No rest for Singapore’s dead

Paying respects: A couple making an offering to their ancestors at Bukit Brown cemetery in Singapore, which is scheduled to be cleared for housing by 2030. — Thomson Reuters Foundation

SINGAPORE: 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.