SINGAPORE / ESTATE HISTORY / BISHAN

Bishan history begins with the dead. Not metaphorically. Before Bishan became one of Singapore’s most desirable central HDB towns, almost the entire landscape was dominated by Peck San Theng, a vast Chinese cemetery founded in the nineteenth century. The graves were so extensive, and the cemetery economy so established, that a living settlement grew around them. That settlement became Kampong San Teng: a village with schools, markets, teahouses, ritual trades, children, gangsters, festivals and ordinary families whose everyday landscape happened to be filled with tombs.

So what was Bishan before Bishan? It was “Peck San” before “Bishan”—the Cantonese burial ground that gave the modern estate its name. It was a federation of clan-managed burial hills before HDB blocks. It was Qing Ming crowds before MRT crowds. It was gravediggers and ritual-goods sellers before Junction 8. It was a wartime battlefield and refuge before a town centre. It was a place where children played among graves and where some taxi drivers later hesitated to enter after dark.

Then Singapore needed the land for housing. Burials stopped. The cemetery was acquired. Tens of thousands of graves were exhumed. Kampong residents were resettled. Roads, flats, schools, a depot and rail lines replaced the burial hills. Yet Bishan never fully escaped the geography that came before it. The town’s name comes from the cemetery. Its rooflines were designed to recall the old pavilions. Its urban folklore still speaks of ghosts. Its columbarium remains nearby. The dead did not disappear from Bishan’s story. They became part of how the living learned to inhabit the new town.

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The short answer

Before modern Bishan, the area was occupied by Kwong Wai Siew Peck San Theng, a huge Chinese cemetery founded in 1870 by Cantonese pioneers from three prefectures in Guangdong. Over time, the cemetery grew to about 384 acres and became the largest Chinese burial ground in Singapore. It was managed through a federation of Cantonese clan organisations and divided into burial hills and pavilions that helped families locate particular graves.

The cemetery created an economy of its own. Caretakers, gravediggers, peddlers, ritual specialists and workers settled nearby. As migration increased, this community developed into Kampong San Teng. The village eventually had a Chinese school, wet market, teahouse, open-air cinema and other amenities. Village life was still closely tied to the cemetery because Qing Ming, the Hungry Ghost Festival and the Double Ninth Festival brought large numbers of visitors and significant commercial activity.

The cemetery also shaped Bishan’s wartime and post-war history. Fighting took place on the burial grounds during the Japanese invasion in February 1942. Refugees, including Samsui women, sought shelter among the tombs. After the war, the secluded cemetery became associated with secret-society activity and crime, giving Kampong San Teng a rough reputation.

Fresh burials were stopped in 1973. The land was acquired for redevelopment in 1979, and exhumations followed. Between the 1980s and around 1990, the cemetery and village were replaced by Bishan New Town. Many former villagers were rehoused in Ang Mo Kio and other estates. Peck San Theng itself survived in greatly reduced form through a temple and columbarium, opened in 1986 and capable of holding tens of thousands of urns.

The modern town deliberately carried its past forward. “Bishan” is the Mandarin rendering of Peck San. HDB blocks were given roof forms that evoked the cemetery’s pavilions. Bishan MRT became one of the stations on Singapore’s first MRT service in 1987, and the town later became one of the system’s major interchanges. The land went from cemetery to showcase new town in little more than a decade.

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Read Bishan by question

• Why is Bishan called Bishan?
• What was Peck San Theng?
• Why did Singapore need such a huge cemetery?
• Who managed the burial ground?
• Why was it divided into hills and pavilions?
• How did a living village grow around graves?
• What was Kampong San Teng like?
• What work did people do there?
• Why were Qing Ming and Hungry Ghost Festival economically important?
• Did children really play among graves?
• Why did secret societies use the cemetery?
• What happened there during the Japanese invasion?
• Why did refugees hide among tombs?
• When were burials stopped?
• How were the graves exhumed?
• Where did the villagers go?
• Why was a columbarium built?
• Why do Bishan HDB blocks have pavilion-like roofs?
• Why is Bishan MRT historically important?
• How did cemetery stigma become property desirability?
• Why are ghost stories still attached to Bishan?
• What actually survives of Peck San Theng today?

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Why is Bishan called Bishan?

Because the new town inherited the name of the cemetery it replaced.

