Malaya Lewis H. Mates DRAFT VERSION: The final version of this was published in Douglas Davies with Lewis H. Mates, The Encyclopedia of Cremation (Ashgate, 2005), pp.311-314 As in Hong Kong, certain religious and ethnic communities brought cremation to modern Malaya. By 1940, a crematorium served the needs of the Japanese Singaporean community and there was a second crematorium attached to the Chinese Taoist temple „San Pao Tung‟ in the northern state of Perak. Some Buddhist temples also had small crematoria for the occasional use of believers, particularly in Penang with its considerable number of Buddhists, especially wealthy women, and its powerful local Buddhist Association. More were built in the later 1940s (Lien-Teh 1949:10). Legally speaking, Malaya did not have a specific law on cremation. The disposal of bodily remains was regarded as a natural right, as long as the method chosen did not contravene the customs and religious beliefs of the deceased. Dismissive of the „primitive‟ methods employed at the Japanese crematorium, Dr Wu LienTeh, a Chinese cremationist living in Malaya, was convinced that a modern municipal crematorium was required and announced his intention to raise the money to build one somewhere in Malaya. By 1940, the Malay cremation movement was already „gathering momentum‟, particularly in Singapore where the British Chamber of Commerce, British Association, Chinese Association and the municipal council all supported the idea of building a municipal crematorium. In fact, Lien-Teh thought that had it not been for the outbreak of war a year earlier, there would already have been a municipal crematorium somewhere in the Malaya. After the Second World War, Lien-Teh still sought a crematorium in Ipoh, the capital of the Perak State. The resident commissioner supported the idea and even promised an urban site. Lien-Teh preferred an electric cremator, since hydro-electric power was cheap and easily obtained from the Perak river power station. Success first came, however, to another part of the colony, when Singapore municipal council debated a proposal to build a crematorium. Despite strong Muslim opposition the pragmatic case seemed overwhelming. The municipality spent $100,000 a year on maintaining the existing burial sites occupying some 2,500 acres. Land use was becoming an increasingly important social, political and economic question and the municipal health officer estimated that, at current rates, the colony‟s population in fifty years would be 4.58 million, with 2.75 million living within the municipality‟s boundaries. Housing was an urgent necessity and land values were rising: cremation would reduce these pressures. Both gas and electricity were available to power the cremators. On 30 July 1948, the Singapore municipal council commissioners agreed to build a new crematorium for all creeds, nationalities and races, and the considerable sum of $200,000 (£25,000) was allocated to the project. Given that not all sections of the diverse (and tax-paying) Singaporean community supported the crematorium project, Lien-Teh warned that there might be a delay before construction work would be properly underway. He advised the formation of a cremation society to accelerate the process (Lien-Teh 1949:10-11). Based in Perak, Lien-Teh appeared encouraged by the development in Singapore. On 27 March 1949, he addressed a meeting of cremationists at the Buddhist Association in Ipoh. At the end of the meeting, they decided to found the Cremation Society of Perak, to operate on a purely charitable, non-profit basis to promote cremation and establish crematoria through a variety of grades of membership. Lien-Teh was elected president of this, the first cremation society in Malaya. It planned a committee to design and build an inexpensive, ferro-concrete cremator fired by wood or charcoal, and, when funds permitted, an electric crematorium 1 would follow. Electricity was abundant, and expended largely on working the rich tin mines: gas was not easily obtainable. Lien-Teh addressed the British Cremation Society in 1949 noting that it had inspired the efforts in the Far East where the „cremation movement is steadily going ahead … and needs only systematic propaganda and extra funds to win adherents to the cause‟ (Lien-Teh 1949:11). The Cremation Society of Perak‟s „model crematorium‟ soon opened, in May 1950 located in a neglected temple inside a cave, complete with stalactites in picturesque surroundings at the foot of a large rocky hill 300 feet high and shaped like a lion‟s head (which gave its name to the temple). On the main road between Penang in the north and Singapore in the south, and four miles from the centre of Ipoh, its location was advantageous. After three months of concerted effort the charcoal-fuelled crematorium was built on a piece of flat land. It combined „western methods with eastern appearances‟, including arched roof-tiles and special British-supplied cement. It was the first of its kind in Malaya. A rocky promontory became the site of a forty-two foot, seven-storey pagoda. Another room was capable of providing refreshments for 1,650 mourners. It was hoped that the new facilities would