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For 10 years from 1985 to 1995 I spent much of my leisure time painstakingly recording the memorial inscriptions within The Colonial Cemetery, Happy Valley, Hong Kong. In those halcyon days before 'political correctness' I became known as 'the mad English lady in the straw hat' - well, who else would be stupid enough to spend their weekends crouching over decaying old gravestones trying to decipher names and dates?! I started off by laboriously writing every inscription in a notepad. One notepad full I went on to another and another and another. Then I progressed to using a handheld tape recorder and had to expand my typing skills to audio typing in order to convert the spoken word to typewritten. The final stage necessitated indexing all the thousands of names I had recorded. This was long before the days of personal computers in every home and as cards were far too bulky for the space I had available I opted for paper slips which I stored in a shoe box. As with notepads, one shoe box became full and then another and so on. Fortunately, Hong Kong is a wonderful place where furniture of every description can be found. A six drawer rosewood cabinet was found which fitted the slips to perfection - it was designed as a cutlery cabinet but a bit of lateral thinking never goes amiss! During the summer months when it was too hot to spend hours under the glare of the sun, or too dangerous to kneel on the ground near the gravestones for fear of snakes basking in the heat, I would spend my time collating details from other sources such as church burial records or newspapers. Many of the early memorial inscriptions were difficult to decipher by the 20th. century and where only partial names or dates could be determined these additional sources provided much needed identification. Although I never managed to index all the church burial records I did complete the task of recording all the decipherable English inscriptions from the cemetery. This was just two weeks before I left Hong Kong in June 1995. I then bade farewell to the cemetery which was home to many who had died so far away from their homeland. The task continues into the 21st. century as I back record convert details from the paper slips into an Access database. At the time of going to press the database contains well over 13,000 entries with surnames A - R completed. For a search of the cemetery database & index please contact: |
Home/The Orient/Colonial Cemetery/The Project/Police/Met.Police/Hong Kong Police/UK/Terms Last modified: 23/10/2005 |
