On a number of occasions, remains in the Protestant Cemetery have been disinterred to make way for road developments, and have been placed in niches in an ossuary, which continues to be used for contemporary cremations.

Some sections of the Protestant Cemetery tended to be reserved for particular groups of deceased, e.g., army, navy, Hong Kong Police.

There are two main categories of graves that can be found in Hong Kong Cemetery: As the name states, this category of graves for British military dead, spanned from the late 19th century until the early 1960s (when the Government of Hong Kong established another cemetery near Sai Wan for military dead in 1965).

There are about 100 military graves of World War I – 79 of them are in Hong Kong Cemetery, mainly the soldiers who died in Hong Kong and Kowloon Military Hospital, which received the sick and wounded from the German-leased territory of Qingdao, on the Shandong peninsula in north-east China.

There are also two monuments erected by the Royal Artillery in memory of their fallen comrades, which were later moved to the Hong Kong Museum of Coastal Defence.

The civilian burials in the cemetery are diverse and exemplify the social structure at the early stage of the colonial era.

The UK folk artist Johnny Flynn released a song in 2008 about the cemetery, found on the album A Larum.