Shanghai’s Lost Foreigner Cemeteries
Up until the 1949 revolution foreigners had been living in Shanghai for over a hundred years, ever since the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing opened up Shanghai as a treaty port. In fact, some foreign missionaries and businessmen continued to live here until they were kicked out en masse in 1952. During those 110 years that a significant number of foreigners lived in Shanghai, some of them obviously had to have died here. But, where are their graves now? Although I had initially assumed they were all destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, it now seems that from 1953 to 1959 almost all the foreigners tombs in the city center were moved to a site out in Xujing Town now occupied by a Muslim Cemetery (Huimin Gongmu) established in 1979, and a neighboring modern cemetery next door. It was only in 1966 that the Xujing foreigners’ cemetery was destroyed, the tombstones being carried off by local villagers to use as construction materials in the surrounding villages where they can still be found dotting the landscape today.
My calculations have concluded that there were as many as eleven foreigner’s cemeteries in Shanghai. This conclusion comes from consulting various sources that each tell only part of the story. According to F.L. Hawks Pott, in his book “A Short History of Shanghai,” (1928), there were at least six foreign cemeteries in Shanghai at that time. The Shanghai Star newspaper published an article on the history of seven foreigners’ cemeteries in 2001. The website of the University of Bristol’s Chinese Maritime Customs Project says there were at least eight foreigners’ cemeteries in Shanghai until 1949.
Almost every one of the eleven former sites of foreigner cemeteries in the Shanghai city center has now become a public park, including Jingan Park, Huaihai Park, Panyu Park, Pudong Park, etc. The site of the Shandong Road Cemetery, open from 1844 to 1871 and once containing 469 foreigners’ graves including that of Mrs. H.M. Alcock, wife of the second British Consul in Shanghai, is now occupied by the Huangpu District Stadium. The Pudong Sailors’ Cemetery open from 1859 to 1904, which once contained the graves of 1,783 foreign sailors, is now part of Pudong Park surrounding the Oriental Pearl T.V. Tower. The Mohawk Road Cemetery established in 1862 as the first one exclusively for Shanghai’s Jewish residents contained 304 graves before it was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution and is now the site of the J.W. Marriott Hotel. The Eight Immortals Bridge Cemetery(Ba Xian Qiao,aka “Pahsienjao”) opened in 1863 and once contained the tomb of Henry Burgevine, who led the Ever Victorious Army against the Taiping Rebels after the death of the units original leader F.T. Ward. It is now Huaihai Park. Bubbling Well Road Cemetery open from 1880 to 1953 and once the home of 5,500 foreigners graves is now Jingan Park. The International Cemetery (Wanguo Gongmu) established at the intersection of Hongqiao Road and Songyuan Road in 1909 was destroyed by Red Guards at the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, and has been the site of Song Qingling’s Tomb Garden (Song Qingling Mu Yuan) since 1981. Although there is still a small Foreigners Tombs Area here, the headstones are all fake reproductions, many of them containing spelling errors, and most bearing very minimal information. The Baikal Road Cemeteryestablished in 1917 on present day Weiming Lu was the largest Jewish one in the city containing 1,692 graves until they were moved out in 1958-59. The Hongqiao Road Cemetery established in 1926 and its neighboring Columbia Road Cemetery established in 1940 specifically for Jewish residents were merged together in 1945, and are now the site of Panyu Park. The grounds of Holy Trinity Cathedral were the site of 110 foreigners graves between 1937 and 1952. Finally, the Point Road Cemetery created for Jewish refugees in 1940 contained 834 graves before it was dismantled in 1958-59. Thus the stain of colonialism has been erased from the city.
Jewish historian Dvir Bar-gal had previously reported finding Hebrew language tombstones near a Muslim cemetery located somewhere in “western Shanghai” in a village called “Minzhu.” Dvir discovered this site back in 2002, and has found 80 Jewish tombstones there since then. However, he’s always been a bit reluctant to be more specific in his directions due to his fear of tomb raiders. Since Shanghai municipality is a big place, covering 18 districts and one county with many towns and villages in an area of 6,340 square km., these vague directions had made it a nearly impossible task for others to find the exact spot. Moreover, Dvir was only interested in collecting old Jewish headstones, whereas to me there was a larger fascinating question here of what happened to all of the foreigners’ cemeteries that previously existed in the downtown city center before 1949. Therefore, during one long holiday in October 2010 I set out to see if I could find this place on my own.
