A love from beyond the grave – Kurt Tong on his ‘ghost marriage’ photographs

His latest project, piecing together the story of a bereaved Hong Kong man who wed his dead fiance, has won an award. The photogapher reveals how it began with the discovery of a trunk of keepsakes

At the centre of Kurt Tong's elaborate visual narrative Dear Franklin, there is a doomed love story that is also a ghost story. It traces the intertwined lives of Franklin Lung, a man who rose from poor beginnings to become part of Hong Kong's social elite in the 1940s, and a young woman known only as Dongyu, the daughter of a high-ranking Chinese general.

They met, fell in love, but shortly after their engagement, Dongyu was one of several thousand refugees fleeing the Chinese communist army on board the SS Kiangya when it struck an old Japanese sea mine. Their love story should have ended with this terrible tragedy," says Tong, but it continued after her death because Franklin agreed to a ghost marriage', an elaborate traditional ceremony in which he became eternally wedded to Dongyu in the spirit world."