Cross-Border Funeral and Refugee Issues

The Rui Cunha Foundation presents today, Wednesday, December 10th at 7:00pm, a conference on “Cross-Border Funeral and Refugee Issues: Macau during the Mid-20th Century”, inserted in the History and Heritage Public Lectures‘ series, an active partnership between FRC and USJ – University of Saint Joseph, Department of History and Heritage, Macau.

Carlos Ka Nok Lo, Research Assistant Professor in the Department of History at University of Macau, and Associate Researcher at University of Macau Advanced Research Institute in Hengqin, will be the guest speaker at this lecture. He will present the topic forming the basis of his recent research, which shall appear in his second monograph, entitled “Death and Funeral Practices in Macao SAR, China”, to be published in 2026.

«From the mid-19th century onwards, due to repeated coercive measures imposed by the Portuguese authorities in Macao, Chinese residents were prohibited from burying their dead on the Macao Peninsula. As modern administrative equipment and documentation systems gradually matured – such as public cemeteries, medical certificates of death, and burial application –, the Portuguese authorities formally authorized Macao’s Kiang Wu Hospital in 1881 to oversee Chinese burials and operate the Chinese Cemetery. This established a unique Cross-border burial pattern between Macao and Xiangshan County (this area is present-day southern Zhuhai), a practice that persists to this day», explains the researcher.

«By the mid-20th century, Japan’s invasion of China triggered mass migration to Macao, exacerbating burial space shortages. The critical lack of burial plotsled to the emergence of mass graves in the border area. Following the conclusion of the Second World War, Macau’s Chinese community actively collaborated with neighboring regions to re-establish the cooperation of Cross-border funeral», the researcher also clarifies.

Carlos Ka Nok Lo is currently an Assistant Research Professor at University of Macau. He has been engaged nine years of extensive research in Global Demography History, Socio-Economic History, Sino–Western Cultural Exchange and Social History of Death. Lo has published over twenty journal articles and conference papers. His doctoral thesis critically examines the use of population census by the Macao-Portuguese colonial Government, exploring its impact on colonial Administration. Recently he has been conducting research on Funeral Practice, Modern Cemeteries and Urban Management in the 18th to 20th Centuries.

The lecture will be moderated by Priscila Roberts, Associate Professor and Head of the Department of History and Heritage at the University of Saint Joseph – Macau, and shall be presented in English with 1 hour duration.

Admission is free.
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For Macau, Further and Higher!

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