Peck San Theng is written 碧山亭. “Peck San” is the Cantonese reading of 碧山, while “Bishan” is the Mandarin pinyin rendering. The phrase is usually translated as something like “Pavilions on the Jade Hills”.

The modern name therefore does not erase the cemetery. It announces it.

That is unusual among Singapore towns. Many new estates reused an older road, village or district name. Bishan reused the name of a burial organisation and cemetery whose physical landscape had been almost completely removed.

This means every time someone says “Bishan”, they are repeating a cemetery name without necessarily knowing it.

Modernisation changed the meaning of the word, but not its origin.

What was Peck San Theng?

A burial ground, a clan institution, an economic system and eventually the centre of a village.

Peck San Theng was founded in 1870 by three Cantonese pioneers representing Kwong Fu, Wai Chow Fu and Siew Hing Fu prefectures in southern China. The cemetery was administered by a federation of 16 Cantonese clans and associations.

Its original purpose was practical and charitable. Chinese immigrants needed burial space. Poor migrants in particular could not always afford private land or expensive funeral arrangements. Clan and dialect associations therefore provided cemeteries as part of a wider mutual-aid system.

Over time, the burial ground expanded. Although founded for Cantonese use, it eventually included people from other dialect groups and, according to heritage accounts, other communities as well.

At roughly 384 acres, the cemetery was enormous by Singapore standards. By the 1970s it was described as the largest Chinese cemetery in the country.

To understand its scale, do not imagine one fenced graveyard. Imagine hills, tracks, clusters of tombs, vegetation, caretakers’ buildings and ritual spaces spread across a landscape large enough to become its own social territory.

Why was the cemetery divided into pavilions and hills?

Because families needed a way to find the dead.

Peck San Theng was organised into named hills and numbered pavilions. A family searching for an ancestor’s grave might first identify a hill, then a pavilion number, and only then navigate through paths and vegetation to locate the exact tomb.

This system was a kind of address network for the dead.

Modern Bishan has blocks, streets and postal codes. Peck San Theng had hills, pavilions and grave locations.

The comparison is not frivolous. Both systems solve the same fundamental urban problem: how do you locate one household—or one ancestor—inside a dense field of many others?

When HDB later used pavilion-like roof forms in Bishan, the design did more than create visual variety. It translated an older spatial language into a new town.

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How did a village grow around a cemetery?

Because cemeteries need workers, and visitors need services.

At first, settlement around Peck San Theng was small. Caretakers maintained the burial grounds. Gravediggers prepared graves. Peddlers sold ritual goods. Others tended shrines, managed access or provided services to families visiting the dead.

Then immigration increased. Workers brought families. More people settled near the cemetery because land and livelihoods were available. A service settlement gradually became Kampong San Teng.

This is a pattern worth noticing. Economic geography creates residential geography. A port produces a fishing village. A plantation produces labour quarters. A cemetery produces caretakers, ritual traders and eventually a community.

Kampong San Teng existed because the dead generated work for the living.

Over time, that relationship became more complex. Villagers farmed, traded, attended school, raised children and participated in village life that was not exclusively about funerals. Yet the cemetery remained the physical and cultural centre around which everything else made sense.

What was Kampong San Teng like?

More complete than the phrase “cemetery village” suggests.

By the twentieth century, Kampong San Teng had developed institutions that served everyday life. There was a Chinese school. There was a wet market. There were teahouses. There was an open-air cinema. Village businesses sold food and household goods.

The settlement had its own routines, gossip, friendships and rivalries. Children went to school. Adults farmed, sold goods or worked in trades connected and unconnected to the cemetery. People celebrated festivals and attended entertainment.

The difference was that graves were never far away.

A cemetery normally sits outside ordinary life. At Kampong San Teng, ordinary life sat inside the cemetery landscape.

That distinction is why Bishan’s history feels so unusual. The dead were not hidden behind a wall at the edge of town. They were part of the terrain through which villagers walked, worked and played.

What work did villagers do?

Some work was directly connected to death.

Gravediggers, caretakers, ritual-goods sellers and people maintaining clan facilities depended on cemetery activity. Funeral-related trades created recurring income because burials, exhumations, grave maintenance and ancestor worship all required labour.

