For the first few years of Chinese immigration, there was no fixed system for repatriating the dead. Regional associations or huiguan played a role. So did families and associates, perhaps often fellow members of secret societies. With a decade or two, however, the process had become systematized. Responsibility for exhuming and sending back the dead lay in the hands of the appropriate district association or huiguan,. which may have maintained the necessary records but usually delegated the task of handling the bodies to subordinate charitable organizations or shantang. Teams from the shantang would go out every ten years or so to make the rounds of known cemeteries and other burial places. Experienced individuals on those teams would undertake negotiations with the local white authorities, pay the necessary fees, and proceed to empty the graves of all deceased individuals from the district in question.
Still later, by 1900 if not before, the national and local Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Associations took over from the district huiguan. Most of the exhumation and body shipment records we possess date from the CCBA period. Bodies have not been shipped to China since 1937, when the Japan-China war made such shipments impossible. Yet in some North American cities, the CCBA still plays a related role, purchasing blocks of land at local cemeteries and selling grave plots to Chinese residents.
Death 2 Articles
D. Exhumation and Shipment to China 先友回唐
Until the late 1930s, most Chinese who died and were buried in the Pacific Northwest and West (as well as many of those who died elsewhere in North America) were dug up again after a number of years and sent back to China.
(2) MarkTwain on the return of Chinese bodies to China马克吐温对执运的观察 12/26/2011
(3) Registration for exhumation and body return域多利是加拿大执运先友的总站 12/27/2011
(4) Women in the burial registers女先友的执运纪录 12/27/2011
(5) Digging up the dead: who were the diggers? 01/03/2012
(6) How exhumations were organized before 1900 01/03/2012
(7) How exhumations were organized after 1900 01/03/2012
(8) How shipping the dead to China was organized
(10) Storing the dead before shipment in Victoria; Larry Wong's remarkable photo revised 01/13/2012
E. After the Bodies Reached China 从香港到故里
Virtually all Chinese remains that arrived back in China were processed through the Tung Wah Hospital, Hong Kong's leading charitable institution. Ideally, remains of each individual would then be passed on to family members for placing in suitable containers, usually jars, and interring in family cemeteries where offerings to the dead would be made regularly, expecially on the Qing-Ming Festival in th spring and the Hungry Ghost Festival in the fall. Inevitably, however, some remains would not be claimed. Those would accumulate at the level either of Tung Wah in Hong Kong or of charitable organizarions in the relevant home district. Those organizations would bury such remains in charity cemeteries, sometimes in mass graves with a single monument and sometimes in separate graves with individual grave markers..
(1) The central role of Hong Kong's Tung Wah Hospital 中介站-香港东华医院 12/23/2011
(2) Unclaimed bodies: charity cemeteries in China 义冢安葬 無主孤魂 12/28/2011
(3) Claimed bodies: burial in the family cemetery 01/07/2012
Chinese in Northwest America Research Committee (CINARC)
This page was last updated: January 20, 2012
The Key Role of Hong Kong's Tung Wah Hospital 中介站 - 香港东华医院
Virtually all Chinese remains that were returned to China went through the Tung Wah Hospital 東華醫院, opened in 1872 and Hong Kong's leading charitable institution ever since. Overseas Chinese organizations, often home district associations (huiguan) or their charity arms (shantang 善堂), having paid shipping costs in advance, would notify Tung Wah that a shipment was on its way, with as much information as possible about the names and home villages of the deceased, as well as the name and arrival date of the ship. Tung Wah, in turn, would notify organizations and clans in the relevant places and would also place advertisements in local newspapers . When the ship arrived, Tung Wah would arrange for one of several undertaker firms to bring the remains back to the hospital grounds. After 1899, the remains were stored temporarily in the so-called Coffin Home. District organizations and clans would arrange either to pick the remains up themselves or pay one of the undertaker firms to deliver them in China.
C. Exhumation and Shipment to China 先友回唐
Reburial Customs of the Southern Chinese 华南流行二次葬
Although the custom is dying out, secondary burials are still performed, even in modern Hong Kong and Macao. A shortage of cemetery space is not the explanation: secondary burial traditions in southern China are much too ancient and widespread for that. They may well go back to the days before the northern Chinese conquest in the late first millennium BC, when the ancestors of most Southerners had non-Chinese cultures and spoke non-Sinitic languages
The editors of this website, including Larry Wong, posted some information about Chinese reburial customs on the Ask Larry page of the Chinese Canadian Historical Society of BC website. For most peoples, including the great majority of northern Chinese, the task would have been a horrifying one filled with spiritual danger. Southern Chinese in North America, however, seem to have handled it without problems, quite possibly because some of them while still in China had learned the procedures and rituals involved.
