The timing of the opening — June 1941 — meant that the cemetery received its first burials in the same year Hong Kong entered the most violent period in its modern history. The Battle of Hong Kong in December 1941 killed thousands, and the three years and eight months of Japanese occupation that followed brought hardship, displacement, and death across the colony. Whether and how that history touched this particular hillside is not recorded in the sparse official account, but it is worth holding in mind: this was a place of burial established on the eve of catastrophe, and the families who brought their dead here in those early years did so in circumstances that were anything but ordinary. The cemetery is the second Chinese permanent cemetery in Hong Kong, following Aberdeen Chinese Permanent Cemetery, and was intended from the beginning to serve the growing Chinese population of the Tsuen Wan and Kwai Chung areas.

The cemetery looks out over Gin Drinkers Bay — named on historical British maps, a corner of the western approaches to Victoria Harbour where the water narrows between Tsing Yi Island and the mainland. Rambler Channel runs beyond, connecting to the busy waterway that carries container traffic in and out of the Kwai Tsing port. From the slopes on a clear day, the scene is layered: water in the middle distance, the industrial shoreline of Tsing Yi beyond, and the green ridge of Tsing Yi Peak rising above it all. It is, despite everything built around it, a considered place to be buried — elevated, facing water, with the hills visible on the far shore. Traditional Chinese beliefs about the orientation of burial sites, and the importance of facing water and open ground, were very much part of how these hillside cemeteries came to occupy the positions they do throughout Hong Kong.

Among those interred in the cemetery are figures who shaped Hong Kong and the wider region in ways still visible today. Eu Tong Sen (1877–1941), who built one of the largest business empires in colonial Malaya and Singapore before his wealth and influence extended to Hong Kong, is buried here. So is Admiral Chan Chak (1894–1949), who in December 1941 led a famous escape from besieged Hong Kong by torpedo boat, bringing British officers and Chinese personnel to safety through Japanese-controlled waters. Tam Woon-tong (1872–1954), a former chairman of Po Leung Kuk — the charity founded to protect women and children from trafficking — and a co-founder of Kowloon Motor Bus, helped bring public transport to the New Territories. Chan Nam Cheong (1900–1971) co-founded Vitasoy, the soy milk brand that became an institution in Hong Kong kitchens. Tang Ti-sheng (1917–1959) wrote for Cantonese opera and film. These were not peripheral lives; they were central to the city's commercial, cultural, and social history.

The cemetery has adapted to the changing practices of Hong Kong's Chinese communities over the decades since it opened. As cremation has become increasingly common — driven partly by the scarcity of land in one of the world's most densely populated cities — the cemetery developed columbariums to hold cremation niches. The first two were completed in 1974 and 1987. Demand continued to grow, and the first columbarium was expanded in 2015, providing additional niches to meet the rising preference for cremation over ground burial. This shift is a significant one in a culture where the treatment of the dead has historically been governed by specific ritual requirements, including the expectation of intact burial. The practical pressures of Hong Kong's land constraints have gradually reshaped those practices, and the cemetery's architecture reflects that transformation — older grave terraces on the slopes, newer columbarium buildings on the same hillside, serving the same families across different generations.