Other residents farmed or operated small businesses. Village economies are rarely as specialised as their most famous activity suggests. Households combine incomes. Someone may tend vegetables, sell food and assist during festival seasons.

The cemetery created peaks of economic activity during major ancestral festivals. Families arriving from elsewhere in Singapore bought incense, food, paper offerings and services. Transport demand increased. Hawkers benefited.

Death was therefore not only cultural memory. It was part of local commerce.

Why were Qing Ming and Hungry Ghost Festival so important?

Because they temporarily transformed the cemetery from quiet landscape into mass gathering place.

During Qing Ming, families travelled to clean graves, make offerings and pay respects to ancestors. The Double Ninth Festival created another period of grave visitation. The Hungry Ghost Festival brought ritual activity centred on spirits and the dead.

For Kampong San Teng, these festivals were social and commercial seasons.

Visitors needed food, ritual goods, directions and transport. Villagers who understood the cemetery’s maze of hills and pavilions possessed valuable local knowledge. Clan organisations coordinated ceremonies and grave maintenance.

A cemetery this large could feel almost like a temporary festival town during peak periods.

The modern equivalent is difficult to imagine because contemporary cemeteries in Singapore are far more regulated, accessible and spatially compressed.

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Did children really play among the graves?

Yes, according to former villagers.

For children growing up in Kampong San Teng, tombs were not automatically frightening because they were part of the everyday landscape. Former teacher and villager Loh Soo Har recalled children flying kites on cemetery hills and chasing runaway kites through the burial grounds.

Open graves could even become accidental playground hazards. Oral histories recorded children falling into empty grave pits and finding water tanks containing fish.

This sounds shocking only if we imagine the cemetery through modern urban expectations.

To a child living there, a hill was a hill even if it contained graves. An open space was somewhere to run. Familiarity changed the emotional meaning of the landscape.

That did not eliminate supernatural belief. Former residents also remembered ghost stories, unexplained illness and warnings about spirits.

The two attitudes coexisted.

You could be afraid of ghosts and still use the cemetery as a shortcut to school.

Why did secret societies like the cemetery?

Because it was large, wooded, secluded and difficult to police.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the wider Toa Payoh and Kampong San Teng area developed a reputation for secret-society activity. Parts of Toa Payoh were so associated with gang violence that the district was nicknamed the “Chicago of Singapore”.

Peck San Theng offered terrain well suited to people who did not want to be seen. Tomb hills and thick vegetation created hiding places. Roads and paths were difficult for outsiders to navigate. Police patrols were limited.

Heritage accounts record illicit distilling, smuggling and gang clashes involving weapons. Criminal investigations sometimes brought police into Kampong San Teng because gangs used the cemetery as a meeting or hiding area.

The reputation became strong enough that some taxi drivers reportedly avoided entering the cemetery at night.

Again, the cemetery’s physical form shaped social behaviour. The same seclusion that gave mourners privacy and villagers open space also gave criminals cover.

What happened at Peck San Theng during the Japanese invasion?

It became a battlefield.

On 13 February 1942, British and Japanese forces fought on the cemetery grounds during the final days before Singapore surrendered. British units including the Cambridgeshire Regiment, Royal Norfolk Regiment and Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Regiment faced elements of the Japanese Imperial Guards.

The cemetery’s hills and tombs became defensive terrain. Fighting intensified through the area, and both sides suffered casualties.

This is another reminder that burial grounds are not outside history. Armies will use any terrain that offers elevation, cover or strategic position.

The violence also reached Kampong San Teng. Bombing damaged attap houses, killed residents and transformed a place associated with the dead into a place producing new casualties.

For villagers, the cemetery’s meaning changed again: family burial ground, home landscape, battlefield.

Why did people seek refuge among the graves?

Because they believed the cemetery would be safer than the city.

As Japanese bombing intensified, Chinese residents fled crowded urban districts. Heritage accounts note that Samsui women were among those who moved toward Peck San Theng to seek shelter.

The logic made sense. Cemeteries were less densely built, more dispersed and away from obvious urban targets.

The reality was more complicated because the invasion itself turned the cemetery into a combat zone.

After the fall of Singapore, however, some residents remembered the occupation period in Kampong San Teng as comparatively less intrusive than life in urban Chinese districts. Possible explanations include the rural location, food production and Japanese reluctance to disturb burial grounds.