The First Day
The Shanghai Muslim Cemetery (Huimin Gongmu) entrance gate stands at #508 Xie Wei Lu near its intersection with Zhu Guang Lu, close to the modern downtown of Minzhu Village (Minzhu Cun) of Xujing Town (Xujing Zhen), Qingpu District (Qingpu Qu). One block south runs the main highway of Huqingping Gong Lu. The official Chinese name is Hui Min Gong Mu, named after the Hui ethnic minority of Chinese Muslims. Several halls near the entrance gate are designed in traditional Arabic-Islamic architecture with onion domes on top. The phone number on their business card is (021) 3985-3286. Staff there stated that they have no website and no e-mail address.
In my first conversation with the clerk in the visitors’ hall he said the cemetery had a history of 30 years (san shi nian). Later, in a second conversation after I had explored the site he told me it was established in 1979, and that any tombstones with earlier dates than that had been moved there.
The site has a strange shape. After the main halls near the gate you enter a garden area (hua yuan), after which the trail takes a diagonal jog sharply to the left and around this corner you enter the much larger tomb area. This area is divided up into sections labeled by signs, and there are Chinese language wall maps of the whole area posted in a few places.
The tombstones seem to be arranged roughly in chronological order. In the West First section (Xi Yi Qu) there were tombstones dating from 1980, and in the East First section (Dong Yi Qu) there were tombstones dating from 1979. The Dong Yi Qu is the closest to the garden and thus the first section a visitor would come to. In this section there were also a few tombstones dated from as early as 1966 and 1969, as well as some from the mid-1970s, but they looked newer than their dated age would imply, and I had already guessed that the few stones from before 1979 may have been moved there when this was later confirmed by the clerk at the visitors’ center.
Dating the establishment of this Muslim Cemetery was important because according to Jewish historian Dvir Bar-gal this was previously the site of a Jewish Cemetery established in 1958, when the tombs of all Jews buried in Shanghai were moved here from four other sites, and before that an International Cemetery. The Jewish Cemetery was destroyed at some point during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and the foreigners’ tombstones were then scattered in surrounding villages where they were used by local residents as construction materials in building their small farm houses.
Dvir Bar-gal began researching, documenting and collecting these scattered tombstones in 2001. However, despite his 9 years of gallant efforts, I was still able to locate 3 or 4 remaining foreigners’ tombstones in the surrounding area before the sun went down on my first day of searching (10-31-10). Some of these still had legible English language and Russian inscriptions, and are not documented in the index of tombstones he has discovered on the websitehttp://shanghaijewishmemorial.com/.
As such, the history of this site is similar to that of the former Foreigners’ Cemetery (Wan Guo Gong Mu) on Songyuan Lu, now the Song Qingling Mu Yuan, which I previously wrote about in my books Shanghai and the Yangzi Delta (2004), andDiscover Shanghai (2010).
Right next door to the Muslim Cemetery on Xie Wei Lu stands another modern cemetery which has obviously been established within the past 10 years. Within its huge expanse stands one large tombstone with a uniquely artistic design and a Russian language inscription. The dates on it are 1915-1939. It is the only non-Chinese language tombstone in the cemetery, and the only one dating from prior to the year 2000.
At 1568 Huqingping Gong Lu, near its intersection with Xie Wei Lu, stands a large building full of “antique” furniture shops. Between the wall of this buildings compound and the wall of the modern Chinese cemetery runs a long narrow road unmarked by any sign. The road leads all the way to the creek which runs behind the two cemeteries. Just before reaching the creek is an intersection at which the road to the left leads to the remains of the old village of Min Zhu Cun. However, straight ahead, on your left stands a large warehouse which an employee told me was a “furniture factory,” but which seems to be stockpiled with recycled wooden remains of old houses, and even a giant drum from a temple.
For our purposes the important point is that right beside the road in front of this warehouse lay a whole row of stone relics that obviously once belonged to the nearby foreigners cemetery. First I noticed about four long, rectangular stone carved troughs that may have once been water basins or contained flower beds. At the end of the row of relics were two stone blocks. One block bore a clearly legible English language inscription on the side facing upward: “In memory of our beloved mother Laisa Berkovitch who died on January 21st 1936 age 63.” It shocked me to find this laying right beside a paved road, and I was even more surprised when I discovered later that this tombstone was not yet included on Dvir Bar-gal’s list athttp://shanghaijewishmemorial.com/.