Perhaps because of taboos surrounding the subject, surprisingly little has been written about Chinese secondary burials. Timothy Y. Tsu of the National University of Singapore has published a good article on secondary burial in a Chinese village in southern Taiwan. A now-classic general source is James L. Watson and Evelyn Rawski, Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, 1988, especially the chapter by Rubie Watson. More data, mostly in the form of brief comments, can be found by.searching for "secondary burials Chinese" in Google Books.
The Cantonese custom of secondary burial, the idea of exhuming the dead, cleaning the bones, and then burying them again, helps to explain why so many Chinese in North America were not only willing to exhume their dead but also to clean the bones and put them in containers for shipment back to China.
The custom is ancient. It is shared by certain Malayo-Polynesian peoples (for instance, by the Toraja of Sulawesi, most Dayaks of Borneo, and most ethnic groups on Madagascar) and by other southern Chinese (in southern Fujian, and Taiwan as well as Guangdong).
Former headquarters, now the museum and archives, of the Tung Wah Hospital in Hong Kong
Volunteers scanning documents in the Tung Wah Hospital archives. Many such documents relate to the reception and onward shipment of Chinese remains from foreign countries 东华三院档案馆
The hospital still stores many sets of human remains that were returned from overseas in earlier times. In 1960 its Coffin Home housed no fewer than 670 coffins, 8060 exhumed bodies, and ashes from116 cremations. Most of the exhumed bodies came from Southeast Asia and North America. For political reasons they were stuck in Hong Kong; it was not possible at that time to send them across the border to China.
Tung Wah Coffin Home entrance, from Wikipedia
东华义庄
Death 2: Exhuming the Dead and Returning Them to China 塵土歸路: 先友回唐 - 墓地 葬仪 过程
版权 Copyright is free for non-profit use: : click here for more information
金山西北角 - 华裔研究中心
Note: an excellent article on the Tung Wah Coffin Home appears under that heading in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tung_Wah_Coffin_Home#Ossarium. A major recent book on the history of Tung Wah is that of Elizabeth Sinn, Power and Charity: A Chinese Merchant Elite in Colonial Hong Kong (Hong Kong University Press, 2003)
Unclaimed Bodies: Charity Cemeteries in Guangdong Province 义冢安葬無主孤魂
Not every set of remains was received by the family of the deceased. Some bodies that arrived in China via Hong Kong might have had so little information that it wasn't possible to connect with their relatives. Others belonged to families that for personal or economic reasons declined to bury them. Hence, a number of charitable organizations in Guangdong took it upon themselves to acquire land to bury those unclaimed bodies.
In 1887 the Guangzhou-based charity, Ai-yu Tang 爱育堂, which was an active partner of Tung Wah Hospital in Hong Kong in returning bodies to their hometowns, buried 924 set of bones that included 467 women in 1887. This burial site is still intact but is part of the yard of the Guangzhou Chest Clinic 广州胸科医院. Although the communal tomb tablet indicates the bodies were shipped from San Francisco, it is likely that San Francisco was just a collecting point for bodies dug up in many parts of America.
In 1893 the Xinhui-based charity, Renyu Tang 仁育堂, buried 387 bodies in individual graves at the Huangkang Cemetery, each furnished with an epitaph. It took the Renyu Tang five years to complete the project. These unclaimed bodies were part of a larger shipment of "Gold Mountain" bodies that reached Xinhui 新会 in 1888. Interestingly, the unclaimed deceased were not exclusively Xinhui natives. Some were neighboring county residents and some from more distant areas.
One of the markers set up by the Renyu Tang in Xinhui's Huangkang Cemetery reads:
"金山各阜先友骸骨运回本邑自光绪十
四年至十八年二月除领回安葬外尚存
三百八十七具于本年二月二十三日安葬与
此地
光绪十九年岁次癸巳仲春仁育堂谨志"
The Huangkang 黄坑Cemetery, Xinhui. A marker at the back reads, "Charity Cemetery". Only two front rows of individual burials are showing; the rest are covered by weeds.
The Ai-yu Tang's communal tomb for unclaimed bodies at the Guangzhou Chest Clinic
Registration for Body Return: B.C.'s Victoria as a Collection Station
域多利是加拿大执运先友的总站
The bones of Canada's deceased Chinese in various cemeteries were retrieved, washed, labeled, and packed in tin boxes. These were handled by the Canada Oversea Chinese Amalgamated Exhumation Board 加拿大华侨联邑执运先友 委员会, which was probably administered by the Victoria's Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA) in Victoria for delivery to Tung Wah Hospital in Hong Kong. It is worth noting that the Committee, however, did not include any Sam-yup (San yi, "three county" natives. The list below shows that not a single soul from any of the three counties, Nanhai 南海, Panyu 番禺, or Shunde 顺德, was included. Yet we know from the burial ground at Harling Point in Victoria that a fair number of Sam-yup burials had been and are still there.
