Bukit Brown chronicles: A brief cultural history of the Chinese in Singapore through the lens of a cemetery

Abstract

Bukit Brown Cemetery was the first Chinese municipal cemetery in Singapore, opened in 1922 to cater to the burial needs of all non-Christian Chinese in Singapore. This chapter argues that the cemetery captured a fragment of the Chinese community’s cultural history in the inter-war years of the last century, profiling the emergence of a pan-Chinese consciousness, the regional embeddedness of the Singapore Chinese, and the cosmopolitan character of Singapore and its Chinese.