CC18 Bukit Brown MRT Station

It is only my second week here at Bukit Brown station. The calls I made for food delivery proved futile. Rather, the name of the place keeps me wondering. Interestingly, Brown is in English and it comes after Bukit, which means hill in Malay.


A rainbow over here on Monday


Bukit Brown station "platform" (sneak peek)


Bukit Brown station tunnel (sneak peek)


Video of a nearby stream teeming with fish, probably the native White Spot aplocheilus panchax

So I did a little research online with the little time I had and this was what I found out about my workplace:

According to Wikipedia®, it is named after Bukit Brown Cemetery nearby. It is a shell station and will be top off.

According to Discover Singapore, the piece of land where the cemetery now stands was bought by George Henry Brown, a ship owner who came to Singapore in the 1840s. He arrived from Calcutta via Penang. He called the area Mount Pleasant, a name which is still applied to the residential road near the cemetery. The land was then bought by Ong Kew Ho and the Hokkien Huay Kuan which gave it to the She Ong Kongsi, a Chinese association.

The government acquired the land in 1919 after facing much reluctance and resistance on the kongsi's side to open a municipal cemetery for the Chinese. It was opened as a public burial ground, the Bukit Brown Municipal Cemetery on 1 Jan 1922 under the management of community leaders Tan Kheam Hock and See Tiong Wah. The cemetery was also known as Kheam Hock Road Cemetery.

The 213 acre cemetery was known among the Chinese as "kopi sua" or coffee hill. It has some very ornate graves with intricate carvings of the 24 Chinese stories of filial piety, with statues in the form of "Sikh Jagas", who were known as security guards of their rich Chinese employers when they were alive. In the 1970s, the government began to clear the cemetery for redevelopment which has been stagnated recently.