Following the road branching off to the left (west) took me into the remaining ruins of the old village of Minzhu Cun. This was where Dvir Bar-gal reported previously finding many of the tombstones he discovered. Unfortunately, the village seemed to be in the process of being cleared away, and most of the houses had already been torn down, with only a few left standing. In addition, the sun was going down and it got dark before I had finished searching. Nonetheless, I was still able to make several more discoveries of foreigners’ tombstones in this area.
The houses in this area don’t have precise addresses, and the muddy dirt tracks between them have no names, so rough directions will have to do. At a spot where a fairly large house still stands surrounded by a wall with a gate, beside it is a goat herder who keeps a flock of goats. In between the goat herder’s shack and the large house runs a narrow dirt trail heading north towards the creek. In the courtyard of a small house behind the large one I found at least two foreigners’ tombstones. At the far end of the courtyard beside the house was one extremely large tombstone, with decorative columns on both sides, but was laying face down so that it was impossible to read the inscription on the other side. It would take several men armed with iron crowbars to turn this over. At the near end of the house was another smaller one containing an English language inscription laying on its side, half buried in the ground. It was easy to miss because the inscription is facing sideways rather than upward. Half the inscription is buried under ground, but the half above ground is clearly legible. Unfortunately, by this time it was pitch black out as the sun had gone down, but I was able to photograph it using a flash. In fact, I took digital pictures of all the sights seen throughout the day.
Half the day was wasted simply wandering around on foot trying to locate the proper location of the site, but now that I know where it is, and considering what I was able to find the first time, I would like to go back and try my luck again. It was like a treasure hunt.
Dvir Bar-gal says he has moved all the significant foreigners’ tombstones from this area to a “Buddhist Cemetery” near the Hongqiao Airport for safe keeping, but obviously he has missed a few.
The Second Day
Going back to the Minzhu Cun site a second day on Monday 11-01-10, in the daylight I found three foreigner’s tombstones with English language inscriptions and one with a Hebrew inscription. These four added to the Laisa Berkovitch stone and the Russian language stone in the nearby modern day cemetery add up to a total of six foreigner’s headstones with legible inscritions discovered in only two days of searching.
The first stone found on the second day is a square piece of marble with a round hole in the center from the top down, and in fact it is used today by a local family to cover a drinking water well. The English inscription here says, “In memory of George Daniel ???hnhorst, born 1st October 1857, died 25th May 1912.” Unfortunately, the first three letters of the family name have been partly covered up with cement and are largely illegible, but it may say Sharnhorst. The North China Herald of June 1, 1912 announced the death on May 25, 1912 of a George Daniel Sharnhorst.
The three other stones were found behind house #447. The house in front bears this address plate, while a second house in back has no number. The courtyard of this rear house is littered with stones, many of which were used to line the sides of a sewage/drainage channel. There are others I was unable to excavate. Of the three at this site I did excavate, one quite large marble stone with decorative columns on either side was originally upside down until I used a shovel and bamboo poles to cantilever it into an upright position with the inscription facing up. This English inscription reads as follows: “William Bennicke Loam, born in Devonshire England, ?th December 1848, died at Shanghai, 20th October 1889.”
At the intersection of two pathways half buried in a drainage ditch was another with an English inscription which I fully excavated until I could read it said, “To the memory of the late Christian Hermann Simon Peter Minck, a native of Gluecksta Holstein. He departed this life in Shanghai December 14th 1884 at the age of 47.”This man had a long name, and at first it wasn’t clear if the word Christian was meant to describe his religion or was his first name. Holstein is an area that straddles the German-Danish border, but we can assume this man was probably German. This is the oldest tombstone found at the Minzhu Cun site. The North China Herald of December 21, 1884 reported the December 14, 1884 death of Mr. Christian Minck, age 47. According to the newspaper report, Minck had “served with Colonel Gordon in the Ever Victorious Army and held the rank of Captain during the [Taiping] Rebellion.” He was also a Freemason and a member of the Shanghai Fire Department.
To the left of this one, hidden in the bushes and half buried in a trash strewn sewage ditch, is a large Hebrew language tombstone with a star of David above the inscription facing away from the trail. Standing on the pathway you can not see that it’s there. After discovering this one I reported it to Dvir Bargal, who upon examining photos I took of it commented that it may be one of the oldest Jewish headstones found in Shanghai, as well as one of the best preserved.