Only 13 women were among the 661 sets of recorded individuals in the Victoria's CCBA list. Twelve of them were married women, almost nameless; they bore their husband's, father's, or son's names. Only one was listed with her full name: she was a mature single lady who was a native of Zengcheng.
Were the bones of the married ladies sent to the hometown of their husband's family? Very likely. One lady, Mrs. Rong, was the mother of another deceased. Both sets were slated to return to the son's hometown, Mazhou village in Xinhui county (Fig.1)
Victoria's CCBA organized such shipments perhaps once a decade from the 1880s onward The consignment prepared in 1937 was the last and least successful one. Because of the Sino-Japanese war broke out in China that interrupted many facets of routine, CCBA had kept the bone boxes in Victoria. The documents of the deceased list survives in the Special Collections of the University of Victoria Library, thanks to David T.H. Lee 李东海 who assembled the documents when he was on the staff of the CCBA in the 50s and 60s, and to David Chuenyan Lai 黎全恩 who facilitated the donation to the library archive.
The surviving documents show that each deceased individual was registered twice, first by the location where the bones were dug up, and then by the Chinese county where the deceased came from. Hence the deceased's name(s), hometown, death date, and burial place, and even the burial reporting agency were included. Most deceased had passed away a number of years previously and came from all over Canada. Apparently 728 sets of bones were dug up for shipment, but 67 sets were reburied on the spot, perhaps because they were not suffiently decomposed for the bones to be cleaned and packed for the journey.
As the bones had to be claimed by their hometown organizations, they were grouped by the Committee as natives from:
Taishan 台山 - 324 sets (6 women)
Kaiping 开平 - 124 sets (1 woman)
Xinhui 新会 - 118 sets (3 women)
Enping 恩平 - 26 sets
Heshan 鹤山 - 2 sets
Zengcheng 增城 - 21 sets (3 women)
Dongguan 东莞 - 2 sets
Yangjiang 阳江 - 3 sets
Registration for Body Return: Women in the Burial Records 女先友的执运纪录
Fig. 1. Reading vertically from R to L, Mrs. Rong was listed as "Mother of Rong Delie, at Mazhou". The six vertical line lists her son, "Rong Delie, Mazhou".
Fig. 2. Three individuals listed vertically from R to L. Mrs. Huang of the Wu family is in the middle. She was listed as 224 in the Taishan shipment, but her child, who was entered under her name, was not given a number.
Fig 4. The vertical line on the right reads "Ms. Huang married to the Chen family, Hengjiang, Xiao O Village, Ningyi [tang]."
Two of the women probably died in childbirth. They were buried together with their babies, who were nameless according to Chinese custom, and thus not counted in the burial list. One lady, Mrs. Huang from the Wu family was to be sent back to Dongkou Village in Taishan county, with her child (Fig. 2). Another deceased mother was Mrs. Huang from the Chen family who too was married to a native of Taishan county; he was from Hengjiang Village 横江 and a member of the Ningshan Tang 宁善堂 (Fig. 3). This particular record may have become confused, however. Mrs. Huang of the Chen family appeared again in the Taishan county list, but this time with her married and maiden last name switched, thus becoming a Mrs. Chen from the family of Huang (Fig. 4) -- from a traditional Chinese point of view, a very serious error,
Fig. 3. The writing indicates that Mrs. Huang of the Chen family was buried in Victoria with her child. The red ink was added to the list to show that the bones were dug up, and that she was affiliated with the Ningyi Tang.
After a suitable time had passed--at least five yearsand often more than ten, it was customary for most or all bodies in a given cemetery to be dug up, the bones cleaned and placed in boxes, and then sent to either San Francisco or Victoria for onward shipment to China. This sequence of events was of major concern to most Chinese North Americans. From the beginning of immigration in the early 1850s, Chinese sojourners made arrangementa for their bodies to be repatriated to China in case they died. The main reason was the imperative need to ensure that one's family--ideally one's sons and grandsons--would be able to make sacrifices at one's family altar and to maintain one's grave in the family cemetery.
(Death 1 Articles)
A. Causes of Chinese Deaths 早期華裔死因
(1) Violent Deaths in British Columbia, [Updated 01/04/2010]
(2) Chinese Suicide in Washington State, 01/04/2010
B. Chinese Funerals in North America
(1) Funerals in San Francisco and Portland, ca. 1900 12/29/2011
C. North American Chinese Cemeteries 北美洲華人坟场
(1) Lone Mountain in San Francisco 12/29/2011
(2) an unidentified early cemetery in Portland. 俄勒岗州钵仑华人墓地 10/13/2009
(3) Spokane's Fairmount. 華州士卜顷坟场纪录 12/13/2010
(5) Mountain View in Walla Walla. 落叶不归根 : 華州抓李抓嚹早期华人墓地
(6) Seattle's Goon Dip decides that his body will not be returned to China 12/27/2011
(7) Ethnic subdivisions at Harling Point: birthplace determined burial place 05/14/2010
This is one of two pages focusing on how and why early North American Chinese died, the ways in which their countrymen handled those deaths, the rituals they followed, how the dead were buried, and why and whether they were dug up again and sent back to China.
