Chiang Mai Citylife - - Get to know Chiang Mai better with these in-depth articles about Chiang Mai, Thailand.

January, 2007

Graveyards are first hand museums, only better. First of all, they’re free. Secondly, you don’t have velvet ropes and glass panels preventing you from touching this and that. In graveyards you can get down on your hunkers and scrape moss from hundred year headstones making yourself feel like some sort of amateur archaeologist. Museums are also sometimes guilty of giving you information overload: there’s too much script accompanying that 2,000 year old flint axe fragment for my liking. Headstones are beautifully succinct. Cemeteries leave much more room to the imagination.

A visit to The Chiang Mai Foreign Cemetery is as good a way as any to learn a little bit about the foreigners who have lived, and of course died, in Chiang Mai since its first internment in 1898. In that year King Rama V of Thailand granted the land for the purpose of a cemetery, for the exclusive use of foreigners. Thais with foreign passports can also be buried here, but judging by the names on the headstones, they are few and far between. This seems to be largely the reserve of Anglo Saxons with intriguing names like Christensen, Bernier, Dallaire and D’Souza offering us visitors an international fragrance. A certain Mrs Boon Wood (nee Panya Chitpreecha), who must have had her foreign passport in order, flies the flag for Thais interred here.

In one corner stands a moderately sized statue of Queen Victoria under which is inscribed ‘Erected as a token of deep reverence and affection for the memory of their late gracious Queen Victoria by her loyal subjects.’ Seeing a symbol of royal devotion in Thailand that is not to a

Rama is quite unusual. This statue was shipped all the way from England via Rangoon, Burmese railway and finally by elephant to Chiang Mai. That was the quickest route to Chiang Mai in those days when Thailand was the poor relation of Burma, not the other way around. When she first arrived, stories of Queen Victoria’s abundance of children lead her statue to become a place of worship for Lanna people seeking fertility; you can still see her shiny feet, rubbed to a sheen over the years.

Graveyards are fascinating not only for what they tell you, but also for what they omit to say. One headstone tells us George Kincaird Proudfoot was born in March 1874 and died in August 1904. But what was he doing in Chiang Mai? What killed him so young? In the month I arrived in Chiang Mai, October 2003, A.H. Verkuyl was laid to rest here. I’m sure he could have told some interesting tales to me, this naïve freshly arrived interloper, especially as his relationship with this part of the world included a stint as a WWII prisoner of war. Richard Willoughby Wood MC has perhaps the best headstone – Asian Legend is all that’s inscribed beneath his name. What he did to win that attribute I don’t know.

Most foreigners regard their trip to Thailand as something of an adventure, a daring escapade into the unknown. But imagine what it was like for Ruth Ann Bailey Rideout who was ‘called’ from her wooden cabin in Arkansas to preach inThailand way back in 1957. That in itself is a venture, but Ms Bailey Rideout took with her four infant children, all of whom were under the age of four. Or the splendidly named Betty Sue Meriwether Morse [Ed. of the Morse Code family] who left her native Texas for decades of teaching and missionary work in Chiang Mai before being buried in 2001. Then there are the numerous forestry workers who succumbed to all sorts of diseases in the early decades of the last century. Some of them were buried out in the jungle, others were laid to rest in this cemetery. Forestry, not teaching, was the chief occupation of the foreigners who came to Chiang Mai in those days.

The lot of the babies buried here has improved considerably. ‘Infant of AB Case d.1930’ or ‘Infant of H. White d.1919’ are both very cold headstones, probably reflective of a time when a baby’s death was unremarkable. More recently, babies are given touching headstones, with, more significantly, a name of their own, such as Oliver Johnson who was drowned at the age of three and whose childish drawings are eternally etched onto his headstone.

From the marble column commemorating the American and Royal Thai Air Forces, to the tiny cross remembering recently departed Tony Knowles against which I grazed my shin, this cemetery is immaculately kept. The tall trees and the canal running behind it give it a very tranquil feel, not a bad place to spend an eternity.

Chiang Mai Foreign Cemetery is located on the east side of the river on the Chiang Mai-Lamphun Road about five hundred metres upriver from the Sheraton not far from the Chiengmai Gymkhana Club. You’d better pop in to see if you like it, you might end up spending quite a bit of time there.

By Fionn Tuohy