These memories should not be romanticised into a claim that the cemetery was “safe”. The village had already been bombed and people had died. Rather, the account shows how wartime risk varied sharply across geography.

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When did the cemetery begin to disappear?

The decisive administrative turn came in the 1970s.

In September 1973, fresh burials at Peck San Theng were stopped and the cemetery was closed to new interments. Six years later, in 1979, the land was acquired for urban development.

That decision transformed the value of the landscape overnight.

For more than a century, land here had been organised around burial. Now it was being redefined as residential land near Singapore’s growing central region and expanding rail network.

But closing a cemetery is not like clearing an empty field.

Every grave represented a family claim, ritual obligation and physical set of remains. Redevelopment required exhumation on an enormous scale.

How were the graves exhumed?

Through a long process involving notices, family searches, clan coordination and physical recovery of remains.

Families were asked to identify and exhume their ancestors. In a well-maintained grave this could be straightforward. In an old cemetery covered by vegetation, with markers damaged or records incomplete, it could be extremely difficult.

One of the most powerful details in Bishan’s history is the number of descendants who could no longer locate a relative’s exact grave.

Heritage writer Ang Zhen Ye recounts how his family searched for his great-grandfather during the mass exhumations and failed to find his remains. The family’s later move to Bishan created a haunting possibility: they might be living close to ground that still held him.

This is what large-scale exhumation means at human level.

A planning map may show land being cleared for housing. A family experiences the same event as losing the location of an ancestor.

Unclaimed or unidentified remains were handled through collective arrangements, while many recovered remains were eventually housed at the new Peck San Theng columbarium.

What happened to Kampong San Teng?

It was resettled along with the cemetery landscape.

As redevelopment proceeded, villagers moved into public housing and other accommodation. Heritage accounts note that many relocated to nearby Ang Mo Kio, itself a newly developed HDB town.

This created a particularly sharp transition.

Someone could leave a timber house beside graves and move into a concrete flat with lifts, piped utilities and planned roads only a few kilometres away.

The physical distance was small. The social distance was enormous.

Village institutions had to adapt. Social networks were redistributed across blocks. The cemetery-related economy largely disappeared. Children who had used burial hills as playgrounds now lived inside highly managed public-housing precincts.

The resettlement connected Bishan directly to the history of Ang Mo Kio, because some of the people displaced from the future Bishan town became residents of the neighbouring new town before Bishan itself was ready.

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Why was a columbarium built?

Because redevelopment compressed a vast horizontal cemetery into a far smaller vertical memorial system.

Kwong Wai Siew Peck San Theng survived redevelopment through a reduced institutional site that included a temple and columbarium. The columbarium opened in 1986 and can hold around 90,000 urns.

The spatial inversion is remarkable.

Old Peck San Theng spread graves over hundreds of acres of hills. The new columbarium stacks ancestral remains inside a multi-storey building.

The change mirrors Singapore housing itself.

The living moved from low-density kampongs into high-rise flats. The dead moved from low-density graves into vertical niches.

Land scarcity reorganised both populations.

When did modern Bishan begin?

The new town took physical form during the 1980s.

Roots records the redevelopment of Peck San Theng and Kampong San Teng between roughly 1983 and 1990. HDB housing, roads, schools and public facilities replaced the cemetery landscape while the remaining Peck San Theng institution was compressed to a smaller parcel.

Bishan was unusual among new towns because planners knew the previous land use carried strong cultural meaning and stigma.

Building flats on cemetery land raised practical and psychological questions. Would people want to live there? Would the area be considered inauspicious? Would stories about ghosts damage demand?

The answer changed rapidly once the town’s central location, schools, transport and housing quality became clear.

What had once been avoided as burial ground became desirable residential property.

Why do Bishan flats have those distinctive roofs?

Because the town’s designers deliberately referenced the cemetery pavilions.

Bishan’s early HDB skyline is famous for blocks topped with pitched or pavilion-like roofs. The forms gave the town a strong visual identity and served as an architectural memory of Peck San Theng.

This is an unusually direct example of new-town design incorporating a displaced landscape.

The graves were removed. The pavilion silhouette returned in concrete and roof form.

Popular culture made the roofs even more recognisable. Bishan flats appeared in the 1990s sitcom Under One Roof, helping associate the estate with aspirational family life.

The transformation could hardly be sharper.

