Chinese Cemetery

Formally Recognized as one of the Canada's Histroic Places on March 15th, 1988, the Kamloops Chinese Cemetery is valued as a representation of the impact of the railway on Kamloops, and the resulting substantial Chinese population, with its strong sense of community that continues to the present day. It is is also valued as an illustration of traditional Chinese death ritual practices transplanted into the Western frontier context. Exacerbated by political turmoil in China, from approximately the 1850s to the 1910s, thousands of Chinese migrated from Guangdong, China, to frontier gold rush sites around the world. The Guangdong Chinese practiced secondary burial, a traditional custom where, after seven to ten years, bones of the deceased were disinterred by organized bone collectors, transferred to a centralized bone house and shipped back to China for reburial in family plots. To accommodate this custom, temporary Chinese burial grounds were set up in many communities; most followed a basic blueprint in their spatial arrangement and material culture. Traditional Chinese rituals associated with the choice of site (fengshui), burial of the deceased and cyclical rituals such as Qing Ming were also carried out. The Kamloops Chinese Cemetery shows clear evidence of these traditional Chinese death ritual practices. For example, in keeping with important tenets of fengshui, the cemetery is aligned on a north-south axis on a sloped site with views of the Thompson River. Evidence of disinterred plots is also visible on the landscape, and traditional funerary monuments are present, including a stone altar and a funerary burner. Non-Chinese influences can be discerned in the tombstone styles. The tradition of honouring the deceased continues to the present day with the recent addition of wooden plank grave markers and the Asian-inspired pagoda and gateway. Graves remained unmarked until after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1923, when Chinese began to settle permanently in Kamloops. This change is clearly indicated by the introduction of permanent, marked tombstones, first installed in 1927. Most marked graves date from the 1930s to the 1960s. The Chinese Cemetery was closed in 1979, and the site now contains approximately 125 burial plots, over 50 of which were disinterred.