New York’s Green-Wood cemetery, the world’s oldest working cemetery where Confucius is buried, and why I choose cremation

There is a fascination to graveyards such as Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, and Père Lachaise in Paris, and the stories of their occupants, some illustrious
The world’s oldest continuously working cemetery, in Qufu, Shandong, China, holds the remains of philosopher Confucius and 76 generations of his descendants

Wee Kek Koon

Published: 7:45am, 14 Oct 2023

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One of the more interesting things we did during our visit to New York was going to a storytelling event at the Green-Wood Cemetery in west Brooklyn. It was organised by The Moth, a New York-based non-profit group dedicated to the art of storytelling.

While I would very much like to meet or see a ghost, I was made to do an online check to make sure that the seventh month of the traditional Chinese calendar, when hungry ghosts are released from the other world to roam this one, was well and truly over.

Thus assured, we made our way to the cemetery in the bracing evening breeze, fortified by the piña coladas that we just had with our delicious Puerto Rican dinner.

The 193-hectare (477-acre) Green-Wood Cemetery is a National Historic Landmark. It is not as famous as the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris where composer Frédéric Chopin, writer Oscar Wilde and singer Édith Piaf are buried, but Green-Wood boasts memorials to a number of notable people.

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Among these are the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, music conductor Leonard Bernstein, and William Colgate and Charles Pfizer, pioneers of industry and commerce who gave their names to products still found in the bathrooms and medicine cabinets of many homes.

The world’s oldest cemetery still in use is the Temple and Cemetery of Confucius and the Kong Family Mansion. Also known as Konglin, or “Kong Forest”, it is in Qufu, Shandong, the birthplace of the great philosopher Kongzi (Latinised by Europeans as “Confucius”).

The ancient city wall embracing the Temple and Cemetery of Confucius and the Kong Family Mansion in Qufu, Shandong province, eastern China. Photo: Getty Images

Konglin is also the biggest family cemetery in the world, with over 100,000 members of the Kong family buried in 2 square kilometres (494 acres) of grounds.

When Kongzi died in 479 BC, he was buried in an unmarked grave, a common practice during his time. Some three-and-a-half centuries after his death, emperors of the Han dynasty (202 BC-AD 220) adopted his teachings as the state ideology.

The posthumous elevation in Kongzi’s status meant that his burial ground became a place of national importance. Somehow, Kongzi’s grave was identified and marked, as were those of his descendants. What might have been an unremarkable burial plot of the Kong family was given a state-sponsored makeover.

By the end of the Han period, Konglin had become a monument of considerable scale.

For the next two millennia, Konglin was maintained and expanded by the governments of successive dynasties, even those whose origins were non-Han Chinese.

An illustration of Confucius, known to the Chinese as Kongxi, whose anonymous tomb was identified and marked when Confucianism became state ideology in China more than 2,000 years ago. Image: Getty Images

Sadly, thousands of historical artefacts in Konglin were destroyed during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when millions of people were turned stark raving mad by demagogues who mistakenly thought that they had everything under control.

Konglin was designated a World Heritage Site by Unesco in 1994. Almost all of Kongzi’s main-line male descendants (i.e., his eldest son’s eldest son, and so on), up to the 76th generation, are buried there. The rest of the graves are of the descendants of peripheral branches of the Kong family.

Cemeteries like Konglin are exceptions. For most of human history, cemeteries were almost always abandoned, forgotten and eventually built over.

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I have already left instructions to scatter my ashes somewhere after my eventual passing (many, many years from now, I hope). What is the point of interning my bodily remains at a cemetery or columbarium?

My contemporaries, my niece and my nephew may or may not visit my grave or niche regularly, but after they die, no one would come any more. I will be just another stranger to their children, if they have any.

Even in a beautifully landscaped and well-maintained cemetery like Green-Wood, many of its occupants, apart from the better-known names and recently buried, had probably not seen visitors for a very long time.

While a few grave markers may be of interest to historians, most are just silent stones that meant something to people who are long gone and forgotten.