A landscape once associated with cemeteries, crime and ghosts became television shorthand for a comfortable Singaporean home.

Was Bishan difficult to sell at first?

The cemetery past produced hesitation, but the town’s location created powerful counter-pressure.

Stories about inauspicious ground circulated widely. Some families worried about living on a former burial site. Ghost stories attached themselves to flats, construction sites and later the MRT station.

At the same time, Bishan sits close to the geographic centre of Singapore and within easy reach of major schools, roads and employment areas. Once the MRT arrived, its accessibility improved dramatically.

Property desirability eventually overwhelmed cemetery stigma.

Some residents even reversed the logic. The old cemetery hills could be interpreted as good feng shui rather than bad luck. What had once made the land undesirable became part of stories explaining why the estate was fortunate.

This is how urban memory adapts to property value.

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Why is Bishan MRT historically important?

Because Singapore’s first MRT passenger service began with a train leaving Bishan Station.

On 7 November 1987, a six-car MRT train departed Bishan on the first service run of Singapore’s new rapid-transit system. The initial operating section of the North-South Line linked Yio Chu Kang through Bishan toward Toa Payoh and the city-side stations then ready for service.

This date is one of the great historical reversals in the estate.

Only a few years earlier, large-scale exhumation was still transforming cemetery land into a new town.

Then Bishan became the starting point of Singapore’s rail future.

The town went from burial ground to one of the first stations on the country’s defining modern transport system within the span of a single generation.

What did the Circle Line change?

It turned Bishan from a major station into a major interchange.

Circle Line Stage 3 opened in 2009, connecting Bishan with Serangoon and other stations on the orbital route. Instead of travelling toward the city centre before changing direction, commuters gained new east-west and cross-island connections.

This strengthened Bishan’s centrality.

The cemetery had once been peripheral enough to provide hundreds of acres for burials. The modern town became central enough to function as a transport interchange linking north, north-east and central Singapore.

Location did not change.

The network around it did.

Where does Junction 8 fit into the story?

It completed Bishan’s transition from residential new town into a regional urban centre.

By the early 1990s, the commercial complex that became Junction 8 was being developed beside Bishan MRT station. Its location was strategic: the town centre sat at the intersection of housing, rail, buses and major schools.

The mall concentrated shopping, dining and entertainment in a form very different from Kampong San Teng’s wet market and teahouses.

Yet the urban function is comparable.

Both the kampong market and the modern mall gathered people because they sat at the centre of a local movement system.

The architecture changed from village commerce to air-conditioned retail. The need for a social-commercial centre remained.

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Why are Bishan ghost stories so persistent?

Because the cemetery history is both real and almost invisible.

Ghost stories become especially powerful when a landscape has undergone total physical replacement. A visible cemetery explains itself. A shopping mall, station and housing blocks built over former graves create cognitive tension: the present gives few clues to the past, yet people know the past is underneath.

Stories fill that gap.

Bishan MRT has accumulated tales of faceless passengers, phantom figures and trains passing strange platforms. HDB blocks have generated stories about unexplained sounds or sightings.

These are folklore, not evidence of supernatural events.

But folklore is historical evidence of another kind. It tells us that people have not fully separated the new town from the cemetery beneath it.

The ghosts survive because memory survived.

How did fear turn into prestige?

Through the ordinary mechanisms of urban value: location, transport, schools, amenities and scarcity.

Bishan is centrally located. It gained early MRT access. It sits near well-regarded schools and established neighbourhoods. Its HDB flats became associated with larger layouts, distinctive architecture and convenient commuting.

Once residents experienced the practical benefits of living there, cemetery stigma weakened.

The change is a useful reminder that ideas of auspicious and inauspicious land are not fixed. They respond to lived success.

A place considered frightening when empty can become desirable after thousands of families build normal lives there.

Every school run, grocery trip, wedding dinner and evening walk competes with the older story of graves.

Eventually ordinary life wins more attention.

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What did old Bishan smell and sound like?

Again, the answer depends on the day.

On an ordinary village morning: cooking fires, bicycles, children, hawkers, farm work, insects and vegetation. Near grave work: soil being dug, stone, incense, ritual paper and funeral activity.

During Qing Ming: buses and cars arriving, families calling to one another across cemetery paths, grass being cleared, incense burning, paper offerings, food, ritual voices and commercial activity around festival crowds.

