Chinese Cemetery in Victoria, British Columbia

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Get directions Crescent Road
Victoria, Capital Regional District, British Columbia Canada

Coordinates: 48.40692, -123.32313
Cemetery ID:

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About these numbers These percentages indicate the number of Find a Grave memorials that have a grave photo or GPS coordinates. We don't know the total number of burials in a cemetery, so we cannot calculate a percentage of those with memorials, photos or GPS coordinates.

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Prior to 1903 the Chinese community buried their dead at Ross Bay Cemetery. However, the Chinese section was located very near the shoreline and storms sometimes washed away the graves. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA) purchased this site in 1903 as a permanent cemetery for the Chinese community and many Chinese graves at Ross Bay were relocated here.

Early Chinese immigrants were buried for a number of years and then their bones exhumed for return to their family cemeteries in China. In 1907 the CCBA constructed a brick "bone house" in the cemetery, to store exhumations from throughout the region waiting for transfer to China.

In the 1930s wars in China halted the practice of repatriating bones. Most marked burials date from this period and later and the bone house filled to capacity.

Burials in this cemetery ceased after the 1950s due to lack of space and afterward the cemetery fell into disrepair. In 1961, 820 unclaimed sets of remains were removed from the deteriorating bone house and buried in 13 mass graves according to each person's home county of origin in China.

In 1996 Canada listed the Cemetery as a national historic site and in 2001 the site was restored.

Source: David Chuenyan Lai, "The Chinese Cemetery in Victoria," B.C. Studies, No. 75, Autumn 1987.