The Death 1 page treats the earlier stages of dealing with the dead. This page, Death 2, discusses what happened after the funeral and initial burial took place.
D. After the Bodies Reached China 先友回唐
Photo: secondary burial jars from a cemetery at Yangjiangyi, Xinhui, Guangdong province, 2011. These particular jars were used for burials of local residents, not bodies returned from overseas.
The Jinniushan 金牛山 Cemetery, Xinhui. Like the Huangkang Cemetery, a burial ground for unclaimed bodies returned from overseas. The image on the right shows how inscribed tile markers for each burial were set in concrete. The image on the left shows burial jars that have been uncovered by farm workers digging at the edge of the cemetery.
The Huangkang and Jinniushan cemeteries were kindly shown to the editors by Lin Wenbin 林文斌, a deputy director at the Xinhui Museum 新会博物馆. The communal tomb at the Guangzhou City Chest Hospital is publicly accessible; the hospital is a well known institution in Guangzhou.
Interested readers should consult Marlon K. Hom's touching and well-informed study of the Huangkang cemetery "Fallen Leaves' Homecoming: Notes on the 1893 Gold Mountain Charity Cemetery in Xinhui" (San Francisco, Chinese Historical Society of America, 2002). The cemetery has been moved to a new location further uphill since Hom's visit.
MarkTwain on the Return of Chinese Bodies to China
美国文坛巨子马克吐温对执运的观察
In 1864, while he was working as a reporter for a San Francisco newspaper, the Daily Morning Call, Twain took an interest in the city's Chinese community. He wrote at least one article on the Ning Yung Association's 宁阳会馆 temple and made the following observations, which he later incorporated in his autobiographical Roughing It (1880):
"On the Pacific coast the Chinamen all belong to one or another of several great companies or organizations, and these companies keep track of their members, register their names, and ship their bodies home when they die. The See Yup Company is held to be the largest of these. The Ning Yeong Company is next, and numbers eighteen thousand members on the coast. Its headquarters are at San Francisco, where it has a costly temple, several great officers . . ., and a numerous priesthood. In it I was shown a register of its members, with the dead and the date of their shipment to China duly marked. Every ship that sails from San Francisco carries away a heavy freight of Chinese corpses--or did, at least, until the [California State] legislature, with an ingenious refinement of Christian cruelty, forbade the shipments, as a neat underhanded way of deterring Chinese immigration. The bill was offered, whether it passed or not. It is my impression that it passed."
Twain confirms that in the 1860s the repatriation of bodies was in the hands of the regional associations or huiguan, of which the Ning Yung Association was one. The bill forbidding the shipment of Chinese bodies, which he sarcastically but perhaps justifiably calls "an ingenious refinement of Christian cruelty," seems never to have passed and become law.
Reference: University of Victoria Library, Special Collections. Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association AR030.1.9 - 1.11.
Digging up the Dead: Who Did It? 執骨工人是誰?
Chinese cemetery during exhumation. Chico, California (S. F. Call 1893-11-14)
Xinhui, China
Guangzhou, China
Hong Kong
Him Mark Lai 麦礼谦 (Becoming Chinese American 2004: pp 99, 114) stated that the three Sam Yup shantang in San Francisco, the Chong How Tong for Panyu county, fand the Hung On Tong for Shunde county, each owned its own charity cemetery in China, meant to provide burial places for individuals without relatives.:
(1) the Fook Yun Tong's cemetery at Huangzhi Gang outside the north city gate of Guangzhou, (2) the Chong How Tong's Meihua Zhuang cemetery at Xinzao, and (3) the Hung On Tong's Hou Gang cemetery at Lanshi. Lai does not cite a source for this statement, which probably means that his information came from the records of the Sam Yup Association, to which he had access while co-authoring the official history of the Association in the 1970s.
Involvement with the digging up of cemeteries was not a monopoly of an organization in a single big city in each country. In Seattle, for instance, the Chong Wa Benevolent Association 西雅图中华会馆 (CWBA) gave money to exhumation specialists. With other seaports like Portland, it could also have handled shipments of bones back to China. The two documents shown here, from unpublished records of the CWBA. show that the Association paid lai-shee, or lucky money, to a person who brought the bodies or bones back to Seattle. In the middle of the 10th month, 1982 Huang Long 黄龙 did that task and received $3 in compensation. This seems like a very small amount. Perhaps most of Huang Long's pay came from another organization, possibly in San Francisco.