The people who live in this village have an ambivalent attitude towards the foreigners’ tombstones laying about their courtyards and gardens. On the one hand they can’t read the foreign language inscriptions and the stones have no personal significance to them at all. On the other hand, as some of them have started to realize that the stones are important to foreigners living today, they have gotten the idea that they can make money off of these relics. One guy offered to help me dig up the headstones at a price of 100 Rmb each. I declined this offer and instead grabbed a shovel and some bamboo poles and excavated the stones myself. Strangely, they didn’t seem to mind me digging up their courtyard. Although he clearly felt that the stones were his property, he was also willing to sell them to me for a price, and even followed me as I was leaving the site saying repeatedly “yao bu yao?” He offered to show me the location of some more headstones, claiming that there were many more yet to be found (“zheli haiyou henduo zhegge.”). But once again, his help was only available in exchange for some financial reward. He made this quite clear by using the international body language of rubbing his fingers together as if clenching a coin. Dvir previously reported that on average he only paid 30 Rmb each to buy the stones he collected, but the villagers obviously expect much more than that today. The few remaining stones may go for a much higher price.
Dvir plans to go out to Xujing to pick up this last remaining Hebrew headstone, although he’s not interested in the tombstones of the non-Jewish foreigners, and I’m glad that I was able to make a small contribution to his continuing efforts at documenting Shanghai’s Jewish heritage. However, I think at this point, now that he’s had an eight year monopoly on exploration of the site, it’s in the public interest for people to know the location. Now it can be told that the exact site is Minzhu Village (Minzhu Cun) of Xujing Town (Xujing Zhen) in Qingpu District (Qingpu Qu).
References
Elliston, E. S., Shantung Road Cemetery, Shanghai, 1846-1868: With Notes About Pootung Seamen’s Cemetery [and] Soldiers’ Cemetery, Shanghai, December 1946. (51pp.)
Hawks Pott, F.L., A Short History of Shanghai, (1928). According to p.72, there were at least six foreign cemeteries in Shanghai at that time.
International Jewish Cemetery Project website describes the history of five Jewish cemeteries in Shanghai. http://www.iajgsjewishcemeteryproject.org/china-inc-hong-kong-a-macao/shanghai.html
North China Herald, a former Shanghai newspaper, obituaries section.
Shanghai Guide website http://www.shanghaiguide.org/Shanghai-Foreign-Cemeteries-2838.html. This website documents the history of five foreigners’ cemeteries in Shanghai.
Shanghai Jewish Memorial website run by Israeli historian Dvir Bar-Gal has an index listing all the Jewish tombstones he has found in Shanghai since 2002. http://shanghaijewishmemorial.com/
Shanghai Star newspaper, “Foreign Ghosts, Lost and Found,” April 5, 2001, documented the history of seven foreigners’ cemeteries in Shanghai, as well as the destruction of the Shandong Lu Cemetery and its replacement with the Huangpu District Stadium.http://app1.chinadaily.com.cn/star/2001/0405/cu18-2.html
University of Bristol’s Chinese Maritime Customs Project website states that there were at least eight foreigners’ cemeteries in Shanghai.http://www.bristol.ac.uk/history/customs/ancestors/shanghai.html
University of Bristol’s Chinese Maritime Customs Project website offers a pdf download of a file on Holy Trinity Cathedral. http://www.bristol.ac.uk/history/customs/ancestors/holytrinity.pdf
Visual Cultures in East Asia (VCEA) website contains a digital online library of photos of the tombstones of some of the more famous foreigners to be buried in Shanghai, including Mrs. H.M. Alcock and Mr. Henry Burgevine. http://www.vcea.net/Digital_Library/Images_en.php
Wei, Betty Peh-ti, Old Shanghai, (1993) p.51, “A Jewish cemetery constructed in 1862 on Mohawk Road was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution a century later.” This is now the site of the J.W. Marriott Hotel according to the Urbanatomy website. http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/
[July 2012 Note: Although originally written nearly two years ago this article continues to be one of the most popular ones on my blog. There definitely seems to be an interest in this topic out there. In particular, I''d like to extend my warm gratitude towards several individuals who not only gave me positive feedback on the earlier draft of this article but also generously shared with me information that they had. Writing is normally a solitary vocation, but Patti Gully of Vancouver, B.C., Nick Fielding of the U.K., and Paul S. Allen of the U.K. have together shown me what a collaborative approach can achieve.]
