Hong Kong Cemetery
St. Michael's, next door to Hong Kong Cemetery in Happy Valley
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| Details | |
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| Established | 1845 |
| Location | 1J Wong Nai Chung Road, Happy Valley |
| Country |
 Hong Kong
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| Hong Kong Cemetery | |||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 香港墳場 | ||||||||
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| Transcriptions | |
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| Yue: Cantonese | |
| Yale Romanization | Hēung góng fàhn chèuhng |
| Jyutping | Hoeng1 gong2 fan4 coeng4 |
Hong Kong Cemetery (Chinese: 香港墳場), formerly Hong Kong (Happy Valley) Cemetery and before that Hong Kong Colonial Cemetery, is one of the early Christian cemeteries in Hong Kong dating to its colonial era beginning in 1845. It is located beside the racecourse at Happy Valley, along with the Jewish Cemetery, Hindu Cemetery, Parsee Cemetery, St. Michael's Catholic Cemetery and the Muslim Cemetery. Hong Kong Cemetery contains 79 scattered Commonwealth burials of the First World War and 62 from the Second World War, which are maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.
The Protestant Cemetery is built as a series of terraces ascending a hillside. The older graves tend to be at the bottom of the hill; those from the 1930s and 1940s are generally at the top.
On a number of occasions, remains in the Protestant Cemetery have been disinterred to make way for road developments, and have been placed in niches in an ossuary, which continues to be used for contemporary cremations. The niches provide basic information on each individual.
The cemetery is a popular place for filming movies and TV shows. The UK folk artist Johnny Flynn released a song in 2008 about the cemetery, found on the album A Larum.
Some sections of the Protestant Cemetery tended to be reserved for particular groups of deceased, e.g., army, navy, Hong Kong Police. There are two main categories of graves that can be found in Hong Kong Cemetery:
As the name states, this category of graves for British military dead, spanned from the late 19th century until the early 1960s (when the Government of Hong Kong established another cemetery near Sai Wan for military dead in 1965). At the beginning of the colonial era, the British garrison force had the same problem as those in India: weather. Some of the members of the force could not adapt to the tropical weather of Hong Kong and died owing to tropical disease, while others fell during the Boxer Rebellion – mainly in 1900. At the time being, it is the major cemetery for military dead along with Stanley Military Cemetery
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