Coffins & Funerals

Several of Forman's photos are related to funerals. [View photos]

• Two are of a coffin being carried along a street
• Others show the bamboo ramps that were built to allow the large wooden coffins to be brought down from the apartment where someone had died
• A third group show a funeral procession in Central district. Judging by the size of the crowd, it must have been for someone from a wealthy family.

Barbara Anslow wrote in with the comment that "when I was a child in HK, was told that this method of leaving the tenement flat was to dodge the devil who would be waiting on the stairs." That's a colourful explanation, though I guess the difficulty of manoeuvering a large, heavy coffin down a tenement's narrow staircase also had a lot to do with it.