“Their name liveth for evermore”

Today, I visited Kranji War Cemetery for work.

It was my first time there in several years, and it was good to be back. The place is vast, very quiet and peaceful, and evokes a lot of feelings. If it wasn’t so far away from the rest of civilisation, I’d gladly work there every day.

The origin of Kranji War Cemetery, from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website:

After the (Fall of Singapore to the Japanese on 15 February 1942), the Japanese established a prisoner of war camp at Kranji and eventually a hospital was organised nearby at Woodlands.

After the reoccupation of Singapore, the small cemetery started by the prisoners at Kranji was developed into a permanent war cemetery by the Army Graves Service when it became evident that a larger cemetery at Changi could not remain undisturbed. Changi had been the site of the main prisoner of war camp in Singapore and a large hospital had been set up there by the Australian Infantry Force. In 1946, the graves were moved from Changi to Kranji, as were those from the Buona Vista Military Cemetery. Many other graves from all parts of the island were transferred to Kranji together with all Second World War graves from Saigon Military Cemetery in French Indo-China (now Vietnam), another site where permanent maintenance could not be assured.

The Commission later brought in graves of both World Wars from Bidadari Christian Cemetery, Singapore, where again permanent maintenance was not possible.

There are now 4,461 Commonwealth casualties of the Second World War buried or commemorated at KRANJI WAR CEMETERY. More than 850 of the burials are unidentified. The Chinese Memorial in Plot 44 marks a collective grave for 69 Chinese servicemen, all members of the Commonwealth forces, who were killed by the Japanese during the occupation in February 1942.

First World War burials and commemorations number 64, including special memorials to three casualties known to have been buried in civil cemeteries in Saigon and Singapore, but whose graves could not be located.

Within Kranji War Cemetery stands the SINGAPORE MEMORIAL, bearing the names of over 24,000 casualties of the Commonwealth land and air forces who have no known grave. Many of these have no known date of death and are accorded within our records the date or period from when they were known to be missing or captured. The land forces commemorated by the memorial died during the campaigns in Malaya and Indonesia or in subsequent captivity, many of them during the construction of the Burma-Thailand railway, or at sea while being transported into imprisonment elsewhere. The memorial also commemorates airmen who died during operations over the whole of southern and eastern Asia and the surrounding seas and oceans.

At least this is one cemetery in Singapore that will not be acquired by the authorities for redevelopment.

As I’ve said before - I’d gladly live among the dead, because unlike the living, the dead is harmless to me. The dead do not hate, or judge, or gossip, or back-stab.

The Caravanserai

I recently came across this intriguing creation, a necessary offspring of the age-old need for intercontinental, yet plodding, transport: The Caravanserai.

From Wikipedia:

A caravanserai or caravansary was a roadside inn where travellers (caravaners) could rest and recover from the day’s journey. Caravanserais supported the flow of commerce, information and people across the network of trade routes covering Asia, North Africa and Southeast Europe, most notably the Silk Road. Although many were located along rural roads in the countryside, urban versions of caravanserais were also historically common in cities throughout the Islamic world, though they were often called by other names such as khan, wikala, or funduq.

The word کاروانسرای kārvānsarāy is a Persian compound word combining kārvān “caravan” with sarāy “palace”, “building with enclosed courts”. Here “caravan” means a group of traders, pilgrims or other travellers, engaged in long-distance travel. The word is also rendered as caravansary, caravansaray, caravanseray, caravansara, and caravansarai. In scholarly sources, it is often used as an umbrella term for multiple related types of commercial buildings similar to inns or hostels, whereas the actual instances of such buildings had a variety of names depending on the region and the local language. However, the term was typically preferred for rural inns built along roads outside of city walls.

Caravanserais were a common feature not only along the Silk Road, but also along the Achaemenid Empire’s Royal Road, a 2,500-kilometre-long ancient highway that stretched from Sardis to Susa according to Herodotus: “Now the true account of the road in question is the following: Royal stations exist along its whole length, and excellent caravanserais; and throughout, it traverses an inhabited tract, and is free from danger.” Other significant urban caravanserais were built along the Grand Trunk Road in the Indian subcontinent, especially in the region of Mughal Delhi and Bengal Subah.

A 17th-century caravanserai in southern Iran. Credit: Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 4.0.

A 16th-century caravanserai in Cairo, Egypt. Credit: Sailko, CC BY 3.0.

In the first few years after the founding of modern Singapore in 1819, development was concentrated in the southern part of the island, where the port town was located at the mouth of the Singapore River. However, from the 1820s, trunk roads began to be laid down from the port to eventually all corners of the island, complementing the agricultural development of the island’s interior. My book Jalan Singapura details this.

Back then, transport was rudimentary - people travelled on foot, or using horses, bullocks, and associated carts and carriages. Cross-Island travel would have been slow, taking hours. I can imagine government or municipal officials, such as surveyors, taking a good part of a day to travel from the Town to a far-flung corner which would now be Jurong, Woodlands, or Changi, spending the night there, and then returning to “civilisation” the following day.

Which is where my interest in Caravanserai comes in. I wonder whether such facilities were built in the early days of modern Singapore, in the 1820s and 1830s, when cross-island transport was still in its early legs. Was there a market for such a business? Did the authorities run such facilities instead? How were these buildings like? Who patronised them?

And the challenge for me, the historian - if they had existed, how do I go about finding them?

I will take on this challenge.

The word serai is sometimes used with the implication of caravanserai. A number of place-names based on the word sarai have grown up: Mughal Serai, Sarai Alamgir and the Delhi Sarai Rohilla railway station for example, and a great many other places are also based on the original meaning of “palace”.

Of course, the Singapore place name “Geylang Serai” immediately comes to mind. However, this time, the “Serai” in “Geylang Serai” is Malay for lemongrass, which used to be grown in the area. I am not aware of any other place name in Singapore with “Serai” in it. That said, I am very happy to be proven wrong!

The geography of telephones

I chanced upon this Straits Times notice from January 1977 - the transfer of telephone lines from Paya Lebar Telephone Exchange to newly-built Yio Chu Kang Telephone Exchange, necessitating the changing of 3,000 telephone numbers.

This was back when:

1. Everyone relied on land lines to communicate! Today, our household doesn’t even have one. We just use our mobile numbers.

2. Most of the area on the map was rural, with just 3,000 households with telephones. Now, the area covers parts of Ang Mo Kio, Hougang, and Sengkang towns.

3. Telephone numbers in Singapore had seven numbers.

4. The Telecommunication Authority of Singapore existed. In 1999, it merged with the National Computer Board to form the Infocomm Development Authority; in 2016, the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) was formed from the merger of the Infocomm Development Authority and the Media Development Authority. IMDA is presently a statutory board under the Ministry of Communications and Information.

Also, the two place names mentioned as the boundaries of the region on the map - Lorong Lentor and Jalan Woodbridge - do not exist anymore in their original forms. Lorong Lentor has been expunged, although the place name “Lentor” has survived in other roads, most notably Lentor Avenue. Jalan Woodbridge has been renamed Gerald Drive.