My first visit to Bukit Brown Cemetery and an unforgettable one.
Lush greenery with the company of the wildlife made this cemetery much less of a cemetery. Step into this green world before slapping it with an “Eerie” tag. Macritchie Reservoir is pale in comparison with Bukit Brown on the Greenery scale!
We walked around, attempting to find different tombstones of certain well-known individuals in Singapore with the map provided by API. However, it seems like some of the tags placed by API have dropped over the time.
We decided to randomly walk around Bukit Brown, enjoy probably the last Green Corridor in Singapore. Through this, we found Ang Seah Im (Seah Im street near bugis named after him), Lee Hoon Leong (Lee Kwan Yew’s Grandfather), Kung Tiang Siong (72nd generation of Confucious descendents), the infamous triple tomb and lastly tombstone of Ong Sam Leong and Sons (largest tombstone in Bukit Brown, with some claiming it to be as big as 10 3-rm Singapore flats). There are many others that have contributed to the growth of Singapore, which we failed to find. I would suggest anyone who wishes to know more in details to join the Bukit Brown Tours to get a better understanding. You will be surprised how knowledgable the people that lead the tours are.
2nd part of this trip was a bonus. After our walk, we were deciding to get some lunch and we met the Bukit Brown folks. Having chatted with Tien, I raised a point about some abandoned temple in Bukit Brown and he directed us to Raymond of API for more details (I heard that API had went in before and lucky us to have met the co-founder of API!)
Raymond was extremely enthusiastic and he just decided to bring everyone there! It took us about 20 minutes to bash through the forest to reach the temple, which was abandoned (of course) have been partially reclaimed by nature (the roots of trees were starting to eat into the structure of the place with part of the temple’s roof collapsed). We spent about 20 minutes taking photos before deciding to take another route back.
This was the 30 minutes of forest bashing, where Raymond brought us through many old tombstones tombstones (some dated back to the 19th century!), including some fengshui tombs (Note that there is a tomb towards the end of the post with a green boulder on the right of the picture – that depicts the green dragon on the left of the tomb. Totally Fengshui!)
Enjoy my pictures! I’m bad with words so I hope my pictures tell a better story!
Anyway, the government have decided to razed part of Bukit Brown Cemetery to the ground, to give way to a highway (So much about Heritage. Blah!). Access to Bukit Brown might be restricted after March 2012. Please go and check out the place at least once if you have never been there before!
Also, do support the Bukit Brown Facebook page. You can also sign up on the Petition when you go to Bukit Brown over the weekends!
BIGBert 