Just last Saturday, I visited the temple at Balestier Road where my late grandparents’ ashes are interred. It has been sometime since I met my maternal relatives, and I chipped in to help my mother and uncles lay out food offerings on the table before we made some prayers to the patron deity of the temple.
My grandfather was originally buried in a cemetery at Bukit Timah, until his grave had to make way for new condominiums at the late 1980s. The Chinese traditionally bury their dead in accordance with Confucian traditions, and this was just the case in Singapore just 50-60 years ago, when cemeteries dotted across the heartlands of Singapore, and housing estates such as Yishun and Bishan sit on former cemetery lands.
The mindset has changed over the years, as the government was successful in its efforts to convince the predominantly ethnic Chinese population to adopt cremation of the deceased. They roped in the funeral specialists to mediate funerary practices to the Chinese populace. These specialists reframed various funerary practices, such as Geomancy and religious rites to suit the practice of cremation.
Exhumation
The first exhumation took place in 1962 when 4 Chinese cemeteries were exhumed to make way for Queenstown. The implementation of such measures is deemed to be necessary in land-scarce Singapore. As our pioneering leaders drafted the National Master Plan back in 1965, cremation of the dead is seen to be a viable path to be taken in order to maximize land use. By the early 1990s, more than two-thirds of Chinese Singaporeans opted to cremate their deceased. In turn, the government was able to carry out exhumation of cemeteries without incurring too much wrath from the Chinese population.
Before a tomb is exhumed, a Taoist priest would usually be invited to chant prayers. The gravediggers would commence exhumation following prayers, and might use a mallet to smash the tombstone to indicate that the remains were about to be re-moved, but practices might vary across families. The gravedigger would dig at the soil with a hoe, and would need to overcome the heavy brick linings laid above the grave. Retrieving bones from the casket could be a challenging task especially in muddy conditions whereby not all bone fragments might be retrieved, especially when the skeletal remains had already been fragmented. In some cases, skeletal remains could not be retrieved as acidic soil conditions had dissolve the casket and bones over the decades. For those whose remains could be retrieved, these were typically washed in Chinese wine and packed into a container before being sent for cremation. The cremated remains were usually then stored in a niche of a columbarium.
The area of land that one average-sized tomb can accommodate is up to 30-50 niches for the same area of land in a columbarium. In a nation where land is a precious resource to accommodate the populace for housing, industrial and economic activities, cremation is seen as a viable alternative choice. The authorities were also concerned about the effect of pollution in cemeteries especially if the body is buried at a shallow depth, as disease vectors can leech from decomposing remains to pollute reservoirs. As cremation involves pulverizing the body at very high temperatures, all traces of these disease vectors that the deceased subject might harbour during a lifetime would be destroyed in the process. These two major factors weighed heavily in the minds of our pioneering policymakers when they deliberated about the use of land in Singapore.
A country needs land for National Development, and more so for Singapore. But in order to accommodate our deceased loved ones in a smaller space, is cremation the only solution to accommodate all their remains? Singaporeans love to brainstorm for new solutions, and there are definitely more alternatives other than the existing practices of cremation and burial.
The Vietnamese way
Just across the South China Sea in Vietnam, the Vietnamese also similarly practice routine exhumation of their deceased, which they aptly call “Boc Mo”. As with Singapore, Vietnam has an official policy of encouraging cremation due to land constraints faced by a booming population, but the vast majority of the populace still chooses to bury their dead. Unlike the Chinese, the Vietnamese would typically exhume the grave of their ancestors 3 years after death and burial. As with Singapore, gravediggers are often hired to carry out the process, although some families may opt to dig the graves themselves.
Pretty much like the Chinese, the Vietnamese would initiate a Taoist prayer ceremony prior to exhumation and bones that are retrieved from the coffin would be hand-washed with rice wine. The bones are transferred over to a smaller ceramic container typically the size of a medium-sized plastic box. The bones are stacked in a manner beginning with the limbs at the bottom, and the skull at the top. Gold-lined joss paper lined in between each layer of bones. The remains would be reburied in a smaller plot of land, often located within the rice fields of the family land.
Europe
Across the globe in Europe, there are many catacombs that have existed. Catacombs are underground passageways typically used for religious purposes, and in many cases remains of deceased individuals are interred. The Catacombs of Rome in Italy are the earliest of such examples in Europe, dating back to the 2nd Century AD. The Catacombs of Rome consist of at least forty individual catacombs whereby the remains of early Christians, Jews and Pagans are interred. At least 16 Roman Catholic popes were interred, together with notable early Christian saints and martyrs.