The Association received substantial money from this business. In 1905 a sum of $102.50 was deposited with the Association by an office that handled digging and transporting the deceased. Assuming that this was real income and not a deposit of some kind, it represented Chong Wa's largest item of income for the entire year.
The lower half of the left most vertical line reads: "Also paid lai-she to Huang Long for guiding the deceased, $3.
CWBA record, 1892.
The second vertical line from left reads, " 31st year (1892) Gee Hee brought and deposited $102.50 from the Digging Deceased office." This Gee Hee is likely to be the civic leader Chin Gee Hee. The account was managed and reported by the Wa Chong Company, which was controlled and largely owned by Chin Gee Hee.
CWBA record, 1905
Seattle: Other Chinatowns Played a Role in Repatriating the Dead
西雅图也参与执运工程
One of the few descriptions we have of such an exhumation specialist appeared in the Spokane (WA) Spokesman-Review (1896-08-15), which noted a visit by “Fang Chung, chief scraper and gatherer of the bones of dead Chinamen for the Six Companies.” He had been hired by the Six Companies (San Francisco’s CCBA) to collect a total of 500 bodies on his tour from San Francisco north to Washington State, including Spokane, then onward to Idaho, and finally back to California. According to the Spokesman-Review, Fang Chung would go on to accompany the consignment of bones to China, “where the relatives of the deceased awaited their arrival.” [quoted and paraphrased from the Spokesman-Review by Judy Nelson, “The Final Journey Home: Chinese Burial Practices in Spokane.” Pacific Northwest Forum, Vol 6, No. 1:70-76. 1993]
Whether exhumation involved special rituals, perhaps performed by a member of the exhumation team, is unclear. Rituals of some sort would seem to have been necessary when engaged in actions as fraught with supernatural danger. On the other hand, the process of preparing their bodies to be sent back home must have been seen as very welcome by the spirits of the deceased. It is possible that the danger did not seem too serious.
The excavated bodies were usually placed in individual metal boxes (in the United States) or wooden boxes (in Canada) and taken to a temporary storehouse designated by the organizing association. Usually the storehouses were in the same city as the organizers’ headquarters. That city was also the port from which the bones would be subsequently shipped. At least three such ports are recorded as having been used for that purpose: San Francisco, Victoria, and – interestingly—New York. There must have been more. As a subsequent article on Seattle shows, Chinese organizations in smaller cities also were able to handle at least part of the job of repatriating the dead.
"The Chinese population of the town of Chico, Cal., has for the past two weeks been under a strain of excitement concerning the exhumation and removal of all the bodies buried in the Chinese cemetery of that place. This has been a gruesome spectacle. A company of native resurrectionists dug Into the graves, took up the coffins, removed their contents and deliberately set to work getting rid of the more or less decomposed flesh, scraping the bones, drying them, then gathering them in bunches, carefully tied, wrapped, then labeled with the respective cognomens of the several deceased and the residence of the particular families in China ... (San Francisco Call 1893-11-14, p 19)
The decision-makers in such exhumation projects were usually Chinese organizations in large coastal cities--shantang (for individual districts), the huiguan (for groups of districts), and,after about 1900, the CCBAs (representing all huiguan). On the other hand, responsibility for excavating the bodies was less clear-cut. The Chinese sections of many and perhaps most cemeteries were controlled by the secret societies. They may have played a major direct or indirect role in handling one of chief difficulties that excavating the bodies involved, getting the necessary permits. Legal requirements and fees for exhumation varied widely from place to place, and it would have been almost impossible for either the big-city organizations or the traveling exhumation teams to have dealt with the necessary paperwork. For that, they needed help of the Chinese communities in or near the cemetery locations. In smaller inland places, this help would have had to be coordinated by the secret societies .
Yet the secret societies and others in the local communities seem not to have had more than an advisory role when it came time to open the graves and dig the bodies up. The shantang, huiguan, and CCBAs hired the specialists who would perform the exhumations and bring the bones back.
Wooden boxes of remains ready for shipment in the former bone vault at Harling Point in Victoria, deposited in the late 1930s. Photo by Larry Wong in1959
How Digging up the Dead Was Organized 怎样管理执骨, 洗骨, 运骨,?
