mourning colours are planted, e.g. yellow allamanda, white spider
lilies, purple thunbergia, and white and yellow frangipani.
It must be emphasised that this brief description of current
Chinese burial customs in Hong Kong represents no more than the
observed practice at a particular point of time. Custom is a living
body that changes gradually from generation to generation. It would
therefore be unwise to assume that all these customs will survive.
The impact of congestion, lack of burial space and improving
social conditions in Hong Kong may well cause further changes. In
particular, the proposed official encouragement of cremation as a
means of disposal of the dead may do much to upset the current burial
pattern, although it will follow the Buddhist practice more closely.
The basic factor seems to be that Hong Kong Chinese are not so much
concerned with the means of disposal of the dead as with being able
to pinpoint the eventual resting place of the remains of the deceased,
whether in the form of bones or ashes. Exhumation, as such, seems
to play no significant part in the process except as a practical means
of reducing the physical bulk of the deceased to proportions that will
either fit into a funerary urn or below a horseshoe grave. Cremation,
therefore, which serves the same practical purpose as exhumation in
reducing bulk, should equally prove unobjectionable to Hong Kong
Chinese, backed as it is by Buddhist belief. In short, one may expect
that, within a generation, cremation may largely replace burial and
exhumation as a means of customary disposal of Chinese dead in Hong Kong. It is worth noting that, in China, cremation is now the
only official means of disposal.
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