Bukit Brown

            My talk went well on Wednesday and afterwards a bunch of us went to lunch there at NUS. After we ate, one of the people there offered to give anyone who wanted a quick tour of the Bukit Brown cemetery, just a short drive away. I went along with two others for the tour.

            Turns out, our guide was actually a member of the Singapore Heritage Society and the spokesperson for the cemetery in the face of a massive road project that will destroy the cemetery (the project is going through, her job is to make sure that the graves get documented and as much historical value as possible gets preserved). The cemetery is huge, both in size and in terms of graves (our guide said that the whole cemetery might have up to 250,000 graves). It was opened in the early 1920s and was mainly a place for rich Chinese families.

            It was amazing how, only ten minutes from NUS, we were basically swallowed up by a jungle that had, in turn, taken over the cemetery. A big monkey was even on the road as we drove in. We did a drive through the area and took a few short walks to look at some graves that were not visible from the road (and I found a bunch of stinging ants…). It was a pretty amazing place and it seems a shame that so much of it will be destroyed to relieve a bit of traffic congestion. But, that’s Singapore I guess.

          We're going on a weekend trip to Malacca tomorrow with our friends so hope to post about that in a few days.

a large Macaque ran in front of the car and scampered up the tree after we entered

view of some of the graves

some had beautiful tiles

our guide's favorite, the "naked angel"

many graves had Sikh guards

many graves also had shrines to the earth deity

view from the road

a lot of the underbrush had actually been cleared away recently for Qing Ming

markers for the preservation project

it had some of the biggest trees we've seen so far

there was a big valley and stream running through it

on the way up to the biggest and oldest grave there

he was the father of the two brothers who started the New World Amusement Park (later home to a cabaret with Filipino musicians)

a colorful grave that we saw back in the car