Dark Heritage Under a Football Field: How Historical Geospatial Methods Helps Find and Interpret a Forgotten Part of WWII Hong Kong History

This paper demonstrates how integrating traditional historical research methods, digital spatial humanities, and geospatial technologies can uncover "dark heritage" sites obscured by urban development where excavation is infeasible. King George V Memorial Park in Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong, long rumoured to be haunted, sits atop a mass grave from the Japanese occupation (25 December 1941– 30 August 1945). Combining archival study, oral history, georeferenced wartime aerial photographs, and Ground-Penetrating Radar (GPR), the research team located a burial pit that was most likely part of a mass grave containing at least 2,632 bodies, according to post-war exhumation records. The results of the GPR scan matched the visual evidence from wartime historical aerial photographs. By mapping the spatial and social context, this paper also argues that the site reveals the spatial inequality experienced by the urban poor during the Japanese occupation. As the grave was quickly turned into a squatter and then a park, and the locals lacked a strong sense of local identity and self- governance tradition, the memory of the population's suffering only lived on as individual memories and ghost stories. This paper offers an example of investigating dark heritage sites across Asia, where post-war urbanisation has obscured civilian wartime suffering.