Fight to save cemetery

HISTORY AND HERITAGE IN OTHER CLEARED GRAVES HAVE BEEN LOST City authorities encouraged people to disperse the ashes in the sea.

When Singapore’s government said it would exhume about 4 000 graves in the defunct Bukit Brown cemetery for an eight-lane highway, an unusually vocal campaign grew quickly to save one of the last remaining artefacts of the past in the modern city.

The cemetery, a rare patch of jungle surrounded by manicured gardens and high rises, has about 100 000 graves, including hundreds of early Chinese immigrants. It is also considered an important relic of the Japanese occupation and World War II.

Although the cemetery closed for burials nearly 50 years ago, descendants still visit their ancestors’ graves. But that ritual will soon end, as Bukit Brown is scheduled to be cleared for housing by 2030.

“This is a living museum,” said Darren Koh, a volunteer with advocacy group All Things Bukit Brown, which has offered guided walks in the cemetery since 2011, when the exhumations were announced.

“We lost a lot of history and heritage in the other cemeteries that were cleared, so we were galvanised into action to save Bukit Brown,” he said.

With some 5.6 million people in an area three-fifths the size of New York City, and with the population estimated to grow to 6.9 million by 2030, Singapore is running out of space.

The island nation has long reclaimed land from the sea, and plans to move more of its transport, utilities and storage underground to free up space for housing, offices and greenery.

It has also cleared dozens of cemeteries for homes and highways.

“Planning for long-term land use in land-scarce Singapore often requires us to make difficult decisions,” the city’s Urban Redevelopment Authority and the Land Transport Authority said.

Bukit Brown has been earmarked for residential use since 1991, and while the government is committed to “retaining and protecting our natural and built heritage, we need to also balance it against other needs such as housing,” officials said.

The Chinese have traditionally believed that the dead must be buried, and that without a proper burial the soul will not rest, but wander about as a “hungry ghost”.

But the burial practice has changed in increasingly crowded cities from Hong Kong to Taiwan to China.

Traditional grave burials gave way to cremation, and the use of columbaria to store urns with ashes. As even columbaria became crowded, city authorities encouraged people to disperse the ashes in the sea, woodlands or parklands.

“The conception of cemeteries as space-wasting activity takes precedence over the idea of cemeteries as sites of leisurely activity,” said Lily Kong, a geographer previously at the National University of Singapore.

“To depart from the practice of grave burial requires a significant cultural shift. In many ways, it may be said that this shift has been made,” she wrote in a 2012 paper on burial rituals. –