Vaughan Grylls Home

Work ⟩1990s ⟩Tales from the South China Sea 1992

About the Work

This work was photographed in an obscure Protestant cemetery in Macau, South China. Each gravestone tells a tale: a British sailor "murdered by Chinese" as his ship plys the odious opium trade; another unfortunate sailor "falling from aloft"; an American responsible for introducing the Japanese to the world's first telecommunication system, the "magnetic telegraph". I photographed the frieze for this work in a Borneo mangrove swamp on the opposite shore of the South China Sea which in the 19th and early 20th centuries was little more than a commercial lake for the west.