The Rev. A. W. Loomis, writing in1868 but already familiar with San Francisco's Chinatown in the 1850s observed that the repatriation of remains was not always so well organized: “The gathering of the bones of the dead and sending them back to China is not part of the work undertaken by these companies [huiguan]; but the people of different districts have in some instances undertaken separately the performance of this office [i.e., as shantang]; they have, however, selected the president of the company to which they belong to be their agent in the transaction of the necessary business and to receive and disburse the funds subscribed for the purpose. Only about half of the districts represented in California have sent home the bodies of their dead; but very many bodies are sent by personal friends here, or at the expense of relatives in China, independently of the aid of the organizations in this country for the removal of the dead.” Rev. Augustus Ward Loomis “The Six Chinese Companies.” Overland Monthly and Out West Magazine, vol 1, 221-227. 1868
Already in the 1850s organizations were being set up in San Francisco to oversee the return of the Chinese dead to China. The historian Him Mark Lai (2004: 72, 99, 114) observed that the Yeong Wo 阳和 and Sam Yup 三邑 associations were quick to settle on a system for repatriating bodies. Within a few years of arriving in California, migrants from each of the three Sam Yup counties had established shantang 善堂, with functions partly to exhume "the bodies of the dead and shipped them to China at regular intervals.”
County/Shantang Date founded Nanhai: Fok Yun Tong 南海福荫堂 1855 Panyu; Chong How Tong 番禺昌后 堂 1858 Shunde; Hung On Tong 顺德行安堂 1858 Lai (ibid.) states that several shantang charities under the Yeong Wo huiguan had come into existence and begun shipping bodies to China at about the same time. These may have included:
Xiangshan; Ji Shan Tang 中山集善堂 1880 Dongguan; Bao On Tong 东莞宝安堂 1868
Xiangshan; Hook Sin Tong 香山福善堂
Several other shantang charities, each representing one or more counties, began functioning somewhat later:
Zhaoqing-Hehe/ Quong Fook Tong 肇庆-合和广福堂 1896?Xinhui/ Tong Tuck Tong 新会同德堂Xinning/ Yee Hing Tong 新宁余庆堂Enping-Kaiping/ Tong Fook Tong 恩开同福堂As time went on, the process became more centralized. While there must always have been rich families who could handle it themselves, in most cases, larger organizations were taking over. By the 1890s, English-language newspapers wrote as if that the huiguan, not the subordinate shantang, were playing a central role. In 1890, The Yan Wo 人和会馆 association [paid $500 for 59 disinterment certificates for bodies in the City Cemetery (San Francisco Call 1890-09-14). In 1888 the "Kong Chu" Company "sent its agent on a tour of the entire country to gather up the bones of defunct Chinamen;" the agent got as far as Brooklyn (New York Times 1888-07-10). In 1893, the Kong Chow 岡州 and Hop Wo 合和 associations not only paid for disinterment certificates but planned to ship 700 sets of bones back to China (San Francisco Call 1893-07-25; see also the New York Times 1893-05-18).
Some of the huiguan continued to handle the exhumation and collection of bones down through the 1930s. A fascinating series of previously unpublished records from the Kong (Kwong) Chow Association 岡州会馆 survives in the private collection of Philip Choy in San Francisco. Three are reproduced here. They represent bills to the Association from one Lin Geng 林庚 for bone collection and transportation services. Lin, one assumes, was a contractor rather than an actual exhumation specialist. He seems to have made a lot of money from his activities in spite of the fact that he had been associated with Kong Chow since at least 1918, used Kong Chow letterhead, and was living in a Kong Chow building.
San Francisco City Cemetery, 1898. Now the park at the Palace of the Legion of Honor art museum. All burials were removed long ago. The Chinese burials were at Numbers 7, 8, and 9 (click to enlarge).
Statement prepared by the Association
Bill for bringing 60 sets of bones to Stockton, CA. $780 Itemized as
-Western [White] diggers,
$5 x 60 = $300
-License, $0.50 x 60 = $30
-Packing?$7.50 x 60 = $450
Statement prepared by the Association, 7/18/1932.
to pay Lin Geng for having exhumed and brought 17 sets of bones from Sacramento to San Francisco, at $24/set = $408
Received and signed by Lin Geng
Statement prepared by the Association 8/31/1932
To pay Lin Geng for having brought 39 sets of bones to Stockton, at $13/set - $507
Received and signed by Lin Geng
Some of the more wealthy regional organizations and even clans continued to handle their own exhumations down through the late 1930s, when all shipments of bodies to China came to an end. Other huiguan and clans, however, seem to have gradually passed responsibility for exhuming and collecting to the increasingly powerful Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), a.k.a. the Six Companies or Chong Wa.
On 11/1/1913, the Call reported that "The bodies of thousands of Chinese will be disinterred throughout the state for shipment to China within a few days under the direction of the Chinese Six Companies." On 6/20/1911, the same newspaper noted that the Six Companies had hired a lawyer to dispute San Mateo county's attempt to charge the Chinese community a $10 exhumation fee for each of 1700 Chinese bodies in a local cemetery, when the State Board of Health was already charging a similar $10 fee.
