Abandoned
The English newspaper The Guardian recently ran an article titled “Decay and discovery: the allure of abandoned sites in Malaysia”. It was written by Dax Ward, a Bangkok-based photographer who specialises in urban exploration, abandoned structures and street portraiture. The newspaper article documents a recent 2,676-kilometre road trip he took in August 2023 through the northern Malay states of Kedah, Perlis, and Penang. His amazing website can be found here. He introduces his subject matter as follows, “Every derelict has its own individual history, but each one is connected in the sense that they are reminders of what once was, what might have been, and what happens when we forget... The allure for urban explorers and photographers lies in identifying and capturing the remaining beauty in these forgotten locations.” Mr. Ward has documented hundreds of abandoned buildings in places such as Thailand, the United States, Ukraine, and South Africa.
In his The Guardian article, Mr. Ward ponders why the abandoned holds such allure for so many people. He says “these locations are a reminder than nothing is permanent, and that decay is an inescapable and inevitable element in the cycle of life.”
Mr. Ward’s work has been featured in numerous media outlets and exhibitions around the world, which just goes to show that fascination with the abandoned, and the stories connected to what once was, is universal, cutting across countries and cultures. Similarly, there are several Instagram sites that are dedicated to the abandoned: @abandondedhousetour has 110,000 followers; @hello.abandoned.world has 121,000 followers. These are just two of the many sites that testify to the global appeal of the idea of abandoned places.
Palace of Ghosts was inspired by the abandoned, but not only an actual place–the physical manifestation of the building is only half of the abandonment. The other half is the history connected to the place. History, too, can be abandoned, forgotten or erased.
The decay and impermanence of the buildings, and of life generally, is indeed something we all need reminding of from time to time. The concept is central to all the world’s great religions, past and present. The building and structures captured in Mr. Ward’s stunning photographs will indeed one day be reduced to dust, as we all will be. But the history, the stories that represent the other half of the abandonment, doesn’t have to be like that. Today we have the technical means to store information forever, but these means are a result of relatively recent technical innovations. There is an inherent value in passing information–data, analysis, experiences, and so on– to future generations. We want our descendants to improve on everything humans have done to date. While that is doable for all recently produced information, it becomes more problematic for historical information that could not be so easily harvested by the data collection and storage technologies that we have available to us today.
The study of history and related fields seeks to address this gap, with the added happy byproduct that some of the stories we uncover and interpret are extremely entertaining. Writing Palace of Ghosts was sometimes like fitting together the pieces to a giant historical puzzle and joining the dots. By bringing the story to the present day it also explores how Singapore’s population engages with the past.
Interestingly, Mr. Ward was guided on his extraordinary road trip by one of Malaysia’s leading paranormal enthusiasts Kay On. Mr. Ward mentions in the article “The faint whispers of ghostly stories waiting to be heard” as he investigated the abandoned places he encountered. Those whispers are clues, leads to explore the past and try and piece together those untold stories, to interpret the events and understand how the past influences the future. Such ghostly whispers feature prominently in Palace of Ghosts. They are echoes from the old Johor-Riau Sultanate, now vanished and barely even known about in Singapore; they are memories of the love, loss and tragedy experienced over decades by the residents of the historic mansions and istana of Tyersall; they are the vulnerabilities of today’s Singaporeans as they struggle with a historical collective consciousness bereft of its connection to a deeper past. These are just a few of the kind of stories that can be preserved forever and avoid the eventual fate of the abandoned places – the istana of Palace of Ghosts, or the buildings and structures in Dax Ward’s amazing photographic collection of what he calls “Abandonia”.
The celebrated Irish musician Van Morrison sings a moving rendition of the US slavery era song “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child”, summoning the deepest emotions caused by the experience, even the idea, of abandonment: a child separated from its mother. Whether it is to do with human relationships, their connections to places or to memories – personally or collectively held – leaving and forgetting about someone, somewhere or something, never fails to strike a chord within us. It is something we have all struggled with and regretted at one time or another.
It is an emotion shared by all humans, but in the later chapters of Palace of Ghosts I speculate that Singaporean’s fascination with the abandoned is perhaps more intense than usual. This idea is backed up by some National University of Singapore research which is reviewed in the book. I also came across a fascinating module of a course offered by the YaleNUS College in Singapore. It is called “The Past and Present: History and Memory in Singapore and Bintan” and a short account of this module can be found here. Singapore and Bintan are islands that are separated by about only 30 kilometres of sea. For nearly all of their history they belonged to the same domain, that of the ancient Sultanates. Only in the last 200 years did they become separated into different political entities. The YaleNUS College course module reveals that in Singapore “the Second World War has loomed large in the Singapore historical memory, dominating local history textbooks, museum exhibitions, and the landscape through monuments and historical plaques”. The module examines the evolution of historical memory in Singapore and, among other things, compares it to that of neighboring Bintan Island just a few kilometers away. In Bintan, the module reveals, public historical memory is focused more firmly on the pre-colonial past despite the fact that Bintan, like Singapore, was under European colonial influence pre-war and was also occupied by the Japanese during World War Two. However, the people of Bintan do not seem to have the same vulnerabilities that Singaporeans are constantly being reminded of by their own politicians. Is it simply because they belong to an enormous sprawling nation state of 17,000 islands many of which are separated by massive distances, language, culture, religion and even physiognomy? Or is it to do with a different way of perceiving the past?
There is of course another factor, another more recently erected figurative screen which blocks out the more distant past and that may be relevant to the fixation Singaporeans perhaps have with the idea of abandonment. In 1963 Singapore became completely independent of British rule when it joined the newly established independent state of Malaysia. Two years later it was expelled. Talking about it at the time, the hard man of Singapore politics, the future Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kwan Yew, broke down in tears during a TV interview. It is a moving thing to see such a colossal historical figure as Mr. Lee cry like a “motherless child”. Perhaps it is this abandonment, coming so soon after the trauma of the Second World War, which somehow acts as a barrier to Singaporeans connecting to their more distant and ancient provenance. Palace of Ghosts seeks to build a greater affinity with some of the stories that connect Singapore to its precolonial past and to contribute to an evolving public memory in Singapore.
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