24/52 - Bukit Brown Cemetery

Week 24 of 52
Bukit Brown Cemetery
Singapore

Since it is Halloween today I thought it would be fun to have a spooky themed 52 weeks blog this week.  I've been wanting to visit the Bukit Brown Cemetery for quite some time so finally made the trip out to see it. 

Bukit Brown Cemetery is actually a Chinese cemetery that has been abandoned since the 1970s.  The area is huge and covers approximately 213 acres of land.  It has been in the news quite a bit this year because there have been talks of exhuming the graves so that they can develop the land.  Just this past week there were a handful of articles in the newspaper because the Singaporean government have agreed to document the graves prior to exhumation in order to document and preserve the history.  According to the articles, about 5% of the nearly 100,000 graves will be exhumed to make way for a new road.

Gates at the entrance.

So, what does a Chinese cemetery look like?  And how is it different from a typical cemetery you would find in the US?

The plots are much larger than you would find in a US cemetery.  Also, in the US you would typically just find a single headstone to mark a plot but as you can see in the picture above there is a lot more than just a single headstone. 

Obviously, the headstones are marked in Chinese so I have absolutely no idea what any of them said.  Although, a fair number of the headstones had photos on them which was a little creepy to me...

A lot of the plots were decorated with creatures from Chinese mythology...

Some of them were even guarded by soldiers...

The cemetery itself is a beautiful and quiet area in an otherwise bustling city.  Even without the beauty and history of the cemetery it was a great place to just stroll around and enjoy a nice walk. 

A few other pictures from my adventure...

And lastly...the scene of the cobra encounter...

I hope you all have a spooky Halloween!