Inventing sacredness in a colonial city: a British garden cemetery in nineteenth-century Hong Kong

Abstract The Hong Kong Colonial Cemetery, established in 1845, served as both an exemplary burial space and a refuge from the ‘degenerative’ tropical urban environment for the British during the second half of the nineteenth century. This article argues that what constitutes the sacredness of the cemetery was not merely Christian values, but a mixture of personal emotional meanings and imperialist sentiments. The sacredness of the site during the nineteenth century also rested upon the exclusion of the Chinese ‘other’, even though such boundaries were often volatile due to the diverse and unfixed nature of the colonial community, and the rising influences of the Chinese elites.