contribute to the beauty of the neighbourhood, revive the temple itself and, of course, help acquaint people with cremation and the work of the cremation society. The Cremation Society of Perak soon claimed other successes, including the opening in February 1951 of a crematorium in Kuala Lumpur. Due to a shortage of land, Chinese Buddhists of the Lotus Hill Temple had built a crematorium with a pagoda to store ashes at a cost of $20,000. In 1951, there was also a new crematorium in Penang whose oil-fired cremator was installed and maintained by a British company. The first cremations there were the remains of 900 people executed in 1942 and discovered buried in a mass grave. In late 1950 the cremation society accepted an invitation to join the International Cremation Federation but could not attend its next congress in Copenhagen. In 1957 the ICF regarded its help of the Malay cremationists as its „first attempt at what might be called colonisation: the first attempt at spreading our boundaries beyond the fortress of Europe‟ (Report 1957:8). In 1952 there were over two hundred cremations in Malaya. A year later the cremation society had forty-two life members and eighty-eight ordinary members. Singapore had also decided to invest further in cremation. The government had developed a plan to build three crematoria on a thirteen-acre site at an estimated cost of $650,000 (£45,000). It had contributed $217,000 of this. It was anticipated that there would be two years of preliminary work prior to beginning actual construction. Each crematorium was to be located in a park-like setting and have its own garden of remembrance flanked on one side by a cloister. The whole site, near a reservoir, was to be landscaped with trees and lawns. The project had received widespread support throughout the diverse community, with only Muslims and Roman Catholics opposing. However, the cremation society itself was not in great health. In 1954 it only had twelve more members than the year before (142) and there had been far fewer cremations in 1953 than the previous year: the cremation society‟s Lion‟s Head crematorium in Ipoh only performed eleven cremations that year, and there were around 120 elsewhere. The society complained in Pharos that it was „handicapped‟ due to a lack of funds and called for donations to help it through „very difficult circumstances‟. Yet only a year later, it appeared that progress was again underway as the cremation society had more than doubled its membership (taking it to 312). Cremations had also increased again: in 1954, Ipoh crematorium performed twenty-five cremations and there were around 210 elsewhere. Less than a decade later there were twenty crematoria in Malaya. Ashes, which had to be taken home, were in many cases deposited in urns in Buddhist temples. The ICF Committee for Propaganda also thought that cremation promised to make a great deal more progress in the 2 region (ICF Paper 1963:20). However, if progress was to be made, it had to occur without the help of a cremation society. In 1964 the Cremation Society of Perak was disaffiliated from the ICF as it had not paid its subscription for three years. It is likely that its demise coincided wit h the death of Dr Wu Lien-Teh who had been its inspiration and driving force. The development of cremation in Malaya was closely paralleled by that in Indonesia. Before 1950, cremation was little practised there, and then only by the Balinese and Indian communities. In 1951 Indonesian Buddhists recognised cremation and the first crematorium opened in Surabaya in the same year conducting twelve cremations. By 1967 there were seven crematoria in Indonesia, all on the island of Java (at Djakarta, Surabaya, Jogjakarta, Surakarta, Semarang, Bandung and Malang). That year Surabaya crematorium performed 545 of the approximate one thousand cremations performed on the island. The key difference was that there was no cremation society in Indonesia until 1973 (though when it was created, it did not survive for long). However, the ICF‟s optimism in 1963 did not appear to have been justified by subsequent developments in Malaya, which was made independent in 1957 and then became Malaysia in 1963 when it merged with Singapore and Sabah and Sarawak in north Borneo. By 1992 there were seven crematoria in Malaysia, located at Hokkien, Jahore, Kuala Lumpur, Kwantung, Wah Chai and two at Petaling Jaya. The discrepancy in crematorium numbers when compared to the twenty crematoria listed in 1963 is presumably because the 1992 figure was for municipal crematoria only and did not include all the private crematoria attached to temples. Some minority Malaysian populations, especially the Chinese and Indians who comprise twenty-five percent and seven percent of the population respectively, practise cremation in present day Malaysia. There was evidence of some level of demand for cremation in 1993 when an American cremator company announced the completion of a major project in Kuala Lumpur that involved the on-site construction of four cremators and that a second project was due to be completed in the country within two years. At the beginning of the twenty-first century around half