CRESWICK cemetery was briefly transformed into a Confucian shrine on Saturday, as more than 400 Chinese buried in unmarked graves were finally given a memorial.
A traditional Chinese offering ceremony was performed to officially unveil the memorial, erected by the Victorian Chinese Memorial Foundation to honour their ancestors.
Foundation treasurer Hong Tan was one of a large Chinese community contingent who travelled to Creswick to take part in the ceremony, which recognises those buried there after dying on the gold fields in the late 1800s.
An estimated 250 people attended.
"The Chinese miners interred there are essentially lost,'' Mr Tan said.
"We cannot possibly find who is buried there because they are all lost, so the memory is now formalised by the building of this memorial.
"It is very important to us because ancestral worship is a key tenet of Confucian culture and this is a way to respect our ancestors.''
The Chinese community members who travelled to Creswick enjoyed roast pork, vegetables and fruit after offering it to their ancestors, along with burning incense.
An estimated 4000 Chinese are thought to have populated the Creswick area at the height of the gold rush in the 1850s and 1860s.
Creswick Cemetery Trust secretary Wendy Ohlsen said it was nice to have a permanent memorial that recognised the contribution of Chinese members of the gold rush era in the historic town.
"We are trying to clean up the cemetery to make it more inviting to encourage people to look after their ancestors and to determine exactly where they are so we can commemorate the fact they were there,'' she said.
"We were thrilled to bits with the Chinese ceremony, it was fantastic and a lovely day."
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