An East India Company Cemetery: Protestant Burials in Macao

Foreword

Foreword IT IS now over 40 years since we were first introduced, independently so it happened, to a quiet corner ofthe Portuguese oriental city ofMacao, where over 160 Protestant memorials of the last century stand screened by high walls from the gaze of all but specially interested or reverent eyes. In retrospect, we now realize what an impression these introductions must have made at the time: for in each of us, separately, they prompted a desire to learn something more than the brief stories the inscriptions told us ofthe men, women, and children whose frail bodies, unequal to the struggle for life in the Orient of their day, found their last resting place in this peaceful enclosure. In 1954 it became possible for us to embark, under difficulties that challenged enthusiasm, on a series of joint studies, and transform an intermittent pastime first into a weekend hobby and then into the ambitious project of recording our findings in the form of a book, in which we might recreate the substance of the dead and the realities of the community in which they lived and died. Xl Here lies an infant child: what hopes of fond parents have thus been frustrated by unplanned fate? Here lies one struck low on the very threshold of expectation: what bonds have moved a friend to commemorate him so? Here is but a name: concealing what, revealing what? To decode their lithic epitaphs, to peer behind and between the lines, seeking their origins and their motives, tracing their interests and influence, logging their travels and exploits, and so to find the sum oftheir essence, absorbed all our free moments. They beckoned, they invited, so that as each successive inscription yielded its fuller meaning, the more we might share in their business and worries and pleasures. About many of them, of course, we found nothing to record, or far too little to slake our thirst. For those to whom a cemetery is little more than an abode of the dead, so compelling an interest in tombs must be hard to comprehend, if not seem morbid. We were not, of course, the first, nor alone, in finding an inspiration in graveyards. Readers of Sir Walter Scott will recall how Old AN EAST INDIA COMPANl' CEMETERY Unk.nown Chillt.It artist: The p,.a){1 Grande, Macao (abollt 1855) xu Mortality of the Waverley Novels forsook his wife and family in middle age, in order to spend the rest of his life mending gravestones in the Scottish lowlands. We and Old Mortality have much in common, except that our restorations were for the more general interest of readers; and we worked in consort and often under a tropical sun, with scrubbing brush and soap, Chinese brush and ink, beleaguered by mosquitoes and sandflies. Cemeteries are often sited in areas ofgreat beauty. This graveyard, together with the nearby Camoens grotto and gardens, is so pleasing a sanctuary so close to the heart of a crowded, noisy city, that its very serenity invites frequent visits. Moreover, it is small and self-contained, it spans a short period of time, and its tenants are all foreign settlers, many being associated in some respects. It thus offers a conspectus of an immigrant society living on the south China coast a century and a half ago. For anyone who still 'hath ears to hear', we wish to unravel their stories, understand their lives, break the bonds of their tombs, free them, and visit them while they live once again for us. There are cemeteries famed for their beauty, or for artistic memorials, or for the distinction oftheir tenants. Some show how beauty can be created from a meagre setting, like many of those in the care ofthe War Graves Commission; the creators of some, helped by nature's hand and without loss of reverence, have left us places of great delight, as at Sai Wan and Stanley in Hong Kong. The days are gone when burial places were considered to be illomened , fit to be visited only by mourners and pilgrims; today is the day of the tourist and hiker witness the daily stream ofvisitors to Westminster Abbey, St Paul's, Pere La Chaise, the Campo Santo, Forest Hills, the Valley of the Kings, the Ming Tombs, Stoke Poges, Arlington, Bladon. As the XUl FOREWORD poet Edmund Blunden, himself once a member of the War Graves Commission, who came to know...