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🕯️ Tiananmen Vigil|維園六四燭光集會

Related: Hong Kong Alliance | 8964 Museum | Chow Hang-tung | 🗽 Statues & Monuments

Tens of thousands hold candles at the 20th-anniversary June 4th vigil in Victoria Park, 2009 The 20th-anniversary vigil in Victoria Park, 4 June 2009, beneath banners reading 薪火相傳 ("passing the flame") and 六四廿年 ("June 4th, 20 years"). Photo: Kap Leung, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

For thirty years, on the evening of 4 June, tens of thousands of Hongkongers filled the football pitches of Victoria Park with candles to mourn those killed in Beijing's 1989 Tiananmen crackdown. It was the largest annual commemoration of June 4th anywhere on Chinese soil — the one place under the Chinese flag where the massacre could be remembered in the open, year after year. Organised by the Hong Kong Alliance, the vigil was a fixture of the city's civic life from 1990 until 2019. Then, within two years, it was banned, criminalised, and erased — its site given over to a pro-Beijing carnival, its organisers imprisoned, and the very act of lighting a candle in the park turned into grounds for arrest.

This page preserves the vigil's history, and asks for your help completing its record.

Born from the massacre (1989–1990)

As the 1989 democracy movement swelled in Beijing, Hong Kong — then a British colony — watched with alarm and solidarity. On 21 May 1989 activists founded the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (支聯會), and in the days around the 4 June crackdown as many as a million people marched in the city. The next year, on the first anniversary in 1990, the Alliance held the first formal candlelight vigil in Victoria Park; an estimated 150,000 attended. It would recur every year for three decades — a disciplined, peaceful ritual of songs, speeches, a minute's silence, and a field of flickering candles, closing with the vow to "never forget June 4th" (毋忘六四) and the demand to "vindicate the 1989 democracy movement."

Thirty years of candlelight

Through the 1990s and 2000s the vigil endured as the emotional centre of Hong Kong's democracy movement, its crowds swelling on landmark anniversaries. Attendance figures were always contested — organisers counting high, police low — but the scale was unmistakable:

  • 1990 — first anniversary vigil: ~150,000
  • 2009 (20th anniversary): organisers 150,000; police 62,800
  • 2012: ~180,000, swelled by anger over the death of dissident Li Wangyang
  • 2014 (25th anniversary): ~180,000, on the eve of the Umbrella Movement
  • 2019 (30th anniversary): 180,000+ — the last vigil ever held in the park

The 2019 gathering, weeks before the anti-extradition-bill protests erupted, was among the largest ever. No one there knew it would be the final one.

The banning (2020–2021)

In 2020, for the first time in three decades, police banned the vigil, citing Covid-19 restrictions — days before Beijing imposed the National Security Law on 30 June. Thousands defied the ban anyway, streaming into Victoria Park to light candles; some two dozen activists — among them Joshua Wong and Alliance chair Lee Cheuk-yan — were later prosecuted and jailed for taking part in or inciting the "unauthorised assembly."

In 2021 the ban returned, now backed by the NSL. Police sealed off Victoria Park behind barriers and deployed thousands of officers to keep mourners out. On the morning of 4 June, Alliance vice-chair Chow Hang-tung was arrested for promoting the banned vigil. That September, under mounting national-security pressure, the Alliance voted to disband; its leaders were remanded in custody, its assets frozen, and its 8964 Museum driven online and overseas.

Erasure (2022–)

Riot police ring an empty, sealed-off Victoria Park on the June 4th anniversary, 2021 The same football pitches, sealed and empty on the 2021 anniversary, ringed by police. Photo: Studio Incendo, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

From 2022 the erasure became deliberate. The football pitches where the candles once burned were handed each June to a pro-Beijing "Hometown Market" carnival, filling the site with food stalls and patriotic displays on the anniversary. Heavy police patrols swept Causeway Bay; officers stopped, searched and detained people merely for mourning — carrying an electric candle, holding flowers, wearing a Goddess of Democracy T-shirt, or displaying the number 8964. Performance artists were escorted away; the owner of a car with a "US 8964" plate shipped it abroad after harassment.

Yet the commemoration did not die — it scattered. As Victoria Park fell silent, June 4th vigils multiplied across the diaspora: in 2025, more than 30 events in 20 cities — from Taipei and London to Vancouver and Washington — kept the candles lit beyond Beijing's reach. And from behind bars, Chow Hang-tung marked each anniversary with a hunger strike.

The keepers of the flame

The vigil's disappearance is inseparable from the fate of the people who ran it. In 2026 the Hong Kong Alliance and its leaders were convicted and jailed for incitement to subversion — Chow Hang-tung (7 years 3 months), Lee Cheuk-yan (7 years) and founding member Albert Ho (5 years 2 months) — the state treating three decades of peaceful remembrance as a crime against itself. The Alliance's Tiananmen relics were scattered too: its Goddess of Democracy and Pillar of Shame were removed and seized, and its museum survives only online, from overseas (the 8964 Museum).

From prison, Chow Hang-tung has insisted the flame outlasts its keepers. In a message marking the anniversary she wrote: 「燭光再小，也永不會滅，因為我們有彼此」 — "However small the candlelight, it will never go out, because we have each other" (as reported by 加拿大國際廣播電台 RCI 中文《當維園燭光晚會不再》). The diaspora has taken up the task: in cities such as Toronto, veterans of the 1989 movement and younger émigrés — some of whom attended the Victoria Park vigil only once before leaving Hong Kong — now hold their own June 4th commemorations, passing the memory on.

Help preserve the vigil — a call for submissions

The physical vigil is gone, and inside Hong Kong even remembering it now carries risk. That makes the record more precious. We are gathering materials to preserve the memory of the Victoria Park vigil and its diaspora successors, and we invite you to contribute:

  • Photographs and video of any June 4th vigil — Victoria Park or overseas, any year. Wide crowd shots, candles, banners, stage programmes, the sea of lights.
  • Personal memories and oral histories — your first vigil, why you went, what it meant, what changed.
  • Ephemera — programmes, leaflets, candle holders, badges, banners, songbooks, tickets, photographs of the annual booths.
  • Diaspora records — footage, posters and accounts from vigils held abroad since 2020.

If you have material to share, or can help preserve it, please see Participation and How to archive — and take care to protect your identity when you do (Signal, Tor, anonymised files). Even a single photograph helps keep the candlelight from going dark.

Sources

香港中文報道 (Chinese-language coverage):

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