Focus

Final resting place of the unknown

By Ming Yeung (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-10-15 08:11

HONG KONG - Nothing is certain in life except death and taxes, as Benjamin Franklin once famously wrote. Yet, for those people without families, preparing for the inevitable and ensuring they get a proper funeral can be difficult.

In Hong Kong, the Special Administrative Region's food and environmental hygiene department handle all unidentified or unclaimed bodies. Officials collect them from mortuaries and hospitals and arrange for their burial or cremation.

People who die in the New Territories and Kowloon are taken to Kwai Chung Crematorium, while those on Hong Kong island go to Cape Collinson Crematorium. Alternatively, bodies are also interred at Sandy Ridge Cemetery.

Sandy Ridge is famous for housing the city's poorest citizens. Many homeless and single elderly have their graves there, although their tombstones carry no names. The deceased who were buried in the cemetery were only assigned a number for identification purpose, rather than have their names inscribed onto the plaques.

As many unclaimed bodies are usually unidentified, officials explained that all bodies are logged as numbers, with any names kept on record. Sandy Ridge Cemetery is a communal grave, so the plaques only record the number of deceased people in a given year rather than the name of each person buried there.

Like other public cemeteries, bodies can be exhumed after six years.

The food and environmental hygiene department has handled about 8,200 unclaimed dead bodies in the past 10 years, according to official statistics.

China Daily