During Hungry Ghost Festival: prayer, offerings, performances and the particular smell of burning joss paper.

During gang clashes or wartime: entirely different sounds—shouting, weapons, police, explosions.

Modern Bishan replaces nearly all of that with trains, buses, shopping-centre music, school bells, stadium activity, traffic and air-conditioning systems.

The land kept the same coordinates and acquired a completely different acoustic identity.

What did redevelopment solve?

It converted centrally located but low-density burial and kampong land into housing, transport infrastructure, schools, parks and civic facilities serving a much larger living population.

Residents gained modern utilities, sanitation and public transport. New schools and facilities were integrated into the town. The MRT linked Bishan directly to employment and education across Singapore.

From a national land-use perspective, the transformation was dramatic. Hundreds of acres dedicated primarily to burial became one of the country’s most intensively used residential and transport districts.

That efficiency matters in a small island city.

But efficiency is not the only measure by which land has meaning.

What did redevelopment destroy?

A burial geography more than a century old and the village economy that depended on it.

Thousands of family grave locations disappeared. Some remains could not be found. Named hills and pavilions stopped functioning as addresses. Cemetery paths vanished. Villagers lost houses and local routines. Businesses tied to funeral and festival traffic disappeared or relocated.

The greatest loss may be the relationship between place and ancestry.

For a family with a grave at Peck San Theng, the landscape once told a genealogical story. A hill, pavilion and tomb linked present-day descendants physically to a named ancestor.

After redevelopment, that relationship could become an urn number inside a columbarium—or, for families unable to recover remains, a memory without a precise location.

Urbanisation did not merely remove structures.

It changed how the living could find the dead.

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A Bishan timeline

1870
Peck San Theng is founded by Cantonese pioneers representing Kwong Fu, Wai Chow Fu and Siew Hing Fu prefectures. It develops under a federation of clan organisations.

Late nineteenth century
The burial ground expands and settlement begins forming around cemetery work and visitor services.

Early twentieth century
Immigration enlarges the living community. Kampong San Teng develops with homes, farming, commerce and community institutions.

Pre-war decades
The village establishes facilities including a Chinese school, wet market, teahouse and open-air cinema. Cemetery festivals remain central to social and commercial life.

13–15 February 1942
British and Japanese forces fight across the Peck San Theng cemetery landscape during the final days before Singapore surrenders.

1942
Chinese refugees, including Samsui women, seek shelter among the cemetery hills as bombing and invasion disrupt urban districts.

1950s–1960s
Kampong San Teng and the cemetery gain a reputation for secret-society activity, smuggling and gang clashes, partly because of the area’s secluded terrain.

September 1973
Fresh burials at Peck San Theng are stopped and the cemetery is closed to new interments.

1979
The government acquires the cemetery land for redevelopment. Exhumation notices begin the process of clearing graves.

Early–late 1980s
Large-scale exhumation, resettlement and construction transform the cemetery and Kampong San Teng into Bishan New Town.

1986
The new Peck San Theng columbarium opens, compressing ancestral remains into a much smaller vertical memorial complex.

7 November 1987
Singapore’s first MRT passenger service begins with a train departing Bishan Station on the North-South Line.

Late 1980s–early 1990s
Bishan matures rapidly as a central HDB town. Pavilion-inspired roof forms create a distinctive skyline while commercial and civic facilities expand.

Early 1990s
The Junction 8 commercial complex is developed beside Bishan MRT, strengthening the town centre as a regional shopping and social destination.

1990s
Bishan’s flats become nationally recognisable through television and popular culture, helping turn the town from former cemetery land into an aspirational residential address.

2009
Circle Line Stage 3 opens, making Bishan an MRT interchange and strengthening cross-island connectivity.

2026
URA’s Bishan 2.0 plans set out the next transformation of the town centre into a larger sub-regional job and community node.

Today
Bishan is one of Singapore’s most established central towns, while the reduced Peck San Theng complex continues to preserve the burial institution that gave the town its name.

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How to read modern Bishan with Peck San Theng in your head

Start with the name.

Every sign that says Bishan is already a cemetery reference.

Look at the pavilion-like roofs of older HDB blocks and read them not just as 1980s design but as a deliberate echo of the burial pavilions that once organised the landscape.

