Then & Now | How Hong Kong and Chiang Mai share surprising historical links, gleaned from the Thai city’s foreign cemetery
- Hong Kong-made tombstones aside, Chiang Mai’s foreign cemetery contains graves of European foresters who settled in the interwar years and married local women
- To many of these men and others like them, English was important but not taught locally, and so a good number sent their children to Hong Kong to be educated
Decades ago, on a visit to Chiang Mai, in northern Thailand, unexpected elements of the region’s long-ago connections to Hong Kong’s own social history appeared.
The town’s foreign cemetery rewarded exploration; several gravestones bore small metal tags inscribed with “C.E. Warren and Co., Causeway Bay, Hong Kong”. These discreet manufacturer’s marks recalled a long-vanished local export industry – tombstones and monumental masonry.
Similar memorials can be found elsewhere in Thailand – Bangkok’s old foreign cemetery has numerous examples.
In Thailand and Burma, some Anglo-Burmese and Anglo-Siamese, as Eurasians were referred to there, went to school in Hong Kong. Usually, their British (or other European) fathers were employed in the forestry industry in northern Burma (present-day Myanmar) or northern Siam (modern Thailand), and lived isolated lives in remote timber concessions.