Here Lies a Graveyard Where ‘East and West Came Together’<br />After watching many of their best-known monuments and neighborhoods leveled over the past decades, Singaporeans began to take action — a turning point<br />that people here compare to the 1963 destruction of Pennsylvania Station, a Beaux-Arts masterpiece in New York City whose loss catalyzed historic preservation in the United States.<br />By IAN JOHNSONAPRIL 4, 2017<br />SINGAPORE — In the middle of this island nation of highways<br />and high-rises lies a wrinkle in time: Bukit Brown, one of the world’s largest Chinese cemeteries.<br />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;<br />and Claire Leow, a former journalist, I began to understand how this city-state was crucial to the British Empire’s Asian holdings.<br />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;<br />and as record of one country’s famous people it recalled Père Lachaise in Paris or Buenos Aires’s Cementerio de la Recoleta.<br />That has put Bukit Brown at the center of an important social movement in a country<br />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.<br />British said that I noticed a lot of graves looked very old and, in fact, that some were from the time of Raffles,
