High-Rise Homes for the Ancestors: Cremation in Hong Kong

Abstract

ABSTRACT. A massive, voluntary shift to cremation has taken place in Hong Kong over the past forty years. The provision of facilities by the colonial government and private organizations began with niche walls in existing cemeteries. These were soon supplemented by sizable buildings known as columbaria. The largest and most recent columbarium, completed in 1996, provides 49,884 niches, each of which can hold at least two sets of ashes. Designing columbaria that are functional, sensitive, and culturally specific provides a fascinating challenge to architects. This article contrasts the conservative response of the public sector with the more expressive solutions of private providers. Keywords: burial, cemeteries, columbaria, cremation, fengshui, Hong Kong. Hong Kong has experienced a quiet revolution in burial practices since the 1950s. The changes are the result of the growing acceptance by Hong Kong's populace of an official strategy, adopted in the 1960s, to encourage cremation by providing and subsidizing the necessary infrastructure and services -- crematories and columbaria -- so that cremation is no more expensive than coffin burial (Lee 1988a, 1988b). Today Hong Kong's many large columbaria are striking buildings, the largest of which have offered architects a complex challenge (Figure 1). Columbaria, where cremains are stored in niches that accommodate the remains of an individual, a couple, or a family, are immensely important to the families concerned. They are the setting for congregations of huge crowds on the public holidays of Qingming and Chongyang, the Gravesweeping Festivals, when relatives pay their respects to their deceased forebears. In the ancient culture of China, where codified beliefs about death can be traced back to the texts of Confucius (551-479 B.C.) and earlier, modern columbaria seem to represent a totally new cultural artifact. Furthermore, in few modern cities other than Hong Kong could provisions for cremains be so architecturally striking. Where else could the departed be so closely integrated, so intimately proximate, with the burgeoning residential, commercial, and industrial quarters of the city? And where else could these ancestors be so thoroughly incorporated into the pattern of the year, what with the Gravesweeping Festivals hooked into the public holiday cycle? Hong Kong's society and economy have been transformed since the end of World War II, and the adoption of columbaria as the major means of providing for the dead is part of this transformation. A tiny colony of 1,095 square kilometers that was essentially an entrep[hat{o}]t in 1946, Hong Kong became first a manufacturing center and then, with the removal of most manufacturing to mainland China after Deng Xiaoping's open door policy, an international center of business and finance. Whereas the population in the early postwar decades comprised, in the main, poor and poorly educated refugees from villages and towns -- albeit with a significant number of wealthy city entrepreneurs -- the last two generations of Hong Kong residents have experienced a Western -- style education and a modern, technology-based economy. An annual growth rate in gross domestic product (GDP) of more than 7 percent in the two decades before 1997 has resulted in one of the highest per capita GDPS in the world (Information Services Department 1997, 48). Traditional beliefs that were widespread among the early wave of immigrants from China in the 1950s have thus faced a powerful challenge. These traditional beliefs persist, however, and no more so than where death is concerned. Fengshui -- essentially a pseudoscience that provides a guide for where and how to provide homes for the living and homes for the dead -- remains a powerful construct in Hong Kong, as in other overseas Chinese communities (Needham 1956). It has proved insuppressible in the People's Republic of China itself (Bruun 1996; Teather and Chow 1999). …