It made sense for a single, neutral organization to take over the collecting and onward shipment of Chinese remains. Back in the 19th century, although exhumation specialists and their employers undoubtedly found it profitable to bring back as many sets of bones as possible, regardless of regional affiliation, members of the Chinese public must have found this problematical. How could the Sam Yup huiguan be certain that a Si Yup organization, like the above-mentioned Kong Chow huiguan, would take proper care in exhuming Sam Yup bodies?
In Canada, exhumations were organized somewhat differently. From its founding in 1884 onward, the CCBA in Victoria not only owned and managed cemetery space but played a central role in digging the dead up and shipping them to China. In 1891 it not only persuaded the county associations (the equivalent of San Francisco's shantang) to set up a Committee of Bones Collection and Shipment, presumably the predecessor of the above-mentioned Oversea Chinese Amalgamated Exhumation Board 加拿大华侨联邑执运先友 委员会, but became directly involved in the collection of Chinese bodies. In 1891 it hired men to dig up graves and retrieve bones from them along the Canadian Pacific Railroad tracks and in the gold mining centers of the Cariboo and Thompson River areas. According to David Lai(Chinese Community Leadership, 2010: pp 83-4) the CCBA paid "$4 for digging up a grave, cleaning the bones, the then packing them properly in a box. If the body had not completely decomposed, the retrieved covered up the grave again and was paid $2." This was cheap by Californian standards.
In later years, more operational responsibility may have been delegated to the Amalgamated Exhumation Board. The document illustrated above shows that the Board was well-versed in Canadian law and customs, which must have made exhumations easier to arrange.
1938 application written by the Canada Oversea Chinese Amalgamated Exhumation Board, Victoria, BC . University of British Columbia Library Archives.
Before 1900 之前
After 1900 之后
Reference: CWBA records reproduced here with the permission of Dick Kay.
Registration by County, 1937.
Registration by Location: Montreal - No. 181. Li Jian-yong. Xinhui. Sponsored by Kong Chow Association ... .
[Note: The above county names represent modern Pinyin spellings. In the 19th and 20th centuries they were usually spelled by North American Chinese according to their Cantonese or Taishanese pronunciation: Nanhai = "Namhoi", Panyu = "Punyu", Shunde = "Shuntak", Xiangshan = "Heungshan" (now Zhongshan = "Chungshan"), Dongguan = "Tungkun", Xinhui = "Sunwui", Xinning = "Sunning" (now Taishan = "Toisan", Enping = "Yanping", and Kaiping = "Hoiping".
The huiguan names are given here in their Cantonese or Taishanese forms. The Pinyin equivalents are Hop Wo = "Hehe", Kong Chow = "Gangzhou", Ning Yung = "Ningyang", Sam Yup = "Sanyi", Si/Sze Yup = "Siyi", Yan Wo = "Renhe", Yeong Wo = "Yanghe"]
Storing the Dead Before Shipment: Larry Wong's Remarkable Photograph
绝无仅有的照片 - 王容伦拍的域多利贮骨所
San Francisco and Victoria both formerly had "bone houses" in local cemeteries where exhumed remains, packed ready for onward shipment, were stored or a few months until arrangements for sending the remains to China were finalized. Such temporary storage places rapidly filled up after 1937, when first the Japanese seizure of Guangdong province and then unwillingness by the new Communist government to cooperate made it impossible to "repatriate" the exhumed remains to China. Not much is known about the bone house or houses in San Francisco. In Victoria, however, thanks to the strong interest of the local Chinese Benevolent Association (CBA) and the activist approach of Professor David Lai, the local civic authorities treated the problem of unrepatriated bones with real seriousness. The bones were given final burial in made graves within the cemetery. and the former bone house destroyed.
Until several months ago, the editors believed that no picture of any bone house was still in existence. So we were surprised when one of CINARC's corresponding editors, Larry Wong of Vancouver, showed us one. Sure enough: the bone house at Harling Point Cemetery. What's more, the photo was of the inside, not the outside, The following story is Larry's, reproduced with his permission
I was with a group of friends in my university year of 1959 and we visited friends in Victoria. Some of us thought it'd be cool to visit the cemetery in the (if you pardon the expression) dead of night. The window of the warehouse was high up and open, that is, it was a square opening, probably for ventilation. I had my camera with me and I was told there were boxes of bones ready to be shipped to China. The window was high up so I had to climb on someone's shoulder to peer through the dark opening. I managed to rest my elbows on the ledge and pointed the camera into the darkness. Only when the flash went off, did I glimpsed the wooden boxes. Not until days later when I had the film developed that I realized what I actually saw.
