The earliest graves belong to those who died during the first Opium War (1839-1842), which ended with Hong Kong's ceding to the British.
"Their stories were not told before I wrote my book," my mother says. These were not the elite - the colonial governors and administrators - but the ordinary people who built Hong Kong and gave their lives to do so: the merchants and missionaries, the opium traders and auctioneers, the prostitutes and pirates. Nowadays, these overgrown memorials are pretty much all that remain of those lives. He'd been the only fluent Japanese speaker in the British army, and he helped negotiate the Japanese surrender in Singapore.īy the time she finished, her initial idea for a simple pamphlet about the cemetery had grown into a 600-page book, Forgotten Souls: A Social History of the Hong Kong Cemetery, which retells the story of Hong Kong through the lives of those buried in Happy Valley. His plane crashed in 1946 en route to Tokyo,where he was heading to give evidence against Japanese army officers at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal.
#Mother mother forgotten souls series#
This is my mother's third book about Hong Kong, and her most ambitious yet.Ī series of identical graves mark the resting spots for 11 British soldiers, including Col. She decided to remedy that by spending the past decade penning her love letter to the graveyard. "I was fascinated by the way Hong Kong had grown up, and nobody knew anything about it," she says. This is Hong Kong cemetery, the last resting place of the early settlers who colonized the island, starting in the 1840s.įor my mother, Patricia Lim, the cemetery is a repository of the island's early untold early history. Last year, she rested on the grave while, unbeknownst to her at the time, she was having a mild heart attack.īelow a noisy flyover alongside Hong Kong's Happy Valley racecourse, there's a little-noticed green oasis stretching up the hillside, punctuated by imposing Victorian chest tombs, granite obelisks and delicate angels. Here, Lim stands at the grave of former Hong Kong police officer Richardson Barry Loxley Leslie. For more than a decade, author Patricia Lim researched the 8,000 graves of the Hong Kong Cemetery, one of the city's oldest Christian cemeteries.
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