Hong Kong Tiananmen Vigil Is Enormous and Somber: Via NYTimes.com .

HONG KONG — Throngs of men, women and children gathered at a park here on Thursday evening for a enormous, somber candlelight vigil to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square killings.

The organizers said that 150,000 people joined the vigil, tying the record set by the first anniversary vigil in 1990 and dwarfing every vigil held since then. The police had no immediate estimate for the crowd.

The peaceful assemblage spilled out into nearby streets, shutting down traffic. Inside Victoria Park, thousands listened to songs and speakers who recounted the events on the night of the crackdown. A half-an-hour into the vigil, the lights in the park were extinguished and the attendees lit a forest of white candles in inverted conical paper shields.

Even before the vigil began at 8 p.m., the tens of thousands of people assembled represented the largest crowd for the annual event here in recent years. The only crowd since the early 1990s that came remotely close was in 2004, when the fifteenth anniversary of the military crackdown coincided with a surge in pro-democracy sentiment in Hong Kong.

Around the park on Thursday, numerous banners in Chinese demanded the vindication of the students and other Beijing residents who perished during the Chinese government crackdown against the protesters. There were people of all ages, from grey-haired retirees to young children whose parents accompanied them to explain why they felt so deeply about an event that took place before they were born.

Yvonne Chow, a middle-aged social worker, said that she had come to the vigil every year for two decades and was heartened to see the turnout on Thursday night.

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