By IAN JOHNSON
SINGAPORE — In the middle of this island nation of highways and high-rises lies a wrinkle in time: Bukit Brown, one of the world’s largest Chinese cemeteries. Now neglected and overgrown, it offers an incredible array of tombstones, statues and shrines just four miles north of the downtown’s banks, malls and regional headquarters.
For years, the 213-acre site was a destination for Halloween thrill seekers and bird watchers, a haven of green in an overcrowded land. But in recent years it has become something much more powerful: a pilgrimage site for Singaporeans trying to reconnect with their country’s vanishing past. That has put Bukit Brown at the center of an important social movement in a country that has rarely tolerated community activism — a battle between the state, which plans to level part of the cemetery, and a group of citizens dedicated to its preservation.
Thanks to the explanations by guides like Ian Chong, a professor at the National University of Singapore; Ang Yik Han, an engineer; lawyer Fabian Tee, a lawyer; and Claire Leow, a former journalist, I began to understand how this city-state was crucial to the British Empire’s Asian holdings.
Built in 1922, Bukit Brown was the final resting place for about 100,000 Singapore families until it was closed in 1972. Its importance is greater than its relatively recent 50-year history implies because many historic graves were relocated there from other cemeteries that were paved over. “This is where East and West came together,” Mr. Ang said. “We are standing at the center of the island, the belly of the dragon, and we can’t let it be cut open.”
We surveyed the enormous mausoleum of Ong Sam Leong, a supplier of labor to the Christmas Islands, who died in 1917 and whose grave was relocated here. I also saw the grave of Tan Kim Cheng, who married Anna to the King of Siam, and those of revolutionaries who supported Sun Yat-sen when he was plotting the ultimately successful downfall of China’s last dynasty.
I couldn’t help but think of many of the world’s other great resting places. In terms of trees and wildlife, Bukit Brown evoked London’s Highgate Cemetery; as a retreat from daily life it felt like Green-Wood in Brooklyn; and as record of one country’s famous people it recalled Père Lachaise in Paris or Buenos Aires’s Cementerio de la Recoleta.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/04/worl ... ether.html