Ch 9-1: Departing Souls: Foreign Graveyards
20 Mrs. Cordelia Stewart's Grave Near Chongqing
Alfred and Myrtle Johns visited this grave on their first trip into West China up the Yangtze River.
While all living missionaries eventually left China, the remains of those who died there were interred in foreign graveyards. As early as 1895, there was a foreign graveyard in Chongqing where Dr. McCartney interred his wife’s body after she died in I-Chang (Gentry 2022, 5). In 1908, Mrs. Cordelia Stewart died on the trip up the Yangtze and was also buried there. Alfred and Myrtle Johns visited her grave while passing through Chongqing on their first trip to Chengdu in 1910 (Johns Family Photographs).
Many missionaries died of disease while serving in West China, and their children were especially vulnerable. When Bob and Grace Service’s (1989, 31-33) baby daughter died on their first voyage through the Yangtze Gorges, they sent a messenger ahead to prepare a grave for her at the foreign graveyard near the Tseng Kai Yai boarding schools on the southern hills opposite Chongqing. When they got there the missionary community – all strangers to Grace at that time – held a simple service with “a scripture reading and a short prayer” at the graveside.
There were also foreign graveyards at Chengdu. Martin Johns (1992, 7) remembers taking flowers to the grave of the two Abrey children who died of typhoid in 1913 the same week as the family had their portrait taken on their verandah at WCUU (Figure 9.5: Abreys). The Canadians’ cemetery, where the Abrey children were buried, was several miles from campus, so the Americans wanted one nearer by with newly planted grass and trees.
In 1917, Dan Dye (n/d, 20) was one of the Trustees for a new American cemetery near WCUU where there were already four people buried. Perhaps an irony of this new cemetery was that WCUU had been built on a Chinese graveyard where they had to exhume over 2,500 graves and move the remains prior to building the campus. Dr. Harry Canright (1933, 46-47) had been on the property committee when, “Every bone that could be found in each grave was reverently picked up with chopsticks by friends or relatives and placed in individual jars to be hurried elsewhere.”
In 1914, the Grahams (n/d, 47) were stationed at Suifu when they lost their ten-month-old son to pneumonia. They buried him at the foreign graveyard at “Ch’i Shin Shan, near the foreign bungalows,” presumably somewhere near Suifu [Yibin]. While most missionaries were buried with only a wooden cross, they brought a pink granite stone from Mt. Emei and had it engraved with his name, date of birth and date of death (Figure 9.6: gravestone).
David Crockett Graham Jr's Gravestone
Gravestone of David Crockett Graham, Jr. in forested hills south of Yibin, where Graham was stationed.
Few of these locations were saved during and after the establishment of the PRC. When Stewart Allen returned to Chengdu in 1981, he sought the grave of his daughter who had died there during the 1940s at nine months old. He found the site of the old Canadian graveyard had been “paved over” (Donaghy Interview 2022, 18).
John Service (1981, 33) recalled that when he was posted in Chongqing in 1941, the foreign cemetery where his sister was buried and his father’s ashes had been taken after he died in Shanghai in 1936, had been damaged by Japanese bombs seeking to destroy Chiang Kaishek’s headquarters, which was just over a fence from the graveyard. Before Grace died in California in 1954, she had requested that her ashes be taken back to be buried there too. In 1969, however, John scattered her ashes at a mountain resort in New York state thinking they would never be allowed back in China. When he unexpectedly returned to Chongqing two years later, the cemetery had “disappeared” (Service 1981, 423).
The Kitchen-Tonge family had a similar experience with the grave of Beatrice Kitchen, who had died in a plane crash enroute to Chongqing in 1947. She was buried in the International Cemetery in Hankow, but the family never got to visit her grave. During their rushed evacuation ahead of the Communist takeover, boats were not stopping at Hankow, which was already in Communist hands. They heard that the Communists had “removed or flattened” all foreign cemeteries and broken up the stones to make stools. The family searched unsuccessfully for Beatrice’s gravesite on their first return trip in 1981. They found the site when they returned to China in 1988. It was being used as the office for a housing development and the sycamore tree near her grave was still standing. Fortunately, a friend had sent the family photographs of the gravestone before its demise (Foster 2008, 35-36).