The Catacombs of Rome came about as the Romans stipulated laws to forbid burials within the boundaries of ancient Rome. Just like modern-day Singapore, Rome faced land shortage problems came about due to overcrowding within the city. Although burials were allowed outside the city perimeter, it was only affordable for the wealthy aristocrats. As the early Christians belonged to the lower castes and could not afford to buy land for burial, the first catacombs were constructed. The practice of the interring the dead in catacombs declined from the 5th Century AD onwards, as the Christians were able to obtain land for cemeteries.
Internment of the dead need not take place in subterranean chambers, and it could be housed in buildings or caves called ossuaries. At the beginning of the 14th century, an epidemic known to historians as the Black Death spread across Europe, killing up to 100 million people during that time. As death rates rose sharply, so did demand for land space for burials. It was at this time when the concept of interring the dead outside of cemeteries re-surfaced once again.
In Rome, Italy, there exists a Capuchin Crypt located beneath the grounds of Our Lady of the Conception of the Capuchins – a Roman Catholic church – where skeletal remains of some 4,000 Capuchin friars are interred. The skeletons are housed collectively together based on the anatomical parts of the human body; 3 crypts store the Skulls, Leg Bones and Thigh bones as well as the Pelvises separately. Most of the bodies were buried in the soil for several years to allow the course of decomposition to take place, before the remains were exhumed and interred in the crypt. A few bodies were allowed to be interred directly, and over the years, mummification of the body took place.
Caretakers of the ossuaries were astute enough to incorporate artistic elements to make these places more meaningful. In some ossuaries such as the Church of the San Bernardino alle Ossa in Milan, Italy and the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic, skulls and long bones were carefully fashioned and arranged to form chandeliers, coat of arms and garlands.
Fast forward another few hundred years, and the English and French re-introduced the very same practice that the ancient Romans had once done. By the early 19th century, both London and Paris faced land shortages for burials as existing cemeteries were quickly used up. London’s city administration passed a law in the 1830s to prohibit new burials within London’s church graveyards, and seven plots of land were gazette for public burials over the next ten years. They formed the seven largest cemeteries in London, informally known as the “Magnificent Seven”. Of these, three of them – Kensal Green, West Norwood and Brompton cemeteries had underground catacombs for those who wished to opt for subterranean internment. Paris also took on a similar direction, and abandoned underground quarries dating back to the 12th century were renovated. Between the 1780s until 1810, some 6 million tombs were collectively reinterred in the abandoned quarries which later became known as the Catacombs of Paris.
Singapore
Singapore has faced, and still faces similar problems of land constraint and population rise, although in a much more severe form than what Europe had experienced back in the Middle Ages and 19th century. The question that we should now ask is that: Is cremation of our exhumed ancestors a necessary measure?
The preservation of skeletal remains have definitely its applications in extracting ancient DNA to detect if past populations may have been suffering from any epidemics or diseases. Morphological examination of intact remains can also help medical researchers to glean raw leads on illnesses where orthopedic disorders would up show such as Arthritis, Spondylosis, and many other characterized clinical presentations.
The latest exhumation of the Bukit Brown cemetery has generated a greater degree of public awareness and concern that Singapore society has not seen before. While the government’s wish to reclaim cemetery land for National Development purposes is not totally unwarranted, we should learn to see and appreciate that exhumation of the bones and re-interring them in an un-cremated form should suffice. Exhumation of the graves to free up available land directly contributes to alleviating Singapore’s land scarcity, but the subsequent step of cremation is not a resolution to the land scarcity problem.
As I was browsing through photographs of a contributor who uploaded photos of his grandfather’s exhumation at Bukit Brown, it was observed that skeletal remains could fit snugly into a Toyogo box just before being sent off for cremation. This is the point where the justification of the stipulated cremation process baffles me; can’t a Toyogo box like this be interred in an ossuary instead? I have not heard of any ossuaries in Southeast Asia thus far, but existing Colombariums can definitely accommodate uncremated remains by just expanding the niche to 2 or 3 times the current size, and stacked up in a multi-storey setting. Wouldn’t this save sufficient space as well, just as the constructors of the catacombs and ossuaries in Europe came to think of this idea?
As a small country where human resource is our nation’s prime asset, countless numbers of Singaporeans have gone abroad to interact with our immediate neighbours and more so from the Western countries to pick up skills, knowledge and to even adopt their cultural preferences. To our immediate ASEAN neighbours like Vietnam, we have invited so many students to pursue and further their studies here and their funerary practices are definitely something for us to ponder upon. To our Western friends from whom we have approached to train us in their scientific and artistic expertise in every possible area of development, it should be timely for us to seek inspiration from others’ funerary practices.
Singapore has sought from other countries for inspiration and ideas. And seeking inspiration to expanding the choice of our current funerary practices should not be excluded from our national agenda.
References
- NEA source on burial/cremation practices
- Funerary practices in VN and Cambodia
- Burying (and re-burying) the dead in My Tho, Vietnam
- 7 sinister ossuaries
- Catacombs of London
- Catacombs of Paris
Jonathan Chan