Grave concerns

IN SINGAPORE, a small, crowded island where the population has more than doubled in a generation, the dead have long had to make way for the living and the unborn. In the 1960s, as a graveyard was cleared, a government minister dismissed objections with the question: “Do you want me to look after our dead grandparents, or do you want to look after your grandchildren?” These days, however, resistance to the planned building of an eight-lane expressway through another cemetery, at Bukit Brown, is less easily swept aside.

Not only is this a special cemetery—the biggest Chinese graveyard outside China, and Singapore’s first municipal pan-Chinese one (as opposed to those for different clans or dialect groups). Singaporeans are also less docile than they were. Bukit Brown, which closed to new applicants in 1973, has become embroiled in their search for a sense of national identity; and hence in a debate about what sort of country Singapore wants to be.