It came to the light of day again last week as a result of a project aimed at identifying and researching Chinese immigrants buried in Dunedin cemeteries.
But mystery surrounds the grave, because now that they have uncovered it, the Cantonese etchings on it show it does not belong to the person thought to have been buried there.
Christchurch amateur historian, researcher and author Adrienne Shaw, creator of social media site Descendants of the Chinese Sojourners New Zealand, said public records showed it was supposed to belong to Quing Bing.
But the Cantonese on the headstone, erected in 1884, showed it belonged to Li Yun Leung, from Xinhua county, China.
‘‘I am going through every Chinese person on the list - male and female, from A to Z.’’
The mystery deepened when she looked up Li using public births, deaths and marriage records, and found he was not on the list.
‘‘So we think he is not recorded, or they have misrecorded him, or they’ve just confused it or muddled it up.
‘‘There’s a bit of mystery surrounding this person.’’
She said a lot of Chinese headstones had dates in English, or a name and then the Chinese name, then the lunar year, the county - even the village.
‘‘But this headstone’s a bit more basic.’’
Despite Li’s grave site being completely covered by a large bush, she was not upset about the lack of maintenance.
‘‘This bush would just grow from a seedling, and it is the responsibility of family to keep it clear. But, because there’s no next of kin ...
‘‘It’s been a thrill to release and find that headstone, giving it the light of day - giving that man dignity and respect.’’
Ms Shaw said the other big question was: where is Quing buried?
She believed he could be in the same grave as some other Chinese men.
‘‘They’re probably in there in what you call an unmarked grave.
‘‘They’re in a shared plot under different years, so it means they could be friends or they could just have been a bit poorer and the undertaker said, ‘well, I’ve got a cheaper plot, you can go in with these guys or all their friends when they went to pay for the burial’.
‘‘If they have money, they tend to have their own plot. If they don’t have money, they get shared or they go into a mass grave, which is what I’m also investigating.’’
‘‘I want to understand how that mass grave came about and roughly what it would have cost and what would have been the rules of the day.’’
Ms Shaw said she was inspired to take on the project because her great-great-grandfather was Chau Chu Taai - a prominent settler at the Chinese camp in Lawrence in the 1870s, who lived in Dunedin before returning to China to die.
‘‘I’m researching when and where they were born, date of death, marriage, undertaker, burial plot as well as information about how many people are in the plot with them, how many years they were in New Zealand, their occupation and their next of kin.’’
She hoped eventually to write a book about her findings, and called on anyone in the community who might know anything about the two men she was trying to research.
‘‘Once all the headstones are identified, I’ll approach the Chinese Poll Tax Heritage Trust for money to either get them cleaned or repaired.
‘‘So this is just the start, really.
‘‘The next thrill will come from writing bios about these people - trying to shine light on these people a bit.’’
