Teo Kah Seng

Introducing my paternal grandfather, Teo Kah Seng, born 1906, died 1959. His ancestral hometown was Tong’an, Xiamen, Fujian, China.

After three attempts and a mini treasure hunt of sorts, I finally found his grave!

I was interviewing my dad about his family, when he mentioned that my grandfather was buried in Bukit Brown. As the latter had passed away suddenly in 1959, 13 years before the municipal cemetery at Bukit Brown was permanently closed to burials, it made sense that he would be buried there, instead of being cremated and laid to rest in a columbarium.

I decided to ask my dad to take me to the grave, so I could document it and add another layer to the research into my family history. My dad told me he last visited the grave more than three decades ago - he stopped doing so after his mother passed away in 1988.

However, he thought he could remember the rough location of the grave. He pointed out the area on a map of Bukit Brown I printed. The area was in the northern half of the cemetery, after it had been sliced in half by the concrete and asphalt monstrosity that is Lornie Highway.

So we headed there last weekend. My brother dropped us off at Sime Road, and we walked in via a track off a slipway feeding into Lornie Highway. Alas, we could not find a way to the spot he had pointed out - there was no clear path there, and the surrounding forest was too thick to traverse. After an hour of searching, we gave up.

My dad then rang his sister - who has been visiting the grave for Qing Ming (Tomb Sweeping Day) every year - for directions. She offered to take us to it.

Yesterday, her husband drove us to... not Bukit Brown, but Kopi Sua, a cemetery just south of Bukit Brown, separated from it by Mount Pleasant Road and Onraet Road. I was speechless when my aunt stopped the car along Mount Pleasant Road and said “yes, we have to stop here and walk in”. My dad had made a complete mistake about his father’s grave’s location - Kopi Sua was more than a kilometre away from the part of Bukit Brown he had pointed out!

More disappointment followed. My aunt led us inside the cemetery, but inexplicably, she could not locate the grave, despite having visited it only 20 months before. We combed the area for more than an hour, but to no avail.

My dad and aunt in Kopi Sua.

After we had departed for home, my dad recalled two more clues: The grave’s number was L52, and there was a coconut tree near it.

Refusing to give up, I made another trip to Kopi Sua the following day, today. This time, I went alone. I entered from the south, through an opening in the grass verge of the Pan-Island Expressway. I found out that the graves in the south were numbered in the 100s and 200s, so I trekked north through knee and thigh-deep grass.

The south side of the hill called Kopi Sua.

Eventually, I reached the area where my aunt had searched yesterday. The graves there were numbered in the 50s, so I knew I was very near. I started systematically scanning every grave.

After a few minutes, I found it: Grave L52. There was a coconut tree nearby, and coconuts scattered around the grave.

Success!

It helped that I had done research on traditional Chinese graves for my work, so I knew what to look out for.

The main information of the deceased is in the middle of the gravestone, running top to bottom:

The first two characters are merely respectful placeholders: Xian Kao means Prominent Deceased Father. The third and fourth characters are Jia Cheng in Mandarin, or Kah Seng in Hokkien - the deceased’s given name. The last three characters are Zhang Gong Mu, meaning Honourable Mr Teo’s Grave.

I offered my Ah Gong an Old Chang Kee curry puff and a can of Carlsberg beer. As Old Chang Kee was created in 1956, he might have tasted the original food just before his untimely death.

I spotted my dad’s given name (Eng Chee in Hokkien, Ying Zhi in Mandarin) on the gravestone (circled):

The grave looked like it needed a lot of cleaning, though. Years of moss caked the stone:

The grave mound from the back:

It was a very satisfying day. My dad - the typical Asian dad - is usually reticent, but when I called him excitedly to tell him I had found his father’s grave, he exclaimed “Well done!”.

We’ll be back the following weekend to clean Ah Gong’s grave. He’s back with us now!

The Land of Silver

An 1836 geopolitical report filed by Scottish diplomatic agent John Anderson (1795-1845), on the sultanate of Perak, Malaya, in the Singapore Chronicle and Commercial Register:

In the report, Anderson provided important information about the geography of the region, its villages and populations, and its sovereign the Sultan of Perak, but all for an ulterior motive of course.

The hilly, jungle-filled lands were sparsely populated by peoples “much less civilised than the (Kedah) people”, but Perak was part of “Tin Country”, which meant it was potentially of value to the British Empire. After all, “Perak is the Land of of (sic) Silver”, the “Silver” here being tin, is it not?

As a child, I read extensively about European explorations of foreign, “exotic” (in European eyes) lands. At the time, these stories captivated me. It was only much later that I learned about the nuances of such narratives in the broader context of colonial exploitation and subjugation, but the romance of fearless ventures into the unknown stayed with me. Many a daydream was about me voyaging to distant lands a la Gulliver’s Travels.

That is why even today, reports such as Anderson’s still grab my attention - and fire my imagination. If I had been a European working in Southeast Asia in colonial times, I would have loved to work on compiling reports such as his.

Travel writer Isabella Bird, and two natives, riding an elephant in Perak, Malaya, in 1883.

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One piece of trivia related to modern Singapore: The last place name in the article is “Burnam” - a reference to Perak’s River Bernam; it gave its name to Tanjong Pagar’s Bernam Street, just one of many Malayan place names in the city-state.

Bernam Street, Singapore. Credit: Google Maps.

Before the move

Come 6 December, Jurong East Temporary Bus Interchange - next to Jurong East MRT Interchange - will close and shift to a nearby site.

This will be the third version of a bus interchange in the Jurong East area.

Jurong East Bus Interchange first opened in 1985, directly north of the MRT station, which opened three years later. The bus interchange was at the junction of Jurong East Street 12 and Boon Lay Way.

The area around Jurong East MRT Interchange in 1991. Jurong East Bus Interchange was to its north.

An aerial view of Jurong East Bus Interchange sometime before 2011, facing west. Credit: Urban Redevelopment Authority.

The interchange served the area for 26 years, until 2011, when it moved to the present site on the other side of the MRT interchange.

The land freed up by the move allowed for the construction of the condominium complex J Gateway, Westgate, and Jurong East Mall, otherwise known as Jem. Most of Jurong East Street 12 was expunged for these landmarks, and the part of Jurong East Street 13 serving the new temporary bus interchange was renamed Jurong Gateway Road.

The area around Jurong East MRT Interchange in 2020. Credit: Streetdirectory.com.

After 6 December, the site of the temporary bus interchange will be redeveloped for the Jurong Region Line and an Integrated Transport Hub, which should be completed by 2027. This means the third version of Jurong East Bus Interchange will last just seven years.

Today, I visited the temporary bus interchange to take pictures of the place before it moves.

Jurong East Temporary Bus Interchange has seven boarding berths, B1 to B7.

Credit: Land Transport Guru.

Tower Transit, the anchor operator of the bus interchange which falls under the Bulim Bus Package, has put up signs in the interchange and stickers on its buses announcing the impending move “across the road”.

What I love about bus interchanges is the continuous movement of buses and passengers. Buses pull in, passengers disembark or board, they move out. The activity never stops.