Title: Screening of “Light on the Lotus Hill” and post-screening talk

 

Speaker: Chan Chow Wah

 

Date: Jul 5, 2013 Friday

 

Time: 7:30pm

 

Venue: Chui Huay Lim Club ( Level 4)
No 190, Keng Lee Road
Singapore 308409
Tel: 65-6253 0111

 

“Light on the Lotus Hill” is a research project by Chan CW to document a chapter of the almost forgotten history of Singapore and World War Two.
After 5 years of research in Singapore, China, Malaysia, and UK, the book was published on 28 May 2009. It documents the life of a Buddhist monk, Venerable Pu Liang, who supported China Relief Fund’s fund raising activities in Nanyang, today’s South East Asia. The Venerable also offered temple grounds for the training of Nanyang Volunteers who later drove on the Burma Road.

 

After the fall of Singapore, the Venerable was executed by the Japanese during the Chinese massacre. During the research, a British POW’s daughter helped provided vital evidence as her father, a British POW at Changi, witnessed the execution. This research offers an alternative understand of World War Two and how Nanyang Chinese occupied multiple spaces of wars in China and Colonial Singapore. These parallel worlds collapse into one dark reality as the Japanese invaded Singapore converging Sino Japanese War with World War Two.

 

Speaker’s bio:
By training an anthropologist, Chan graduated with a Masters in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics. He was a Lee Kong Chian Research Fellow in 2006, a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, UK, and a Member of the American Anthropological Association, USA. He is also a Member of the International Oral History Association. His publications include the book “Light on the Lotus Hill” and the article “Storm in Shuang Lin” published in the April 2007 issue of Biblioasia.