This weekend, I went for a walk with my family in a place called Bukit Brown Cemetery.  It is a secluded, overgrown graveyard in Singapore.  It is unique in that you are in the middle of a metropolis that is Singapore but be standing in the solitude of a rainforest.

Bukit Brown Cemetery is also known to the local community as Kopi Sua or Coffee Hill.  It is a Chinese cemetery, established in the early 20th Century and was the biggest Chinese graveyard outside China.  The cemetery was named after its first owner, George Henry Brown, who was a ship owner and arrived in Singapore from Calcutta in the 1840s.  He bought the area and named it Mount Pleasant.

As I wondered around this oasis of nature and calmness, it was very distressing to see all the construction work underway, something very common in Singapore.  The issue here is that Bukit Brown Cemetery is slowly but sure being sacrificed to the god of progress.  Large swathes of land have already been dug up and this beautify setting will soon be replaced by suburbia, concrete and glass.

In a place like Singapore, where such places are rare and revered, it is a shame that such a tranquil and spiritual place is being ruined to make way for apartments and the MRT (underground system).

If you are keen to see this wonderful place before it disappears forever, you can find it located between Lornie Road and Mount Pleasant Road, off Sime Road and Kheam Hock Road.

For further information about Bukit Brown Cemetery, here are some links, including a site to help save it from extinction:
1) Information about the cemetery: http://bukitbrown.com/main/
2) Save the cemetery site: https://sosbukitbrown.wordpress.com/
3) Preserving the history of Bukit Brown: http://www.bukitbrown.info/