A day after the ornate tomb of philanthropist businessman Tan Gim Kheng, who lived in the 1880s, was dug up by an excavator, a gaping hole lay in the ground where his bodily remains had been interred. All that was left was the broken frame of a wooden coffin upturned in the muddy hole. The concrete tomb had been smashed, while the statue of an angelic maiden, built to protect and grace the grave, lay helplessly still as though awaiting its own fateful destruction.

Nearby, the resplendent tomb of Gim Kheng’s father, Tan Hup Chui, who co-founded the Penang Chinese Town Hall in 1881, was left untouched. It had, however, been painted with a number, just like a string of other graves in the hilly old cemetery in Batu Lanchang that had been marked for their inevitable removal.

Meanwhile, several descendants of other historic individuals buried around the site had rushed from overseas in a last-gasp, frantic attempt to delay the removal of their ancestors’ graves.

This was the drama that gripped Penang last week after a developer was granted permission to exhume 56 graves at a corner of the sprawling and well-known Batu Lanchang cemetery.

The Penang Island Municipal Council (MPPP) confirmed that it had approved a permit for Jiran Bina Sdn Bhd to dig up the graves, after the company made an application on Oct 22 last year, to make way for a reported RM300 million development project on the site.

The descendants who showed up to appeal against the MPPP’s decision, however, questioned why the council had given approval before the courts have even decided on a legal dispute taking place over the land.

The MPPP maintained that its decision was legally guided by provisions in the Local Government Act. But the explanation was scant consolation for the descendants and heritage activists horrified at the removal of the old tombs.

Historian Tan Kim Hong called the demolition a "great loss" to Penang’s heritage. "An important page of Penang history has been torn out," he said. "We could depend on the inscriptions on the graves for epigraphic evidence into Penang’s early history."

Such a sentiment stemmed from the fact that the extensive cemetery was jointly used by at least six clans and housed many important Hokkien leaders. Tan Hup Chui, for example, was a respected Hokkien mediator who was instrumental in efforts to bring peace to the 1867 riots between the Ghee Hin and the Hai San secret societies.

Incidentally enough, the latest turn of events came on the heels of an equally controversial move in January by another developer to exhume the tomb of respected community leader Koh Seang Tatt and his wife, who also lived in the 1800s, on a different hillock nearby.

The grave of Seang Tatt’s great grandfather, the kapitan Koh Lay Huan who helped to bring in the first waves of Chinese and Malay migrants to Penang island soon after Captain Francis Light’s historic landing in 1786 is also located there.

Lay Huan’s tomb was among more than 20 that were removed as a residential development project has been planned on the site. But the move triggered a backlash from heritage conservationists and NGOs.

At the heart of the legal contention over these removal of graves was whether they were bound by the National Heritage Act which encourages protection for structures that are more than a hundred years old. Developers have asserted that the legislation does not apply for graveyards in the open, while heritage activists say cemetery structures ought to be included.

In a city steeped in living history, the legal explanation has hardly sufficed to placate a populace that is so parochially protective of its heritage. There has now been a call for all burial sites, tombs, memorial monuments and cenotaphs that are over 50 years old, or that are of significant historical value, to automatically come under the state’s legal protection.

Reasoning that old cemeteries have become an integral part of our heritage and culture, the Penang Heritage Trust even called for a comprehensive approach by the authorities to preserve all historic burial sites and memorials to prevent the exhumation of ancient graves.

The debate on the value of our tombs is bound to rage on, with the question of whether the physical monuments of the dead are worth protecting in the world of those who still live.

** Reprinted with permission. This article appeared in the March 17, 2011 issue of theSun. Himanshu is theSun’s Penang bureau chief.