The Shanghai Muslim Cemetery (Huimin Gongmu) entrance gate stands at #508 Xie Wei Lu near its intersection with Zhu Guang Lu, close to the modern downtown of Minzhu Village (Minzhu Cun) of Xujing Town (Xujing Zhen), Qingpu District (Qingpu Qu). One block south runs the main highway of Huqingping Gong Lu. The official Chinese name is Hui Min Gong Mu, named after the Hui ethnic minority of Chinese Muslims. Several halls near the entrance gate are designed in traditional Arabic-Islamic architecture with onion domes on top. The phone number on their business card is (021) 3985-3286. Staff there stated that they have no website and no e-mail address.
In my first conversation with the clerk in the visitors’ hall he said the cemetery had a history of 30 years (san shi nian). Later, in a second conversation after I had explored the site he told me it was established in 1979, and that any tombstones with earlier dates than that had been moved there.
The site has a strange shape. After the main halls near the gate you enter a garden area (hua yuan), after which the trail takes a diagonal jog sharply to the left and around this corner you enter the much larger tomb area. This area is divided up into sections labeled by signs, and there are Chinese language wall maps of the whole area posted in a few places.
The tombstones seem to be arranged roughly in chronological order. In the West First section (Xi Yi Qu) there were tombstones dating from 1980, and in the East First section (Dong Yi Qu) there were tombstones dating from 1979. The Dong Yi Qu is the closest to the garden and thus the first section a visitor would come to. In this section there were also a few tombstones dated from as early as 1966 and 1969, as well as some from the mid-1970s, but they looked newer than their dated age would imply, and I had already guessed that the few stones from before 1979 may have been moved there when this was later confirmed by the clerk at the visitors’ center.
Dating the establishment of this Muslim Cemetery was important because according to Jewish historian Dvir Bar-gal this was previously the site of a Jewish Cemetery established in 1958, when the tombs of all Jews buried in Shanghai were moved here from four other sites, and before that an International Cemetery. The Jewish Cemetery was destroyed at some point during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), and the foreigners’ tombstones were then scattered in surrounding villages where they were used by local residents as construction materials in building their small farm houses.
Dvir Bar-gal began researching, documenting and collecting these scattered tombstones in 2001. However, despite his 9 years of gallant efforts, I was still able to locate 3 or 4 remaining foreigners’ tombstones in the surrounding area before the sun went down on my first day of searching (10-31-10). Some of these still had legible English language and Russian inscriptions, and are not documented in the index of tombstones he has discovered on the websitehttp://shanghaijewishmemorial.com/.
As such, the history of this site is similar to that of the former Foreigners’ Cemetery (Wan Guo Gong Mu) on Songyuan Lu, now the Song Qingling Mu Yuan, which I previously wrote about in my books Shanghai and the Yangzi Delta (2004), andDiscover Shanghai (2010).
Right next door to the Muslim Cemetery on Xie Wei Lu stands another modern cemetery which has obviously been established within the past 10 years. Within its huge expanse stands one large tombstone with a uniquely artistic design and a Russian language inscription. The dates on it are 1915-1939. It is the only non-Chinese language tombstone in the cemetery, and the only one dating from prior to the year 2000.
At 1568 Huqingping Gong Lu, near its intersection with Xie Wei Lu, stands a large building full of “antique” furniture shops. Between the wall of this buildings compound and the wall of the modern Chinese cemetery runs a long narrow road unmarked by any sign. The road leads all the way to the creek which runs behind the two cemeteries. Just before reaching the creek is an intersection at which the road to the left leads to the remains of the old village of Min Zhu Cun. However, straight ahead, on your left stands a large warehouse which an employee told me was a “furniture factory,” but which seems to be stockpiled with recycled wooden remains of old houses, and even a giant drum from a temple.
For our purposes the important point is that right beside the road in front of this warehouse lay a whole row of stone relics that obviously once belonged to the nearby foreigners cemetery. First I noticed about four long, rectangular stone carved troughs that may have once been water basins or contained flower beds. At the end of the row of relics were two stone blocks. One block bore a clearly legible English language inscription on the side facing upward: “In memory of our beloved mother Laisa Berkovitch who died on January 21st 1936 age 63.” It shocked me to find this laying right beside a paved road, and I was even more surprised when I discovered later that this tombstone was not yet included on Dvir Bar-gal’s list athttp://shanghaijewishmemorial.com/.