At Bishan MRT, remember that Singapore’s first MRT service began here only a few years after mass exhumations had transformed the land.

At Junction 8, compare the modern shopping complex with Kampong San Teng’s wet market and teahouses. Both are forms of town-centre life created for completely different populations.

At Peck San Theng, notice how little land the surviving institution occupies compared with the 384-acre cemetery that once defined the whole district.

At the columbarium, think about verticalisation applying to the dead as well as the living.

At the edge of Bishan-Ang Mo Kio Park, remember that Bishan’s modern green spaces connect to the same Kallang River system that shaped neighbouring Ang Mo Kio’s older landscape.

And when someone tells a Bishan ghost story, treat it as folklore rather than fact—but also as evidence that the cemetery past is still active inside the town’s cultural memory.

What survives when an entire cemetery becomes a town?

Not much survives in the form it originally had.

The hills are no longer mapped by pavilion number. The grave paths are gone. Kampong San Teng’s market, school routines and open-air cinema belong to memory and archives. Most graves were exhumed. Former villagers live elsewhere.

Yet the old landscape survives in unusually powerful ways.

The name survives.

The institution survives through Kwong Wai Siew Peck San Theng.

The dead survive through the columbarium.

The pavilions survive through architectural reference.

The ghost stories survive through oral culture.

And the families survive—some now living in the very town built over the cemetery their ancestors once occupied.

This is why Bishan may be the clearest example in Singapore of urban redevelopment failing to produce complete forgetting.

The old place was physically removed and culturally retained at the same time.

Why does Bishan matter beyond Bishan?

Because it forces Singapore’s land story into its most difficult form.

Redeveloping farmland changes livelihood.

Redeveloping a cemetery changes ancestry.

The land question is therefore not only economic. Who has a claim to space after death? How long should burial land remain untouched? What happens when population growth makes permanent burial impossible? How should remains be moved? What does a city owe to the memory of a place once the original landscape is gone?

Bishan is one of Singapore’s most visible answers.

The answer was not preservation in place.

It was compression, exhumation, resettlement, architectural reference and institutional survival.

That model is uncomfortable precisely because it exposes the trade-offs of a land-scarce city so clearly.

So what was Bishan before Bishan?

It was Peck San Theng.

It was a cemetery before it was a town. It was hills and burial pavilions before streets and blocks. It was clan associations organising grave space before HDB organised residential precincts. It was gravediggers, caretakers and ritual sellers before retail shops and office workers.

It was Kampong San Teng: a living village built around a landscape of the dead.

Children flew kites between graves. Families sold goods to mourners. Festivals filled the burial hills with visitors. Gangsters used the terrain for cover. Refugees hid there during war. British and Japanese soldiers fought across the cemetery.

Then burials stopped.

The cemetery closed. Graves were opened. Remains were moved. Some were never found. Villagers left. The burial ground became development land.

And then Bishan performed one of the fastest identity reversals in Singapore.

Within years, trains were running where tombs had stood. Families moved into pavilion-roofed flats. A mall grew beside the station. Children attended schools on land once navigated by grave markers.

The cemetery became a prestigious address.

But not by becoming historically blank.

The name remained.

The pavilions returned in architecture.

The dead returned in stories.

Peck San Theng survived in compressed form.

Modern Bishan did not replace the cemetery so completely that the cemetery disappeared.

It replaced the landscape and inherited the memory.

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Sources and further reading

This article prioritises Singapore institutional, archival and heritage sources. Supernatural stories are treated as folklore and cultural memory, not as factual evidence of paranormal events.

• National Heritage Board / Roots — “Bishan: Living with the Dead”
• National Heritage Board, MUSE — Kampong San Teng and Peck San Theng history
• National Library Board — Streets and Places in Singapore: Bishan and Peck San Theng references
• Urban Redevelopment Authority — Kallang River guide: Bishan and Braddell / Peck San Theng
• Land Transport Authority — Circle Line history and the first MRT service from Bishan
• Land Transport Authority — Circle Line
• Urban Redevelopment Authority — Bishan 2.0

Continue through the neighbouring history: What Was Ang Mo Kio Before Ang Mo Kio? → What Was Serangoon Before Serangoon? → What Was Hougang Before Hougang? → What Was Sengkang Before Sengkang? → What Was Punggol Before Punggol?