About Manila Chinese Cemetery

Walk the lanes of the Manila Chinese Cemetery and the family tombs read like a survey of architecture: Neo-Classical and Neo-Gothic mausoleums, Art Deco from the 1930s and 1940s, post-war Modernism, and buildings that set Gothic lancet arches beside Chinese guardian lions. It covers about 54 hectares in Santa Cruz, in the north of the city, and is run by the Philippine Chinese Charitable Association as a working cemetery for the Chinese-Filipino community. It grew out of an exclusion. Under Spanish rule only Catholics could be buried in the city's cemeteries, and non-Catholic Chinese either sent their dead back to China or buried them outside the La Loma Catholic Cemetery. Accounts of the founding differ, with dates from 1843 to about 1870, and credit the community leader Lim Ong. The sources agree that it was enlarged in 1878, when Mariano Fernando Yu Chingco bought further land from the Dominicans. The Chong Hock Tong temple, built in 1878, was a blend of Chinese temple and Catholic chapel where Christian, Buddhist and Taoist images were venerated side by side. The old structure, in poor condition, was taken down in 2015 and replaced by a new temple that keeps the mixed altar. The cemetery also remembers the Japanese occupation. A memorial built by the community in 1948 honours Clarence Kuangson Young, the Chinese consul general, and seven of his staff, who refused to leave Manila, were imprisoned by Japanese forces and killed in 1942, and are buried here. Liat See Tong, a hall from the early 1950s, honours ten Chinese community leaders executed during the war. Families still come here to tend graves and to mourn.