Harling Point., Victoria. The former bone house may have been in this part of the cemetery
Sign at Harling Point stating that in 1960 the contents of the bone house were moved into 13 mass graves
Interior of Victoria's Bone House in 1959. This is the only extant photograph, taken at night by Larry Wong, as described here. Boxes ready for shipping are in the lower right corner.
Years later, when Wayson and I visited Dr. Lai I casually mentioned how I took a photograph of the boxes. He was astonished as no one had taken a picture of the interior. When I returned home, I sent him a copy.
Still later, a film maker visited him and he mentioned the photo to her. She emailed me and said she'd be interested in the image. I did and it showed up in her documentary, From Harling Point.
So the photo has a bit of a history, thanks to a middle of the night foray of the cemetery. And if I recall, I think it was on a dare!
A closup of the bone shipping boxes appears above -- to see it, click here. In California, such boxes had to be made of metal. In British Columbia, they were made of wood.
Claimed Bodies: The Normal System for Reburying Bodies and Bones from North America in the Family Cemetery
入土为安 – 故乡是先友的终点站
When everything went as planned, the sets of bones and sometimes whole bodies in coffins) shipped from America would be sent onward by the Tung Wah Hospital to district organizations or clans in China which in turn would hand the remains over to the relevant family for burial.
A successful merchant and first president of Victoria's Chinese Benevolent Association, the first in Canada, Lee Yau Kan [Li Youqin], a.k.a., Lee Poon Yew and, in English-language newspapers, Lee Tow King and Lee Hon Kim, is a perfect example of the kind of person for whom the repatriation and reburial system existed. He had done well in his overseas career. Beginning his career as a merchant first in Hong Kong and then in Portland, he came to Victoria in the 1860s. His Kwong On Lung Co. on Comorant Street sold goods wholesale and was a major opium refiner (perfectly legal in those days). Lee gave generously to local charities in the 1860s through 1880s, and initiated the long, unsucessful fight against the notorious Head Tax imposed only on Chinese Canadians. He was a founder and the first president of the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association in Victoria 域多利埠中华会馆. He must have supported charities back in China as well, for the Qing dynasty government awarded him the honorary title of Imperial-Conferred First Class Sub-Prefect.
He had come from a small village in the Siyup area, Xiangbei hamlet, Shuilou village 水楼乡, Dajiang district 大江镇, Taishan county台山. At least one of his three wives and perhaps a son or daughter, may still have been living in Xuangbei at the time of his death. They and more distant relatives would have kept track of his achievements in the U.S. and Canada, and his financial success as well as the title given him by the Imperial government would have been a source of pride there in the home village. They naturally were more than willing to make room for him in the family cemetery, located only a few hundred meters away.
The editors do not know whether he was buried while still in the fancy Western-style coffin in which his body seems to have been shipped from Victoria (see below). But the modern residents of Xiangbei still know where his grave is, and continue to clear the area around it during the Qing-Ming Festival every spring.
Lee Yau Kan's Grave in Taishan 台山李祐芹墓
So his body was brought home to Taishan from Canada, in a full-sized coffin rather than a small box, and soon after his death without having been buried and dug up again. The English-language news sources do not indicate whether the CCBA, which he had helped to found only four years previously, was involved in arrangements for sending him back. The CCBA's assistance may not have been needed. Lee's firm had close connections in Hong Kong and Guangzhou, and would have been accustomed to handling shipments to and from those places.
He died on August 24, 1888. His funeral, a splendid one "owing to the rank of the deceased and the esteem in which he was held by his countrymen," was held on August 27. "The body was enclosed in a lead casing, the outer casket being of ebony, handsomely finished and mounted with silver. The plate bore the name, age, and date of death in Chinese characters." After ceremonies at Vicoria's Ross Bay cemetery were completed, the casket with the body inside was "brought back to the city and stored away to await shipment to China."
Note: sources for Lee Yau Kan's life include issues of the British Colonist newspaper (see especially 1888-08-24, 1888-27, and 1888-08-31), and David Chuenyan Lai, Chinese Community Leadership 2010: p 52. Lai's information comes partly from his work with unpublished CCBA archival material now at the University of Victoria.
The editors located Lee Yau Kan's grave thanks to the directions given us by Myron Lee of Portland. He and his brothers, great-grandsons of Yau Kan, have okayed the publication by CINARC of images of Yau Kan's grave.
Xiangbei hamlet in 2011. Newer houses are on the right, older ones are straight ahead, and the village pond, a standard feature of communities in this part of Taishan, is on the left.
Lee Yau Kan's gravestone
Lee family cemetery at Xiangbei, Taishan
Reburying the dead from Harling Point's bone house in 1960. Some of the same wooden boxes, one for each deceased person, are shown in the image below. Photo from Bon Lee; original now donated by him to the University of Victoria.
