Sai Wan War Cemetery

Brief information

Sai Wan was built in 1946 as a military cemetery for soldiers and officers of the Hong Kong garrison who died in the world wars. The main meaning of the place is evident not only in the rows of burials, but also in how the cemetery works with absence: among the 2,072 graves, 444 belong to unidentified individuals, and some names are placed on memorial panels because the graves have not been found or have not survived.

Most of those buried here are connected with the defence of Hong Kong against Japanese forces in December 1941. British, Canadian, Dutch, Indian, and Hong Kong military personnel lie side by side, along with several civilians. Sai Wan should therefore be understood as a place where one military campaign is seen through different forms of remembrance: a grave, a name on a panel, a memorial to the cremated, and the memory of those whose burial place has disappeared.

What to notice first

It is worth comparing the three forms of remembrance that the source text names separately. The first is the burials themselves: they show that the cemetery preserves not an abstract list of losses, but specific graves, including hundreds of unidentified dead. The second is the panels at the entrance to the Memorial Hall with the names of more than 2,000 Commonwealth servicemen who died in the Battle of Hong Kong or in captivity, where their place of burial is unknown. Here, the name replaces the grave.

The third form is the additional panels of the memorial to cremated soldiers of the Indian Army. Their remains were cremated according to religious customs, so memory is fixed in a different way than in an ordinary burial. Added to this is a memorial to 72 victims of the two world wars whose graves in mainland China have not survived. A separate memorial plaque with scenes from the battle helps connect these different elements with the scale of the Hong Kong campaign.