Following the road branching off to the left (west) took me into the remaining ruins of the old village of Minzhu Cun. This was where Dvir Bar-gal reported previously finding many of the tombstones he discovered. Unfortunately, the village seemed to be in the process of being cleared away, and most of the houses had already been torn down, with only a few left standing. In addition, the sun was going down and it got dark before I had finished searching. Nonetheless, I was still able to make several more discoveries of foreigners’ tombstones in this area.
The houses in this area don’t have precise addresses, and the muddy dirt tracks between them have no names, so rough directions will have to do. At a spot where a fairly large house still stands surrounded by a wall with a gate, beside it is a goat herder who keeps a flock of goats. In between the goat herder’s shack and the large house runs a narrow dirt trail heading north towards the creek. In the courtyard of a small house behind the large one I found at least two foreigners’ tombstones. At the far end of the courtyard beside the house was one extremely large tombstone, with decorative columns on both sides, but was laying face down so that it was impossible to read the inscription on the other side. It would take several men armed with iron crowbars to turn this over. At the near end of the house was another smaller one containing an English language inscription laying on its side, half buried in the ground. It was easy to miss because the inscription is facing sideways rather than upward. Half the inscription is buried under ground, but the half above ground is clearly legible. Unfortunately, by this time it was pitch black out as the sun had gone down, but I was able to photograph it using a flash. In fact, I took digital pictures of all the sights seen throughout the day.
Half the day was wasted simply wandering around on foot trying to locate the proper location of the site, but now that I know where it is, and considering what I was able to find the first time, I would like to go back and try my luck again. It was like a treasure hunt.
Dvir Bar-gal says he has moved all the significant foreigners’ tombstones from this area to a “Buddhist Cemetery” near the Hongqiao Airport for safe keeping, but obviously he has missed a few.
The Second Day
Going back to the Minzhu Cun site a second day on Monday 11-01-10, in the daylight I found three foreigner’s tombstones with English language inscriptions and one with a Hebrew inscription. These four added to the Laisa Berkovitch stone and the Russian language stone in the nearby modern day cemetery add up to a total of six foreigner’s headstones with legible inscritions discovered in only two days of searching.
The first stone found on the second day is a square piece of marble with a round hole in the center from the top down, and in fact it is used today by a local family to cover a drinking water well. The English inscription here says, “In memory of George Daniel ???hnhorst, born 1st October 1857, died 25th May 1912.” Unfortunately, the first three letters of the family name have been partly covered up with cement and are largely illegible, but it may say Sharnhorst. The North China Herald of June 1, 1912 announced the death on May 25, 1912 of a George Daniel Sharnhorst.
The three other stones were found behind house #447. The house in front bears this address plate, while a second house in back has no number. The courtyard of this rear house is littered with stones, many of which were used to line the sides of a sewage/drainage channel. There are others I was unable to excavate. Of the three at this site I did excavate, one quite large marble stone with decorative columns on either side was originally upside down until I used a shovel and bamboo poles to cantilever it into an upright position with the inscription facing up. This English inscription reads as follows: “William Bennicke Loam, born in Devonshire England, ?th December 1848, died at Shanghai, 20th October 1889.”
At the intersection of two pathways half buried in a drainage ditch was another with an English inscription which I fully excavated until I could read it said, “To the memory of the late Christian Hermann Simon Peter Minck, a native of Gluecksta Holstein. He departed this life in Shanghai December 14th 1884 at the age of 47.”This man had a long name, and at first it wasn’t clear if the word Christian was meant to describe his religion or was his first name. Holstein is an area that straddles the German-Danish border, but we can assume this man was probably German. This is the oldest tombstone found at the Minzhu Cun site. The North China Herald of December 21, 1884 reported the December 14, 1884 death of Mr. Christian Minck, age 47. According to the newspaper report, Minck had “served with Colonel Gordon in the Ever Victorious Army and held the rank of Captain during the [Taiping] Rebellion.” He was also a Freemason and a member of the Shanghai Fire Department.
To the left of this one, hidden in the bushes and half buried in a trash strewn sewage ditch, is a large Hebrew language tombstone with a star of David above the inscription facing away from the trail. Standing on the pathway you can not see that it’s there. After discovering this one I reported it to Dvir Bargal, who upon examining photos I took of it commented that it may be one of the oldest Jewish headstones found in Shanghai, as well as one of the best preserved.