of the twenty four million population are Malays, who are Muslim and opposed to cremation. Islam is also the national religion and, as it is government policy to strongly support it, conditions are not ideal for cremation to develop much further. Indeed, as cremation is not an option for the majority of Malaysians, other ways of coping with increasingly full cemeteries are required. The state assembly in central Selangor, where cemeteries are either full or approaching capacity, has begun to consider the „radical‟ idea of burying corpses vertically (The New Straits Times n.d.). Another consideration was to require housing developers to set aside one hectare of burial land for every 5,000 planned residents. Cremation has had more success in Singapore, which became independent from Malaysia in 1965. The new sovereign government implemented legislative restrictions and controls to regulate the somewhat randomly scattered Chinese burial grounds. The administration simultaneously began to promote cremation amongst the Chinese community: before 1965, only about ten percent of Chinese were cremated (Hui and Yeoh 2002:10). Learning from the failures of the previous colonial municipality‟s attempts to encourage cremation in the Chinese community, the government avoided direct confrontation. It provided the cremation infrastructure and persuaded the Chinese to use it through the medium of „funeral specialists‟ within their own community (caretakers, priests, funeral parlour owners or geomancers). This coincided with a weakening of traditional death beliefs which paralleled the „diminished role that regional, dialect and clan associations play in Chinese social life after independence‟ (Hui and Yeoh 2002:10). The government helped foster this development in the late 1970s by building columbaria for exhumed remains at places like Yishun and Mandai. Chinese clan associations were also allowed to build columbaria and, though cremation was encouraged, the 3 state still provided grounds for those desiring burial, thereby ensuring that the Chinese community did not feel forced to cremate. In the early 1970s there were problems with traditional Chinese coffins being too bulky to cremate. The only available coffins were those designed for Christians whose crosses offended Chinese sensibilities. These were, however, simply replaced by more fitting symbols such as bronze „lion head‟ designs. These practical adaptations were mirrored by unanticipated changes in the practice of Chinese beliefs that facilitated the use of cremation. Again, the government revealed itself to be open to altering its rules in order to adapt. For example, in 1983, the government ended its practice of allocating niches at the Mount Vernon Crematorium and instead allowed them to be chosen freely. This came after pressure from the relatives of some deceased who were retaining ashes until they were allocated a favourable niche. The „unfavourable‟ niches were located in the two lower rows of the columbarium as they were most likely to be touched by cleaner‟s brooms and were also most exposed to dirt. Thus most opted for the two upper rows and some also consulted geomancers in search of a favourable niche. By the 1970s, the Singaporean state had successfully promoted the use of cremation: „Whereas in the past descendants looked after their ancestral tombs, increasingly it became their duty to take care of the ashes of their ancestors‟ (Hui and Yeoh 2002:11). In 1988 just over sixty-eight percent of Singaporean Chinese were cremated, contributing to the general increase in cremation at the expense of burial in Singapore since its independence. In the 1990s, eighty percent of those whose religion did not require burial opted for cremation in one of three crematoria located at Mandai, Mount Vernon and Brighthill. Those cremated came largely from the Chinese and Indian communities comprising over seventy-five percent and around eight percent of the Singaporean population respectively (Muslim Malays, around fifteen percent of the population, are the main non-cremators). Yet even then advances were still to be made. In 2002, Singapore had a forth crematorium, at Tse Tho Aum. A total of 11,892 cremations performed that year amounted to almost seventy-seven percent of Singaporean deaths. References Hui, Tan Boon and Brenda S.A. Yeoh (2002), „The “Remains of the Dead”: Spatial Politics of Nation-Building in Post-War Singapore‟, Human Ecology Review, 9(1):1-13, available online at: www.humanecologyreview.org/pastissues/her91/91tanyeoh.pdf. (Accessed: May 2004). ICF Paper (1963), ICF Committee for Propaganda, „The World Problems of the Disposal of the Dead‟, Paper Presented at the ICF Congress, Berlin, CRE/D4/1963/3. ICF Reports (1951, 1964) (Annual), CRE/D2. Lien-Teh, Dr Wu (1949), „Cremation Among the Chinese - Past and Present‟, Pharos 15(2) 1949:9-11. Pharos, 1934- present day, CRE/A/UK/19. Report (1948), of the ICF Congress at The Hague, CRE/D4/1948/1. The New Straits Times (n.d.), „Malaysia considers vertical graves to save space‟, at Ananova (news website): http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_839621.html? menu=news.quirkies. (Accessed: May 2004). 4