Google result...
here is an article from 2002
Yong is responsible for the hands-on work in a government project
to clear the Bidadari Cemetery, one of the largest Christian burial
grounds in Southeast Asia. The project will convert the resting
place for 58,000 dead into 12,000 centrally located, high-rise
apartments for the living.
The project is fueled by crowded Singapore's hunger for land. The
tiny island, nestled between Malaysia and Indonesia, covers 251
square miles and has 4 million residents.
In Singapore, government housing, highways and rapid-transit lines
have been creeping ever closer to the Bidadari Cemetery and will
take over within 10 years when the apartments and a new subway
station are completed.
For now, the oasis of frangipani trees and rolling hills remains
peaceful. Rows of gravestones and marble statues are spread over 64
acres, their epitaphs engraved in a dozen languages, including
Chinese, English, Portuguese, Japanese and Hindi. The word Bidadari
itself comes from "widyadari," a type of Hindu nymph.
Over the last two decades, the government has exhumed bodies from
more than 36 cemeteries of different races and religions. Bidadari,
one of the largest to be cleared, contains the remains of 58,000
Christians buried between 1907 and 1972, with most interred before
1951.
An additional 68,000 bodies will be exhumed from a neighboring
Muslim section and reburied elsewhere.
All unclaimed Christian remains will be cremated by the government
and, unless the ashes are claimed within a year, they will be
scattered at sea. Christian families who want to rebury remains
must pay for it, but the government is reburying remains from
faiths that ban cremation, including Muslims, Jews and
Parsis.
Since March 2001, Singapore has published numerous notices about
the exhumation in newspapers here and in Australia, Britain and
Malaysia, but only 9,449 bodies have been claimed.
Once those remains are exhumed, Yong's team will start digging up
and cremating the unclaimed, said Sum Foong Yee, a spokesman for
the Housing and Development Board, which is overseeing the
project.
In many cultures, cemeteries are considered landmarks and even
tourist attractions, but not in traditional Chinese communities,
noted Scottie Oakley, an American who is a guide at Singapore's
Asian Civilizations Museum and is helping produce a picture book to
preserve Bidadari's history before the bulldozers roll in.
Oakley said many Chinese, who make up 75 percent of Singapore's
population, will not visit friends after paying respects at family
plots because they believe it's bad luck.
"I could spend an afternoon in a cemetery, but in this culture that
would not happen," she said. Oakley and two other women, Sue
Williams and Liesel Strauss, began work on the coffee-table book
about the cemetery last year, taking pictures and recording
epitaphs.
About 10 percent of those buried here are expatriates, businessmen
from the colonial era, missionaries or casualties of war.
Families can take sculptures and gravestones home, but most have
not. Unclaimed headstones are smashed and put into a pit.
Chinese people tend to be uncomfortable having tombstones in their
homes, said Brigid Tracy Tan, whose great-grandfather was exhumed
from Bidadari. Her family left the tombstone and marble cross
behind.
Tan, a curator for the Singapore Art Museum, spent hours
scrutinizing Bidadari's sculptures, looking for "aesthetically
significant" examples. But she found most - even beautiful ones -
were mass produced. One of the two pieces she rescued is an
intricately carved marble headstone for 12 Roman Catholic nuns of
the Canossian Sisterhood who died between 1907 and 1956. "I do wish
that more of these monuments could be saved or a section of the
cemetery could be saved," Oakley said. "In a lot of countries that
could happen, but not here."
