Families visiting their ancestors’ graves at Yuen Chau Tsai in Tai Po were in for a nasty shock yesterday morning. A visitor, who declined to be named, went to sweep his grandmother’s grave for Chung Yeung festival when he discovered that it had been dug up and robbed of some valuable personal effects. After looking around, he saw that many of the other tombs nearby had been similarly disturbed, and alerted the police.
Police report that at least nineteen tombs had been tampered with, and classified the cases as criminal damage. So far, no arrests have been made.
The hillside has been a popular burial site for the Yuen Chau Tsai fishing community for over a century. It contains more than a thousand tombs, most commonly for families named So, Lee, Choi, Chung and Shek.
Local resident Lee Kwok-wing told Apple Daily, “It is a custom of the fishing families in Tai Po to bury their loved ones with personal effects, like gold or jade”, and valued the items at less than ten thousand dollars. Mr Lee also noted that the burial ground was not managed or maintained by anyone other than the relatives of the deceased.
It is customary in Chinese tradition to exhume a tomb 10 years after burial, after which the personal effects that were buried with the deceased are returned to their descendants. None of the tombs that were desecrated had been exhumed yet, which suggests the robberies were committed by someone who was familiar with the burial site.
During an exhumation on the 19th of September, a local family had noticed evidence of a grave being disturbed, but chalked it up to somebody accidentally digging up the wrong tomb.
It is estimated that the damage caused by the excavations will cost between 30 to 50 thousand dollars.
Photo: Wong Tai Sin Temple by Annette Chan
