Places
Chinese Cemetery
Adjacent to Oak Hill Memorial Park and to Dairy Hill is a now un-used Chinese Cemetery. From about 1850 until 1900, Chinese Americans in San José were buried in Oak Hill Cemetery. In 1900, the Oak Hill Improvement Company sold off a one-half acre section to a group of eight Chinese associations for a Chinese cemetery. The transaction agreement mentioned that 306 of the existing buried bodies were “now in fit condition to be disinterred for shipment to China.” These bodies would be removed for return to China. According to Chinese custom, the remains of the deceased must be buried in his family or clan cemetery in his home village. Chinese associations in the United States continued this tradition well into the 20th century. It is unclear whether the Oak Hill burials were actually moved, or how many subsequent burials in the new Chinese cemetery were eventually removed. Oak Hill Memorial Park believes that some 300 graves remain in the Chinese cemetery, but no one has been buried there for several decades.