The people who live in this village have an ambivalent attitude towards the foreigners’ tombstones laying about their courtyards and gardens. On the one hand they can’t read the foreign language inscriptions and the stones have no personal significance to them at all. On the other hand, as some of them have started to realize that the stones are important to foreigners living today, they have gotten the idea that they can make money off of these relics. One guy offered to help me dig up the headstones at a price of 100 Rmb each. I declined this offer and instead grabbed a shovel and some bamboo poles and excavated the stones myself. Strangely, they didn’t seem to mind me digging up their courtyard. Although he clearly felt that the stones were his property, he was also willing to sell them to me for a price, and even followed me as I was leaving the site saying repeatedly “yao bu yao?” He offered to show me the location of some more headstones, claiming that there were many more yet to be found (“zheli haiyou henduo zhegge.”). But once again, his help was only available in exchange for some financial reward. He made this quite clear by using the international body language of rubbing his fingers together as if clenching a coin. Dvir previously reported that on average he only paid 30 Rmb each to buy the stones he collected, but the villagers obviously expect much more than that today. The few remaining stones may go for a much higher price.
Dvir plans to go out to Xujing to pick up this last remaining Hebrew headstone, although he’s not interested in the tombstones of the non-Jewish foreigners, and I’m glad that I was able to make a small contribution to his continuing efforts at documenting Shanghai’s Jewish heritage. However, I think at this point, now that he’s had an eight year monopoly on exploration of the site, it’s in the public interest for people to know the location. Now it can be told that the exact site is Minzhu Village (Minzhu Cun) of Xujing Town (Xujing Zhen) in Qingpu District (Qingpu Qu).
References
Elliston, E. S., Shantung Road Cemetery, Shanghai, 1846-1868: With Notes About Pootung Seamen’s Cemetery [and] Soldiers’ Cemetery, Shanghai, December 1946. (51pp.)
Hawks Pott, F.L., A Short History of Shanghai, (1928). According to p.72, there were at least six foreign cemeteries in Shanghai at that time.
International Jewish Cemetery Project website describes the history of five Jewish cemeteries in Shanghai. http://www.iajgsjewishcemeteryproject.org/china-inc-hong-kong-a-macao/shanghai.html
North China Herald, a former Shanghai newspaper, obituaries section.
Shanghai Guide website http://www.shanghaiguide.org/Shanghai-Foreign-Cemeteries-2838.html. This website documents the history of five foreigners’ cemeteries in Shanghai.
Shanghai Jewish Memorial website run by Israeli historian Dvir Bar-Gal has an index listing all the Jewish tombstones he has found in Shanghai since 2002. http://shanghaijewishmemorial.com/
Shanghai Star newspaper, “Foreign Ghosts, Lost and Found,” April 5, 2001, documented the history of seven foreigners’ cemeteries in Shanghai, as well as the destruction of the Shandong Lu Cemetery and its replacement with the Huangpu District Stadium.http://app1.chinadaily.com.cn/star/2001/0405/cu18-2.html
University of Bristol’s Chinese Maritime Customs Project website states that there were at least eight foreigners’ cemeteries in Shanghai.http://www.bristol.ac.uk/history/customs/ancestors/shanghai.html
University of Bristol’s Chinese Maritime Customs Project website offers a pdf download of a file on Holy Trinity Cathedral. http://www.bristol.ac.uk/history/customs/ancestors/holytrinity.pdf
Visual Cultures in East Asia (VCEA) website contains a digital online library of photos of the tombstones of some of the more famous foreigners to be buried in Shanghai, including Mrs. H.M. Alcock and Mr. Henry Burgevine. http://www.vcea.net/Digital_Library/Images_en.php
Wei, Betty Peh-ti, Old Shanghai, (1993) p.51, “A Jewish cemetery constructed in 1862 on Mohawk Road was destroyed during the Cultural Revolution a century later.” This is now the site of the J.W. Marriott Hotel according to the Urbanatomy website. http://www.thatsmags.com/shanghai/
[July 2012 Note: Although originally written nearly two years ago this article continues to be one of the most popular ones on my blog. There definitely seems to be an interest in this topic out there. In particular, I''d like to extend my warm gratitude towards several individuals who not only gave me positive feedback on the earlier draft of this article but also generously shared with me information that they had. Writing is normally a solitary vocation, but Patti Gully of Vancouver, B.C., Nick Fielding of the U.K., and Paul S. Allen of the U.K. have together shown me what a collaborative approach can achieve.]